environment Politics: alarmism denialists idiots media irresponsibility wildfires
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 14: Liberals Have A Reality-Bias…
The Portland (ME) Press-Herald runs a WaPo article on climate change and the hell-on-earth that is Colorado:
WASHINGTON — Snow hardly fell during winter in snowy Colorado. On top of that, the state’s soaking spring rains did not come. So it was no wonder that normally emerald landscapes were parched as summer approached, tan as a pair of worn khakis.
All the earth needed was a spark.
Colorado and U.S. Forest Service firefighters are battling the state’s most destructive wildfires ever. Lightning and suspected arson ignited them four weeks ago, but scientists and federal officials say the table was set by a culprit that will probably contribute to bigger and more frequent wildfires for years to come: climate change.
In the past two years, record-breaking wildfires have burned in the West — New Mexico experienced its worst-ever wildfire, Arizona suffered its largest burn and Texas last year fought the most fires in recorded history. From Mississippi to the Ohio Valley, temperatures are topping record highs and the land is thirsty.
“We’ve had record fires in 10 states in the last decade, most of them in the West,” said U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Harris Sherman, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service.
A revision and extension of the letter from two days ago. Sent July 3:
Not too long ago, any public figure who pointed out that a runaway greenhouse effect would have significant negative consequences for humanity could look forward to insults and mockery from conservatives. Anyone who suggested that it would probably be a good idea to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere would be called a “climate alarmist,” an “environazi,” or a “watermelon” (green on the outside, red on the inside — get it?).
The name-calling’s still going on, but some of the climate-change denialists are beginning to wake up. Even Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson publicly acknowledged the fact of human-caused global warming in a recent speech, although his assertion that humanity will “adapt” blithely glosses over the enormous human cost involved. More generally, the fact that America is undergoing a nationwide heat wave has rendered the denialist position harder to sustain.
More than three decades ago, climatologists started predicting that global warming would bring about this type of erratic and unpredictable weather, but politicians and the media have consistently ignored or derided their emergency signals. Such dismissals can now be understood as a grave abdication of the responsibilities of leadership.
“Alarmism” is just a sensible response to an alarming situation; as planetary temperatures rise and smoke billows above a burning Colorado, it’s obvious and inescapable: global climate change is as alarming as it gets.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 13: Zippadee Doo Dah, Zippadee Day!
The New York Times fails at journamalism:
HILL CITY, Kan. — This town on the parched plains, best known for its bountiful pheasant hunting and museum of oil history, recently earned a new, if unwelcome, distinction — the center of America’s summer inferno.
For five days last week, a brutal heat wave here crested at 115 degrees. Crops wilted. Streets emptied. Farmers fainted in the fields. Air-conditioners gave up. Children even temporarily abandoned the municipal swimming pool. Hill City was, for a spell, in the ranks of the hottest spots in the country.
“Hell, it’s the hottest place on earth,” Allen Trexler, an 81-year-old farmer who introduced himself as Old Man Trexler. He spoke while standing in the shade of a tree on Saturday morning, the temperature already sneaking toward 100.
Gotta love Old Man Trexler. Sent July 2:
When Kansas is reeling from a blistering heat wave, it’s a human interest story, complete with a picturesque old gentleman standing in the shade of a tree. When several states are hammered with extreme high temperatures, it’s a genuine emergency.
And when the whole country is experiencing either higher temperatures or extreme weather (like the massive thunderstorms that left millions of people without electricity in Virginia and Washington, D.C.), and hundreds of nations all over the globe are going through the same kinds of troubles, what is it then?
It’s a symptom of global warming — confirming predictions made as far back as the 1970s that an accelerating greenhouse effect would lead both to higher temperatures and weirder, uglier weather.
And what’s a good way to describe a feature article on Kansas’ disastrous weather that never once mentions planetary climate change?
“Irresponsible journalism” springs to mind.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialism invasive species media irresponsibility pine beetles Republicans rising sea levels
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 12: The Snooze Button Lasts For Twenty Thousand Years
The local “Metro-West” paper runs a piece by Rick Holmes, who’s clearly just another DFH:
Mountain pine beetles are tiny critters, the size of a grain of rice. They bore under the bark of Western pine trees, infecting them with a fatal fungus that turns their trunks blue, dries their needles to a rusty red, and then they fall.
Cold winters kill off the beetle larvae and keep populations in check, but over the last 20 years, cold winters have become fewer and farther between. The beetles have taken full advantage of changes in the climate. They are thriving at higher altitudes and have expanded their range. They now reproduce twice a year instead of once.
In the last few years, the beetles have ravaged Rocky Mountain forests from upper Canada to New Mexico. The blight has deadened 3.3 million acres of forest in Colorado alone.
A long-running drought has left those dead pines extra crispy, and Colorado has been seeing record heat. Denver hit 105 degrees this week, and Colorado Springs has had a string of 100 degree days.
Add a spark and what to you get? Colorado is in flames. The Waldo Canyon fire near Colorado Springs, having burned thousands of acres and destroyed hundreds of homes, is the most destructive fire in state history. It broke the record set the week before by the High Park fire outside Fort Collins.
It’s still early in the wildfire season, but everything seems to be coming early this year. Hurricane season is young, but we’re already up to E for named storms. It was a warm winter here in New England as well, and the flowers seem to be blooming about three weeks ahead of schedule.
Watch the mockery begin! Sent July 1:
For a long time, the word “alarmist” appeared regularly in the arsenal of right-wing pejoratives. Anyone pointing out some of the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect would be labeled a “climate alarmist” and mocked for presumed fealty to Al Gore (or, in Rush Limbaugh’s vernacular, “algore”). Watch what happens to Rick Holmes, who has the temerity to continue talking about the slow-motion emergency that is global climate change.
Climate scientists are the diagnostic physicians of our planet, and their increasingly urgent emergency signals have been ignored for decades by politicians and the media. Fortunately, more Americans are gradually accepting reality (even Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, who acknowledged climate change recently while blithely asserting that humanity will “adapt” to its new environment).
As the world sets high-temperature records, as Colorado burns, and the seas rise far faster than experts had anticipated, “climate alarmism” is looking increasingly like simple common sense.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes EPA greenhouse emissions Republicans
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 8: Gonna Build A Big Fence Around Texas….
The Nashua Telegraph (Nashua, NH) is one of many papers reporting on the decision of the Federal Appeals Court’s decision upholding the EPA’s authority to regulate GHG emissions. Note the huge floater left in the bowl by Texas’ AG Greg Abbott:
WASHINGTON – A federal appeals court here ruled unanimously to uphold the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, dealing a setback to fossil-fuel industries, states and lobbying groups that have fought for years to delay action on climate change.
(snip)
Led by the conservative Chief Judge David B. Sentelle, the three-member appeals panel found that the EPA’s approach to regulating greenhouse gases has been “unambiguously correct.”
Continually facing litigation from environmentalists and industry alike on a multitude of issues, the EPA welcomed the court’s decision. “I am pleased that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that the EPA followed both the science and the law in taking common-sense, reasonable actions to address the very real threat of climate change by limiting greenhouse gas pollution from the largest sources,” said agency Administrator Lisa Jackson.
Plaintiffs decried the decision and warned the economy could be hurt if the EPA continued to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the ruling “failed to rein in the unelected bureaucrats at the agency who are holding our country’s energy independence and fragile economy hostage to a radical environmental agenda.”
Of course, if it was a Republican administration’s EPA, they’d be given free rein to regulate environmentalists, don’cha know. Sent June 27:
It’s as predictable as a disco hit: any legal victory for environmentalists cues a chorus of faux outrage from Republican officials. Today, it’s the US Court of Appeals upholding the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse emissions, followed by some righteous trumpeting from Texas’ Attorney General Greg Abbott about a “radical environmental agenda.”
Only in Conservastan is a sensible legal decision aimed at holding back the accelerating catastrophe of global climate change “radical” in any sense of the word. The real radicals are the corporate “persons” whose profits depend on a consumer economy entirely dependent on fossil fuels, who continue to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in clear disregard of the overwhelming consensus of climatologists everywhere around the world. No, there is nothing radical about protecting the environment, despite the steady drumbeat of derision from politicians and pundits whose allegiance to their paymasters trumps their responsibility to the common good.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots rising sea levels timescale US Geological Survey
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 7: History Is A Bunk Bed
More on rising East coast seas, from the Andover (MA) Eagle-Tribune:
If you think there are flooding problems in the region now, just wait — it’s going to get a whole lot worse, according to a study released Sunday by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Scientists have found that our coastline is part of a unique, 600-mile-long “hot spot” along the Atlantic Coast where sea levels are rising at a significantly faster rate than the world as a whole — three to four times faster. The hot spot stretches down the Atlantic Coast from north of Boston to North Carolina.
“Flooding right now is an annoyance, but it will be more of an annoyance and bad enough that you’ll think twice about parking your car in the driveway if there’s a storm coming and it’s the spring tide,” said Peter Howd, a co-author on the study and a contracted oceanographer with the U.S. Geological Survey.
This letter was inspired by the comments (q.v.). Sent June 26:
When human society pays attention to time spans larger than an individual lifetime, that’s called “civilization.”
For a quick and dirty education in the problems inherent in short-term thinking, watch climate-change denialists’ reactions to the U.S. Geological Survey’s study showing drastic sea-level rises along the East coast. While a few may stubbornly cling to their repeatedly-debunked conspiracy theories (Al Gore’s gonna confiscate your SUV!), the majority will loudly assert that since the problems are predicted to happen over the next hundred years, it’s pointless to worry about them.
Climate change is a significant threat already, and it’s projected to get a lot worse within our lifetimes. Those who use cheap faux-populist rhetoric against the dedicated work of climate scientists undermine the civility essential to public discourse; those who would bequeath our posterity a ruined and inhospitable planet are choosing to opt out of the multi-millennium project of human civilization.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots Republican obstructionism rising ocean levels rising sea levels
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 6: Keep Your Eyes Wide
The Boston Globe:
As temperatures are projected to climb, polar ice to melt, and oceans to swell over the coming decades, Boston is likely to bear a disproportionate impact of rising sea levels, government scientists report in a new study.
The seas along the East Coast from North Carolina to New England are rising three to four times faster than the global average, and coastal cities, utilities, beaches, and wetlands are increasingly vulnerable to flooding, especially from storm surges, according to the US Geological Survey study published Sunday.
“Cities in the hot spot, like Norfolk, New York, and Boston, already experience damaging floods during relatively low-intensity storms,” said Asbury Sallenger, a Geological Survey oceanographer and lead author of the study in the journal Nature Climate Change. “Accelerated sea-level rise,” he said, will add to “the height that storm surges and breaking waves reach on the coast.”
Figured the times were ripe for a little bit of old Prophet Bob. Sent June 25:
The times they are indeed a’changin’. Climate-change denialists must be finding it difficult to cling to their bizarre conspiracy theories in the face of the latest reports from the U.S. Geological Survey, predicting that rising ocean levels will radically alter the East coast of the United States over the next few decades, a forecast entirely congruent with other scientific analyses of the effects from a melting Arctic ice cap.
The insurance industry’s changing its coverage model to account for damages caused by climate change; the American military’s developing new strategic protocols for a post-greenhouse-effect world; US intelligence agencies are trying to anticipate the geopolitical impact of global warming. These bastions of liberalism are all following Bob Dylan’s advice to “…admit that the waters around you have grown, and accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone.”
When will our Senators and Congressmen “please heed the call”?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility fossil fuels sustainability
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 5: Right Time, Wrong Place?
We need more like this (from the Washington Post):
LONDON — Four climate change activists scaled gates at Queen Elizabeth II’s Buckingham Palace home on Saturday and locked themselves to railings in a protest demanding more urgent action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The group, from the Climate Siren environmentalist movement, wore T-shirts with the slogan “Climate emergency. 10 percent annual emission cuts” and chanted through a loud hailer.
London’s Metropolitan Police said the four had climbed up a gate at the front of the palace and secured themselves to it, sitting with their legs through the railings.
The protesters unfurled a banner quoting a 2008 speech by Prince Charles, the queen’s son and heir, warning over a lack of progress on tacking climate change. It read: “’The doomsday clock of climate change is ticking ever faster towards midnight.”
This letter was an easy one to write. Sent June 24:
It’s easy to share the anger and urgency of the British environmentalists who recently locked themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace. After all, the grim scientific news on climate change is depressingly complemented by the systemic paralysis of our political system when it comes to tackling the most crucial issue of our time.
But those four activists are directing their intensity at the wrong palace. While British royalty offers a telegenic backdrop, they’re not the real villains of the climate crisis. That role is reserved for the giant multinational corporations currently fighting tooth and nail to guard their exorbitant profits against meaningful climate and environment policies. They are the drug dealers to the world, misrepresenting their product as “cheap” and “harmless” when it is neither. The corporate headquarters and boardrooms of these oligarchs are more appropriate targets for the outrage of those justifiably concerned about our threatened planet.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture National Research Council rising sea levels sustainability Water
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 4: Stop Me Before I Strike Again!
California’s gonna get a soaker sometime soon (SF Chronicle):
Global sea-level rise, induced by the warming climate, will hit California’s coastline harder than the other West Coast states over the coming decades and on through the end of the century, according to a new report from the National Research Council.
Oceans around the world are rising, but seas around California will rise even higher – by more than 3 feet before 2100, the report says. Tide gauges and satellites show that the rate of sea-level rise has increased steadily since 1900, and with each passing decade, storm surges and high waves will put low-lying regions like the Bay Area at heightened risk of dangerous flooding.
The forecasts come from the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, which appointed the 12-member committee to investigate earlier estimates of sea-level rise and factor in all new available evidence. The result was a 260-page report issued Friday.
The report was commissioned primarily by California’s Department of Water Resources, along with state agencies from Oregon and Washington in order to aid their planning efforts.
Another job-killing bureaucracy to kill! Sent June 23:
The next few decades are going to be ones of drastic transition for many Americans. Insulated by our wealth and elaborate consumer lifestyle, we have lost sight of the fact that ultimately our lives entirely depend on our increasingly tenuous control of water.
Now, as rising oceans transform our coastlines, inland states anticipate water shortages. Even as our vulnerable aquifers are overused by an expanding population, climate change makes weather more unpredictable and droughts more extreme. It doesn’t take Nostradamus to see that this future isn’t going to be kind to us, despite the glib pronouncements of denialists in politics and the media.
In a sensible world, the National Research Council’s report on global sea-level rise would be a wake-up call for all of us, everywhere. Since our world is anything but sensible, what are the odds that the next Republican “jobs” bill will also eliminate funding for the NRC?
Warren Senders
environment music Politics: humor idiots Republicans
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Colbert takes on North Carolina…
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environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility hunger sustainability
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 2: The Hunger Games?
USA Today’s Wendy Koch:
As leaders from more than 130 nations convene a United Nations conference on sustainable development Wednesday, new research shows how climate change will likely exacerbate a key issue: hunger.
The number of undernourished women and young children could increase 20% and affect one of every five within a decade because of climate change’s impact on food production, according to an analysis by the World Health Organization and other groups. Today, one in seven or 495 million women and children under age 5 lack sufficient food, the report says, adding population growth will worsen the problem.
Eventually they’re going to eat the rich. Sent on June 21:
The connections are obvious: more unpredictable weather means fewer predictable crops, which means more hunger, privation and misery. A mother facing a catastrophic crop failure can ill afford the luxury of pretending that the planetary greenhouse effect is a conspiracy ginned up by a liberal cabal. An undernourished child cannot silence hunger pangs with out-of-context statistics.
Furthermore, the humanitarian consequences of climate change are only part of the picture. Starvation has its own devastating geopolitical impacts, and any robust environmental policy must address them before they threaten global security. Our political paralysis in the face of this threat demonstrates once again that climate-change denial is the exclusive prerogative of the economically protected. If the wealthy power-brokers in corporate boardrooms and the halls of Congress could abandon their gourmet lunches and finally face a hungry, thirsty, malnourished world, perhaps they’d stop blocking progress towards a meaningful global agreement on climate.
Warren Senders