environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots industry IPCC Republicans
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 17: They Can Have Any Color They Want As Long As It’s Black
The San Antonio Express-News, on Republican denialism and foolishness:
So why is there such a disconnect between what scientists think and the public debate?
Recent cognitive research helps us understand this. Researchers find that beliefs on climate change science strongly correlate with other policy preferences.
For example, if you are skeptical of the science of climate change, then you almost certainly oppose the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and support gun rights.
Those who support action to reduce greenhouse gases very likely hold the opposite views.
If arguments about the science of climate change were actually about the science, then this result would make no sense. Whether climate change is true or not is a scientific matter, and it should be uncorrelated with philosophical views on the role of government in health care or the constitutional right to own a firearm.
But they are correlated. And this tells us that the arguments about the science of climate change are not actually about science.
So what is the argument about? The answer is policy.
If climate change is true and we decide to reduce emissions, then it will almost certainly require intervention by the government into the energy market. For some, that idea is so repugnant that the only conclusion is that the problem must not exist.
It is also about being part of the tribe. Climate change has achieved such an elevated status in the policy debate that it has become a litmus test. To be a Republican, for example, you must reject the science.
Any Republican who does not risks being voted out of office — as happened, for example, to Rep. Bob Inglis. (www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/environment/climate- of-doubt/bob-inglis-climate- change-and-the-republican- party/).
As proud Texans, we are sympathetic to those who worry about out-of-control eco-totalitarianism. And we both love cheap and abundant energy and the lifestyle it allows us to lead. But, like most people, Republican and Democrat alike, we also want to protect the environment. Thus, we both support balanced action to address the clear and present danger of climate change.
Writing a letter like this is like shooting fish in a barrel. October 8:
The extraordinary thing about self-styled “fiscal conservatives” is their near-pathological readiness to bet against their own country. Just look at the people who whine that changing emissions regulations to cut down on greenhouse gases is going to handicap American manufacturers. They’re the same ones who screamed in the 1960s that making seat belts mandatory was going to cripple the automobile industry. Last I looked, there were plenty of cars on the road, and while auto companies have had their problems, nobody believes seat belts are the reason why.
For all their loud professions of American exceptionalism, conservatives’ opposition to sensible climate change policy is rooted in a “can’t do” ideology. We can’t change our energy economy (even if it saves us money) — because it’s too hard. We can’t take a position of global leadership (on the most important challenge facing the world today) — because it’s too hard.
That’s not fiscal conservatism. That’s laziness. That’s not economic responsibility. It’s whining.
Imagine these people running the Apollo program. We’d never have gotten into orbit, much less reached the Moon.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 15: If Pigs Could Fly, We’d All Have To Carry Really Big Umbrellas
Brian Dickerson writes in the Detroit Free Press about the chimerical Republican enlightenment on climate change:
But just a year later, Michigan environmentalists have been heartened by signs that politicians from both parties are coalescing around their key objective: increasing the state’s use of cleaner energy sources.
A draft report being circulated by the Michigan Public Service Commission says that, contrary to the dire warnings of electric utilities who opposed Proposal 3, the costs of generating renewable energy are plunging.
Produced at the behest of Gov. Rick Snyder, the PSC report says the surcharge that utilities have been levying on their customers to finance the transition to renewable power sources — such as wind and solar — could shrink to zero by 2014, “because project costs are, in some cases, essentially equivalent to conventional generation.”
“From a technical perspective,” the report adds, it would be possible for Michigan utilities to generate as much as 30% of their electricity from renewable fuels like wind and solar “from resources located within the state.”
I’ve got some swampland in Florida he should see. October 6:
It’d be great to see conservative politicians supporting clean energy and environmental responsibility. Once upon a time, there were pro-business Republicans who recognized that sensible public policies required, well, sense. But that was long ago; rejecting anything that smacks of expertise, today’s anti-intellectual GOP can’t solve even the most trivial policy problems. And climate change is no trivial problem, but the central issue of our time.
Republicans should embrace strategies for reducing greenhouse emissions, reinforcing infrastructure, and educating the public about the causes and consequences of climate change — but because their ideology defines itself in simple-minded opposition to everything “liberal”, they won’t. A recent study showed that conservatives eagerly bought CFL bulbs when they were labeled as money-savers, but rejected them if the packaging mentioned the environment.
Such doctrinal rigidity may lead the Republican Party to extinction. Let’s hope they don’t take the rest of humanity with them.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists IPCC media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 13: The Germ Of An Idea Blossoms In My Fevered Brain
McClatchey’s Eric Pooley discusses the IPCC report, in the Fresno Bee (CA):
The people who are paid to spread doubt and confusion about our changing climate have been working overtime this week, because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific body that includes thousands of the world’s best climate scientists, has just issued its latest assessment. The IPCC report is the Olympics of climate change – once every few years the best in the world show us the results of thousands of the most recent research studies. Inevitably, it brings out the peddlers of doubt, people who do their best to muddy the waters about our changing climate. It’s so predictable you could write a book about it.
In fact, I did write one. Six years ago, when the last IPCC assessment came out, I left my day job in journalism and started work on “The Climate War.” I thought it would be a book about how we finally started to get serious about climate change – I figured we had to, because that report declared that global warming was “unequivocal” and that most of the observed warming was “very likely” caused by human activity.
Instead, it became a book about how we didn’t get serious. The peddlers of doubt won that round and, in 2010, they defeated climate action in the U.S. Senate.
Now the IPCC is back with a new report. Basically, the scientists are as sure that human activity is warming the planet as they are that cigarettes cause cancer.
Miley Cyrus! October 5:
If the greenhouse effect was a nubile starlet offending our sensibilities on national television, newspapers, TV pundits, and Facebook would be full of discussion about the implications for our children, and the future of our civilization. If oceanic acidification was the newborn scion of a hereditary dynasty, we’d be able to read about it in every supermarket checkout line in the nation. Our collective ignorance of the single largest threat our species has yet faced in its time on Earth is enabled by our mass media’s obsession with trivial scandals and irrelevancies.
This, then, is the central challenge of our time. All humanity’s other struggles — the fight to end slavery, to spread democracy, to empower women, to stop the exploitation of children, to curb epidemic diseases — require a stable environment. Earth’s climate is the stage upon which history’s greatest ideas are realized, upon which the dreams of a better future are shared.
If this is destroyed because of the irresponsible consumption of fossil fuels, our aspirations will be replaced by a grim fight for survival on a newly hostile planet. Fail to address climate change, and we fail at everything.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots IPCC
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 12: Plus ca change…
Who the fuck is “Ambrose”? The Henderson (KY) Gleaner:
Given what the report seeks, you’d think it would deal at length with a major fact in conflict with its tone of certainty, admonition and fright. It’s that there has been no global, atmospheric warming for 15 years. The report belittles the issue, saying 15 years isn’t so long in the time span we’re discussing, and, besides, all that warmth may be hiding in the depths of the ocean.
Here’s the thing. The computer models that predicted something more accelerated than what has actually happened since 1998 are the same ones predicting disaster in the long run. If they were wrong about the past 15 years, it is a good sign they are wrong about the long run, too.
Sheesh. There’s that year again! October 4:
On reading Ambrose’s opinion piece belittling the IPCC report on Earth’s transforming climate, I wondered: why is it that when climate-change denialists assert that the atmosphere hasn’t warmed, it’s always “since 1998”? What’s so special about 1998?
Well, that year had a drastic temperature spike, so if we start there, the resulting graph sure looks like a decline. But since our measurements go back long before Monica Lewinsky made the headlines, we can look at planetary temperatures recorded over the past hundred and twenty years or so — and the picture’s very different: a zigzagging line climbing steadily across the page, accelerating significantly faster after around 1975.
Because competent scientists — unlike op-ed columnists — know the difference between statistical “noise” and genuine long-term trends, 1998’s anomalous heat is as irrelevant to the overall picture as 1995, a year of equally anomalous cold. Mr. Ambrose’s statistical cherry-picking irresponsibly misrepresents the overwhelming climatological consensus.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies divestiture heroes sustainability
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 11: The Words In My Heart Reveal How I Feel About You
USA Today, on the divestiture movement:
Students also express their concern for the planet through green majors such as environmental science, sustainability and environmental policy.
Colin Nackerman, a sophomore at George Mason University, was inspired to major in environmental policy after growing up in a small town in Southern California that was affected by environmental issues.
“I kinda wanted to get into the regulation side of policy to hopefully save places like my hometown from being devastated by environmental disasters,” Nackerman says.
At George Mason, he is also involved with the Environmental Action Group, whose goal this year is to fight for more transparency on funding the school receives from the Koch brothers, opponents of climate-change regulations.
Students cite their future as the reason for getting involved with climate change activism on campus.
“We’re the ones inheriting these issues and we’re going to have to be dealing with them in the future, so it behooves us to act now,” Bruck says.
Good luck, kids. You’ll need it, I’m afraid. October 3:
350.org’s founder Bill McKibben and many other environmentalists have frequently likened the movement to divest from the fossil fuel industry with student-propelled social initiatives to end financial ties to apartheid South Africa in business, government, and academia. In the 1980s, young people felt the moral imperative to end the injustices of institutionalized racism, and translated their outrage into action. Today’s environmental activists are likewise driven by a deep sense of social responsibility and the need to disassociate from the wrongdoing of a group of highly irresponsible and extremely powerful economic actors. The similarities are profound. But there is one important set of differences.
Apartheid’s victims lived in a single state on a single continent — and at a single pivotal point in time. That the burgeoning climate crisis will claim its casualties everywhere on Earth for centuries to come is a fact which dramatically strengthens the ethical necessity of divestiture.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility fisheries oceanic acidification sustainability
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 10: Shadow-Boxing In The Dark
The Grand Falls/Windsor Falls Advertiser (Newfoundland) discusses fisheries specialist George Rose’s recent presentation:
Rose told the approximately 250 conference delegates the collapse of cod stocks, and the moratorium, was mainly due to overfishing.
However, looking ahead — whether the subject is cod, caplin, lobster, crab, shrimp or any other species — determining what amounts to a sustainable fishery is about gathering the information that will provide the best, most detailed understanding of the ever-changing situation within offshore ecosystems.
Temperatures, acidity levels, and even the amount of plastic floating in our waters all need to be considered, he said.
On climate change, “I’ve read recent reports from as diverse places as Norway, the Northeastern United States and China … all basically reporting similar phenomenon: massive changes in production of their local waters,” he said.
Rose said climate has long been recognized as “a major, major — probably the most important influence” on fisheries.
Revised an earlier letter and sent it off. October 2:
Even if we ignore the looming threat of climate change, Newfoundland’s fisheries are already feeling the devastating impact of overfishing, where the abundant catches of decades past are no longer attainable even with the most advanced technologies. Once we include heating and acidification (the two most significant oceanic impacts of the rapidly accelerating greenhouse effect) in our assessments, there’s no getting around the inevitability of catastrophic declines. There’ll be fewer fish in the coming decades, and they’ll be increasingly difficult (and expensive) to catch. You’ve heard of Peak Oil? We’ve already reached Peak Fish.
With as much as a third of Earth’s population directly or indirectly relying on the ocean for food, this constitutes a humanitarian emergency. Add climate change’s likely impacts on agriculture, and it’s a grim warning to humanity: storm clouds are gathering, and we’re in for a hell of a ride.
The fossil-fuel industry’s myopic readiness to subsidize climate-change denial in politics and the media is a grave mistake. With billions of lives hanging in the balance, these corporations are elevating the easy lure of quarterly profits over the long-term happiness and prosperity of our species.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 9: A World Of Hurt
An editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch takes conservatives to task:
There was a time in U.S. history, not long ago, but longer than the recent 15-year slowdown in warming trends, when Republicans and Democrats could respond to such challenges together. When they could realize, as President Nixon said on that important day in 1970, “that all of us, Democrats, Republicans, the House, the Senate, the executive branch, that all of us can look back upon this year as that time when we began to make a movement toward a goal that we all want.”
What we all want is a planet, a country, a city, that we can pass on to the next generation. We want our children and grandchildren to have the same or better opportunities than we have had. Climate change is making that less likely.
To deny climate change is to deny them that chance.
It’s always the right time to mock Republicans. October 1:
Republicans love to invoke “future generations” when they’re inveighing against the ostensible evils of taxation and government, but when it comes to addressing a crisis that’s going to disrupt the lives of our children’s children for generations to come, they’re strangely resistant to doing anything. Trapped between the profit-above-all orientation of their corporate sponsors and the anti-science, anti-tax hysteria of their Tea Party constituents, GOP politicians can no longer even publicly recognize the existence of climatology as a scientific field, much less pay any heed to the findings of climatologists.
From the McCarthy-era purges of State Department China specialists to their unrelenting opposition to such notably successful initiatives as Medicare, Social Security, and the Voting Rights act, conservative politicians have repeatedly wound up on the wrong side of history. As their reflexive and ideology-driven opposition to tackling the climate crisis demonstrates, they’re on the wrong side of the future, too.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: citizen action corporate irresponsibility corruption heroes
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 8: I’m Gonna Live Forever…
The Athens News (OH) runs a great article by the always-great Amy Goodman:
Last week, far out in the Arctic Ocean, the Greenpeace vessel Arctic Sunrise approached a Russian oil-drilling platform and launched a nonviolent protest, with several protesters scaling the side of the platform. They wanted to draw attention to a dangerous precedent being set.
The platform, the Prirazlomnaya, owned by Russian gas giant Gazprom, is the first to begin oil production in the dangerous, ice-filled waters of the Arctic. The Russian government responded swiftly and with force, deploying special-forces soldiers, their faces masked by balaclavas, threatening the peaceful Greenpeace activists with automatic weapons, destroying their inflatable boats by slashing them, arresting 30 and towing the Greenpeace ship to the northern Russian port of Murmansk. At last report, the protesters faced a potential charge of piracy.
This protest is remarkable for its sheer audacity. But it is by no means the sole protest lately against runaway fossil-fuel extraction and consumption. People are speaking up around the globe, demanding action to combat global warming. In North America, a broad coalition has been growing to stop the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, as well as to stop the exploitation of Alberta’s tar sands, which the pipeline is designed to carry.
The corporate persons aren’t just sociopaths, they’re stupid. September 30:
The recently released IPCC report confirms the urgency of the climate crisis. While widespread citizen action to advocate sane climate policies in America and around the world is a good sign, it’s distressing that the business and financial communities have been both tardy and inadequate in their approach to the problem: a decade late, a trillion dollars short.
The plain facts are simple: action now to mitigate damages will save us money, time and lives in the future. That our government has failed to take even the most anodyne steps to address the metastasizing greenhouse effect is testimony to an ugly reality: the corporate sector which dominates our politics is itself dominated by a toxic mix of scientific ignorance and greed.
The facts are simple: excessive CO2 emissions are damaging our planet’s health and are on track to disrupt and destroy much of our civilization over the coming century, while bringing humanity closer to what evolutionary biologists coyly term an “evolutionary bottleneck” — a delicate euphemism for extinction-level global trauma. I may be naive, but I can’t see how letting your customers get wiped out is good for long-term profitability. Business needs to wake up and support climate action.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility economics media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 7: May The Wind Always Be At Your Back
The Economist weighs in on the IPCC report – far more responsibly than American business outlets, needless to say:
IT HAS been a long time coming. But then the fifth assessment of the state of the global climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body, was a behemoth of an undertaking. It runs to thousands of pages, involved hundreds of scientists and was exhaustively checked and triple-checked by hundredds of other boffins and government officials to whom they report—and whose policies are often based on what they read. The first tranche of the multi-volume report—an executive summary of the physical science—was released in Stockholm on September 27th. And it is categorical in its conclusion: climate change has not stopped and man is the main cause.
It may be the last report of its kind: a growing chorus of experts thinks a more frequent, less bally-hooed and more up-to-date assessments would be more useful. It is certainly the first since negotiations for a global treaty reining in carbon emissions collapsed in Copenhagen in 2009; the first since questions were raised about the integrity of the IPCC itself following mistaken claims about the speed of glacier melt in the Himalayas and, most important, the first since evidence became incontrovertible that global surface air temperatures have risen much less quickly in the past 15 years than the IPCC had expected. A lot is riding on its findings, from the public credibility of climate science to the chances of a new global treaty.
Gack. September 29:
For too long, the business community’s discussion of climate change has been mistakenly conceived as a competition between different economic viewpoints, and environmentalists have often been vilified for pointing out the obvious truth that when we exceed Earth’s carrying capacity, we put ourselves in very grave danger. As the recently released IPCC report makes clear, industrialized civilization has stressed the planet’s resources to the breaking point; dealing honestly and comprehensively with the climate crisis is not an issue of ideology, but of survival.
Our carbon dioxide emissions linger in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years, causing rising sea levels, oceanic acidification, and incidences of extreme weather all over the globe. “Emit now, pay later” has been our approach for the decades since the problems of global warming were first identified in the 1950s. Now the bills for our accumulated greenhouse emissions coming due, and the longer we wait to take care of our environmental debt, the more it’s going to cost — in money, in infrastructure, and in the shattered lives we will bequeath to our posterity.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists heroes media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 6: Thank You, Sir — May I Have Another?
PennLive – The Patriot-News – runs a great interview with Michael Mann:
To all the climate-change deniers out there, Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann has this suggestion:
Stop arguing about whether the globe is warming and whether human pollution from greenhouse gases plays a major role in it. The science on those counts is settled.
Instead, he said, join the debate about what, if anything, the world can — or should — do about it. Is taking action against climate change simply too expensive? Why should we sacrifice given what China and India are doing?
Some critics are asking those questions, he said when interviewed Wednesday in Harrisburg for an event sponsored by PennFuture. And that approach would bring the discussion to “a legitimate level where it’s possible to have a policy debate,” he said. In some ways, I welcome that. We can talk about efficacy, fairness” and other issues.
“If that’s where we really were, we’d be in really good shape,” he said.
Alas, we are not, as a flood of commenters on this article will surely demonstrate. Denialists will bring up out-of-context data points and cite the handful of academically-credentialed dissenters who dispute the overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject.
“There are always devil’s advocates and contrarians in science,” said Mann.
Always a pleasure to stand up for a stand-up guy. September 28:
Even since Dr. Michael Mann first published his findings on the accelerating pace of climate change, he’s come under steady attack from anti-science conservatives. Despite the fact that they’ve come up empty in their search for incriminating evidence of academic malfeasance, these anti-science zealots aren’t abandoning their fruitless crusade.
The recent IPCC report once again demonstrates that the specialists who’ve dedicated their lives to understanding Earth’s climate agree that there is a very serious problem, and that we — all of us — need to talk about it. Unable to refute the rapidly accumulating evidence of the climate crisis, denialist pundits and politicians instead resort to misrepresentations, ad hominem attacks, and statistical cherrypicking.
In the face of a rapidly accelerating crisis, Michael Mann and other climatologists exemplify not just good scientific practice, but the broader virtues of responsible citizenship. They deserve our thanks and respectful attention, not calumnies and abuse.
Warren Senders