environment Politics: 2012 American exceptionalism assholes denialists idiots Republicans
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 7, Day 4: There Is A Reason The Biggest Tag In My Cloud Is “idiots.”
The June 19 issue of the Christian Science Monitor notes the Republican lineup is filled with denialist dingalings, although they describe it somewhat more politely:
There was a time when Republicans were at the forefront of efforts to investigate – maybe even do something about – the impact of human activity on global climate.
John McCain was an early and persistent supporter of cap-and-trade efforts to reduce the greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide) associated with climate change. So was Newt Gingrich, who went on to make a YouTube video ad – with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, no less – where he said, “Our country must take action to address climate change.”
Now, Republican presidential hopefuls seem to be racing in the opposite direction – disavowing their past support for policy measures on climate – even any sense that there’s a problem to be addressed.
Sheesh.
Sent June 19:
For all their fulsomely patriotic homilies, Republican presidential aspirants seem deeply reluctant to advocate anything that would restore America’s status as a leader in the world community. Instead, they offer tax cuts and an end to government regulation as universal panaceas, accompanying a vision of the future as myopic as it is dystopic. Since the climate-change crisis requires responsible action on multiple fronts, the GOP’s 2012 lineup prefers to deny that the problem exists, instead taking refuge in bizarre conspiracy theories and liberal-bashing tropes that play well to their anti-science, anti-tax base. A genuinely robust response to global warming is necessary to avoid catastrophic outcomes, and would give an enormous boost to our economy. The Republican platform? Stick our fingers in our ears, reject scientific expertise, and wait for free-market solutions to the laws of physics. Their version of American exceptionalism? We’re number one — when it comes to ignorance and irresponsibility!
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots New Hampshire Republican obstructionism RGGI
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 28: Doesn’t Sound Very Manly To Me, George…
New Hampshire is in a struggle between wise and witless:
CONCORD, N.H.—New Hampshire’s participation in a regional program designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is still up for debate in the Legislature despite the Senate sending legislation to the governor repealing the state’s law.
The Senate sent a bill to Gov. John Lynch that both ends New Hampshire’s participation in the program and also modifies the state’s shoreland protection law. Lynch promises to veto any bill that ends New Hampshire’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. The Senate can’t override a veto repealing RGGI, but wants the shoreland protections.
But we all know what’s really going on. Sent June 13:
The Republican-dominated state government of New Hampshire is, typically and reflexively, against any state initiative which acknowledges the existence of human-caused climate change, or makes an effort to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing it. The recent bill ending the state’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is a case in point. While the scientific consensus is overwhelming, and the evidence correlating planetary heating with an increase in extreme weather throughout our country and the world is accumulating ever more rapidly, Republicans have committed themselves to denying the reality in front of their eyes. It’s a positive step that Governor Lynch plans on vetoing their plans to drop out of the RGGI, which is on track to be one of the relatively few success stories in the complex history of America’s attempts to deal with the looming threats posed by global climate change.
Warren Senders
environment: Conservatives denialists idiots Rocky Mountains Water
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 27: We Used To Use These On Mountainsides.
The Christian Science Monitor addresses the study of decreasing snow mass in the Rockies:
A blend of natural climate swings and global warming appears to be driving a long-term decline in snowpack along the Rocky Mountains rarely seen in the past 800 years.
In the process, and perhaps more important for the future, the dominant driver behind available snowpack along the continental spine appears to be shifting from precipitation to temperature, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science.
If this shift holds, the study’s team adds, it could represent a change that would accelerate the loss of the West’s natural freshwater reservoirs – if long-term average temperatures continue to rise with increasing levels of industrial greenhouse gases, as most climate scientists are convinced they will.
Ski the Rocky Mountains while you can, kids.
Sent June 12:
There aren’t a great many surprises in the new study of the Rocky Mountains’ shrinking snowpack. Rather, we find evidence that supports hundreds of other studies in the confirmation of a troubling planetary trend. The Earth is warming; human beings are causing it with emissions of greenhouse gases; it’s going to affect ecosystems all around the world in complex and disruptive ways. The Rocky Mountains are one such area, and their decreasing snow mass is going to have significant effects on the water usage patterns of the entire American West. It is a tragedy in the making, exacerbated by an ideologically-based refusal of “conservatives” to acknowledge scientific reality and its implications. In fact, self-styled conservatives are the real radicals when it comes to climate: by advocating a rapid transformation of the Earth’s atmosphere to unexplored extremes, they’re endangering all of us. That’s not conservatism, that’s reckless insanity.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists idiots scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 26: Bliss.
A twerp named Bronwyn Eyre writes a generic denialist screed in the June 10 Saskatoon Star-Phoenix:
I know it’s futile to complain about the weather. But are weather researchers fair game?
Last week, it was reported a University of Regina project, led by Prof. Dave Sauchyn, was being awarded $1.25 million from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to study the role of climate change in natural disasters on the Prairies.
“Climate is a pattern. One event is weather,” Sauchyn said. “But if you get a bunch of these (weather incidents) from across the Prairies and it happens again and again, we say, ‘Something is going on.’ And it’s probably climate change.”
Sounds a bit like witchcraft reasoning to me.
Look: If there’s a clear pattern of global warming – sorry, “climate change” – that can be proven without skullduggery or obfuscation, most of us will be willing to do what it takes to rectify things. But increasingly, it seems, “experts” are claiming wacky weather simply to advance an agenda.
Sigh. Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
Sent June 11:
Bronwyn Eyre’s flip dismissal of climate change relies on facile generalities when an outright misstatement of fact isn’t available. For example, the so-called “climategate” scandal has been debunked, and the researchers’ facts have been vindicated. Repeatedly. When she calls for the “hard, empirical evidence,” what does she mean? A stack of temperature readings and atmospheric CO2 levels, minus the expertise required to correlate and synthesize the data? If I’m really sick and need some tests, do I know how to interpret the results? No; without medical training, I require professional expertise. Climatologists are the professional specialists; it is destructive folly to reject their advice just because it conflicts with one’s ideological preconceptions. Arguing with a climate-change denialist like Ms. Eyre is eerily similar to arguing with a young-earth creationist who dismisses the “hard, empirical evidence” for Darwinian evolution; her glib insouciance is not genuine skepticism, but scientific ignorance and innumeracy.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists idiots scientific consensus scientific method tree rings Water
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 25: Look! Bipartisanship!
The June 10 Seattle Times reports on yet another study confirming what we all know:
They looked at the rings of thousands of ancient trees in the mountains above the most important rivers in the West.
What they found may influence how water gets used from Arizona to Canada — and particularly in the Columbia River basin.
Despite odd years like this one, researchers have long reported declines in the mountain snows that power Western rivers. But on Thursday a group of scientists said they now also know this: Those declines are virtually unprecedented throughout most of the last millennium.
Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and University of Washington measured tree-ring growth from forests that included 800-year-old trees. They learned that snowpack reductions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries were unlike any other period dating to at least the year 1200, according to new research published in the journal Science.
It struck me that these results aren’t surprising to either side of the “debate” any more, and I thought I’d address that surprising unanimity of perception in this letter, sent June 10:
Of course the newest study from the U.S. Geological Survey confirms the existence of climate change, and reinforces the predictions of a complex and catastrophic future for our country and the world! Up to this point, both climate-change denialists and environmental realists are in agreement. But the realists expect to see these results because many decades worth of research on climate questions already supports the core hypothesis: climate change is human-caused, and it’s going to have severe impacts on all of our lives for generations to come. Denialists, by contrast, expect these results because they believe scientific research is part of a liberal campaign to take away their SUVs and force them to change their lightbulbs, a laughable conspiracy theory boosted by corporations afraid of lessening their quarterly returns. Sense and survival on the one hand — paranoia and profit on the other. The choice is clear.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: armageddon assholes eschatology idiots scientific literacy
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 23: The Last Trump — A Competitive Sport?
June 9: Mitt Romney’s tactical waffling on climate change has lots of Republicans up in arms. The idiot wing of the GOP (which is almost the entire party by now) is terribly upset. Mitt is going to keep plugging away at this; he’ll alienate the teabaggers, but I think he’s hoping to attract disaffected Independent environmentalist free-market libertarians, both of whom are certainly watching his campaign with interest at this point.
The New York Daily News mentions Romney as a counterpoint to Rick “Google” Santorum:
“I believe the Earth gets warmer, and I also believe the Earth gets cooler,” Santorum said. “And I think history points out that it does that. The idea that man, through the production of carbon dioxide – which is a trace gas in the atmosphere, and the man-made part of that trace gas is itself a trace gas – is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd .”
He then said the issue was an “opportunity for the left” to take more government control.
“It’s been on a warming trend so they said, ‘Oh, let’s take advantage of that and say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life some more because it’s getting warmer.’ It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life.”
The issue of climate change has been heating up the 2012 GOP race.
Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney made headlines earlier this month when he broke from far-right orthodoxy and said he believes humans are partially responsible for climate change.
I had a sudden realization about these assholes, and incorporated it into this letter, which went out on June 9:
There is hardly anything that can bring down the wrath of modern Republicans than acknowledging fact-based, testable scientific reality. Enter Mitt Romney, who wants to bring the climate change debate to the table in the upcoming primary season. While Mitt doesn’t actually think we should do anything about the greatest threat human civilization has ever faced, his willingness to entertain the notion that carefully executed scientific research might have something to tell us is in itself a notion utterly repellent to Tea-party Republicans. The GOP’s anti-intellectual core is also overwhelmingly likely to believe in the Biblical Armageddon, suggesting that their rejection of climate science may be nothing more than eschatological jealousy; if civilization is going to end, they want to be certain their team gets the credit. Those of us who would like the human race to endure and thrive for eons to come, however, are watching with appalled fascination.
environment: American West Colorado River denialists idiots Water
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 21: I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles
The US Bureau of Reclamation has a report predicting…guess what? The Grand Junction Sentinel (CO) has more:
Climate change may result in about a 9 percent drop in average Colorado River flows over the next half-century, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation says in a new report.
Drought frequency and duration are expected to increase under a climate-change model, one of four different water supply scenarios used by the agency in an ongoing study of supply and demand in the Colorado River Basin.
The report says projected changes in the basin include continued warming in the basin, along with snowpack decreases as more precipitation falls as rain.
This let me find out about the nature of a “Class Six” rapid. Scary stuff:
Grade 6: Class 6 rapids are considered to be so dangerous as to be effectively unnavigable on a reliably safe basis. Rafters can expect to encounter substantial whitewater, huge waves, huge rocks and hazards, and/or substantial drops that will impart severe impacts beyond the structural capacities and impact ratings of almost all rafting equipment. Traversing a Class 6 rapid has a dramatically increased likelihood of ending in serious injury or death compared to lesser classes. (Skill level: successful completion of a Class 6 rapid without serious injury or death is widely considered to be a matter of great luck or extreme skill)WIKI
Sent June 7:
The history of the American West could be written from the perspective of rivers, aquifers and wells, for water shortages have triggered innumerable social upheavals and economic disruptions over the past few centuries. To willfully ignore scientific warnings of scientists about climate change’s impact on the Colorado River is to face grave dangers unprepared. And yet many members of our political and media systems are doing just that. By embracing spurious conspiracy theories (Light-Bulb Police! Compulsory Bike Paths!) while rejecting the carefully prepared evidence of experts, climate denialists set the stage for global disasters of terrifying proportions.
Climatologists’ predictions have been coming true with alarming regularity over the past several decades; their principal errors are invariably those of underestimating the magnitude of the problem. Climate denialists’ disregard of the overwhelming scientific consensus is as socially irresponsible as a drunk fratboy’s attempt to run Class Six rapids in an inner tube.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Australia denialism idiots media irresponsibility
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 18: Up With Which I Will Not Put
The Gold Coast Mail (Australia) notes a study which suggests that climate denialism is dying out Down Under:
CLIMATE change sceptics are an endangered species in Australia, a national survey shows.
The survey of almost 3100 Australians found 74 per cent believe the world’s climate is changing.
When asked a different question about the causes of climate change, which removed the reference to personal beliefs, 90 per cent of respondents said human activity was a factor.
Just five per cent said climate change was entirely caused by natural processes.
Overall, less than six per cent of respondents could reasonably be classified as true climate change sceptics, the study by Griffith University researchers found.
The comments on the article would, unfortunately, indicate otherwise. Sent June 4:
Recently, a new and invasive species was spotted in many locations all over the world. Combining intellectual genomes from anti-science religious zealots and anti-environment business forces, these “climate change denialists” fed on toxic media emissions, rapidly growing larger and posing ever-greater threats to journalism and the civility of public discourse. Clogging the channels of communication essential to a free society, denialists rapidly replaced subtler ideas about planetary climate patterns and regional weather events with ill-founded conspiracy theories and innumerate contempt for scientific authority. The result? Many of the world’s developed cultures were virtually incapacitated; the USA hosts a particularly virulent strain which has essentially destroyed the integrity of its political system.
Denialists’ status as an endangered species in Australia is very welcome news. We can only hope that in centuries to come, they’ll have a place in the history books alongside the Dodo, the Pig-footed Bandicoot, and the Passenger Pigeon.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Mitt Romney Republicans
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 17: King of Hearts
Mitt Romney acknowledges the existence of climate change. Gosh. The NY Daily News is all a-flutter:
Mitt Romney, the newest Republican to declare himself a candidate for President, sounded suspiciously like a Democrat when he said Friday that global warming is real.
“I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course,” Romney said at a Town Hall-type meeting in New Hampshire. “But I believe the world’s getting warmer.”
Romney then added, “And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that.”
That’s heresy in many GOP circles – and a position the other Republican candidates have not taken in public.
Damned if I know what to think about this. I just used it as the hook for a standard Republicans-are-idiots screed. Sent June 3:
It’s testimony to the weirdness of American presidential politics that a perfectly reasonable statement from a Republican contender is viewed as an unforgivable deviation from the party line. The cries of outrage over Mitt Romney’s words on global climate change are coming from the GOP’s mainstream, which has now completely rejected actual science in favor of increasingly improbable conspiracy theories involving Al Gore and compulsory re-education camps for SUV drivers. The few remaining conservatives who are prepared to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific consensus on the human causes of global warming have been relegated to their party’s “lunatic fringe,” which must be an unusual experience for them. While Mr. Romney’s words confirm that he’s not completely off-the-wall, in an electoral environment which values wackiness over factuality, that won’t work in his favor. Someday Republicans will acknowledge the laws of physics — but it’s not going to happen before the 2012 election. Unfortunately.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists idiots
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 15: My Home-Town Paper
The Boston Globe employs a hack buffoon named Jeff Jacoby as its token conservative asshole. And true to form, he’s an ignorant jackass:
THE MAY 21 apocalypse foretold by the fundamentalist minister Harold Camping never materialized, but end-of-the-world doomsaying goes on as usual among the global warmists.
If you really want the full effect, go and read it. My nervous system can no longer stand the strain. Sent June 1:
After reading his latest attempt to dismiss the worldwide scientific consensus on global climate change (a genuine threat of enormous significance), I have a simple question about Jeff Jacoby’s predictive skills. How often has he been right? About Iraq? Gay marriage? The environment? Examining his writings confirms that for decades, he’s been consistently wrong on just about everything. Why, then, should his opinions on matters of science be given any credibility whatsoever?
Although I lack a comfortable sinecure as the Globe’s token conservative columnist, I too would like to make a prediction: the climate is going to go miserably haywire just as climatologists are forecasting, and when Mr. Jacoby eventually does acknowledge the inescapable reality of climate change, he’ll advocate free-market solutions to the greenhouse effect’s destructive consequences — preferably involving tax cuts for billionaires and oil companies. And he’ll be wrong. Why mess up a perfect record?
Warren Senders