environment Politics: assholes idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus Storms
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 14: Semolina Pilchard?
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s energy writer, Thomas Content, is one of many to stir the climate-change pot a bit. His column for November 10 is titled “Climate change is here, even if election skipped it.” Indeed:
Neither climate change nor the wacky weather of 2012 stirred much attention during the presidential campaign – a couple of conflicting snippets during the political conventions, a brief line in President Barack Obama’s election night victory speech, a mention here or there.
But climate scientists say the record warm weather of the past year, punctuated by extreme events such as superstorm Sandy in the Northeast, provides a glimpse of things to come and should push the issue higher on the list of national priorities.
Already, businesses, households and governments in Wisconsin are dealing with some of the climate-related changes that scientists expect to proliferate as the planet warms.
The extremes that Wisconsin has experienced this year include a record warm winter, a severe drought that gripped much of the country, and widespread flash flooding in far northwestern Wisconsin.
“A lot of these things that we’re seeing are the kinds of things that we might expect more of in the future,” said Dan Vimont, climate scientist and leader of an ongoing research and public outreach project, the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts.
One can hope our culture will wake up. The comments on the article, however, are not encouraging. Sent November 12:
As climate change disrupts the regional ecologies in which they flourished, innumerable species of animals are migrating to new territories in search of food and resources. We can observe these shifts dispassionately, through the eyes of science — while recognizing that many of these adaptive behaviors are bad news for our own species and for the civilization we’ve built. While millions of acres of new territory to colonize is great news for the mountain pine beetle, there’s no upside for us in watching once-green forests turn into dessicated matchsticks waiting for a spark to surrender their trapped carbon to the atmosphere.
Our inability to address climate change — or even simply to acknowledge its existence in our national discussion — is the central failure of our age. While an insect or mammal species can move onward to a new ecological niche, humanity’s “niche” is Earth itself. Where shall we go when our planetary home no longer welcomes us?
It’s time for our politicians to do the math on climate change. Further delay is unacceptable.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 13: POW! ZAP! SPLAT!
The Kansas City Star asks, “Post-Sandy and post-election, will political taboo on climate change be lifted?” Gee, what do you think?
Even before President Barack Obama took the stage for his victory speech Tuesday night, environmentalists were laying out their expectations for his second term: act on climate change, whether it’s through sweeping legislative action, regulatory rules or decisions like blocking the Keystone XL pipeline.
Just minutes after the race was called Tuesday, the group 350.org announced a Keystone XL protest on Nov. 18. Young climate activists who joined the celebration outside the White House held up a sign saying “Sandy Demands Climate Action Now,” a reference to the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy.
One line in Obama’s victory speech gave the green groups hope that he might act.
“We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt, that isn’t weakened by inequality, that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet,” the president said.
But taking action to achieve those goals isn’t going to be easy. While more than a dozen legislators targeted by environmental groups for their votes on clean energy and climate change bills were defeated in the election, neither chamber switched parties. With the status quo likely to continue in Congress, environmental groups say they’ll pressure the White House to continue, or amplify, its work of the last four years.
We’ve got a lot of work ahead. Sent November 11:
The mere existence of a “political taboo” on discussion of climate change is a shameful indictment of our news media and our systems of governance. Because of the atmosphere of hyper-partisanship artificially generated over the last several decades by conservative commentators and politicians, rational discussion has been all but impossible either in the halls of Congress or on our national news networks. Perhaps the nationwide rejection of conservative ideology in the recent election will bring this paralysis to an end; a recent survey reveals that more than two-thirds of Americans believe global warming poses a serious threat to our future.
It’s time for conservative legislators to stop interfering with principled policies designed to address the accelerating greenhouse effect and its consequences. Simple cost-benefit calculations reveal that, when it comes to the climate crisis, a billion spent in prevention and mitigation is worth a trillion spent in after-the-fact cleanup and repair.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: causation denialists extreme weather media irresponsibility Storms
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 12: O-Bla-Di, O-Bla-Da
The Athens Banner-Herald (GA) runs a column by one Eugene Linden, who is trying to hell people something:
Even as Sandy underwent its bizarre metamorphosis from hurricane to winter storm, the question arose in many inquiring minds (at least those not beholden to a solemn oath of climate-change denial): Was this historic storm a symptom of global warming? Climate science has two ready answers: Absolutely! And, of course not!
On the one hand, a warming globe makes megastorms more probable, while on the other, it is impossible to pin a global warming sticker on Sandy because the circumstances that turned it into a monster could have been mere coincidence.
There is, however, another way of looking at Sandy that might resolve this debate, and also help frame what we really should be worried about when it comes to global warming: An infrastructure created to defend against historical measures of worst-case natural threats was completely overpowered by this storm.
New York City’s defenses were inadequate, and coastal defenses failed over a swath of hundreds of miles. Around the nation, such mismatches have been repeated ever more frequently in recent years.
This summer, barge owners discovered that dredging in the Mississippi River, predicated on the history of the river’s ups and downs, left it too shallow for commercial traffic because of the intense Midwestern drought. And, famously, levees in New Orleans that were largely through the process of being improved even as Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 were still breached in 50 places. Then, seven years to the day after Katrina struck, Plaquemines Parish was drowned by Hurricane Isaac in flooding residents described as worse than Katrina’s.
Will the American public wake up? Details at eleven. Sent November 10:
The relationship between global climate change and extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, or the drought that devastated America’s corn belt this summer cannot be understood without recognizing the big difference between specific causation and systemic causation. A specific rock broke a specific window; a specific iceberg collided with the Titanic; a specific O-ring failed on the Challenger. Conversely, a metastatic lung tumor cannot be traced back to a single cigarette, and the catastrophic weather that hammered America’s East coast cannot be attributed unambiguously to the accelerating greenhouse effect. But does this mean that smoking is safe, or that our emissions of carbon dioxide are without effect on the planet’s weather systems? In a word, no.
By conflating these two different kinds of cause, our media has abdicated its responsibility to the citizenry it is supposed to serve. If we as a nation (indeed, as a species) are to survive and prosper in the coming centuries, we can no longer afford ignorance on matters of basic science. It is time for all of us to face the facts.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists U.S. Chamber of Commerce
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 11: We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia.
The Chillicothe Times-Bulletin (IN) has a good column by a chap named Bill Knight, who calls out the deniers nicely:
However, deniers and apologists remain bold. If they’re ostriches hiding heads in sand, they’re powerful birds. Fox News still tries to legitimize those who deny the evidence, (recently airing a British tabloid’s story based on a report by a U.K. agency — which criticized the broadcast as misleading). Besides disinformation, the most disturbing reaction has been from corporations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson suggests that humans will just adapt to changed climate, saying, “Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around — we’ll adapt to that.”
The Chamber in a brief filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency urged officials not to regulate carbon: “Should the world’s scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up,” the Chamber wrote, “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations.”
More sensible insights come from environmentalist and journalist Bill McKibben, who recently warned about Earth facing three crucial numbers: 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 Fahrenheit), the maximum increase in global temperatures that the planet can tolerate; 565 gigatons (a gigaton is 1 billion metric tons), the most carbon dioxide that can be released into the air by midcentury and remain below that 2-degree mark; and 2,795 gigatons, the amount of proven reserves of coal, oil and gas available for burning.
Rupert Murdoch and all those in his sphere of influence are doing irreparable damage to our collective future. Sent November 9:
Conservative groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce use a lot of doublespeak when they try to explain away the frightening facts of the climate crisis. What on Earth do they mean when they assert that humanity can adjust to a radically transformed climate “via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations”?
“Behavioral adaptations” like car-pooling or recycling are worthy activities, to be sure, but they’re inadequate coping strategies for a world that’s drastically hotter and racked by catastrophic weather events. Is the Chamber actually just telling us to run for the hills? And how will “technological adaptations” like electric cars or wind turbines protect us against extreme droughts and superstorms? “Physiological adaptation” is easy to understand. It’s an Orwellian euphemism for dying in large numbers.
If our species is to prosper in the coming centuries, we must stop denying and distorting the facts of the climate emergency.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 10: Got To Get You Into My Life
Eugene Robinson of the WaPo, printed here in the Richmond, Indiana, Palladium-Item:
WASHINGTON — We’ve had two once-in-a-century storms within the span of a decade. Hurricane Sandy seems likely to be the second-costliest storm in U.S. history, behind Hurricane Katrina. Lower Manhattan is struggling to recover from an unprecedented flood and the New Jersey coast is smashed beyond recognition.
Will we finally get the message?
How, at this point, can anyone deny the scientific consensus about climate change? The traditional dodge — that no one weather event can definitively be attributed to global warming — doesn’t work anymore. If something looks, walks and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Especially if the waterfowl in question is floating through your living room.
For decades now, researchers have been telling us that one of the effects of climate change would be to make the weather more volatile and violent. Well, here we are.
And here we will remain, perhaps for the rest of our lives. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humans began burning fossil fuels in earnest, the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by an incredible 40 percent. We have altered the composition of the air.
Nate Silver:Dick Morris — James Hansen:Willie Soon. Reality rox:
Now that the post-election period of reflection has arrived, we can begin to understand how number-crunchers like the New York Times’ Nate Silver got it right, while conservative pundits without exception got it so wrong. By relying exclusively on data that confirmed their own preconceptions, the prognosticators of the right wing built a bubble of denial that was finally shattered by a flood of real, irrefutable, data — votes. The statisticians were right all along.
And what if those math-and-science types are also right on climate change? If the research and analyses of respected climatologists like James Hansen and Michael Mann weren’t part of a liberal hoax after all? Why, that would mean that the GOP’s reality-rejection strategy has cost America (and the world) over twelve years of preparation and mitigation — years we’ll never get back. When it comes to climate change, it’s time for conservatives to face the facts — and the future.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism false equivalency media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 9: Fair And Balanced: 50% Truth, 50% Lies
The Arizona Daily Star reprints Eugene Robinson’s column from the Washington Post, in which he wonders:
We’ve had two once-in-a-century storms within the span of a decade. Hurricane Sandy seems likely to be the second-costliest storm in U.S. history, behind Hurricane Katrina. Lower Manhattan is struggling to recover from an unprecedented flood and the New Jersey coast is smashed beyond recognition.
Will we finally get the message?
How, at this point, can anyone deny the scientific consensus about climate change? The traditional dodge – that no one weather event can definitively be attributed to global warming – doesn’t work anymore. If something looks, walks and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Especially if the waterfowl in question is floating through your living room.
For decades now, researchers have been telling us that one of the effects of climate change would be to make the weather more volatile and violent. Well, here we are.
And here we will remain, perhaps for the rest of our lives. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humans began burning fossil fuels in earnest, the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by an incredible 40 percent. We have altered the composition of the air.
Rupert Murdoch has a lot to answer for. He’s not the only one, but he’s a biggie on the list of climate criminals. Sent November 3:
Hurricane Sandy’s devastation has indeed brought the metastasizing greenhouse effect back in the national spotlight. But is our chronically distracted American media up to the challenge of addressing a long-term issue fraught with compounded interdependencies and complex variables? Because this country’s politicians are for the most part creatures of the media, taking their cues from the opinions of well-paid professional pundits, this is a crucial question.
Any scientist who’s experienced media coverage of his or her work can attest that the standard of scientific literacy in our print and broadcast media is shockingly low. Statistics are misunderstood, misrepresented and misreported; tentative conclusions are broadcast as breathless fact; robust correlations are dismissed; false equivalencies are rampant.
Can an accelerating planetary crisis motivate our news establishment to handle climate change with higher standards of reportorial accuracy and integrity? Far beyond Tuesday’s election, this is the crucial question of our time.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: capitalism economics media irresponsibility rising sea levels scientific consensus Storms
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 8: When You Need Advice On Running An Army, Be Sure To Ask A Hippie
Well, it looks like Wall Street got wet. Forbes Magazine asks, “What If Mike Bloomberg Is Right And A Climate Change Nightmare Is Here?”
Lower Manhattan was almost entirely without power, probably until tomorrow. Staten Island was devastated. At least 38 New Yorkers are dead. The devastation in the nearby Jersey Shore is even worse. Nobody knows when the subway system will be running between Manhattan and other boroughs again. It’s true, as ProPublica pointed out, that the hospital evacuations are part of an epidemic of hospital generators failing during natural disasters, and that the generators were, in the words of NYU Langone trustee Gary Cohn, “not state-of-the art and not in the most state-of-the art location.” We couldn’t come to emotional terms with the destruction a fourteen foot wall of water could do to this city. Now we don’t have any choice.
“In just 14 months, two hurricanes have forced us to evacuate neighborhoods — something our city government had never done before. If this is a trend, it is simply not sustainable,” wrote New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in his endorsement of President Barack Obama. “Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be — given this week’s devastation — should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.”
Why not ask some climatologists for advice on your investment strategies? That’d probably work as well or better than asking an apologist for capitalism for his opinion on climate. Sheesh. Better late than never, I suppose. Sent November 2:
What if Mike Bloomberg is right on climate change? A very good question indeed, but not the one that really needs asking.
If it takes an extreme weather event of Sandy’s magnitude to get him to recognize that climate scientists knew what they’ve been talking about all along, what does that say about the ability of the private sector to recognize and acknowledge expertise in any area? If environmentalists’ predictions are coming true, can the business community even realize that it’s been on the wrong side of both science and history?
If business leaders finally acknowledge that climate change is real, human-caused and dangerous to humanity, can they take the next step, and recognize that our planet’s resources and resilience are finite, and cannot support an economic model predicated on continuous growth? Can market capitalism transform itself into an agent of long-term sustainability rather than accelerating consumption and waste?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists Hurricane Sandy media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism Storms
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 7: Who Won The War?
The Hartford Courant is one among many outlets seizing upon the hurricane as an opportunity to advocate responsible policies on climate change. Not bad:
Let Hurricane Sandy be our tipping point toward a better America.
First, we’re all in this together. As the wind strengthened and the hurricane neared, the political negativity and hostility waned. There’s nothing like a common adversary to unite us, even a benign atmospheric one. It wasn’t just that Sandy wreaked havoc on campaign plans. It’s that both presidential candidates began to act more like governors than ideological opponents beholden to a spectrum of groups.
Watching them gave me more faith in America’s potential than all the bickering I’ve been forced to hear. Apparently, when push comes to shove, we can work together because we must.
Second, a picture is worth a thousand words. The satellite images showed a white, counterclockwise pinwheel of clouds just like every other hurricane I’ve seen — except for its size. With what the pundits are calling a wingspan a thousand miles across, Sandy was two to three times larger than typical. Keep in mind that one of the most robust predictions of climate change theory is that extreme events will be more powerful, whether this unprecedented storm or last summer’s unprecedented drought.
Let this pinwheel become a pinup to move us toward a saner, safer, smarter future. A cultural shift similar to what I remember happening after earthlings got a chance to see our spherical, cloud-gauzed, green-swathed living planet from space. I refer to the famous “Earthrise” photo taken from the moon during the Apollo 11 landing in July 1969. It helped launch the most potent phase of the American environmental movement, which centered on pollution and wilderness. Let the new pinup energize a third phase already underway, one focused on a sane energy policy and policy adaptations to the good and bad things of climate change.
We can hope. They haven’t taken that away from us, yet. Sent November 1:
Mother Nature has been sending us increasingly urgent messages for quite a few years now, as the burgeoning greenhouse effect has raised atmospheric temperatures steadily and inexorably. Yet climate change has remained on the to-ignore list for almost every single politician in America. This is partially because of the disproportionate influence of fossil fuel money on our political and legislative systems, partially because the subject has been so heavily politicized by (mostly) Republican lawmakers and commentators, and partially because our media is astonishingly incompetent at addressing subjects of any complexity whatsoever. Well, that may have ended a few days ago. In Hurricane Sandy, many Americans got a chance to see the consequences of all those carbon dioxide emissions, up close and personal.
A heart attack can catalyze the transformation of a single lifestyle. Will Sandy’s devastating waves catalyze an analogous change in American society — a step away from feverish consumerism and towards responsible stewardship of our planet? And will our media and politicians heed the call?
In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush told Americans to go shopping. Eleven years later, perhaps we need to hear a different message.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: denialism extreme weather innumeracy scientific consensus Storms systemic causation
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 6: Because…Freedom!
The Erie Times-News is one of a number of papers featuring this article about the scientific perspective on our recent FrankenStorm:
WASHINGTON — Climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer stood along the Hudson River and watched his research come to life as Hurricane Sandy blew through New York.
Just eight months earlier, the Princeton University professor reported that what used to be once-in-a-century devastating floods in New York City would soon happen every three to 20 years. He blamed global warming for pushing up sea levels and changing hurricane patterns.
New York “is now highly vulnerable to extreme hurricane-surge flooding,” he wrote.
For more than a dozen years, Oppenheimer and other climate scientists have been warning about the risk for big storms and serious flooding in New York.
Still, they say it’s unfair to blame climate change for Sandy and the destruction it left behind. They cautioned that they cannot yet conclusively link a single storm to global warming, and any connection is not as clear and simple as environmental activists might contend.
It would be a good thing to learn about systemic causation. Sent October 31:
When it comes to climate change and the increasing likelihood of catastrophic storms like Hurricane Sandy, we need a new way of discussing causation. It is absurd to say that global warming “caused” Sandy — but it’s also absurd to say that a particular cigarette “caused” a case of lung cancer. There are direct causes (the baseball that caused your broken window), and there are “systemic” causes, which are no less real for being harder to isolate. The relationship between smoking and lung cancer is one example of systemic causation, as is that between drunk driving and auto accidents, and that between increased atmospheric CO2 and the likelihood of extreme weather.
While precise scientific language won’t allow responsible climatologists to claim direct causation, hardly any doubt that global heating systemically causes events like Hurricane Sandy.
Here’s another example of systemic causation: the relationship between statistical ignorance and climate-change denialism.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists hurricane media irresponsibility rising sea levels Storms
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 5: Turn Off Your Mind, Relax And Float Downstream…
The San Jose Mercury News wonders:
The debate over global warming has often turned at key points after major weather events. After a presidential campaign in which neither candidate said much on the issue, could Hurricane Sandy put it back in the spotlight?
Sure. News at 11. Sent October 30:
Hurricane Sandy could well do for climate-change awareness what a major celebrity death did for AIDS or Alzheimer’s disease. That is, make the accelerating greenhouse effect and its consequences a focus of the kind of media attention normally reserved for celebrity scandals or TV season premieres.
That’s good news and bad news. It’s good news because climate change is overwhelmingly the single most significant issue affecting our country’s future and the lives of our descendants. Our collective lack of attention has set us back several decades when it comes to addressing the threat — so any coverage is better than none.
It’s bad news because what we need from the media is an intelligent discussion of a complex subject. If climate change is treated with the breathless superficiality that characterizes contemporary news coverage, our citizenry, and our politicians, will never fully understand why action is essential. Let’s get serious. Now.
Warren Senders