environment Politics: denialism evolution idiots scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 27: Sex Laxar I En Laxask
The New York Times reports on a nice piece of science:
Alaskan salmon are apparently evolving to adapt to climate change.
Researchers have suspected that temperature-driven changes in migration and reproduction behaviors — which have happened in many species — may be evidence of natural selection at work. Now there is genetic evidence to confirm the hypothesis.
For their study, published online last week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the scientists studied Alaska pink salmon in a small stream near Juneau where there have been complete daily counts of all adult fish since 1971.
The salmon migrated in two distinct populations, one appearing toward the end of August, the other starting in September. In 1979, scientists introduced a neutral genetic marker into the later-migrating population so it could be identified and tracked without affecting its fitness.
A small prize to anyone who can tell me something about the headline. Sent July 16:
The news that pink salmon are beginning evolutionary adaptation to a rapidly transforming environment should be a powerful signal to those people still actively denying the reality of global climate change. But there’s a big gap between “should” and “is,” and it’s spelled “rejection of science.”
The same people proclaiming evolution a blasphemous falsehood are at the forefront of the climate-denial pack, rejecting as absurd the suggestion that two centuries’ worth of CO2 emissions might have an effect on Earth’s atmospheric equilibrium. Such ignorance would be merely risible but for the fact that blinkered rejection of facts is now an absolute prerequisite for electability in today’s Republican party.
As the scientific evidence for climate change keeps accumulating, the GOP’s positions will evolve — incorporating even-more-convoluted explanations for the inconvenient facts. 2016’s Republican convention will likely be a sea of tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists. Can those Alaska salmon produce their birth certificates?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: belief systems denialists greenhouse effect scientific method
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 25: “We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.” (H.L. Mencken)
The Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot reports on a new poll that offers a sort of good news:
A majority of Americans say they think climate change is real, according to a new poll on Friday.
Six in ten believe weather patterns around the world have been more unstable in the last three years, The Washington Post/Stanford University poll found, and almost as many people said it has been hotter on average in that time than ever period. And as for what the two presidential candidates want to do about climate change, almost half of those polled say that President Barack Obama wants to take a lot of government action on global warming, while just 11 percent say they feel that’s a goal of Mitt Romney.
Just over half, or 55 percent, told pollsters they think a “great deal” or “good amount” can be done to combat future global warming, but 60 percent disagree.
Seven in ten Americans say they are not in favor of tax increases on electricity or gas, and 66 percent want tax breaks to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the Post reported. But 20 percent say they would like the government to not be involved at all with regulating greenhouse gases.
Just one problem….Sent July 14:
The laws of chemistry and physics were operating long before human beings began understanding them; indeed, they were operating long before there were human beings at all. Those same laws govern the greenhouse effect which now poses a significant threat to our species and the civilization we’ve developed over our countless millennia on Earth.
From a scientific perspective, it’s irrelevant that more people “believe” in climate change; whether we accept the data or not, it’s happening. From a political perspective, it’s irrelevant that the scientific consensus on climate change is overwhelming; what matters is what people believe to be true.
American energy and environmental policies must be firmly founded on measurable scientific reality, not blown this way and that by the endlessly changing winds of public opinion. The climate crisis is real, and humanity’s future hinges on whether our politicians can recognize that the emergency isn’t affected by electoral exigencies.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 23: I Wonder Why THAT Keeps Happening?
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette runs an editorial column ruing the lackadaisical attitude of the common people:
This should be the summer of our discontent, with heat waves, drought and other troublesome weather affecting large parts of the nation. Instead, Americans are hot but apparently not bothered about what it all might mean.
According to a new Washington Post-Stanford University poll, just 18 percent of Americans interviewed named climate change as the world’s top environmental problem. In 2007, when Al Gore’s warning documentary and a United Nations report were making headlines, 33 percent called climate change the top issue.
Like so much on this topic, the findings of the poll are contradictory. It’s not as if people don’t care about the environment; the top concern, as expressed by 27 percent of those surveyed, was polluted water and air — certainly real challenges.
And those polled don’t dismiss climate change or even mankind’s hand in it; in fact, nearly three-quarters believe that the Earth is warming and approximately the same number think temperatures will continue to rise if nothing is done. Many want government and businesses to do more.
The poll and follow-up interviews suggest that people are looking to Washington, D.C., for leadership and action, although, after seeing little or none, they are not consumed by a sense of urgency.
Somebody better do something. I wonder who? Sent July 12:
The disconnect between the facts of global climate change and American public concern about the issue can be laid at the feet of our country’s politicians, who are too focused on short-term electoral exigencies to address long-term problems — and at the feet of our irresponsible media establishment, which has spent decades fostering the notion that simply reporting two sides of every argument constitutes the whole of journalism.
In a common-sense world, the looming climate crisis would be story number one, day after day. But we live in twenty-first century America, where there is no crisis bigger than the latest celebrity scandal du jour. Now there is no time left for equivocation. If we are to preserve our agriculture, our infrastructure, and ultimately our civilization, our leaders must accept the responsibility of leadership — and our media must accept the responsibility to inform the public about the gravest threat our species has faced in recorded history.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibillity
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 22: No. This Has Been Another Episode Of “Short Answers To Stupid Questions.”
The LA Times asks a reasonable enough question: “Can somebody, please, help George Will understand climate?”
George Will seems like a smart guy, so it’s a little mystifying why he cannot seem to understand the difference between weather and climate — concepts that with a little education, the average third-grader could easily grasp. Could it be that he’s not trying?
In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Will dismissed the notion that the heat wave plaguing the nation has anything to do with climate change. “How do we explain the heat? One word: summer,” Will said, asserting that current record-setting temperatures in the U.S. are nothing unusual.
“Come the winter there will be a cold snap, lots of snow, and the same guys, like [Washington Post columnist] E.J. [Dionne], will start lecturing us. There’s a difference between weather and climate. I agree with that. We’re having some hot weather. Get over it.”
Will would be almost right, if he weren’t willfully ignoring the evidence pointing to a changing climate. It is true that commentators on both sides of the political question about global warming tend to confuse weather with climate, with those who favor denying the problem pointing to cold winters as proof that it doesn’t exist, even as alarmists see hot summers as proof that Armageddon is nigh.
It’s not “mystifying” once you recognize that Will is a media whore who will say anything for money. He’s lying, and his avid mendacity is a disgrace to humanity, but he doesn’t give a shit, because he’s laughing all the way to the bank. Sent July 11:
Upton Sinclair famously remarked, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Just look at syndicated columnist George Will — a man of some intelligence who steadfastly refuses to change his opinions in the face of facts.
Mr. Will’s latest failure is, as usual, in the area of climate change. Despite having been repeatedly proved wrong on this issue, (as in 2009, when two Washington Post reporters vigorously corrected his misrepresentations about the extent of Arctic sea ice), he touts a gospel of climate-change denialism even as overwhelming scientific evidence confirms the reality of human-caused global heating.
It’s not just Mr. Will’s own salary that depends on his failure to “understand” climate change. His readiness to confuse the public discussion demonstrates his fealty to giant multinational corporations whose profit margins might shrink if America finally addressed a looming planetary emergency.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 20: Lexicography Edition
The Wisconsin State Journal’s Cynthia Tucker says that “Global warming skeptics rule GOP”:
For multiple days already this summer, the interior of the country has cooked underneath a bowl of hot air. As that heat wave wore on, a freakish storm erupted from Chicago to Washington, D.C., bringing winds that resembled the edge of a hurricane. And in what has become a summer ritual, wildfires are raging not only in the western United States but in parts of the eastern U.S., too.
If global warming is a hoax, it is a strangely powerful one, hoisting global temperatures to record highs, melting the Arctic ice cap, and threatening agriculture and ecosystems across the planet. So how did scientists make that up?
They didn’t, of course, despite the insistence of powerful Republican leaders that your frying lawn is a figment of your imagination. It’s hard not to notice that it’s hotter than it used to be.
This year, indeed, has brought the United States the broad spectrum of weird weather that climate scientists have warned about for years. That includes drought conditions across two-thirds of the country.
“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level. The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about,” Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, told The Associated Press.
Still, of all the debates that rage like wildfires across the political landscape — taxes, health care, immigration — climate change gets precious little attention. Now that Republicans such as Mitt Romney have shifted their stances to line up with hard-core climate change skeptics, Democrats have given up. President Barack Obama hasn’t made it a priority for a long time.
I hate it when words are misused. Don’t you? Sent July 9:
Describing the GOP as being “ruled by global warming skeptics” would be right on target, were it not for one small problem: genuine skeptics rely on evidence; they’re ready to change their minds when the facts demand it. They distrust their own preconceptions and are ready to suspend judgement in order to accumulate and analyze relevant facts. And genuine skeptics always seek to avoid confirmation bias in their research.
Conservative politicians’ approach to climate change, like their approach to every other policy area in modern American life, embodies none of these qualities. Rather, they’re entirely driven by confirmation bias, dismissing any information that threatens their preconceptions. Having decided long ago that climate science was a “liberal” issue, they’re ideologically bound to deny its existence, severity, and causes.
True skepticism demands intellectual discipline and rigor, qualities not found in any contemporary Republican analysis of climate change. Describing Republican true believers as “skeptics” is an undeserved insult to the genuinely skeptical, and an undeserved compliment to cynical and intellectually complacent politicians who wouldn’t recognize intellectual rigor if it slapped them in the face.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus wildfires
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 19: Strike Anywhere…
The Tehama County Daily News (CA) notes that things are sorta kinda on fire:
LOS ANGELES (MCT) After several years of relatively benign fire seasons, the West is headed into a hot dry summer of potentially ferocious blazes like the ones that have scorched Colorado in recent weeks.
The wildfires that have already destroyed more than 700 homes and outbuildings along Colorado’s Front Range and blackened hundreds of thousands of acres of New Mexico wilderness are not likely to be the season’s last for one simple reason: drought.
“This year, fires are going big,” Tom Harbour, fire and aviation director for the U.S. Forest Service, said last week. “We’ve had some really extraordinary runs … fires that are running 10 miles in lighter fuels.
Fires that are running miles in forested areas.”
A dry La Nina winter and a paltry, quick-melting snowpack in much of the West have set the stage for another incendiary summer, compounding the effects of a long-term drought that has gripped the seven-state Colorado River basin for more than a decade.
“The reason Colorado is burning is they’ve had prolonged drought,” said Bob Keane, a forest service research ecologist based in Montana.
Add the high temperatures and gusting winds that hit the state last week, and you have a recipe for combustion.
Quick and dirty. Sent July 8:
No single event can be unambiguously linked to global climate change, because climate science doesn’t work that way. But any attempt to claim that the wildfires devastating America’s West aren’t connected to Earth’s burgeoning greenhouse effect is statistically absurd.
Climatologists have been predicting for years that the consequences of increased CO2 emissions would include weather that was hotter, weirder, fiercer, and less predictable. And while some of their forecasts were erroneous, most of those mistakes were underestimations of the speed and magnitude of the transformation in our environment.
Despite an ongoing campaign of climate-change denial, the atmosphere is still getting hotter. We’d mock any Colorado residents who refuse to heed the gathering flames — why, then, are climatologists and environmentalists whose decades of predictions on climate change have been overwhelmingly vindicated still treated with derision by the petroleum-funded professionals in our politics and media?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 18: If You’ll Say “You Told Me So,” I Won’t Say “I Told You So”
The Merriville (IN) Post-Times runs an AP story on the current heatwave:
Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.
These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it’s far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.
Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and time. Sometimes it isn’t caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.
And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren’t having similar disasters now, although they’ve had their own extreme events in recent years.
But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.
More pounding on the denialists. Sent July 7:
Even as the American Midwest sizzled under a heatwave of staggering proportions, climate-change denialists kept on sounding their message of complacency and inaction. Everything’s fine, they say. The planet’s actually getting cooler. If Earth’s atmosphere is heating up, it’s just sunspots, or “natural cycles.” Anyway, humans aren’t to blame. The climate has always changed. If humans are involved, it’s too expensive to do anything about it. Al Gore has a big house. And on and on.
When politicians and media figures mock “climate alarmists,” it is part of their pathetic attempt to rationalize an unsustainable status quo — one which now promises massive crop failures, droughts and wildfires throughout America.
We owe our nation’s existence to those who woke to the call of a midnight rider bringing the news that the British were coming. Climate scientists are the Paul Reveres of the present day. Will we finally heed their warnings?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 7, Month 7, Day 17: DFH! NIMBY?
The Washington Post acknowledges the hippies:
Wildfires? Record thunderstorms? Blast furnace heat? An earthquake, even?
At least that’s what one group of folks is thinking, even if they don’t voice it quite so crassly.
“We don’t want to do it in an I-told-you-so kind of way,” demurs John Topping, who is the president of the Washington-based Climate Institute.
But see, people! This is what all the global-warming Paul Reveres have been shouting about.
Now some are finally paying attention, at least in the Washington region.
“Granted, we’ve only lived in the area for 25 years,” one reader wrote to me. “But the first 15 left an impression that this was not one of Dante’s circles. The last ten: approaching inner circle quickly.”
Apparently, a tree falling on a house hits much closer to home than a melting ice cap.
Because it will be sooooo excellent to be smug while we circle the bowl on our way to the Venus effect. Sent July 6:
For decades, climatologists warned us that increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases would trigger chaotic and destructive weather. We’ve were warned of rising temperatures and rising seas, of droughts, invasive species, wildfires, tropical storms — all consequences of global climate change.
And for decades our media and politics have ignored and derided those scientific specialists and their findings. Whether it’s tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists convinced that Al Gore is out to confiscate their SUVs, petroleum-backed politicians protecting their puppetmasters, or ordinary citizens with more immediate concerns, the unavoidable fact is that Americans have too long assumed that climate change is a problem for other people, other places, other times.
No more. While we’ll always pay more attention to what’s happening in our own backyards, there is no escaping that this is a crisis of planetary scope and millennial span. Earth is the new neighborhood, and a century is the new now.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 16: I Do Not Think About Things I Do Not Think About.
The Washington Post notes that people don’t seem to care all that much:
Climate change no longer ranks first on the list of what Americans see as the world’s biggest environmental problem, according to a new Washington Post-Stanford University poll.
Just 18 percent of those polled name it as their top environmental concern. That compares with 33 percent who said so in 2007, amid publicity about a major U.N. climate report and Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary about global warming. Today, 29 percent identify water and air pollution as the world’s most pressing environmental issue.
Still, Americans continue to see climate change as a threat, caused in part by human activity, and they think government and businesses should do more to address it. Nearly three-quarters say the Earth is warming, and just as many say they believe that temperatures will continue to rise if nothing is done, according to the poll.
The findings, along with follow-up interviews with some respondents, indicate that Washington’s decision to shelve action on climate policy means that the issue has receded — even though many people link recent dramatic weather events to global warming. And they may help explain why elected officials feel little pressure to impose curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.
“I really don’t give it a thought,” said Wendy Stewart, a 46-year-old bookkeeper in New York. Although she thinks warmer winters and summers are signs of climate change, she has noticed that political leaders don’t bring up the subject. “I’ve never heard them speak on global warming,” she said. “I’ve never heard them elaborate on it.”
But noticing the media’s irresponsible coverage of this issue is terribly uncivil. Can’t have that, now, can we? Sent July 5:
If climate change has lost its first-place position among Americans’ environmental worries, that’s because politicians and media figures would rather ignore any problem that can’t be resolved within an election cycle or two. After all, since rising temperatures are probably irreversible at this point, we’re probably better off focusing on problems we know we can fix, like air and water pollution. No politician craves electoral martyrdom, even in the service of a noble cause.
The problem with this attitude, of course, is that the unfolding disaster of global warming remains the preeminent environmental concern of our century. Colorado’s metastasizing wildfires and the country-wide heat wave are just two symptoms of a crisis that is planetary in scope and multi-generational in timespan — something which requires political will and genuine leadership, rather than the evasions and platitudes which have persuaded millions of Americans that there’s really nothing much to worry about.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 15: Time For A Declaration of Independence?
The Toledo (OH) Blade is shrill:
Searing heat, violent thunderstorms, wildfires, smog, power blackouts, crop losses. These things aren’t new, yet their recent magnitude raises new questions about human influence on climate.
Climate change is real, despite the stubbornness of a denial movement that shrugs off both the problem and the science that documents it. Although such change is partially inevitable, the question of human influence and how to mitigate it demands a central role in this year’s political debate.
Recent heat waves, in Ohio and Michigan and elsewhere, point to greater warming of the Earth. As this part of the country basked in an unusually warm March, northern Michigan’s cherry crop was devastated by early growth followed by frost. Now comes word that 90 percent of that state’s apple crop is destroyed.
Problems associated with climate change are not limited to extreme events. There are more subtle signs. Growth of toxic algae begins earlier, stays later, and becomes more dominant in the western Lake Erie region.
An additional month of dredging is scheduled for the second straight year by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to keep the Toledo shipping channel navigable despite excessive silt that enters waterways after storms.
Ozone-induced smog, allergies, and diseases transmitted by mosquitoes also drive up costs. Much of northwest Ohio remains abnormally dry or in a drought, even after hail and heavy thunderstorms swept across the region this week.
Lobbyists have convinced lawmakers — at least, those who want to be convinced — that much of the evidence of man-made climate change is merely anecdotal. They have blocked cap-and-trade legislation that would provide incentives to industry to reduce emissions related to warming.
Always good to quote Upton Sinclair. Sent July 4:
Almost a century ago, Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” His words perfectly describe the politicians who, bankrolled by powerful corporate interests, have been consistently obstructing our progress towards rational energy and environmental policies.
Coal, oil and gas are the energy sources of the past — privileged by tradition and by a false pricing system that ignores externalities: pollution cleanup, health impacts, resource wars, and global climate change. Even if the deniers were right, getting our country onto renewables is the right thing to do, for countless reasons.
But the deniers are wrong, as this incendiary summer confirms to all but the most avariciously self-deluding. It’s time for our politicians to start refusing paychecks from those who would let us burn rather than surrender even the tiniest fraction of their astronomical profit margins.
Warren Senders