environment Politics: assholes denialists Ed Markey idiots Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 2: When You Care Enough To Send The Very Best
The Boston Globe reports on a recent Town Hall meeting held by Ed Markey (MA-07) on Boston’s vulnerability to a Sandy-like storm:
There could be enough water in Boston for boats to float through parts of the Back Bay and fish to swim across the Public Garden if a super storm were to hit Boston years from now. That was a worst-case prediction displayed on color-coded maps in Faneuil Hall today as part of a forum on the potential impact of climate change.
The maps detailing potential flooding, on stage as part of a “What If Sandy Happened Here?” forum, factored in rising sea levels and suggested that by 2050 a severe 100-year storm could also send floodwaters lapping into Central Square and Harvard Square in Cambridge.
“Sandy was a warning,” US Representative Edward Markey, a Malden Democrat long active in climate change legislation, said as about 150 people filled the Great Hall, where he led a town hall-style meeting on the costs Greater Boston could face if a super storm hits.
Cast as a gathering to contemplate the havoc climate change could cause, the meeting drew together speakers who focus on the issue and an audience that included many area activists.
“This reaffirms the need to put greater energy and greater effort into convincing others that this issue is significant,” James Kaufman, president and CEO of The Laboratory Safety Institute, a health, safety, and environmental affairs nonprofit in Natick, said after the hour-long meeting.
Maria Cooper, president of the environmental group Green Decade Newton, said the forum was “all the more inspiring because we can see that people are getting it. This is urgent stuff that we need to address in our everyday lives.”
Did I mention that I love my Congressman? Sent November 26:
Representative Markey deserves high praise for his relentless calls for action on global climate change, starting long before Superstorm Sandy returned the accelerating greenhouse effect to the national conversation. It’s particularly galling to compare the Congressman’s work on this issue with the anti-science positions of Republican members of the House of Representatives, who appear to be in a contest to see who can most enthusiastically advocate the most regressive ideas (such as Georgia’s Paul Broun, who recently described evolution, embryology, and cosmology as “lies from the pit of Hell.”).
Based on meticulous computer modeling and the careful analysis of massive amounts of data, climate science is as impartial as it gets. The GOP’s relentless politicizing of the by-now-completely-resolved debate on the causes and dangers of global warming is another symptom of their scientific illiteracy. Ed Markey’s research and advocacy on behalf of humanity’s future isn’t political strategizing, but reality-based humanitarianism.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Doha climate conference idiots Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 30: I’d Love To Turn You On…
The San Francisco Chronicle runs an AP story on the upcoming Doha conference, titled, “Will US role at climate talks change after storm?”
STOCKHOLM (AP) — During a year with a monster storm and scorching heat waves, Americans have experienced the kind of freakish weather that many scientists say will occur more often on a warming planet.
And as a re-elected president talks about global warming again, climate activists are cautiously optimistic that the U.S. will be more than a disinterested bystander when the U.N. climate talks resume Monday with a two-week conference in Qatar.
“I think there will be expectations from countries to hear a new voice from the United States,” said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute in Washington.
The climate officials and environment ministers meeting in the Qatari capital of Doha will not come up with an answer to the global temperature rise that is already melting Arctic sea ice and permafrost, raising and acidifying the seas, and shifting rainfall patterns, which has an impact on floods and droughts.
They will focus on side issues, like extending the Kyoto protocol — an expiring emissions pact with a dwindling number of members — and ramping up climate financing for poor nations.
With us in the studio is Senator James Inhofe. Senator? Sent November 24:
One of the most important factors in President Obama’s decisive re-election was the simple truth that Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republican Party were determined to ignore the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. From evolution-denying congressmen to Governor Romney’s mocking reference to rising sea levels, the GOP showed an ideologically-driven rejection of expertise that repelled voters. In 2012, America re-elected science and math.
For the Administration to dismiss this groundswell of popular support for common sense and environmental good-citizenship would be politically as well as globally irresponsible. At the upcoming Doha Climate Conference, America needs to prove to the rest of the world’s nations that our days of denial are over. Superstorm Sandy showed us what rapid climate change really looks like, and Governor Christie’s cooperation with the President demonstrated what a sensible Republican can do in a crisis. Will the rest of his party please pay attention?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility fossil fuels idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 29: Found My Way Downstairs And Drank A Cup / Looking Up, I Noticed I Was Late…
The Riverside, CA Press-Enterprise notes a recent study suggesting some folks are waking up:
Nothing like a natural disaster to make you believe in global warming.
A post-election survey of voters found that a majority of Americans understand Hurricane Sandy was made worse by climate change. The survey also found strong majorities of voters connecting climate change to the record high summer temperatures witnessed in 2012 as well as this year’s extraordinary drought.
The survey by Penn Schoen Berland found that 60 percent of Americans who voted in the 2012 presidential election agree with the statement that “global warming made Hurricane Sandy worse.” The survey also found that 73 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: “Global warming is affecting extreme weather events in the United States.”
A small but significant number of voters indicated that damage from Hurricane Sandy directly influenced their vote in the presidential election. Twelve percent of respondents said yes when asked, “Did the damage from Hurricane Sandy and the government response influence your vote in the presidential election.” And of those saying yes, 42 percent said it was “a very important factor” in casting their vote.
How much time have we wasted playing pretend games? Sent November 24:
The really troubling part of the Penn Schoen Berland study showing significant change in Americans’ increased awareness of climate change is that fully forty percent of our nation’s citizens don’t recognize a strong correlation even if it’s flooding their basements and dessicating their farmlands. That number testifies to the power of fossil fuel interests and their well-paid media enablers, who have spent enormous time and resources on muddying the debate — fostering confusion where the data instead points overwhelmingly to certainty.
How much more evidence will these doubters require? Clearly the statements of climate scientists won’t do the trick; when conservative politicians must reject even basic science to pass muster with their supporters, the testimony of experts is an irrelevance. Superstorm Sandy hit home for many. Perhaps our nation will only accept the scientific consensus when climate change isn’t just knocking on our doors, but knocking down our homes.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes highways idiots infrastructure Republican obstructionism transportation
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 28: Get Your Kicks!
The Vacaville Reporter (CA) runs an AP article on climate change’s impact on our transportation systems:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Wild weather is taking a toll on roads, airports, railways and transit systems across the country.
That’s leaving states and cities searching for ways to brace for more catastrophes like Super-storm Sandy that are straining the nation’s transportation lifelines beyond what their builders imagined.
Despite their concerns about intense rain, historic floods and record heat waves, some transportation planners find it too politically sensitive to say aloud a source of their weather worries: climate change.
Political differences are on the minds of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, whose advice on the design and maintenance of roads and bridges is closely followed by states. The association recently changed the name of its Climate Change Steering Committee to the less controversial Sustainable Transportation, Energy Infrastructure and Climate Solutions Steering Committee.
Still, there is a recognition that the association’s guidance will need to be updated to reflect the new realities of global warming.
“There is a whole series of standards that are going to have to be revisited in light of the change in climate that is coming at us,” said John Horsley, the association’s executive director.
In the latest and most severe example, Superstorm Sandy inflicted the worst damage to the New York subway system in its 108-year history, halted Amtrak and commuter train service to the city for days, and forced cancellation of thousands of airline flights at airports in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia.
In Washington state, “we joked we were having 100-year storms every year,” said Paula Hammond, head of the state’s Department of Transportation.
Joked. Ha ha ha….funny!
If there is any aspect of American domestic policy that should be exempt from partisanship, transportation is it. Everybody needs to get from place to place; nobody likes driving on rotten roads or coping with failing infrastructure. And yet, time and time again, we find that dogmatism stands in the way of a reality-based approach to renewing our country’s crumbling transportation systems.
That the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials re-named their Climate Change Steering Committee into something marginally less likely to set Republican alarm bells ringing is just another demonstration that obvious truths must be carefully disguised to pass muster with conservative politicians. The climate IS changing; our roads, rails, airports, waterways and public transport must be strengthened. This is a fact, not an opinion. When it comes to preparing America’s transportation for the climate crisis, there’s no room on the road for the ideologically-driven.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 25: New Math
The Iowa City Press-Citizen is aware of a problem:
More than 40 University of Iowa scientists — some of them irked by the lack of climate change discussion in the recent presidential election — added their name to a statement released Monday declaring that climate change caused the 2012 drought.
All told, 138 science faculty and research staff from 27 Iowa colleges and universities — 44 from UI — put their stamps of approval on the statement, which conceded that although science can’t with 100 percent certainty pin human activities as the drought’s culprit, such extreme weather events in recent years are symptomatic of a climate that’s growing warmer because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
With Iowa in the midst of an ongoing drought and the recent devastation of the East Coast by the unprecedented Hurricane Sandy, now is a “teachable moment” when it comes to climate change, said Jerry Schnoor, co-director of UI’s Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research and a leader in organizing the statement.
“We wanted to make clear that most scientists and people who teach science in our colleges and universities in Iowa feel quite strongly that climate change is here now and we’re suffering costs as a result of that,” he said. “There are a lot of things we can do to respond, both in terms of adapting to climate change and mitigating it and lowering our own emissions.”
Science, biyotches. Sent November 20:
While it was amusing to watch Republican strategists get sucker-punched by math and facts on election night, the moment of reckoning for climate change’s reality won’t be much to laugh about. Think about it: a major political party in the most powerful nation on Earth has rejected science and expertise in just about every area of policy. The GOP is grimly determined to create their own reality: Damn the experts! Full speed ahead!
This is fine for political reality, which is determined by the demands of the 24-hour news cycle. But climatic reality is determined by other factors, like the amount of CO2 in the upper atmosphere and the albedo of Arctic ice coverage. Carbon dioxide molecules don’t watch TV, and Arctic ice doesn’t care whether Karl Rove’s math is accurate. How much more devastation will it take for Republicans to acknowledge the scary factuality of a radically transforming climate?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Gore carbon tax denialists fee and dividend idiots tobacco industry
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 19: Roll Your Own?
The Durango Herald (CO) runs an AP piece discussing the benefits of a tax on carbon:
Experts on all sides of the issue have watched climate proposals fail in the past. Congress is still split, and many in the Republican party deny the existence of human-made climate change, despite what scientists say. Congress also on Tuesday blocked the European Union from imposing a tax on American airliners flying to the continent as part of an effort to reduce greenhouse gases.
Energy industry lobbyist Scott Segal said many utilities will fight a carbon tax.
“The conditions are far from ripe for a carbon tax, if for no other reason than a carbon tax is a tax on economic growth,” he said.
But environmental advocates are seizing the moment, determined not to let the interest in climate change subside with the floodwaters.
On Wednesday, former Vice President Al Gore launched a 24-hour online talkfest about global warming and disasters. Another group, 350.org, headed by environmental advocate and author Bill McKibben, is amid a 21-city bus tour.
Gore compared the link between extreme weather and “dirty energy” from coal, oil and natural gas to the links between cigarette smoking and lung cancer or the use of steroids and home runs in baseball.
They have a 350-word limit, which is way on the high side. Interesting how that affects the processes of composition. Sent November 15:
America’s fossil-fuel consumption is one of the most significant drivers of global climate change, and it’s revealing to follow up on former Vice-President Gore’s analogy with tobacco. Our entire economy is built around the ready availability and artificial cheapness of oil and coal, and the result has been a national addiction to these substances and the convenience they facilitate. Like heavy smokers, we recognize our dependency while pretending to be immune from the cold equations; like heavy smokers, we promise to quit but never seem to get around to it.
Of course, once the biopsy comes back positive, it’s too late for quitting to do much good, which is the position our civilization is in right now with fossil fuels. The diagnosis is very clear: Earth’s health is in dire jeopardy, with a planetary greenhouse effect on the brink of a catastrophic “tipping point” beyond which recovery will be impossible.
And the voices most loudly raised in denial? Unsurprisingly, their paychecks come from the very fossil fuel industry reaping huge profits from our addiction. Equally unsurprisingly, many of the same “experts” currently asserting that climate change is unrelated to fossil fuel consumption were testifying a few decades ago that tobacco didn’t have anything to do with lung cancer. They were lying then, and they’re lying now.
It’s time for America, and the world, to kick the fossil fuel habit once and for all. Oil, gas and coal need to come with warning labels, and we must stop subsidizing an industry that is destroying our home.
Warren Senders
It’s time
environment Politics: 350 assholes Barack Obama idiots media irresponsibility Republicans
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 18: Figures Don’t Lie, And Liars Can’t Figure
USA Today says that “Climate change worries have had a high profile in New York, post-Hurricane Sandy.” Gee, ya think?
Climate change is suddenly a hot topic again. The issue is resurfacing in talks about a once radical idea: a possible carbon tax.
On Tuesday, a conservative think tank held discussions about it while a more liberal think tank released a paper on it. And the Congressional Budget Office issued a 19-page report on the different ways to make a carbon tax less burdensome on lower income people.
A carbon tax works by making people pay more for using fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas that produce heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
A letter with actual numbers in it! Sent November 14:
Hurricane Sandy definitely brought climate change back into the national spotlight by making the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect exponentially harder to ignore. But another recent storm should also help bring global warming back to the policy table. On November 6, Hurricane Arithmetic made landfall on the coast of Republican self-delusion, as nerds and statisticians predicted election results far more accurately than any conservative pundits had ever imagined. Not only was the President re-elected, but math was vindicated.
As Mr. Obama heads into his second term, he and his administration must call America’s attention to two numbers: 350 and 400. The first describes the level (in parts per million) of atmospheric CO2 consistent with the survival of our civilization. The second is the level of CO2 in our atmosphere today. While political posturing over the “fiscal cliff” may make for good headlines, the imminent “climate cliff” is far, far more permanent.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes idiots John Boehner Republican obstructionism scientific consensus statistics
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 17: You Can Leave Your Hat On
BREAKING: John Boehner is still an asshole:
SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER has made some encouraging statements since last week’s election, pointing toward productive policy-making. This was not one of them:
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’ve had climate change over the last 100 years,” he told USA Today. “What has initiated it, though, has sparked a debate that’s gone on now for the last 10 years.”
The Ohio Republican continued: “I don’t think we’re any closer to the answer than we were 10 years ago.”
President Obama recently sounded some positive notes on climate change, perhaps the most neglected big issue of the 2012 campaign. His comments rekindled hopes of environmentalists that his second term will see more aggressive policymaking to combat global warming than did his first. Mr. Boehner’s words, which appear to mischaracterize the scientific debate on global warming, indicate that blinkered Republican opposition to doing much of anything about the problem may persist.
The Great Orange One is an utter waste of space. I can’t believe these Republicans, can you? Sent November 13:
The election is over; the nerds won. Statisticians and data-crunchers combined with a prodigious grass-roots effort brought victories to Democrats all over the US, and provided a spectacular view of conservative pundits and politicians stumbling all over themselves trying to explain how they could have gotten things so wrong.
But there’s another election in two years. In the realm of climate change, by contrast, we’ve only got one planet, and climatology’s statisticians and data-crunchers are unanimously warning us that we’re perilously close to ruining it forever. John Boehner’s years in Washington have taught him the wrong lessons; what’s needed right now is responsible action, not politically expedient procrastination. Once the full ramifications of the climate crisis are upon us, there’ll be no satisfaction for environmentalists in watching conservatives trying to rationalize their failure to take the its seriously. Speaker Boehner needs to lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus statistics
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 16: Wake Up And Smell The Red Bull
Oregon’s former SoS is one of those reality-based guys:
Bill Bradbury figures you don’t have to be a climate-change expert to know which way the wind is blowing.
The former Oregon secretary of state, who will discuss “Climate Reality” Thursday evening at Southern Oregon University, said he has seen denial over climate change slowly fade since he began giving talks about it in 2006.
“When I first started giving presentations, it was very normal to have a small group of deniers attending,” said Bradbury, 63. “Now I don’t need to convince anyone that climate change is happening.
“The focus has changed to, ‘OK, so what are we going to do about it?’ ” he added. “There are some who believe there is not much we can do to change the direction we are going. But most believe we can change how we act and affect climate change.”
Bradbury was one of the first 50 people trained in Nashville to spread the climate-change gospel according to former Vice President Al Gore. Bradbury has given about 300 presentations on climate change in Oregon, outlining the need to reduce carbon pollution caused by dependence on oil and coal.
In addition to recent weather extremes, including the fact this past July was the hottest on record for the nation, Bradbury will talk about energy needs in Oregon and strategies to reduce carbon pollution. As part of Gore’s Climate Reality Project, he met with leading climate change scientists this past summer.
Recent nationwide polls indicate about 70 percent of the population believes the global climate is changing because of human activity.
Will our talking heads pull out of their own rears? Who the hell knows? Sent November 13:
While the 2012 election forcefully demonstrated the power of statistical analysis, it should also end the mainstreaming of climate-change denial in our media and politics.
While Nate Silver’s prediction models were astonishingly accurate, he and other statisticians were mocked before the election by commentators relying less on science than on their own inscrutable blends of gut reaction and wishful thinking. By midnight Tuesday, however, it was clear: real-life numbers didn’t match those in the Republican bubble of denial. Conservatives’ cognitive dissonance as mathematical reality overwhelmed their expectations was dramatic (and occasionally hilarious).
Well, the world’s climate scientists are numbers-and-facts people, rather like Mr. Silver. And those same Republican pundits and politicians have denied the science of climate change for decades, ignoring the profoundly troubling results of genuine analysts while extolling the expertise of ideologically-convenient denialists. Not any more — a superstorm’s far more tangible than a 100-EV margin, and when climatic reality finally overwhelms conservative preconceptions, the results won’t be funny at all.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus Storms
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 14: Semolina Pilchard?
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s energy writer, Thomas Content, is one of many to stir the climate-change pot a bit. His column for November 10 is titled “Climate change is here, even if election skipped it.” Indeed:
Neither climate change nor the wacky weather of 2012 stirred much attention during the presidential campaign – a couple of conflicting snippets during the political conventions, a brief line in President Barack Obama’s election night victory speech, a mention here or there.
But climate scientists say the record warm weather of the past year, punctuated by extreme events such as superstorm Sandy in the Northeast, provides a glimpse of things to come and should push the issue higher on the list of national priorities.
Already, businesses, households and governments in Wisconsin are dealing with some of the climate-related changes that scientists expect to proliferate as the planet warms.
The extremes that Wisconsin has experienced this year include a record warm winter, a severe drought that gripped much of the country, and widespread flash flooding in far northwestern Wisconsin.
“A lot of these things that we’re seeing are the kinds of things that we might expect more of in the future,” said Dan Vimont, climate scientist and leader of an ongoing research and public outreach project, the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts.
One can hope our culture will wake up. The comments on the article, however, are not encouraging. Sent November 12:
As climate change disrupts the regional ecologies in which they flourished, innumerable species of animals are migrating to new territories in search of food and resources. We can observe these shifts dispassionately, through the eyes of science — while recognizing that many of these adaptive behaviors are bad news for our own species and for the civilization we’ve built. While millions of acres of new territory to colonize is great news for the mountain pine beetle, there’s no upside for us in watching once-green forests turn into dessicated matchsticks waiting for a spark to surrender their trapped carbon to the atmosphere.
Our inability to address climate change — or even simply to acknowledge its existence in our national discussion — is the central failure of our age. While an insect or mammal species can move onward to a new ecological niche, humanity’s “niche” is Earth itself. Where shall we go when our planetary home no longer welcomes us?
It’s time for our politicians to do the math on climate change. Further delay is unacceptable.
Warren Senders