environment: assholes denialists idiots Occam's Razor
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 31: A Taxonomy of Stupid
In the Missourian, David Rosman takes on the people who hold up recent heavy snowfalls as proof that climate change is nonexistent. It’s a good piece, and triggered a somewhat longer response than usual. As far as I could make out, the paper has no length limits on LTEs, so I’m up around 200 or so. This was a fun piece to write.
Climate change deniers have many fascinating ways to avoid confronting reality. A few hew to a form of Biblical literalism in which humans can’t possibly affect our global environment because — well, because God won’t allow it. Others make the argument from personal incredulity: “global warming isn’t happening because I don’t understand how it works.” A closely related approach is the argument from apparent contradiction: if it’s snowing in your neighborhood, then global warming is disproved. While the latter two arguments may be consistent intellectual stances, ignorance, as Scott Adams’ “Dilbert” once said, is not a point of view. And then there are the truly convoluted theories — avaricious scientists forming a worldwide conspiracy headed by Al Gore (or, as Limbaugh’s minions prefer, “algore”) in which every bike path, public transport system and solar panel is a step on the road to a Socialist New World Order. Next up? Compulsory Carbon Footprint Re-Education Camps for SUV drivers!
These notions fail Occam’s Razor, of course. The simpler explanation is the correct one: industrial civilizations burn a lot of carbon, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, and it’s warming the planet. A lot.
But since doing something about it would require adjusting our habits and reducing the profit margins of big oil companies, it’s easier to stay ignorant.
Our descendants won’t have that luxury.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Ken Cuccinelli Michael Mann University of Virginia
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 21: There’s IDIOTS and Then There’s *I*D*I*O*T*S*
C-Ville Weekly, a local paper in Charlottesville, has more on the Cuccinelli/Mann/UVA harassment story.
Since May, Cuccinelli has sought Mann’s documents as part of an investigation into whether Mann violated Virginia’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act (FATA). UVA hired outside counsel to fight Cuccinelli’s demands, and the case is still before the courts, though UVA won an initial legal victory.
The legal bills for the initial defense cost UVA more than $350,000, paid for through private donations. In a separate request, ATI and Marshall also seek release of documents regarding the funding UVA used to fight Cuccinelli’s demands. The University responded that it has no documents that aren’t protected by attorney-client privilege, according to Horner.
The entire mess stems from so-called Climate-gate, the controversy regarding the contents of a pilfered server from Britain’s East Anglia University published online in late 2009. Global warming skeptics pounced on exposed e-mail chains between climate scientists, pointing to language like “trick” and “manipulation” as evidence of deliberately doctored data. Investigations in the U.S. and abroad have so far cleared scientists involved of wrongdoing.
The only good thing about this whole megillah is that it makes letter-writing easy.
Attorney General Cuccinelli’s continued harassment of Dr. Michael Mann is a monumental waste of taxpayer dollars and an embarrassment to the state of Virginia. Multiply exonerated of any wrong-doing or scientific malpractice by separate independent investigations, Mann has been singled out in an attempt to make the practice of climate science (and perhaps, finally, any and all science) impossible. The cost in Mann’s time and resources required to defend himself against state-sanctioned stalking is ultimately deducted from his scientific work; even in a less critical area of research this would be a shame, but given the magnitude of the problems Mann is investigating, Cuccinelli’s vendetta is particularly ill-considered. The Attorney General is patently unable to comprehend scientific method and practice, and his “climate zombie” stance is clearly designed to ingratiate himself with those voters who are offended by anything they can’t understand — a bloc that is, unfortunately, growing.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots Ken Cuccinelli Michael Mann
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 20: There Are Idiots, And Then There Are IDIOTS.
A couple of Democratic state senators from Virginia are trying to get VA Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to abandon his insane vendetta against climatologist Michael Mann, reports the Charlottesville Daily Progress. Good luck on that one; “Cooch” is about as amenable to sweet reason as Captain Ahab.
It is glaringly obvious that Ken Cuccinelli is ill-equipped to perform an analysis of scientific research; his investigative zeal would be better served in a search for genuine criminality than in a perseverative attempt to harass a climate scientist whose work has been vindicated repeatedly. After multiple investigations into Mann’s work and practices failed to yield any inculpatory evidence, Cuccinelli’s near-obsessive pursuit should have ceased. Given that the processes underlying climate change have been confirmed over and over again by multiple teams of independent researchers, and that Mann’s work has likewise been confirmed repeatedly, it’s time for the Attorney General to call it quits. That won’t happen, of course, since Mr. Cuccinelli isn’t motivated by concerns of rationality or logic; he is a “climate zombie,” ideologically wedded to the idea that global warming doesn’t exist, cannot exist, and will not exist. The state of Virginia deserves better.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 15: You Bet Jurassic!
USA Today notes that last year tied 2005 as the warmest year the planet has ever experienced since we began keeping records. I thought I’d use it as a hook to scold some of the deniers, and bring the car-crash analogy out for another run.
Yes, 2010 was Earth’s warmest year in recorded history. As the slow-motion disaster of climate change unfolds, that record won’t stand for long. Along with many who deny it’s happening at all, there are those who claim that humans will thrive on a warmer earth. After all, they say, the planet was a lot warmer during the time of the dinosaurs! Left out is the fact that it took millions of years to build up high levels of atmospheric CO2 back in the Pleistocene — while human industrial civilization is accomplishing the same feat in a century or less. A million years gives life time to adapt; on a geological time-scale, a hundred years is shatteringly abrupt — like hitting a cement wall at ninety miles an hour. Unfortunately, the climate-change deniers in the House of Representatives are going to make sure we’re not wearing our seat belts.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists idiots ignorance Texas
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 13: I’m Gonna Build A Big Fence Around Texas
The Dallas Morning News has a piece on Texas’ ongoing struggle to block the Environmental Protection Agency from doing its job.
In attempting to block the regulatory initiatives of the Environmental Protection Agency, Texas is leading the way. Perhaps the rest of America will eventually follow — but to where? On the one hand, the state’s attempt to limit the EPA’s authority will make it easier for major polluters to continue their ongoing destruction of the planetary environment; increasing greenhouse emissions will soon bring Earth to levels of CO2 last seen hundreds of millions of years ago. On the other hand, the level of scientific ignorance used to justify anti-EPA lawsuits demonstrates that in at least some quarters, prehistoric ways of thinking already dominate. Unable or unwilling to grasp the relevance and reality of climatological data, the conservative groups attempting to stop the EPA’s work are leading Texas backward — all the way to the Carboniferous Period.
Warren Senders
environment: conservative scientist denialists scientific method
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 9: The Rarest of the Rare
Stop the presses! Neela Banerjee has a story in the Seattle Times about Dr. Kerry Emanuel, a responsible climatologist who is also a political conservative.
Unsurprisingly, the guy’s a little baffled these days. Where is the Republican party of yore?
As a politically conservative climatologist who accepts the broad scientific consensus on global warming, Emanuel occupies a position shared by few scientists.
“There was never a light-bulb moment but a gradual realization based on the evidence,” Emanuel said. “I became convinced by the basic physics and by the better and better observation of the climate that it was changing and it was a risk that had to be considered.”
He sounds like a pretty good guy.
“I’ve always rebelled against the thinking that ideology can trump fact,” said Emanuel, 55. “The people who call themselves conservative these days aren’t conservative by my definition. I think they’re quite radical.”
Paradoxically, conservative Republican administrations in the past four decades pushed through the creation of the EPA and the signing of the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act.
And only a Republican could have opened Communist China to the world. See how this works? The Republicans used to have a Jekyll/Hyde thing, where they’d do tons of dirty tricks and then occasionally allow some decent legislation to pass so they could get credit for it later, as witness Richard Nixon’s EPA. But the last vestiges of Jekyll have been thoroughly expunged; we’re now all-Hyde, all the time.
Naturally, he’s horrified by the behavior of the politicians he’s supported in the past, although he still “reveres Ronald Reagan.” But the current gang of crooks and thugs was too much for him. He supported Obama in 2008, which automatically makes him a far-left DFH.
Once upon a time it was possible for scientific integrity and conservative political views to coexist in the same individual. Charles Keeling, the climatologist whose detailed records of atmospheric CO2 made it possible to measure the greenhouse effect, was, like Kerry Emanuel, a lifelong Republican. The contemporary GOP, however, is deeply antipathetic to the principles that underlie scientific thinking. Ideologically-driven and devoid of scruples, wearing intellectual dishonesty as a badge of honor, the Republican party of today is a danger to the nation and to the planet.
There is no logical reason to deny climate science; the greenhouse effect is indifferent to ideological affiliation. The only reasons are rooted in the profit motive; as they fulfill the wishes of their corporate sponsors, Republican politicians show a near-sociopathic disregard for the common good. Alas, (as Dr. Emanuel has discovered) the phrase “Republican scientist” now sounds sadly oxymoronic, and a tad embarrassing.
Warren Senders
And for your viewing pleasure, here are some old-style Republicans transforming into new-style Republicans before your very eyes:
And here’s one featuring some modern-day Democrats, too!
environment: denialists Iowa media irresponsibility
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 7: As Falls Wichita…
There’s been a new report released on climate change’s projected effects on Iowa, and the WCF Courier is all over it. Naturally, the comments on the article are a fount of stupid.
Earlier I had read this piece at Daily Kos, which points out that our media have (surprise!) done an absolutely wretched job of covering what is, y’know, actually a major threat to our country and our world. Now watch this drive!
So I put the two together, and sent this off to the WCF Courier:
The university scientists who’ve just released a report on climate change’s impact on Iowa in the years to come are hopeful that their work will “inform future discussions” — a hope that is, alas, sadly naive. While the effects of global warming are by now well understood, and the role of human beings and their greenhouse emissions established beyond doubt, there’s something else taking place across America that bodes ill for our nation’s future. While the planet has been steadily heating up, our news media have been steadily less inclined to cover any issues related to climate change (unless it’s to run stories that tout an anomalous snowfall as somehow “disproving global warming”). In 2010, newspaper coverage of climate change in Europe was double that in the USA, according to researchers at the University of Colorado. Robert Brule, a researcher at Drexel University, points out that television news networks’ December coverage of the crucial Cancun conference added up to exactly ten seconds — a single clip. The result of this drop in coverage has been exactly what you’d expect: an increase in ignorance. The authors of “Climate Change Impacts on Iowa” will have their work cut out for them.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists EPA
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 5: Stop Them Before They Stop Us!
The Lewiston Sun/Times reprints an editorial from the Miami Herald, with some good words for the Environmental Protection Agency.
As we keep taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere, our planet continues to heat up. The long-term consequences of this unplanned experiment in geoengineering are likely to be disastrous for our children and their children in turn, as we face a future of disrupted seasons, wild fluctuations and ever-more-frequent “once-in-a-lifetime” weather events. Those who pay attention to the consequences of our civilization’s environmental disruption would have liked nothing better than a robust climate bill to emerge from the previous Congress — but thanks to nihilistic Republicans and timid coal-state Democrats, even the ludicrously watered-down Kerry/Lieberman effort was unable to advance. Hence it is up to the EPA. The kneejerk opposition to this agency in the newly GOP-dominated House is a three-part failure: of our politics, dominated by corporate cash; of our schools, dumbed-down and pandering to anti-science factionalism, and of our news media, whose specious false equivalence enables the claim that “the science of global warming isn’t settled.” We’re headed for a world of hurt in the coming centuries unless we get our carbon emissions under control; Republicans who seek to hamper the EPA are increasing the likelihood of disaster.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists EPA idiots
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 3: Fred Upton Is An Idiot. Who?
The Boston Globe notes that new EPA regs go into effect today, and lets us know that the Republicans are outraged! Outraged! Outraged!
It’s instructive to keep count of the number of times GOP legislators use the phrase “power grab” when referring to a perfectly legitimate use of governmental authority on the part of the Obama administration. Fred Upton’s use of this meaningless rhetorical trope, however, may have more severe repercussions. The new and more stringent EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions that have just gone into effect are one of our final lines of defense against the steadily building threat of global warming; if the conservative nay-sayers have their way, our national policy on this issue will consist entirely of denial. When Upton says he’s “not convinced” greenhouse gases need controlling, the question arises: what would convince him? I suspect that scientific facts and figures will never persuade the Michigan representative; the only figures that will influence Mr. Upton and his colleagues are those to the right of the dollar sign.
Warren Senders
environment: Australia denialists scientific consensus
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 1: Hangover Edition
Adam Morton gives a good summary of the past ten years’ worth of climate change in The Age (Australia). I figured I’d get a jump on the deniers with this letter…
Listening to the increasingly vociferous voices of those who deny the validity and relevance of climate science, one wonders: do these people live on the same planet we do? The planet climatologists are studying is buffeted by increasingly severe weather, uprooting people from their lands, crippling agricultural systems, and tearing holes in the fabric of life. On the alternate planet where global warming deniers live, it’s always the right temperature; crops aren’t wilting; floods aren’t wiping out villages; glaciers aren’t melting. On the planet we live in, we’re headed for a significant temperature increase in a time span so short it doesn’t even qualify as a geological instant. On the planet of the deniers, that’ll be fine, because when dinosaurs were alive, the atmosphere was a lot hotter than it is now. Our species is inadequately prepared for such an abrupt climatic shift — on this Earth, anyway.
Warren Senders