environment: scientific consensus scientific method winter sports
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 13: Ain’t No Place A Man Can Hide, Will Keep Him From The Sun
The Woodland, CA Daily Democrat runs an AP article on the future of Beautiful Lake Tahoe and environs:
Lake Tahoe is “the fairest picture the whole earth affords,” Mark Twain once wrote. Its crystal blue waters, surrounded by stunning snowy mountains, define one of California’s crown jewels as an American landmark. It attracts 3 million skiers, boaters, campers, hikers and other visitors each year.
But it could look very different in 100 years.
Climate change could profoundly affect the Tahoe area, scientists say, taking the snow out of the mountains and the blue out of the water. Last winter’s ski season showed a glimpse of what a future, warmer Tahoe may look like. Snow didn’t start falling in the mountains until January. The California Ski Industry Association reported that 25 percent fewer skiers visited the Sierra last season. For a region that boasts a $5 billion year-round economy, that hurts.
New climate models show that in a worst-case scenario average temperatures in the Tahoe area could rise as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That’s equivalent to moving Lake Tahoe from its current elevation of 6,200 feet above sea level to 3,700 feet, climate scientists report in a special January issue of the journal Climatic Change. That’s as high as the peak of Contra Costa County’s Mount Diablo, which gets only an inch of snow a year.
(snip)
Homewood Ski Resort, a lower-elevation resort without an extensive snowmaking system, is well aware of the threat of climate change. Last season, Homewood didn’t open until Dec. 14, said resort spokesman Paul Raymore, and it wasn’t able to open any chair lifts until January. More winters such as last year’s would be disastrous. “We do rely on Mother Nature and what she provides in terms of natural snowfall,” Raymore said.
While doing little to curb global climate change, the resort does encourage skiers to use public transit, now offering $5 off lift tickets for those who do. “We have a vested interest in ensuring that the mountains stay cold,” Raymore said.
To be sure, people should keep in mind that the climate models aren’t necessarily forecasts, said Michael Dettinger, a climate modeler at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego and one of the authors of the special Climatic Change issue. “They’re what-if predictions,” he said, adding that scientists can’t say yet which scenario is most likely to unfold.
But….
Sent January 8:
When considering climate scientists’ warnings about the dangers of a climate-changed future, we must remember that climate models are notoriously fallible — and that their predictions of how a transformed planetary atmosphere will impact our lives are frequently inaccurate.
So does this mean everything’s fine? Nope. Those scientists almost universally erred in underestimating the speed and severity of the damage. By now “worse than expected” is a near-universal refrain in scientific circles and the public media. Arctic ice? Melting faster than expected. Sea levels? Rising faster than expected. Heat waves? Hotter, longer, and larger than expected.
That these effects are now outracing experts’ predictions is no reason to dismiss scientific study of our climate. If your oncologist tells you the prognosis is worse than expected, that doesn’t mean you should abandon therapy. Those who love and enjoy the beauties of Lake Tahoe had better get ready for the unexpected.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 12: ‘Twas In Another Lifetime, One Of Toil And Blood
A doctor dude named Howard Frumkin waxes shrill on the pages of the Seattle Times, discussing the large-scale health impacts of climate change:
HERE’S a riddle: What do the Oklahoma dust bowl, smoke in Wenatchee, mold on Long Island and Washington’s oyster industry have in common?
And why would a doctor, like me, care?
The common link is climate change. We must act now to stop it.
Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, “The Dust Bowl,” recounts how reckless land management, combined with severe heat waves and drought during the 1930s, triggered a catastrophe — loss of soil, destruction of farms, displacement of people.
Record-breaking wildfires dominated the news last summer. Vast tracts of forest and grassland in central Washington and across the west were destroyed. People breathed higher levels of smoke than on the most polluted days in Beijing or Mexico City.
“Rockaway cough,” not to mention rashes, asthma, injuries and carbon-monoxide poisoning, are filling the emergency departments and relief centers of Long Island and New Jersey, as the victims of Superstorm Sandy endure numerous hazardous exposures in their efforts to clean up and rebuild.
The guy is obviously a supporter of the Kenyan usurper, so we should discount everything he says. Sent January 7:
Dr. Howard Frumkin’s column is a crucial reminder of what the climate crisis portends for our future. That this includes a diverse array of public-health impacts is undeniable to any who can examine the evidence without first donning the distorting lenses of anti-science conservatism. Unfortunately, the Republican climate-denial mechanism is well-funded (thanks to the generosity of the oil and coal industries) and well-promoted (thanks to a complaisant media which values irrelevant controversy over facts and expertise).
A physician like Dr. Frumkin will recognize this behavior. Just as a patient may vehemently reject a frightening diagnosis, the GOP’s blustery avoidance of an inconvenient reality is merely a childlike form of magical thinking. But climate-change denial is no match for the obdurate, implacable laws of physics; the sooner conservatives realize this, the more chance we have of rising to meet the challenges of the coming centuries.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: clouds economics geo-engineering scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 11: Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on one of our technological back-up plans:
One afternoon last fall, Armand Neukermans, a tall engineer with a sweep of silver bangs, flipped on a noisy pump in the back corner of a Sunnyvale lab. Within moments, a fine mist emerged from a tiny nozzle, a haze of salt water under high pressure and heat.
It didn’t look like much. But this seemingly simple vapor carries a lot of hope – and inspires a lot of fear. If Neukermans’ team of researchers can fine-tune the mechanism to spray just the right size and quantity of salt particles into the sky, scientists might be able to make coastal clouds more reflective.
The hope is that by doing so, humankind could send more heat and light back into space, wielding clouds as shields against climate change.
The fear, at least the one cited most often, is that altering the atmosphere this way could also unleash dangerous side effects.
“Ten years ago, people would have said this is totally wacky,” Neukermans said. “But it could give us some time if global warming really becomes catastrophic.”
When, not if. Sent January 6:
While the prospect of geoengineering technologies for mitigating climate change’s effects is terrifying, the crisis allows for no non-terrifying outcomes. We’re midway through a mass extinction of a magnitude unprecedented in human history; our greenhouse emissions have achieved a critical mass sufficient to forestall an ice age 50,000 years from now (even if we completely stopped burning fossil fuels today); melting methane in the Arctic has transformed the “Venus effect” from a never-in-a-million-years nightmare to a statistically significant probability.
There’s no single cause of the climate disaster, and no single solution. But the business-as-usual approach which has brought us to this point must be rejected; we humans must transform ourselves, our communities, and our nations — putting the survival of our species above our short-term gratification. Armand Neukermans’ work on increasing cloud reflectivity could never as dangerously uncontrolled an experiment on Earth’s atmosphere as the multi-century endeavor known as industrial civilization.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment: atheism Jesus religion sustainability timescales
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 10: The Moans Of The Damned
The Whittier Daily News (CA) speaks about the question of faith and the environment:
Throughout all of California and the rest of the country, the faith community has been working for many years to preach the gospel of good stewardship of our shared environment.
Amid theological differences, we have fostered a shared sense of purpose and urgency that unites us in solidarity with our local and global communities, especially those most vulnerable to climate change.
The action that results from this shared sense of purpose goes far beyond a congregation’s four walls. People of faith bring shared principles – such as working for the common good, caring for our neighbors, and working for economic justice – into the public policy arena.
For example, the California faith community strongly supported the passage and implementation of Assembly Bill 32, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. This bill, which was fully implemented on Jan. 1, 2013, aims to cut carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, addressing both global -climate change as well as regional air pollution.
But even policy change in itself is not enough to address the crisis we are currently facing as people of faith struggle with the power to indelibly alter God’s Creation and affect the lives of many generations that come after us.
The environmental crisis is at root a spiritual crisis. To remedy this we must begin to build a new relationship with the earth. That means answering the call to be good stewards of Creation and understanding that the “environment” is not a nebulous “out-there” reality; rather it is intimately connected with our lives and our spiritual development.
This value system is not incompatible with economic growth. On the contrary, the clean technology sector is a major factor in building California’s economy. According to a recent Next 10 report, the clean tech sector grew by 53 percent from 1995-2010, while jobs in the wider economy grew by 12 percent. When we care for the environment, we are caring for the health, livelihood and economic situation of our neighbors and ourselves.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning. Sent January 5:
Attempts to reconcile the demands of long-term sustainability with Christian theology are more complex and problematic than they seem at first blush. While many modern Christians have rejected the notion of Armageddon, a substantial number still advocate for a final apocalypse; a concluding spasm of terrifying violence yielding to a paradisical afterlife for true believers.
The sustainability so desired by environmentalists is predicated on the notion that humanity’s future is open-ended, that our species has a place in the web of Earthly life and a part to play in the long-term history of our universe. These wholly laudable concepts are on a collision course with the notion that the world is destined to end conclusively and explosively, providing an eventual reward for the faithful. For the “faith community” to credibly preach environmental stewardship, it must direct its attention to the many self-described Christians who still hew to End Times theology.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists idiots islands Republican obstructionism rising sea levels
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 9: Maui Wowee?
The Honolulu Weekly notes that climate change has arrived in Hawaii:
For years we’ve been hearing ominous rumblings about climate change and its many implications for the planet, especially Hawaii and other islands in the Western Pacific. The scenarios fueled by a rapidly expanding body of science are sobering: rising temperatures and prolonged droughts, dying coral reefs and dwindling fish stocks. Rising sea levels will eventually, for some atolls and low-lying areas of Hawaii, bring total inundation.
“We have lots and lots of science,” says Jesse Souki, director of the Office of State Planning (OSP). “We have a pretty good idea of what the problem is, and what’s going to happen. The hard part is figuring out what to do about it.”
The islands make a good hook for a standard screed on GOP idiocy. Sent January 4:
Hawaii isn’t alone. Every day, nations, states, regions and communities around the world are find that climate change is no longer an abstraction but a difficult and sometimes dangerous reality. When the weather goes haywire, farmers can’t plan. When out-of-season storms start happening more and more often, the whole notion of “season” goes out the window — along with vulnerable infrastructure. When mountaintop ice vanishes, people in the valleys who’ve depended on glacial melt for their water are forced from the land they’ve occupied for millennia. And when islands are under threat from rising sea levels, tourism may take a back seat to simple survival.
But while people everywhere on Earth are waking up to the threat of climate chaos, there is still one place where the rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect has failed to make an impact. In the offices and caucus rooms of Congressional Republicans, global warming is still a liberal hoax, not a potentially devastating reality. While these conservative lawmakers may answer to different constituencies, they all represent, ultimately, the same state of denial.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Big Oil corporate irresponsibility denialists
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 8: My Heart Goes Where The Wild Goose Goes
What could possibly go wrong? Time Magazine:
As terrible as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill was, one element worked in the favor of rescuers and cleanup personnel: location. The Gulf of Mexico is the nerve center of the U.S. offshore oil industry, which made it that much easier for BP and the federal government to respond quickly to the spill. The warm Gulf environment also simplified operations and accelerated the natural dispersal of the oil. As one environmentalist noted at the time, having an oil spill in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico was like having a heart attack in the middle of a hospital. It’s still a heart attack, but at least you won’t have to wait long for treatment.
Now imagine the opposite — a heart attack far, far away from the closest medical care. That’s what’s unfolding this week in Alaska, where a Shell drilling rig called the Kulluk broke free from a tow ship in stormy seas on New Year’s Eve before running aground on the southeast coast of Sitkalidak Island, near the larger island of Kodiak. It’s not clear yet how much if any of the rig’s more than 150,000 gal. of diesel fuel and lubricants might have spilled into the freezing cold waters. And because the ship was in transit rather than actively drilling, there’s no danger of a major oil blowout similar to the Deepwater Horizon spill. But the accident and the struggles that Shell and the U.S. Coast Guard have already experienced trying to save the rig underscores just how difficult and dangerous drilling in Arctic waters will be — which should be worrying since the oil industry and the Obama Administration are counting on the bounty promised in the far north.
Fucking delusional idiots. Sent January 3:
Einstein’s definition of insanity, “doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result,” is perfectly applied to Shell Oil’s current Arctic debacle. For decades Shell and its Big Oil peers have botched every aspect of their business: exploration and extraction leave gaping wounds on the Earth’s surface; transportation spills toxic crude in oceans and aquifers, devastating local and regional ecosystems; refineries waste huge quantities of raw material as pollution. Meanwhile oil’s business practices enrich a small coterie of executive while feeding at the public trough and fostering a culture of dependency among consumers; oil’s geopolitics leads us into war after war at an immeasurable cost; oil’s PR funds the denial of science and muddies the national conversation on climate change, the gravest crisis in humankind’s history.
Perhaps entrusting the future of our energy economy to demonstrably incompetent and untrustworthy corporations wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility fossil fuels Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 7: Ring-A-Ding-Ding!
The Orlando Sentinel joins the shrill chorus:
Earth is growing warmer; the records prove that. Some still doubt human activity has anything to do with it, but it’s past time for the rest of us to face reality.
We need, first, good leadership. The United States should provide it, as it has repeatedly promised but failed to do. To begin with, it needs to join those other nations that have committed to reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions.
Florida should be a leader among the states, because it is among those most threatened with ecological problems and rising sea levels.
Who’s to bell the cat? Sent January 2:
As 2012 shrinks in the rearview mirror, we can recognize it as the year that climate change came home for many of us. Whether it was the devastating drought that hammered the Corn Belt, the unprecedented destruction wrought by Superstorm Sandy, or the hundreds of other examples of extreme weather, last year Americans learned that geographical serendipity is no longer going to protect us from the accelerating greenhouse effect.
But one important group of our fellow citizens remains to be convinced. Congress and elected leaders have been shamefully timid, offering platitudes and half-measures where bold and forceful action is urgently needed. Did I say “one”? Make that two: our Politicians and their Ownership. We’ll only see genuinely meaningful policy responses to the climate crisis if we get fossil fuel money out of politics, or convince Big Oil and Big Coal to value humanity’s survival more than their already grotesque profit margins.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Michael Mann
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 6: A Sphinctral Fricative
The Pottstown (PA) Mercury runs a column by a professional asshole named Gil Spencer, attacking Michael Mann:
The professor found this sentence written by Steyn to be particularly offensive:
“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.”
Pretty good, huh?
But Professor Mann found it not the least bit amusing. He demanded that Steyn’s snappy critique be removed from the NRO website and when it wasn’t, he sued.I say, Professor Mann is not the Jerry Sandusky of climate science. I say he is the Jerry Falwell.
Sheesh. Have a nice day, everybody. Sent January 1:
Given that every single allegation against climatologist Michael Mann has been debunked multiple times, I’d say he has a right to be angered by the calumnies leveled at him by writers in the National Review. Since Mann first published his findings, conservatives have attacked him and his work, invariably coming up empty in their search for incriminating evidence. While scientific method is entirely built around evidence and analysis, lack of evidence poses no obstacle to the anti-science zealots who routinely reject any data that doesn’t fit their worldview.
Let’s put it plainly: scientists who have spent their lives developing expertise on Earth’s climate think there is a problem, and all of us need to talk about it. Writers and commentators on the payrolls of various petroleum-funded “think tanks” cannot refute the evidence of the climate crisis, and resort to ad hominem attacks instead. Gil Spencer’s column is an egregious affront to the rules of civilized communication, and an insult to the intelligence of your readership.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes Conservatives denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 5: They Seek The Truth, Before They Can Die
The Capitol Times (Madison, WI) has a nuanced discussion of climate denial in the educational system. What’s happening in WI is happening everywhere.
The far right dominates the world of “climate change denial,” which Wikipedia defines as: “A set of organized attempts to downplay, deny or dismiss the scientific consensus on the extent of global warming, its significance, and its connection to human behavior, especially for commercial or ideological reasons.”
You don’t even need to leave the state to find one of the nation’s leading practitioners. In a PBS “Frontline” program titled “Climate of Doubt” that aired in October, U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Menomonee Falls, argued that scientists have failed to convince Congress about global warming.
Which brings me to Casey Meehan, born in Janesville and educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For six years, Meehan taught high school psychology and history in the Janesville and Monona Grove school districts before returning to UW-Madison to pursue a Ph.D. in education.
Meehan has just finished his dissertation on how climate change is taught in Wisconsin schools. You might not be surprised by his conclusion: Unlike most subjects on which there is scientific consensus, with climate change the human role typically is taught as an open question.
Meehan’s initial focus upon returning to school was environmental education, but he says he noticed that not much had been written about the teaching of climate change.
“I started thinking more about how climate change is such an ideologically polarizing topic, and I was just curious about how schools were dealing with that,” he told me in an interview. “How are they teaching this topic that the public thinks a range of things about, but scientists think something very specifically about?”
Yup. December 31:
Once upon a time, political conservatives were simply cautious people who feared change — especially change that threatened their economic security or social position, as witness their early opposition to such mainstays of American society as Social Security. But somehow over the past few decades, conservatism has become resistant, not to change, but to reality itself. While this is evident in their responses to issues like marriage equality and immigration policy, nowhere does it do so much harm as in the politicized discussion of the climate crisis.
Thanks to the Right’s relentless demonization of scientists and environmentalists, even the most anodyne statements about the natural world are now considered too controversial for free discussion in schools, as demonstrated by Casey Meehan’s illuminating study of the problems Wisconsin teachers face in addressing climate change. The fact that educators cannot address scientific reality in their classrooms without risking parental backlash is a sad commentary on the scientific literacy in America — and a demonstration that conservatism has become a grotesque parody of its former self.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialism media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 4: Because The Wind Is High…
The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel thinks there is No Denying Climate Change:
Earth is growing warmer; the records prove that. Some still doubt human activity has anything to do with it, but it’s past time for the rest of us to face reality.
We need, first, good leadership. The United States should provide it, as it has repeatedly promised but failed to do. And Florida should be a leader among the states, because it is among those most threatened with ecological problems and rising sea levels.
Tallahassee should take its cues from South Florida, where local governments have long recognized the dangers associated with climate change. Raising seawall heights, moving drinking-water wellfields farther inland and imposing tougher development regulations for particularly vulnerable areas — ideas once unthinkable — are now part of a regional climate-change plan designed to help local communities address a changing environment.
While the flooding and saltwater intrusion now seen in South Florida occur regularly, far more devastating effects are happening in other parts of the world. According to the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a 20-nation consortium of developing countries, failure to act will result in about 100 million deaths worldwide by 2030 from mega-droughts, floods, disease, crop failure and major water shortages. The forum puts the economic costs of climate change at $1.2 trillion a year now, and says it will double by 2030. Some nations could lose 11 percent of GDP. Oxfam, an anti-poverty group, puts potential agricultural and fishery losses alone at $500 billion a year by 2030.
Skeptics may pooh-pooh the climate forum’s report as commissioned by those nations most at risk, which makes them most in need of help. But its findings are consistent with those from the world’s most important climate-change organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
A generic let’s-get-our-shit-together-soon letter, sent December 29:
There would be no significant climate change denial in America were it not for the egregious irresponsibility of our news media and their financial co-conspirators. Over the past several decades, conservative “think tanks” heavily funded by the oil and coal industries have created a denialist cottage industry, supplying our broadcast and print media with authoritative pundits whose voices have stridently rejected the findings of climate scientists in favor of the convenience of continued consumption (which, by an odd coincidence, result in the highest corporate profit margins in history).
While geographical serendipity has kept the US off the “front lines” of our rapidly transforming climate for years, 2012’s massive storms and devastating droughts make it clear that we can no longer avoid the impacts of our century-long fossil-fuel binge. A drastically warming Earth is inevitable, but acknowledging climatic reality now may make a profound difference to the lives of our descendants.
Warren Senders