environment Politics: agriculture denialism drought media irresponsibility sustainability
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 8, Day 14: The Horns Of A Dilemma
The Coshocton Tribune (Arkansas) runs a column by Gene Lyons, noting that while humans may still be pretty clueless, cows have it all figured out:
Of all the ways nature has to kill you, drought might be the cruelest. The desiccation proceeds day after punishing day. The afternoon sun pounds the earth like a brazen hammer. As I write, the temperature here in Perry County, Ark., has reached 108 degrees.
The countryside is dying. There’s nothing green in my pastures except inedible weeds. Even pigweed is drooping. Our pond dried up six weeks ago. The ground beneath is bare and cracked. Up on the ridge, some hardwoods are shedding leaves and going dormant; oaks are simply dying.
When I’d turned my cows into their new pasture last year, they kicked up their heels and frolicked like calves. So much fresh grass! Last week, they tore down a low-hanging limb from the persimmon tree they rest under most afternoons. They herded in and stripped the leathery leaves within an hour, the first green thing they’d eaten in weeks.
Lucky cows. Mine is basically a hobby farm, so I can afford to keep my small herd intact. Because spring came a month early, I had enough hay left over to see them through the summer. Neighbors who operate close to the margin have hauled thousands of cows to the sale barn — animals they’d planned on breeding. Pastures stand barren and empty throughout the region.
I don’t know about Buddha nature, but they’re smart enough to come in out of the drought. Sent August 3:
When the vast majority of people are totally disconnected from the food they eat, it’s unsurprising that many still can’t find a reason for concern about global climate change. After all, milk and corn both come from the supermarket, right? Eventually, of course, the reality will start hitting home; once our grocery bills go up to reflect the destructive droughts and heatwaves that have devastated American agriculture, we’ll have no choice but to acknowledge that the consequences of a century’s consumption of fossil fuels may well include an end to the abundance we have long taken for granted.
Or will we? We shouldn’t underestimate the strength of denial. The corporations whose profits hinge on our continued use of fossil fuels are working hard with a complaisant news media to ensure that Americans and their elected representatives never learn what a herd of cows already know: climate change is real.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism false equivalency media irresponsibility
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 8, Day 13: Coming Up: More On That Runaway Squirrel Story!
The Santa Cruz Sentinel (CA) regrets that the public is so uninterested in the problem:
Maybe the lack of substance in the presidential campaign reflects a perception by President Barack Obama and Republican erstwhile nominee Mitt Romney that voters aren’t really that plugged in.
If so, that would explain why issues such as climate change seem lost in the ether as the candidates seem content to trade daily attacks.
An illustration: Despite years of gloomy prognostications by scientists and California’s efforts to get out in front on global warming, most people in this state know absolutely nothing about the controversial cap-and-trade program, which is due to be rolled out in November, the same month as the presidential election.
According to new polling by the Public Policy Institute of California, 57 percent of likely voters say they haven’t heard anything about the program, in which the state will be auctioning off emissions permits. Cap and trade is a central part of California’s AB32, signed into law by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. AB32 sets limits on companies’ greenhouse gas emissions, while allowing non-polluters to sell permits to companies that exceed the new limits.
The state will get money from these auctions — with estimates as high as $1 billion annually. Gov. Jerry Brown is already eyeing this revenue to help pay for another controversial project — high speed rail, which might explain why two of three Californians say they have little or no confidence the state will spend the auction money wisely.
Yadda yadda yadda. Sent August 2:
Our species’ survival is absolutely the most important issue of the century — indeed, the most important issue in our entire history on the planet. Right? Right. When surveys show that citizens aren’t that worried about climate change, our media reliably poses the same old question: why not?
The answer is pretty simple: because that same media has for years been hewing to an irresponsible approach that “balances” every genuinely worried climatologist with a petroleum-funded denialist — thus presenting “both sides of the argument.” Our politicians take their cues from the media, so it’s hardly surprising that all but a few of our elected representatives won’t spend any more time on climate change than they have to.
If we want more people to be concerned about this very genuine and very terrifying threat, it is incumbent on our news media to inform them about it without equivocation or false equivalency.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: false equivalency media irresponsibility reality-based community
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 8, Day 12: What Would You Do If The People You Knew…?
The Monterey County Herald (CA) tells it like it is:
The United States, among the top three emitters of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, cannot hope to confront climate change unless our political leaders stop tiptoeing around the issue. Few scientists doubt that the Earth’s climate is changing and growing warmer. Only a small number of skeptics dispute that humans are a prime cause of the problem, and the ranks of the skeptics just got smaller, with UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller joining the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is real and that human-caused pollution is a major culprit.
Describing his “total turnaround,” Muller wrote in a Sunday column for the New York Times: “Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”
This summer offers a sense of the consequences. We’ve seen huge drought, Colorado on fire, and Atlanta recording its hottest day in history. While it’s impossible to tie specific events to climate change, these are the kinds of extremes we will increasingly see unless emissions are brought under control.
On the campaign trail, there is plenty of vague talk about “energy independence” or “clean energy,” with both presidential candidates ducking what policies they will pursue to reduce greenhouse gases.
J. Lo had TWINS! OMG! Sent August 1:
There is no better demonstration of the complementary dysfunctions of American media and American politics than the failure of both systems to properly address global warming. In a culture where news is a form of entertainment, it makes a bizarre sort of sense that the long-term consequences of atmospheric carbon dioxide are ignored or dismissed in favor of the latest celebrity scandal. When the subject is discussed at all, every genuine climatologist is “balanced” by a petroleum-funded spokesperson, creating the utterly false impression that the science of climate change is still unresolved. This is like including a member of the Flat Earth Society in a segment on the space program.
Things are no better in the political arena. An official in the previous administration famously asserted, in a conversation with journalist Ron Suskind, that “We’re an empire…we make our own reality.” We are indeed making our own reality, and it’s going to include droughts, wildfires, resource wars, steadily rising temperatures, ocean acidification, and all the other epiphenomena of an accelerating greenhouse effect. Pitting the exigencies of political theater against the laws of physics and chemistry is a recipe for disaster.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes idiots media irresponsibility Richard Lindzen Richard Muller scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 8, Day 11: Tremendous Richard(s)
More on Muller, from the San Francisco Chronicle:
The hot issue of global warming got hotter Monday when a UC Berkeley physicist, once a loud skeptic of human-caused climate change, agreed not only that the Earth is heating up, but also that people are the cause of it all.
Richard Muller converted only a year ago to the idea that the world has been warming for decades. Before then he had argued that global warming data – even figures compiled by U.N. experts – were badly flawed.
Now Muller is going further, blaming the warming almost entirely on human emission of greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide – a conclusion that almost all climate scientists reached long ago.
Muller argued that the evidence from more than 36,000 temperature stations worldwide shows that the global thermometer has risen by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years. The warm-up began with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, Muller said, and has accelerated in recent years.
Watchng the comments pile up is a real education in despair. Sent July 31:
Those seeking scientific opposition to the worldwide consensus on global climate change had their available options significantly reduced by Dr. Richard Muller’s “conversion.” For many years, Muller was one of the go-to guys for media outlets needing a contrarian voice to bolster a “the science isn’t settled” argument. Now, with the release of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project’s results, Muller embraces the science he once scorned, leaving conservative pundits and politicians no choice but Dr. Richard Lindzen, the poster boy not only for climate-change denialists, but also for those who still doubt the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
Like those apocryphal Japanese soldiers still fighting Allied forces on forgotten Pacific islands, Lindzen is a true believer with thoroughly solidified opinions, making him a perfect recipient for the Koch brothers’ next climate-change research grant. The rest of us are pleased to welcome Richard Muller to the reality-based community.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans Richard Muller
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 8, Day 10: Breathing Oil Fumes Will Do That To A Guy
The Boise Weekly, on Richard Muller:
One of the most-outspoken global warming deniers has reversed his stance on climate science, saying it is indeed human-made. The news that physicist Richard Muller had gone public with his reversal was even more surprising because his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project is heavily funded by the climate change-denying billionaire Koch brothers.
Muller said that his new opinion stems from his own Koch-funded project, whose meticulous work, he said, led to the only explanation for rising temperatures was human activity.
In an Op-Ed in the New York Times, Muller was blunt about his reversal.
“Three years ago, I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming,” Muller wrote.”I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”
Dr. Muller is about to encounter the vicious, ignorant, gratuitously stupid face of modern American conservatism. Sent July 30:
Dr. Richard Muller has long been one of the go-to guys for conservative politicians and media figures who wanted scientific credibility for messages of climate-change denial. Along with a few other professional climate-science contrarians (such as Dr. Richard Lindzen, who’s noteworthy as one of the vanishing few who still hasn’t accepted a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer), Muller publicly doubted the overwhelming consensus on the human origins of the greenhouse effect.
“Was,” not “is.” With the release of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project’s conclusions this week, Muller is now firmly aligned with the rest of the climatology community in accepting the reality and the dangers of anthropogenic climate change. At least, he’s caught up with the conclusions of climate science from the late 1990s, which is a step in the right direction.
Muller’s results, important though they are, won’t convince anyone who isn’t convinced already. If his experience is similar to that of other climatologists, he’s going to receive hate mail and death threats from the same people who, a few months ago, were lionizing him as a scientist of great integrity and a courageous voice of dissent.
Warren Senders
environment: adaptation adaptationism assholes corporate irresponsibility denialism idiots Koch Brothers scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 8, Day 9: Evolutionary Koch-Bottleneck Edition…
The New York Times prints Richard Muller’s acknowledgement that everybody else was right all along:
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
He’ll disappear down the memory hole. Or will he? Sent July 29:
Now that Richard Muller’s examination of the data has brought him into agreement with the majority opinion that climate change is of human origin, one wonders how the Koch brothers, who funded much of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, will respond. While Dr. Muller is now nicely aligned with the climatological consensus of the 1990s, if the Kochs’ position simply joined the twentieth century, it would be a major advance.
Those notorious global warming denialists will probably shift their opinions from denialism to adaptationism, following the lead of Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, who recently acknowledged the reality of climate change while blithely asserting that humanity will “adapt,” an ominous euphemism for gigadeaths. While our species will surely change in response to climatic transformations, the question is whether these fossil fuel profiteers will help our civilization avoid catastrophe if it negatively impacts their quarterly returns. The available evidence isn’t encouraging.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: CFCs chloroflourocarbons greenhouse emissions hippies ozone
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 8, Day 8: But The Fossil Fuel Companies Are Always Right In The Beginning!
More on ozone layer destruction, this time from the Christian Science Monitor:
Global warming could open new holes in Earth’s ozone layer at latitudes that until now have seemed immune to the ozone destruction that recurs over Antarctica and the Arctic, a new study warns.
The underappreciated keys to this conundrum: water vapor and temperatures in the lower stratosphere, where the ozone layer appears. Both, the researchers say, reach summertime values over the continental US known to encourage ozone-destroying chemicals that are already aloft to attack ozone.
The team makes no attempt to project when significant erosion might be expected to occur. And researchers have yet to make the measurements that would confirm that the reactions the study describes are occurring. Rather, it points to conditions that are appearing and are known to stimulate stratospheric ozone destruction.
The hippies were right then, and they’re right now. Sent July 28:
Any American over a certain age remembers the discovery some decades ago that flourocarbon emissions were destroying the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere. At the time, outraged columnists claimed that changing our spray-can habits was an assault on our traditional values; those who sensibly pointed out the benefits of a life without skin cancer were mocked and derided. Eventually, we changed our spray-can habits (without harming traditional values), and since then, fortunately, that scary hole in the stratosphere has been shrinking.
While we already knew that greenhouse emissions are triggering runaway climate change, the news that water vapor from severe thunderstorms poses a renewed threat to the ozone layer is unpleasantly nostalgic. Transforming our entire culture’s energy economy won’t be easy; it’ll be much harder to give up fossil fuels than it was to shift away from CFCs, but there’s no longer any time to waste. Let’s get started.
Warren Senders
environment: economics extreme weather infrastructure ozone Storms sustainability
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 8, Day 7: You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone
Two separate stories in the New York Times make for an exceptionally frightening synergy. Read ’em and weep:
Weather Extremes Leave Parts of U.S. Grid Buckling:
WASHINGTON — From highways in Texas to nuclear power plants in Illinois, the concrete, steel and sophisticated engineering that undergird the nation’s infrastructure are being taxed to worrisome degrees by heat, drought and vicious storms.
On a single day this month here, a US Airways regional jet became stuck in asphalt that had softened in 100-degree temperatures, and a subway train derailed after the heat stretched the track so far that it kinked — inserting a sharp angle into a stretch that was supposed to be straight. In East Texas, heat and drought have had a startling effect on the clay-rich soils under highways, which “just shrink like crazy,” leading to “horrendous cracking,” said Tom Scullion, senior research engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. In Northeastern and Midwestern states, he said, unusually high heat is causing highway sections to expand beyond their design limits, press against each other and “pop up,” creating jarring and even hazardous speed bumps.
Excessive warmth and dryness are threatening other parts of the grid as well. In the Chicago area, a twin-unit nuclear plant had to get special permission to keep operating this month because the pond it uses for cooling water rose to 102 degrees; its license to operate allows it to go only to 100. According to the Midwest Independent System Operator, the grid operator for the region, a different power plant had had to shut because the body of water from which it draws its cooling water had dropped so low that the intake pipe became high and dry; another had to cut back generation because cooling water was too warm.
Strong Storms Threaten Ozone Layer Over U.S.:
Strong summer thunderstorms that pump water high into the upper atmosphere pose a threat to the protective ozone layer over the United States, researchers said on Thursday, drawing one of the first links between climate change and ozone loss over populated areas.
In a study published online by the journal Science, Harvard University scientists reported that some storms send water vapor miles into the stratosphere — which is normally drier than a desert — and showed how such events could rapidly set off ozone-destroying reactions with chemicals that remain in the atmosphere from CFCs, refrigerant gases that are now banned.
The risk of ozone damage, scientists said, could increase if global warming leads to more such storms.
I tried to get some Joni Mitchell quotes into the letter itself, but couldn’t make it work. Sent July 27:
Whether it’s a power blackout, a buckled roadbed, a broken water main or a breached levee, infrastructure’s only noticeable at the failure point. As climate change gets faster and more severe, we’re going to discover just how much we’ve taken for granted over the past hundred years of civilizational growth. If America is to prosper in the centuries to come, we’ll need to retool and rebuild for far more stressful conditions.
But there’s another, grander infrastructure that cannot be addressed with a public works bill. The newly established connection between climate change and ozone loss is vivid evidence that many of the environmental mechanisms which have made our species’ efflorescence possible are endangered by the greenhouse effect and its epiphenomena. Genuine sustainability must recognize that such natural systems — oxygen-producing phytoplankton, the processes of photosynthesis, or upper-atmosphere protection against UV rays — are even more essential than sewers and roadways.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists idiots scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 8, Day 6: Al Gore Is Fat, Apparently.
Paul Krugman’s piece on climate change has been making the rounds. Here it is published by the Seattle Times:
A couple of weeks ago the Northeast was in the grip of a severe heat wave. As I write this, however, it’s a fairly cool day in New Jersey, considering that it’s late July. Weather is like that; it fluctuates.
And this banal observation may be what dooms us to climate catastrophe, in two ways. On one side, the variability of temperatures from day to day and year to year makes it easy to miss, ignore or obscure the longer-term upward trend. On the other, even a fairly modest rise in average temperatures translates into a much higher frequency of extreme events — like the devastating drought now gripping America’s heartland — that do vast damage.
On the first point: Even with the best will in the world, it would be hard for most people to stay focused on the big picture in the face of short-run fluctuations. When the mercury is high and the crops are withering, everyone talks about it, and some make the connection to global warming. But let the days grow a bit cooler and the rains fall, and inevitably people’s attention turns to other matters.
Making things much worse, of course, is the role of players who don’t have the best will in the world. Climate-change denial is a major industry, lavishly financed by Exxon, the Koch brothers and others with a financial stake in the continued burning of fossil fuels. And exploiting variability is one of the key tricks of that industry’s trade. Applications range from the Fox News perennial — “It’s cold outside! Al Gore was wrong!” — to the constant claims that we’re experiencing global cooling, not warming, because it’s not as hot right now as it was a few years back.
Shrill. Sent July 26:
One of the simplest and most important pieces of advice we give to our children is that actions have consequences — and that much wisdom lies in considering them before we act, rather than realizing belatedly that we have erred. An ounce of prevention, a stitch in time.
Why, then, are we adults so bad at following our own suggestions? We’ve known for decades about the likely consequences of an accelerating greenhouse effect (presidents have been getting scientific advice on global warming since the 1960s!). Each new piece of research interprets, contextualizes and refines its predecessors, making climate change one of the most exhaustively researched subjects in the world. We’ve been well warned about the dangers of continued consumption of fossil fuels.
Teenagers think they’re immortal, terrifying their parents with foolish thrill-seeking — but our society badly needs the wisdom of considered consequences, not the adrenaline rush of self-destructive folly.
Warren Senders
environment: glacial melt Greenland ice melt scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 8, Day 5: The Mighty Quinn, Redux.
This is horrifying, in an awful kind of way. The New York Times is one of many reporting on NASA’s recent observations of Greenland, which appears to be melting very fast. Very fast:
In a scant four days this month, the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet melted to an extent not witnessed in 30 years of satellite observations, NASA reported on Tuesday.
The extent of Greenland’s ice sheet surface, in white, on July 8, left, and July 12, right, based on measurements from three satellites, which pass over at different times and whose data are combined and analyzed. The deepest pink areas reflect maximal certainty that the ice has melted.
On average, about half of the surface of the ice sheet melts during the summer. But from July 8 to July 12, the ice melt expanded from 40 percent of the ice sheet to 97 percent, according to scientists who analyzed the data from satellites deployed by NASA and India’s space research institute.
“I started looking at the satellite imagery and saw something that was really unprecedented” since the advent of satellite imaging of the earth’s frozen surface, or cryosphere, said Thomas L. Mote, a climate scientist at the University of Georgia who for 20 years has been studying ice changes on Greenland detected by satellite.
While scientists described it as an “extreme event” not previously recorded from space, they hastened to add that it was normal in a broader historical context.
But Al Gore is fat. Sent July 25:
When it comes to the news on climate change, “rare” seems to be the new “often.” How often in the recent past have we heard reports of “once-in-a-century” storms suddenly happening every year? Of nearly snowless winters several times in a row — in places normally measuring the stuff in yards?
NASA’s report of unprecedented melting on Greenland’s ice sheet is just the latest and most terrifying example of this phenomenon. While the researchers studying the ice discuss it in careful scientific language, there’s no doubt they are shocked and disturbed by such extreme melting.
How much more evidence do we need to connect the accelerating greenhouse effect to these stunning disruptions of the environmental status quo? Our civilization was made possible by a mild and predictable climate — one rapidly vanishing in the rear-view mirrors of our industrial-size SUVs. Now that “bizarre” is the new “normal”, whither humanity?
Warren Senders