environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 25: Come Back With Your Shield, Or On It.
The San Francisco Examiner notes that California governor Jerry Brown is taking steps on behalf of science-type stuff:
Gov. Jerry Brown isn’t shooting for the moon on this one.
On Monday, the governor used an annual summit in Lake Tahoe to launch a new website to rebut skeptics of climate change, commonly referred to as global warming. California has implemented many programs and laws to lead the fight against emissions that contribute to climate change, and now Brown is using his bully pulpit to counter critics who deny there is a problem.
The issue is especially pressing for California, where miles of coastline, including here in the Bay Area, could be hit by rising sea levels, larger waves and higher storm surges in the coming decades. The best science we have points to the inescapable conclusion that emissions from human activity are preventing heat from escaping the atmosphere, causing our planet to warm. Such higher temperatures have myriad consequences, including altered weather patterns — such as droughts, scorching heat waves and stronger storms — and the rapid melting of polar ice, which adds more water to the oceans.
A recent report from the National Research Council pointed out that a sea level change could affect oceans around the world. But one key highlight was that the sea level along the California coastline could rise by more than 3 feet by 2100. For San Francisco, a city bordered on three sides by water, this is a critical topic to address. Thousands of residents and businesses near the ocean or Bay could be affected, as well as key infrastructure such as San Francisco International Airport.
With an urgent need to focus on the monumental task of working to curb future emissions and to plan for those climate changes that it’s too late to avoid, it is frustrating that effort must still be expended to combat climate change deniers. Too much energy is being wasted on peripheral fights that delay the real work that needs to be done. Many might remember “ClimateGate,” the investigation into emails stolen from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in 2009 that allegedly showed scientists were exaggerating the perils of climate change. Years later, the core of the studies have held up, showing an overall warming of Earth. Fighting against such allegations merely diverts time from solving the real problems.
Good for him. Sent August 14:
Governor Brown’s recent climate-change website launch is a salutary example of a politician advocating on behalf of the truth. There will always be people proclaiming that human-caused global warming is illusory (or a liberal hoax), but this isn’t a valid argument against the scientific consensus. Some people believe the Earth is flat, that aliens abducted their aunts, that Elvis lives in Buenos Aires, that the Moon landing was staged — every absurd notion has its adherents. A responsible news media, however, has no obligation to report on such eccentric “true believers.”
Climate change denialists in politics develop energy and environmental policies rooted not in reality, but in a fantasy world where tax cuts for the rich create jobs, President Obama was born in Kenya, and human CO2 emissions have no impact on the planetary greenhouse effect. Responsible politics, like responsible media, should be based on facts and evidence, not ideology.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: false equivalency media irresponsibility Richard Muller scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 24: You Say Ee-ther, I Say Eye-ther…
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in an editorial:
While those with vivid memories of weather during the Depression might take umbrage, it is now official that July 2012 was the hottest month ever in the United States.
So far, 2012 is the driest and hottest year in more than a century. Farmers are battling a drought estimated to cover 63 percent of the country. Crops are failing and livestock are being put down. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has designated half of all counties disaster areas and expects the lowest corn yield in 17 years. This soon will be reflected in higher food prices.
Meanwhile, wildfires have been a problem nationwide. Rivers are receding and exposing once dark river beds to direct sunlight. At the same time, heavy rains have hit parts of the United States, but the damage to crops and livestock has been done.
Writing July 28 in The New York Times, former climate-change skeptic Richard A. Muller conceded what most of the scientific community has already considered gospel — global warming is real. Mr. Muller now agrees that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to the rise in the planet’s temperature, but he also believes much of the extreme weather is the result of cyclical, natural forces.
While there will probably be an argument about the validity of global warming until the last polar bear drowns, the oppressive heat of July 2012 will be remembered for a long time — or until its record is broken.
That is to say, August. Sent August 13:
The scientific argument about the reality of planetary climate change was settled quite some time ago — well before the recent conversion of erstwhile skeptic Dr. Richard Muller. The overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists (ninety-seven percent, more or less) are in agreement on the issue, differing only in their interpretation of particular details.
Yes, there probably will “be an argument about the validity of global warming until the last polar bear drowns,” as your editor writes. Heck, there’ll probably be such an argument as long as there are enough humans to encompass a wide range of opinions and beliefs. But just because there’s an argument doesn’t mean that both sides have equivalent factuality. The Earth is not flat; astronauts actually landed on the moon; Elvis is dead; global warming is real, human-caused, and getting worse.
Without a responsible news media, the Jeffersonian ideal of “a well-informed citizenry” is unachievable — and if there ever was a time when we needed such a citizenry, it’s now.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots James Hansen James Inhofe media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 22: Admitting Error Would Cause Me To Lose Face. Therefore Global Warming Is A Hoax.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review offers a forum to arch-denialist Marc Morano:
Marc Morano operates Climatedepot.com, an Internet clearinghouse for information on climate, environmental and energy news. Morano, a former aide to U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., spoke to the Trib on the latest developments in the climate-change debate.
Q: It’s the hottest year on record so far in the Northeast. Must be global warming, right?
A: Globally, it’s not the hottest. In fact, here is the problem: The heat they are touting as proof of man-made global warming is occurring in the continental United States, which is less than 2 percent of the Earth’s surface. So far in 2012, (global) temperatures have been slightly below the average for the last 15 years. So if the Earth isn’t actually in record warmth globally, why are we looking at 2 percent (of its surface) and then trying to draw extrapolations?
Q: Why are we?
A: It’s politics, pure and simple. When James Hansen (director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies) announces this week, as he has done in previous years, that we’re having (record heat), it sounds so impressive and scary. It sounds like proof of their theory, except for one problem: The (record) temperatures are within hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit difference between (ordinary) years and the years they are claiming are the hottest years.
Q: So you consider such pronouncements scare tactics?
A: Yes, these are hard-core ideological activists at work posing as neutral scientists. It’s not that Hansen is lying; it’s that he’s excluding any information he doesn’t find convenient. Satellite temperature data for July (indicated the month was the) coolest globally since 2008. So not only was it not impressively warm globally, it was actually somewhat cooler. We are not looking at unprecedented warmth. They (global-warming activists) are cherry-picking.
Assholes. Sent August 11:
Marc Morano, the alter ego of Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, offers a textbook example of projection in his interview with Eric Heyl. Offering no foundation for his accusation that climatologists are “playing politics” in their research, Mr. Morano’s overheated rhetoric implies that such gamesmanship is to be expected from anyone who participates in a discussion of climate change. In other words, it’s not scientists, but Mr. Morano and Senator Inhofe who “play politics” with science.
In March, Senator Inhofe told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow that “I was actually on your side of this issue…I thought it must be true until I found out what it cost.” The Senator’s reason for changing his mind was fiscal, not factual. By analogy, rejecting your biopsy results because chemotherapy is too expensive may be an understandable first reaction to a poor prognosis, but beating the disease necessarily begins with acknowledging the truth.
Climatologists have delivered their diagnosis. Now it’s time for us to face the facts. Morano, Inhofe and their compatriots in climate-change denial are exemplars of irresponsibility, in the face of a crisis of historic proportions.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists greenhouse effect idiots James Hansen media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 17: Quiet Out There! Do You Have Any Idea What Time It Is?
James Hansen again, this time reprinted in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988, I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.
But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.
My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.
In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.
This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.
The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.
These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.
Another Paul Revere letter. Sent August 6:
As far back as the Kennedy administration, scientists have warned that consequences of our CO2 emissions had the potential to transform Earth in potentially devastating ways — and politicians chose to leave the problem for someone else to solve. By the 1980s, climate science had grown more sophisticated, and experts predicted that genuine disaster loomed unless action was taken to limit our greenhouse emissions. Instead, the can was kicked again and again; the public was kept in the dark. During the Bush administration, NASA climatologist James Hansen’s report on the situation was blocked by politically-motivated censorship — and increasingly unhinged conservative media figures whipped up anti-science zealotry among their audiences. Climate scientists like Hansen, Michael Mann and many others routinely receive hate mail and death threats for reporting their findings.
Over two centuries ago, the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord responded unhesitatingly to a midnight warning, and our nation remains grateful. Now, a modern-day Paul Revere is trying to wake us up. Where would America be if the patriots of 1775 had hurled abuse and calumnies at that midnight rider before they rolled over and went back to sleep? And where will we be two centuries from now if we ignore James Hansen’s clear and urgent warnings?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots scientific consensus scientific literacy
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 16: Oh, The Water — O-oh The Water…
The Winston-Salem Journal (NC) discusses the state’s ongoing parade of idiocy:
In North Carolina, a state-sponsored science panel warned sea levels could rise by more than 3 feet by 2100. Lawmakers supported by development interests responded with a bill to ban those figures.
During their summer session, legislators moved to mandate that future trends be based solely upon historical data, which doesn’t account for the accelerated sea-level rise expected by many scientists. They said the move prevented the economic burdens of building farther from the coast or higher off the ground.
The North Carolina bill called for preparing for a much smaller 8-inch rise during the same period. The smaller projected rise means less regulation on coastal developments. But after international ridicule and a spot on the satirical television show “The Colbert Report,” lawmakers in the state’s majority-Republican legislature backed off the move — instead opting for a scientific moratorium on any figures until 2016 while more studies are conducted. Gov. Bev Perdue on Wednesday decided to let the bill become law without her signature.
{snip}
North Carolina is out front of the issue to regulate against what is generally accepted as scientific consensus. But other states have tested the waters, and even more could follow suit.
The vast majority of coastal states do not legislate on “climate change,” which has become a politically charged term after being used as a substitute for the more politicized term “global warming.”
Many states have laws that allow for coastal planning, but rarely do states mandate practices specifically on the rising seas.
In Virginia, legislators removed language about “sea-level rise” from a study bill. They replaced it with the phrase many lawmakers were more comfortable with — “recurrent flooding.”
Politicians felt the previous language was left-leaning.
How about the phrase, “y’all a buncha knuckle-draggin’ morons.” Is that a “left-leaning” term? Sent August 5:
To characterize the phrase “climate change” as “politically charged” is truer even than anti-science conservatives acknowledge. The term was first proposed during the Bush administration by Republican strategist Frank Luntz — as a less-frightening synonym for “global warming.” That Luntz’ coinage is equally accurate and even more frightening has nothing to do with its political implications, but with the nature of climatic reality, which is changing faster and more wildly than all but the most extreme predictions.
When North Carolina legislators respond to problematic facts and analyses by attempting to regulate the terms of discussion, they replace scientific consensus (the result of a planet-wide effort to understand the world we live in) with unscientific cowardice. Future generations of Americans living on a continent with a completely transformed coastline will rightly mock these politicians for their ignorance and cupidity.
As Stephen Colbert once said, reality has a liberal bias.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes idiots media irresponsibility Richard Lindzen Richard Muller scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 11: Tremendous Richard(s)
More on Muller, from the San Francisco Chronicle:
The hot issue of global warming got hotter Monday when a UC Berkeley physicist, once a loud skeptic of human-caused climate change, agreed not only that the Earth is heating up, but also that people are the cause of it all.
Richard Muller converted only a year ago to the idea that the world has been warming for decades. Before then he had argued that global warming data – even figures compiled by U.N. experts – were badly flawed.
Now Muller is going further, blaming the warming almost entirely on human emission of greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide – a conclusion that almost all climate scientists reached long ago.
Muller argued that the evidence from more than 36,000 temperature stations worldwide shows that the global thermometer has risen by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years. The warm-up began with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, Muller said, and has accelerated in recent years.
Watchng the comments pile up is a real education in despair. Sent July 31:
Those seeking scientific opposition to the worldwide consensus on global climate change had their available options significantly reduced by Dr. Richard Muller’s “conversion.” For many years, Muller was one of the go-to guys for media outlets needing a contrarian voice to bolster a “the science isn’t settled” argument. Now, with the release of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project’s results, Muller embraces the science he once scorned, leaving conservative pundits and politicians no choice but Dr. Richard Lindzen, the poster boy not only for climate-change denialists, but also for those who still doubt the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
Like those apocryphal Japanese soldiers still fighting Allied forces on forgotten Pacific islands, Lindzen is a true believer with thoroughly solidified opinions, making him a perfect recipient for the Koch brothers’ next climate-change research grant. The rest of us are pleased to welcome Richard Muller to the reality-based community.
Warren Senders
environment: adaptation adaptationism assholes corporate irresponsibility denialism idiots Koch Brothers scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 9: Evolutionary Koch-Bottleneck Edition…
The New York Times prints Richard Muller’s acknowledgement that everybody else was right all along:
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
He’ll disappear down the memory hole. Or will he? Sent July 29:
Now that Richard Muller’s examination of the data has brought him into agreement with the majority opinion that climate change is of human origin, one wonders how the Koch brothers, who funded much of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, will respond. While Dr. Muller is now nicely aligned with the climatological consensus of the 1990s, if the Kochs’ position simply joined the twentieth century, it would be a major advance.
Those notorious global warming denialists will probably shift their opinions from denialism to adaptationism, following the lead of Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, who recently acknowledged the reality of climate change while blithely asserting that humanity will “adapt,” an ominous euphemism for gigadeaths. While our species will surely change in response to climatic transformations, the question is whether these fossil fuel profiteers will help our civilization avoid catastrophe if it negatively impacts their quarterly returns. The available evidence isn’t encouraging.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists idiots scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 6: Al Gore Is Fat, Apparently.
Paul Krugman’s piece on climate change has been making the rounds. Here it is published by the Seattle Times:
A couple of weeks ago the Northeast was in the grip of a severe heat wave. As I write this, however, it’s a fairly cool day in New Jersey, considering that it’s late July. Weather is like that; it fluctuates.
And this banal observation may be what dooms us to climate catastrophe, in two ways. On one side, the variability of temperatures from day to day and year to year makes it easy to miss, ignore or obscure the longer-term upward trend. On the other, even a fairly modest rise in average temperatures translates into a much higher frequency of extreme events — like the devastating drought now gripping America’s heartland — that do vast damage.
On the first point: Even with the best will in the world, it would be hard for most people to stay focused on the big picture in the face of short-run fluctuations. When the mercury is high and the crops are withering, everyone talks about it, and some make the connection to global warming. But let the days grow a bit cooler and the rains fall, and inevitably people’s attention turns to other matters.
Making things much worse, of course, is the role of players who don’t have the best will in the world. Climate-change denial is a major industry, lavishly financed by Exxon, the Koch brothers and others with a financial stake in the continued burning of fossil fuels. And exploiting variability is one of the key tricks of that industry’s trade. Applications range from the Fox News perennial — “It’s cold outside! Al Gore was wrong!” — to the constant claims that we’re experiencing global cooling, not warming, because it’s not as hot right now as it was a few years back.
Shrill. Sent July 26:
One of the simplest and most important pieces of advice we give to our children is that actions have consequences — and that much wisdom lies in considering them before we act, rather than realizing belatedly that we have erred. An ounce of prevention, a stitch in time.
Why, then, are we adults so bad at following our own suggestions? We’ve known for decades about the likely consequences of an accelerating greenhouse effect (presidents have been getting scientific advice on global warming since the 1960s!). Each new piece of research interprets, contextualizes and refines its predecessors, making climate change one of the most exhaustively researched subjects in the world. We’ve been well warned about the dangers of continued consumption of fossil fuels.
Teenagers think they’re immortal, terrifying their parents with foolish thrill-seeking — but our society badly needs the wisdom of considered consequences, not the adrenaline rush of self-destructive folly.
Warren Senders
environment: glacial melt Greenland ice melt scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 5: The Mighty Quinn, Redux.
This is horrifying, in an awful kind of way. The New York Times is one of many reporting on NASA’s recent observations of Greenland, which appears to be melting very fast. Very fast:
In a scant four days this month, the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet melted to an extent not witnessed in 30 years of satellite observations, NASA reported on Tuesday.
The extent of Greenland’s ice sheet surface, in white, on July 8, left, and July 12, right, based on measurements from three satellites, which pass over at different times and whose data are combined and analyzed. The deepest pink areas reflect maximal certainty that the ice has melted.
On average, about half of the surface of the ice sheet melts during the summer. But from July 8 to July 12, the ice melt expanded from 40 percent of the ice sheet to 97 percent, according to scientists who analyzed the data from satellites deployed by NASA and India’s space research institute.
“I started looking at the satellite imagery and saw something that was really unprecedented” since the advent of satellite imaging of the earth’s frozen surface, or cryosphere, said Thomas L. Mote, a climate scientist at the University of Georgia who for 20 years has been studying ice changes on Greenland detected by satellite.
While scientists described it as an “extreme event” not previously recorded from space, they hastened to add that it was normal in a broader historical context.
But Al Gore is fat. Sent July 25:
When it comes to the news on climate change, “rare” seems to be the new “often.” How often in the recent past have we heard reports of “once-in-a-century” storms suddenly happening every year? Of nearly snowless winters several times in a row — in places normally measuring the stuff in yards?
NASA’s report of unprecedented melting on Greenland’s ice sheet is just the latest and most terrifying example of this phenomenon. While the researchers studying the ice discuss it in careful scientific language, there’s no doubt they are shocked and disturbed by such extreme melting.
How much more evidence do we need to connect the accelerating greenhouse effect to these stunning disruptions of the environmental status quo? Our civilization was made possible by a mild and predictable climate — one rapidly vanishing in the rear-view mirrors of our industrial-size SUVs. Now that “bizarre” is the new “normal”, whither humanity?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies false equivalency media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 31: I Know Nothink!
The Iowa City Press-Citizen notes that nobody’s talkin’ about it:
The 800-pound gorilla in the Mount Pleasant High School Gymnasium Tuesday was the subject of climate change.
Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad called for a public discussion on drought conditions in Iowa, and all of the governmental players were there:
• U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
• Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.
• Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
• And the Farm Services Administration.
The phrase “climate change” or any analysis of causation for the current drought was absent from the public discussion. This was a meeting about row crop agriculture and related agricultural producers and it was intended to deal with the as-is situation.
The obvious problem, as Mark Schouten of Homeland Security and Emergency Response put it, “you can’t snap your fingers and make it rain.”
{snip}
It was the Farm Services Agency that raised the issue of environmental groups, saying a group had sued for an environmental impact statement before releasing CRP acres to haying or grazing.
During the public comment section, a truck driver who had just delivered a load of grain stood at the microphone and demonized the environmental groups for trying to influence food production. It got the biggest applause at the event and the governor jumped on board reminding us of his joining a lawsuit in Nebraska against an environmental group.
Trouble in River City. Sent July 20:
It’s unsurprising that people still aren’t drawing the connection between the extreme weather hammering America’s farmlands and the accelerating greenhouse effect caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but blaming environmentalists for devastated crops while ignoring the role of climate change is like blaming oncologists for cancer.
While scientists have been making increasingly scary predictions for several decades about the consequences of uncontrolled greenhouse emissions, their words have gone unheeded; many who’ve tried to sound the warning have been mocked, harassed, and threatened for their pains. Meanwhile, our print and broadcast media have maintained a scrupulous false equivalency between genuine expertise and the pronouncements of petroleum-funded denialists.
The United States owes its existence to the Minutemen of Concord and Lexington, who responded unhesitatingly to a midnight rider’s call. The Paul Reveres of the present day are climatologists; our nation will owe its future to those who heed their alarms.
Warren Senders