I have…
…written letters through the 8th of November. I’m going to stop until Wednesday; the election has removed all the other air from the room.
I’ve done 5 separate GOTV canvassing shifts and a miniscule amount of phonebanking. Tuesday I’m driving people to the polls in the morning. Nothing tomorrow; I’m alternating daddy-duty and teaching work.
environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility scientific consensus Storms
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 4: I Know You Are, But What Am I?
The L.A. Times wonders whether Hurricane Sandy is possibly related to, you know, that climate change thingy?
As Hurricane Sandy bears down on the Eastern seaboard — laden with predictions of drenching rains, fierce winds, snow and extensive damage — some scientists are pointing out ways that climate change might be influencing hurricanes.
No single weather event, be it drought, snowfall or hurricane, is caused by climate change, climatologists say. Rather, climate change amplifies the intensity or duration of extreme weather, akin to “putting hurricanes on steroids,” writes Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist for the National Wildlife Federation, an environmental advocacy group.
“The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question,” writes Kevin E. Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”
Hurricane Sandy poses several threats. Vast and slow-moving, it is expected to pour drenching rains and unleash powerful winds in the Northeast over a protracted period, perhaps several days.
No way they’re going to print this one. Sent October 28:
Despite sober and careful analyses from climatologists pointing out that a heating atmosphere makes extreme storms and anomalous weather increasingly likely, the conservative voices in politics and the media are certain to tell us that Sandy is an “isolated incident,” which cannot be definitively attributed to the accelerating greenhouse effect — even when specific triggering factors (such as a warming ocean) are obviously present.
Indeed. And as those same pundits and politicians hasten to reassure us, the steady drumbeat of right-wing hate on talk radio has nothing to do with the frequent outbursts of violence from the ultra-conservative fringe. Each gun-toting lunatic is an “isolated incident” which cannot be definitively attributed to the accelerating atmosphere of apocalyptic hatred generated by shock jocks and their enablers — even when specific triggering factors (such as a shelf of books by those same polarizing figures) are obviously present.
No connection. None at all.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: assholes denialists Education idiots scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 3: Don’t Think Of An Elephant!
Those crazy Kansans are at it again:
Kansas State Board of Education races this year are shadowed by an emerging conflict over science standards for public schools — and it’s not all about evolution.
Climate change is emerging as a potential political flashpoint in Kansas and possibly 25 other states working with the National Research Council on common standards. If adopted, the guidelines could encourage public schools to spend far more time teaching students about the Earth’s climate and how human activity affects it.
Kansas state school board candidates are used to questions about the state’s science standards because of past debates about how evolution should be taught, but the possibility of a similar debate about climate change is a new twist as the Nov. 6 election approaches. Five of the board’s 10 seats are on the ballot, and three races are contested.
The winners, along with the hold-over board members, are expected to vote on new science standards early next year. At least a few conservative Republicans in Kansas are wary of what the standards will say about climate change amid support from educators and scientists for addressing the topic more thoroughly than in the past.
“When you’re looking at 100 scientists, you’ve got 90-some, high 90s, that have no question about climate change, and so for them, they have no problem with that being in,” said John Richard Schrock, a veteran biology professor at Emporia State University.
But, he acknowledged, to others, “It looks political.”
We are sooooooo fucked. Sent October 27:
As the East coast prepares for an oncoming superstorm, and the corn belt struggles to recover from a season of devastating drought, it beggars belief that climate-change denialist positions are under serious consideration for inclusion in Kansas’ science curricula. If, as the Emporia biology professor notes, the subject “looks political,” that’s not because it’s under any serious scientific dispute, but because a group of cynical, profit-hungry opportunists have exploited a complacent and complaisant media to push the spurious notion that there still remains any meaningful dispute about the existence, causes and genuine dangers presented by climate change.
Conservatives’ conflation of scientific methodology with religious doctrine is revealing. For these folk, the notion of a gradually-strengthening scientific consensus supported by empirical evidence and the logical analysis of data is simply another dogma. Americans should reject such thinking as more appropriate to an earlier, and far more barbaric, chapter in human history.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama idiots media irresponsibility Mitt Romney Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 2: But They Say There’s A Hell. What The Hell? What The Hell Do They Think THIS Is?
The Dallas Daily News runs a NYT article on climate ignorage in the Presidential campaign:
WASHINGTON — For all their disputes, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney agree that the world is warming and that humans are at least partly to blame. It remains wholly unclear what either of them plans to do about it.
Even after a year of record-smashing temperatures, drought and Arctic ice melt, none of the moderators of the four general election debates asked about climate change, nor did any of the candidates broach the topic.
Throughout the campaign, Obama and Romney have seemed most intent on trying to outdo each other as lovers of coal, oil and natural gas — the very fuels most responsible for rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Obama has supported broad climate change legislation, financed extensive clean energy projects and pushed new regulations to reduce global warming emissions from cars and power plants. But neither he nor Romney has laid out a legislative or regulatory program to address the fundamental questions arising from one of the most vexing economic, environmental, political and humanitarian issues to face the planet.
Should the United States cut its greenhouse gas emissions, and, if so, how far and how fast? Should fossil fuels be more heavily taxed? Should any form of clean energy be subsidized, and for how long? Should the United States lead international mitigation efforts? Should the nation pour billions of new dollars into basic energy research? Is the climate system so fraught with uncertainty that the rational response is to do nothing?
Many scientists and policy experts say the lack of a serious discussion of climate change in the presidential contest represents a lost opportunity to engage the public and to signal to the rest of the world U.S. intentions for dealing with what is, by definition, a global problem that requires global cooperation.
“On climate change, the political discourse here is massively out of step with the rest of the world, but also with the citizens of this country,” said Andrew Steer, the president of the World Resources Institute and a former special envoy for climate change at the World Bank. “Polls show very clearly that two-thirds of Americans think this is a real problem and needs to be addressed.”
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along, move along. Sent October 26:
It must be difficult to be Mitt Romney — agreeing on one hand with the scientists who’ve studied the problem of climate change, yet prevented from stating his agreement definitively in public by the anti-intellectual intransigence of the tea-party conservatives who comprise his (not entirely willing) electoral base. Given Romney’s pathological aversion to a definite commitment on anything beyond the idea that he deserves to be president, such cowardice is understandable, although hardly a recommendation for the position he seeks.
President Obama’s reluctance to discuss climate change, however, most likely springs from a strategic avoidance of controversy. Given the firestorm of opprobrium engendered by his adoption of Republican ideas about health care, one can only imagine the howls of outrage from conservatives were he to actually make the long-term future of our civilization a legislative priority. Through judicious executive orders, he has made significant strides on energy efficiency and environmental responsibility without engaging our know-nothing congress the futile and ugly wrangling that characterized the eventual passage of the Affordable Care Act.
While neither candidate represents an optimal choice for those cognizant of the magnitude of the climate crisis, there is no equivalence between their respective silences on the subject.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 1: Make Me Wanna Holler…
The Christian Science Monitor wonders why nobody wonders why nobody wonders why nobody wonders why:
Energy and green energy were hot topics during the presidential debates, but climate change didn’t come up once. The candidates may be avoiding the issue because voters don’t want to hear a difficult message.
In four years, climate change has gone from the elephant that blind men are trying to describe to the elephant in the room.
No one wants to talk about it. With a few exceptions, voters don’t ask. And presidential candidates don’t tell.
Now that the 2012 presidential debates are over, commentators have begun to take notice. Not once during the three presidential encounters or the single vice-presidential debate did the subject come up.
“National elections should be a time when our nation considers the great challenges and opportunities the next President will face,” opines the website ClimateSilence.org, a project of Forecast the Facts and Friends of the Earth Action aimed at pushing the issue into campaigns. “But the climate conversation of 2012 has been defined by a deafening silence.”
Sheesh. Sent October 25:
For a major news outlet to assert that “voters don’t want to hear a difficult message” as an explanation for the presidential candidates’ aversion to discussion of climate change is disingenuous. While nobody likes getting bad news, it is (or should be) the responsibility of professional journalists to help the general population understand difficult or complex subjects. This is crucial when the problem is exacerbated by delay, as in the case of the greenhouse effect and its consequences.
Over the past several decades, in fact, our print and broadcast media have shown extraordinary reluctance to cover environmental issues in a scientifically responsible way. Instead we’re offered a neutralized version of the truth, in which scientific findings are falsely equated with predictable denialist tropes. When reporters and analysts tell us that “the public doesn’t care about climate change,” they’re really saying that they don’t want to tackle the subject.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: diplomacy droughts famine geopolitical strategy geopolitics humanitarian conflicts resource wars
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 31: A Cheerful Thought.
USA Today points out that frogs in the pot of boiling water are more likely to start wars with one another:
If climate change predictions turn out to be true, some parts of the world could become more violent, according to a new study released today.
“The relationship between temperature and conflict shows that much warmer-than-normal temperatures raise the risk of violence,” the authors write in the study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study was led by John O’Loughlin, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado. It was done in concert with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
This study is not trying to draw parallels to how violence escalates in some urban areas in the summer due to heat, reports O’Loughlin. This is about how warmer temperatures cause stresses on crops and grasslands, forcing people to fight with their neighbors for food and other resources.
O’Loughlin and his team examined the influence of temperature and precipitation on the risk of violent conflict in nine East African countries between 1990 and 2009, and found that increased precipitation dampened the risk of violence, whereas very hot temperatures raised it.
The changer things get, the samer they stay. Sent October 24:
As the planet’s atmosphere heats, the potential for extreme weather increases. The extra energy triggered by the accelerating greenhouse effect will show up as unseasonal storms, unpredictable rain and snow, careening high and low temperatures, and bizarre events. It’s hardly surprising that the seasons of human life will be likewise disrupted.
In the coming years of climate crisis, nations everywhere will be faced with massive stresses and strains: famines, droughts, refugee crises, and resource conflicts. While we cannot forecast exactly whose boundaries will be rent asunder by the ravages of a transforming climate, there’s no doubt that the twenty-first century will be packed with international emergencies.
It’s not just reinforced roads and bridges, or a decentralized power grid. If we are to avoid climate change’s geopolitical impacts, the world’s nations must develop a robust diplomatic infrastructure to prevent Earth’s radically transforming environment from forcing us into devastating wars.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denial idiots media irresponsibility Mitt Romney Republicans
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 30: Put Your Money Where Your Money Is.
Time Magazine wonders “Why Climate Change Has Become the Missing Issue in the Presidential Campaign”. I wonder, too.
We’re in the final few months of what’s shaping up to be the hottest year on record. In September, Arctic sea ice melted to its smallest extent in satellite records, while the Midwest was rocked by a once-in-a-generation level drought. Global carbon dioxide emissions hit a record high in 2011 of 34.83 billion tons, and they will almost certainly be higher this year. Despite that fact, the more than two decade-old international effort to deal with climate change has hit a wall, and the upcoming U.N. global warming summit in the Qatari capital of Doha — whose residents have among the highest per-capita carbon emissions in the world — is unlikely to change that hard fact.
Given all that, it might seem reasonable to think that climate change —a nd how the U.S. should respond to it — would be among the top issues of the 2012 presidential election. We are, after all, talking about a problem that has the potential to alter the fate of the entire planet, one that requires solutions that utterly alter our multi-trillion dollar energy system. Climate change has been a subject at the Presidential or Vice-Presidential debates since 1988, as Brad Johnson, who surveys environmental coverage for ThinkProgress, pointed out this week. Yet through all of the 2012 debates, not a single question was asked about climate change, and on the stump, neither candidate has had much to say about the issue — with Mitt Romney more often using global warming as a punchline, and President Obama mentioning it in passing, at most.
Here are two different reasons. Which do you think it is? Sent October 23:
As the evidence for global heating goes from merely overwhelming to absolutely incontrovertible, look for conservatives to begin their transition into the next phase of climate-change denial: arguing that liberals were the ones to politicize the discussion, thereby making meaningful policy impossible.
In this context, President Obama’s reluctance to raise the subject can be understood as a strategic move; by offering nothing for the anti-science GOP to push against, he’s denied them one of their most convenient rhetorical antagonists. Mr. Romney, who has previously acknowledged the existence and severity of the climate crisis, is now governed entirely by his basest political instincts, and cannot address scientific reality without antagonizing his supporters.
Another interpretation, of course, is that both candidates’ behavior is wholly conditioned by the corrosive influence of fossil fuel corporations, whose profits would be adversely affected by any move toward mitigation of the metastasizing greenhouse effect and its consequences.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: hunting Republican obstructionism sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 29: Squeeeeeeeeze….
The Baltimore Sun notices that hunters are hippies:
Last month, a Republican-aligned polling firm called on hunters and fishermen nationwide to get their views. Some of the results were unsurprising: Outdoorsmen regard themselves as politically conservative and register Republican over Democratic by a more than 2-to-1 ratio.
But here’s one response that may have caught President Barack Obama and his re-election team by surprise, if they noticed it at all: A majority of these sportsmen believe global warming is the cause of this past summer’s high temperatures and want the White House and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.
Watermelons! With guns! Sent October 22:
Unlike the despicable pretenders who inflate their egos by blasting away at tethered game, real sportsmen recognize that their hunting licenses rest on a foundation of genuine respect for the natural world. It’s unsurprising that they are aware of climate change and its impacts on local and regional environments everywhere on Earth. Anyone accustomed to the wild already knows that rising atmospheric temperatures are altering things: animal migration patterns, ranges and habitats; plant flowering schedules and pollination cycles; seasonal freezes and thaws. And scientists tell us that the planetary greenhouse effect will have far more extreme effects in the decades to come.
The readiness of conservative lawmakers and media figures to politicize the question of climate change is profoundly irresponsible. To avert a humanitarian and environmental tragedy, we must work together to forestall the devastating consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect — not play political games while the Earth burns.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 28: Screw It, Let’s Play In Four
The Glens Falls (NY) Post-Star runs Eugene Robinson’s column, “Silence over climate change is deafening”:
WASHINGTON — Not a word has been said in the presidential debates about what may be the most urgent and consequential issue in the world: climate change.
President Obama understands and accepts the scientific consensus the burning of fossil fuels is trapping heat in the atmosphere, with potentially catastrophic long-term effects. Mitt Romney’s view, as on many issues, is pure quicksilver — impossible to pin down — but when he was governor of Massachusetts, climate change activists considered him enlightened and effective.
Yet neither has mentioned the subject in the debates. Instead, they have argued over who is more eager to extract ever-larger quantities of oil, natural gas and coal from beneath our purple mountains’ majesties and fruited plains.
“We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years,” Obama said in Tuesday’s debate. “Natural gas production is the highest it’s been in decades. We have seen increases in coal production and coal employment.”
Romney scoffed Obama “has not been Mr. Oil, or Mr. Gas, or Mr. Coal,” and promised he, if elected, would be all three. “I’ll do it by more drilling, more permits and licenses,” he said, adding later this means “bringing in a pipeline of oil from Canada, taking advantage of the oil and coal we have here, drilling offshore in Alaska, drilling offshore in Virginia, where the people want it.”
If this is a contest to see who can pretend to be more ignorant of the environmental freight train barreling down the tracks toward us, Romney wins narrowly.
Time for another screed on our hopeless media system. Sent October 21:
The candidates’ inability to discuss climate change must be understood as a symptom of a larger malady afflicting our governance. With each passing year, the trivialization of complex policy issues becomes more egregious: government by sound-bite and bumper sticker. Our profit-driven media is an integral part of this malign equation; its irresponsible combination of false equivalence and ADD ensures that the single most crucial issue of our century receives no national attention.
The climate crisis will bring economic, geopolitical and environmental consequences: the likely collapse of agriculture and infrastructure under climatic pressures will impoverish unimaginable numbers of people; we’ll see more drought refugees, submerged nations, famines and governmental instability — not to mention the loss of planetary biodiversity, the extinction of entire species, and the likelihood of devastating “tipping points.”
But for American TV networks, genuine discussions of climate change could be truly catastrophic: people might change the channel.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama foreign policy geopolitics media irresponsibility sapir-whorf hypothesis
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 27: Both Candidates Will Eat A Live Bug, On National Television
By the time this shows up on the blog, the last presidential debate will be in the past. Maybe my letter will have been rendered irrelevant. In any case, as I type this, it’s Saturday, October 20, and the LA Times notes that climate activists are still trying to get somebody (anybody!) to ask some damn questions:
With just 2 1/2 weeks left before election day, there’s an urgency on all fronts in the presidential race. For activists, it’s not just about whether President Obama or Mitt Romney will win, but whether either man will pay attention to their issue.
Perhaps no interest community has been as disappointed as those who worry about global climate change. They have repeatedly called for more attention to the issue and, for the most part, failed to get it.
This week’s presidential debate prompted a new round of regret and demands for Romney and Obama to address the topic, as both candidates spent their most notable time arguing about how much coal they would extract from federal lands.
“Both President Obama and Gov. Romney maintained the silence on climate, again ignoring the growing roster of extreme climate-change induced weather events,” said Maura Cowley, executive director of a consortium of youth-oriented groups called the Energy Action Coalition. “As young voters, and the generation with the most to lose if we don’t address the climate crisis now, we demand both candidates break the silence on climate change by standing up to big oil and gas with ambitious plans for clean energy.”
A political application of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis helps us understand why it’s nahgannahappan. Sent October 20:
Monday’s presidential debate will focus on foreign policy, which ought to provide a perfect opening for questions about global climate change. After all, the accelerating greenhouse effect transcends national boundaries, affecting all life on Earth equally. Furthermore, rising planetary temperatures and increased extreme weather will have humanitarian and geopolitical consequences, often in areas with a long history of conflict. It’d seem that our rapidly transforming climate is an essential subject in any discussion of foreign policy. Why won’t it happen on Monday?
“Foreign policy” as a field is concerned precisely with national boundaries — those human abstractions which surging atmospheric CO2 counts make irrelevant. The hard truth is that America (and the rest of the world) must rise above the narrow strategic concerns which have preoccupied us for centuries. Climate change is a global problem, not a “foreign” one, and there is as yet no scheduled debate on “planetary policy.”
Warren Senders