environment Politics: atmospheric CO2 CO2 denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republicans
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 4: In This Issue Of Tiger Beat: Meet Stephen Hawking!
The New York Daily News reports on a finding from the Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Hence the headline. Note:
Copenhagen, July 24 — The greatest climate change ever recorded by the world over the last 100,000 years has been the transition from the ice age to the warm interglacial period.
New research from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen indicates that, contrary to previous opinion, the rise in temperature and the rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) follow each other closely in terms of time.
In the warmer climate, the atmospheric content of CO2 is naturally higher. CO2 is a green-house gas that absorbs heat radiation from the Earth and thus keeps the planet warm. In the shift between ice ages and interglacial periods the atmospheric content of CO2 helps to intensify the natural climate variations, the journal Climate of the Past reports.
Too many big words for the Daily News, I suppose. Sent July 24:
The close correlation between a warming planet and increased levels of atmospheric CO2 should surprise no one who’s paid attention to the past several decades of climate science — no one, that is, who hasn’t entirely swallowed the zany paranoid fantasy that the world’s climatologists are part of a massive planet-wide plot to confiscate our SUVs.
Research from the Neils Bohr Institute confirms that in the past, CO2 levels have followed planetary warming — a reversal of the present-day situation, in which our industrialized civilization has dumped gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere in a geological instant, putting the Earth on a drastic and potentially devastating course towards climate chaos as the greenhouse effect makes temperatures rise.
There’s no longer any possible excuse for inaction. To reject science on the grounds that it is ideologically inconvenient is to sacrifice the future of our nation on the altar of electoral exigency.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: economics indigenous peoples Native Americans sustainability tribal societies
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 3: Ring-A-Ding-Ding!
More on the indigenous cultures story, this time from the Carroll County Times:
The severe weather extremes of recent years has many more people considering climate change and our impact on the planet, but a Senate committee last week heard from a group that is directly impacted, and what they had to say should be heard by everyone who claims climate change isn’t real.
Members of several West Coast tribes and Alaska communities were in Washington last week for a symposium on the impact of climate change.
The Associated Press reported that during a committee hearing, Hawaii Senator and committee chairman Daniel Akaka said that native communities are disproportionately impacted because they depend on nature for traditional food, sacred sites and for cultural ceremonies.
Villages are being wiped out by coastal erosion. According to the Associated Press, Mike Williams, chief of the Yupit Nation in Akiak, Alaska, to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee how the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race had to be moved because of a lack of snowfall, and how it had become necessary for the dogs to run at night to stay cool.
“We’ve always lived off the land and off the waters and continue to do that. But we’re bearing the burden of living with these conditions today,” The Associated Press reported Williams telling the committee.
Talking to a Senate committee is going to do them a hell of a lot of good, I’m sure. Sent July 23:
Indigenous peoples around the world are invariably on the front lines of climate change. Because their lives are integrated with the cyclic flow of seasons and the gradual transformations of ecosystems over time, they are uniquely situated to read warning signals most of us wouldn’t even recognize.
But we should not be deluded into believing that global warming is only going to affect tribal populations. With Midwestern agriculture under significant threat from devastating heat waves, Americans can anticipate climbing grocery bills and the likelihood of shortages in the months to come. Nobody’s going to be able to evade the impact of industrial civilization’s CO2 spree much longer, even with the help of petroleum-funded professional denialists in the print and broadcast media.
Traditional societies may hear the alarms sooner and louder than the rest of us, but there can be no doubt: the bells are tolling for us all.
Warren Senders
environment: glacial melt media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 2: “…the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
The Kansas City Star runs a McClatchy intern’s story on climate change’s effects on a place nobody will ever visit:
AYALOMA, Ecuador — Frosts aren’t on time for the 960 people living in this tiny, remote village, hidden on a chilly, windswept mountain ridge in South America.
A minor problem? Maybe for some. But in the Andean community, 8,800 feet above sea level, frosts – and their impact on crop cycles – are kind of a big deal.
In this agricultural community, crops are planted during the full moon, a tradition meant to help ensure a full harvest. But these days, the harvests aren’t as full.
Village residents say it’s the mark of climate change descending upon the Ayaloman people.
“In Ecuador, we’ve really experienced a sudden change in our climate,” said Ana Loja, a professor at the University of Cuenca, in the Andes of southern Ecuador. “We cannot say, ‘Maybe this is not happening,’ but I think everyone is aware it is a real problem.”
It’s always the Other what feels the blow. Sent July 22:
A strong human-interest element is essential to good reporting, and Annika McGinnis’ report on climate change’s impact on a tiny village in Central America is a wonderful example. The story of how these tough mountain people are coping with a radically changing world makes for compelling reading.
But that’s not all there is to news. Ms. McGinnis’ article needs to make the connection to the lives of readers in the United States. For too long, climate change has been the problem of an unspecified “other”, only affecting people and nations far from our own. As Midwest heatwaves and Colorado wildfires make clear, the impact of the burgeoning greenhouse effect is not the exclusive province of the Third World; the climatic consequences of a century-long carbon binge are no respecters of national boundaries. The industrialized West will soon have more in common with Ayaloma’s residents than we can presently imagine.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture corporate irresponsibility cultural imperialism native peoples
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 1: What Do You Mean, “We,” White Man?
The Laramie (WY) Boomerang prints an AP article on the impact of climate change on indigenous populations:
Native American and Alaska Native leaders told of their villages being under water because of coastal erosion, droughts and more on Thursday during a Senate hearing intended to draw attention to how climate change is affecting tribal communities.
The environmental changes being seen in native communities are “a serious and growing issue and Congress needs to address them,” Tex Hall, chairman of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation of New Town, N.D., said Wednesday.
Mike Williams, chief of the Yupit Nation in Akiak, Alaska, said in the informational Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing, that villages are literally being wiped out by coastal erosion. Williams said he can cast a net and catch salmon at his childhood home because the home is under water, he said. He also described how the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, in which he participates, has been moved because of lack of snowfall and that dogs must run at night to stay cool.
“We’ve always lived off the land and off the waters and continue to do that. But we’re bearing the burden of living with these conditions today,” Williams said.
Sen. Daniel Akaka, committee chairman, acknowledged that environmental changes are widespread, but the Hawaii Democrat said native communities are disproportionately impacted because they depend on nature for traditional food, sacred sites, and for cultural ceremonies. Several tribes already are coming up with plans to adapt to the changes and federal agencies are assisting with resources, Akaka said.
Food doesn’t come from plants. It comes from the Safeway. Sent July 21:
The world’s indigenous people, because of their ancestral closeness to the natural systems upon which their lives depend, are necessarily on the front lines of climate change. These cultures, whether they’re in Hawaii, the American Southwest, the Amazon rainforest, or the highlands of Papua New Guinea, are all at risk from the consequences of industrial civilization’s prodigal consumption of fossil fuels over the past two centuries.
But the loss of tribal societies is only one facet of the crisis. Global heating is already having devastating impacts on world agriculture, whether it’s a failed wheat crop in Russia or acres of dying corn plants in the Midwest. And because half of our political system denies the problem entirely, governmental action to avert catastrophe is all but impossible.
The accomplishments of our high-tech civilization are no protection against the collapse of the planetary ecosystems which allow us to eat, drink and breathe. Native cultures may be first to suffer the consequences of our profligacy, but barring concerted action on a global level, we’re next. Complacency is no longer an option.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies false equivalency media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 31: I Know Nothink!
The Iowa City Press-Citizen notes that nobody’s talkin’ about it:
The 800-pound gorilla in the Mount Pleasant High School Gymnasium Tuesday was the subject of climate change.
Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad called for a public discussion on drought conditions in Iowa, and all of the governmental players were there:
• U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
• Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.
• Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
• And the Farm Services Administration.
The phrase “climate change” or any analysis of causation for the current drought was absent from the public discussion. This was a meeting about row crop agriculture and related agricultural producers and it was intended to deal with the as-is situation.
The obvious problem, as Mark Schouten of Homeland Security and Emergency Response put it, “you can’t snap your fingers and make it rain.”
{snip}
It was the Farm Services Agency that raised the issue of environmental groups, saying a group had sued for an environmental impact statement before releasing CRP acres to haying or grazing.
During the public comment section, a truck driver who had just delivered a load of grain stood at the microphone and demonized the environmental groups for trying to influence food production. It got the biggest applause at the event and the governor jumped on board reminding us of his joining a lawsuit in Nebraska against an environmental group.
Trouble in River City. Sent July 20:
It’s unsurprising that people still aren’t drawing the connection between the extreme weather hammering America’s farmlands and the accelerating greenhouse effect caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but blaming environmentalists for devastated crops while ignoring the role of climate change is like blaming oncologists for cancer.
While scientists have been making increasingly scary predictions for several decades about the consequences of uncontrolled greenhouse emissions, their words have gone unheeded; many who’ve tried to sound the warning have been mocked, harassed, and threatened for their pains. Meanwhile, our print and broadcast media have maintained a scrupulous false equivalency between genuine expertise and the pronouncements of petroleum-funded denialists.
The United States owes its existence to the Minutemen of Concord and Lexington, who responded unhesitatingly to a midnight rider’s call. The Paul Reveres of the present day are climatologists; our nation will owe its future to those who heed their alarms.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 30: After The Break, The 8th Anniversary Of Janet Jackson’s Nipple!
More on the “Generation X doesn’t give a shit” story, this time from U.S. News And World Report:
If each season was progressively a little bit warmer, people might be able to more easily understand climate change, but “if it’s perturbed, it’s hard for people to grasp,” he says. “I’m not sure common sense alone will ever carry the day on this. The pattern is not likely to be consistent.”
Climate change, besides being controversial, isn’t something that can be easily solved with a couple of regulatory changes, and behavioral changes today will take decades to reduce the atmosphere’s carbon levels, Miller says.
“It’s a challenging political problem because it won’t cause a lot of problems in [Generation X’s] lifetimes,” he says.
In the study, he writes that “adults have a limited attention span for public policy issues and tend to grow tired of the same issues if they persist over a number of years. This argument was made in regard to the public reaction to both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and it may be applicable to a long-term issue such as climate change.”
So, in a world that expects quick responses to imminent problems, people are ambivalent towards climate change. Miller says that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as elected politicians take the long view and don’t let the issue die. According to the study, just 10 people are “doubtful” or “dismissive” about climate change, and that most are simply “disengaged.”
I wonder why that is? Sent July 19:
In an informational environment dominated by celebrity scandals and the manufactured hysteria of the 24-hour news cycle, Generation X’s dismissal of climate change is understandable if unforgivable. The difficulty of explaining statistical correlation to an audience fixated on Missing White Women means that the dangers of an accelerating greenhouse effect are still not part of the national conversation. Our media and political establishments reap profits and accrue power through exploiting America’s national case of ADD.
The NSF survey confirms that 37-40 year olds are too preoccupied with immediate issues to worry about the decades-away effects of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and an acidifying ocean — but their troubling indifference to the issue is a single symptom of a systemic problem. When it comes to the future of our planet and our civilization, the broadcast and print media have made it easy for all of us to evade our responsibilities.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Conservatives denialism idiots
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 29: (Facepalm)
The Greenville Online (NC) notes that young conservatives are sad:
On the Facebook page for the group Young Evangelicals for Climate Change, there’s a classic satirical “LOLchart,” except in this case the numbers are real.
A map of the United States is supposed to be colored blue wherever temperatures have been cooler than normal, and orange wherever they’ve been warmer than usual.
It’s a useless distinction, because the entire map is orange — June capped the country’s warmest 12 months on record.
This, of course, doesn’t itself prove that humans have provoked profound global climate change, and in the political football that often erupts over the subject, the skeptics tend to discount such maps, while believers note them with alarm.
Some younger conservatives, however, have grown increasingly uneasy with the presumption that they hew to the skeptical line of the Republican Party, and some evangelicals in particular are looking for ways to embrace the science and steward the planet.
As far as political representation goes, they’re mostly on their own.
What happens, in Paul Greene’s observation, is that many of the loudest voices drawing a bead on climate change come off as world-is-crumbling alarmists, which is a turn-off to many conservatives.
What’s missing is the calmer, conservative voice of reason. Some Republicans have tried it, but without much success: Voters hear a leftist/screaming/Al Gore point of view, he says.
For Greene, an attorney, former intern for a Republican congressman and board member for TreesGreenville, the party’s sprint to the right is exasperating.
“That hasn’t made me vote Democratic yet, but that certainly isn’t pushing the electoral options into my worldview,” Greene said.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Grow up, why don’cha? Sent July 18:
As global warming intensifies and America bakes under anomalous heat waves, young conservatives who are paying attention to environmental issues will need to reject the stereotypes exemplified in Paul Greene’s pat dismissal of a “leftist/screaming/Al Gore point of view.” Given that scientists’ predictions of climate change have generally erred by underestimating the likely extent of the problem, those so-called “climate alarmists” are rapidly emerging as the people who had it right all along.
Al Gore is an American politician with enough understanding of basic science to recognize that the country he loves is in for a world of hurt as the greenhouse effect intensifies, and enough sense of responsibility to take the initiative and do something about it. It wasn’t environmental activists who cast the former VP as a “screaming leftist”, but right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh, who’s as wrong on climate as he is on countless other issues.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies ignorance media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 28: Smile When You Say That, Punk.
Buncha slackers:
Amid a summer of record-setting heat, most of Generation X ‘s young and middle-aged adults are uninformed and unconcerned about climate change, says a survey today.
Only about 5% of Gen Xers, now 32 to 52 years old, are “alarmed” and 18% “concerned” about climate change, reports the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Two-thirds, or 66%, of those surveyed last year said they aren’t sure global warming is happening and 10% said they don’t believe it’s occurring.
“Most Generation Xers are surprisingly disengaged, dismissive or doubtful about whether global climate change is happening and they don’t spend much time worrying about it,” said author Jon D. Miller.
I’ve used the Arabic translation motif before. This one works pretty well, I think. Sent July 17:
It’d be easier if “climate change” had a scarier name. If we said it in Arabic, jingoistic politicians could warn their constituents that “Aletgheyrat Alemnakheyh” would devastate American agriculture and infrastructure. Flag-waving pundits on cable news could discuss the threat to our way of life, drumming up support for an all-out national effort against an unpronounceable enemy — an epic struggle to preserve our civilization. Young people would be patriotically inspired to enlist.
But as the NSF survey shows, America’s youth are understandably too preoccupied with shorter-term, more immediate issues — paying for their education, finding jobs — to consider the threats posed by climate change. And who can blame them? It is the job of a society’s elders to think in the long term, to avoid convenient falsehoods and easy generalizations. Our generation has evaded its responsibilities to the future; it is theirs that will pay the price.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism evolution idiots scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 27: Sex Laxar I En Laxask
The New York Times reports on a nice piece of science:
Alaskan salmon are apparently evolving to adapt to climate change.
Researchers have suspected that temperature-driven changes in migration and reproduction behaviors — which have happened in many species — may be evidence of natural selection at work. Now there is genetic evidence to confirm the hypothesis.
For their study, published online last week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the scientists studied Alaska pink salmon in a small stream near Juneau where there have been complete daily counts of all adult fish since 1971.
The salmon migrated in two distinct populations, one appearing toward the end of August, the other starting in September. In 1979, scientists introduced a neutral genetic marker into the later-migrating population so it could be identified and tracked without affecting its fitness.
A small prize to anyone who can tell me something about the headline. Sent July 16:
The news that pink salmon are beginning evolutionary adaptation to a rapidly transforming environment should be a powerful signal to those people still actively denying the reality of global climate change. But there’s a big gap between “should” and “is,” and it’s spelled “rejection of science.”
The same people proclaiming evolution a blasphemous falsehood are at the forefront of the climate-denial pack, rejecting as absurd the suggestion that two centuries’ worth of CO2 emissions might have an effect on Earth’s atmospheric equilibrium. Such ignorance would be merely risible but for the fact that blinkered rejection of facts is now an absolute prerequisite for electability in today’s Republican party.
As the scientific evidence for climate change keeps accumulating, the GOP’s positions will evolve — incorporating even-more-convoluted explanations for the inconvenient facts. 2016’s Republican convention will likely be a sea of tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists. Can those Alaska salmon produce their birth certificates?
Warren Senders
environment: denialists media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 26: Quiet Out There! Don’t You Know What Time It Is?!?!
More on the “startled by bizarre weather, people are wondering if climate change is real” story, this time from the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Before the financial crisis hit, Americans were pretty sure that the globe was warming, and that humans were causing it, and that it was kind of a big deal. As the economy slumped, Americans decided that climate change wasn’t actually happening — and even if it was, it wasn’t our fault. And now, after a flurry of wild weather — deadly tornados, floods, droughts, an uncommonly mild winter, and recent heat waves — we’re back to believing that global warming is real. But we’re still hesitant to take the blame.
These generalizations are based on a series of Yale University studies over the last few years. According to the studies, Americans’ belief in global warming fell from 71 percent in November 2008 to just 57 percent in January 2010, but it rebounded to 66 percent by this spring. The findings mirrored those of the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, which showed belief in global warming bouncing from 65 percent in 2009 to 52 percent in 2010 and back up to 62 percent this year.
What accounts for the rebound? It isn’t the economy, which has thawed only a little. And it doesn’t seem to be science: The share of respondents to the Yale survey who believe “most scientists think global warming is happening” is stuck at 35 percent, down from 48 percent four years ago. (That statement remains just as true now as it was then: It’s the public, not the scientists, that keeps changing its mind.)
No, our resurgent belief in global warming seems to be a function of the weather. A separate Yale survey this spring found that 82 percent of Americans had personally experienced extreme weather or natural disasters in the past year. And 52 percent said they believed the weather had been getting worse overall in recent years, compared to just 22 percent who thought it had gotten better.
Whatever wakes you up from your stupor, I suppose. Sent July 15:
While it’s encouraging that more Americans are taking the threat of climate change seriously, public attention to the crisis may well fade the next time there’s an interlude of balmy weather. Our national case of ADD makes it almost impossible to convey the implications of the accelerating greenhouse effect, something which will affect all human civilization over centuries.
Climatologists are the Paul Reveres of today, sounding a warning that the effects of our civilization’s carbon binge are now upon us — but the careful language of scientific discussion doesn’t always convey the urgency of the crisis. If the minutemen had ignored the midnight call and gone back to sleep, the redcoats would have won the day.
It behooves all of us to look beyond the latest celebrity scandal and the 24-hour news cycle, and recognize that the climate emergency has profound implications for countless generations yet to come.
Warren Senders