Politics: idiots Republicans
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On this date in 2003…
…we invaded Iraq.
“My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”
—Dick Cheney (3/16/03)
environment: denialists Great Lakes ice loss idiots
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 18: Mother Superior Jumped The Gun
The Albert Lea Tribune (MN) runs an AP story on ice loss in the Great Lakes:
DULUTH — A published report says the amount of ice covering the Great Lakes has declined about 71 percent over the past 40 years, a drop that the lead author partly attributes to climate change.
The report published last month by the American Meteorological Society said only about 5 percent of the Great Lakes surface froze over this year.
“There was a significant downward trend in ice coverage from 1973 to the present for all of the lakes,” according to the study, which appeared in the society’s Journal of Climate.
Researchers determined ice coverage by scanning U.S. Coast Guard reports and satellite images taken from 1973 to 2010. They found that ice coverage was down 88 percent on Lake Ontario and fell 79 percent on Lake Superior. However, the ice in Lake St. Clair, which is between Lakes Erie and Huron, diminished just 37 percent.
The study’s lead researcher is Jia Wang of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Ann Arbor, Mich. He attributed the decline to several factors, including broad climate change and smaller cyclical climate patterns like El Nino and La Nina.
Sent March 12:
The decline of Great Lakes ice is a local manifestation of a global phenomenon. Everywhere around the planet, people are noticing that, climatically speaking, things ain’t what they used to be. Regions that depend on glacial ice melt for their water supplies are facing increasingly arid futures, while the residents of island countries are making plans to evacuate their homelands entirely as rising seas turn sovereign nations into historical footnotes.
But America is unique among nations in the number of its citizens who deny the existence of climate change entirely. No mountain of evidence can convince Rush Limbaugh’s followers that the greenhouse effect’s reality is going to disrupt their lives in unimaginably complex ways.
One can sympathize with their reluctance to accept the facts of global warming (who looks forward to planetary catastrophe?), but future generations on the shores of an ice-free Lake Ontario will not remember the denialists kindly.
Warren Senders
Year 3, Month 3, Day 14: And Twin Peruvian Midgets In Thigh-High Leather Boots….
Well, this is a novel argument. According to the Boulder (CO) Weekly’s Paul Danish, since our children’s children’s children’s…..children will have gotten used to catastrophic post-greenhouse meltdown conditions, there’s no reason to do a damned thing:
There is, of course, no other rational reason for attempting to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels. That’s because if we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, it will be two or three centuries before atmospheric CO2 began to drop. Like it or not, the planet is going to keep getting warmer for centuries just on the strength of the CO2 that’s been released up to now. Today’s level of global warming, and then some, is a done deal, yea unto the seventh generation.
So the only reason to reduce our carbon footprint today is the hope that the eighth generation will get something out of it — to do the right thing for posterity, in other words.
Too bad the eighth generation isn’t going to see it that way.
When that glorious day finally arrives when CO2, temperatures and sea level all begin to fall, the eighth generation will be angry beyond belief. They will curse our names and piss on our graves.
The reason why the advent of the global cooling will not be met with huzzas and hosannas is that the eighth generation will have adapted to global warming. Embraced the suck. Learned to live with it. More than learned to live with it. Learned to thrive in it. Learned to thrive because of it.
And they will be horrified by the prospect of having to re-adapt to a colder world, just as we would be horrified by the the prospect of having to re-adapt to ice age conditions.
Ohhhhh-kay. My head hurts. Sent March 8:
It’s tempting to think we clever apes will be able to survive and prosper on a drastically warmed planet. Paul Danish carries this to a surreal apotheosis, stating that should we succeed in slowing the runaway greenhouse effect even slightly, eventually allowing the Earth’s atmosphere to start shedding CO2 and cooling down, our descendants (who will by that time be enjoying life in a climate previously experienced only by dinosaurs) will be enraged at our actions.
By this logic, there is no reason to mitigate any catastrophe, since the survivors (as survivors always do) will adapt to conditions on the ground. But such adaptability demands gradual civilizational changes rather than frantic emergency responses. Humanity will flourish in the coming centuries only if we substitute a sustainable economy for our present consumption-based model; if we don’t start now, our descendants will be too busy struggling for survival to curse our memories.
Warren Senders
Education environment: denialists extreme weather idiots
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 12: And In Related News…
This letter was prompted by the comments on this article in the (upstate NY) TImes-Herald-Record:
A new report by an environmental advocacy group shows our region has been particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events — driven by what it believes is climate change.
The report, compiled by Environment New York Research and Policy Center, shows our nook of the Northeast has had a high number of federal disaster declarations since 2006.
Numbers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency show Ulster County has had six weather-related federal disaster declarations in the last five years, while Orange County has had five and Sullivan County, four.
Related Stories“Catskill, Hudson Valley, and Mohawk River Valley residents have endured extreme weather beyond the usual cold winters during the last five years,” David VanLuven, director of the Center, said in a statement.
Our region stands out for the amount of federal disaster declarations in the past five years.
I figured I’d write a guide for wanna-be “skeptics.” Sent March 6:
Here’s how to simulate a climate-change denialist’s response to the report linking New York state’s increasingly extreme weather to global warming.
First, assert that the climate has always changed over time, so why worry? Second, note that since the report was sponsored by an environmental group its contents are necessarily suspect. Third, point out that scientists predicted global cooling in the 1970s, so why should their opinions be trusted now? Fourth, claim that the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia show climatologists can’t be trusted. Fifth, raise the specter of a socialist New World Order apparently operated for the enrichment of dastardly tree-huggers. And last but not least, make fun of Al Gore.
Leaving aside the last two absurdities, each of these arguments is simply rebutted. Multiple inquiries absolved the “climategate” scientists from any wrongdoing while confirming their results; a substantial majority of climatologists were in fact predicting global warming in the 1970s; most reports on the environment come from environmental groups (surprise!). Finally, nobody suggests Earth’s climate has never changed — just that if climatic shifts that historically lasted a hundred thousand years are now taking a hundred, that’s not a good sign.
It’s easy.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots Peter Gleick
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 10: (Facepalm)
Meet a denialist clod at the North County Times (“serving North San Diego and SW Riverside Counties” — CA), named Steven Greenhut. He mouths off about Gleick, and about climate scientists in general:
When it comes to global warming, the ends apparently justify the means. People from all political persuasions do stupid things to advance their cause, but what bothers me most are respectable people who justify behavior they would never tolerate from their foes. That type of ideological fanaticism is corrosive of our democratic society.
It’s easy to chide the hypocrisy of Gleick. He had been the chairman of an ethics committee for a scientific association. His column blasting dishonesty still sits on his institute’s website. It’s harder to explain away his deceit as a mere aberration in the climate-change drama.
In the “Climategate” scandal in 2009, “Hundreds of private email messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change,” according to a New York Times report from the time.
The emails showed that the scientific community is so invested in this climate-change ideology for financial and ideological reasons that it would rather cook the numbers than level with the public about the reality of the threat. A follow-up release of emails in 2011 provided even more evidence supporting skeptics’ claims.
Blah, blah, blah.
The whole thing could have been written by a robot, and probably was. But my response was written by a human, and mailed on March 4:
Let’s stipulate in advance that Dr. Peter Gleick shouldn’t have impersonated a staffer at the Heartland Institute in order to authenticate some documents purportedly originating at the secretive right-wing think tank. But the arguments Mr. Greenhut builds on this fact are specious, and reveal that he has swallowed the denialist message — hook, line and sinker.
For example, he cites the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia without noting that multiple separate investigations cleared the scientists involved of any improprieties. Mr. Greenhut cites “a New York Times report at the time,” but ignores the paper’s subsequent coverage acknowledging that “climategate” was a “manufactured controversy” (editorial, July 10, 2010).
The Heartland Institute documents revealed a carefully crafted agenda for undermining science education in America. Under the guise of “teaching the controversy,” Heartland planned to supply curricula which covered climate science inaccurately, in a way consistent with the profit-driven motives of the Institute’s funders. It’s analogous to a tobacco company funding health and fitness curricula downplaying the link between cigarettes and cancer.
Whether retail or wholesale, lies have no place in science. But those on the denialist side of the climate change argument have far more to answer for than Peter Gleick.
Warren Senders
environment: conspiracy theory denialists idiots oceanic acidification
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 9: Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Our Lives
Oceanic acidification is the great unrecognized disaster awaiting us. The Albany Times-Union:
ALBANY — Greenhouse gases that drive man-made climate change are also dangerously changing ocean chemistry, likely faster than at any other time in the past 300 million years, according to research coordinated between New York state and the United Kingdom.
The change — known as ocean acidification — is associated with several massive extinctions of marine life in that period of Earth’s history, and now presents a growing threat, said study lead author Barbel Honisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Located in Rockland County on the Hudson River, where the ocean tides stretch upriver to Troy, the observatory was joined by the University of Bristol in southern England in the report, which examined several hundred independent studies from around the world done over the last two decades.
I just felt in the mood for some mockery. Sent March 3:
Red alert! The global scientific conspiracy is not satisfied with contaminating the minds of our nation’s citizens with actual, you know, science-y stuff about the accelerating concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These nefarious empiricists have now infiltrated oceanography!
As part of their plan to bring about a New World Order, rogue researchers are now presenting genuine facts about the terrifying likelihood of catastrophic acidification in the world’s oceans. Have they no shame? Because of this unprecedented power play on the part of the corrupt scientific cabal, climate-change denialists will need to work even harder to keep their minds unsullied by any contact with actual evidence. Note: if you don’t see the sarcasm in these paragraphs, you’re probably part of the problem.
What will the doubters do when the evidence is finally too much to refute? How much more will it take for them to change their minds?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots Michael Mann Peter Gleick
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 5: Kill, Kill, Kill For Peace.
Time Magazine, on the war-on-science:
The climate war — the public opinion battle between skeptics of man-made global warming and those who believe in the scientific consensus — escalated to a new level of ferocity this past month. First a series of memos allegedly from the Heartland Institute — a libertarian think tank that has long supported climate skepticism — surfaced on the Internet, detailing the group’s previously anonymous corporate funding and outlining its plan to fight action on global warming. Then came the news last week that the Heartland memos had been fraudulently acquired by the environmental advocate and scientist Peter Gleick, who — after allegedly being sent an initial memo by a person he identified as a Heartland insider — impersonated as a Heartland board member via email in order to obtain several additional internal documents. Worse, Heartland now claims one of the memos was doctored — while nonetheless confirming that it plans to push global warming skepticism in the nation’s schools, opening up one more, very impressionable front in the seemingly endless climate war.
If there’s anyone who knows how nasty the climate fight can be, it’s Penn State climatologist Michael Mann. Mann, who has been involved with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for over a decade, gets regular death threats at his office. He’s been the target of a lengthy — and, critics say, politically motivated — investigation by the attorney general of Virginia. His private emails to colleagues have been hacked and published, and he’s become a major public target for Heartland and like-minded groups. “I guess over the years I’ve experienced quite a few adventures,” says Mann, who is about to publish book on his experiences, called The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. “It’s given me not just a solid understanding of the problem of man-made climate change, but also the campaign — largely funded by the fossil fuel industry — to deny that science.”
They go on to talk more about Gleick. I’m very tired and this letter was interrupted by family stuff repeatedly during its composition….but I feel pretty good about it anyway. Sent February 28:
It’s very easy to deplore Peter Gleick’s ethical lapse. After all, even the MacArthur-winning climatologist himself agrees that impersonating a Heartland Institute employee in order to verify documents was a bad idea. And all over America and the world, pundits are chiming in that this misdemeanor will ruin the credibility of climate scientists everywhere.
Lost in the squabbling over Gleick’s actions is the fact that Heartland and similar organizations have worked for years to ruin the credibility of climate scientists everywhere. They have used ample sources of corporate funding to impugn the veracity of dedicated researchers and misrepresent a worldwide scientific consensus. Consider the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect over the next century, and add to them the consequences of inaction today — a paralysis the Heartland Institute actively supports — and ask yourself: would you tell a lie to save a single life? A billion lives? A civilization?
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots quacks
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 4: Goat Glands!
The Philadelphia Inquirer speaks sooth:
Recent revelations are highlighting the corrosive nature of our national dialogue about climate change.
Bloggers recently published what appear to be internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a group that has long sought to undermine public understanding of climate science. The documents detail the organization’s plan to introduce misleading information about climate change to science classrooms as part of a larger campaign to constrain the American response to the problem. And last week, a highly regarded climate scientist revealed that his frustration over continuing attacks on climate science led him to trick Heartland into sending him its documents.
Sadly, stolen documents and e-mails, opaque corporate financing of interest groups, and a simple lack of civility have come to define the public discourse on climate change.
There is a better way.
The truth is that the scientific community has reached a consensus on climate change. The buildup of heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels and clearing forests is changing the climate, posing significant risks to our well-being. Reducing emissions and preparing for unavoidable changes would greatly reduce those risks. That is the conclusion of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the world’s leading scientific societies, and the overwhelming majority of practicing climate scientists.
I’ve just been reading Pope Brock’s book on John Brinkley. Go ahead, read about him; I’ll wait. Sent February 27:
While fleecing the rubes is a long-standing American tradition, there’s a big difference between the Heartland Institute and old-fashioned con artists like “Doctor” John Brinkley, who crippled thousands and made millions selling “rejuvenation” treatments to the gullible and needy in the 1920s. Brinkley and others of his ilk peddled nostrums they knew to be spurious, and countless anxious individuals believed their lies.
While Heartland’s agenda is not so much about selling lies as it is about devaluing the truth, the charlatans and quacks who sold snake oil and goat glands would feel right at home with the Institute’s science-denying curriculum salesmen. Funded by corporate interests whose astronomical profit margins are threatened by any sort of regulatory action on climate change, this secretive conservative think tank distorts and denies the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, fostering public confusion and ignorance. And all for the basest of motives: money.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 3: Dumber-est-est-est…er.
The Washington Post wonders:
IS THE FIGHT against global warming hopeless? It can seem so. The long-term threat to the climate comes from carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, locking in higher temperatures for generations. After decades of effort, only about one-tenth of America’s energy mix comes from renewable sources that don’t produce carbon dioxide.
But two policies can buy the world more time to allow carbon-free technologies to catch up. One is aimed at greenhouse substances that clear out of the atmosphere after a few years, months or even days. Cutting back the emission of soot and ozone gases such as methane would reduce the world’s warming by as much as a half degree Celsius over the next few decades, according to a study in last month’s Science. Adding hydrofluorocarbons — another class of short-lived pollutants — to the list would help even more to delay the approach of temperature thresholds beyond which global warming could be catastrophic.
Reducing these emissions is relatively cheap, especially when the benefits to health are factored in. For example, primitive cooking stoves in developing countries produce much of the world’s soot; using more efficient ones would prevent perhaps millions of deaths from respiratory illness. Methane, meanwhile, is the primary component of natural gas — a commodity that pipeline or coal-mine operators could sell if they kept it from escaping into the atmosphere. Researchers have even concluded that global crop yields would rise.
Global warming will be easy to conquer, compared to stupidity, against which the gods themselves contend in vain. Sent February 26:
While the struggle against runaway planetary warming is not completely hopeless, the outlook for the next few centuries can seem pretty bleak. The unifying thread in climatologists’ forecasts of the likely impact of climate change has been that they’re far too conservative; virtually without exception the environmental consequences have been worse, and earlier, than predicted. It’s hard to look at the accumulated evidence and remain cheerful — unless, of course, you’re a climate-change denialist, in which case all that extreme weather everywhere around the globe is proof of a giant conspiracy to bring about a New World Order (don’t forget compulsory re-education camps for SUV owners!).
It’s an unfortunate irony that those conspiracy theorists are the ones stymieing the revamped energy economy and upgraded infrastructure that would bring hope to the fight. The ignorance of climate-change deniers may be blissful, but it carries grave consequences for the rest of us.
Warren Senders
Education environment: denialists Heartland Institute idiots Peter Gleick
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 2: One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other
The Hudson Valley Media Group runs a piece from the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch with the title, “Heartland Institute: Not a think tank, just in the tank.”
Oh, my, yes:
The purported Heartland Institute internal documents leaked to media outlets last week were not exactly revelatory.
Collectively, the 100 or so pages describe an advocacy group going about the business of pushing its agenda and raising money to help it do so. Chicago-based Heartland has been doing that since it was created in 1984 “to discover, develop and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems,” according to its current mission statement.
Still, the leak and Heartland’s response to it are useful reminders to anyone seeking hard information about controversial issues: Words such as “institute,” “center” and “council” in an organization’s name do not necessarily signal impartial inquiry or dispassionate investigation. Any organization can call itself a “think tank,” but sometimes spin is just spin.
When the documents first appeared on the Internet last week, Heartland quickly confirmed that some of its materials had been “stolen.” On Wednesday, Heartland declared one two-page memo to be an outright fake but said the rest of the material had not yet been reviewed to see if anything had been altered.
By Thursday, Heartland chief executive Joseph Bast wrote in a blog post that the organization still didn’t know if any documents had been modified. And in a letter sent Saturday to some Internet sites that had posted the documents, Heartland’s general counsel said the group still was investigating whether the documents had been altered.
Authenticating the documents isn’t that difficult. Heartland created and possesses the originals, after all. If it could discredit them, it would.
The first comment triggered this letter, which was sent off on February 25:
When confronted with Heartland Institute’s plans to disseminate climate-science denialist curricula, conservatives quickly invoke the “climategate” emails. The disagreements over statistical methods between scientists at the University of East Anglia are somehow equated to a heavily funded anti-science program affecting public schools nationwide, presumably because both involved documents obtained outside normal channels.
Well, no.
Three separate independent inquiries completely exonerated the UEA scientists, and other climatologists all over the world support their conclusions. The hackers who obtained the “climategate” emails have never revealed themselves, let alone apologized.
Conversely, the Heartland Institute’s climate-change denial curricula are produced by someone with no training in the field. While Heartland’s position is disputed by the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, their work is supported by corporations hoping to protect their profitability by delaying environmental regulation. The lone individual who obtained the Heartland documents almost immediately identified himself.
The two cases are emphatically not equivalent.
Warren Senders