environment Politics: Frank Luntz idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 1: Time For Our Three Minutes Dumb
The Tribune-Chronicle (Warren, OH) responds to the new USDA map of hardiness zones with a marvelous piece of stupid:
Whether or not you believe global warming is caused by human activities or if you think it’s a natural effect of climate change, there is no doubt things are changing.
So much so that for the first time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has updated the growing regions in its Plant Hardiness Zone Map. This is the guide that gardeners, growers and just about everyone in the plant industry uses to determine which plants will survive the coldest temperatures in various regions of the country.
The map was upgraded in 2003, but rather than a zone change, it was a more detailed map that narrowed down the previous existing zones into sub-categories.
This time, however, the map has changed to reflect changes in climate and it tells the story that here in northeast Ohio, we are getting warmer.
Dingleberries. Sent January 26:
In a fine example of the the kind of journalistically, logically, and scientifically sloppy reportage that has kept Americans from fully understanding the magnitude of the climate crisis, Kathleen Evanoff’s January 26 article on the revised USDA Map of hardiness zones begins, “Whether or not you believe global warming is caused by human activities or if you think it’s a natural effect of climate change….”
Global warming isn’t a “natural effect of climate change,” but the other way around. The climate’s transformation in new and inhospitable directions is exacerbated by the rising atmospheric temperatures brought by the greenhouse effect, a phenomenon first discovered almost two hundred years ago and experimentally confirmed multiple times since then. And there is not one iota of controversy in the scientific community about the causes of the greenhouse effect: us.
The phrase “climate change” was originally proposed to the Bush Administration by the Republican pollster and political strategist Frank Luntz, as a way of neutralizing public response to the phrase “global warming.” The substitute term offered by the mastermind of Orwellian conservative NewSpeak was actually a more accurate description.
The USDA Map offers yet more evidence to add to the pile, but until science and environmental journalists learn to do their jobs, the public discussion will remain confused, and precious time will have been squandered in delay.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 27: Actually, It’s Just More Hippie-Punching
The Salt Lake Tribune (UT) runs an AP article on the anti-environmental stance of the GOP presidential field:
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. • Four years after the GOP’s rallying cry became “drill, baby, drill,” environmental issues have barely registered a blip in this Republican presidential primary.
That’s likely to change as the race turns to Florida.
The candidates’ positions on environmental regulation, global warming as well as clean air and water are all but certain to get attention ahead of the Jan. 31 primary in a state where the twin issues of offshore oil drilling and Everglades restoration are considered mandatory topics for discussion.
“It’s almost like eating fried cheese in Iowa,” said Jerry Karnas of the Everglades Foundation. Drilling has long been banned off Florida’s coasts because of fears that a spill would foul its beaches, wrecking the tourism industry, while the federal and state governments are spending billions to clean the Everglades.
Though most expect the candidates to express support for Everglades restoration — as Mitt Romney did in his 2008 campaign — environmentalists are noting a further rightward shift overall among the GOP field. The candidates have called for fewer environmental regulations, questioned whether global warming is a hoax and criticized the agency that implements and enforces clean air and water regulations.
This article is all over the place, so I’m going to build a few more letters on it over the next 36 hours. Sent January 23:
Since the early fifties, when a McCarthy-era Red Scare purged “China hands” from State Department (with predictably dismal consequences for US policy in Southeast Asia over the next twenty years), conservatives have built a electoral and media strategy by exploiting and nurturing a long-standing strain of anti-intellectualism in American life.
Climate scientists make a terrific target. For accurately reporting their findings and suggesting ways to respond to a genuine threat, they’ve been rewarded with mockery, hate mail, and death threats — while their legitimate concerns are derided by politicians whose electoral aspirations make it impossible for them to acknowledge genuine expertise. The candidates’ inability to address the scientific reality of global climate change is a symptom of their party’s lengthy effort to reduce intellectual influence on the crafting of policy. When the only experts the GOP respects are their political strategists, it’s no wonder their presidential field lacks intellectual heft, and it’s no wonder environmentalists are worried.
Warren Senders
Education environment: denialists NCSE science education scientific consensus scientific method
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 21: You Can’t Make An Omelette Without Breaking A Few Eggheads…
The L.A. Times’ Neela Banerjee writes about the NCSE’s decision to address the way climate change issues are handled in our schools:
Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.
In May, a school board in Los Alamitos, Calif., passed a measure, later rescinded, identifying climate science as a controversial topic that required special instructional oversight.
“Any time we have a meeting of 100 teachers, if you ask whether they’re running into pushback on teaching climate change, 50 will raise their hands,” said Frank Niepold, climate education coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who meets with hundreds of teachers annually. “We ask questions about how sizable it is, and they tell us it is [sizable] and pretty persistent, from many places: your administration, parents, students, even your own family.”
Against this backdrop, the National Center for Science Education, an Oakland-based watchdog group that supports the teaching of evolution through advocacy and educational materials, plans to announce on Monday that it will begin an initiative to monitor the teaching of climate science and evaluate the sources of resistance to it.
Good for them. The NCSE does terrific work. Sent January 16:
The conservative assertion that climate change is a “scientifically controversial” topic offers an example of how their ideologically-driven strategy functions in the public sphere. Since there is no significant scientific disagreement on the basic facts of global warming (it’s happening, it’s largely human-caused, it’s getting worse, the sooner we do something about it the less it will cost), the denialists in politics, media and the corporate sector have manufactured a convenient controversy by misinterpreting analyses, obfuscating results, and all too often simply lying through their teeth.
If all the scientists but a petrol-funded few are on one side of an issue, and a political philosophy with a long history of rejecting inconvenient facts is on the other, does that actually count as a dispute? If we’re supposed to “teach the controversy” of global climate change in our schools, what’s next for our science teachers — the medieval theory of humours?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility resource wars scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 15: That’s When My Love Comes Tumblin’ Down
The Deseret News (UT) runs a story from the L.A. Times about the assessment of the situation from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
LOS ANGELES — Doomsday is one minute closer, folks.
The hands on the face of the symbolic Doomsday Clock have been repositioned to five minutes before midnight — signaling how close we may be to a global catastrophe unless we get our act together.
On Monday, the Doomsday Clock read six minutes before midnight. But on Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, self-tasked with informing the public about the pending threat from nuclear weapons, climate change and emerging technologies, decided to push the clock up a minute. It now reads five minutes before midnight — in recognition of a growing nuclear threat and damage from climate change.
“Inaction on key issues including climate change, and rising international tensions motivate the movement of the clock,” Lawrence Krauss, co-chairman of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists board, said in a statement released Tuesday.
The statement added: “As we see it, the major challenge at the heart of humanity’s survival in the 21st century is how to meet energy needs for economic growth in developing and industrial countries without further damaging the climate, exposing people to loss of health and community, and without risking further spread of nuclear weapons, and in fact setting the stage for global reductions.”
Only one minute? Sent January 11:
Given the steady accumulation of ominous news on climate change over the past year, it’s actually surprising that the analysts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists only moved their “doomsday clock” a single minute closer to the symbolic midnight point.
Even leaving aside the specific climatic impacts of a runaway greenhouse effect, there’s no doubt that the coming century’s droughts, wildfires, extreme weather, and rising ocean levels will bring profound geopolitical consequences — resource wars and refugee crises, often in some of the world’s most volatile areas.
And yet, the three major US networks broadcast only 14 news stories about climate change — a total of 32 minutes — during 2011. More time was given to celebrity weddings and the latest scandal du jour than to the most significant threat our species has faced in recorded history. Our collective failure to address this slow-motion catastrophe will have devastating consequences. Midnight is nigh.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 5: You Only Gave Me Your Invitation
The Delaware News Journal agrees that we have a problem:
Croze is one of the many citizens, scientists, academics, public officials, business owners and environmentalists we’ve interviewed during our six-month investigation on the impact climate change and rising sea levels are having in Delaware.
We pursued this story because it’s clear that Delaware, which is sinking and has the lowest elevation of any state in America, is highly exposed to sea level rise.
We stayed with it because coastal communities demanding government intervention at taxpayer expense is quickly becoming an important public policy debate – one infused with hope for solutions, heartbreaking loss and unsettling predictions that would dramatically change the lifestyle we cherish in a landscape blessed with beaches, tidal estuaries and marshes rich with wildlife.
The overwhelming majority of scientists say climate change is real, as does Gov. Jack Markell and Colin O’Mara, secretary of Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
They start to call out the mis-informers, although there is still a bit of false equivalency in the piece. Sent December 30:
As one of the states most vulnerable to rising sea levels, Delaware is a perfect example of the importance of including climate change in debates on state development and sustainability policy. Only by recognizing scientific reality can our lawmakers craft legislation that is more than political theater.
For a counter-example, just look at several other East coast states whose politicians have decided that dramatic posturing is more important than the future of their constituencies. Earlier this year, North Carolina passed a law prohibiting estimates of sea level rise from using anything other than historical climate data, effectively banning measurements that recognize the accelerating global warming which climatologists predict. Such willful ignorance highlights climate change’s importance as an educational challenge as well as an environmental and moral issue. The misinformation propagated by petroleum-funded think tanks and a complaisant media has delayed meaningful action on this issue for far too long.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Durban Conference idiots Republicans scientific consensus
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 16: It’s 20-20, All Right.
REPORTING FROM WASHINGTON — Negotiators at a climate change meeting in South Africa struck an 11th-hour deal to avoid the collapse of international negotiations over global warming, averting the worst fears of environmental advocates but doing little to immediately advance the cause of limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
The agreement in effect would postpone new concerted global action on climate change for at least eight years. However, given the political realities, particularly in the United States and China, the accord probably offered the best chance to move the process forward, analysts said.
The mood at the United Nations gathering in Durban was somber as the talks ended just before dawn Sunday, participants said, largely because many questions remained unanswered and the risk of a catastrophic increase in global average temperature had not been reduced.
Under the deal, nations committed themselves to talks aimed at reaching a legally binding agreement by 2015 that would limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to global warming. The limits would not go into effect until 2020 at the earliest.
Decrying the oppositional nature of these two cultures is an easy way out, but I don’t mind. Sent December 12:
Political and scientific realities are entirely different. Politics, the “art of the possible,” deems the recent agreement from the Durban climate conference to be a triumph — the result of tremendously difficult and complex negotiations, one that offers participating nations, and the world, a best way forward. Scientists, on the other hand, concern themselves with measurable facts and their implications — and the details of the general scientific consensus on climate change suggest that Durban’s “best way forward” is virtually certain to be too little, too late.
It’s time for a reality-based politics to emerge in our nation and the world. The fact that Republican presidential candidates can gratuitously dismiss scientific expertise should be a red flag: ideologies that must reject facts in order to survive cannot be successful in the long run — for in the long run, the laws of physics and chemistry will win. They always do.
Warren Senders
environment: corporate irresponsibility Durban Conference scientific consensus
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 3: You Kids Think Money Grows On Trees?
The Christian Science Monitor has done quite a bit of pretty solid analysis:
As this year’s round of global climate talks begin in Durban, South Africa, negotiators once again try to tackle an elusive goal: Trimming nations’ greenhouse gas emissions enough to meet the target of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) before the end of the century.
This target is expected to reduce the potentially devastating effects of climate change, but, so far, it appears a long way off.
Last year, negotiators in Cancún, Mexico, agreed to the goal of limiting warming of the Earth’s average surface temperature to 3.6 degrees F above pre-Industrial Revolution levels. Their agreement notes, however, that a ceiling of 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C) might be warranted.
A world 2 degrees warmer is not an ideal scenario. Even if nations are successful, the planet can still expect increasing heat spells, drought, flood damage and certain other severe weather events, along with elevated rates of extinctions and shifts in species’ ranges, including those of disease-spreading insects, and many other potentially problematic changes, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 Synthesis Report. Their severity grows along with increasing projected temperature rise, according to the report.
A scold. That’s me. Sent November 29:
With mountains of conclusive evidence attesting to both the reality and the danger of runaway climate change, the failure of the world’s industrialized nations to address the issue in any meaningful way cannot be ascribed to ignorance. Rather, the developed world’s unwillingness to take responsibility for the looming threat of catastrophe is essentially a failure of imagination — a failure to think beyond the shared assumptions of an energy economy based on fossil-fuels, a failure to evaluate human progress by measures other than quarterly profit reports, and a failure of empathy with the people whose lives will be devastated.
We’ve taken out an enormous advance on our Bank of Earth credit card. Like irresponsible youngsters on a spending spree, we conveniently forget that when the bill arrives, all humanity will have to pay it. Genuine fiscal responsibility requires aggressive and immediate action on climate change, rather than penny-wise, pound-foolish intransigence.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies denialists Durban Conference scientific consensus
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 1: Maybe We Could Get A Carbon Patch?
This sounds depressingly familiar. NYT:
WASHINGTON — With intensifying climate disasters and global economic turmoil as the backdrop, delegates from 194 nations gather in Durban, South Africa, this week to try to advance, if only incrementally, the world’s response to dangerous climate change.
To those who have followed the negotiations of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change over their nearly 20-year history, the conflicts and controversies to be taken up in Durban are monotonously familiar — the differing obligations of industrialized and developing nations, the question of who will pay to help poor nations adapt, the urgency of protecting tropical forests, the need to develop and deploy clean energy technology rapidly.
I used the cancer analogy yesterday, and I’m using it again today. Sent November 27:
The United States, one of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, is acting like a five-pack-a-day man trying to wish away a negative biopsy. Scientists the world over, with increasing urgency, are saying that genuine action on climate change must be taken soon to avoid a metastasizing catastrophe — and America’s politicians are equivocating, because…well, because they’re scared.
Like someone who’s just come out of the oncologist’s office, they’re scared of change, scared of an uncertain and dangerous future, and scared of what it’s all likely to cost. And just as a heavy smoker unequivocally “needs” a cigarette to stay calm while he contemplates his diagnosis, the industrialized carbon-burning nations “need” another hit of carbon energy before they give it up.
We know it’s bad for us, that it’s very expensive, that it has drastic long-term health consequences. And we swear to quit, soon. Maybe next year. We promise!
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Durban Conference scientific consensus
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 29: Puttin’ On The Hair-Shirt
The UK Guardian runs an optimistic take on Durban (NOT):
The will to act on climate change is out of political energy, running on empty. The problem is (relatively) distant, complex and intractable. The solution is costly, immediate, and the gains uncertain. It is the kind of slow-burn crisis that democratic politicians only tackle under sustained popular pressure and right now western voters have other things on their minds. Here, the government that promised to be the greenest ever is allowing emission-cutting policies to appear an indulgent hangover from a more prosperous age. Starting on Monday, when the 17th climate change conference opens in Durban, Africa has the opportunity to remind the rest of us why inaction is not an option.
Writing letters to the UK press always makes me want to use fancy words and allusions. To the best of my recollection, Saint Augustine has never before manifested in one of my climate letters. Sent November 25:
The yawning chasm between scientific reality and political exigency is swallowing up any hope for a meaningful agreement from the upcoming Durban climate conference.
Ultimately, the world’s nations are negotiating not with one another, but with a party whose inflexibility and intransigence would be the envy of any tinpot dictator. The laws of physics and chemistry are unmoved by arguments of economic survival, of market imperatives, of global justice — and their demands are simple: stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Immediately. And all of us (nearly seven billion humans along with the rest of Earthly life) are the hostages.
The industrialized world’s leaders aspire to climatic chastity and carbon continence, but (like Saint Augustine) not yet. Their hope is that at some unspecified future date, some unspecified future politicians will do the right thing, an outcome depressingly less likely than the ravages of a runaway greenhouse effect.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots IPCC Republicans Richard Muller scientific consensus
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 23: Defund or Defend?
More on the IPCC report, this time from the Washington Post:
Climate change will make drought and flooding events like those that have battered the United States and other countries in 2011 more frequent, forcing nations to rethink the way they cope with disasters, according to a new report the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued Friday.
The report — the culmination of a two-year process involving 100 scientists and policy experts — suggests that researchers are far more confident about the prospect of more intense heat waves and heavy downpours than they are about how global warming is affecting hurricanes and tornadoes. But the new analysis also speaks to a broader trend: The world is facing a new reality of more extreme weather, and policymakers and business alike are beginning to adjust.
It’s late at night in a hotel room in Madison, Wisconsin. I’ve got a big day tomorrow — four hours of classroom teaching and a concert, so I figured I’d get the letter out of the way before I went to sleep. Sent November 18:
As the case of Dr. Richard Muller case demonstrates, a responsible scientist changes his or her mind when confronted with factual evidence. The past few weeks have seen a plethora of studies demonstrating over and over again that the reality of human-caused climate change is no longer deniable. The newly released report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offers an ominous look at a post-greenhouse-effect future in which extreme weather is the norm, with concomitant effects on agriculture, infrastructure and geopolitics that range from inconvenient to outright terrifying.
Scientific ethics compelled Dr. Muller to revise his opinion once he confirmed the validity of worldwide temperature measurements. Confronted with the same data, conservative politicians would resolve the problem differently — by defunding the IPCC and any other scientific organizations with the temerity to report facts as they are. In Republican politics, electoral exigencies trump the truth, every time.
Warren Senders