Education environment Politics: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots Karl Rove reality-based community Republicans
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 21: Post-Modernist Science Education: Applying the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis To Atmospheric Chemistry.
More on the Heartland Institute leak, from the New York Times:
Leaked documents suggest that an organization known for attacking climate science is planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public schools, the latest indication that climate change is becoming a part of the nation’s culture wars.
Related in OpinionThe documents, from a nonprofit organization in Chicago called the Heartland Institute, outline plans to promote a curriculum that would cast doubt on the scientific finding that fossil fuel emissions endanger the long-term welfare of the planet. “Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” one document said.
While the documents offer a rare glimpse of the internal thinking motivating the campaign against climate science, defenders of science education were preparing for battle even before the leak. Efforts to undermine climate-science instruction are beginning to spread across the country, they said, and they fear a long fight similar to that over the teaching of evolution in public schools.
You know what? I’m sick of people saying “alarmist” like it’s an insult. The news is pretty fucking alarming, all the damn time. If you’re not alarmed (hell, if you’re not absolutely terrified) you’re just not paying attention. Sorry to harsh your mellow, but that’s what’s happening.
Anyway, I like the phrase “nihilistic political solipsism.” Sent February 16:
In the helter-skelter 24-hour news cycle that shapes American politics, the words of officials from the previous administration might as well be written in hieroglyphics; the first decade of our century is already ancient history. But the recent leak of documents from the Heartland Institute describing their plans to foster climate-change denial in our nation’s classrooms call to mind Karl Rove’s comments to journalist Ron Suskind. Expressing contempt for the “reality-based community,” Rove went on to say, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
But this is a dangerous game. Old-style Soviet historical revisionism is only effective when the facts are all in the past; the Heartland Institute is attempting to revise the future by applying their nihilistic political solipsism to actual real-world problems requiring reality-based solutions. The physics and chemistry of the greenhouse effect won’t be fooled by banners and photo ops.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 18: Bad Moon Risin’
Inexplicably, the Columbus, Indiana Republic runs an AP article on the Vermont state government’s intelligent approach to climate questions:
MONTPELIER, Vt. — A new report by the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources says flooding from Tropical Storm Irene shows the state needs to be better prepared for future flooding.
The state’s “Climate Change Team” says climate change data predicts that Vermont will get more extreme rain events in the future, so “flood resiliency” may be a critical adaptation to climate changes.
The report shows that Vermont’s river communities, which were hit hard by Irene, are vulnerable to intensive flood disasters.
The report begins to count the costs associated with that vulnerability and asks some of the hard questions our state and communities will need to answer in order to build flood resiliency.
As usual, it’s the Republicans who’ve made a mess of everything. Sent February 13:
Even as the federal government remains paralyzed by Republican intransigence in the face of climate change, state and regional agencies are engaged and active. The report from the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources is a lesson to other states: don’t swallow the denialist’s assertions without thinking.
For make no mistake, the signs are in the offing. Climatologists predicted a drastic increase in extreme weather events as the greenhouse effect intensified, and the data pouring in from all over the world has shown that the only errors these scientists made were in underestimating the force of the disruption. At this stage of the game, it’s undoubtedly too late to avoid billions of dollars of costly and inconvenient damage to our infrastructure, our agriculture, and our security — but by acting promptly, we may be able to avert the most catastrophic of outcomes. The Green Mountain state is leading by example.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 17: Many Tables For One, In A Greek Restaurant
The Lehigh Valley Morning Call (PA) has a nice piece from a local allergist, discussing denialism in general in the context of a textbook dispute:
At a recent Saucon Valley School Board meeting, board member Bryan Eichfeld raised his concerns about a textbook proposed for the 2012-13 school year. The book was not a manual for teaching creationism in the classroom, nor was it a book espousing particular political beliefs. The textbook, “Globalization and Diversity,” simply spoke of the geopolitical, cultural and environmental impacts of — gasp — climate change.
Thankfully, the board overrode Eichfeld’s motion to reject the text, and for that it should be commended. However, the fact that this sort of science denialism is seeping into our schools and possibly hindering the education of our students is troublesome and deserves to be the topic of a healthy public discourse.
As an allergist in the Lehigh Valley, I have seen the health effects of a warmer climate — including an earlier and longer pollen season — firsthand. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading international network of climate scientists, first recognized the potential for climate change to impact asthma and allergic diseases in 2001, and I have been deeply concerned about the implications for my patients ever since.
The affects of global warming will extend well beyond my specialization, however, and the implications for everyone will be serious. Climate change will exacerbate extreme weather events, jeopardize the U.S. food supply and drastically alter the landscapes we call home. Educating the public on the science behind these risks and their consequences is the first step to confronting and mitigating this pressing issue.
I’m in kind of a hurry, so this was ideal for a generic “Republicans are idiots” screed. Sent Feb 12:
For more than fifty years, the Republican Party has waged a steady war on expertise and logic. Since the election of Ronald Reagan, the role of actual facts in GOP policy-making has steadily diminished. The eight years of the Bush administration showed us what happens when ideology trumps reality, and it’s not pretty. It will take decades to recover from the damage inflicted during that time.
Nowhere is this more problematic than in the public discussion over the issues of climate and energy, where a group of factually-challenged ideologues have hijacked the conversation. The Tea-Partiers have been cynically manipulated by (to resurrect Teddy Roosevelt’s phrase) “malefactors of great wealth.” Their denial of global climate change serves the temporary profits of a few, while delaying the long-term preparations necessary in the face of one of the greatest threats our species has yet confronted.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists economics extinction idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 15: Problems Of Scale, As Usual
The bigger the political system, the less competent it is to address the problem. The Albany Times-Union:
ALBANY — Seven “hundred-year floods” have hit the Catskills during the last 15 years, and lobsters have grown so scarce in Long Island Sound that lobstermen have given up trying to make a living there.
As a result, it’s time for the humans to start figuring out how to protect the trout, lobsters and countless other species being challenged by climate change.
That’s the problem state and federal environmental officials and scientists are grappling with in the middle of a winter that been virtually snowless in much of New York.
A group gathered at the state Department of Environmental Conservation headquarters Thursday to work on a plan for protecting plant and animal life in the decades to come.
While political pundits may still be debating global warming or the impact of greenhouse gases, a broad consensus of scientists have agreed the climate is changing.
Extinction is bad for the bottom line. Sent Feb 10:
It’s good news that state and local governments are taking action to mitigate the expected effects of climate change. But it is shocking that the federal government remains paralyzed by ideological squabbling in the face of what is arguably the greatest threat human civilization has yet faced. Did I say “squabbling?” Perhaps that’s the wrong word, since all the name-calling, vituperation, and misinformation are coming from one side of the political spectrum.
If Republicans and their financial backers were to consider the implications of climate research objectively, several things would happen. First, they’d stop denying the factuality of global climate chaos, and start working actively to slow it down and to cope with its impacts. Second, they would recognize that preserving the planetary systems on which our culture depends is as important for market capitalists as it is for radical “tree-huggers,” for a profitable economy requires environmental stability to flourish.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: conspiracy theory denialists idiots Richard Hofstadter
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 13: Get A Brain! Morans!
Aw, jeez. These idiots again? Check it out. The NYT:
Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.
They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights.
“Down the road, this data will be used against you,” warned one speaker at a recent Roanoke County, Va., Board of Supervisors meeting who turned out with dozens of people opposed to the county’s paying $1,200 in dues to a nonprofit that consults on sustainability issues.
Oy. What can you do with this kind of dreck? Sent February 7:
In the minds of Tea-Partiers, everything is evidence of a conspiracy. If enough people are riding bicycles that municipal governments incorporate bike lanes in street planning, that’s not simple good sense — it’s a conspiracy. If research suggests that informing people about their energy consumption decreases waste, that’s a conspiracy, too. If the accumulated evidence supporting the existence (and threat) of global climate change outweighs that compiled by deniers by a twenty-thousand-to-one ratio, that’s just proof that the scientists are in on it.
Richard Hofstadter’s analysis of the “paranoid style” in American politics — “…heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” — has never seemed so accurate. Imagine the benefit to our country if these suspicious zealots could stop obsessing about a Socialist New World Order concealed in an innocuous UN memorandum about environmental responsibility, and instead turned their energy towards making a more cooperative, just, and sustainable society.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: economic inequities island nations rising sea world court
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 11: I’d Like To Be / Under The Sea
The Pakistani daily “Dawn” runs an article on the plans of island nations to attempt legal pressure on the irresponsible giants:
UNITED NATIONS: Small island nations, whose very existence is threatened by the rising sea levels brought about by global warming, are seeking to take the issue of climate change before the International Court of Justice.
Johnson Toribiong, president of Palau, said Friday his country and other island nations had formed an expert advisory committee to bring the issue before the U.N. General Assembly. That would allow the world court in the Hague to determine the legal ramifications of climate change under international law.
”If 20 years of climate change negotiations have taught us anything, it’s that every state sees climate change differently. For some, it is mainly an economic issue … for others it’s about geopolitics and their past or future place in the global economy, but for us it’s about survival,” Toribiong said.
”Pacific countries are in the red zone, a swell of ocean where waters have risen two or three times higher than anywhere else in the world. That differential might explain why we speak about climate change so urgently and we look to everyone in every corner of the United Nations to find a solution,” he added.
Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Colombia University and a member the advisory committee, said the idea is to have a court determination compelling developed nations to control emissions of the greenhouse gases believed to cause global warming in the absence of an international treaty.
I would loooooove to see that happen. Sent February 5:
The incapacity of the developed nations to address the looming climate crisis would be pathetic if it did not hold such tragic consequences for the rest of the world. Paralyzed by the overwhelming influence of multinational corporations, the United States and its allies are unable to respond even to an obvious emergency like the plight of island nations. It’s a curious irony that even as countries like Palau, Kiribati and the Maldives unflinchingly confront the rising sea levels that may soon submerge them, the industrialized West is drowning, unawares, in a toxic flood of corporate cash and media misinformation.
Eventually, of course, those petrol-paid politicians and their enablers will discover that in the wake of the greenhouse effect, there is no safe harbor. In a sad reversal of John Donne’s maxim, even those living on the economic high ground will learn: in a climate-changed world, every nation is an island.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots James Hansen reality-based community sapir-whorf hypothesis scientific consensus scientific method
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 9: There Is No Word For That In Our Language
John Monahan writes a nice piece in Modern Times Magazine (AZ) addressing climate change denial, with specific reference to the WSJ flap. The whole piece is well worth your attention.
Feb. 3, 2012 — What a crazy seven days it has been for the climate change debate. Scientists from both sides of the issue took to the Wall Street Journal late last week and early this week to opine on the merits of the issue and what should be done about it.
But that’s just putting it nicely. What really happened is one side said the other was wrong — knowingly in an attempt to hide the truth — in pursuit of riches.
To say it even more bluntly, each said the other was the ‘real’ greedy liar.
The most important bit is the part where he quotes James Hansen, who is, as usual, right:
“Public doubt about the science is not an accident. People profiting from business-as-usual fossil fuel use are waging a campaign to discredit the science. Their campaign is effective because the profiteers have learned how to manipulate democracies for their advantage,” Hansen said. “The scientific method requires objective analysis of all data, stating evidence pro and con, before reaching conclusions. This works well, indeed is necessary, for achieving success in science. But science is now pitted in public debate against the talk-show method, which consists of selective citation of anecdotal bits that support a predetermined position.”
Simply, Hansen is saying corporations are using the scientific method to bolster an argument that has little merit only because it serves their bottom line. He also places blame upon the mainstream media, calling their need for “balance” a means to validate bad science and support corporate positions.
“Today most media, even publicly-supported media, are pressured to balance every climate story with opinions of contrarians, climate change deniers, as if they had equal scientific credibility. Media are dependent on advertising revenue of the fossil fuel industry, and in some cases are owned by people with an interest in continuing business as usual. Fossil fuel profiteers can readily find a few percent of the scientific community to serve as mouthpieces — all scientists practice skepticism, and it is not hard to find some who are out of their area of expertise, who may enjoy being in the public eye, and who are limited in scientific insight and analytic ability,” Hansen wrote.
They have a 500-word limit; I took about 225 to try and tie all these phenomena together. Sent Feb 3:
Climate-change denial is part of a larger problem, one exemplified by the anonymous Bush official who told journalist Ron Suskind, “We’re an empire; we create our own reality,” and ridiculed those who lived in the “reality-based community.” Conservative politicians and electoral strategists appear to believe in a post-modern universe where measurable reality is just another kind of fiction. Examples of this are easy to spot.
The anti-evolution politicians whose claim that “science is just another religion” serves as a rationale for their attempts to introduce creationism into public school science curricula; the runup to the war in Iraq, in which facts were manipulated and cherry-picked to support President Bush’s martial agenda; the legislators in some Southern states who seek to have any mention of slavery simply removed from history books — the list goes on and on.
Climate change denial is by far the most damaging of these delusions. Human science has discovered and illuminated the laws of physics and chemistry, but that doesn’t mean that the “we make our own reality” crowd can apply wishful thinking to the greenhouse effect. Given enough time, American culture could recover from forced creationism, historical revisionism, and clueless warmongering — but if we fail to recognize the imperative need to address climate change, we’re not going to have the chance.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: denialists scientific literacy scientific method
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 8: What He Was Doing In My Pajamas, I’ll Never Know
The Tuscaloosa News runs an editorial stating that “Climate Change Should Influence Politics”:
Azaleas are budding and daffodils can be found in full bloom along rural roads around West Alabama. Is that proof of global warming?
Hardly, but that doesn’t mean evidence of sustained, rapid climate change isn’t mounting.
Consider this: Nine of the 10 warmest years in the past century have occurred since the year 2000, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. More of the Arctic Sea is melting.
And now the U.S. Department of Agriculture has changed the map that helps gardeners decide when to plant flowers and which will grow well here. Tuscaloosa, which used to be grouped with much of northern Alabama, now falls in the zone with Mobile.
Even all that isn’t conclusive proof of global warming. No, but the case for climate change has convinced more than 97 percent of scientists actively publishing studies in the field of climatology.
They agree that not only is climate change real, but the rapid rise in temperatures around the world over the past few decades is due to human activity.
Yep. Sent Feb 2:
At the moment, it seems as though science is just about the only element in American public discourse that doesn’t influence politics. Presidential candidates vie with one another for the approval of conservative religious groups, not to mention the various deficit-fixated, abortion-fixated, gay-marriage-fixated ideological factions which have dominated the national conversation for years. Meanwhile, Republican legislators are working overtime to reduce the amount of actual science taught in our country’s science classes, and to reduce the government’s funding of actual scientists who are carrying out research projects crucial to our country’s future.
But has there never been a Presidential “science debate” or anything more than the most anodyne public statements from the candidates about the value of science in our lives — and that’s a tragedy, for scientific method is by far the most accurate and comprehensive way to find out what’s actually happening in the real world — and policies that aren’t reality-based are guaranteed to fail.
And nowhere is this more crucial than in the issue of climate change. The scientific ignorance of our political culture is a disaster in the making.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility economic inequities economic justice greed scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 5: It’s All About The Benjamins
The Bangor Daily News’ Dana Wilde talks about why Climate Change is real:
Several readers, with helpful intentions I’m sure, reassured me earlier this month with a few pats on the head that climate change, if it’s even happening, is a natural occurrence that’s nothing to do with us and moreover, to jog me out of naivete, that global warming is a hoax. Don’t worry, be happy, we were sagely advised in the 1980s.
Here are some of the points I’ve heard that are meant to reassure me there’s no need to worry about climate change or global warming:
• It still gets cold in winter.
• Earth’s climate has always changed and always will change.
• Global warming is just a theory.
• There is no proof the exhaust from my car hurts anything.
• Scientists are often wrong.
• Scientists fake climate research findings.
• Global warming is not mentioned in the Bible.
• There was no Y2K disaster.
The problem I have with these arguments is that I believe in the existence of computers, cellphones, penicillin, bone marrow transplants and internal combustion engines. I also believe in photosynthesis, DNA, infrared light, blood types, viruses, the theory of relativity and the vibration A440, even though I have never seen any of these actual items or processes with my eyes.
What I mean by this is that the same method of study — namely, what we call “the scientific method” — led to microchips, life-saving chemistry, instant communication and so on. So that method has a certain high reliability. It has been applied to Earth’s climate, and so the findings of climatologists are very likely to be in the same range of reliability.
Now, if the climatologists were disagreeing about the findings, then we would have a situation where the research was incomplete, the matter was not fully understood and global warming would be “just a theory.” In other words, the scientists would not yet be sure whether the proposed explanation was completely accurate to reality or not. Scientists are often wrong about their theories. That’s why they keep compiling, analyzing and checking data until they agree on an accurate explanation.
It’s a good piece. And the comments are mostly full of stupid (don’t these trolls have anything better to do? Or would they all fail Turing tests?). I felt the time was ripe for an OWS-style letter. Sent January 30:
Cui bono? Once conservative media outlets and their allies in politics ginned up a “controversy” about the causes and severity of global climate change, it is appropriate to ask: who benefits from increased support of climate science? And, conversely, who benefits from delay and obfuscation?
On the one hand, climatologists in small teams, angling for (at most) a few million dollars to carry out complex research projects. On the other hand, companies like Exxon, which reported profits of 10.6 billion in the first quarter of 2011 — over two thousand times more than a five-million dollar grant for a typical climate study carried out over several years. Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s CEO, received twenty-nine million dollars last year, over three hundred times the average salary of a climate scientist.
Big oil’s obscene profits won’t survive once America changes its energy economy. No wonder they want to confuse the subject as much as possible.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes hippie-punching idiots Republican obstructionism Republicans
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 4: Nattering Nitwits of Know-Nothingism
The Daily Advertiser (Lafayette, LA) runs another in a series of rueful analyses from former Republicans who’ve broken with the batshit crazies now running their party:
The abuse directed at climate researchers sheds light on a tragic political truth — a cancer is consuming the soul of American conservatism. Conservatism is taking on many of the hallmarks of a cult — one in which information and doctrine are received, without question, from recognized authority figures or sources, and in which dissent cannot be tolerated. The conservative cult views the political process in apocalyptic terms, and sees its opponents as demonically evil. Sadly, climate denial is a key pillar in this cult’s ideology.
Under these circumstances, conservative scientists like Hayhoe and Emanuel are particularly dangerous. They demonstrate that there isn’t a fundamental incongruity between religious faith, or conservatism, and accepting the science behind AGW. They are heretics, calling to other conservatives from beyond the walls of the cult compound. And that’s a mortal threat to the climate deniers, and perhaps to the very existence of the cult itself.
In the end, the bullying and abuse of scientists is a sign of growing desperation. The cult must be defended, by any means. Dissenters must be intimidated into silence. With everything else against them, conservative climate deniers have only one option left – it’s time to get personal, and pound.
So the GOP’s full of crazy, huh? Gosh! Wouldn’t have expected that. Wonder why? Sent January 29:
Michael Stafford’s analysis of Republican cultishness (with particular reference to climate change denial) is exactly accurate. The exclusive reliance on received knowledge, the glib dismissal of ideologically inconvenient facts, the Manichaean mindset in which subtlety is inconceivable and compromise impossible — behold the public face of American conservatism today!
But how did the GOP turn into an apocalyptic, willfully ignorant mob? Mr. Stafford, a former party official, is readier to deplore his erstwhile compatriots’ behavior than to acknowledge the party’s complicity in its own degradation.
It’s undeniable: conservative politicians have long cultivated a virulent strain of electorally useful anti-intellectualism. Demagogues have been elected all over America by railing against “pointy-headed professors”, and “so-called experts.”
Who’d have thought that fifty years spent attacking intelligence, reason and scientific expertise would build an ignorant, unreasonable, and scientifically incompetent constituency? A few liberal intellectuals, perhaps — but their opinions didn’t count. Buncha damned hippies!
Warren Senders