environment: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 29: One False Move And The Bunny Gets It!
The Kennebec Journal (ME) has a denialist jackass named M.D. Harmon weighing in on a debate between various candidates for Senate in the state:
“Democrat Cynthia Dill answered next: ‘The exact opposite of what he said.’ Dill said the evidence is clear and ‘I am also convinced that it is the biggest threat to civilized society.'”
Wow. The chance that temperatures might rise on average a couple of degrees over the next hundred years is a bigger threat to civilization than the chance that Islamic jihadists might get nuclear bombs?
Doesn’t she know it will be a lot hotter at Ground Zero if the Iranians blow up Tel Aviv (or, for that matter, New York) than it might become on a midsummer day in Cape Elizabeth in 2075 because of “climate change”?
As “biggest threats to civilized society” go, one can think of quite a few more immediate worries than Al Gore having his beachfront house in Malibu swamped by a higher tide than he’s used to.
The article added, “Former Gov. Angus King, an independent, disagreed with Summers, too, and pulled up a graph on his smartphone showing carbon dioxide levels rising in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. ‘I don’t see how you can possibly avoid the science,’ he said.”
OK, Mr. King. You’re a smart guy, and we both know that carbon dioxide levels have been rising since industrial development began lifting people out of widespread poverty in the 19th century.
But those levels have been 10 or 20 times higher in the distant past, and somehow life managed to continue.
Indeed, it flourished, as carbon dioxide is plant food and nursery owners now pump it into their greenhouses because current atmospheric levels aren’t high enough for maximum growth.
If carbon dioxide increases, so will food crops and trees, and that’s not a bad thing.
Double facepalm. Sent September 22:
As M.D. Harmon demonstrates, the ludicrous climate-change-doesn’t-exist arguments just keep on a’coming. Scientifically aware citizens do grow tired of playing whack-a-mole; there are surely better ways to spend one’s time than in endlessly debunking the same old arguments, exposing the same old strawmen.
Yes, life existed back when CO2 levels were much higher than they are today. No, it wasn’t human life. Yes, given enough time to evolve into new conditions, life is adaptable. No, the accelerating greenhouse effect isn’t going to give us enough time; we’ve got, not millions of years, but a few centuries.
Yes, many world governments are shying away from greenhouse gas reduction treaties. No, it’s not because they’re a bad idea, but because the fossil fuel industry is pouring billions of dollars into misdirection and misinformation.
Yes, a two degree increase seems small. No, it isn’t: two degrees (Celsius, not Fahrenheit) is the now-abandoned-as-unattainable maximum level consistent with sustainable civilization; we’re now heading for an increase closer to six degrees,. And therein lies the difference between climate reality and Harmon’s jihadist-with-a-bomb fever dream: a city or nation might take a decade to rebound from a terrorist attack, but an overheated planetary atmosphere (replete with mass extinctions, whole populations of climate refugees, collapsed agriculture and destroyed infrastructure) may well set human civilization back by millennia.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots Mitt Romney scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 27: Suck On This!
The Bend Bulletin (OR) runs the same McClatchy story on the two campaigns’ approaches to climate issues:
Romney has said previously that he believes climate change is occurring and that human activity is a contributing factor.
During the Republican primary season, though, he said he didn’t believe it was the right course to spend “trillions and trillions” to reduce carbon emissions.
More recently, he said in a questionnaire submitted to Science Debate, a nonprofit organization focusing on science issues in the presidential campaign, that he believes human activity contributes to global warming and that policymakers should consider the risk of negative consequences.
Frank Maisano, a lobbyist whose firm represents energy interests and who has been involved in climate change discussions for 15 years, cautioned not to read too much into Romney’s dig about the rise of the oceans. It was designed to show Obama is “a little bit out of touch,” he said.
“Right now, you need someone who cares about you rather than these larger, soaring rhetorical issues,” Maisano said.
Sheesh. Sent September 20:
So according to a representative of the energy industry, climate change is a “soaring rhetorical issue.” How bizarre. When Frank Maisano suggests that discussion of our civilization’s future happiness and prosperity of our civilization is “rhetoric,” he’s really saying that the short-term profitability of his clients in the oil and coal business is more important than the world our children and grandchildren will inhabit.
When ocean acidification has broken the food chain, when extreme weather has devastated agriculture, when vanishing glaciers have ended water supplies for innumerable cultures everywhere around the planet, when rising seas have wiped entire nations off the map — will Mr. Maisano and his colleagues finally put down their quarterly reports and address the catastrophic transformations they have wrought?
To be sure, we need action even more than “soaring rhetoric.” But Republicans and energy lobbyists offer only a toxic blend of legislative paralysis and mendacious misrepresentations.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama denialists idiots media irresponsibility Mitt Romney Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 25: She Said She Said…
The Anchorage Daily News runs a McClatchy story comparing the two presidential candidates’ approach to climate change:
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It was just six words, but when President Barack Obama gave a shout-out to global warming in his acceptance speech this month, he reintroduced an issue that had all but disappeared from the political debate.
“Climate change is not a hoax,” Obama said, an assertion that brought Democratic National Convention delegates to their feet, as he pledged to continue approaching energy policy in a way he said would “continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet.”
In a year when the political debate has lacked nearly any discussion of climate change, some environmentalists have struggled to summon enthusiasm for the Democratic president they helped elect in 2008 in part because of his views on global warming. So they rejoiced when the president rebutted a taunt tossed out by Republican candidate Mitt Romney the week before. Romney had quipped in his own acceptance speech in Tampa, Fla., that Obama “promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.”
“My promise is to help you and your family,” Romney added.
It was a rhetorical flourish, an attack line offered to make the point that Romney understands the kitchen table issues that, he says, the president doesn’t. But environmentalists heard it as heresy.
“Twenty years from now, history is going to judge the next generation on how they responded to the destabilization of our climate,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “With a couple of short sentences, Romney made clear what’s at stake in this election.”
It looks increasingly improbable that Mitt is going to get anywhere near the oval office. Good. Sent September 18:
It stretches credulity that a significant percentage of Americans continue to reject the reality of climate change. This is both an environmental and an educational crisis; too many of us spurn the evidence of both science and our senses in favor of the comforting untruths peddled by a fossil-fueled media.
Scientific discourse is couched in careful and meticulous language; responsible climatologists will shy away from definitive statements connecting, say, a particular extreme weather event with the burgeoning greenhouse effect. That’s because science deals with probabilities, correlations and complexities — not in polemics. But there’s a reason these specialists are exceptionally worried: the evidence for runaway atmospheric warming is unequivocal and unambiguous, and the likely effects of even moderate warming are devastating to agriculture, infrastructure, and the integrity of local and regional ecosystems.
By steadily ignoring the science of climate change, both our media and politicians have been profoundly irresponsible. A crisis of planetary magnitude demands a commensurate response — and there can be no moral justification for continued ignorance.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots scientific consensus tobacco industry
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 23: Show Us Your Lark Pack!
The Tri-City News (Vancouver, BC) has an excellent editorial highlighting the venal and mendacious nature of the denial industry:
There were times this summer when I thought I didn’t need science to tell me global warming is real: sweating in my seat at Theatre Under the Stars, watching the frightening heat waves in the east and avoiding golf because it was too hot.
But luckily, most of us base our conclusions about global warming not on anecdotes about extreme summer weather but on scientific research and consensus.
But not my colleague, who, thanks partly to Exxon Mobil, is one of a group of environmental deniers not swayed by the overwhelming scientific consensus about climate change.
Deniers don’t believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the internationally mandated IPCC, which has, over the last 10 years, compiled four scientific reports based on the work of 2,500 scientists from 130 countries. Each IPCC report warns of the dangers of global warming caused by man-made greenhouse gases.
And deniers don’t believe the body of literature in scientific journals, which, over the past decade, contained 928 articles on global warming, none of which included a scientific denial that man is hastening global warming.
Climate change-denying groups are convinced that global warming is a scientific hoax, a scare tactic dreamed up by environmentalists to frighten us into supporting anti-business laws and regulations.
I agree that there is a conspiracy to misrepresent the facts about climate change but 2,500 environmental scientists from 130 countries aren’t in on it. Exxon Mobil is.
Since 1998, Exxon has doled out $22,123,456 to climate change-denying groups. The Heritage Foundation ($730,000), Frontiers of Freedom, ($1.2 million) and 40 other groups received money from Exxon to help deny climate change. Even B.C.’s Fraser Institute has bagged $120,000 from Exxon since 1998.
Tareyton is Better. Charcoal Is Why.
Sent September 16:
The climate-change denial industry has worked hard for the past couple of decades, spreading confusion and misinformation about the reality, causes, and consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect. These people — the same characters who reassured us for years that nicotine wasn’t addictive and the link between smoking and lung cancer was inconclusive — are skillful, well-funded, and unencumbered by any responsibility to the truth.
But tobacco addiction’s public health consequences were limited to the smokers and their neighbors, with no multi-generational impacts. Climate change is an entirely different story, with effects that will still be felt a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years from now. It is as if cigarette smoking brought cancer, heart disease, and emphysema not just to the smokers but to a hundred generations of their descendants. In an odious bargain, the denialists are sacrificing the future of human civilization for short-term personal gain.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 21: So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed
The Marysville, CA Appeal-Democrat reprints that same stupid editorial quoting a Heartland Institute flack:
When Hurricane Isaac hit Louisiana, “the storm provided a rare break in one of the longest periods of hurricane inactivity in US history,” said James Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute, Indeed, 2012 also is breaking records for the lack of tornado activity, according to the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration records. Ditto for droughts and floods, records show.
Low-Hanging Fruit….Sent September 14:
It was just a few months ago that the Heartland Institute was opened up to public disgust and ridicule when the secretive conservative think tank initiated a billboard campaign comparing climate scientists to the Unabomber. Given that they apparently had more billboards ready to go which extended the comparison to other major villains, including Charles Manson, the controversy probably did this group of diehard climate-change denialists a favor. Around the same time, climatologist Dr. Peter Gleick released internal documents regarding Heartland’s plans to promulgate misinformation about climate change to science teachers in American public schools. Gleick, by the way, has been completely exonerated of any wrongdoing — something which cannot be said of Joe Bass and the rest of his colleagues at Heartland.
An op-ed prominently quoting a Heartland Institute spokesman on climate change deserves to be taken about as seriously as a tobacco industry statement denying a link between smoking and cancer. Oops! Turns out Heartland has a long-standing relationship with the cigarette industry. Paging Philip Morris!
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 19: Sunny Days I Thought Would Never End
The Orange County Register (CA) is a wingnut outpost, and they’re true to form in an editorial published on September 11:
For years, President Barack Obama has been curiously low-key about global warming, or climate change, as politically correct terminology now prefers. Perhaps that’s because, when running for office in 2008 he overpromised, declaring that his nomination would mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal.”
It wasn’t quite passing the buck, but the president altered his climate-change rhetoric slightly last week in accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for a second term. “More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke,” Mr. Obama said. “And in this election, you can do something about it.”
The president’s assurance that a vote for him will “do something about” droughts, floods and wildfires is reminiscent of his 2008 hyperbole. Climate alarmism relies on connecting disparate and often-unrelated dots in a hypothetical chain of cause and effect that is far from proven.
When climate alarmists declare the Earth is experiencing unprecedented horrific weather because of global warming and man-made greenhouse gases, it’s just so much hot air.
When Hurricane Isaac hit Louisiana, “the storm provided a rare break in one of the longest periods of hurricane inactivity in U.S. history,” said James Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute, Indeed, 2012 also is breaking records for the lack of tornado activity, according to the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration records. Ditto for droughts and floods, records show.
James Taylor, huh? I tend to lean a little more in the direction of Fire and Rain. Sent September 12:
When your dismissal of the world’s climate scientists is built around a statement from a Heartland Institute spokesman, you know you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. After all, they’re the same people who equated genuine environmentalists with the Unabomber in a scurrilous billboard campaign that was only halted after a huge public outcry. These are the same people who instituted a massively-funded campaign to insert misleading science curricula in our nation’s public schools, with the express aim of muddying public understanding of the climate crisis. Given their public record of mendacity and character assassination, Heartland’s reliability as a source of meaningful data and analysis is close to zero.
Despite the pronouncements of a few contrarians, the conclusions of the world scientific community about climate change are pretty darned alarming. They agree that we’re facing a complex and extremely dangerous period in our civilization’s history — one that will require every ounce of foresight and preparation we can muster. “Alarmism” under these circumstances is just plain common sense.
Remember that the CIA’s warnings about Osama Bin Laden in the spring of 2001 were repeatedly dismissed as “alarmism” by the Bush administration — and we all know how that turned out.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 17: Reality Bites
The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette reprints a WaPo editorial on Arctic ice melt, under the headline “Ice Melt Fuels Need For Climate Change Action.” True enough:
The Arctic is getting warmer faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. The latest evidence came in an announcement from the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center saying that, as of Aug. 26, the Arctic sea ice cover shrank to 1.58 million square miles this summer, the smallest area since satellite measurements began in 1979. The trend is expected to continue in the next few weeks.
Over the past three decades, the average extent of the Arctic sea ice has declined by 25 to 30 percent, and the rate of decline is accelerating. In the past, older, thicker ice would drift away and be replaced by seasonal ice. But now more of the older ice is melting in the Arctic, a phenomenon that had been relatively rare. Also, less seasonal ice is replacing it.
What’s alarming is that in recent years scientists have detected a feedback effect: The seasonal sea ice melts more quickly, and the decline results in more heat absorption by open
I pivoted from this to a direct “Republicans suck” letter. Sent September 10:
Democratic cowardice on the issue of climate change should remind us that there is nothing praiseworthy about inaction in an emergency. But when it comes to moral turpitude on a planetary scale, nothing beats the current Republican stance on energy and global warming. Yes, President Obama’s recent fleeting reference was probably too little, too late — but that’s a far cry from openly mocking the crisis, as Mitt Romney did in his corresponding speech in Tampa.
Today’s GOP is a group of anti-science radicals who would institute policies based not on verifiable reality, but on their own corporatist fever dreams. Science, however, doesn’t do wishful thinking, and the laws of physics and chemistry are immune to Mitt Romney’s celebrated charm (sic) or Paul Ryan’s equally celebrated candor (sic). Democrats are far from perfect, but in the fight against climate change, the Republican dreamworld is a nightmare in the making.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots ignorance Republicans
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 15: Take That! And That! And That!
The Lawrence Journal-World (KS) discusses the role of science in campaigning and governance:
This fall, President Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney will have a series of debates covering domestic and foreign affairs. The first debate should be about Science, with a capital S. Why? Because Science affects every aspect of society, underpinning smart policy governing energy, food production, human health, national security, economic growth, environmental fitness, natural resources and the quality of life.
How well versed or advised are our candidates in the science of climate? Water? Biofuels? Biomedicine? Is the science they cite credible or quack? Face it: Political expediency never lets the scientific facts get in the way, opting for soothing delusions over tough, responsible policy implications.
Let’s begin with two questions.
Climate Change. As The Economist magazine declared recently, we have entered the Anthropocene Era, in which humans are the greatest agents of change on a planetary scale. Global warming, much of it human-induced, is playing with the life-support systems of the planet. If unchecked, potentially we face: devastation of our oceans, protein resources, fresh water and agro-production; virulent diseases run amok; disruption of ecosystems that clean our air, water and soil; extinction of half or more of Earth’s plants and animals; and sea-level rise and inundation of coastal cities. Yet, during the Republican primaries, all but one of the candidates proudly ridiculed climate change and the science behind it.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Sent September 8:
Even taking into account their long history of scorn for expertise, the Republican party’s eagerness to deny the essentiality of science and mathematics in formulating public policy is a spectacular celebration of ignorance. While their spokespersons proudly oppose “cultural relativism,” the GOP’s tenuous and tortured relationship with the verifiable reality of climate change suggests that they are the party of factual relativism, where ideologically inconvenient truths are twisted when they’re not ignored outright.
How else to describe it when, confronting rising sea levels, North Carolina legislators outlaw accurate measurement and analysis, Virginia lawmakers simply ban the phrase, and Mitt Romney, on stage in Tampa, turns it into a laugh line? While television news often distorts the facts to further a preconceived narrative, the real world is not so malleable. Any politician who treats the laws of chemistry and physics as annoyances to be mocked or dismissed is inherently unworthy of the public trust.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Rex Tillerson scientific method
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 11: Eppur Si Muove
Originally from the Guardian (UK), but reprinted in the Hindustani Times:
No one would want a novelist to perform brain surgery with her biro. No one would want a man with a PhD in political science to then write textbooks claiming that those misadventures are best medical practice.
Society understands the architecture of academia and knows there are
relevant qualifications in different fields, and the media accepts the idea of specialisations and accords greater respect to those with greater expertise. With one exception: climate science.When it comes to this academic discipline, it seems that if you are a specialist in public sector food-poisoning surveillance or possess a zoology doctorate on sexual selection in pheasants, editors will seek your contrarian views more avidly than if you have qualifications in climate science and a lifetime’s professional expertise. The press is further littered with climate “heretics” almost all of whom have academic backgrounds in history, literature, and the classics with a diploma in media studies. (All these examples are true.) One botanist trying to argue that glaciers were advancing took his data (described as simply false by the World Glacier Monitoring Service) from a former architect.
I recently watched a debate between a climate scientist and that pheasant-expert-turned-journalist. An audience member asked: “Please could you explain how it is that you are ‘right’ while all climate scientists are ‘wrong’?” He could not. I almost felt sorry for him. I know that he has lectured publicly on scientific heresy. I think that he wants to be Galileo.
Well said. Sent September 4:
When Galileo turned his eyes outward to the stars and planets, he was setting the power of direct observation and analysis against a body of received knowledge that, although internally consistent, was unverifiable and unfalsifiable. He was also taking on the church of Rome, the most powerful institution in the world at the time.
Given that fossil-fuel corporations are the most powerful economic forces of our era, it takes no courage whatsoever to align one’s opinions with their interests. Denialists’ attempts to assume the mantle of one of the founders of modern science is ludicrous at best and deeply cynical at worst.
While it took the church many centuries to acknowledge that it was mistaken and Galileo was correct, even big oil companies are now recognizing the factuality of global warming, as witness the recent remarks of EXXON CEO Rex Tillerson. Climate-change deniers aren’t “heretics” — they’re just plain wrong.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans Richard Lindzen
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 9: Silver Bells Mounted On A String…
Hey, gang! Wanna meet an asshole? Here’s the Las Vegas Journal-Review’s Vin Suprynowicz. What a tool:
Too many “are still calling climate change a liberal hoax,” declared U.S. Sen. Harry Reid as he opened his fifth annual National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas on Aug. 7. “They falsely claim scientists are still debating whether carbon pollution is warming the planet.”
“This year alone, the United States has seen unparalleled extreme weather events – events scientists say are exactly what is expected as the Earth’s climate changes. The Midwest is experiencing its most crushing drought in more than half a century – or maybe ever. … Corn crops are withering and livestock are dying. …
“Our nation’s infrastructure is literally falling apart because it wasn’t designed to withstand these conditions,” Sen. Reid continued, just getting warmed up. “Runways are melting, trapping planes. Train tracks are bending, derailing subways. Highways are cracking, buckling and breaking open. … Yet despite having overwhelming evidence and public opinion on our side, deniers still exist, fueled and funded by dirty energy profits. These people aren’t just on the other side of this debate. They’re on the other side of reality.”
Good heavens. And I’ve even left out Harry’s chilling account of the monsoons of Bangladesh. Who ever heard of a monsoon hitting Bangladesh before?
“In the words of one respected climate scientist: ‘This is what global warming looks like,’ ” the senator reported. “Dozens of new reports from scientists around the globe link extreme weather to climate change.”
Responding to this rhetorical version of a Godzilla movie, Norman Rogers, Ph.D. in physics from the University of Hawaii, member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, and senior policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, posted the following Friday:
“The advocates of global warming are beginning to have the classic doomsday cult problem. The Earth hasn’t been warming for 16 years, and that’s starting to get very embarrassing. The first adjustment to the dogma was to stop talking about global warming and start talking about climate change. The latest version of the party line is that we are going to have more extreme weather. The reality is that the weather is not any more variable or extreme than in the past. But with suitable fishing in the data, it is easy to make a case that this or that weather phenomenon has become more extreme.
“The scientist Richard Lindzen has pointed out that the extreme weather theme is inconsistent with the global warmers’ own theories,” Mr. Rogers continues. “The global warmers have long claimed that the poles will warm faster than the tropics. One of their key scary claims is that vast amounts of ice at the poles will melt and raise sea level. So, according to warmer theory, the temperature difference between the poles and the equator will lessen. But it is that very temperature difference that drives weather, particularly extreme weather. … So the warmers’ claims are fundamentally contradictory.”
(facepalm). Sent September 2, very early in the morning:
Skepticism FAIL.
The science, the source, and the threat of global climate change are very real, and Vin Suprynowicz’ op-ed mocking those who are justifiably concerned about climate change is a gold mine of half-, quarter-, and un-truths. One powerful “tell” is his reliance on Richard Lindzen — the only remaining climatologist of any repute who maintains a contrarian position on the issue, and also one of the only scientists still disputing the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Similarly, the analyses of Norman Rogers, Suprynowicz’ other cited authority, have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked, as a few moments’ research will demonstrate.
Ridiculing the change in nomenclature from “global warming” to “climate change” as a sign of liberal desperation is another standard denialist argument, but nothing could be further from the truth. The term “climate change” was first proposed by Republican strategist Frank Luntz during the Bush administration — as a “less frightening” alternative to “global warming”. It’s a peculiar irony that Luntz’ attempt at deceiving the public is a more accurate way of describing the complex phenomena that so profoundly alarm scientists and environmentalists — perhaps one of the only times that Bush-speak told the truth.
Mr. Suprynowicz’ paper gets an F.
Warren Senders