environment Politics: agriculture denialists drought idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 7: You Get No Bread With One Meat Ball
WICHITA, Kan. — Years of drought are reshaping the U.S. beef industry with feedlots and a major meatpacking plant closing because there are too few cattle left in the United States to support them.
Some feedlots in the nation’s major cattle-producing states have already been dismantled, and others are sitting empty. Operators say they don’t expect a recovery anytime soon, with high feed prices, much of the country still in drought and a long time needed to rebuild herds.
The closures are the latest ripple in the shockwave the drought sent through rural communities. Most cattle in the U.S. are sent to feedlots for final fattening before slaughter. The dwindling number of animals also is hurting meatpackers, with their much larger workforces. For consumers, the impact will be felt in grocery and restaurant bills as a smaller meat supply means higher prices.
Cattle numbers have been falling for years as the price of corn used to feed animals in feedlots skyrocketed. The drought accelerated the process, but many feedlots were able to survive at first because ranchers whose pastures dried up weaned calves early and sent breeding cows to be fattened for slaughter.
Yum. Sent February 25:
Even as the drought hammering the world’s most productive farmland goes into its second year, the anti-science conservatives in American politics and media are still stuck in full-denial mode: there is no drought, and if there is, it’s not caused by climate change, which isn’t happening; even if the climate is changing, it’s not caused by humans, and even if it is, it’s too expensive to do anything about it anyway. Does your head hurt? Mine does.
It’s not just farm states that are waking up to the consequences of an accelerating greenhouse effect. Everywhere across the nation and the world people are realizing that a transformed climate is going to wreak havoc on our food supply, with ripple effects that will radically alter the lives of everyone on the planet.
Eventually, of course, the denialists will have to eat their words. There won’t be anything else left to eat.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists fruit sustainability
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 6: One Piece In The Shape Of A Pair
Public Opinion, a news outlet in Chambersburg, PA, tells us about a fruit scientist and what he had to say:
Local fruit growers wanted to know about hail netting after Rob Crassweller, Penn State pomologist, finished his talk on climate change.
What color? What mesh?
Crassweller had said very little about hail during his presentation on Thursday to the Franklin County Horticulture Society at the Savoy Restaurant in Waynesboro. It’s a four-letter word fruit growers don’t like to hear or speak.
Crassweller spoke at length to the 40 growers about expected changes in pruning, pests, production and plant diseases.
“That’s something we can handle,” said Dwight Mickey, secretary of the county fruit growers. “You just have to learn to adapt. Those are things we can control, the influx of new insects and diseases.”
Hail on the other hand is unpredictable and usually devastating.
Mickey, Pennsylvania’s 2012 Grower of the Year, lost most of his 2011 apple crop to a hailstorm.
[snip]
Crassweller told growers he would not get into the causes of climate change.
“Things have changed and will continue to change,” Crassweller said. “We know enough that things are going in a different way.”
Indeed. Why ask for trouble? Sent February 24:
As global weather has gotten steadily weirder over the past year or so, the ranks of those rejecting climatology’s conclusions have thinned. But this means only that denialists have moved back to their next line of attack: even if the climate is changing, that doesn’t mean humans caused it.
And given the history of conservative denialists’ behavior, it’s easy to understand why Dr. Rob Crassweller abstained from addressing the causes of climate change when talking with Pennsylvania fruit growers. Nobody wants the obscene phone calls, hate mail, death threats, and frivolous legal actions that have disrupted the lives and careers of climate scientists whose conclusions indicate that anthropogenic global warming is a fact.
But ignoring a truth won’t make it go away. Climate change is real, it’s here, it’s dangerous — and human civilization is its primary driver. The sooner we face the facts, the sooner we’ll start making progress against a profound civilizational threat.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 5: And Yet It Moves!
The Newark Star-Ledger throws down the gantlet:
PSE&G wants to spend a staggering $4 billion over the next decade to harden its electric and gas systems against the impact of severe storms like Sandy and Irene, a sum that works out to about $500 per person in New Jersey.
“This is a cost of climate change, pure and simple,” says Jeanne Fox, a commissioner on the Board of Public Utilities, which oversees the utilities.
It’s a pity we cannot send the entire bill to the flat-earthers who are willfully deaf to the chorus of warnings from the world’s most respected scientists. By blocking political action on climate change, even now, they are driving up the costs of coping.
Flat-earthers. Heh. Sent Feb. 23:
In some ways, climate-change denialists are even more regressive than “flat-Earthers.” After all, the Earth’s curvature is imperceptible until the parochial and uninformed eye graduates to an understanding of vaster distances and the evidence of science. Climate change, by contrast, is sharply evident everywhere around the planet. When flowers bloom a month earlier, agriculture is devastated by drought, superstorm after superstorm clobbers coastlines, and heatwaves make cities almost uninhabitable, these transformations can be recognized by anyone with the wit to look around.
The institutions rejecting the scientific evidence of rapidly warming planet are not driven purely by ignorance, but a far less forgivable motive. The fossil-fuel corporations whose products contribute the most to the burgeoning greenhouse effect will see their quarterly returns affected by a societal move away from carbon-based energy. It is surely a pity that our tax dollars should subsidize such a toxic mix of cupidity and stupidity.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists extreme weather sustainability
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 4: In Case Of Accident, He Always Took His Mum
More shrill alarmism from the Grey Lady:
DENVER — After enduring last summer’s destructive drought, farmers, ranchers and officials across the country’s parched heartland had hoped that plentiful winter snows would replenish the ground and refill their rivers, breaking the grip of one of the worst dry spells in American history. No such luck.
Across the West, lakes are half full and mountain snows are thin, omens of another summer of drought and wildfire. Complicating matters, many of the worst-hit states now have even less water on hand than a year ago, raising the specter of shortages and rationing that could inflict another year of losses on struggling farms.
Reservoir levels have fallen sharply in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. The soil is drier than normal. And while a few recent snowstorms have cheered skiers, the snowpack is so thin in parts of Colorado that the government has declared an “extreme drought” around the ski havens of Vail and Aspen.
“We’re worse off than we were a year ago,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center.
But Al Gore uses a private jet. February 22:
Higher temperatures increase evaporation, bringing higher humidity, leading in turn to a steadily-increasing likelihood of extreme precipitation. But this doesn’t mean all that extra rain or snow’s falling where it’s needed — a lesson farmers in the American Midwest are learning painfully as their land parches and cracks under the ravages of extreme drought. This is climate change.
Warmer winters mean that invasive insect pests like the mountain pine beetle are no longer stopped by below-freezing temperatures, which means the likely death of millions of pines. Thousands of acres of dead forest in a land hammered by drought; a superfire waiting to happen. This is climate change.
The subtle and varied edifices of human civilization are built on the foundation of a benign and stable environment — something far more fragile than anyone imagined. As the land loses its ability to support our species’ numbers, this, too, is climate change.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 3: Let’s Split The Difference Between Catastrophic And Apocalyptic!
U.S. News And World Report gives us a teaser on POTUS’ intentions:
President Barack Obama is tired of waiting for Congress to move on legislation to reduce carbon emissions, and his administration is poised to move forward on actions to do just that—including a move that will effectively eliminate the possibility of any new coal plant opening in the United States, experts say.
“We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence,” Obama said during his State of the Union address. “Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science—and act before it’s too late.”
Climate change has been a controversial public policy issue in recent years, as many conservative Republicans have denied a relationship between carbon emissions and incremental increases in temperatures, which many scientists link to increasingly severe weather events.
But…
…there’s always a but. February 22:
There’s much to cheer in President Obama’s stated intention to push ahead initiatives for combating climate change over the rest of his second term. With American agriculture hammered by drought and extreme weather delivering blow after blow to coastline cities, it’s clear to all but the most willfully ignorant that climate change cannot be wished out of existence. A coherent national and global strategy for addressing the crisis is the need of the hour.
But given Mr. Obama’s desire for common ground, he must recognize that in this struggle, a compromise with his political opponents is no better than abject surrender to natural forces far more powerful than they. His real adversaries are neither the increasingly intransigent GOP or the profit-driven fossil fuel corporations whose executives recently joined him for a round of golf, but the laws of chemistry and physics — immune, alas, to electoral exigencies or soaring oratory.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 2: I Smoke Fettucini Alfredo, Myself
In breaking news, Chris Christie is an utter idiot:
Did global warming and rising sea levels trigger Hurricane Sandy?
And does it matter?
Gov. Christie says it doesn’t. Whether environmental changes caused the storm is an “esoteric question,” he said at a news conference at the Shore earlier this month. Victims of the storm don’t “give a damn” either – as confirmed by a group of Sandy survivors who applauded Christie’s remark.
But scientists say they all need to start caring. Because regardless of what caused Sandy, even those skeptical about climate change say a Sandy-like storm will happen again. And so, steps must be taken now to prevent loss of life and property later.
The guy gives douchenozzles a bad name. Sent February 21:
We’ve seen this behavior hundreds of times, perhaps in our own families or neighborhoods. A friend has a heart attack, or a relative develops a malignancy — while rejecting any connection to unhealthy habits. Since there’s no way to link a particular cardiac episode to a daily diet of jelly donuts and cheeseburgers, or a particular tumor to a 3-pack-a-day smoking habit, this makes it easier to deny even an obvious causal relationship.
Chris Christie’s doing the same thing in refusing to consider climate change’s impact on New Jersey’s future. The simple fact is that America has developed some very unhealthy habits over the past century; while no single storm can be definitively linked to our fossil-fuel addiction, we’ve tilted the probabilities in favor of more disastrous weather in the years to come. Governor Christie needs to spend more time in New Jersey, and less in a state of denial.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 1: Maybe He Was Talking Them Into Taking A Pay Cut?
The San Antonio Express-News runs an AP article on Obama’s seeming readiness to embrace the climate cause:
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is talking about climate change like it was 2009.
The president, who rarely uttered the words “climate change” or “global warming” during the second half of his first term and during the re-election campaign, has re-inserted it boldly back into his lexicon. In his latest State of the Union address before Congress, Obama sounded like he did in his first, urging lawmakers to limit gases blamed for global warming “for the sake of our children and our future.” Those words followed his inaugural address, in which he said, “We will respond to the threat of climate change.”
The difference between then and now is that Obama knows Congress is unlikely to agree. He said that if Congress won’t act, he will through executive action. The question is: What will he do?
But then, we read this:
WASHINGTON — On the same weekend that 40,000 people gathered on the Mall in Washington to protest construction of the Keystone Pipeline — to its critics, a monument to carbon-based folly — President Obama was golfing in Florida with a pair of Texans who are key oil, gas and pipeline players.
[snip]
But on his first “guys weekend” away since he was reelected, the president chose to spend his free time with Jim Crane and Milton Carroll, leading figures in the Texas oil and gas industry, along with other men who run companies that deal in the same kinds of carbon-based services that Keystone would enlarge. They hit the links at the Floridian Yacht and Golf Club, which is owned by Crane and located on the Treasure Coast in Palm City, Fla.
Oh, fuck it. Go ahead and have your apocalypse, but don’t expect me to cheer. Sent Feb. 20:
So President Obama finally brought up climate change in his State of the Union address. Given that the rapidly transforming planetary atmosphere has the potential to render all other political concerns irrelevant within a few generations, it’s only appropriate for the leader of the world’s most powerful nation to address the problem.
So far, so good.
But it’s extremely troubling that last Sunday, as 40,000 people filled Washington for the country’s largest-ever environmental demonstration, the President chose to spend his time golfing with Jim Crane and Milton Carroll, leading figures in the Texas oil and gas industries. Fossil-fuel’s grossly disproportionate influence on American politics can’t be nullified with words, no matter how forceful or eloquent, and since policies robust enough to have a positive impact on climate change will certainly hurt the quarterly profits of Big Oil and Big Coal, these corporate actors will fight tooth and nail against meaningful action.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: denialists economics sustainability timescale
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 28: Right Now, Over Me…
The Loveland Reporter-Herald (CO) runs a thoughtful op-ed by a smart young man named Reid Maynard. He’s in high school:
Before opening our discussion, let us leave some baggage behind. Let us release prejudices regarding media misinformation, sensationalism and hypocritical vice presidents.
With minds unhindered, let us approach the table and discuss climate change. Much passionate argument emerges in this debate with logic and demagoguery on both sides, but it presents high stakes and sacrifices for all generations: adult, youth and child. Therefore, we must carefully consider the subject without the stain of bias.
The existence of climate change is no longer a debate. Simply observe modern evidence, such as the fact that nations now dispute maritime boundaries in the Arctic as shipping routes emerge where ice once reigned. Today, politicians and pundits argue about causes. Most researchers agree that human activity exacerbates this phenomenon, accelerating change beyond natural pace. Others dispute anthropogenic change and insist that mitigation creates unacceptable costs. Throw in lobbyists, profiteers and screaming extremists and we have painful gridlock.
I could have done without the dig at Al Gore. But rahne do, he’s a good kid. We need more like him. Feb 19:
When it comes to the long-term future of our species, we ignore the voices of the young at our peril. Even as the market-driven consumer economy encourages us to adopt the short-term mindset of immediate gratification, thoughtful young people cannot ignore the damage this is doing to the planet and the environment upon which all of us depend. They see, all too clearly, that a lifestyle based on continuous consumption will end by consuming us all; as Reid Maynard demonstrates in his op-ed column, they understand that there are no easy options.
And what of us, their parents and grandparents? If we are prepared to accept the facts of global heating — no matter how uncomfortable, disquieting, or inconvenient — then we can collaborate with our children in solving the problems of survival and prosperity in a transformed world. On the other hand, if we reject the science of climate change because it conflicts with our preconceptions and ideologies, we are no longer partners, but adversaries.
It’s up to us.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes idiots Iraq media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 27: I Don’t Like You…
The Detroit Free Press reports on February 17th’s climate rally in DC:
WASHINGTON — In what was billed as the largest climate rally in U.S. history, thousands of people marched past the White House on Sunday to urge President Obama to reject a controversial pipeline and take other steps to fight climate change.
Organizers, including the Sierra Club, estimated that more than 35,000 people from 30-plus states — some dressed as polar bears — endured frigid temperatures to join the “Forward on Climate” rally, although the crowd size could not be confirmed. Their immediate target is Obama’s final decision, expected soon, on the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would carry tar sands from Canada through several U.S. states.
“This movement’s been building a long time. One of the things that’s built it is everybody’s desire to give the president the support he needs to block this Keystone pipeline,” Bill McKibben, founder of the environmental activist group, 350.org, said as protesters gathered on the National Mall.
Read the comments on the article to get your stomach churning. February 18:
In the aftermath of America’s largest-ever demonstration for environmental causes, it’s worth remembering what we were doing ten years ago.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, politicians and media outlets hammered relentlessly on the potential for a global conflagration ignited by Saddam’s WMDs, and the expression of doubt was considered a moral failing. Lost in the hullabaloo was the fact that credible intelligence about the purported threat was nonexistent; now that a decade has passed, we’re eager to forget our national credulity.
Climate change offers precisely the inverse situation. Here is a genuinely civilizational threat, backed up by mountains of credible intelligence from thousands of different sources. If our politicians and media cared about a real danger as much as they did about a spurious one, we’d see an entirely different set of stories on the daily news, and an entirely different set of policy responses from Capitol Hill.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: economics national boundaries sustainability
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 26: Trying To Make A Dovetail Joint…
Enjoy Mount Hood skiing and snowboarding while you can — your children and grandchildren may not get the same chance.
Oregon’s winter tourism industry is imperiled by climate change and diminishing snowfall patterns, according to a recent study.
It could be that within 50 years, only the upper ski areas of Mt. Hood will be available for snow sports, says Angus Duncan, chairman of the Oregon Global Warming Commission. “If you look at some of the time-series photos of the glaciers on Mount Hood in the last 50 years, you can see where the glaciers are melting away,” Duncan says.
In the past decade, 38 states have suffered a cumulative $1 billion loss and 37,000 fewer jobs as a result of diminishing snowfall, according to a Dec. 6 report by advocacy groups Protect Our Winters and the Natural Resources Defense Council. The study was conducted by University of New Hampshire researchers Elizabeth Burakowski and Matthew Magnusson. They wanted to help policy makers understand the ski and snowmobile industry’s economic importance and the potential economic impacts of climate change.
Skiing and snowboarding had a $482 million economic impact in Oregon in 2010-11— accounting for 6,772 jobs — according to a new report by the University of Oregon.
I’m refurbishing the “(insert state) isn’t alone” letter over and over; trying to build up a backlog so when I go to India later this year I can take a few weeks off and not fall behind. Feb 17:
When it comes to feeling the increased impact of global heating, Oregon’s got plenty of company. Whether it’s vanishing snowpacks, crippling droughts, unseasonal monsoons in Asia, or invasive insect infestations, the consequences of the accelerating greenhouse effect are getting harder to ignore. While a few communities and regions may see temporary benefits, the long-term struggle to cope with a radically transformed climate offers some of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced.
If there is a positive aspect to the metastasizing climate crisis, it’s that we humans may finally be forced to recognize that what we do today in our own neighborhoods can — and will — affect the lives of others, even if they’re distant in space and time. To ensure happiness and prosperity for our descendants, we must recognize that in the face of the gathering storm, political boundaries and cultural differences are irrelevant.
Warren Senders