environment Politics: glacial melt mountains peace sustainability
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 12: Imagine….
The Hindustan Times reports on a conference of mountain nations hosted by the Nepali government. Good for them:
Threat posed by global warming and the need to have a collective voice in climate change negotiations have brought mountain countries from across the world to one platform.
Representatives from government and organization from over two dozen countries having peaks with heights of 4,000
metres or more have gathered here to deliberate on the way ahead.Initiated by Nepal government, the two-day conference will discuss effects of climate change on 25% of land Earth’s surface covered by mountains and nearly 13% world population residing there.
The objective is to promote concerns of mountain countries within UNFCCC process, draw global attention to the threat, seek solutions and adopt a Kathmandu Call for Action.
Terming climate change as the greatest threat facing humankind, Nepal President Ram Baran Yadav said that mountain nations are experiencing disproportionate effects of it.
I’m just a peacenik. Sent April 5:
Only a few years ago, climate change was generally understood as something that would only affect our descendants. Now, as the likely consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect become evident in our daily lives, it’s apparent that we — all humanity — are on the front lines of a battle against a remorseless and unfeeling enemy. The conference of mountain nations initiated by the Nepalese government is one of many international collaborations that may very well be our species’ best chance of survival.
As even the nations most invested in climate-change denial will eventually discover, this enemy attacks mountains and islands alike, ravaging forests and deserts with impersonal efficiency. We are under assault by forces we have ourselves created through profligate consumption of fossil fuels, and to win this battle, we must enter a new era of international cooperation; the fight against climate change leaves no more room for war.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: automobiles corporate irresponsibility corporate personhood sustainability transportation
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 11: I’ll Show Him That A Cadillac Is Not A Car To Scorn
A guy named Randy Salzman writes an op-ed in the New York Times that’s well worth a read. It’s titled “Invitation to a Dialogue: Our Addiction to Cars.” The final few grafs:
While oil worldwide costs the same, other nations put higher fees on gasoline and diesel consumption. Japan’s high gas taxes make its 127 million people a huge test market for energy efficiency, while our lower taxes cajoled Detroit into selling gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s.
Of course, decreasing driving in a culture famed for its “love affair with the automobile” is difficult. No one, yet everyone, is to blame for our national default position of key in the ignition to get anywhere, everywhere and — often — nowhere. Our politicians are not willing to tell us the most inconvenient of inconvenient truths.
If we’d use our cars smarter, we’d mitigate a host of problems and prevent our grandchildren from following our children in fighting wars in the Middle East.
To begin using our cars intelligently rather than habitually, we need a rational federal gasoline “user fee” rolled in slowly over a decade.
It’s time politicians led an adult conversation with America.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, though I tried, in this letter, sent April 4:
From the stories of the early pioneers and Horace Greeley’s “Go West, young man,” to Kerouac’s Beat generation tales, the freedom to get up and go wherever we please is a formative element of the American myth. But the individual liberation implied by the automobile is chimerical; our society rightly castigates those who would abdicate their responsibilities to family and community, and our collective responsibility for the past century’s profligate consumption of fossil fuels is not something from which we can simply drive away. There is no freeway that will let us avoid the environmental consequences of introducing so much extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Yes, contemporary America’s social infrastructure is utterly dependent on the automobile — but this cannot be an excuse for inaction. If we are to steer in the direction of planetary good citizenship, we must change our oil economy, and the myths that lend it credibility.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: sustainability timescale urban survival
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 10: People Get Ready…
The Salt Lake Tribune praises the city’s initiatives on climate change:
Climate change should be a matter of science, not politics. But only changes in public policy, which is often determined by political ideology, can reduce the human-caused warming that is threatening ecosystems around the globe.
In the end, governments, large and small, will be forced to confront the vast upheavals that climate change can bring if we don’t act now to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.
That’s why it’s important that Salt Lake City is supporting a growing movement among cities to urge President Barack Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency to invoke the Clean Air Act to place limits on carbon emissions. The City Council and Mayor Ralph Becker collaborated on a resolution urging the federal agency to “swiftly employ and enforce” the act. Only Councilman Carlton Christensen voted against it.
The need to act is underscored by a new report on severe weather events related to global warming coming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel, founded by the United Nations in 1988, is focusing for the first time on extreme weather changes, which have increased in number and intensity in recent decades.
Weather disasters including drought, flooding, hurricanes and rising seas cost the U.S. government an average of $3 billion a year in the 1980s. In the past 10 years, that figure has skyrocketed to $20 billion a year, adjusted for inflation.
Read the comments on this article if you want to be seriously depressed. Sent April 3:
Successful approaches to climate change must be polycentric — operating at multiple levels of geographical scale, from the individual home all the way to the national and global.
Urban initiatives like Salt Lake City’s are essential components of the total picture; without the engagement of cities, any attempt at mitigation and adaptation is doomed to failure. Similarly, no progress can take place without the commitment of dedicated people, families and communities, working together to reduce their carbon footprints and prepare for the infrastructural and agricultural disruptions that are now inescapable.
But none of these will make sense without broader-scale government support. Just as the planetary environment supports a vast range of diverse and interdependent ecosystems, only federal government action can support the wide range of individual, local, and regional initiatives that are necessary to address the slowly unfolding catastrophes that are the inevitable consequences of the burgeoning greenhouse effect.
Warren Senders
environment music: genius
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The Beauty of Shakuhachi
Elizabeth Reian Bennett plays Tsuki No Kyoku (“Song Of The Moon”). What an exquisite music!
She will be performing at Playing For The Planet: World Flutes Against Climate Change. Don’t miss it!
environment: automobiles corporate irresponsibility corporate responsibility denialists Heartland Institute
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 9: Little Deuce Coupe
General Motors is now a certified left-wing tree-hugger (The Boise Weekly):
The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that promotes denial of climate change, lost funding from General Motors last week. The Los Angeles Times reports that a leak of confidential funding documents showed that the General Motors Foundation provided funds to the institute during the last two years.
“GM operates its business as if climate change is real,” said GM spokesman Greg Martin.
The move received immediate praise from environmental groups.
“We applaud GM’s decision and the message it sends—that it is no longer acceptable for corporations to promote the denial of climate change,” said Daniel Souweine, campaign director for Forecast the Facts, a group that urges meteorologists to talk more openly about climate change. “Support for an organization like Heartland is not in line with GM’s values.”
It’s about eleven meta-levels away from actual good news, but I’ll take what I can get. Sent April 2:
In pulling its funding from the anti-science Heartland Institute, General Motors is demonstrating readiness to engage with the factual realities of climate change. While nobody enjoys contemplating a civilizational threat of such magnitude, the evidence of impending drastic alterations of the Earth’s climate is now so irrefutable that denialist posturing is morally, environmentally and fiscally irresponsible.
Since Americans’ love affair with their cars shows no sign of ending, it’s imperative that the automobile industry recognize the urgency of the crisis and begin developing newer, less wasteful technologies — a move that General Motors seems to be making.
Heartland Institute, by contrast, is doubling down, rejecting unambiguous science in favor of ideologically convenient misinterpretations that support the profitability of their funders. GM’s decision to sever ties with this secretive right-wing think tank reflects a deeper understanding of a simple fact: a global climate catastrophe would be terrible for business.
Warren Senders
Education environment: denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 8: The International Homework Alarmist Conspiracy!
Anne Zammit, in the Times of Malta, notes that the time for denial is long past:
Scepticism is essential for good science but the time for debate has long been over. Scientists (notably climatologists) reached consensus that global warming is happening but it took decades for the problem to penetrate public discourse.
Indications that human activity is having an effect on the climate are nothing new:
In 1896, Swedish Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius presented his findings that human activities releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere could change the earth’s climate.
Scientists Charles Keeling and Roger Revelle demonstrated in the 1950s that a large part of the carbon dioxide released from the burning of coal, oil and gas was remaining in the atmosphere because the oceans couldn’t absorb it fast enough.
A scientific advisory panel warned US President Lyndon Johnson of the dangers of adding greenhouses gases to the atmosphere back in 1965.
By 2007 there were no credible scientific sceptics left to challenge the broad projections and underlying scientific theory of climate change.
Two years later the National Academies of Science of the world’s major industrialised nations issued an unprecedented joint statement on the reality of climate change and the need for immediate action.
Despite overwhelming evidence, a cell of climate change deniers showed up for a debate last month in Valletta, organised by the Euro Media forum, a discussion platform which “celebrates freedom of expression while respecting diversity in society”.
Letters like this one are easy; the media’s incredible irresponsibility is a ludicrous target. Sent April 1:
From schoolchildren shirking homework to cardiac patients disregarding the advice of their doctors, there’s no shortage of people who act as if ignoring a crisis will make it vanish. But the psychological mechanisms of denial are not the only thing to blame for the widespread rejection of the scientific reality of global warming.
Imagine a world in which the simple existence of heart disease was vigorously disputed; a world where the media promulgated an equivalency between concerned pulmonary specialists and those proclaiming that heart attacks and COPD are fabrications of an international conspiracy. It sounds bizarre — but it’s analogous to the way many news outlets address the issue of climate change.
Climate scientists are, in essence, “planetary physicians.” While their diagnosis is scary and their advice inconvenient, we owe it to our descendants to stop pretending that the problem will go away if we don’t acknowledge it.
Warren Senders
And it’s printed.
environment Politics: clueless denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 7: The Door Is Open
The Worcester Telegram (MA) has a columnist named Bill Fortier. Sigh:
They say that as the climate warms, the weather will become more extreme, or, in today’s world of instant communication, perhaps we just see it more often. Although it does seem that when we were kids we never saw summer-like, mid-winter thunderstorms like we’ve had the past three winters.
While that is worrisome, I’m sure I’m not alone in saying there is something good to be said about our changing weather.
To wit, it was most enjoyable to go all winter without putting on layers of winter clothes and clunky boots.
And it was great to hear the spring peepers March 13, the first time I have ever heard them before St. Patrick’s Day.
We spent last week in Washington, D.C., where the cherry blossoms reached their peak March 20, the third earliest date ever.
We wore shorts all week, had dinner outside twice and walked on King Street in Alexandria, Va., eating ice cream like we would on a July night. If the climate is changing, bring it on.
George W. Bush said that, too, inviting attacks on our soldiers. Idiots. Sent March 31:
Bill Fortier asserts that people who know “way, way more” than he does cannot state with certainty whether the greenhouse gases we release affect the climate. Actually, they can, and do. Science is silent on whether the accelerating greenhouse effect is responsible for a specific incidence of extreme weather, simply because that’s not how science works — but there is no doubt whatsoever that extra atmospheric methane and CO2 are having radically destabilizing effects.
Meanwhile, Mr. Fortier wonders what’s wrong with a warmer winter. Rhapsodizing over his ability to wear shorts on a March day, he writes, “If the climate is changing, bring it on.” Maybe he should talk to New England’s fruit farmers, whose trees are blooming too early, or ask foresters what happens when there aren’t enough freezing temperatures to destroy the larvae of insect pests.
Bring it on, huh? Climate change is coming, invited or not.
Warren Senders
environment: agriculture media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 6: Let’s Have Another Cup Of Coffee, Let’s Have Another Piece Of Pie
New Hampshire’s fruit growers are getting worried, reports the Nashua Telegraph:
When you were basking in record warmth last week, farmers were worried. They knew the abnormal weather was making some plants vulnerable when seasonable weather returned.
On Monday night, their fears were realized.
“It got down to 21 degrees in some spots. On apples, we could have lost as much as 10 percent,” said Chip Hardy, owner of Brookdale Fruit Farm in Hollis. “If it had gotten down to 15, we could have lost 90 percent, so we were lucky it didn’t get that cold.”
The problem is that trees and bushes were fooled by a stretch of 80-degree days last week, producing their flowers roughly a month earlier than usual, leaving frost-sensitive buds exposed.
Fruiting plants from apple and peach trees to blueberry bushes and grape vines are vulnerable, as are some decorative plants such as magnolia trees.
We are so fucked. Sent March 30:
Yes, the early spring seems like good news for those who want to get out and bask in the sun. But farmers are right to be worried. When weather is this unpredictable, agriculture is impacted in countless ways, with ripple effects throughout our society. Large monocrops are more vulnerable to extreme weather and invasive insect pests, and food prices inevitably go up as availability goes down.
And yet our society is remarkably resistant to connecting the dots between isolated regional weather events, and the broader transformation of our climate that shows every sign of accelerating into a planetwide disaster. David Brooks’ article downplayed the obvious link between New England’s “winter that wasn’t” and global warming — a connection that we dismiss at our peril.
What is happening in New Hampshire is happening in thousands of regions all over the world; we must wake up to this clear and present danger.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Big Oil idiots Senate Republicans sustainability
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 5: My God! It’s Actually A Cookbook!
The Boston Globe, reporting on the readiness of our state’s Junior senator to do the bidding of his paymasters:
Senator Scott Brown joined with Senate Republicans on Thursday to foil President Obama’s plan to strip $24 billion in tax subsidies from the country’s largest oil companies, a stance that Democrats immediately focused on as an issue in the Massachusetts Senate race.
In voting against the bill, Brown contended the measure did not address the most pressing problem.
“I do not support this bill in its current form because it will do nothing to reduce prices at the pump,’’ Brown said.
Which, in a nutshell, is why you (and I) should be donating to Elizabeth Warren. Brown is an idiot. And he’s a Republican.
But I repeat myself.
Sent March 30:
In following the rest of his Republican colleagues in voting to sustain subsidies to oil companies, Scott Brown defies both common sense and the principles of Massachusetts residents. Ignoring the scientific consensus on climate change, our junior senator advocates for continuing our current levels of fossil fuel consumption — loading the climatic dice for a costly and dangerous future of extreme weather.
While Senator Brown’s rejection of environmentally ethical fiscal policy may be antithetical to our state’s values, his vote helps us clarify who he really represents. Unlike Bay State voters, Scott Brown’s big oil constituents get four billion dollars in subsidies and tax breaks every year. That’s seven thousand dollars a minute — a powerful political motivator!
At a time when America should be transforming its energy economy into a model of sustainability, Senator Brown and the GOP offer regressive policies that are both environmentally unsound and fiscally irresponsible.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots IPCC scientific method
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 4: They’ll Pry My Light Bulbs Out Of My Cold Dead Sockets…Or Something
The Boston Globe covers the IPCC report:
Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts, and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of climate scientists says in a report issued Wednesday. The greatest danger from extreme weather is in highly populated, poor regions of the world, the report warns, but no corner of the globe – from Mumbai to Miami – is immune. The document by a Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heat waves, deluges, and droughts.
More of the same. Sent March 29:
The latest IPCC report forecasting greatly increased risks of extreme weather disasters caused by global climate change is sure to surprise no one.
The people who’ve been paying attention to the ongoing war on the environment are already gloomily aware that things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better, given that it’s going to take the planet’s climate centuries or millennia to recover from the past century’s profligate carbon-burning spree.
And the people who believe in a giant secret cabal planning to raise our taxes and outlaw incandescent bulbs are already fully convinced that the IPCC is in on the conspiracy.
Given that science has an impressive record of steadily-more-accurate predictions and a built-in self-correction system — unlike political conservatives, who have been consistently wrong about pretty much everything — perhaps it’s time for our politicians and media to pay attention to the IPCC’s report.
Warren Senders