environment Politics: 2012 American exceptionalism assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 4: There Is A Reason The Biggest Tag In My Cloud Is “idiots.”
The June 19 issue of the Christian Science Monitor notes the Republican lineup is filled with denialist dingalings, although they describe it somewhat more politely:
There was a time when Republicans were at the forefront of efforts to investigate – maybe even do something about – the impact of human activity on global climate.
John McCain was an early and persistent supporter of cap-and-trade efforts to reduce the greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide) associated with climate change. So was Newt Gingrich, who went on to make a YouTube video ad – with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, no less – where he said, “Our country must take action to address climate change.”
Now, Republican presidential hopefuls seem to be racing in the opposite direction – disavowing their past support for policy measures on climate – even any sense that there’s a problem to be addressed.
Sheesh.
Sent June 19:
For all their fulsomely patriotic homilies, Republican presidential aspirants seem deeply reluctant to advocate anything that would restore America’s status as a leader in the world community. Instead, they offer tax cuts and an end to government regulation as universal panaceas, accompanying a vision of the future as myopic as it is dystopic. Since the climate-change crisis requires responsible action on multiple fronts, the GOP’s 2012 lineup prefers to deny that the problem exists, instead taking refuge in bizarre conspiracy theories and liberal-bashing tropes that play well to their anti-science, anti-tax base. A genuinely robust response to global warming is necessary to avoid catastrophic outcomes, and would give an enormous boost to our economy. The Republican platform? Stick our fingers in our ears, reject scientific expertise, and wait for free-market solutions to the laws of physics. Their version of American exceptionalism? We’re number one — when it comes to ignorance and irresponsibility!
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility extreme weather media irresponsibility United Nations
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 3: Painful.
The June 18 issue of the China Daily sounds an alarm:
Christiana Figueres, the official responsible for overseeing United Nations organized climate negotiations in Bonn, has admitted that a gap in enforcing the emission reduction regime is already unavoidable. Even if countries are willing to sign up to new reduction targets in December, they will still require legislative ratifications by governments around the world, which is unlikely to be completed by 2012.
The discrepancy between the stance adopted by developed and developing nations makes reaching an agreement extremely uncertain. While poor nations have put a high priority on renewing the Kyoto Protocol, some industrialized countries, such as Japan and Canada, have voiced a clear intention to walk away and build up a new architecture for global emission cuts, and the United States, the world’s largest economy and carbon polluter, did not ratify the protocol in the first place.
But the time we have to save the planet from the disastrous consequences of global warming is fast ticking away.
I have been thinking long and hard on the nature of our collective insanity these days. Not much fun. It would be nice to have more music.
Sent June 18:
In the year 3000, as humanity continues its fight to recover from the effects of a huge increase in atmospheric carbon a thousand years before, scholars of ancient history will be baffled by the inability of the world’s nations to act in a timely fashion to avert a grave catastrophe. They will look back and wonder, noting that we had ample notice of the consequences of the greenhouse effect; ample time to change our energy infrastructure, keeping millions of years’ worth of fossil carbon in the ground instead of burning it. They will shake their heads in amazement at the failure of our communications systems — at the globe-spanning media that remained focused on trivialities and gossip rather than a civilizational threat requiring concerted action. For all the technological and cultural accomplishments of this time in human history, we will probably be remembered, and reviled, for what we failed to do.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: American exceptionalism Bangladesh Bonn Conference Industrialized nations
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 2: We’re Number What?
The Bonn talks conclude today, June 17; Mexico and Papua New Guinea have a proposal on the table:
After years of incremental progress in U.N. climate talks, a proposal is on the table to change the rules.
The joint initiative from Mexico and Papua New Guinea is meant to break what some delegates call built-in deadlock, where a handful of nations — or even a single delegation — can stymie agreements.
The plan is to allow the 193 nations to adopt decisions by an “overwhelming” majority vote.
But the proposal faces Herculean obstacles from countries both large and small who jealously protect their power to influence, delay and ultimately block
I figured this was a good time to play the shame card, and I did it by exploiting the news that Bangladesh is amending its constitution to give its government the powers needed to address climate change. Unlike America, where we’re reluctant to admit that our government has any powers at all, unless it’s to bomb brown people or read our own citizens’ mail. Sheesh.
Sent June 17:
The appalling political stalemate on display at the Bonn Climate Conference is a demonstration of systemic failure on the part of our governing institutions; not just those of the United States, but of industrialized societies worldwide. The inability of the richest and most developed countries to take responsibility for the side-effects of their own successes is a grotesque object lesson for the rest of the world — especially those nations which have the most at stake in the battle against the effects of global heating. Nations like Bangladesh, which plans to amend its constitution to include a provision outlining the government’s responsibilities in addressing climate change. By seizing the initiative, the poorest and most vulnerable members of the international community have shamed the rest of the world. To be first of the nations where partisan gamesmanship has rendered meaningful policy essentially impossible is an especially tragic sort of American exceptionalism.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: scientific consensus wildfires
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 1: Who Burned Cock Robin?
When it comes to those disastrous forest fires (still raging as this is being written on June 16), the experts are reluctant to point the finger of blame:
The fires searing parts of the West are an eerie echo of the past, a frightening reminder of a once terrible danger that had been held largely at bay for decades.
The number of large wildfires has been rising for roughly the past 25 years, and they are lasting longer during fire seasons that also last longer.
Is it global warming? Experts won’t say that, pointing instead to a variety of factors, including weather, insect infestations and more people living and camping in the woods.
Fortunately, I’m not an expert.
Sent June 16:
The unwillingness of climatologists to assert that global climate change has caused the Arizona wildfires says a lot more about scientific integrity than it does about the way those conflagrations got started. Ethical and responsible scientists are reluctant to describe a complex situation in simplistic ways; a climate specialist who asserted direct causality between global warming and increased forest fires would be rightly criticized by his or her professional colleagues. But when we dig a little deeper (something our media often forgets to do), we discover that these same scientists have been predicting for decades that an accelerating greenhouse effect will create conditions likely to bring more frequent fires, floods, snowstorms, tornadoes, and any other extreme environmental event you can imagine. While professional responsibility prevents scientists from stating unambiguous causality, moral responsibility demands that our politicians stop wasting time on trivialities, and address the looming threat of catastrophic climate change.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Franken Arizona fire management Forest Service Lisa Murkowski wildfires
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 30: This Is Not Funny
Big fires happening in Arizona. Big discussions in the Senate. Al Franken brought something up:
Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell, one of the witnesses present at the hearing, cited research from within the service to link fires and climate change.
(snip)
Tidwell’s testimony was prompted by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who used the positive response to chide committee members into considering climate change as one of the committee’s key issues.
“I would just like to underscore that for members of our body, when we have discussions about the impact of climate change, the cost of this,” he said. “It would be all well and good for members to understand that this is related to climate change, and how important it is for us to address and take national action to reduce our carbon emissions.”
Following which, Lisa Murkowski criticized the Government’s performance in handling fire management:
However, climate change was not the focus of members’ disapproval of current fire management. Energy and Natural Resources Committee ranking member Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) was quick to point to poor management and slow policy implementation as the primary factor for out-of-control fires, caused by recent cuts to the Forest Service budget as well as a strategy of tackling smaller areas rather than larger projects. Murkowski criticized the Forest Service for not implementing the Healthy Forest Restoration Act to its fullest extent. Less than a third of the authorized projects were ever completed, according to Murkowski.
Now, I don’t know a thing about Fire Management, or about how the Federal Government is handling it. There’s probably as much ineptitude there as anywhere else in a big bureaucracy, but I don’t see that as an anti-government argument; it’s an anti-ineptitude argument.
But today I was in a hurry, so I just pointed out that Republicans are anti-science dingleberries without exception. Easy. Sent June 15:
As Alaska’s Senator Murkowski asserts, lags in implementing forest management policy are a big factor in forest fires like the one currently devastating huge swaths of Arizona. As Senator Franken points out, so is climate change. And there in a nutshell is the difference between the two parties’ approaches to environmental issues. Republicans bend every effort to underfund essential programs, then cite their failures as reasons to mistrust “big government.” Republicans are forced — from above by their energy-industry sponsors, from below by their ideologically inflamed tea-party base — to deny the relevance of basic science. When it comes to environmental policy, necessarily based on measurements, facts, and probabilities, the GOP’s approach is practically surrealist in its gleeful disregard of ideologically inconvenient expertise. Whether or not the Wallow fire is directly linked to climate change, the connection between Republican climate denialism and the failure of American environmental policy is unequivocal.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots New Hampshire Republican obstructionism RGGI
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 28: Doesn’t Sound Very Manly To Me, George…
New Hampshire is in a struggle between wise and witless:
CONCORD, N.H.—New Hampshire’s participation in a regional program designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is still up for debate in the Legislature despite the Senate sending legislation to the governor repealing the state’s law.
The Senate sent a bill to Gov. John Lynch that both ends New Hampshire’s participation in the program and also modifies the state’s shoreland protection law. Lynch promises to veto any bill that ends New Hampshire’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. The Senate can’t override a veto repealing RGGI, but wants the shoreland protections.
But we all know what’s really going on. Sent June 13:
The Republican-dominated state government of New Hampshire is, typically and reflexively, against any state initiative which acknowledges the existence of human-caused climate change, or makes an effort to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing it. The recent bill ending the state’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is a case in point. While the scientific consensus is overwhelming, and the evidence correlating planetary heating with an increase in extreme weather throughout our country and the world is accumulating ever more rapidly, Republicans have committed themselves to denying the reality in front of their eyes. It’s a positive step that Governor Lynch plans on vetoing their plans to drop out of the RGGI, which is on track to be one of the relatively few success stories in the complex history of America’s attempts to deal with the looming threats posed by global climate change.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: armageddon assholes eschatology idiots scientific literacy
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 23: The Last Trump — A Competitive Sport?
June 9: Mitt Romney’s tactical waffling on climate change has lots of Republicans up in arms. The idiot wing of the GOP (which is almost the entire party by now) is terribly upset. Mitt is going to keep plugging away at this; he’ll alienate the teabaggers, but I think he’s hoping to attract disaffected Independent environmentalist free-market libertarians, both of whom are certainly watching his campaign with interest at this point.
The New York Daily News mentions Romney as a counterpoint to Rick “Google” Santorum:
“I believe the Earth gets warmer, and I also believe the Earth gets cooler,” Santorum said. “And I think history points out that it does that. The idea that man, through the production of carbon dioxide – which is a trace gas in the atmosphere, and the man-made part of that trace gas is itself a trace gas – is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd .”
He then said the issue was an “opportunity for the left” to take more government control.
“It’s been on a warming trend so they said, ‘Oh, let’s take advantage of that and say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life some more because it’s getting warmer.’ It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life.”
The issue of climate change has been heating up the 2012 GOP race.
Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney made headlines earlier this month when he broke from far-right orthodoxy and said he believes humans are partially responsible for climate change.
I had a sudden realization about these assholes, and incorporated it into this letter, which went out on June 9:
There is hardly anything that can bring down the wrath of modern Republicans than acknowledging fact-based, testable scientific reality. Enter Mitt Romney, who wants to bring the climate change debate to the table in the upcoming primary season. While Mitt doesn’t actually think we should do anything about the greatest threat human civilization has ever faced, his willingness to entertain the notion that carefully executed scientific research might have something to tell us is in itself a notion utterly repellent to Tea-party Republicans. The GOP’s anti-intellectual core is also overwhelmingly likely to believe in the Biblical Armageddon, suggesting that their rejection of climate science may be nothing more than eschatological jealousy; if civilization is going to end, they want to be certain their team gets the credit. Those of us who would like the human race to endure and thrive for eons to come, however, are watching with appalled fascination.
Year 2, Month 6, Day 22: I’d Like To Sup With My Baby Tonight…
June 8: Boston’s in the middle of a heat wave. Tomorrow (the 9th) it’s supposed to go up to 100 — a little weird for early June, don’cha think?
WASHINGTON—The mercury climbed into the 90s across more than half the country Wednesday in an early-June blast of August-like heat, forcing schools with no air conditioning to let kids go home early and cities to open cooling centers. And scientists say we had better get used to it.
A new study from Stanford University says global climate change will lead permanently to unusually hot summers in the coming years.
Temperatures around 90 and higher were recorded across much of the South, the East and the Midwest. By 2 p.m., Washington had tied the record high for the date of 98 degrees, set in 1999, according to preliminary National Weather Service data. The normal high is about 82. Philadelphia was at 94, one degree shy of the record. Chicago reached 94 by midafternoon.
The hook for a standard “denialists suck” letter, sent June 8:
And so it goes. Much of New England is experiencing record high temperatures for early June. Before that? Tornadoes — hardly a regular feature of this region’s climate. Meanwhile, other parts of the world are setting records of their own. Once-in-a-century floods, droughts, snowfalls, heatwaves — all coming more and more frequently. Is it really “once-in-a-century” when it happens twice in a five-year period?
For decades, climate scientists have forecast exactly this sort of weather behavior as a consequence of the greenhouse effect. They’ve been proven right over and over again — except when they’ve been too conservative in their estimates of climate change’s speed and severity. The one thing they couldn’t predict was the vehemence and stubbornness of climate-change denialists in our media and politics — qualities which are now preventing us from taking the necessary actions to deal with the storms that loom over our grandchildren’s futures.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporatism denialists floods refugees Republicans
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 20: Lie Back And Think Of An Island Nation
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer runs an AP piece on the reality of climate refugees. Yow:
OSLO, Norway (AP) — About 42 million people were forced to flee their homes because of natural disasters around the world in 2010, more than double the number during the previous year, experts said Monday.
One reason for the increase in the figure could be climate change, and the international community should be doing more to contain it, the experts said.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre said the increase from 17 million displaced people in 2009 was mainly due to the impact of “mega-disasters” such as the massive floods in China and Pakistan and the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti.
This letter is part of my ongoing “total capitulation to the forces of evil” theme. Sent June 6:
At some point in the not-too-distant future, the climate-change denialists are going to change their tune. As the atmosphere warms it’ll hold more moisture, which means more precipitation: snow, rain, sleet, hail. More extreme weather events will mean more climate refugees; as people’s homes and regional economies are destroyed, they’ll have to move elsewhere. And the GOP, the engine of climate denial, will be faced with the consequences of its anti-science policies: more refugees crossing borders, more emergencies requiring intervention, more jobs lost and economies undermined. But what changes denialists’ minds will be the realization on the part of their corporate sponsors that the multiple crises emerging from a runaway greenhouse effect offer enormous opportunities for graft, corruption and profiteering. If offering a license to steal is the only way to get the world’s largest corporations to bring all their resources to bear on climate change, I’m all for it.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Australia denialism idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 18: Up With Which I Will Not Put
The Gold Coast Mail (Australia) notes a study which suggests that climate denialism is dying out Down Under:
CLIMATE change sceptics are an endangered species in Australia, a national survey shows.
The survey of almost 3100 Australians found 74 per cent believe the world’s climate is changing.
When asked a different question about the causes of climate change, which removed the reference to personal beliefs, 90 per cent of respondents said human activity was a factor.
Just five per cent said climate change was entirely caused by natural processes.
Overall, less than six per cent of respondents could reasonably be classified as true climate change sceptics, the study by Griffith University researchers found.
The comments on the article would, unfortunately, indicate otherwise. Sent June 4:
Recently, a new and invasive species was spotted in many locations all over the world. Combining intellectual genomes from anti-science religious zealots and anti-environment business forces, these “climate change denialists” fed on toxic media emissions, rapidly growing larger and posing ever-greater threats to journalism and the civility of public discourse. Clogging the channels of communication essential to a free society, denialists rapidly replaced subtler ideas about planetary climate patterns and regional weather events with ill-founded conspiracy theories and innumerate contempt for scientific authority. The result? Many of the world’s developed cultures were virtually incapacitated; the USA hosts a particularly virulent strain which has essentially destroyed the integrity of its political system.
Denialists’ status as an endangered species in Australia is very welcome news. We can only hope that in centuries to come, they’ll have a place in the history books alongside the Dodo, the Pig-footed Bandicoot, and the Passenger Pigeon.
Warren Senders