environment Politics: arctic methane greenhouse effect
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 16: Dinosaurs Are STILL Deadly
The Western Star (“Western Newfoundland’s only daily newspaper”) prints an article by David Suzuki called “A worrisome wet wake-up call from the Arctic.” Indeed:
According to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, record melt has occurred for the past six years. Both the NSIDC and the European Space Agency say ice is thinning at a rate 50 per cent faster than scientists predicted, mainly because of global warming, and that summer Arctic ice could soon disappear altogether.
The implications for global climate and weather, and for animals and people in the North, are enormous. One would think the urgency of this development would draw a swift and collaborative response from government, industry, media, and the public. Instead, news media have downplayed the issue, the only mention made of climate change at the recent Republican National Convention was to mock the science, and many government and industry leaders are rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of oil and gas extraction opportunities and shipping routes that will open up as the ice disappears.
We just don’t get it. As ice melts, more of the sun’s energy, which would normally be reflected back by the ice, is absorbed by the dark water, speeding up global climate change and warming the oceans. The Arctic is now heating at almost twice the rate as the rest of Earth. There’s also the danger that methane could be released as ice and permafrost melt. It’s a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide, so this would accelerate global warming even further. Scientists believe methane may also be uncovered by the warming Antarctic.
Hmmm? Mmphgh? Wha? Huh? No, I’m wide awake. I’ll be right there. (rolls over, shuts eyes)
Sent September 9:
A “wake-up call” from the melting Arctic? Perhaps. But it seems more likely that it is our industrial emissions that have woken a sleeping giant. When gigatonnes of methane (a greenhouse gas twenty times more powerful than CO2) enter the atmosphere as a consequence of the rapid thawing of the North, we humans may well discover that we should have heeded the alarms of climate scientists long ago.
Make no mistake: climatologists have been warning us for decades. The possibility of melting glaciers and ice caps was mentioned in the American popular press in the late 1950s; U.S. presidential advisers have been advocating action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions since the 1960s. The wake-up call actually came many years ago, but we’ve been hitting the snooze button instead of facing the facts: climate change is real, it’s human-caused, and it poses a profound existential threat to us and our civilization.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots ignorance Republicans
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 15: Take That! And That! And That!
The Lawrence Journal-World (KS) discusses the role of science in campaigning and governance:
This fall, President Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney will have a series of debates covering domestic and foreign affairs. The first debate should be about Science, with a capital S. Why? Because Science affects every aspect of society, underpinning smart policy governing energy, food production, human health, national security, economic growth, environmental fitness, natural resources and the quality of life.
How well versed or advised are our candidates in the science of climate? Water? Biofuels? Biomedicine? Is the science they cite credible or quack? Face it: Political expediency never lets the scientific facts get in the way, opting for soothing delusions over tough, responsible policy implications.
Let’s begin with two questions.
Climate Change. As The Economist magazine declared recently, we have entered the Anthropocene Era, in which humans are the greatest agents of change on a planetary scale. Global warming, much of it human-induced, is playing with the life-support systems of the planet. If unchecked, potentially we face: devastation of our oceans, protein resources, fresh water and agro-production; virulent diseases run amok; disruption of ecosystems that clean our air, water and soil; extinction of half or more of Earth’s plants and animals; and sea-level rise and inundation of coastal cities. Yet, during the Republican primaries, all but one of the candidates proudly ridiculed climate change and the science behind it.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Sent September 8:
Even taking into account their long history of scorn for expertise, the Republican party’s eagerness to deny the essentiality of science and mathematics in formulating public policy is a spectacular celebration of ignorance. While their spokespersons proudly oppose “cultural relativism,” the GOP’s tenuous and tortured relationship with the verifiable reality of climate change suggests that they are the party of factual relativism, where ideologically inconvenient truths are twisted when they’re not ignored outright.
How else to describe it when, confronting rising sea levels, North Carolina legislators outlaw accurate measurement and analysis, Virginia lawmakers simply ban the phrase, and Mitt Romney, on stage in Tampa, turns it into a laugh line? While television news often distorts the facts to further a preconceived narrative, the real world is not so malleable. Any politician who treats the laws of chemistry and physics as annoyances to be mocked or dismissed is inherently unworthy of the public trust.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture corporate irresponsibility economics public health
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 14: When We Talk About Reducing Poverty, This Is NOT What We Had In Mind.
The Chicago Tribune notes a new report from Oxfam. Are you poor? Too bad, loser:
LONDON (Reuters) – Climate change may pose a much more serious threat to the world’s poor than existing research has suggested because of spikes in food prices as extreme weather becomes more common, Oxfam said on Wednesday.
More frequent extreme weather events will create shortages, destabilize markets and precipitate price spikes on top of projected structural price rises of about 100 percent for staples such as maize over the next 20 years, the charity said in a report.
Droughts in the U.S. Midwest and Russia this year have helped to propel prices for maize and soybeans to record highs and United Nations food agencies this week said that world leaders must take swift action to ensure that food-price shocks do not turn into a catastrophe that could hurt tens of millions of people.
This is going to get really really ugly. Sent September 7:
While spiking food prices are going to clobber poor people, climate change’s impact on worldwide agriculture is only just beginning to be felt. When rising sea levels submerge low-lying areas, the farmers who are turned into refugees and forced from their homes will face profound and devastating losses of land, income, heritage and hope. When insect species travel to new areas to keep up with a rapidly transforming climate, they’ll bring new diseases with concomitant public health impacts — and guess who’ll do most of the suffering? It won’t be the “one percent,” that’s for sure.
When infrastructure crumbles under the assault of extreme weather, the very wealthy may find themselves inconvenienced, but it is those without economic power whose lives will be shattered. Affecting food, land, health, and work, climate change will swell the ranks of the world’s powerless in ways that our politicians have completely failed to anticipate.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility Democratic timidity media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 13: What Was The Question Again?
The New York Times reports on the Sciencedebate questions to the presidential aspirants:
Sciencedebate.org, which counts among its members the National Academies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Scientific American magazine and dozens of other professional and academic scientific societies, was created with the goal of raising the profile of scientific and technical questions in the presidential campaign.
In his response to the group’s question on climate change, Mr. Obama called it “one of the biggest issues of this generation” but stopped short of calling for a cap and trade system or other broad national policy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, something that he had favored during the 2008 campaign. He said his administration had set stricter limits on emissions from vehicles, invested billions in clean energy research and proposed the first limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. He also said that the United States was leading international negotiations on climate change, although those talks have so far had little impact on greenhouse gas levels worldwide.
Mr. Romney, whose views – or at least, his language – on climate change have shifted somewhat over the years, gave one of his most forceful statements on the question yet. “I am not a scientist myself, but my best assessment of the data is that the world is getting warmer, that human activity contributes to that warming and that policymakers should therefore consider the risk of negative consequences,” he wrote.
I’m far from satisfied with Obama’s handling of this issue…but Romney is truly, truly terrifying. Sent September 6:
The president’s reluctance to make climate change an issue in his campaign is the result of three mutually reinforcing factors in American politics: Republican intransigence, Democratic timidity, and the pervasive influence of corporate dollars. In their obsessive rejection of environmental common sense, the GOP has turned the survival of our civilization into a partisan issue. In shying away from anything that might trigger Republican outrage, the Democrats have acknowledged the political toxicity of reality-based energy and environmental policies. And by injecting mountains of cash into the electoral and legislative processes, the world’s most powerful corporations have rigged the game in their favor.
And the erstwhile Massachusetts moderate? Romney cannot acknowledge scientific consensus without angering the tea-party voters who’ve adopted the rejection of facts and expertise as a political philosophy.
Both approaches are bad news for humanity. Politicians of both parties must start recognizing reality, not running from it.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 12: There Is No Gravity; The Earth Sucks.
The L.A. Times records both candidates’ responses on climate change issues from the online Science Debate:
WASHINGTON — At the Republican National Convention last week and in at least one stump speech over the weekend, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney used climate change as a laugh line ridiculing President Obama’s priorities.
But in comments to the Science Debate website Tuesday as part of an online debate organized by a consortium of scientific organizations, the Republican candidate took another position, similar to the more moderate stance he struck last year, when he conceded that the planet was getting warmer.
“I am not a scientist myself, but my best assessment of the data is that the world is getting warmer, that human activity contributes to that warming, and that policymakers should therefore consider the risk of negative consequences,” Romney said in response to a question about climate change.
Obama for his part seldom utters the words climate change, although his administration has taken several significant steps to combat it. Yet, as he has worked the last few weeks to draw clear contrasts between himself and Romney, the president has talked about climate change to younger audiences, often at colleges. To Science Debate, Obama identifies climate change as one of the most pressing concerns of the era and lists the steps he has taken during his term to mitigate it — and what he might do next.
“Climate change is one of the biggest issues of this generation, and we have to meet this challenge by driving smart policies that lead to greater growth in clean energy generation and result in a range of economic and social benefits,” Obama said.
We are soooooo fucked. Sent September 5:
In a political environment dominated by scandals du jour and the demands of the chattering class, it is inevitable that science in general — and climate science in particular — will get short shrift. However, it is fascinating to observe the responses from Mr. Romney and President Obama to questions about climate change.
While Mr. Romney typically says one thing to his scientific interlocutors and something else to his tea-party constituency, who regard any acknowledgement of global warming as apostasy, one can only speculate about the President’s reluctance to use climate change as a campaign issue. He may be correct in feeling that a crisis unfolding over decades lacks the emotional immediacy required for a modern electoral campaign. Perhaps as planetary extreme weather intensifies, the greenhouse effect’s epiphenomena will no longer fall outside the purview of the 24-hour news cycle. That would be good news — of a very bad kind.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Rex Tillerson scientific method
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 11: Eppur Si Muove
Originally from the Guardian (UK), but reprinted in the Hindustani Times:
No one would want a novelist to perform brain surgery with her biro. No one would want a man with a PhD in political science to then write textbooks claiming that those misadventures are best medical practice.
Society understands the architecture of academia and knows there are
relevant qualifications in different fields, and the media accepts the idea of specialisations and accords greater respect to those with greater expertise. With one exception: climate science.When it comes to this academic discipline, it seems that if you are a specialist in public sector food-poisoning surveillance or possess a zoology doctorate on sexual selection in pheasants, editors will seek your contrarian views more avidly than if you have qualifications in climate science and a lifetime’s professional expertise. The press is further littered with climate “heretics” almost all of whom have academic backgrounds in history, literature, and the classics with a diploma in media studies. (All these examples are true.) One botanist trying to argue that glaciers were advancing took his data (described as simply false by the World Glacier Monitoring Service) from a former architect.
I recently watched a debate between a climate scientist and that pheasant-expert-turned-journalist. An audience member asked: “Please could you explain how it is that you are ‘right’ while all climate scientists are ‘wrong’?” He could not. I almost felt sorry for him. I know that he has lectured publicly on scientific heresy. I think that he wants to be Galileo.
Well said. Sent September 4:
When Galileo turned his eyes outward to the stars and planets, he was setting the power of direct observation and analysis against a body of received knowledge that, although internally consistent, was unverifiable and unfalsifiable. He was also taking on the church of Rome, the most powerful institution in the world at the time.
Given that fossil-fuel corporations are the most powerful economic forces of our era, it takes no courage whatsoever to align one’s opinions with their interests. Denialists’ attempts to assume the mantle of one of the founders of modern science is ludicrous at best and deeply cynical at worst.
While it took the church many centuries to acknowledge that it was mistaken and Galileo was correct, even big oil companies are now recognizing the factuality of global warming, as witness the recent remarks of EXXON CEO Rex Tillerson. Climate-change deniers aren’t “heretics” — they’re just plain wrong.
Warren Senders
When Did You Leave Heaven?
Big Bill Broonzy sings sooooo beautifully. Enjoy his careful phrasing and subtle guitar accompaniment on this film clip from “Low Lights and Blue Smoke.”
And on these songs, from the film “A Musical Journey: The Films of Pete, Toshi and Dan Seeger.”
Pete Seeger: “This is the last time Big Bill Broonzy ever sang. The following day he got operated on for cancer, and he didn’t have a voice from then on. This was a little place called Circle Pines Camp in Western Michigan, and that’s his own guitar he’s playing, he brought it with him. He said to me, ‘Pete, you got that camera with you?’ I had told him I wanted to film him sometime. I said, ‘Yeah, I have it with me.’ He says, ‘Well, you better film me now, I’m going to go under the knife tomorrow.’ ”
Irrelevant aside: I was at an LRY conference at Circle Pines Camp in August of 1975. Amazing.
environment Politics: Arctic ice melt denialists media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 10: Don’t Do That Anymore. Please. Do You Hear Me?
The Gainesville Sun’s John L. Ward is shrill:
The alarm expressed in the Sun editorial of August 26 over the record-breaking Arctic sea ice melt is deserved.
Even before this year’s stunning loss, a study published in the journal Nature last November, based on historical records, ice cores, tree rings, and lake sediments, concluded that “both the duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years” and that human activity “stands out as a very plausible cause.” The record melt not only confirms that the world is warming, it speeds the change. Since everyone, including the yet unborn, will be affected, we should all grasp the significance of the event and the response it requires.
The white surface of ice limits warming by reflecting more of the sun’s rays back into space; darker water absorbs the heat. A feedback loop is created so that the warmed water melts even more ice, and the increased area of dark water warms the water even more.
The warmer Arctic water also warms the air, which increases the melting of glaciers and other land ice. Scientists were startled this summer to find that nearly the entire ice cover of Greenland deposited the previous winter had melted, an event unprecedented since satellite observations began 33 years ago. This ice loss contributes to sea level rise worldwide.
Cue the parade of ignorance. Sent September 3:
Yes, Arctic ice is melting rapidly, but the climate-change denial machinery is already working hard to spin away the most recent set of horrifying numbers. We saw it at the RNC, and we see it daily in the irresponsible pontifications of media figures dutifully repeating the talking points they receive from their petroleum-industry sponsors.
Apparently expertise is no longer persuasive, or we’d consult teachers (not corporations) when it comes to education reform, economists (not corporations) when it comes to economic reform, and doctors (not corporations) when it comes to health-care reform. Since McCarthyite Republicans purged the State Department of China experts (thereby setting the stage for our Vietnam debacle), the GOP has rejected people who actually know something about a subject in favor of those who reinforce their ideological biases. Climate change is one of many such examples — albeit the one upon which our species’ collective future hinges.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans Richard Lindzen
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 9: Silver Bells Mounted On A String…
Hey, gang! Wanna meet an asshole? Here’s the Las Vegas Journal-Review’s Vin Suprynowicz. What a tool:
Too many “are still calling climate change a liberal hoax,” declared U.S. Sen. Harry Reid as he opened his fifth annual National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas on Aug. 7. “They falsely claim scientists are still debating whether carbon pollution is warming the planet.”
“This year alone, the United States has seen unparalleled extreme weather events – events scientists say are exactly what is expected as the Earth’s climate changes. The Midwest is experiencing its most crushing drought in more than half a century – or maybe ever. … Corn crops are withering and livestock are dying. …
“Our nation’s infrastructure is literally falling apart because it wasn’t designed to withstand these conditions,” Sen. Reid continued, just getting warmed up. “Runways are melting, trapping planes. Train tracks are bending, derailing subways. Highways are cracking, buckling and breaking open. … Yet despite having overwhelming evidence and public opinion on our side, deniers still exist, fueled and funded by dirty energy profits. These people aren’t just on the other side of this debate. They’re on the other side of reality.”
Good heavens. And I’ve even left out Harry’s chilling account of the monsoons of Bangladesh. Who ever heard of a monsoon hitting Bangladesh before?
“In the words of one respected climate scientist: ‘This is what global warming looks like,’ ” the senator reported. “Dozens of new reports from scientists around the globe link extreme weather to climate change.”
Responding to this rhetorical version of a Godzilla movie, Norman Rogers, Ph.D. in physics from the University of Hawaii, member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, and senior policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, posted the following Friday:
“The advocates of global warming are beginning to have the classic doomsday cult problem. The Earth hasn’t been warming for 16 years, and that’s starting to get very embarrassing. The first adjustment to the dogma was to stop talking about global warming and start talking about climate change. The latest version of the party line is that we are going to have more extreme weather. The reality is that the weather is not any more variable or extreme than in the past. But with suitable fishing in the data, it is easy to make a case that this or that weather phenomenon has become more extreme.
“The scientist Richard Lindzen has pointed out that the extreme weather theme is inconsistent with the global warmers’ own theories,” Mr. Rogers continues. “The global warmers have long claimed that the poles will warm faster than the tropics. One of their key scary claims is that vast amounts of ice at the poles will melt and raise sea level. So, according to warmer theory, the temperature difference between the poles and the equator will lessen. But it is that very temperature difference that drives weather, particularly extreme weather. … So the warmers’ claims are fundamentally contradictory.”
(facepalm). Sent September 2, very early in the morning:
Skepticism FAIL.
The science, the source, and the threat of global climate change are very real, and Vin Suprynowicz’ op-ed mocking those who are justifiably concerned about climate change is a gold mine of half-, quarter-, and un-truths. One powerful “tell” is his reliance on Richard Lindzen — the only remaining climatologist of any repute who maintains a contrarian position on the issue, and also one of the only scientists still disputing the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Similarly, the analyses of Norman Rogers, Suprynowicz’ other cited authority, have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked, as a few moments’ research will demonstrate.
Ridiculing the change in nomenclature from “global warming” to “climate change” as a sign of liberal desperation is another standard denialist argument, but nothing could be further from the truth. The term “climate change” was first proposed by Republican strategist Frank Luntz during the Bush administration — as a “less frightening” alternative to “global warming”. It’s a peculiar irony that Luntz’ attempt at deceiving the public is a more accurate way of describing the complex phenomena that so profoundly alarm scientists and environmentalists — perhaps one of the only times that Bush-speak told the truth.
Mr. Suprynowicz’ paper gets an F.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots indigenous cultures Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 8: It’s After The End Of The World. Don’t You Know That Yet?
Steve Stajich offers a caustic assessment of the GOP’s resistance to reality, in the Santa Monica Mirror (CA):
At some point years ago, an exhausted demonstrator warning of global warming probably set down his or her protest sign and sighed heavily, adding, “Those who think we’re kidding won’t believe us until they’re knee-deep in flood waters at their own picnic.”
CUT TO: Tampa, Florida. Exterior GOP Convention. Sign on door reads, “Monday is canceled because of violent weather caused by altered climate. The Oil and Coal Lobby Cocktail Hour will be moved to higher ground.”
For those in the GOP, or anywhere, who are still in denial about climate change and global warming I guess the next question is, “I’m sorry but what, exactly, will it take?”
Romney-Ryan (or as I’m starting to think of it, the Kraken…) believes that there is a jackpot of jobs waiting for unemployed Americans in the “development” of domestic energy supplies. Drill, baby, drill. Coal interests tout a “clean coal” that, so far, does not actually exist. “Energy security” trumps any concerns we might have that the weather we’re creating with our use of fossil fuels could ultimately destroy us… for $5 a gallon.
Go ahead. Have your armageddon; let’s just get it over with. Sent September 1:
While the customs of many indigenous peoples are far from infallible (tribal views on medicine, causality and gender are often spectacularly wrong), there’s one area where we post-industrial humans could learn a crucial lesson. The whole world over, traditional cultures recognize the close interdependent relationship between their own survival and the planetary ecosystems surrounding them — an awareness placing a higher priority on societal than individual survival. Our media-saturated culture, by contrast, offers only the fleeting thrills of the moment.
The climate crisis is a profound indictment of a cultural inability to think in the long term. Our political system offers us only Hobson’s choice: whether we select complete denial (the Republican option) or platitudes coupled with inaction (the Democratic approach) the end result is the same. The tribal wisdom reminding us to consider the next seven generations in our decision-making? Now buried beneath a mountain of titillating trash.
Warren Senders