environment: denialism deserts National parks
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 4, Day 4: A Horse With No Name?
The Riverside, CA Press-Examiner notes an upcoming conference on the effects of climate change on desert flora and fauna, which are really going to get it in the shorts as things start hotting up:
“This year’s conference is going to examine the fate of Joshua trees in Joshua Tree National Park. It’s going to look at our potentially drier southwestern climate, and we’re also going to look at how migrating birds might be affected by climate change.”
The southwestern United States, including the park and Mojave National Preserve, are expected to be some of the hardest hit areas under climate change models, which predict temperatures could jump as much as 7 degrees over the next century.
Scientists already are seeing evidence of warming, including the migration to higher elevations of the iconic Joshua trees and desert tortoises, said Shteir, whose group is endorsing the Desert Protection Act of 2011.
Sent March 27:
In 2011, most Americans had never seen an automobile, and the thought of a nation of motorists driving everywhere would have been considered a fever dream. To humans, a century seems a very long time. But ours is not the only timescale. From the perspective of our planet’s five billion years, a hundred trips around the sun is just a geological eye-blink. Which is why the news about global climate change is so alarming. Climatic transformations in the Earth’s past have taken place over thousands of years, allowing ecosystems a chance to evolve and adapt to changing temperatures and weather patterns. When this happens gradually over millennia, it’s like using the brakes to bring your car to a controlled stop; the same changes over a century are more like driving full-speed into a concrete wall. It’s time for the climate-change denialists to buckle up; we’re headed for a crash.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialism USDA
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 30: How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down On The Farm?
The Washington Post reports on a new initiative from the US Department of Agriculture:
MINNEAPOLIS — The federal government is investing $60 million in three major studies on the effects of climate change on crops and forests to help ensure farmers and foresters can continue producing food and timber while trying to limit the impact of a changing environment.
The three studies take a new approach to crop and climate research by bringing together researchers from a wide variety of fields and encouraging them to find solutions appropriate to specific geographic areas. One study will focus on Midwestern corn, another on wheat in the Northwest and a third on Southern pine forests.
Shifting weather patterns already have had a big effect on U.S. agriculture, and the country needs to prepare for even greater changes, said Roger Beachy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And since the changes are expected to vary from region to region, he said different areas will need different solutions. Some areas may gain longer growing seasons or suffer more frequent floods, while others may experience more droughts or shorter growing seasons.
Given that the WaPo has been climate-denial central in its OpEd pages for years (George Will primus inter pares), it’s always refreshing to see that its news division can still reprint an article from the AP.
Sent March 21:
It’s good news that the Department of Agriculture is putting some money towards preparation for the multivariate threats presented by runaway climate change. There is no doubt that the extreme weather events that accompany global warming present a grave danger to America’s agricultural productivity. Severe precipitation can erode farmland, destroy crop plants, or affect cultivation and harvesting. Furthermore, given the prevalence of monocultures on most large-scale farms, it is sobering to realize that regional temperature increases of only a few degrees can impact plant productivity significantly. But the USDA’s research isn’t enough. We must recognize throughout this country that denial of climatic facts is no longer an option; “tea-party” Republicans and timid coal-state Democrats both need to address scientific reality. There is no time to waste. If we fail to act decisively on the causes of anthropogenic global warming, a devastated agricultural system will be the least of our worries.
Warren Senders
environment: community denialism survivalism
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 22: Merastan Hamara Jai Jai Jai
The Portland (ME) Sunday Herald reprints an op-ed that first showed up in the Washington Post a little while back. Environmentalist Mike Tidwell talks about his decision to invest more heavily in survivalist accoutrements:
WASHINGTON – Ten years ago, I put solar panels on my roof and began eating locally grown food. I bought an energy-efficient refrigerator that uses the power equivalent of a single light bulb. I started heating my home with a stove that burns organically fertilized corn kernels. I even restored a gas-free lawn mower for manual yardwork.
As a longtime environmental activist, I was deeply alarmed by new studies on global warming, so I went all-out. I did my part.
Now I’m changing my life again. There’s a new set of dead bolt locks on all my doors. There’s a new Honda GX390 portable power generator in my garage, ready to provide backup electricity. And last week I bought a starter kit to raise tomatoes and lettuce behind barred basement windows.
Reading it again, I was struck by a significant omission that speaks volumes as to how deeply the Republican one-for-one and none-for-all ideology has permeated even the thinking of people on our side.
Mailed March 13:
Mike Tidwell’s pragmatic response to the reality of steadily-increasing climatic disruptions over the coming decades is correct — but incomplete. In his description of the steps he’s taken to prepare for what will certainly be a time of compounding difficulties, infrastructural disruptions, and interrupted food supplies, he omits perhaps the single most effective thing we humans can do to prepare for disasters we know are inevitable. Where do Mr. Tidwell’s neighbors figure in his plans? In circumstances where any individual or family unit will be terribly vulnerable, a community of people can persevere. While generators, food supplies, and survival skills are necessary in times of crisis, our capacity for cooperation to extend our influence more widely over time and space may be what rescues us from civilizational collapse. Interestingly, people who reject the notion of the “common good” are overwhelmingly likely to deny the reality of global climate change.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism media irresponsibility scientific consensus
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 18: I Know Nuzzink!
The Newberg Graphic (Newberg, OR) runs an op-ed from a guy named Brian Doyle, who speaks considerable sooth on climate issues:
While the political winds blow hot and cold, the climate and the weather it drives are oblivious to politics. Political pronouncements aren’t going to affect the climate any more than they can affect the weather, the tides or sunrise in the morning.
Politicians should be deciding what, if anything, to do about climate change rather than debating or denying scientific facts. Nonetheless, some politicians, their appointees and various talk show hosts have presumed to know more about the earth’s climate than scientists with a lifetime of experience and study. It’s as though controlling the climate was the same as swinging the next election.
It’s one thing to spin or misrepresent a political issue and another thing to alter or ignore physical reality. While political victories are temporary (via death or the ballot box) climate change is permanent and the consequences of misrepresenting it are far more serious than an election’s results or next year’s profits.
So I generated the following. The Semmelweis reference is a new twist. With a little luck, I’ll be able to make it tighter and pithier in subsequent iterations.
Sent March 9:
Assuming that our species makes it through the imminent evolutionary bottleneck posed by runaway climate change, future generations will look back at this moment in history with utter incredulity. How is it possible that our media and our politics — the very systems responsible for informing us about problems and addressing them in a timely and cognizant way — have abdicated their responsibilities so completely? The politicization of every aspect of our national discourse has expanded to include scientific fact, as if physical laws could somehow be negated by the right combination of sound bites and photo-ops. In 1847, when Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that handwashing drastically reduced mortality rates in hospitals, other doctors disregarded him, refusing to believe they’d carried infections from freshly-dissected cadavers to living patients. And hundreds of people died needlessly. When it comes to climate change, today’s Republican politicians and media figures are the philosophical heirs to Semmelweis’ colleagues; easily offended, mentally inflexible, always ready to sacrifice the lives of others rather than admit error.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes conspiracy theory denialism idiots royalty
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 2, Day 19: Bonnie Prince Charlie
The UK Sun runs a brief piece on Prince Charles, who’s come out swinging at the climate deniers:
PRINCE Charles blasted climate change sceptics yesterday, accusing them of playing “a reckless game of roulette” with the planet.
The campaigning royal added that doubters are having a “corrosive effect” on public opinion.
He asked: “How are these people going to face their grandchildren?”
Charles hit out at claims people fighting climate change “are secretly conspiring to undermine and deliberately destroy the entire market-based capitalist system”.
This letter was sent on February 10. I used the British spelling of “sceptic.” I may be delusional, but I always feel a greater freedom to use big words and fancy allusions when I’m writing to the British press. Even the Sun, which ain’t no Times of London.
Prince Charles’ comments on those who deny the threat of climate change are entirely apropos. The petroleum-funded media and the politicians they enable (both in the UK and the USA) are playing a very dangerous game: whether fomenting paranoid delusions that the world’s climatologists have formed a giant cabal secretly planning a New World Order, attributing the dramatic uptick in extreme weather events across the globe to “sunspot activity,” or simply refusing to acknowledge the existence of a problem, these individuals and organizations are setting the future of their own descendants, and the rest of us, at risk. One has only to examine their rhetoric to recognize that the term “sceptic” is a terrible misnomer; far from being empiricists committed to the use of reason, logic and evidence, they are so determined to make the world fit their increasingly twisted conspiracy theories that they’ve left Occam’s razor far, far behind.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialism EPA idiots scientific literacy
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 2, Day 12: Raisin’ My Lonely Dental Floss
Sally Mauk, in the Montana Missoulian, writes about a climatologist who spoke recently at the University of Montana. Naturally, he’s plenty worried. Also naturally, the dimwits in the comment section are full of the usual crap.
After I wrote the letter, I located the LTE link and was informed that the paper only prints letters from within their print circulation area. So I sent it anyway, but registered as a commenter and posted this there. I assume that I’ll be shouted at and told I’m a brainwashed follower of algore.
The conundrum of climate change requires action and understanding on a variety of fronts. For us to realize the gravity of the situation requires re-calibrating our own thinking, focusing more on the long-term consequences of our actions than we’ve ever considered. Our industry and business sectors must accomplish the same transformation, moving from the pervasive paradigm of quarterly profits as indicators of corporate health to a value system that encourages generational continuity rather than growth for its own sake (which Edward Abbey rightly described as “the ideology of the cancer cell.”). And our government must provide a regulatory authority which makes these changes possible, which is why the current anti-EPA legislation is an exceptionally bad idea. Given that it’s riddled with “climate zombies” who reject science and the evidence of experts, it’s a fair bet that no law regulating atmospheric pollutants will emerge from the current Congress. Meanwhile, we all need to learn from the scientists who’ve been studying it for decades; our skepticism is better saved for the oil-industry apparatchiks who daily tell us that climate change isn’t happening.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialism idiots scientific consensus Storms
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 2, Day 9: Auntie Em?
The Kansas City Star takes on the big storms & crazy weather by acknowledging that, as the headline puts it, “Some scientists believe extreme weather events becoming the norm.” The comments on this article are what prompted the closing sentences in my letter (mailed 2/2/11):
The phrase “some scientists” is misleading; it’s just about impossible for the scientific consensus on human causes of global warming to get any stronger. Barring a few petroleum-funded contrarians, the overwhelming majority of climate specialists agree: anthropogenic greenhouse emissions are warming the atmosphere, and the results are going to bring us a world of hurt in the coming decades. The current crop of freak weather events all over the world is just a preview of coming attractions; for decades climatologists have been predicting a worldwide increase in anomalous weather as a consequence of the greenhouse effect. Now their predictions are coming true from Queensland to Kansas as hundreds of millions of lives are disrupted by severe storms, flooding, snow, and drought. But climate-change deniers cannot admit they’ve been misled; their ideologically-driven rejection of global warming’s factuality is not susceptible to actual evidence, no matter how much of it piles up on their doorsteps.
Warren Senders
environment: climate zombies denialism scientific literacy
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 2, Day 5: Keep ’em Ignorant!
The Attleboro Sun-Chronicle (MA) runs a fairly standard “hey, it’s snowing! Does that mean global warming is bunk?” piece, replete with a quote from an Accuweather denialist at the end.
So-called “climate skeptics” are fond of pointing out extreme snowfalls as somehow “disproving” the whole notion of global warming, thereby demonstrating the dismal state of science education in our country. A warmer atmosphere means that more water evaporates and turns into precipitation, be it rain, snow, hail or any of the peculiar combinations for which Massachusetts is rightly famed. The science of evaporation is hardly controversial — and the science behind the greenhouse effect has been firmly established for many decades. One of the first predictions of climatic instability as a consequence of increased atmospheric CO2 appeared in Popular Mechanics — in 1953! — and climatologists have been refining their analyses ever since. But most “climate skeptics” are unworthy of the term; a skeptic is one who relies on evidence and understanding, while the current crop of naysayers wear their ignorance of basic scientific concepts as a badge of honor.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialism idiots scientific literacy
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 2, Day 3: Who Needs Experts When We Can Just Look Out The Window?
The Vancouver Times-Colonist points out that winter storms don’t disprove climate change. Since the headline (“Winter storms don’t undermine global warming science, climate experts say”) includes the phrase “experts say,” I am confidently expecting a barrage of “why would we trust them damn experts” comments, but I may be disappointed. Actually I couldn’t see any comments at all; perhaps the Times-Colonist doesn’t allow them? Anyway, rather than mock the deniers, I’m trying to be diagnostic.
Those who deny the existence of global climate change are caught in several all-too-human problems. One is the question of timescale; climatic shifts, while accelerating rapidly due to the greenhouse effect, are still too slow for most people to perceive (and by the time they’re happening fast enough for us to notice, it’ll be too late to do anything about it). Then there’s our inability to grasp the statistics of probability (since global warming doesn’t cause any single storm, flood, drought or weather event, but makes such events more likely everywhere). This innumeracy is part and parcel of the larger crisis of scientific ignorance; how can we understand all the crazy weather we’re having unless we know enough chemistry and physics to figure out how evaporation works? And finally, of course, is the sad fact that we in the developed world consider abandoning our conveniences a fate worse than death.
Warren Senders
environment: denialism idiots IPCC NOAA
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 25: We’re Telling You So
The Idaho Mountain Press joins the ranks of global warming alarmists with an article noting that things are getting hotter and it’s going to start hurting us, like, really soon. And the comments on this article are extraordinarily stupid, which prompted this response:
The pattern of online comments responding to articles discussing the very real threat of climate change is predictable. First there are the reflexive deniers — those whose talking points come directly from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. They can be recognized by their reliance on uninformed mockery (ridiculing Al Gore, for example). Then come the conspiracy theorists who would have us believe that all the world’s scientists are attempting to seize our assets, criminalize SUV ownership, and usher in a new socialist world order — a notion especially ludicrous to anyone who’s ever actually known a scientist. Close behind them are the “Climategate” afficionadi, who cling to the notion that a multiply-debunked non-scandal somehow invalidates decades of measurement and analysis. And when a voice of reason points out that the wealthy and powerful petroleum industry is far more likely to distort unwelcome data than climate scientists, he or she is treated to a stream of insults and derision. Meanwhile, the world grows ever hotter.
Warren Senders