atheism Education environment Politics: assholes denialists evolution idiots Republicans theocracy
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 20: He That Troubleth His Own House…
This is entirely expected — but it still sucks:
NASHVILLE — Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam today allowed a controversial bill allowing teachers to discuss the “weaknesses” of evolution and other scientific theories to become law without his signature.
It is the first time Haslam, a Republican, has refused to sign a bill passed by the GOP-led General Assembly.
The legislation has been derided by critics nationwide as a modern-day “monkey bill,” a reference to a 1920s Tennessee law that outlawed the teaching of evolution and spurred the arrest and trial of Dayton, Tenn., teacher John Scopes in the infamous 1925 “Monkey Trial.”
“I have reviewed the final language of HB 368/SB 893 and assessed the legislation’s impact,” Haslam said in a statement. “I have also evaluated the concerns that have been raised by the bill. I do not believe that this legislation changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools or the curriculum that is used by our teachers.
“However,” Haslam added, “I also don’t believe that it accomplishes anything that isn’t already acceptable in our schools.”
I wish they’d never been allowed to rejoin the Union. Sent April 11:
Although he’s allowing HB 368/SB 893 to become law without his signature, Governor Haslam cannot avoid soiling his fingers on a dirty piece of legislation. The bill’s language is entirely disingenuous. It is absolutely obvious that this is an attempt to undermine a genuine and robust scientific consensus under the guise of “discussing the weaknesses” in scientific opinion on evolution and climate change.
Will Tennessee’s teachers really explore the relationship between feedback and forcing in climate models — or will they promulgate attractive and convenient pseudo-facts (“carbon dioxide is our friend!”) offered by well-funded denialist groups? Will they explore the relationship between punctuated equilibrium and phyletic gradualism in our understanding of evolution — or will they offer attractive and convenient pseudo-facts from well-funded creationist groups?
When the world’s climate is perilously close to spinning entirely out of equilibrium, we can no longer afford the luxury of substituting ignorance for knowledge under the guise of “teaching the controversy.” This will not end well — for Tennessee, for America, or for the world.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility timescale
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 18: More Pathetic Whining From Aggrieved Hippies
The Lincoln, NE Journal-Star has an editorial. It’s shrill:
Temperatures have retreated to levels closer to the norm in Lincoln, but the heavy green foliage of trees and the profusion of blooming flowers bear witness that March 2012 was the warmest on record in the Capital City.
Pleasant as it was, the numbers represent an extreme.
The average high was 69.5 degrees, 17.2 degrees above normal. The temperature soared to 91 degrees March 31, setting a record for that day and tying the all-time high for March. It was the second record daily high set during the month. A high of 83 degrees on March 13 topped the previous record of 80 degrees.
Still fresh in memory is the weather extreme of 2011, when snow and rain created record runoff of more than 60 million acre-feet of water in the Missouri River basin. The usual runoff is 24.8 million acre-feet. The previous record was 49 million acre-feet.
Such weather extremes should be expected more frequently as global warming continues, according to a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2010, Russia recorded its hottest summer in 500 years. Last year, rainfall in Thailand was 80 percent more than average.
“It’s very clear that heat waves are on the increase both in terms of numbers and duration,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the panel. “Another important finding is the fact that extreme precipitation events are on the increase.”
It’s often been said during the debate on global warming that “weather is not climate.” Weather is short-term. Climate is long-term.
Still, it’s worth remembering that in January the USDA released a new plant hardiness zone map that showed most of Nebraska is in a warmer zone than it was in 1990, the last time the map was updated.
The USDA cautioned that the change was based on only 30 years of weather data gathered from 1976 to 2005, and should not be considered evidence of global warming. The trend would have to persist for 50 or 100 years to be considered climate change, the USDA said.
So, in a long-term sense, the warmest March on record for Lincoln is just another dot that must be connected to many others to be considered a trend. Nonetheless, on a 91-degree March afternoon, it was difficult to believe that some still deny that global warming is real.
I haven’t checked the comments yet. I’m sure they’re full of denialist drivel. Sent April 9:
Yes, the unseasonably warm temperatures are a troubling omen of a future in which climatic extremes become the new norm — but they’re unlikely to change the mind of the climate change denialists who long ago decided global warming is a hoax/conspiracy/liberal plot. A mere plenitude of evidence would hardly be enough to convince people who have repeatedly shown their contempt for scientific truth, and indeed for science itself. The multi-decade effort by the Republican party to base policy on ideology rather than facts has been assisted by a complaisant media establishment that for years has abdicated journalistic responsibility in favor of a specious false equivalency between opposing viewpoints; the result may well be toxic to the survival of our civilization and our species. We — all of us — need to be thinking about the long term; if humanity is to succeed, both our politics and media must be transformed. Ideologically motivated ignorance is a luxury our species can no longer afford.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists hockey stick Michael Mann
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 17: Hockey Fights
Looks like Asheville, North Carolina had a visit from Dr. Michael Mann, and Katie Rose-Anderson writes it up for the Mountain Express:
If you chart global temperature changes in last 1,000 years or so, the resulting graph looks like a hockey stick.
Climatologist Michael Mann published that conclusion in 1998, and he’s still explaining what the data means and how a simple graph became a controversial icon in the debate over whether human-caused climate change is happening.
On April 3, he spoke at Warren Wilson College, offering about 60 attendees a glimpse into his new book, The Hockey Stick and The Climate Wars. “I thought if I could write the book, I could explain why people discredit science,” said Mann. “We have to be more effective in presenting scientific truth.”
Since publishing the Hockey Stick in 1998, he has had his email hacked and picked apart for the purpose of incriminating and discrediting his studies; his family has received death threats, which was apparent at the presentation: A small security team escorted Mann.
Nobody should have to undergo what Mann’s had to undergo. Sent April 8:
Modern conservatism is nothing but a framework for rejecting inconvenient facts and the people who deliver them. Just ask Dr. Michael Mann, whose work has been attacked for years by powerful corporate interests. Over and over they’ve claimed that that his results are falsified, that he is guilty of academic malfeasance, that he has manipulated his results — and over and over Mann has been vindicated.
And has it made a bit of difference? Nope; the petrol-funded denialist industry cares more about its short-term bottom line than either the ethics of their egregious misrepresentations or the long-term survival of our species. For make no mistake, Mann’s research will be foundational for humanity’s struggle over the coming centuries, as we try to make sense of a world drastically transformed by a rapidly and chaotically changing climate. Conservatism’s anti-science stance must disqualify it from any status as a legitimate political philosophy.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 16: My Ding-A-Ling?
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a columnist named Reg Henry, who takes on a certain frothy former Senator in a meticulous piece of dissection:
While nobody can be certain that the early spring here in the East is a manifestation of global warming, you know the old saying: Something that looks like a groundhog, walks like a groundhog and makes weather forecasts like a groundhog is probably a groundhog that gets his information from talk radio, as filtered through men in top hats.
Indeed, the party that looks out for the interests of men in top hats is pretty much united in the belief that global warming is a hoax — in particular, man’s alleged role in it.
Pennsylvania’s own Rick Santorum has been in the forefront of such remarks, in the belief that the Republican primaries are a competition to say the stupidest things. This strategy has been quite successful for him. While he won’t win, he hopes to parlay his victories into an appointment as Grand Inquisitor in the Romney administration.
Unfortunately, the climate — not knowing concepts such as conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat — just goes on getting weirder and weirder, pretty much as climate change theory predicts. Tragically, this erratic weather is also becoming more deadly each passing year, with hurricanes, tornadoes and floods of growing ferocity.
Of course, in bursts of sanity, some conservative politicians admit that perhaps the world’s scientists have a point, but the perpetrators are soon forced to recant lest they be considered elitist — which these days, as you know, means anyone who thinks.
This was enjoyable. Sent April 8:
Rick Santorum’s massive ignorance would be a lot funnier if he didn’t represent a worldview shared by millions of Americans. While Pennsylvania’s embarrassment of an ex-senator embodies resurgent American anti-intellectualism, there’s no doubt he’s happy to use the products of the past few centuries’ worth of scientific progress (confining ourselves to the letter “A,” these might include antibiotics, automobiles, airplanes, anesthesia, and antiseptics, without which Mr. Santorum’s life would probably have been very different).
Apparently, science is invalid only when it contradicts the senator’s ideology. Nowhere is this more problematic than in his position on global climate change, which he believes is a worldwide scientific conspiracy (one which, curiously, includes the Pope, whose infallibility doesn’t seem to extend that far).
Deliberate ignorance of the facts is both intellectually and morally irresponsible; for human civilization to survive the burgeoning climate crisis, denialists like Rick Santorum must remove their mental chastity belts.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 15: Harper Valley PTA
Neela Banerjee writes in the LA Times about Tennessee’s embarrassing new legislation, which is eagerly awaiting its gubernatorial flourish before slime-spattering students throughout the state:
WASHINGTON — Tennessee is poised to adopt a law that would allow public schoolteachers to challenge climate change and evolution in their classrooms without fear of sanction, according to educators and civil libertarians in the state.
Passed by the state Legislature and awaiting Republican Gov. Bill Haslam’s signature, the measure is likely to stoke growing concerns among science teachers around the country that teaching climate science is becoming the same kind of classroom and community flash point as evolution. If it becomes law, Tennessee will become the second state, after Louisiana, to allow the teaching of alternatives to accepted science on climate change.
The Tennessee measure does not require the teaching of alternatives to scientific theories of evolution, climate change, human cloning and “the chemical origins of life.” Instead, the legislation would prevent school administrators from reining in teachers who expound on alternative hypotheses to those topics.
The measure’s primary sponsor, Republican state Sen. Bo Watson, said it was meant to give teachers the clarity and security to discuss alternative ideas to evolution and climate change that students may have picked up at home and want to explore in class.
Morons. Sorry — that should be Morans; my bad. Sent April 7:
When contemporary conservatives want schools to “teach the controversy,” it’s a sure bet they’re referring to controversies they’ve created themselves. Tennessee’s new legislation is an excellent example of this; the notion that science teachers are somehow restricted by requiring them to actually teach science is a fabrication of the evangelical subset of American conservatism.
The arguments within climatology concern the details of feedback and forcing mechanisms in Earth’s environment, and what they portend for the future of the planet and its inhabitants; the human causes of global warming are as fully settled as the basic processes of Darwinian evolution. Assertions to the contrary are either mendacious or ignorant; probably both.
But what the hell — let’s teach the controversy: is Marxist economics valid? Is the Earth flat? Does your astrological sign influence your life? Is Elvis alive? Is Paul dead? Is there really a Flying Spaghetti Monster? Welcome to school.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: analogies Buckminster Fuller slavery timescale
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 14: Ventilated Prose Edition
Curse you, Jim Hansen! Why must you be right, all the time? The Guardian (UK):
Averting the worst consequences of human-induced climate change is a “great moral issue” on a par with slavery, according to the leading Nasa climate scientist Prof Jim Hansen.
He argues that storing up expensive and destructive consequences for society in future is an “injustice of one generation to others”.
Hansen, who will next Tuesday be awarded the prestigious Edinburgh Medal for his contribution to science, will also in his acceptance speech call for a worldwide tax on all carbon emissions.
In his lecture, Hansen will argue that the challenge facing future generations from climate change is so urgent that a flat-rate global tax is needed to force immediate cuts in fossil fuel use. Ahead of receiving the award – which has previously been given to Sir David Attenborough, the ecologist James Lovelock, and the economist Amartya Sen – Hansen told the Guardian that the latest climate models had shown the planet was on the brink of an emergency. He said humanity faces repeated natural disasters from extreme weather events which would affect large areas of the planet.
“The situation we’re creating for young people and future generations is that we’re handing them a climate system which is potentially out of their control,” he said. “We’re in an emergency: you can see what’s on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction.”
This is the first time I’ve been able to invoke Bucky Fuller in a letter. Sent April 6 (I’m now 8 days ahead — yay me):
Dr. James Hansen has it exactly correct. Just as the slave trade’s poisonous legacy continues to haunt the United States a hundred and fifty years after the “peculiar institution” passed into history, the consequences of a century’s worth of profligate carbon consumption will be felt by the next twenty generations of our descendants.
Since the advent of the industrial revolution, we have become accustomed to an apparently inexpensive and endless supply of what the futurist Buckminster Fuller called “energy slaves” — fossil-fueled technology that replaces captive human labor. But now, as climatology reveals the damage wrought by burning all that oil, gas and coal, it is becoming apparent: those energy slaves weren’t cheap after all, and the bill is coming due.
A globally-implemented carbon tax is essential if we are to transform our economic system into one that is not ruinous to the earth upon which all of us depend.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 13: Whodunnit?
Krishneil Narayan writes in the Fiji Times, attempting to clarify an important distinction:
There is always much confusion between the terms Global Warming and Climate Change (CC). Many a times, people young and old, find it difficult to define these terms and use it interchangeably. But to tackle the devastating impacts of the changing climate and its threats to humanity, it is important to be able to differentiate the fine line stuck between the two.
The international scientific community agrees that there has been a significant change in global climate in recent years. The Earth’s climate is changing at an alarming rate.
In most places around the world, average temperatures are rising. Scientists have observed a warming trend beginning around the late 1800s.
According to the leading international scientific body for the assessment of climate change consisting of some 4000 climate scientists — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the reason behind this trend is global warming and CC due to human activity. Humans releasing heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is the basis of the warming trend.
Credit where credit is due. Sent April 6:
As your article makes clear, the warming atmosphere and the changing climate are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. But there is more to this than terminological niceties. The phrase “climate change” was first suggested in 2002, by Frank Luntz, a public relations specialist for the U.S. Republican Party, as a way of deflecting increasing public concern about “global warming.” The new words sounded less ominous, and therefore less likely to trigger demand for meaningful policy responses — anathema to the petrol-funded Bush administration.
In a rare turn of events, the term generated by a political consultant more accurately describes the situation, and is now routinely used by climatologists. But the grim irony of the situation is that Mr. Luntz’ strategic euphemism enabled the United States and its industrialized allies to postpone indefinitely the changes that must be made if our species and our civilization are to prosper in the coming centuries.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: glacial melt mountains peace sustainability
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 12: Imagine….
The Hindustan Times reports on a conference of mountain nations hosted by the Nepali government. Good for them:
Threat posed by global warming and the need to have a collective voice in climate change negotiations have brought mountain countries from across the world to one platform.
Representatives from government and organization from over two dozen countries having peaks with heights of 4,000
metres or more have gathered here to deliberate on the way ahead.Initiated by Nepal government, the two-day conference will discuss effects of climate change on 25% of land Earth’s surface covered by mountains and nearly 13% world population residing there.
The objective is to promote concerns of mountain countries within UNFCCC process, draw global attention to the threat, seek solutions and adopt a Kathmandu Call for Action.
Terming climate change as the greatest threat facing humankind, Nepal President Ram Baran Yadav said that mountain nations are experiencing disproportionate effects of it.
I’m just a peacenik. Sent April 5:
Only a few years ago, climate change was generally understood as something that would only affect our descendants. Now, as the likely consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect become evident in our daily lives, it’s apparent that we — all humanity — are on the front lines of a battle against a remorseless and unfeeling enemy. The conference of mountain nations initiated by the Nepalese government is one of many international collaborations that may very well be our species’ best chance of survival.
As even the nations most invested in climate-change denial will eventually discover, this enemy attacks mountains and islands alike, ravaging forests and deserts with impersonal efficiency. We are under assault by forces we have ourselves created through profligate consumption of fossil fuels, and to win this battle, we must enter a new era of international cooperation; the fight against climate change leaves no more room for war.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: automobiles corporate irresponsibility corporate personhood sustainability transportation
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 11: I’ll Show Him That A Cadillac Is Not A Car To Scorn
A guy named Randy Salzman writes an op-ed in the New York Times that’s well worth a read. It’s titled “Invitation to a Dialogue: Our Addiction to Cars.” The final few grafs:
While oil worldwide costs the same, other nations put higher fees on gasoline and diesel consumption. Japan’s high gas taxes make its 127 million people a huge test market for energy efficiency, while our lower taxes cajoled Detroit into selling gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s.
Of course, decreasing driving in a culture famed for its “love affair with the automobile” is difficult. No one, yet everyone, is to blame for our national default position of key in the ignition to get anywhere, everywhere and — often — nowhere. Our politicians are not willing to tell us the most inconvenient of inconvenient truths.
If we’d use our cars smarter, we’d mitigate a host of problems and prevent our grandchildren from following our children in fighting wars in the Middle East.
To begin using our cars intelligently rather than habitually, we need a rational federal gasoline “user fee” rolled in slowly over a decade.
It’s time politicians led an adult conversation with America.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, though I tried, in this letter, sent April 4:
From the stories of the early pioneers and Horace Greeley’s “Go West, young man,” to Kerouac’s Beat generation tales, the freedom to get up and go wherever we please is a formative element of the American myth. But the individual liberation implied by the automobile is chimerical; our society rightly castigates those who would abdicate their responsibilities to family and community, and our collective responsibility for the past century’s profligate consumption of fossil fuels is not something from which we can simply drive away. There is no freeway that will let us avoid the environmental consequences of introducing so much extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Yes, contemporary America’s social infrastructure is utterly dependent on the automobile — but this cannot be an excuse for inaction. If we are to steer in the direction of planetary good citizenship, we must change our oil economy, and the myths that lend it credibility.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: sustainability timescale urban survival
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 10: People Get Ready…
The Salt Lake Tribune praises the city’s initiatives on climate change:
Climate change should be a matter of science, not politics. But only changes in public policy, which is often determined by political ideology, can reduce the human-caused warming that is threatening ecosystems around the globe.
In the end, governments, large and small, will be forced to confront the vast upheavals that climate change can bring if we don’t act now to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.
That’s why it’s important that Salt Lake City is supporting a growing movement among cities to urge President Barack Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency to invoke the Clean Air Act to place limits on carbon emissions. The City Council and Mayor Ralph Becker collaborated on a resolution urging the federal agency to “swiftly employ and enforce” the act. Only Councilman Carlton Christensen voted against it.
The need to act is underscored by a new report on severe weather events related to global warming coming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel, founded by the United Nations in 1988, is focusing for the first time on extreme weather changes, which have increased in number and intensity in recent decades.
Weather disasters including drought, flooding, hurricanes and rising seas cost the U.S. government an average of $3 billion a year in the 1980s. In the past 10 years, that figure has skyrocketed to $20 billion a year, adjusted for inflation.
Read the comments on this article if you want to be seriously depressed. Sent April 3:
Successful approaches to climate change must be polycentric — operating at multiple levels of geographical scale, from the individual home all the way to the national and global.
Urban initiatives like Salt Lake City’s are essential components of the total picture; without the engagement of cities, any attempt at mitigation and adaptation is doomed to failure. Similarly, no progress can take place without the commitment of dedicated people, families and communities, working together to reduce their carbon footprints and prepare for the infrastructural and agricultural disruptions that are now inescapable.
But none of these will make sense without broader-scale government support. Just as the planetary environment supports a vast range of diverse and interdependent ecosystems, only federal government action can support the wide range of individual, local, and regional initiatives that are necessary to address the slowly unfolding catastrophes that are the inevitable consequences of the burgeoning greenhouse effect.
Warren Senders