atheism environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 23: Preacher Went a-Hunting, Lord, Lord, Lord.
The Miami Herald runs a McClatchy article on the increasing desperation of the people who actually give a shit:
WASHINGTON — Just before he and other environmentalists marched to the White House on Tuesday, climate change activist James Hansen warned he wouldn’t be able to be arrested with them this time. Hansen, a NASA scientist by day and an activist on his own time, had to be available for a press conference in the afternoon announcing that worldwide temperatures in 2012 were in the top 10 hottest ever recorded.
“I’d be honored to be arrested with you,” Hansen said. A few hours later, he declined to discuss politics on a conference call with reporters, but he outlined how he and other government scientists arrived at their calculations as well as their concerns about future warming trends.
But as President Barack Obama approaches his second term, some of the country’s largest and most influential environmental groups and best-known advocates have drawn up blueprints for the White House to address climate change and its attendant problems: rising sea levels, droughts, more severe storms and acidic oceans. Despite doubts from others about how much could be accomplished in the coming years, they’re calling for the president to crack down on big polluters with tougher emissions rules, to reject the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s tar sands, and to stick to higher new fuel efficiency standards for cars. Other groups want the White House to encourage energy innovations that would curtail emissions.
And some, like the religious leaders who rallied Tuesday on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, said there’s nothing left to do but pray. Among their prayers: that Obama would hear their pleas and have the courage to emerge as a leader on climate change.
The prayer angle led me to go Old-Testament cute for this letter. Sent January 16:
While prayers may have benefits for those who are doing the praying, their efficacy in the measurable world remains unproven. Perhaps environmentalists’ fervent supplications will soften the hearts of our corporate and political pharoahs, who have thus far been obdurate in their refusal to consider the implications of a runaway greenhouse effect on the complex civilization humanity has built over many thousands of years. And then again, perhaps not.
Ultimately, our fate will not rest in the hands of a deity, but in our own collective ability to restore sobriety to a society drunk on fossil fuels and distracted by ephemeral entertainment. Massive investments in science and technology are necessary; human ingenuity just might solve some of the most pressing problems of climate change, but only if it’s well-funded — and treated with something other than the arrant disdain showed by the anti-science pharisees now occupying the halls of congress.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 22: Just Wait Till Your Father Gets Home
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette joins the chorus of shrill hippies:
Mother Nature is trying to tell us something and every passing year her message becomes more urgent. That is the takeaway from the news that 2012 was the hottest year in the history of the contiguous United States.
The politicized community of climate change deniers will always find a way to deny the obvious, but more and more the obvious just won’t be pushed out of sight. The situation has become a grim variation of the punch line to the old joke: Who are you going to believe, the climate change deniers or the evidence of your own eyes — or, in this case, the temperature of your own skin?
Plainly, something is seriously wrong with the weather and the climate systems that form it. You don’t have to be a scientist to recognize this. In Pittsburgh, you just have to remember the winters of yore when ponds were frozen and winter sat heavily on the landscape for weeks.
As it happens, the world’s scientists are overwhelmingly united in the belief that the planet’s climate is changing and mankind’s release of carbon-based pollution has had a hand in it. The fallback position of the skeptics is that the facts can be explained in terms of natural rhythms that have always occurred. That is progress, the place where a sensible debate might begin.
Shhhh. Sent January 15:
Mother Nature, that tedious scold whose messages we’ve so successfully ignored for decades, is at it again — this time with the assistance of climate scientists: people who’ve devoted their lives to figuring out exactly what it is she’s trying to tell us. And Mom is mad, because not only have we denied any responsibility for completely trashing our home, we’re refusing to help her clean up.
American conservatives have moved so far away from measurable reality that even the most blatant signals from our traumatized environment are misinterpreted. On one hand, climatologists who’ve been predicting for decades that the metastasizing greenhouse effect would trigger extreme storms and anomalous weather — just like the extreme storms and anomalous weather we’ve been experiencing. On the other hand, evangelical preachers blaming it on gay marriage, and libertarians denouncing attempts to avert catastrophe as unpardonable infringements of their freedoms.
No wonder Mom’s angry.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment: idiots morality religion scientific consensus scientific method timescale
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 21: I Do Not Believe You Are An Idiot. My Choice Of Verb Is More Accurate: I KNOW You’re An Idiot.
The Anchorage (AK) Daily News reprints an Op-Ed from the Kansas City Star of a few days ago, titling it “The Costly Ignorance Of Climate”:
The overwhelming number of scientists who believe in climate change scored another “victory” in 2012.
Unfortunately, because of timid political leadership in the United States and around the world, the war against global warming is still being lost.
Scientists have long warned that man-made greenhouse gases are heating up the Earth. They added more evidence to their arsenal when the contiguous United States recorded its hottest year ever in 2012. The average temperature was 55.3 degrees, smashing the 1998 record by one full degree, an incredible leap given the usually small changes in these kinds of measurements.
The New York Times reported other worrisome facts: 34,008 daily high records were established at U.S. weather stations but only 6,664 record lows in 2012.
Worldwide, the average temperature is expected to come in as one of the 10 warmest ever, with all of those occurring in the last 15 years.
Always happy to mock the faithful. January 14:
There’s no doubt among people who pay attention to the evidence that climate change is a dangerous reality. Self-styled “skeptics” confuse incomprehension with intellectual honesty; the root of the problem lies in a word we hear too often in the discussion of the burgeoning greenhouse effect and its consequences. “Believe.”
Scientists’ relationship with reality is vastly different from the faithful’s relationship to their religions. You’ll never hear a religious adherent say that they’ve evaluated the data and are prepared to accept their creed’s validity within two standard deviations, and you’ll never hear a climatologist say they “believe” in climate change. Scientists accept the evidence for climate change because they understand how that evidence was collected and analyzed, and their evaluation of other possible explanations for that evidence suggests that the consensus explanation is the correct one.
To conflate the concepts of belief and understanding is to do both science and religion a disservice. And when this confusion makes concerted international action on global climate change less likely, it makes risible religion’s claims to moral ascendancy.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: delay denialists media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 20: If Weather Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Be Weathered. What?
The Duluth Tribune runs an op-ed from George Erickson, advocating that we, um, pay attention and actually, you know, do something:
Some people might argue the distractions of the holidays and the fiscal cliff made the New Year a poor time to address climate change. But neither of those issues was as important as the shocking examples of climate change delivered by 2012 — one right after another.
While the fossil-fuel industries have spent millions on anything-for-a-buck campaigns to continue the status quo, nature has been shouting at us — and often has gone unheard.
In 2012, the U.S. set more than 4,000 daily high-temperate records, and that was just in July. Drought spread across 80 percent of the country, leaving Lake Meade so low the intakes for Hoover Dam’s generators may soon have to be lowered, which would reduce the dam’s generating capacity. Across the West, wildfires blackened 9 million acres of forest, while in the North, Lake Superior reached a record high temperature. Now add the damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy and the abnormal onslaught of 39 late-season tornadoes that prowled the South on Christmas Day.
Sleepers, wake! Sent January 13:
Just as firearms advocates are always telling us not to discuss gun control in the aftermath of a shooting, politicians and media figures have been saying for years that while sometime in the future might be a good time to discuss climate change, we don’t have the political will to do it now. The NRA’s argument loses any moral authority it might have claimed once shootings start happening every day — and those who’ve been trying to delay discussion of the greenhouse effect and our future on a climate-transformed planet must abandon their position once it’s clear that such a future is here already. With superstorms, crippling droughts, devastating heat waves, and anomalous weather events happening every day around the world, ignorance is no longer a viable option.
If we fail to address climate change in a comprehensive and scientifically-grounded way, our children won’t get to address it at all.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes congress idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 19: Cupidity And Stupidity
USA Today’s Wendy Koch (no relation, I hope) tells us about the NCA Report:
Climate change is already affecting how Americans live and work, and evidence is mounting that the burning of fossil fuels has roughly doubled the probability of extreme heat waves, the Obama administration said Friday.
“Sea level is rising, oceans are becoming more acidic, and glacier and Arctic Sea ice are melting,” says a draft of the third federal Climate Assessment Report, compiled by more than 240 scientists for a federal advisory committee. “These changes are part of the pattern of global climate change, which is primarily driven by human activity.”
The 400-page report, required by a 1990 U.S. law, comes as 2012 set a century-plus record for hottest year in the United States. As Americans grapple with such extreme weather, President Obama has called for a national conversation on climate change.
“We can’t wait to have that conversation. The science is in. Now we just have to act,” says Juanita Constible, science and solutions director for The Climate Reality Project, a non-profit begun by former vice president Al Gore to educate the public on climate impacts.
Midway through the article she writes this about the report:
Despite skepticism about the problem’s severity and causes by some members of Congress and a few scientists, it says the evidence tells an “unambiguous story: The planet is warming.” Among its findings:
Let’s try again and see if e can get our definitions right. Sent January 12:
Congressional ignorance on the issue of climate change shouldn’t be dignified with the term “skepticism.” Genuinely skeptical lawmakers respect evidence and expertise, and recognize that reality-based policies need to be based (unsurprisingly) on reality, rather than on electoral exigencies or political posturing. Genuine skeptics would be more likely to doubt those Washington insiders who insist, ignoring the facts, that addressing a profound and imminent threat to our civilization is somehow something we ought to delay — again, and again, and again.
Let’s reserve the term “skeptic” for those few politicians who owe their allegiance to verifiable data rather than to their corporate sponsors in the fossil fuel industries. The National Climate Assessment paints a sobering picture of a climate-transformed America in which economic and humanitarian devastation is the face of our future. Congressional aversion to responsible action is not skepticism, but a toxic mix of greed and folly.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots National Climate Assessment Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 18: The Very Rich Are Different From You And Me
The Delaware News-Journal discusses the hot-off-the-presses National Climate Assessment:
A new national report flatly declared Friday that global climate change “is already affecting the American people” – making seasons hotter and drier, whipping up more furious storms and floods and threatening global ecosystems and every aspect of human activity.
“Evidence for climate change abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” said the draft National Climate Assessment, which is issued every four years.
In an opening to the 1,146-page document, described as “A letter to the American People,” the report’s lead officials said: “Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” with evidence to be found in hotter seasons, increased wildfires, and retreating sea ice.
“Americans are noticing changes all around them,” the report said. “Summers are longer and hotter, and periods of extreme heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours, though in many regions there are longer dry spells in between.”
I was tired of excoriating the media, so I excoriated fossil fuel corporations instead. Sent January 12:
The newly released National Climate Assessment is a sobering read, confirming once again that the consequences of a century-long fossil-fuel binge are already clobbering America and the world, with more heavy blows yet to come. And yet this document will probably land in Congress’ to-be-ignored pile, along with the scores of other such reports on climate change and its effects. Our representatives apparently have more important things to do than address the potential for natural disasters that could cost hundreds of billions of dollars by the decade’s end.
What possible rationale would justify our elected officials’ egregious abdication of responsibility to their constituents? The answer’s a simple one: our lawmakers are no longer beholden to us citizens, but to the oil and coal industries, whose eagerness to co-opt our governance for sake of increased profits is a tragic demonstration that great economic power has a negative correlation with civic virtue.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 17: Turn Off All Thought, Surrender To The Void
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson weighs in on climate change, with an excellent column titled “Hot Enough For You?”:
All right, now can we talk about climate change? After a year when the lower 48 states suffered the warmest temperatures, and the second-craziest weather, since record-keeping began?
Apparently not. The climate-change denialists — especially those who manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has halted or even reversed course — have been silent, as one might expect. Sensible people accept the fact of warming, but many doubt that our dysfunctional political system can respond in any meaningful way.
The thing is, though, that climate change has already put itself on the agenda — not the cause, but the effects. We’re dealing with human-induced warming of the atmosphere. It’s just that we’re doing so in a manner that is reactive, expensive and ultimately ineffectual.
A slap at George Will in my second paragraph. Ha ha ha ha. Sent January 11:
Climate change denialists have always had lots of excuses and diversionary tactics available for use in the face of Mother Nature’s stubbornness. The climate’s not changing — but if it is, it’s not dangerous — but if it is, humans aren’t responsible — but if they are, it’s too expensive to do anything — but if it’s more expensive to do nothing…well, repeat ad nauseum. Enabled by a complaisant media, anti-science politicians dance attendance on the fossil-fuel establishment, whose profits might be infinitesimally reduced if we took steps to address the accelerating greenhouse effect before it spins catastrophically out of control.
Whether they’re scientifically-ignorant tea-partiers or bow-tied faux-intellectuals, denialists have this in common: no amount of evidence or logic can shake their faith. In this respect, they’re like the NRA: enablers and excusers of a destructive technology, and avatars of ignorance at a time when our society desperately needs wisdom.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture aquifers denialists Water
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 16: Low Bridge! Everybody Down!
The Ridgefield Press (CT) runs a column on climate change and the problem with rivers:
Dear EarthTalk: How is it that climate change is negatively affecting the health of rivers and, by extension, the quality and availability of fresh water? — Robert Elman
Global warming is no doubt going to cause many kinds of problems (and, indeed, already is), and rivers may well be some of the hardest hit geographical features, given the likelihood of increased droughts, floods and the associated spread of waterborne diseases.
For one, rivers are already starting to lose the amount of water they channel. A 2009 study at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that water volume in the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest declined by 14 percent since the 1950s. This trend is similar in major rivers all over the world.
“Many communities will see their water supplies shrink as temperatures rise and precipitation patterns shift,” reports the nonprofit American Rivers, adding that a rise in severe storms will degrade water quality and increase the risk of catastrophic floods. “Changes in the timing and location of precipitation combined with rising levels of water pollution will strain ecosystems and threaten the survival of many fish and wildlife species.” These shifts will have dramatic impacts, threatening public health, weakening economies and decreasing the quality of life in many places. In the U.S., the number of storms with extreme precipitation has increased 24 percent since the late 1940s-and the trend is expected to continue.
I got them deep river blues. Sent January 11:
The ongoing slow-motion catastrophe of climate change is getting harder to deny. Precipitously dropping river levels are one of the most powerful indicators that in countless ways, things ain’t what they used to be — a realization daily shared by formerly doubting Americans who’ve started to see global warming’s effects first-hand. But despite the burgeoning awareness of the problem, many of our country’s social and infrastructural mechanisms are stuck in the past. Developed in a period of conspicuous consumption and never upgraded, both agriculture and manufacturing sectors waste unimaginable quantities of water every day — water that will soon be recognized as a precious resource, not a disposable commodity.
New technology will be vital in husbanding dwindling water supplies, but the most important changes will be in our attitudes and behavior. We Americans must recognize that the era of waste is ended, and transform our ways of living accordingly.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 15: Frankly, Gentlemen, I Wouldn’t Want Her To Marry ANY Of You Goyim.
The fiscal cliff is a tragic example of an all-too-common malady: managing by living crisis to crisis. In this case, it was almost entirely a self-created crisis, but the underlying financial problems, such as increasing healthcare costs and entitlement spending, have been building for some time. Waiting until things are really, really bad before acting not only does not to prevent crises, but makes them worse when they do happen (a truth my chiropractor has kindly but insistently pointed out to me when I wait until I can only hobble before getting care for my troublesome back).
But finances (and even to some degree, my bad back) can be repaired. We are in far more long-term danger for failing to address climate change.
Last year, temperatures in the continental United States were hotter than they had ever been in more than a century of record-keeping, government scientists found. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described the results (temps last year were, on average, 3.2 degrees higher than the 20th century average) as part of a bigger and longer trend of hotter, drier and more extreme weather. Some of it is the result of weather patterns, but human activity—such as the burning of greenhouse gases—is also to blame, researchers found.
Everybody sucks, but some suck more than others. Sent January 10:
It’s easy to point out the myopia of our political class by contrasting their hair-on-fire handling of the “fiscal cliff” with their apathetic treatment of the far more genuine threat posed by runaway climate change. But this comparison, while accurate and convenient, overlooks a similarity between the two crises.
If Congressional Republicans really cared about fiscal rectitude, they wouldn’t have created a deficit crisis in the first place by running up two wars’ worth of debt at the behest of the Bush administration (despite liberal warnings that the bill would be enormous). While we all share responsibility for climate chaos, both lawmakers and media ignored, minimized, and misrepresented the problem during the decades when it could have been forestalled, thereby ensuring that we would ultimately face a crisis of civilizational significance. Both the fiscal cliff and the ongoing climate catastrophe are human-created disasters, exacerbated by human ideology, ignorance and irresponsibility.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility fracking methane Natural Gas
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 14: Something Is Happening, But You Don’t Know What It Is.
The Albany Times-Union, on New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s approach to climate change:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has placed himself in the vanguard of public officials pledging action on climate change. He repeatedly has recognized that climate change is real and that New York is vulnerable to the extreme weather events that accompany our rapidly warming climate.
The governor has reignited a public debate on climate change, flatly stating that our nation had become distracted by an argument over the causes while failing to address the “inarguable effects” of our warming climate.
In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, after viewing the devastation and the damage that had been wrought, Cuomo laid down his marker when he said, “We need to act, not simply react.”
Color me skeptical. Sent January 9:
Governor Cuomo’s going to face some hard choices if his actions are to match his rhetoric on climate change. In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, he noted that “Mother Nature is telling us something,” but she’s not the only one trying to attract his attention. Natural gas companies are heavily invested in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” and the question of whether to allow this risky technology in New York is going to cross Mr. Cuomo’s desk very soon. But when it comes to the greenhouse emissions that are driving climate change, research has shown that natural gas extraction and processing emit significant quantities of methane, an extremely powerful greenhouse gas. Given that fossil-fuel corporations have also invested very heavily in our country’s politicians, should we be surprised if the Governor responds to their messages rather than those of our endangered environment, or those of the ordinary citizens of New York?
Warren Senders