environment Politics: assholes media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 28: Screw It, Let’s Play In Four
The Glens Falls (NY) Post-Star runs Eugene Robinson’s column, “Silence over climate change is deafening”:
WASHINGTON — Not a word has been said in the presidential debates about what may be the most urgent and consequential issue in the world: climate change.
President Obama understands and accepts the scientific consensus the burning of fossil fuels is trapping heat in the atmosphere, with potentially catastrophic long-term effects. Mitt Romney’s view, as on many issues, is pure quicksilver — impossible to pin down — but when he was governor of Massachusetts, climate change activists considered him enlightened and effective.
Yet neither has mentioned the subject in the debates. Instead, they have argued over who is more eager to extract ever-larger quantities of oil, natural gas and coal from beneath our purple mountains’ majesties and fruited plains.
“We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years,” Obama said in Tuesday’s debate. “Natural gas production is the highest it’s been in decades. We have seen increases in coal production and coal employment.”
Romney scoffed Obama “has not been Mr. Oil, or Mr. Gas, or Mr. Coal,” and promised he, if elected, would be all three. “I’ll do it by more drilling, more permits and licenses,” he said, adding later this means “bringing in a pipeline of oil from Canada, taking advantage of the oil and coal we have here, drilling offshore in Alaska, drilling offshore in Virginia, where the people want it.”
If this is a contest to see who can pretend to be more ignorant of the environmental freight train barreling down the tracks toward us, Romney wins narrowly.
Time for another screed on our hopeless media system. Sent October 21:
The candidates’ inability to discuss climate change must be understood as a symptom of a larger malady afflicting our governance. With each passing year, the trivialization of complex policy issues becomes more egregious: government by sound-bite and bumper sticker. Our profit-driven media is an integral part of this malign equation; its irresponsible combination of false equivalence and ADD ensures that the single most crucial issue of our century receives no national attention.
The climate crisis will bring economic, geopolitical and environmental consequences: the likely collapse of agriculture and infrastructure under climatic pressures will impoverish unimaginable numbers of people; we’ll see more drought refugees, submerged nations, famines and governmental instability — not to mention the loss of planetary biodiversity, the extinction of entire species, and the likelihood of devastating “tipping points.”
But for American TV networks, genuine discussions of climate change could be truly catastrophic: people might change the channel.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama foreign policy geopolitics media irresponsibility sapir-whorf hypothesis
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 27: Both Candidates Will Eat A Live Bug, On National Television
By the time this shows up on the blog, the last presidential debate will be in the past. Maybe my letter will have been rendered irrelevant. In any case, as I type this, it’s Saturday, October 20, and the LA Times notes that climate activists are still trying to get somebody (anybody!) to ask some damn questions:
With just 2 1/2 weeks left before election day, there’s an urgency on all fronts in the presidential race. For activists, it’s not just about whether President Obama or Mitt Romney will win, but whether either man will pay attention to their issue.
Perhaps no interest community has been as disappointed as those who worry about global climate change. They have repeatedly called for more attention to the issue and, for the most part, failed to get it.
This week’s presidential debate prompted a new round of regret and demands for Romney and Obama to address the topic, as both candidates spent their most notable time arguing about how much coal they would extract from federal lands.
“Both President Obama and Gov. Romney maintained the silence on climate, again ignoring the growing roster of extreme climate-change induced weather events,” said Maura Cowley, executive director of a consortium of youth-oriented groups called the Energy Action Coalition. “As young voters, and the generation with the most to lose if we don’t address the climate crisis now, we demand both candidates break the silence on climate change by standing up to big oil and gas with ambitious plans for clean energy.”
A political application of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis helps us understand why it’s nahgannahappan. Sent October 20:
Monday’s presidential debate will focus on foreign policy, which ought to provide a perfect opening for questions about global climate change. After all, the accelerating greenhouse effect transcends national boundaries, affecting all life on Earth equally. Furthermore, rising planetary temperatures and increased extreme weather will have humanitarian and geopolitical consequences, often in areas with a long history of conflict. It’d seem that our rapidly transforming climate is an essential subject in any discussion of foreign policy. Why won’t it happen on Monday?
“Foreign policy” as a field is concerned precisely with national boundaries — those human abstractions which surging atmospheric CO2 counts make irrelevant. The hard truth is that America (and the rest of the world) must rise above the narrow strategic concerns which have preoccupied us for centuries. Climate change is a global problem, not a “foreign” one, and there is as yet no scheduled debate on “planetary policy.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Gore denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 26: I Wouldn’t Have Smoked In Bed If We Hadn’t Installed Those Smoke Detectors!
Not that this is news or anything, but the New York Times’ David Brooks is an utter idiot:
The period around 2003 was the golden spring of green technology. John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduced a bipartisan bill to curb global warming. I got my first ride in a Prius from a conservative foreign policy hawk who said that these new technologies were going to help us end our dependence on Middle Eastern despots. You’d go to Silicon Valley and all the venture capitalists, it seemed, were rushing into clean tech.
From that date on the story begins to get a little sadder.
Al Gore released his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. The global warming issue became associated with the highly partisan former vice president. Gore mobilized liberals, but, once he became the global warming spokesman, no Republican could stand shoulder to shoulder with him and survive. Any slim chance of building a bipartisan national consensus was gone.
Then, in 2008, Barack Obama seized upon green technology and decided to make it the centerpiece of his jobs program. During his presidential campaign he promised to create five million green tech jobs. Renewable energy has many virtues, but it is not a jobs program. Obama’s stimulus package set aside $90 billion for renewable energy loans and grants, but the number of actual jobs created has been small. Articles began to appear in the press of green technology grants that were costing $2 million per job created. The program began to look like a wasteful disappointment.
Federal subsidies also created a network of green tech corporations hoping to benefit from taxpayer dollars. One of the players in this network was, again, Al Gore. As Carol Leonnig reported in The Washington Post last week, Gore left public office in 2001 worth less than $2 million. Today his wealth is estimated to be around $100 million.
I’m going to stop doing facepalms and start doing headbricks, I swear. Sent October 19:
As the evidence accumulates all around us, and the scientific consensus reaches near unanimity, we’re going to hear more conservatives acknowledge the reality of global climate change. But because it involves admitting error, this process will involve them in a lot of blame-shifting, equivocating, and historical revisionism. David Brooks offers us a preview of what this will look in his attempt to hold Al Gore responsible for the American epidemic of climate-change denial.
Apparently Mr. Gore couldn’t attract conservative support because he was too…shrill? Too popular among hippies? Too right, too soon? Mr. Brooks blithely ignores both the GOP’s decades-long antipathy to science and their pathological hyper-partisanship in his eagerness to avoid responsibility for what his own ideological allies have wrought. Now that climate change itself is irrefutable, the locus of denial has shifted: Republicans would have done something about climate change, but those pesky environmentalists were in the way.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists droughts Rex Tillerson scientific consensus sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 25: Also Younger Than The Sun
The Belleville News-Democrat (IL) runs an opinion piece on the need for a transformation in our way of thinking about the environment:
For decades environmentalists have been guided in their work by what became known as the “precautionary principle.” This decision-making guide was first put forward in environmental terms by pioneering naturalist and biologist Aldo Leopold in his landmark 1940s essay “Round River.”
His focus was the complexity of the environment.
“If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering,” Leopold wrote.
This is the major logic behind the Endangered Species Act, the strongest environmental law ever written. For the United States to allow a species to go extinct, it must go through an exhaustive process that is politically perilous.
This imperative has strong support. John Turner, the director of the U.S. Wildlife Service under George H.W. Bush, was a Republican president of the Wyoming Senate and a rancher. He regularly told a story of how his grandfather had kept all of the broken farm equipment he ever owned.
“My granddad and my dad used to say ‘It’s important to save all the parts,’ ” Turner said. “You never know when you’re going to need them.”
Protecting all the parts was a daunting task before. In the face of climate change that could dramatically transform or destroy ecosystems across the globe, it has become impossible.
This is a fairly generic letter; it could go to any source that admits the existence of the problem. Sent October 18:
Earlier this year, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson finally admitted that climate change was both real and caused by human activity. But the oil baron also blithely asserted that humanity would adapt; the problem, he said, was essentially one of “engineering.”
Well, maybe so. Our innovative, forward-looking, technological species will undoubtedly find ways of fixing some of what we’ve broken and restoring some of the things we’ve destroyed. But as environmentalist Bill McKibben asked recently, “What are you going to develop that replaces Iowa?” Global warming is going to drastically reduce agricultural yields, which is hard to reconcile with our expanding global population. Unless we address the causes of the climate crisis, adopting better farming practices essentially amounts to putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
And if climate change can actually be “solved by engineering,” isn’t it time for our fossil-fueled politicians to stop denying the existence of the crisis — and instead aggressively fund the engineers and scientists we’ll be needing more than ever over the coming decades?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists droughts idiots sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 24: Hellzapoppin…
More on the agricultural disaster currently underway: the same article as yesterday, this time reprinted in the Mitchell Daily Republic (KS):
“I don’t have a place to store pinto beans, OK?” said Rowe, who has managed his community’s grain elevator for 25 years. “This is corn and soybean ground. The reason someone else is more diverse is because there’s more money in being diverse. It’s all economics.”
Still, the hotter, dryer weather pattern may change crop rotations even in the heart of the Corn Belt. “Wheat acres will be very high” next year, said Tabitha Craig, who sells crop insurance for Young Enterprises, an agricultural services and input dealer in New Hartford, Mo.
Climate change will probably push corn-growing regions north while making alternatives to the grain more important elsewhere, said John Soper, the vice president of crop genetics research and development for Pioneer, the seed division of DuPont. The company’s researchers anticipate more corn in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, traditional Canadian wheat-growing areas, while sorghum and sunflowers may experience a revival in Kansas as rainfall declines and irrigation becomes less practical, he said.
The company is developing new varieties of corn, both in traditional hybrid and genetically modified seeds, while boosting research in sorghum and other crops that don’t need irrigation in areas where they’re expected to make a comeback, he said.
Still, fighting drought with better seeds and new trade sources only mitigates the effects of climate change, said Roger Beachy, the first head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture and now a plant biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Revising yesterday’s letter…very busy today. Sent October 17:
Those parched cornfields are a preview of coming attractions. Scientists predict a 10 percent drop in crop yields for each degree of temperature increase; given that we’re on track for a six-degree rise by the end of the century, we’re looking at agricultural output that could well be cut in half. And that’s not just in America, but everywhere. History and common sense tell us that crop failures trigger food shortages, which can turn whole populations into refugees fleeing a land that can no longer support them.
Unfortunately one of our country’s two major political parties has rejected science, history, and common sense as guidelines for policy, which means that any government attempts to prepare for these environmental, humanitarian, and geopolitical crises will inevitably be hamstrung by irrational posturing and gamesmanship. When the coming century promises to uprooting millions of human lives, such a deny-and-delay strategy is intellectually and morally abhorrent.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialism sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 23: As Dry As An Elephant’s Sigh…
The San Antonio Express-News notes that there is a developing problem out there in flyover country:
WASHINGTON — Joe Waldman is saying goodbye to corn after yet another hot, dry summer convinced him that rainfall won’t be there when he needs it anymore.
“I finally just said uncle,” said Waldman, 52, surveying his stunted crop about 100 miles north of Dodge City, Kansas.
Instead, he will expand sorghum, which requires less rain; let some fields remain fallow; and restrict corn to irrigated fields.
While farmers nationwide planted the most corn this year since 1937, growers in Kansas sowed the fewest acres in three years, instead turning to less-thirsty crops such as wheat, sorghum and even triticale, a wheat-rye mix popular in Poland.
Meanwhile, corn acreage in Manitoba, a Canadian province about 700 miles north of Kansas, has nearly doubled over the past decade because of weather changes and higher prices.
Shifts such as these reflect a view among food producers that this summer’s drought in the United States, the worst in half a century, isn’t a random disaster. It’s a glimpse of a future altered by climate change that will affect worldwide production.
But we don’t need to do anything, because Al Gore is fat. And besides, FREEDOM! Sent October 16:
Scientists have estimated that for each 1 degree Celsius increase in global temperature, we’ll experience a 10 percent drop in agricultural productivity. International climate conferences have produced position papers and draft agreements predicated on a 2-degree rise, but this number is already looking absurdly low; experts warn that we’re on track for triple that by the end of the century.
Aside from drastically boosting the number of storms and extreme weather events, such a temperature increase will cripple agriculture throughout the world. Are we ready for the food shortages and refugee crises that inevitably follow crop failures? When these geopolitical and environmental pressures collide with the American conservative strategy of politicized ignorance and obstruction, horrifying results are guaranteed.
Deny-and-delay ceases to be effective political strategy when millions of human lives hang in the balance. We must address the climate catastrophe before it forces us into what biologists coyly call an “evolutionary bottleneck.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: media irresponsibility scientific consensus seasons
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 20: All Russet Brown
The Easton Star-Democrat (DE) tells us about a study of changing leaves that reinforces what should now be absolutely common knowledge:
COLLEGE PARK – Fall colors are arriving later and are fading more quickly because of climate change, according to researchers.
The climate-driven changes are already visible in some forests in New England. Scientists worry that leaf-peeping hotspots in Maryland also could eventually see duller foliage and delays in the start of leaf season.
“It [climate change] certainly could have an impact here, as well,” said Saran Twombly, a researcher at the National Science Foundation, who studies the impact of climate change on foliage.
In Massachusetts’ Harvard Forest, data collected by retired Harvard professor John O’Keefe suggests that leaves are changing color four days later than they did in 1993.
In New Hampshire, sugar maples are shedding their leaves two to five days later than two decades ago, according to data collected by the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in Woodstock, N.H.
Warmer temperatures and erratic weather patterns driven by climate change have an adverse affect on tree health, according to phenologists – those who study the effects of seasonal changes on plants.
Peepers away! Sent October 13:
At first blush, the news that autumn leaves are changing color a few days ahead of schedule doesn’t seem like much to worry about. But the climate crisis requires long-term thinking; it requires us to extrapolate from current trends, and to integrate scientific data from as many sources as possible.
The deniers in our media and politics who claim the science of climate change “isn’t settled” should have no more credibility than flat-Earthers or those who believe the moon landings were faked; the climatological evidence confirming global warming is overwhelmingly conclusive and extremely alarming.
For millennia, Earth’s steady, predictable, and hospitable climate has allowed our species to prosper, our civilization to develop, and our capacity to understand our universe to expand a millionfold. Now that’s changing; those early autumn leaves are one of countless harbingers of a new and less welcoming future we’ve inadvertently created for our descendants. We can no longer afford to ignore these signs.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: media irresponsibility rising sea levels scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 19: Shut Up He Explained
The Naples Daily News (FL) wonders about something:
NAPLES — A national organization of scientists wants President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney to turn their attention to the sea during the final presidential debate in Florida later this month.
The Union of Concerned Scientists on Thursday sent a letter to the candidates, urging them to address rising sea levels during campaign stops across the state. The letter, which was signed by more than 120 Florida city and county government officials and scientists, also asks the candidates to address the issue during their last presidential debate on Oct. 22 at Lynn University in Boca Raton.
Lee County Commissioner Ray Judah was the only Southwest Florida elected official who signed the letter. Judah declined to comment about his decision to sign the letter.
According to the letter, Florida already is feeling the effects of sea level rise, and it “jeopardizes the health, safety and economic well-being of our communities.” The letter points to increased flooding, salt water intrusion of inland water storage and failing flood control structures as signs that rising sea levels need to be addressed at all levels of government.
Not gonna happen. Because FREEDOM, bitches! Sent October 12:
It would be wonderful to see the candidates asked substantial questions about climate change in their upcoming debates. Given the undeniable threat posed by the runaway greenhouse effect (to say nothing of oceanic acidification and thawing Arctic methane, two other nightmares emerging from our past century of CO2 emissions), it would seem absurd to ignore the problem.
And yet this is all too likely what will happen. The sad fact of the matter is that America’s economy is more like an overloaded Hummer than a nimble Prius, with multinational fossil fuel corporations in the driver’s seat. These organizations are loath to relinquish even a tiny bit of their extraordinary profit margins, even if it means denying the existence of a problem far greater in scope, and graver in consequences, than any of the issues currently occupying the attention of our media and political establishments.
This is irresponsibility of unprecedented magnitude.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists economics extreme weather insurance sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 18: No Joke
More on the Munich Re report, this time from USA Today:
5:07PM EST October 10. 2012 – The number of natural disasters per year has been rising dramatically on all continents since 1980, but the trend is steepest for North America where countries have been battered by hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, searing heat and drought, a new report says.
The study being released today by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance firm, sees climate change driving the increase and predicts those influences will continue in years ahead, though a number of experts question that conclusion.
Whatever the causes, the report shows that if you thought the weather has been getting worse, you’re right.
The report finds that weather disasters in North America are among the worst and most volatile in the world: “North America is the continent with the largest increases in disasters,” says Munich Re’s Peter Hoppe.
This letter seemed to fall into two parts. I don’t know if it’s effective, but I write the letters I write, not the letters I wish I’d write. Sent October 11:
The Munich Re report linking climate change with three decades of steadily increasing natural disasters everywhere on Earth provides yet more support for those who maintain that the rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect is a clear and present danger to our civilization. Despite the absurd mischaracterizations of conservative opinionators, this group (aka the “reality-based community”) isn’t just comprised of liberal environmentalists, climatologists, and hippies, but also includes the American armed forces, the intelligence community, and the insurance industry.
While it’d be nice to discover that the free market system is the most effective way to deal with the consequences of a century of fossil-fuel consumption, the evidence so far suggests otherwise. Today’s loudest advocates of deregulation and laissez-faire economics are also the ones most conspicuously ignoring or denying scientific reality. The accelerating climate crisis demands action on a scale that the private sector cannot possibly encompass — a planetary Manhattan project.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists insurance public health
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 17: Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair
The Burlington Free Press (VT) notes that another big insurance organization has gone all DFH on us:
The number of natural disasters per year has been rising dramatically on all continents since 1980, but the trend is steepest for North America where countries have been battered by hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, searing heat and drought, a new report says.
The study being released today by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance firm, sees climate change driving the increase and predicts those influences will continue in years ahead, though a number of experts question that conclusion.
Whatever the causes, the report shows that if you thought the weather has been getting worse, you’re right.
The report finds that weather disasters in North America are among the worst and most volatile in the world: “North America is the continent with the largest increases in disasters,” says Munich Re’s Peter Roder.
The report focuses on weather disasters since 1980 in the USA, Canada, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Roder says this report represents the first finding of a climate change “footprint” in the data from natural catastrophes.
Take a bath, you lazy flower children. Sent October 10:
How often are we reminded that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?” The newly released Munich Re report on the likely impact of climate change should bring that old maxim back to the forefront of our thinking. Insurers are quite rightly anxious about having to shell out big bucks to pay for our national failure to anticipate the disastrous consequences of global warming in our own country and around the world.
Conservative politicians may extol the virtues of the free market, but this is merely rhetoric; their deny-and-delay policies will do incalculable damage to our economy when the bill finally comes due. And what a bill: coping with devastated agriculture, crippled infrastructure, decimated biodiversity, geopolitical instability, and catastrophic public-health impacts is going to cost trillions of dollars. It’s both economically and environmentally sensible to address the climate crisis before it’s too late.
Prevention, not cure.
Warren Senders