environment Politics: denialists idiots insects invasive species
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 20: More Than A Few Bugs In The System
There’s a problem at the site of Flight 93, out there in the wilds of Pennsylvania:
PITTSBURGH (AP) – The grove of hemlock trees around where United Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11 is being attacked by an insect that wasn’t there 20 years ago, and some scientists say it’s an example of how climate change combines with other factors to cause environmental damage.
The problem at the Flight 93 National Memorial in southwestern Pennsylvania doesn’t involve superstorms or melting polar icecaps, but rather hemlocks battling the slow, deadly spread of a tiny creature that has only one natural predator in eastern forests – extremely cold winters.
The hemlock wooly adelgid is about the size of a match head, and for thousands of years it didn’t exist on the East Coast. Native to Asia, the insects lay their eggs on the underside of hemlock branches, and the young insects feed on the sap of the trees, often causing them to lose needles and die within five to 10 years.
Left to their own devices, hemlocks can grow to over 150 feet tall, and the dense evergreen branches create a cool, shaded environment that some liken to a forest cathedral. The tree has long flourished from the Carolinas to Maine, but after the first adelgids were discovered in Virginia during the 1950s, some areas suffered heavy die-offs.
I did a version of this letter a year or more ago, making the same point WRT pine beetles in Colorado. November 10:
Conservative politicians and their media enablers expend a lot of energy demonizing “illegal aliens”, but their ire would be better directed at the undocumented visitors who are doing genuine and profound damage: the non-native species which cross our borders in huge numbers as a consequence of climate change. The wooly adelgids now ravaging hemlocks at the site of Flight 93’s crash are a case in point.
If Republican lawmakers could overcome the anti-science biases of their tea-party constituents, they might be able to recognize the existence and causes of global warming — and we might have a chance to combat adelgid infestations and the larger climatic forces which trigger them.
What has happened to the GOP? After nurturing these parasitic ideologies for decades, America’s erstwhile “party of business” is now infested with virulent xenophobia and anti-intellectual hysteria, leaving our nation paralyzed in the face of grave and profound threats.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: common sense responsibility sustainability transit
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 19: Playing To The Tide
I know people in Portland, Oregon. They like it there.
Electric car charging stations in Hillsboro. Transit-oriented development on 82nd Avenue in Portland. Revitalizing downtown Beaverton as a walkable neighborhood. A new park in Gateway. A walking trail in Rockwood. A community-based bus system in Wilsonville.
Those are among many local initiatives that are already fighting climate change by encouraging alternatives to private motor vehicle trips, according to a report from Metro, the regional elected governments. Similar projects will become increasingly important as proof mounts that human activity is responsible for global warming, the report explained.
(snip)
Metro found that most of the initiatives are rooted in the 2040 Growth Concept Plan adopted by the regional government in 1990 to guide development. The document encourages growth in designated urban centers and along existing transportation corridors. Since it was adopted, cities in the region have amended their state-mandated comprehensive land use plans to include many of the concepts. They include increased transit options and an emphasis on “active transportation” options such as walking and bicycling.
The state has directed Metro to adopt a regional plan for meeting its 2035 greenhouse gas reduction target. The council will consider a range of options based on the results of case studies later this year. The final scenario, to be adopted in December 2014, could well include elements from all of them.
Funding will be a challenge, however. Metro is projecting a shortfall of up to $26 billion to build and maintain needed infrastructure in the region over the next two decades. Although many ideas are being discussed — including encouraging private investment in public infrastructure projects — regional leaders have yet to agree on financing plans.
Good on ya, kids. November 9:
Yes, getting ready for the impacts of planetary climate transformation will be expensive. But the likely costs of preparing for the new climatic reality pale into insignificance compared with those of inaction. This is true at all levels: individual, local, regional, national, and global initiatives to anticipate the impacts of the accelerating greenhouse effect will undoubtedly call on our resources and resourcefulness in ways we’ve never before experienced — but will mean lives saved, infrastructure protected, and civilization strengthened. The alternative — failure — is simply unacceptable.
Self-styled “fiscal conservatives” must recognize that advance planning — like Portland’s admirable local preparations — is always less costly than hasty and uncoordinated after-the-fact responses. When we learn about climate change, we can begin to plan ahead for what seems likely to be a complex and dangerous future — and as the bumper sticker says, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes capitalism corporate irresponsibility false equivalence media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 18: These Foolish Things Remind Me Of You
The Tennessean runs an Op-Ed deploring the state of our media:
It is often the case that what is absent from the nightly news sheds more light on media priorities than what is actually covered.
The lack of any serious coverage, for example, of a topic that is front and center in most other countries is one indication of very low media quality. It’s the reason that I have had to read about the release of the latest report from the International Panel on Climate Change from foreign news sources, such as The Guardian, or by reading selected U.S. sources online.
The efforts of the IPCC represent one of the largest consensus-building undertakings in human history, and deal with an issue that affects not only the present, but also future generations. The panel’s exhaustive work, both pro bono and peer-reviewed, produces policy guidelines for world leaders. As has been the case since the group’s founding in 1988, the recent report continues to confirm the dire predictions for life on this planet under the business-as-usual model.
A key update in the report is the change of a 90 percent confidence level to 95 percent concerning man’s role in the changing climate. Converging to a 95 percent level of confidence from such a diverse body of scientists is no trivial matter, and impossible to write off even for the most relentless of conspiracy theorists.
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along. November 8:
In an extraordinary mixture of journalistic irresponsibility and simple laziness, American news media and their financial enablers have succeeded in trivializing and minimizing what is unarguably the most important issue of our times. Observe their ludicrous false equivalence, which “balances” the overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists with the unsupported rhetoric of petroleum-industry shills. Observe their relentless coverage of electoral horse-races and scantily-clad starlets, while a crisis of global proportions builds unremarked. How have we come to this pass?
For decades, the oil and coal industries have funded conservative “think tanks” which supply our media outlets with authoritative-sounding voices stridently rejecting the findings of climate scientists. They do this to perpetuate an economy built on convenience and consumption (while, oddly enough, reaping profits higher than any in our nation’s history).
America’s “can do” reputation is in tatters thanks to this ill-conceived strategy of calculated ignorance and greed. The time for denialism is over; the first step in solving the problem of climate change is to recognize its existence.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture corporate irresponsibility denialists media irresponsi monocropping sustainability Water
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 17: There Is No Greater Love
The Boise Weekly assesses climate impacts on Idaho:
Winter in Idaho is many things: bracing, frustrating, stunningly beautiful, exhilarating, inversion-stricken, way too long or way too short. No matter how the season measures up, it remains one thing: the climatic engine that drives everything else for the rest of the year.
In the West, water rules all, and in a place like Idaho, where roughly 80 percent of the annual precipitation comes in the form of snow, the entire economy–even the lifestyle–is tied in some way to winter. From irrigating crops to moving water down the rivers for recreation, and from flood management to supporting the water needs of a growing population (and keeping things green enough that the whole area doesn’t burst into flames every summer), everything depends on winter snows and the spring runoff they create.
But what if Idaho winters went the way of the dodo? What if continued climate changes mean that winters heat up and seasonal snows become a memory told in tales that start with the phrase, “When I was a kid…”?
The Bad News
While there are still some skeptics out there, the majority of scientists now agree that the world is experiencing climate change and that its effects vary by location. In Idaho, forecasting models predict that winters will continue to get warmer and, because of that, most of the precipitation in the Treasure Valley will come in the form of rain, with snows limited to higher and higher elevations.This also means that hot, dry summers will likely continue to be the norm, but without winter snows and spring runoff, the strategy for coping with those conditions will have to change.
“Everything here ties back to water and our ability to keep it,” said Scott Lowe, associate professor in the Department of Economics at Boise State University and director of the Environmental Studies Program.
“This nexus of water, energy, agriculture … we have an understanding of it, but people in the Treasure Valley don’t realize to what extent it’s intertwined,” Lowe said.
Nobody does, sir. Nobody does. November 7:
When it comes to confronting the troublesome facts of climate change, Idaho’s farmers aren’t alone. All over on Earth, we’re waking up to the realization that that the tab for a century-long binge on fossil-fuels is coming due. Whether they’re monocropping food factories in the corn belt or sharecropping peasants in nations like Bangladesh, agriculturists are discovering that the predictable seasons and stable regional environments that made productive farming possible are being compromised — often enough to trigger crop failures or drastically reduced yields — by the consequences of an accelerating greenhouse effect.
To prepare for the coming decades of increased climatic instability, we need arguments; we need a vigorous public discussion of coping strategies, risk assessment, and scientific findings. But we don’t need any more arguments about the existence, causes, and harmful potentials of climate change; that subject is as settled as (for example) the link between smoking and cancer.
The oil and coal industries still supporting climate-deniers in our media and politics do not have the best interests of our species at heart; they sacrifice our collective future at the altar of profit.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: apocalypse assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 15: Gotta Walk The Line
The Central Pennsylvania Patriot-News runs a good op-ed by CCL’s Richard Whiteford:
Scientists believe that we can’t allow the preindustrial global temperature to rise higher than another 2 degrees Celsius or human survival will be very challenging. We are almost half way there now.
The oil, gas and coal industries and their paid henchmen like the Heartland Institute and certain bought politicians distract the public with red herring issues like claiming that switching to clean energy will hurt the economy, kill jobs, and cause energy shortages.
What is mostly overlooked by them and the media is that if humans want to survive on this planet we have to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible.
Scientists say that we can’t put much more than another 565 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere without disastrous results. At this time, financial analysts calculate that there is already 2,795 gigatons of CO2 contained in readily available oil, gas and coal reserves. That’s five times more CO2 than we can afford to burn and expect to survive yet the plan remains to drill baby drill!
There is enough carbon in the Canadian Tar Sands oil deposits to send the global temperature above the 2 degree limit. That is the reason environmentalists are protesting the Keystone XL Pipe Line. We just can’t afford to burn that carbon and expect to survive.
Have a nice day. November 5:
As the evidence supporting both the reality and the danger of anthropogenic global heating continues to mount, the anti-expertise wing of American conservatism finds itself increasingly isolated. Propped up by mountains of fossil-fuel cash, the science-denying politicians and media figures are still muddying the national discussion of an accelerating global emergency with debunked “facts,” cherry-picked statistics, and — all too often — outright lies.
Why? The answer lies in the intersection of two factors. First, the short-term fiscal motives embedded in the language of corporate charters; companies are required by law to focus on profits above all other objectives. Second, the pro-apocalyptic orientation of fundamentalist religion, which eagerly embraces notions of a fiery Armageddon while rejecting the inconvenient conclusions of scientists. With one providing the money and the other providing the zealotry, these two combine to create a political force which is impervious to logic, data, or the notion of good environmental stewardship.
Eventually, of course, they will lose. The laws of physics and chemistry will overcome fanaticism and greed alike. The question is whether the rest of us will survive the consequences of this toxic blend of cupidity and stupidity.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans Tea Party
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 12: Like A Second Marriage
In the Asbury Park Press, CCL’s Joseph Robertson reaffirms the triumph of hope over experience:
There is deep and lasting trauma, reasonably rooted in lived experience along the coastal areas of our region, from the impact of superstorm Sandy. Some towns worry they need to be integrated into neighboring municipalities if they cannot rebuild or attract new investment. Homeowners and business owners are determined to rebuild, but face daunting obstacles.
Congress has not been eager to provide the disaster relief funding promised. Leaders focused on solving problems have found fissures that run along party lines can be a great obstacle to progress for real people.
There are a number of seasoned, rational, service-oriented conservatives in New Jersey, who are in a unique position to open a new way through the ideological divisions holding us back. For a long time, conservatives have been pressured to refuse to respond to the need for climate change mitigation policy (like a price on carbon emissions or a cap on overall emissions). Sandy made that position all but untenable for anyone representing real people facing real and unprecedented problems. Those conservatives who understand the problem, and who are willing to lead, can now do so in a new context.
The fifth consensus report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a strict, detailed and conclusive examination of scientific evidence endorsed even by oil-dependent nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran — has answered many of the most pressing questions posed by climate policy skeptics. The science is now settled, the evidence is clear and the report shows we have already burned through half of global civilization’s lifetime carbon fuel budget.
Tea-partiers. The apotheosis of vicious stupidity. November 2:
Joseph Robertson’s plea for “climate skeptics” to support a carbon tax is a sensible and well-crafted argument built on common sense, scientific reality, and a nuanced understanding of conservative values. That is to say, it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of persuading those now controlling the conservative movement and the Republican party.
Today’s GOP is not the party of Lincoln. It’s not the party of Eisenhower. It’s not the party of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, but of ideologically-driven fanatics who fear and detest scientific expertise.
In a political environment where a plurality of primary voters still cling to bizarre birther notions and zombie conspiracy theories, even acknowledging the existence of climate change is electoral suicide. Unlike, say, the human causes of global warming, the idea that “seasoned, rational, service-oriented conservatives” will risk their careers for the good of the planet has — unfortunately — no supporting evidence whatsoever.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: extinction media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 11: With A Friend Or Two I Love At Hand
The Chicago Tribune runs a piece from Bloomberg News which underlines the fact that, basically, we’re toast.
Temperatures in New York are increasing, and after 2047 they won’t return to the historical average of the past one and half centuries, according to a study Wednesday in the journal Nature.“Climate departure,” when the average temperature for each year is expected to exceed historical averages from 1860 through 2005, will occur in Jakarta, Indonesia; and Lagos, Nigeria, in 2029; Beijing in 2046 and London in 2056, according to the study. New York will match the global departure 34 years from now and tropical areas will get there sooner.
The research highlights the urgency of cutting greenhouse- gas emissions because the warming climate may drive some species to extinction, threaten food supplies and spread disease, according to the study. By 2050, 5 billion people may face extreme climates, and migration and heightened competition for natural resources may trigger violence and instability.
“The results shocked us: regardless of the scenario, changes will be coming soon,” Camilo Mora, a geographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past.”
The global point of climate departure will be 2047, with tropical areas reaching it earlier.
Sorry ’bout that, kids. November 1:
The report on climatic tipping points recently published by Nature suggests that a “business as usual” approach to our consumption of carbon-based fuels will bring near-apocalyptic outcomes by the middle of this century: devastating heat waves, crippled agriculture, and refugee populations numbering in the millions. We need to recognize that scientists are generally a mild-mannered bunch, for whom phrases like “robust correlation” and “statistically significant” are the equivalent of shouting. These authors are not wild-eyed “alarmists,” but climate experts comfortably in the scientific mainstream, who were “shocked” at the severity of their conclusions.
American history would have been drastically different if the citizens of Lexington and Concord had returned to bed instead of heeding Paul Revere’s midnight calls. Now, the overwhelming majority of the world’s climatologists are sounding an even more urgent warning to everyone on this planet. Will we heed their words , or hit the snooze button — again?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 9: (Head-desk)
Oh, for fuck’s sake. The Omaha World-Herald:
The Nebraska lawmaker who initiated the Legislature’s first study of climate change now prefers to see the study abandoned rather than continue along what he called a politicized, scientifically invalid path.
State Sen. Ken Haar of Malcolm said Tuesday the state committee handling the study is disregarding the intent of the Legislature.
Haar, a Democrat, is asking his fellow senators to help him salvage the $44,000 study by encouraging the committee to reconsider the restrictions it published Monday in the official request for study assistance.
The request says researchers “should consider ‘cyclical climate change’ to mean a change in the state of climate due to natural internal processes and only natural external forcings such as volcanic eruptions and solar variations.”
The use of the term “natural” would rule out the primary cause of the climate changes that have occurred in the last half-century: humans.
The issue of “cyclical” climate change was successfully amended into Haar’s bill by Sen. Beau McCoy of Omaha, a Republican candidate for governor.
McCoy on Tuesday elaborated on his opposition to using state tax dollars to study man-made climate change: Humans aren’t capable of influencing climate patterns.
“I firmly believe our planet goes through cyclical weather patterns. There have been hotter times, colder times, wetter times and drier times,” he said.
A fourth-generation rancher who has become involved in construction, McCoy said he “lives and dies” by the weather. Environmental extremists, he said, are drumming up climate change hysteria to further their own agenda.
There aren’t enough faces and palms for this level of stupid. October 30:
Senator Beau McCoy’s insistent denial of human impacts on climate is a fine example of the logical error known as the “argument from incredulity” — if he can’t understand something, it can’t be real. As a fourth-generation farmer, the Senator presumably has no problem diverting water to irrigate his crops, thereby creating a localized “micro-climate” that helps his plants grow tall — but somehow the countless ways humans have already altered our environment for better or worse escape his attention.
As the history of the Dust Bowl reminds us, overgrazing leads to erosion, destroying topsoil and devastating agriculture. Pumping industrial wastes into rivers and lakes turns them toxic, and releasing smoke into the atmosphere does the same for the air we breathe. Given that it’s so easy to damage our soil, our water, and our air, it shouldn’t be that hard to affect the chemical equilibrium of our atmosphere, which is essentially how the greenhouse effect works. Legislating from ignorance may play well on TV, but the anti-science posturing of such politicians will inevitably fail in the real world, where the laws of physics and chemistry always win in the end.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility Republicans scientific method sustainability timescales
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 8: Their Walls Are Made Of Cannonballs
Terence Duvall and Molly Gilligan write in the Poughkeepsie Journal, bemoaning the “Climate-Change Disconnect.”
We are currently experiencing a slow-motion catastrophe. The dye is cast. We have emitted enough carbon into the atmosphere to guarantee climate change and rising sea levels. Some of our most precious real estate, our commercial capital and destination beaches, are doomed.
And yet, instead of proactively considering possible solutions, from abstaining from new building on fragile coastlines to moving inland, the response of many is to deny that they are or will ever experience the effects of climate change in the city they call home. This is despite the fact that we are already beginning to see the effects of climate change in many coastal cities within the United States and worldwide. Why then, is there still such disconnect between science and societal beliefs? How can this gap be closed?
If I still have hope, it’s because I fight — not the other way around. October 29:
There are several forces behind our national indifference to the ongoing crisis of climate change. First the cognitive reality that we clever apes are generally poor at long-term thinking; most of us are to preoccupied with the daily and weekly concerns of our lives to give much thought to a looming catastrophe just over the horizon, and we can spare no time to imagining the lives of future generations in a world turned hot and hostile.
Second is the scientific reality that most of the factors and phenomena of climate change cannot be linked by simple causal connections; even though our greenhouse emissions have “loaded the dice” for increasingly extreme weather, no responsible scientist will specifically attribute any single extreme weather event to climate change — because scientific methodology simply doesn’t work that way.
Finally, of course, is the media reality: when oil and coal companies spend millions of dollars to influence the public discussion of climate change, they’re investing a miniscule amount compared to the profits they reap from selling fossil fuels to a captive economy. When it comes to the climate catastrophe, Bob Dylan had it right. Money doesn’t talk; it swears.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility extreme weather media irresponsibility Storms
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 7: God Damn, Well I Declare — Have You Seen The Like?
The Times of Trenton (NJ) talks about the ongoing post-Sandy reconstruction effort:
As the first anniversary of the storm that forever changed the Jersey Shore approaches, the region is looking back at the checkered record of state aid and federal funds that have been delivered to those in need — and the millions still entangled in red tape.
New Jersey officials have done a good job in some areas to address the immediate problems spawned by Sandy. But far too many people are still waiting for the promised help to repair their homes so they can move back to the neighborhoods where they’ve lived all their lives.
Particularly in the northern part of the state, the individual stories are full of uncertainty. Every storm forecast triggers fear for some; others remain displaced living in whatever shelter they can find; and some, who haven’t received the loans they’re counting on, don’t know where to begin picking up the splintered pieces.
New Jersey may be stronger than THE (caps or ital, please) storm, but what about the next one or the one after that?
Climate change is a certainty. And as the polar ice melts, one of the irrefutable effects is the ocean’s slow swallowing of the barrier islands — and its creeping reach from the back bays onto the coastline. An Army Corps of Engineers construction project is expected to begin next year that will result in dunes standing sentry along the 127-mile oceanfront. Communities that had dunes withstood the forces of Sandy better than places without the protection but, eventually, the sea will vanquish the sand.
I’ve got so many letters now, it’s really easy to revise them and crank out new versions. October 28:
Why do we ignore climate change in talking about post-Sandy reconstruction? Several reasons: humans are no good at long-term thinking, and most people simply want their normal lives back as fast as possible. Even though Earth’s climate is changing incredibly fast, most of us simply cannot imagine the lives of our descendants as they struggle to survive in the world we’ve left for them.
Another factor is that simple causality doesn’t apply to a complex system like our climate; we can’t describe single events like Superstorm Sandy as definite consequences of the greenhouse effect, even though our CO2 emissions have loaded the dice for extreme weather.
Last but hardly least is the inconvenient fact that fossil fuel corporations have spent massively to influence politicians and media to avoid reality-based discussion of climate change — because such discussion would highlight the central role of oil and coal in creating the crisis, inevitably impacting their profit margins.
Warren Senders