environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 21: Hey-Ho, Make You Lose Your Mind…
Ann Arbor.com appears to be an online paper servicing (duh!) Ann Arbor, MI. They note big problems ahead with the state’s fruit growers:
As climate change takes hold, Michigan’s orchards may increasingly fall victim to the spring thaw-and-freeze pattern that devastated fruit crops last year, scientists said Tuesday.
The grim prognosis is part of a broader evaluation of the likely effects of a warming climate being developed by federal and university scientists. It predicts that more intense flooding, heat stress, drought and other extreme weather will take a toll on Midwestern agriculture.
“The trends we’re observing are a bit disturbing,” Jeff Andresen, Michigan’s state climatologist, said during a conference in Ann Arbor where he and other experts outlined the latest findings of the National Climate Assessment, which integrates the most recent scientific research on climate change and is updated every four years. A draft is being circulated for public review.
Temperatures soared into the 80s across much of the state last March, causing cherry, apple and other fruit trees to sprout blooms that were killed the next month during a series of frosts and freezes. Crop damage exceeded 90 percent in some areas. Michigan State University estimated losses to farmers at $223 million.
Same damn letter I’ve used before, with the serial numbers filed off. I’m tired and rushed today. Sent February 13:
Michigan’s got company. It’s not just fruit growers, but agriculturalists everywhere in the world who are facing hard evidence that climate change is no future-tense abstraction, but a present-tense fact. And it’s not just orchards and fields and plantations that are coming under threat from the accelerating greenhouse effect and its consequences. Extreme weather will inevitably damage or destroy parts of America’s vulnerable infrastructure — and crippled roads, bridges, and utility systems can hurt farmers just as much as a storm or drought.
However, there are a few places left where the climate crisis is making no impact whatsoever. Thanks to their fossil-fuel sponsors, the plush, air-conditioned chambers of Republican politicians are well-insulated against the facts. Anti-science conservatives may hail from all over America, but the state of Denial is grossly over-represented in our country’s politics. Michigan deserves better. All of us do.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: consumerism economics Storms sustainability
by Warren
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 20: I Am The Eggman! I Am The Walrus
The Cumberland County Daily Journal (NJ) notes that victims of Sandy are agitating for the President to address climate change in the SOTU (which will be long past, by the time this page appears on the site):
WASHINGTON — Congressional lawmakers from New Jersey want President Barack Obama to address a variety of issues, including the deficit, the sluggish economy, immigration reform, climate change and gun violence, in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
“Without a doubt the No. 1 issue confronting the nation is the state of the economy, and it’s not nearly as strong as any of us would like,” said GOP Rep. Leonard Lance. “I’d like to hear him focus on that.”
Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone named the economy as the top issue, but said he also wants the president to address immigration reform, gun violence and climate change.
Action on climate change is “important for the shore” and is a job-creator, he said.
Alyssa Durnien of Keansburg couldn’t agree more. She joined a group of Hurricane Sandy victims at a news conference in front of the White House on Monday to call on Obama to address climate change in his address before Congress.
“My message to Obama is, instead of flying over my community, put on a pair of boots and come see what it’s like,” she said. “I want him to see the devastation that is still there 98 days after the storm.”
We badly need to change how we think about economics, don’t we? Sent February 12:
Perhaps the single most pervasive misconception in our politics today is the notion that the interests of the environment and the economy are opposed. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Yes, the consumer economy is predicated on the desirability of infinite expansion, but an obvious impossibility on a finite planet. The true measure of economic health is not continuous growth, but long-term sustainability — which is obviously aligned with the policy initiatives necessary to respond to the threat of climate change.
Those who lost their homes to Superstorm Sandy can testify that global warming is not an abstraction. The ramifications of the accelerating greenhouse effect are destroying agriculture, infrastructure, and ecosystems all over the world — and without these resources intact, our economic longevity can be measured in months. Earth needs people to preserve environmental “capital” for our descendants, not simply turning a quick profit, heedless of the consequences.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists Deval Patrick idiots power grid
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 19: Can’t Do Nothin’ Without The Man.
The Boston Herald reports that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is arguing in favor of buried power lines. Given that the power lines currently have about 200 kg of ice on them, that’s not such a bad idea:
SCITUATE – Gov. Deval Patrick this morning called for a sweeping review of the cost to bury power lines underground as the weekend’s storm left 100,000 Bay Staters still without electricity and more than 1,000 still in shelters.
“I am personally very interested in seeing a real analysis done on the cost to bury utilities underground. I know it’s expensive, but I have to believe that with the cost of recovery, the disruption to personal and work lives over time and given the increased frequency of storms of this severity,” it’s worth a review, Patrick said.
Early Monday, an estimated 100,000 Bay Staters were still without power and approximately 1,500 storm-displaced people were still in shelters.
With fiercer weather events predicted, and the state’s history of long-lasting power outages, the governor said, “We need to start thinking long term about how we adjust. Meteorologists are telling us that we’re going to see more storms like this, and so we are going to have to start thinking, long term, about how we address this,” Patrick said from this hard-hit town’s high school, where more than 100 residents rode out Superstorm Nemo.
But since climate change isn’t real, this is going to cost too much. Sent February 11:
When Governor Patrick, arguing for underground power lines in the Commonwealth, says that “meteorologists are telling us that we’re going to see more storms like this,” what he’s really talking about, of course, is climate change. Rising sea levels and increased atmospheric humidity are going to make the next generation of hurricanes and snowstorms into massive events. The prospect of a Nemo-sized storm once or twice every winter is an excellent argument for putting as many electrical lines underground as possible — as fast as possible.
States on the frontline of the transforming climate will have to work rapidly to avert catastrophic consequences over the coming decades. But there is another strategy which has outlived its usefulness: the attempt by conservative politicians and media to deny the obvious facts of a rapidly transforming climate. Climate-change denialists are on the wrong side of science, and the wrong side of history.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
by Warren
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 18: Hey Now Baby, Get Into My Big Black Car
The Palm Beach Post wonders if the President is gonna go there:
Climate change — a topic absent from last year’s presidential campaign — has slipped so far down the nation’s to-do list that stakeholders have taken to counting how often the president even utters the phrase.
So when President Barack Obama mentioned climate change in his inaugural address Jan. 21, those observers cautiously took notice. Now they are waiting to see whether the president mentions climate change again in his State of the Union address Tuesday.
“If he were to talk about it regularly, then it would matter,” said Theda Skocpol, professor of government and sociology at Harvard, who recently published articles on climate change policy during the president’s first term. “Public opinion researchers have found that public opinion decays really fast, so you have to keep at it.”
Read the comments on the article and get seriously depressed. Sheesh. February 9:
A storm of unprecedented size hammers the East coast of the USA, destroying towns and causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage. A giant snowstorm drops two feet of snow on the Northeast, leaving half a million people without power. Drought cripples our agriculture; last year is confirmed as the hottest in recorded history — and yet there is still a question as to whether climate change deserves presidential recognition? How bizarre.
Think of it this way: if a terror attack destroyed thousands of homes, wrecked infrastructure, crippled huge sections of the power grid, and threatened the continued safety and productivity of our agriculture, politicians and media would be beating the war drums night and day. But when the same wreckage is a consequence of our addiction to oil, those voices are curiously silent.
There is still hope to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, but there is no time to lose, and none to waste. Conservative commentators who treat “global warming” as a laugh line are on the wrong side of science, and the wrong side of history.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism scientific literacy
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 17: Lies From The Pit Of Hell
The Christian Science Monitor extols the potential of new technology for carbon capture:
Global temperatures are rising faster than scientists thought possible even a few years ago. The Arctic icecap is melting at a rate that few researchers had anticipated, and, most ominously, the permafrost is beginning to thaw, which could release vast amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2.
The situation is indeed grave – but not unsolvable. While the majority of scientists agree that we humans have made the problem, new innovations show that we can also solve it. Climate change is a global problem, but the world looks to the US for leadership and solutions.
There are three reasons for this. First, America is the world’s largest economic power. Second, the US has been the main obstructionist at global climate conferences preventing the tough action that needs to be taken to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases and slow the progress of climate change. Finally, and more hopefully, the US remains the world leader in science and innovation.
I saw proof of this when I visited Dr. Klaus Lackner, the chairman of the Earth and Environmental Engineering department at Columbia University in December. He showed me a palm-sized mockup for an “artificial tree” that mimics the photosynthesis of real trees by chemically sucking CO2 out of the air. A single such tree-sized device left standing in the wind, Dr. Lackner told me, would remove one ton a day of carbon from the atmosphere, the equivalent of the greenhouse gases produced by 36 automobiles.
If horses could fly, they’d be airplanes. Or something. Feb 9:
It’s comforting to think that American ingenuity, resourcefulness, and determination can mitigate the rapidly accelerating climate crisis. After all, we’re the nation that initiated the Manhattan Project, that landed men on the moon and brought them back safely. Surely the threat of global heating can be eliminated with good old American know-how and our iconic “can-do” spirit?
Maybe. But putting all that ingenuity, resourcefulness, and determination to work addressing the climate threat will take money, a taboo subject for the Republican lawmakers currently blocking forward motion on meaningful energy or environmental policy. So much for the “can-do” part of the equation. If we can take their public statements on scientific subjects as evidence, those same legislators are notoriously short on know-how.
Yes, scientific and technological innovations may well provide ways to cope with climate change — but only if our politicians fully accept the science and fully fund the innovation.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: blizzards denialists idiots Storms
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 16: If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now
Time Magazine takes another whack at the argument from personal incredulity:
As the blizzard-bound residents of the mid-Atlantic region get ready to dig themselves out of the third major storm of the season, they may stop to wonder two things: Why haven’t we bothered to invest in a snow blower, and what happened to climate change? After all, it stands to reason that if the world is getting warmer — and the past decade was the hottest on record — major snowstorms should become a thing of the past, like PalmPilots and majority rule in the Senate. Certainly that’s what the Virginia state Republican Party thinks: the GOP aired an ad last weekend that attacked two Democratic members of Congress for supporting the 2009 carbon-cap-and-trade bill, using the recent storms to cast doubt on global warming.
(See pictures of the massive blizzard in Washington, D.C.)Brace yourselves now — this may be a case of politicians twisting the facts. There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm. As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.
Stupid is as stupid does. Feb. 8:
While the notion that a warming planet could trigger more extreme snowstorms is counterintuitive, the fact is that if nature always corresponded to our intuitions, there would be no science. Our species’ innate intuitive sense of how things work doesn’t include bacteria, DNA, irrational numbers, subatomic particles, or radioactivity — but they’re real beyond any doubt. So, too, are the localized manifestations of a steadily rising global temperature, which include extreme rain and snow, droughts, heat waves, superstorms, and increasingly unpredictable weather everywhere around the planet.
Indeed, many of the processes attendant to global heating are complicated and unobvious, which is why scientific insights are essential. Climate-change deniers, unable to understand the mechanisms whereby a hotter atmosphere turns once-in-a-century storms into frequent occurrences, reject the science entirely, shamefully rendering America’s energy and environmental policies captive to the intellectual failures of our most willfully ignorant and superstitious politicians.
Warren Senders
atheism Education: Christians stupidity
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Someone who really should know better…
…sent me this stupid chain email:
An atheist was seated next to a little girl on an airplane and he turned to her and said, “Do you want to talk? Flights go quicker if you strike up a conversation with your fellow passenger.”
The little girl, who had just started to read her book, replied to the total stranger, “What would you want to talk about?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the atheist. “How about why there is no God, or no Heaven or Hell, or no life after death?” as he smiled smugly.
“Okay,” she said. “Those could be interesting topics but let me ask you a question first. A horse, a cow, and a deer all eat the same stuff – grass. Yet a deer excretes little pellets, while a cow turns out a flat patty, but a horse produces clumps. Why do you suppose that is?”
The atheist, visibly surprised by the little girl’s intelligence, thinks about it and says, “Hmmm, I have no idea.” To which the little girl replies, “Do you really feel qualified to discuss God, Heaven and Hell, or life after death, when you don’t know shit?”
And then she went back to reading her book.
Ha Ha Ha!!!
Christians 1, Atheists 0.
PWNED!
I sent back the following:
And the atheist said, “I don’t know everything about animal digestion, but we can ask a scientist who does.” Fortunately the person in the seat behind them was a zoologist specializing in digestive processes, who was able to supply them with the needed information.
The little girl then turned to a Priest, a Mullah, a Rabbi and a Pandit who were conveniently seated elsewhere on the plane and asked them about deities, heaven, hell, and life after death. Naturally they could not agree on anything beyond the “irrefutable fact” that everyone else’s views were wrong.
A religious riot broke out on the plane that ended when competing eschatological factions beat one another into bloody pulp, terrorizing the other passengers. All participants were arrested. Unfortunately the little girl was severely injured in the fray and has not yet regained consciousness.
No answer to her concerns was ever provided, although the questions about shit were both answerable and answered.
environment Politics: agriculture consumerism economics farms sustainability
by Warren
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 15: You Can’t Fool Me.
USA Today let us know: the farmers are f**ked:
A comprehensive USDA study concludes rising temperatures could cost farmers millions as they battle new pests, faster weed growth and get smaller yields as climate change continues.
WASHINGTON — Climate change could have a drastic and harmful effect on U.S. agriculture, forcing farmers and ranchers to alter where they grow crops and costing them millions of dollars in additional costs to tackle weeds, pests and diseases that threaten their operations, a sweeping government report said Tuesday.
An analysis released by the Agriculture Department said that although U.S. crops and livestock have been able to adapt to changes in their surroundings for close to 150 years, the accelerating pace and intensity of global warming during the next few decades may soon be too much for the once-resilient sector to overcome.
“We’re going to end up in a situation where we have a multitude of things happening that are going to negatively impact crop production,” said Jerry Hatfield, a laboratory director and plant physiologist with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and lead author of the study. “In fact, we saw this in 2012 with the drought.”
It’s a hoax! I saw it on FOX! Sent February 7:
As the song puts it, the farmer feeds us all. However, many Americans, raised in a consumer economy where produce sometimes travels thousands of miles to local stores, lack the experience to understand the implications of a phrase like “devastated agriculture.” Industrialized farming has created a food system capable of feeding huge numbers — but only under absolutely predictable conditions. The encroaching threat of climate change is certain to render those conditions anything but predictable. The result? A farm system that decades ago moved to monocropping — taking advantage of economies of scale at the expense of resilience and flexibility — will become enormously vulnerable to changing environmental conditions, rapidly evolving pests, and diseases which can eradicate entire harvests in an eyeblink.
In the late 19th century, Irish monocroppers facing devastating potato blight had two alternatives: die of starvation, or emigrate. What choices will Americans face in the coming decades?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists endangered species extinction regional ecosystems stupidity timescales
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 14: And Because I Love You, I’ll Give It One More Try
The North Andover Eagle-Tribune reports on climate change in New England:
One of the harbingers of change has been the lobster industry, which Wahle called a kind of “canary in a coal mine.”
Maine fishermen have set record harvests over the past few years, perhaps due in part to higher water temperatures and fewer groundfish, which prey on young lobsters. Fishermen off Newburyport have also reported good harvests, with last year being among the best.
Meanwhile, in southern New England, it’s an entirely different story. Mass lobster kill-offs in Long Island Sound have been caused by warming waters, Wahle said, while a disease that infects lobster shells has been spreading northward through the sound and into Massachusetts waters.
“(The disease) seems to have stalled out just south of Cape Ann,” Wahle said.
If the disease spreads further north, it could have a devastating impact on northern New England’s lobster fisheries, Wahle said.
As of Feb. 6, the comment thread on this article was 100% denialist stupidity. Sent, with an optimistic tag:
New England’s not alone in feeling the increasing impact of global warming. While specific symptoms of climate change vary from place to place, regions everywhere around the planet are affected. Whether it’s drought in the corn belt, unseasonal monsoons in Asia, or warmer winters fostering pine beetle infestations in Colorado, the consequences of the greenhouse effect are hitting people painfully. Some communities may reap temporary benefits — like Maine lobstermen who are hauling in a bumper harvest — but since warmer winters may bring an end to the state’s skiing industry, there’s no real positive economic impact on a wider scale.
If there is any upside to the accelerating climate crisis, it is that our species’ future requires us to realize that what we do today in our own narrow corner of the world will affect people thousands of miles — and hundreds of years — away. Only by recognizing that political boundaries and cultural differences are irrelevant in the face of the gathering storm can we humans make a happy and prosperous future for our posterity.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: cowering before the apocalypse existential crisis extinction
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 13: Too Much Confusion Going On, I Can’t Get No Relief
The Canberra Times runs an op-ed by a chap named Nicholas Stuart, who gets the brass ring:
Even if you still believe there is doubt about the specific linkage between carbon dioxide emissions and the rising global temperature – and I do not believe there is – there can be no doubt about the increasing incidence of extreme climatic events. The hottest January on record resulted in terrible bushfires across the nation, while at the same time we’ve suffered devastating floods in the tropical north: Australia can no longer rely on ”global action” to avoid the catastrophe that climate change represents.
Yet you would not know this listening to what passes for political debate in this country. Politicians still seem to believe that all that is required during a natural disaster is for them to tour the affected area, nodding sympathetically and promising relief.
Environmental catastrophe is framed as the ”work of nature” and therefore inexplicable. By pretending we cannot comprehend why this is happening we absolves ourselves from dealing with reality. This means that individuals can avoid the hard choices about the future while society pretends it can still afford to ”nationalise” the losses. A far better way of coming to terms with the way the climate is changing is provided by the internal workings of insurance companies.
Businesses don’t deal in academic theory. They deal in reality. That’s why the cost of insuring against damage caused by natural disasters is climbing, because the companies realise that the chance of these events is increasing. There’s nothing ideological about this and certainly no pro-Labor bias at work.
The opposition needs to explain immediately how it will deal with climate change because the holes in its current program are so large, and urgency so absent, that one inevitably returns to the possibility that Tony Abbott doesn’t believe in climate change at all.
Aye. Sent Feb. 5.
Nicholas Stuart has it exactly right in his description of climate change as an existential crisis. We humans have faced other crises of our own creation before this; the life-shattering forces of war and the morally overwhelming phenomena of slavery and genocide come to mind. But these, all-encompassing and inescapable though they may be, have always played out on a planetary stage that has changed its shape slowly if at all. The climate crisis, rendering our feeble political systems incompetent and impotent, is a threat of an entirely different nature.
War, slavery, and injustice transpire on a historical timescale of decades and centuries, while climatic processes have taken place over millennia, over eons. Now, climatic transformations are happening with the speed of war. With our wasteful consumer economies and our fossil fuel addictions, we have unwittingly an auto-immune response from the natural environment upon which our lives depend. Our species’ continued survival hinges on how rapidly we can understand these facts and their implications.
Warren Senders