environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 23: I Wonder Why THAT Keeps Happening?
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette runs an editorial column ruing the lackadaisical attitude of the common people:
This should be the summer of our discontent, with heat waves, drought and other troublesome weather affecting large parts of the nation. Instead, Americans are hot but apparently not bothered about what it all might mean.
According to a new Washington Post-Stanford University poll, just 18 percent of Americans interviewed named climate change as the world’s top environmental problem. In 2007, when Al Gore’s warning documentary and a United Nations report were making headlines, 33 percent called climate change the top issue.
Like so much on this topic, the findings of the poll are contradictory. It’s not as if people don’t care about the environment; the top concern, as expressed by 27 percent of those surveyed, was polluted water and air — certainly real challenges.
And those polled don’t dismiss climate change or even mankind’s hand in it; in fact, nearly three-quarters believe that the Earth is warming and approximately the same number think temperatures will continue to rise if nothing is done. Many want government and businesses to do more.
The poll and follow-up interviews suggest that people are looking to Washington, D.C., for leadership and action, although, after seeing little or none, they are not consumed by a sense of urgency.
Somebody better do something. I wonder who? Sent July 12:
The disconnect between the facts of global climate change and American public concern about the issue can be laid at the feet of our country’s politicians, who are too focused on short-term electoral exigencies to address long-term problems — and at the feet of our irresponsible media establishment, which has spent decades fostering the notion that simply reporting two sides of every argument constitutes the whole of journalism.
In a common-sense world, the looming climate crisis would be story number one, day after day. But we live in twenty-first century America, where there is no crisis bigger than the latest celebrity scandal du jour. Now there is no time left for equivocation. If we are to preserve our agriculture, our infrastructure, and ultimately our civilization, our leaders must accept the responsibility of leadership — and our media must accept the responsibility to inform the public about the gravest threat our species has faced in recorded history.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibillity
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 22: No. This Has Been Another Episode Of “Short Answers To Stupid Questions.”
The LA Times asks a reasonable enough question: “Can somebody, please, help George Will understand climate?”
George Will seems like a smart guy, so it’s a little mystifying why he cannot seem to understand the difference between weather and climate — concepts that with a little education, the average third-grader could easily grasp. Could it be that he’s not trying?
In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Will dismissed the notion that the heat wave plaguing the nation has anything to do with climate change. “How do we explain the heat? One word: summer,” Will said, asserting that current record-setting temperatures in the U.S. are nothing unusual.
“Come the winter there will be a cold snap, lots of snow, and the same guys, like [Washington Post columnist] E.J. [Dionne], will start lecturing us. There’s a difference between weather and climate. I agree with that. We’re having some hot weather. Get over it.”
Will would be almost right, if he weren’t willfully ignoring the evidence pointing to a changing climate. It is true that commentators on both sides of the political question about global warming tend to confuse weather with climate, with those who favor denying the problem pointing to cold winters as proof that it doesn’t exist, even as alarmists see hot summers as proof that Armageddon is nigh.
It’s not “mystifying” once you recognize that Will is a media whore who will say anything for money. He’s lying, and his avid mendacity is a disgrace to humanity, but he doesn’t give a shit, because he’s laughing all the way to the bank. Sent July 11:
Upton Sinclair famously remarked, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Just look at syndicated columnist George Will — a man of some intelligence who steadfastly refuses to change his opinions in the face of facts.
Mr. Will’s latest failure is, as usual, in the area of climate change. Despite having been repeatedly proved wrong on this issue, (as in 2009, when two Washington Post reporters vigorously corrected his misrepresentations about the extent of Arctic sea ice), he touts a gospel of climate-change denialism even as overwhelming scientific evidence confirms the reality of human-caused global heating.
It’s not just Mr. Will’s own salary that depends on his failure to “understand” climate change. His readiness to confuse the public discussion demonstrates his fealty to giant multinational corporations whose profit margins might shrink if America finally addressed a looming planetary emergency.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility morons
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 21: Red Scare Edition
Never heard of Dennis Byrne before, but he’s left a big floater in the Chicago Tribune’s bowl:
As surely as stink follows a garbage truck, the deadly national heat wave brought forth predictable and terrifying scenarios from global warming alarmists.
Triumphantly, the alarmists proclaimed that global warming (or climate change, or extreme weather, or whatever is their latest rendition of Earth’s frightful fate) was back high on the list of everyone’s worst fears.
Told-ya-sos flowed. Denunciations of global warming “skeptics” and “deniers” were renewed. The threadbare mantra — “the science is in, the debate is over” — was re-energized.
Reliably, a Washington Post story about Colorado’s destructive wildfires waved away fact with speculation: “Lightning and suspected arson ignited them four weeks ago, but scientists and federal officials say the table was set by a culprit that will probably contribute to bigger and more frequent wildfires for years to come: climate change.”
And thus the unconscionable corruption of real science by global warming propagandists continues unabated. It’s unconscionable because they are using the loss of life and destruction of property as a prop to get you to believe that the worst is yet to come. It’s unconscionable because making such predictions is not what real science does. For all the condemnation about “anti-science deniers” on the right, the truth is that actual anti-science folks are the ones on the left using bad science to try to scare the bejabbers out of us.
(facepalm). Sent July 10:
One of the cardinal principles of science is that good theories provide verifiable predictions.
Several decades ago, climatologists began predicting what would happen to Earth’s weather as the greenhouse effect intensified. While a few researchers considered the possibility of global cooling, the vast majority agreed that rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would trigger chaotic weather patterns, with regional and local effects including heatwaves, droughts, and intensified storms. When they pointed out that these phenomena would have negative impacts on humanity, they were ignored, censored, and derided by politicians and media figures.
Now, after a decade of record high temperatures, those dire predictions are coming true. The “alarmists” Dennis Byrne derides include the US Armed Forces, the CIA, and insurance companies all over the world.
Paul Revere was an alarmist, too. If he’d been living in Concord in April, 1775, Mr. Byrne would’ve turned over and gone right back to sleep.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 20: Lexicography Edition
The Wisconsin State Journal’s Cynthia Tucker says that “Global warming skeptics rule GOP”:
For multiple days already this summer, the interior of the country has cooked underneath a bowl of hot air. As that heat wave wore on, a freakish storm erupted from Chicago to Washington, D.C., bringing winds that resembled the edge of a hurricane. And in what has become a summer ritual, wildfires are raging not only in the western United States but in parts of the eastern U.S., too.
If global warming is a hoax, it is a strangely powerful one, hoisting global temperatures to record highs, melting the Arctic ice cap, and threatening agriculture and ecosystems across the planet. So how did scientists make that up?
They didn’t, of course, despite the insistence of powerful Republican leaders that your frying lawn is a figment of your imagination. It’s hard not to notice that it’s hotter than it used to be.
This year, indeed, has brought the United States the broad spectrum of weird weather that climate scientists have warned about for years. That includes drought conditions across two-thirds of the country.
“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level. The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about,” Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, told The Associated Press.
Still, of all the debates that rage like wildfires across the political landscape — taxes, health care, immigration — climate change gets precious little attention. Now that Republicans such as Mitt Romney have shifted their stances to line up with hard-core climate change skeptics, Democrats have given up. President Barack Obama hasn’t made it a priority for a long time.
I hate it when words are misused. Don’t you? Sent July 9:
Describing the GOP as being “ruled by global warming skeptics” would be right on target, were it not for one small problem: genuine skeptics rely on evidence; they’re ready to change their minds when the facts demand it. They distrust their own preconceptions and are ready to suspend judgement in order to accumulate and analyze relevant facts. And genuine skeptics always seek to avoid confirmation bias in their research.
Conservative politicians’ approach to climate change, like their approach to every other policy area in modern American life, embodies none of these qualities. Rather, they’re entirely driven by confirmation bias, dismissing any information that threatens their preconceptions. Having decided long ago that climate science was a “liberal” issue, they’re ideologically bound to deny its existence, severity, and causes.
True skepticism demands intellectual discipline and rigor, qualities not found in any contemporary Republican analysis of climate change. Describing Republican true believers as “skeptics” is an undeserved insult to the genuinely skeptical, and an undeserved compliment to cynical and intellectually complacent politicians who wouldn’t recognize intellectual rigor if it slapped them in the face.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus wildfires
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 19: Strike Anywhere…
The Tehama County Daily News (CA) notes that things are sorta kinda on fire:
LOS ANGELES (MCT) After several years of relatively benign fire seasons, the West is headed into a hot dry summer of potentially ferocious blazes like the ones that have scorched Colorado in recent weeks.
The wildfires that have already destroyed more than 700 homes and outbuildings along Colorado’s Front Range and blackened hundreds of thousands of acres of New Mexico wilderness are not likely to be the season’s last for one simple reason: drought.
“This year, fires are going big,” Tom Harbour, fire and aviation director for the U.S. Forest Service, said last week. “We’ve had some really extraordinary runs … fires that are running 10 miles in lighter fuels.
Fires that are running miles in forested areas.”
A dry La Nina winter and a paltry, quick-melting snowpack in much of the West have set the stage for another incendiary summer, compounding the effects of a long-term drought that has gripped the seven-state Colorado River basin for more than a decade.
“The reason Colorado is burning is they’ve had prolonged drought,” said Bob Keane, a forest service research ecologist based in Montana.
Add the high temperatures and gusting winds that hit the state last week, and you have a recipe for combustion.
Quick and dirty. Sent July 8:
No single event can be unambiguously linked to global climate change, because climate science doesn’t work that way. But any attempt to claim that the wildfires devastating America’s West aren’t connected to Earth’s burgeoning greenhouse effect is statistically absurd.
Climatologists have been predicting for years that the consequences of increased CO2 emissions would include weather that was hotter, weirder, fiercer, and less predictable. And while some of their forecasts were erroneous, most of those mistakes were underestimations of the speed and magnitude of the transformation in our environment.
Despite an ongoing campaign of climate-change denial, the atmosphere is still getting hotter. We’d mock any Colorado residents who refuse to heed the gathering flames — why, then, are climatologists and environmentalists whose decades of predictions on climate change have been overwhelmingly vindicated still treated with derision by the petroleum-funded professionals in our politics and media?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 18: If You’ll Say “You Told Me So,” I Won’t Say “I Told You So”
The Merriville (IN) Post-Times runs an AP story on the current heatwave:
Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.
These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it’s far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.
Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and time. Sometimes it isn’t caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.
And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren’t having similar disasters now, although they’ve had their own extreme events in recent years.
But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.
More pounding on the denialists. Sent July 7:
Even as the American Midwest sizzled under a heatwave of staggering proportions, climate-change denialists kept on sounding their message of complacency and inaction. Everything’s fine, they say. The planet’s actually getting cooler. If Earth’s atmosphere is heating up, it’s just sunspots, or “natural cycles.” Anyway, humans aren’t to blame. The climate has always changed. If humans are involved, it’s too expensive to do anything about it. Al Gore has a big house. And on and on.
When politicians and media figures mock “climate alarmists,” it is part of their pathetic attempt to rationalize an unsustainable status quo — one which now promises massive crop failures, droughts and wildfires throughout America.
We owe our nation’s existence to those who woke to the call of a midnight rider bringing the news that the British were coming. Climate scientists are the Paul Reveres of the present day. Will we finally heed their warnings?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 7, Month 7, Day 17: DFH! NIMBY?
The Washington Post acknowledges the hippies:
Wildfires? Record thunderstorms? Blast furnace heat? An earthquake, even?
At least that’s what one group of folks is thinking, even if they don’t voice it quite so crassly.
“We don’t want to do it in an I-told-you-so kind of way,” demurs John Topping, who is the president of the Washington-based Climate Institute.
But see, people! This is what all the global-warming Paul Reveres have been shouting about.
Now some are finally paying attention, at least in the Washington region.
“Granted, we’ve only lived in the area for 25 years,” one reader wrote to me. “But the first 15 left an impression that this was not one of Dante’s circles. The last ten: approaching inner circle quickly.”
Apparently, a tree falling on a house hits much closer to home than a melting ice cap.
Because it will be sooooo excellent to be smug while we circle the bowl on our way to the Venus effect. Sent July 6:
For decades, climatologists warned us that increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases would trigger chaotic and destructive weather. We’ve were warned of rising temperatures and rising seas, of droughts, invasive species, wildfires, tropical storms — all consequences of global climate change.
And for decades our media and politics have ignored and derided those scientific specialists and their findings. Whether it’s tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists convinced that Al Gore is out to confiscate their SUVs, petroleum-backed politicians protecting their puppetmasters, or ordinary citizens with more immediate concerns, the unavoidable fact is that Americans have too long assumed that climate change is a problem for other people, other places, other times.
No more. While we’ll always pay more attention to what’s happening in our own backyards, there is no escaping that this is a crisis of planetary scope and millennial span. Earth is the new neighborhood, and a century is the new now.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: alarmism denialists idiots media irresponsibility wildfires
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 14: Liberals Have A Reality-Bias…
The Portland (ME) Press-Herald runs a WaPo article on climate change and the hell-on-earth that is Colorado:
WASHINGTON — Snow hardly fell during winter in snowy Colorado. On top of that, the state’s soaking spring rains did not come. So it was no wonder that normally emerald landscapes were parched as summer approached, tan as a pair of worn khakis.
All the earth needed was a spark.
Colorado and U.S. Forest Service firefighters are battling the state’s most destructive wildfires ever. Lightning and suspected arson ignited them four weeks ago, but scientists and federal officials say the table was set by a culprit that will probably contribute to bigger and more frequent wildfires for years to come: climate change.
In the past two years, record-breaking wildfires have burned in the West — New Mexico experienced its worst-ever wildfire, Arizona suffered its largest burn and Texas last year fought the most fires in recorded history. From Mississippi to the Ohio Valley, temperatures are topping record highs and the land is thirsty.
“We’ve had record fires in 10 states in the last decade, most of them in the West,” said U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Harris Sherman, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service.
A revision and extension of the letter from two days ago. Sent July 3:
Not too long ago, any public figure who pointed out that a runaway greenhouse effect would have significant negative consequences for humanity could look forward to insults and mockery from conservatives. Anyone who suggested that it would probably be a good idea to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere would be called a “climate alarmist,” an “environazi,” or a “watermelon” (green on the outside, red on the inside — get it?).
The name-calling’s still going on, but some of the climate-change denialists are beginning to wake up. Even Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson publicly acknowledged the fact of human-caused global warming in a recent speech, although his assertion that humanity will “adapt” blithely glosses over the enormous human cost involved. More generally, the fact that America is undergoing a nationwide heat wave has rendered the denialist position harder to sustain.
More than three decades ago, climatologists started predicting that global warming would bring about this type of erratic and unpredictable weather, but politicians and the media have consistently ignored or derided their emergency signals. Such dismissals can now be understood as a grave abdication of the responsibilities of leadership.
“Alarmism” is just a sensible response to an alarming situation; as planetary temperatures rise and smoke billows above a burning Colorado, it’s obvious and inescapable: global climate change is as alarming as it gets.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots sociopathy
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 11: Everything’s All Pacified, Just As You Ordered, Sir.
More on this a$$hole, this time from the Detroit Free Press:
NEW YORK — ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling and energy dependence are overblown.
In a speech Wednesday to the Council on Foreign Relations, Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling are well understood and can be mitigated, he said. Dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain, he said.
Tillerson blamed a public he called illiterate in science and math, a lazy press, and advocacy groups that “manufacture fear.”
The oil executive questioned the ability of climate models to predict the magnitude of the impact, and said that people would adapt to rising sea levels and changing climates that may force agricultural production to shift.
“We have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution.”
Just collateral damage, folks. Nothin’ to worry about. Sent June 30:
Given that his company has been a generous funder of climate-change denialism over the past several decades, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson’s recent claim that the public is “scientifically illiterate” sets a new standard in chutzpah. And given that his company has reaped enormous profits while abdicating its responsibility for hundreds of disastrous oil spills all over the world, his glib statement that the risks of drilling are “well-understood and can be mitigated” is breathtakingly arrogant.
But it is his insouciant assertion that humanity will “adapt” to climate change that is the most horrifying of all, as a moment’s consideration of the consequences of an “adaptation” transpiring in a geological instant rather than over many millennia will make clear. Breezily glossing over megadeaths and incalculable misery, Mr. Tillerson’s seemingly benign verb conceals a self-centered immorality that makes the robber barons of the gilded age seem like great humanitarians in comparison.
Evil.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 10: Would I Lie To You?
Rex Tillerson is very sad. Nobody believes his reassurances. Poor baby.
NEW YORK (AP) — ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling, and energy dependence are overblown.
In a speech Wednesday, Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will be able to adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling are well understood and can be mitigated, he said. And dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain, he said.
Tillerson blamed a public that is ‘‘illiterate’’ in science and math, a ‘‘lazy’’ press, and advocacy groups that ‘‘manufacture fear’’ for energy misconceptions in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.
He highlighted that huge discoveries of oil and gas in North America have reversed a 20-year decline in U.S. oil production in recent years. He also trumpeted the global oil industry’s ability to deliver fuels during a two-year period of dramatic uncertainty in the Middle East, the world’s most important oil and gas-producing region.
It’s tough being one of the most powerful people on the planet. Sent June 29:
Poor Rex Tillerson. He’s the CEO of a fossil-fuel corporation that has reaped unimaginable profits from the exploitation of planetary resources over the past half-century, one of the most powerful economic agents in the world — and yet he just can’t seem to persuade his customers that he’s really got their best interests at heart. Given that Exxon has done its utmost to confuse the national discussion of energy and environmental policy by providing lavish funding to climate-change denialist organizations, Mr. Tillerson’s criticism of a science-ignorant public is disingenuous, to put it very mildly.
But why shouldn’t the American people trust Exxon’s word? Let us count the ways. This corporate leviathan has a long rap sheet ranging from disastrous spills and long-delayed compensation, to illegal extraction of oil from state and federal lands, to human-rights abuses in Indonesia and Columbia. In this context, Mr. Tillerson’s attempt to persuade us that climate change isn’t something to be worried about sounds anything but reassuring.
Warren Senders