environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists media irresponsibility Republicans Senate Republicans
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 8: It’s The Pits
The San Joaquin Record Net (CA) reports on local agriculture and the regional preponderance of denialism:
Today: cherries and the Valley mind.
In the past few days, the media reported that climate change threatens Valley crops. What is interesting about this is most Valley farmers don’t believe in climate change.
Farmers are realists; but most Valley farmers reject (what I believe to be) global warming reality. Something in the Valley’s conservative mindset impels them to.
“The climate does change,” said cherry grower Bruce Fry. “It’s not, in my opinion, because of humans. Look what volcanoes can do.”
Fry does not believe greenhouse gases are causing the greenhouse effect. Rather, he believes the Earth’s vast weather cycles bring changes naturally.
It doesn’t change his mind that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has warned Valley farmers to prepare for climate change by finding warmer-weather crops.
“The problem is I don’t trust Uncle Sam,” Fry said.
Government alienates Valley farmers mainly with its regulations. Farmers resent regulations as intrusive, ill-conceived and bad for business – which sometimes they are.
“These guys up at their offices in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., need to get out of their offices and see what is reality, not according to their spreadsheet and the book,” Fry said.
Nor does it persuade him that the overwhelming majority of scientists agree the Earth is warming.
The state Department of Water Resources, for example, said spring runoff has declined 10 percent over the past 100 years; double that in recent years.
A recent University of California, Davis, study found Valley “chilling hours” – cold temperatures required by many crops (including cherries) – have declined up to 30 percent.
“Usually there’s two sides to the scientific data, too,” Fry said. “Just like in statistics, you can manipulate that one way or the other.”
Cherries and the Valley mind. Sheesh. Sent September 30:
Of all the assaults on reason perpetrated by conservative politicians and their collaborators in the media, their relentless campaign of disinformation on the issue of global climate change is certainly the most damaging. While their ideologically driven policies on practically every issue may cause huge amounts of harm (whether it’s more people lost to gun violence, more people living in poverty, or more unnecessary wars), but there is always the hope that given enough time, our species can find solutions and resolutions. Given another millennium, who can believe humanity won’t figure out a better way?
But when it comes to global warming, the Right’s misrepresentations and anti-science rhetoric may have ensured that we won’t have the time we need. We’ve known about the greenhouse effect for more than 150 years; scientists have been urging American presidents to act on limiting CO2 emissions for half a century — and conservative media and politicians have been blocking meaningful action for just as long. But the kicker lies in the fact of “tipping points.” Climatologists predict that when certain temperature thresholds are exceeded, planetary climate systems will trigger rapidly escalating feedback loops of civilization-ending power — and we’re currently exceeding those thresholds, right now.
This year’s cherry crop may be a good one, but unless all of us recognize the threat and act rapidly and decisively on a global level, the long-term forecast is for a bitter harvest indeed.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists false equivalence farming media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 7: Straining Conditions.
The Merced Sun-Star (CA) reports on the problems farmers are facing:
Ten miles outside of Modesto, in the farming town of Hughson off Highway 99, the Duarte Nursery is at the front line of dramatic changes under way in California’s immense agriculture industry.
The family-run nursery, founded in 1976, is one of the largest in the United States, and there’s a good chance the berries, nuts and citrus fruits eaten across the West began their journey to market as seedlings in Duarte’s 30 acres of greenhouses, labs and breeding stations.
The nursery’s owners have built a thriving business using state-of-the-art techniques to develop varieties adapted to the particular conditions and pests that California farmers face.
These days, according to John Duarte, president of the nursery, that means breeding for elevated levels of heat and salt, which researchers say are symptoms of climate change, even if Duarte doesn’t necessarily see it that way.
“Whether it’s carbon built up in the atmosphere or just friggin’ bad luck,” he said, “the conditions are straining us.”
That friggin’ bad luck will get you every time. Sent September 30:
As growing seasons shift by weeks or months, as weather extremes endanger crops, as droughts yield vast acreages of dessicated stubble, far too many farmers are reluctant to recognize the reality of global warming. Why? When it comes to climate change and its effects on agriculture, there’s only one reason growers in America are still unpersuaded: our irresponsible news and opinion media.
When reporting on medicine, TV news doesn’t include an alternative viewpoint on the medieval theory of “humours.” When discussing the space program, talking heads correctly ignore conspiracy theorists who maintain the moon landing happened on a Hollywood soundstage. But when it’s time to discuss climate issues, our print and broadcast outlets bend over backward to ensure equal representation for the fossil fuel industry.
This is accomplished with “false equivalence,” where a genuine scientist (whose genuine data show a genuine problem) is “balanced” by a petroleum-funded spokesperson (whose spurious data don’t show a thing). By confusing the conversation, they redirect the political pressure for climate solutions, preserving the (highly profitable) status quo.
But any farmer knows Mother Nature can’t be fooled forever. By sowing misinformation and confusion, our media and their corporate sponsors ensure a harvest of disaster.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture farming sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 5: The Reaper Will Reap
The Fresno Bee (CA) notes the likely impact of a transformed climate on regional agriculture:
New science and research has San Joaquin Valley farmers taking a harder look at the effect that climate change may have on their industry.
If researcher’s predictions hold true, the Valley’s multi-billion dollar agriculture industry will be hit with longer stretches of hot temperatures, fewer colder days and shrinking water supplies.
What that means for agriculture is potentially lower yields, a loss of revenue and fewer acres being farmed.
Farmers and industry leaders say that while there is still skepticism among their ranks, they are doing what they can to stay ahead of the issue, including educating themselves, testing new fruit varieties or investing in water-saving technologies.
“You know, this is sort of like Y2K,” said Joel Nelsen, president of the Exeter-based California Citrus Mutual, a citrus trade group. “You better figure out if it is going to affect you or not and what are the possible scenarios.”
One of those scenarios is not good news for farmers. Researchers predict that rising temperatures over the next several decades could pinch the yields of some Valley crops, including an 18% drop in citrus, 6% in grapes and 9% among cherries and other orchard crops.
Nelsen said he was one of the early naysayers. The early debates about climate change were often mired in politics, or seen by farmers as an agenda pushed by the environmental community. But more credible research has caused many to take the issue more seriously.
“I am not completely buying into it,” Nelsen said. “But as an industry, it behooves us to be out in front of an issue that could affect the production of citrus in the state.”
Nelsen wants to know how hotter temperatures will affect the flavor of citrus fruit and how oranges will develop their vibrant color with fewer colder days.
One of these days the “if it had an Arabic name the Republicans would be lining up to denounce it” idea will see print. Sent September 27:
If a terrorist group threatened our farmlands, Congress would react. If a terrorist group threatened our water supply, Congress would react. If a terrorist group threatened our infrastructure, our power grid, or our communications systems, you can bet your bottom dollar you’d see our legislators sounding the alarm. Why, then, have they been so reluctant to acknowledge the threat of global climate change, which endangers all aspects of our society from top to bottom?
It’s too bad that the greenhouse effect doesn’t come with a scary Arabic-sounding name; that might persuade the Islamophobic Republican Party to pay attention to something that puts more Americans at risk than any jihadist nightmare scenario. Seriously, when we contemplate the effect of climate change on agriculture, it’s absolutely clear that we’re facing a world of hurt, with spiking food prices and diminished production heralding a future in which hunger affects more of our nation’s population than at any time in the past century.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture media irresponsibility oceanic acidification sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 1: Driver, How Can I Get Scrod In This Town?
The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports on the parlous condition of the ocean:
SANTA CRUZ – A new study shows that increasingly acidic seawater threatens the food supply in developing countries, particularly island nations dependent on fish for protein.
Released today, the report is the first to rank the threat to countries from the phenomenon, which researchers say is related to climate change. Researchers factored in nations’ exposure to acidification, their dependency on seafood as a food source and their ability to adapt.
“You’re potentially going to have a lot of people that will lose a significant source of protein, something that they sustainably harvested for thousands of years,” said report author Matthew Huelsenbeck, a marine scientist with the conservation group Oceana. “Their way of life is threatened.”
Seafood is an important source of protein, particularly in the developing world, where it supplies 15 percent of the protein for 3 billion people. But oceans are also a key absorbent of carbon dioxide, taking in 300 tons per second – about a quarter of all carbon dioxide produced worldwide.
That has taken a toll, with ocean acidity up 30 percent since the mid-18th century. The change recently has led fish populations to seek out cooler, less acidic waters, and the resulting carbonic acid threatens coral reefs and shellfish.
But I don’t eat fish, so I’m okay, right? Ha ha ha ha ha…
Sent September 24:
While climate change has been largely ignored by politicians and media alike — or else subjected to ludicrous false-equivalency reportage — the lack of attention given to ocean acidification is incomprehensible. As the seas absorb CO2, their pH levels change, disrupting the ecological balance upon which much of the planetary food chain rests.
Less than a decade ago, the Bush administration raised the possibility that terrorists would contaminate our food supply — perhaps poisoning hundreds of citizens. That’s a scary thought — but as fodder for nightmares, it’s dwarfed by the fact that since literally billions of people rely either directly or indirectly on the sea for their food, collapsing oceanic ecosystems could trigger starvation on a level almost impossible to imagine.
In their inability to address the consequences of the burgeoning greenhouse effect, our political and media establishments demonstrate a tragic, and inexcusable, indifference to America’s future.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture extreme weather weather patterns
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 22: He Lives On Credit Till The Fall
The Christian Science Monitor has an intelligent article on a weather phenomenon known as a “blocking pattern.”
As the summer of 2012 winds down, with drought and searing temperatures its hallmark for much of the continental United States, researchers are trying to get a better handle on the factors that contribute to the persistence of weather patterns responsible for the extremes.
The immediate culprit: patterns of atmospheric flow that steer storms along a given path for weeks, heating and depriving some areas of needed rain while drenching others. Such blocking patterns are a global phenomena, a normal component of Earth’s weather systems.
But some researchers suggest that global warming’s influence on the Arctic and on the tropics can change circulation patterns in ways that keep blocking patterns in place longer than they otherwise might.
For the continental US, blocking has been a byword for much of the year. The first eight months of 2012 have gone into the books as the warmest January-August period on record for the continental US, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The 12-month span ending in August 2012 was the warmest 12 months on record. The summer itself ranks third among the warmest summers on record.
Impossible. Weather only exists on television. Sent September 15:
Our complex industrialized culture ensures that many of us are profoundly distanced from the natural systems upon which, ultimately, our lives depend. For countless city-dwellers and suburbanites, a cow is just a picture on a milk carton, and ears of corn grow naturally wrapped in cellophane at the local supermarket. This separation means that we don’t recognize threats to our agriculture; droughts and crop failures are just words on print or a short clip on the evening news.
But as the old song has it, “the farmer is the one who feeds us all.” As extreme weather keeps impacting crops throughout America and the world, the farmer’s bounty may no longer be enough. When the climate crisis starts hitting Americans both in the wallet and the stomach, will we finally pay attention? And will we start respecting the scientists whose work helps us understand the complex dynamics of the situation?
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
Education environment Gardening: agriculture biology corporate irresponsibility ecology sustainability symbiosis
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 26: Big Bee Gets The Honey
The Kitsap Sun (WA) is one of a number of papers running a Seattle Times story about a scientist who studies flowers:
SEATTLE (AP) — University of Washington researcher Elinore Theobald is studying the relationship between flowers and their pollinators on Washington’s highest mountain. And what she is finding so far — avalanche lilies at higher elevation set seed at one-third the rate of lilies elsewhere on the mountain — points to troubling questions.
Is it possible that the lilies are struggling because of a mismatch in their timing with their pollinators? And does that, in turn, point to trouble as the climate changes?
Theobald, a doctoral candidate, is working with field assistants Natasha Lozanoff and Margot Tsakonas to understand not just how a single species might be affected by even small changes in temperature, but how biological interactions between species respond to changing climates.
It is, if you will, a burning question: The average annual temperature in the Pacific Northwest has increased 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1920, and is projected to increase an additional 3.6 to 7.2 degrees or more by the end of the century, according to the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington.
What might that mean for plant and animal communities? One way to find out is to head to the mountain, Theobald figured, where the range in elevation can be a proxy for the shifts in climate that are forecast.
She posits that understanding how plant and pollinator interactions are playing out at those different elevations today might be a clue to what will occur in the future. And if you love avalanche lilies, it might not be good.
A flower is a lovesome thing. Sent August 21:
One of the most important things to be learned from studying ecological relationships is that every living thing on the planet is connected intricately with countless other living things. Humanity’s perch at the high end of the food chain depends on the millions of complex symbiotic relationships that collectively form Earth’s biosphere — like those between flowers and their pollinators. The University of Washington’s Elinore Theobald and her team of researchers have uncovered some very troubling evidence suggesting that these examples of nature’s genius in fostering teamwork may be at considerable risk due to the rapid acceleration of global climate change.
Just as individual achievements depend on the infrastructure created by a well-functioning society, so is our species’ collective progress built on an environmental “infrastructure” millions of years in the making. While the past century of industrial growth has brought our civilization to a level of remarkable accomplishment, it has also disrupted the climate in ways that seem likely to have disastrous consequences.
If our internet goes out for an hour, we feel sorely inconvenienced. But the planetary environment is a larger, older, and far more essential kind of “world-wide web” — one we cannot afford to lose.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists drought
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 19: Arkansas Traveler Meets Rocky Raccoon.
The Black Hills Pioneer (SD) reprints Gene Lyons’ piece on his cows:
Of all the ways nature has to kill you, drought may 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.
The National Weather Service calls it an “exceptional drought.” Nobody I talk to can remember anything like it. 1980 was bad, but the devastation was more limited in scope. What’s happening in Arkansas is taking place across the entire middle of the country — a remorseless, slow-motion catastrophe.
As of 8 pm on August 8, there were no comments. This will see blogspace 11 days from now, on the 19th. I wonder what the ratio of denialists to sane people will be by then?
It’s too bad Gene Lyons’ cows don’t watch FOX News or listen to conservative talk radio. They’d surely feel better on learning that their dessicated Arkansas pasture is an isolated anomaly and a liberal hoax. Seriously, don’t you think the few remaining climate-change denialists in politics and the media must be getting a little uneasy? They’re still trying to reject the science of global warming while the entire country is setting new records for heat and drought, and those pesky climatologists keep coming up with more corroborative evidence.
And the environment just isn’t cooperating with the denialist message anymore. When a freak snowstorm fell on Washington, DC, James Inhofe, the self-proclaimed “number one enemy of the Earth, built an igloo with a sign on top, mocking Al Gore. It’s pretty hard to do that when you’re on your third consecutive week of hundred-degree-and-higher temperatures.
This is what climate experts have been predicting for decades would be the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect. Now, as their forecasts are coming true with disturbing frequency, the anti-science zealots are still hard at it, hoping to persuade us that there’s nothing to worry about.
Mr. Lyons’ cows know better. So should we.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialism drought media irresponsibility sustainability
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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: 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