environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans rising seas
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 21: Post-Modernism As Policy, Chapter 29
North Carolina isn’t the only state with a stupidity surplus. Virginia is in the running:
State lawmakers ran into a problem this year when recommending a study on rising sea levels and their potential impacts on coastal Virginia.
It was not a scientific problem or a financial one. It was linguistic.
They discovered that they could not use the phrases “sea level rise” or “climate change” in requesting the study, in part because of objections from Republican colleagues and also for fear of stirring up conservative activists, some of whom believe such terms are liberal code words.
On its website, for example, the Virginia tea party described the proposed “sea level rise” study this way: “More wasted tax dollars for more ridiculous studies designed to separate us from our money and control all land and water use.”
The group urged its members to contact elected officials right away to defeat the measure: “They will pass this without blinking if we don’t yell loudly.”
So lawmakers did away with all mention of sea level rise, substituting a more politically neutral phrase: “recurrent flooding.”
The amended study, while fixed on the same research, sailed through the General Assembly and was signed by Gov. Bob McDonnell, who also has raised questions about what is causing slightly higher temperatures on the planet.
How I wish this was unbelievable. Sent June 10:
Everybody seems to be risk-averse when it comes to discussing the problems that accompany the accelerating greenhouse effect. Democratic politicians tend to avoid the issue entirely if they can, while Republicans simultaneously cater to the emotional needs of their voter base (who entirely deny the existence of climate change) and the financial demands of their funders (who refuse to take responsibility for mitigating the mess they’ve helped create).
While Virginian lawmakers don’t want to use words like “sea-level rise,” because they’ve acquired negative political associations, North Carolina’s gone one step further, actually banning any techniques of measurement that could potentially yield troublesome numbers. “Ignore it and it will go away” works fine for the night-time fears of childhood, but it makes for a poor climate policy; it is long past time for America’s politicians to address the crisis rather than using terminological hairsplitting as an excuse for inaction and complacency.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots insurance scientific consensus survival sustainability timescale wildfires
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 19: Double Whammy Bar
Two separate articles in the June 7 issue of the Vancouver Sun:
The Earth’s ecosystems could reach a point of no return resulting in rapid irreversible collapse in as little as 50 years, according to projections by a group of 18 scientists.
Their article in the journal Nature today says that human activities – such as energy use and widespread transformation of the Earth’s surface for habitation and agriculture – are pushing the planet toward a critical threshold for “state shift” not unlike the transition from the last ice age about 12,000 years ago.
Such a shift would create a new nor-mal condition for the entire planet with a new range of temperatures, new ocean levels and widespread species extinctions resulting in an entirely new web of life.
It would not necessarily be a comfortable place for human beings.
“We’ve had a good long run of really benign conditions that have allowed humans to go from cracking rocks together to walking on the moon,” said Simon Fraser University biodiversity professor Arne Mooers, one of the authors of the article.
The number of major forest fires in B.C. will likely increase by 50 per cent or more in the next 40 years according to a recent report on climate change.
Telling the Weather Story, released this week by the Insurance Bureau of Canada, addresses altering weather patterns across the country in the coming decades and urges Canadians to adjust to the realities of climate change.
The study predicts B.C. can expect an increase in wildfires over the average of nearly 2,000 blazes a year between 2000 and 2010. Furthermore, the province will likely see a host of other weather-related issues like warmer temperatures, declining — and, in some regions, disappearing — mountain snowpacks, more intense rainfall during the winter, and drier summers. The number of wildfires sparked by lightning strikes — responsible for nearly 60 per cent of fires — is also expected to rise.
“It’s not a just a possibility,” said Dr. Gordon McBean, the report’s lead researcher. “There’s a very real probability it will happen.”
McBean, a climatologist and professor at the University of Western Ontario, conducted the research with cooperation from the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, where he also serves as policy chairman.
Read the comments for the full flavor. Sheesh. Sent June 8:
The Insurance Bureau of Canada’s report on the increased risk of forest fires is a localized version of the dire planetary “tipping point” projections just published in the journal Nature. The two articles in the June 7 edition of the Sun reinforce one another in the same way that climate-change processes do. For example, hotter summers set the stage for more forest fires, which release more carbon into the atmosphere in a positive feedback loop; the pine-beetle infestations brought by milder winters can leave whole forests of flammable dead trees — which, naturally, cannot reabsorb carbon as healthy forests do. Thawing Arctic permafrost releases even more carbon, while melting polar ice means less light is reflected back into space, in turn leading to greater heat absorption by the oceans.
Unfortunately, the mechanisms of denial are very strong, and many people will ignore this obvious crisis rather than contemplate changing their convenient lifestyles.
Humanity is a tenacious, flexible and adaptable species. We can survive the consequences of global climate change — but only if we stop denying the existence of the emergency, instead bringing all of our resources, ingenuity and commitment to bear on the problem.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture biodiversity idiots infrastructure public health
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 17: I Have A Banana In My Ear!
U.S. News and World Report acknowledges that the Public Health picture is far from rosy, in an article entitled “Expert: Climate Change Will Increasingly Become Global Health Issue”:
Previously just the worry of climate scientists, environmentalists, doomsday prognosticators, and gas-price watchers, climate change is starting to worry some others— public health specialists, who say that global warming could affect large swaths of the population.
In a paper published in the journal PLoS Medicine Tuesday, a group of European public health experts write that climate change could alter “patterns of physical activity and food availability, and in some cases [bring] direct physical harm.” Slight temperature increases could also change disease distribution in colder regions and make hotter regions less hospitable to humans.
“Certain subgroups are at more risk—mainly the young, the old, and the poor,” says Peter Byass, director of the Umea Centre for Global Health Research in Sweden. “The middle age and wealthy will be better off. It’s a crude way of looking at it, but it’s not so far off the mark.”
That means more prevalence of diseases that affect the poor, such as malaria and dengue fever, and heat stroke in drought-afflicted areas.
For years, scientists have warned about more extreme hurricanes and weather patterns, but until recently, not much emphasis was put on less noticeable changes.
The comments include much stupidity, in highly predictable formats. Sent June 6:
The public health consequences of climate change are going to be very significant. It’s more than just hotter days and crazier weather; it’s invasive insects migrating to keep pace with environmental transformations and bringing tropical diseases with them; it’s the potential damage to our infrastructure that will make hamper sanitation; it’s allergies and asthma and a host of other debilitating ailments that will make our lives and those of our children progressively more difficult in coming centuries.
But even this does not begin to fully address the problem, for what affects humans will affect other life as well. Many species will be unable to cope, and we can anticipate losing much of the biodiversity that forms Earth’s priceless genetic heritage. Your headline announces that climate change is becoming a “Global Health Issue.” Indeed. It’s not just the people who live on it, but the planet itself that is deeply ill.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: economics idiots responsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 5: It Wasn’t Me Who Made Him Fall / No, You Can’t Blame Me At All…
The Worcester Telegram (MA) runs an AP story on the squabbling teenagers of the international community:
BONN, Germany — Another round of U.N. climate talks closed Friday without resolving how to share the burden of curbing man-made global warming, mainly because countries don’t agree on who is rich and who is poor.
China wants to maintain a decades-old division between developed and developing countries, bearing in mind that, historically, the West has released most of the heat-trapping gases that scientists say could cause catastrophic changes in climate.
But the U.S. and Europe insisted during the two-week talks in Bonn that the system doesn’t reflect current economic realities and must change as work begins on a new global climate pact set to be completed in 2015.
“The notion that a simple binary system is going to be applicable going forward is no longer one that has much relevance to the way the world currently works,” U.S. chief negotiator Jonathan Pershing said.
Fools. Sent May 26:
If there’s anything more depressing than the continual accumulation of bad news on climate change, it’s the endless cycle of avoidance and denial on the part of the world’s richest nations. For decades we’ve watched the same spectacle: those countries which have prospered economically through their profligate consumption of fossil fuels are also the ones resisting any moves toward responsibility for the messes they’ve created. Meanwhile, the world’s poorest nations — also, of course, the smallest contributors to the planetary greenhouse effect — are the good citizens of the international community, committing themselves to further reductions in CO2 emissions even as the United States dithers and blusters.
Coupled with this is the predictable chorus of catcalls directed at those who point out the obvious fact that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. The first president Bush once stated, “The American way of life is non-negotiable.” Why not?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republicans
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 31: Sounds Pretty Fair And Balanced To Me….
The West Virginia Gazette-Journal has an editorial by some brave fellow who dares to speak the truth in the midst of Coal Country:
Last year, America suffered historic weather calamities: disastrous tornadoes, severe floods, extended drought, record-breaking snowfall, raging wildfires, etc. Federal agencies say $52 billion in property loss was inflicted, and more than 1,000 Americans died in weather ravages.
This year brought the warmest March ever known, breaking about 15,000 local U.S. heat records. Early tornadoes again left wreckage and death.
Scientists say the violent weather is solid evidence that fossil fuel fumes are girdling Planet Earth with greenhouse gases that produce global warming and climate change. Warmer air holds more moisture, producing more extreme storms.
A new study by Yale and George Mason university pollsters found that 70 percent of Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” Yale professor Anthony Laiserowitz commented: “People are starting to connect the dots.”
Read the comments for the full effect. Sent May 21:
On one side of the Great Climate Change Debate, we have almost every single scientific association on Earth. Their overwhelming consensus, built on the integrated results of thousands of different studies and research projects over the past five decades, is that climate change is real, it’s dangerous, human consumption of fossil fuels is a major factor, and doing something about it before it gets worse is both an economic and an environmental necessity.
On the other side, we have the oil-funded American Association of Petroleum Geologists along with a few other scientists (like Dr. Richard Lindzen, who still firmly believes the link between cigarettes and cancer is statistically inconclusive). We have conservative “think-tanks” like the Heartland Institute (recently famous for recklessly comparing environmentalists with mass murderers), a coterie of professional denialists whose voices are heard constantly in our broadcast and print media, and a major political party firmly opposed to science of every sort. Their interpretation of the data? There is no such thing as climate change; if there is, it’s not dangerous; if it’s dangerous, it’s not caused by humans; if it’s caused by humans, it’s too expensive to address. And anyway: Liberals! Socialism! Squirrel!
Warren Senders
atheism environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists Heartland Institute idiots
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 30: Heartland Haz A Sad
Awwwwwwww. So sad. Heartland’s feeling some heat:
In a fiery blogpost on the Heartland website, the organisation’s president Joseph Bast admitted Heartland’s defectors were “abandoning us in this moment of need”.
Over the last few weeks, Heartland has lost at least $825,000 in expected funds for 2012, or more than 35% of the funds its planned to raise from corporate donors, according to the campaign group Forecast the Facts, which is pushing companies to boycott the organisation.
The organisation been forced to make up those funds by taking its first publicly acknowledged donations from the coal industry. The main Illinois coal lobby is a last-minute sponsor of this week’s conference, undermining Heartland’s claims to operate independently of fossil fuel interests.
Its entire Washington DC office, barring one staffer, decamped, taking Heartland’s biggest project, involving the insurance industry, with them.
Board directors quit, conference speakers cancelled at short-notice, and associates of long standing demanded Heartland remove their names from its website. The list of conference sponsors shrank by nearly half from 2010, and many of those listed sponsors are just websites operating on the rightwing fringe.
“It’s haemorrhaging,” said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, who has spent years tracking climate contrarian outfits. “Heartland’s true colours finally came through, and now people are jumping ship in quick order.”
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of sociopaths. Sent May 20:
By sponsoring billboards comparing climate scientists to mass murderers, the Heartland Institute proves that bizarre beliefs lead inexorably to bizarre behaviors. This secretive corporatist think-tank has for years invested enormous fiscal and intellectual capital in ideas unconnected to verifiable scientific fact; their plans for the promotion of anti-science curricula demonstrate: this isn’t just ordinary climate-change denial, but near-sociopathic fabulism.
But organizations this disconnected from reality in one area cannot be expected to understand the consequences of their actions in other areas, which is why Heartland’s response to the predictable outrage generated by their grotesque guilt-by-association strategy seems so clumsily pathetic. “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” wrote Voltaire, centuries ago. We now have a new corollary to his apothegm: those who believe their own absurdities cannot recognize their own atrocities.
Heartland’s wounds are entirely self-inflicted — yet another inconvenient reality for them to deny.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 29: Getting So Much Realer All The Time
The Ledger (Lakeland, FL) runs a piece by Charles Reynolds, addressing some implications — and taking a dig at the chuckleheads along the way.
Some people believe the concept of climate change, also called global warming, is a plot cooked up by tree-hugging liberals to get everyone else to stop treating planet Earth like a trash heap. But governments and multinational corporations worldwide don’t think climate change is a hoax.
Among corporations taking an active role in finding solutions for problems caused by ever-worsening weather patterns are Weyerhaeuser, DuPont, Boeing, Georgia-Pacific, Deutsche Telekom, Royal Dutch/Shell, Toyota and Ontario Power Generation. Hardly bastions of liberalism. And speaking of the flip side of altruism, the government of communist China is becoming increasingly concerned about the damage climate change is causing.
The organizations mentioned are, of course, worried about their bottom lines. It’s the world’s biologists, botanists and scientists who are distressed over the effects of climate change on hundreds of thousands of species of plants and animals.
Sent in a rush, 5/19 – getting ready for the Flutes concert.
When confronted with the facts about climate change, denialists respond in one of several extremely predictable ways. By far the most popular is a mix of guilt-by-association and ad hominem attack, as in the endless attacks on the integrity of former Vice President Al Gore. Another “greatest hit” for self-styled skeptics is the argument from incredulity — “it must be impossible, because I don’t understand anything about science.” And, of course, we’re always going to hear from the tinfoil hat brigade, with their increasingly far-fetched conspiracy theories: “global warming is a hoax cooked up by socialists in order to enforce global redistribution of wealth from the hands of the job creators into the pockets of greedy climatologists,” or something like that.
Meanwhile, the researchers who are actually working in the field keep finding more information that suggests the problem is actually significantly more dangerous than had been previously thought. While warmer weather is excellent news for gardeners in the short term, the steady increases in planetary temperature are going to make feeding our civilization exponentially more difficult in the centuries to come — something which should (eventually) engage the attention of the denialists.
Would those who reject the validity of climate science be willing to sign insurance waivers, relinquishing any damages from the effects of global warming? Let’s see them put their money where their mouths are.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 26: Zippadee Doo Dah Day
More on the Heartland idiocy, this time from the Pocono Record (NY):
The Heartland Institute may be doing climate scientists a big favor through its lastest anti-climate change campaign.
The group is employing a sensational illogic in trying to debunk the theory that the earth is warming, allying repellent criminal characters with an acknowledgement of rising temperatures. It’s an odd marriage, so odd that maybe deeper thinkers will question its merit, as they should.
Recently, the Heartland Institute launched a billboard advertising campaign in Chicago featuring the image of convicted “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski along with the statement, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?”
The so-called think tank announced plans to link deranged murderer Charles Manson and international terrorist Osama bin Laden to global warming, too.
Maybe their idea is that the unknowing public will begin to identify climate scientists as beyond the pale — mentally ill criminals or insanely cruel religious zealots.
So is Defense Secretary Leon Panetta a nut case? Panetta has described global warming as a national security threat.
Is former vice president Al Gore a terrorist? You may not agree with his assessment that climate change is “An Inconvenient Truth,” but should he really be locked up?
I know who deserves to be locked up. Sent May 16:
Given the possible catastrophic consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect, the irresponsibility of denialist organizations like the Heartland Institute is staggering. In cherry-picking from the available climatological research only the few small smatterings of data which support their predetermined conclusions, Heartland’s “experts” engage in a travesty of scientific method. This alone would warrant dismissal of their assertions. But by framing the discussion of climate change with comparisons between climate scientists and deranged sociopaths, the corporate-funded “think tank” has sacrificed any remaining vestiges of credibility.
In reality, of course, the worldwide scientific consensus on climate change is exceptionally robust, and getting more so every day as new evidence is integrated with the old. By preventing or delaying much-needed policy responses to the rapidly unfolding crisis, organizations like the Heartland Institute are far closer to those conscienceless mass murderers than the researchers and environmentalists they have so grotesquely maligned.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists ecologies idiots media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 25: The Pitter-Patter Of Little Feet
The Boston Herald (my local Murdoch rag) runs an article from the Seattle Times on a problem with animals:
SEATTLE — As climate change transforms their habitat, some animals are already on the move. But a new analysis from the University of Washington warns that many species won’t be able to run fast enough to survive a warming world.
On average, about 9 percent of the Western Hemisphere’s mammals migrate too slowly to keep pace with the rapid climate shifts expected over the next century, says the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In some areas, including parts of the Appalachian Mountains and the Amazon basin, nearly 40 percent of mammals may be unable to reach safe haven in time.
They’ll never print this one in a million years, but it was fun to write. Sent May 15:
If the thousands of mammal species whose slowly-changing migratory patterns put them at risk of extinction just knew that climate change is a hoax engineered by a worldwide conspiracy of scientists and liberal environmentalists, it would undoubtedly make them feel much better about the loss of their irrecoverable habitats.
But only humans are susceptible to the misdirection practiced by conservative news networks, which means that those endangered animals will just have to get used to their newly inhospitable ecological niches, or die. Ultimately, though, it’s not just regional and local ecosystems that are being transformed, but the entire planet. That’s what “climate change” means — global, not local; long-term, not short-term — and the implications of the University of Washington study should be a wake-up call for any still living in the denialist dreamland.
Humans are mammals, too. Where will we go when our habitats will no longer sustain us?
Warren Senders
Ha ha! The joke’s apparently on me. They printed it. And boy oh boy did it attract a fusillade of stupidity in the comments.
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 24: We Can Share…
The Idaho Statesman discusses the, um, intellectual foundations of the partisan divide on climate change:
The science that has driven and dominated this debate is the “psychology of persuasion.”
The Heartland Institute is an organization now leading the climate-skepticism campaign, after it ended its efforts to raise doubts about the connection between smoking and cancer. Recently, the group pushed its case with billboards citing “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, Charles Manson and Fidel Castro as examples of people who believe in global warming.
It’s not surprising that with the most famous promoter of climate change being Al Gore, the former Democratic candidate for president, many Republicans see the issue in partisan terms.
Generic “Republicans are idiots” screed. Sent May 14:
Devaluing expertise has long been a feature of conservative politics and government. As far back as the McCarthy-era purge of “old China hands” from the State Department, Republican politicians have exploited anti-intellectualism in American culture for their own electoral advantage, reaching new lows in the past few decades with the rise of ideologically slanted news outlets and right-wing “think tanks” dedicated entirely to the avoidance of inconvenient realities.
Call it “veriphobia” — fear of truth — and its greatest potential for long-term disaster lies in the area of climate change and its effects. Future historians will point to the psychological mechanisms of denial as key elements in our national failure to address the climate crisis. Do NASA studies indicate the planet is warming? Do climate scientists agree on the human causes of the greenhouse effect? Republicans would sooner defund NASA and vilify climatologists rather than admit error.
Warren Senders