environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots James Hansen media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 21: He’s Just Not A Very Serious Person.
James Hansen again, this time reprinted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.
There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.
The future is now. And it is hot.
So right…he’s wrong. What? Sent August 10:
Has anyone noticed that our politicians and media figures are determined to avoid acknowledging anyone who had it right from the get-go? Those who protested the disastrous and costly Iraq invasion are ignored in all subsequent formulation of foreign affairs. Those who knew from the beginning that Bush’s tax cuts were a fiscal disaster are marginalized in any discussion of economic issues. And, most importantly for all of us, the scientists and environmentalists who’ve been warning us for years about climate change are systematically excluded from any influence on environmental and energy policy.
After being silenced by the Bush administration, NASA climatologist Dr. James Hansen is speaking out with increasing fervor and eloquence, hoping against hope that we can address the looming climate crisis before time runs out. Since Dr. Hansen recognized and understood the danger early on, it seems all too likely he’ll be ignored again. Why?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: economics elections media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 20: How Do You Know That You Know What You Know When You Don’t Know What You Know At All?
The Winnipeg Star notes that American presidential politics doesn’t seem to care, really:
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Barack Obama promised to tackle climate change when he ran for the White House four years ago, but as he battles for a second term, he says little about the issue, even as the United States suffers through a drought of historic proportions, wild storms, and punishing heat that topples temperature records almost daily.
As late as April, he told Rolling Stone magazine climate change would be a central campaign issue.
“I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way,” he said.
Instead, Obama is fighting Republican challenger Mitt Romney in a tight race over the struggling American economy and stubbornly high unemployment. Gallup polling repeatedly shows the economy is the chief concern among American voters, at 65 per cent, while environmental and pollution issues were mentioned by less than one per cent of those polled.
Even without a big push on climate change, Obama has the support of environmentalists. Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said Obama “has done a substantial amount in his three years to fight the climate crisis.” Romney, he said, “is taking his lead from fossil-fuel companies and does not even acknowledge there is a climate problem.”
Romney has been accused of changing positions on the issue to curry favour with the most conservative Republicans, many of whom deny climate change exists.
La la la la la la. Sent August 9:
This year’s extreme weather may have forced climate change into the public eye, but we still hear that concerns about the economy must necessarily supersede environmental worries. This is a profoundly misleading notion.
We have been able to ignore the crisis for so long because we have not yet recognized that the health of the economy and that of the planet are inextricably linked. The ecological “economy” of planet Earth has been functioning well for many orders of magnitude longer than industrialized humanity’s fiscal economy. To elevate the importance of the latter over the former is to make a profound miscalculation with potentially disastrous consequences.
Ultimately, our prosperity depends on a healthy and consistent climate; if you subtract potable water, clean air, regular weather and flourishing biodiversity from the equation, the result is always going to be catastrophe — regardless of how well the GDP is doing that quarter.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists drought
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 19: Arkansas Traveler Meets Rocky Raccoon.
The Black Hills Pioneer (SD) reprints Gene Lyons’ piece on his cows:
Of all the ways nature has to kill you, drought may be the cruelest. The desiccation proceeds day after punishing day. The afternoon sun pounds the earth like a brazen hammer. As I write, the temperature here in Perry County, Ark., has reached 108 degrees.
The countryside is dying. There’s nothing green in my pastures except inedible weeds. Even pigweed is drooping. Our pond dried up six weeks ago. The ground beneath is bare and cracked. Up on the ridge, some hardwoods are shedding leaves and going dormant; oaks are simply dying.
When I’d turned my cows into their new pasture last year, they kicked up their heels and frolicked like calves. So much fresh grass! Last week, they tore down a low-hanging limb from the persimmon tree they rest under most afternoons. They herded in and stripped the leathery leaves within an hour, the first green thing they’d eaten in weeks.
Lucky cows. Mine is basically a hobby farm, so I can afford to keep my small herd intact. Because spring came a month early, I had enough hay left over to see them through the summer. Neighbors who operate close to the margin have hauled thousands of cows to the sale barn — animals they’d planned on breeding. Pastures stand barren and empty throughout the region.
The National Weather Service calls it an “exceptional drought.” Nobody I talk to can remember anything like it. 1980 was bad, but the devastation was more limited in scope. What’s happening in Arkansas is taking place across the entire middle of the country — a remorseless, slow-motion catastrophe.
As of 8 pm on August 8, there were no comments. This will see blogspace 11 days from now, on the 19th. I wonder what the ratio of denialists to sane people will be by then?
It’s too bad Gene Lyons’ cows don’t watch FOX News or listen to conservative talk radio. They’d surely feel better on learning that their dessicated Arkansas pasture is an isolated anomaly and a liberal hoax. Seriously, don’t you think the few remaining climate-change denialists in politics and the media must be getting a little uneasy? They’re still trying to reject the science of global warming while the entire country is setting new records for heat and drought, and those pesky climatologists keep coming up with more corroborative evidence.
And the environment just isn’t cooperating with the denialist message anymore. When a freak snowstorm fell on Washington, DC, James Inhofe, the self-proclaimed “number one enemy of the Earth, built an igloo with a sign on top, mocking Al Gore. It’s pretty hard to do that when you’re on your third consecutive week of hundred-degree-and-higher temperatures.
This is what climate experts have been predicting for decades would be the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect. Now, as their forecasts are coming true with disturbing frequency, the anti-science zealots are still hard at it, hoping to persuade us that there’s nothing to worry about.
Mr. Lyons’ cows know better. So should we.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility economics sustainability
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 18: Expletive Un-Deleted Edition
Fred Krupp, in the Wall Street Journal, says “It’s time for conservatives to compete with liberals to devise the best, most cost-effective climate solutions.” Uh-fucking-huh:
One scorching summer doesn’t confirm that climate change is real any more than a white Christmas proves it’s a hoax. What matters is the trend—a decades-long march toward hotter and wilder weather. But with more than 26,000 heat records broken in the last 12 months and pervasive drought turning nearly half of all U.S. counties into federal disaster areas, many data-driven climate skeptics are reassessing the issue.
Respected Republican leaders like Govs. John Kasich of Ohio and Chris Christie of New Jersey have spoken out about the reality of climate change. Rupert Murdoch’s recent tweet—”Climate change very slow but real. So far all cures worse than disease.”—may reflect an emerging conservative view. Even Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, during public comments in June, conceded the reality of climate change while offering assurances that “there will be an engineering solution” and “we’ll adapt.”
Even if my outlook differs, these views may turn out to be a welcome turning point. For too long, the U.S. has had two camps talking past each other on this issue. One camp tended to preach and derided questions about climate science as evidence of bad motivation. The other camp claimed that climate science was an academic scam designed to get more funding, and that advocates for action were out to strangle economic growth. Charges of bad faith on both sides—and a heavy dose of partisan politics—saw to it that constructive conversation rarely occurred.
If both sides can now begin to agree on some basic propositions, maybe we can restart the discussion. Here are two:
The first will be uncomfortable for skeptics, but it is unfortunately true: Dramatic alterations to the climate are here and likely to get worse—with profound damage to the economy—unless sustained action is taken. As the Economist recently editorialized about the melting Arctic: “It is a stunning illustration of global warming, the cause of the melt. It also contains grave warnings of its dangers. The world would be mad to ignore them.”
The second proposition will be uncomfortable for supporters of climate action, but it is also true: Some proposed climate solutions, if not well designed or thoughtfully implemented, could damage the economy and stifle short-term growth. As much as environmentalists feel a justifiable urgency to solve this problem, we cannot ignore the economic impact of any proposed action, especially on those at the bottom of the pyramid. For any policy to succeed, it must work with the market, not against it.
If enough members of the two warring climate camps can acknowledge these basic truths, we can get on with the hard work of forging a bipartisan, multi-stakeholder plan of action to safeguard the natural systems on which our economic future depends.
There’s just one fucking problem with this fucking Peter Pan everybody-fucking-clap-louder stuff… Sent August 7:
It’s certainly gratifying to see that some self-described conservatives are finally coming around to accepting the scientific consensus on climate change. And it’s certainly true that those on both sides of the ideological spectrum are going to have to work together to develop solutions and approaches that will protect and nurture the health of the American and planetary economy.
However, it needs to be said: by denying the findings of climate science, by mocking and threatening climatologists, and by stubbornly adhering to a position that is (to put it mildly) catastrophically wrong, conservatives have forfeited their credibility on the issue.
In business terms: a management team that rejects the facts, misunderstands the measurements, and insults everyone else in the organization (and is eventually shown beyond any doubt to have been wrong all along) should not be given an equal voice in determining the company’s future. It’s just plain common sense.
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: analogies assholes denialists idiots James Hansen media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 15: One If By Land, How Many By Sea?
James Hansen, in the Washington Post: It’s worse than we thought.
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.
Time to break out the Paul Revere analogy again. Sent August 4:
If today’s news media had been broadcasting back in 1775, our forebears would have known that there are always two exactly equal sides to every story. Patrick Henry’s inflammatory words would have been “balanced” by an apologist for King George III, and since the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord would have realized that the issue of whether the British were coming wasn’t entirely settled, they’d have ignored the sound of hoofbeats in the dark.
Fortunately, it didn’t happen that way, and we owe our nation’s existence to the early patriots who rolled out of bed and shouldered their muskets in response to the midnight calls of a known “alarmist.”
On the other hand, it’s happening that way now, with many Americans convinced by a complaisant media that there is still a “debate” on the science of climate change. In his stubborn struggle against complacency and denialism, Dr. James Hansen is the Paul Revere of our time. We ignore his warnings at our peril.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialism drought media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 14: The Horns Of A Dilemma
The Coshocton Tribune (Arkansas) runs a column by Gene Lyons, noting that while humans may still be pretty clueless, cows have it all figured out:
Of all the ways nature has to kill you, drought might be the cruelest. The desiccation proceeds day after punishing day. The afternoon sun pounds the earth like a brazen hammer. As I write, the temperature here in Perry County, Ark., has reached 108 degrees.
The countryside is dying. There’s nothing green in my pastures except inedible weeds. Even pigweed is drooping. Our pond dried up six weeks ago. The ground beneath is bare and cracked. Up on the ridge, some hardwoods are shedding leaves and going dormant; oaks are simply dying.
When I’d turned my cows into their new pasture last year, they kicked up their heels and frolicked like calves. So much fresh grass! Last week, they tore down a low-hanging limb from the persimmon tree they rest under most afternoons. They herded in and stripped the leathery leaves within an hour, the first green thing they’d eaten in weeks.
Lucky cows. Mine is basically a hobby farm, so I can afford to keep my small herd intact. Because spring came a month early, I had enough hay left over to see them through the summer. Neighbors who operate close to the margin have hauled thousands of cows to the sale barn — animals they’d planned on breeding. Pastures stand barren and empty throughout the region.
I don’t know about Buddha nature, but they’re smart enough to come in out of the drought. Sent August 3:
When the vast majority of people are totally disconnected from the food they eat, it’s unsurprising that many still can’t find a reason for concern about global climate change. After all, milk and corn both come from the supermarket, right? Eventually, of course, the reality will start hitting home; once our grocery bills go up to reflect the destructive droughts and heatwaves that have devastated American agriculture, we’ll have no choice but to acknowledge that the consequences of a century’s consumption of fossil fuels may well include an end to the abundance we have long taken for granted.
Or will we? We shouldn’t underestimate the strength of denial. The corporations whose profits hinge on our continued use of fossil fuels are working hard with a complaisant news media to ensure that Americans and their elected representatives never learn what a herd of cows already know: climate change is real.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism false equivalency media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 13: Coming Up: More On That Runaway Squirrel Story!
The Santa Cruz Sentinel (CA) regrets that the public is so uninterested in the problem:
Maybe the lack of substance in the presidential campaign reflects a perception by President Barack Obama and Republican erstwhile nominee Mitt Romney that voters aren’t really that plugged in.
If so, that would explain why issues such as climate change seem lost in the ether as the candidates seem content to trade daily attacks.
An illustration: Despite years of gloomy prognostications by scientists and California’s efforts to get out in front on global warming, most people in this state know absolutely nothing about the controversial cap-and-trade program, which is due to be rolled out in November, the same month as the presidential election.
According to new polling by the Public Policy Institute of California, 57 percent of likely voters say they haven’t heard anything about the program, in which the state will be auctioning off emissions permits. Cap and trade is a central part of California’s AB32, signed into law by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. AB32 sets limits on companies’ greenhouse gas emissions, while allowing non-polluters to sell permits to companies that exceed the new limits.
The state will get money from these auctions — with estimates as high as $1 billion annually. Gov. Jerry Brown is already eyeing this revenue to help pay for another controversial project — high speed rail, which might explain why two of three Californians say they have little or no confidence the state will spend the auction money wisely.
Yadda yadda yadda. Sent August 2:
Our species’ survival is absolutely the most important issue of the century — indeed, the most important issue in our entire history on the planet. Right? Right. When surveys show that citizens aren’t that worried about climate change, our media reliably poses the same old question: why not?
The answer is pretty simple: because that same media has for years been hewing to an irresponsible approach that “balances” every genuinely worried climatologist with a petroleum-funded denialist — thus presenting “both sides of the argument.” Our politicians take their cues from the media, so it’s hardly surprising that all but a few of our elected representatives won’t spend any more time on climate change than they have to.
If we want more people to be concerned about this very genuine and very terrifying threat, it is incumbent on our news media to inform them about it without equivocation or false equivalency.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: false equivalency media irresponsibility reality-based community
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 12: What Would You Do If The People You Knew…?
The Monterey County Herald (CA) tells it like it is:
The United States, among the top three emitters of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, cannot hope to confront climate change unless our political leaders stop tiptoeing around the issue. Few scientists doubt that the Earth’s climate is changing and growing warmer. Only a small number of skeptics dispute that humans are a prime cause of the problem, and the ranks of the skeptics just got smaller, with UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller joining the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is real and that human-caused pollution is a major culprit.
Describing his “total turnaround,” Muller wrote in a Sunday column for the New York Times: “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.”
This summer offers a sense of the consequences. We’ve seen huge drought, Colorado on fire, and Atlanta recording its hottest day in history. While it’s impossible to tie specific events to climate change, these are the kinds of extremes we will increasingly see unless emissions are brought under control.
On the campaign trail, there is plenty of vague talk about “energy independence” or “clean energy,” with both presidential candidates ducking what policies they will pursue to reduce greenhouse gases.
J. Lo had TWINS! OMG! Sent August 1:
There is no better demonstration of the complementary dysfunctions of American media and American politics than the failure of both systems to properly address global warming. In a culture where news is a form of entertainment, it makes a bizarre sort of sense that the long-term consequences of atmospheric carbon dioxide are ignored or dismissed in favor of the latest celebrity scandal. When the subject is discussed at all, every genuine climatologist is “balanced” by a petroleum-funded spokesperson, creating the utterly false impression that the science of climate change is still unresolved. This is like including a member of the Flat Earth Society in a segment on the space program.
Things are no better in the political arena. An official in the previous administration famously asserted, in a conversation with journalist Ron Suskind, that “We’re an empire…we make our own reality.” We are indeed making our own reality, and it’s going to include droughts, wildfires, resource wars, steadily rising temperatures, ocean acidification, and all the other epiphenomena of an accelerating greenhouse effect. Pitting the exigencies of political theater against the laws of physics and chemistry is a recipe for disaster.
Warren Senders