Education environment Politics: idiots NCSE scientific method
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 22: You Can’t Spell “Idiot” Without An “Id.”
USA Today reports on the NCSE’s new project:
A noted science education organization Monday announced a turn to battling climate science naysayers.
The National Center for Science Education, based in Oakland, Calif., is best known for leading charges against creationist efforts to remove evolution from public schools nationwide. But now, the three-decade-old group will also fight efforts to slip incorrect climate science information into school lessons.
“We are seeing more efforts in legislatures and schools to push climate misinformation on teachers and students,” says NCSE head Eugenie Scott. The NCSE plans to serve as a resource for science teachers facing school board or classroom fights over climate science.
Good luck, guys. Sent January 17:
The National Center for Science Education has an uphill battle ahead. Their laudable initiative to spur education on climate change is certain to be turned into a political football by the petro-funded id of American governance, the Republican party.
Over the coming months, prepare for cries of “ideologically biased education!” and “brainwashing our kids!” It’s already happened with the teaching of evolution; several states are now readying legislation forcing science teachers to treat Darwin’s discoveries on a par with young-Earth creationism.
Conservatives will protest that they simply want to “teach the controversy” of climate change. Nonsense; if that were so, they’d advocate a place in the classroom for Marxist economics, geocentric cosmology, and the medieval theory of humours. Global climate change is a fact; an uneducated citizenry won’t be able to cope with the threats it poses, which is why the NCSE’s work is so vitally important for our future.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 20: Cry Me A River, Assholes
The Berthold Recorder (CO) runs a story from Grist detailing the WATB behavior of conservatives who find their shibboleths crumbling into irrelevance under the assault of facts:
Prominent MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has been receiving an unprecedented “frenzy of hate” after a video featuring an interview with him was published recently by Climate Desk.
Emails contained “veiled threats against my wife,” and other “tangible threats,” Emanuel, a highly-regarded atmospheric scientist and director of MIT’s Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate program, said in an interview. “They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive.”
“What was a little bit new about it was dragging family members into it and feeling that my family might be under threat, so naturally I didn’t feel very good about that at all,” Emanuel said. “I thought it was low to drag somebody’s spouse into arguments like this.”
Swine. It reminds me of the bullshit Jessica Ahlquist is currently going through. Sent January 15:
That climatologists are now the target of ideologically driven abuse from climate denialists whose carefully packaged preconceptions are endangered by inconvenient facts is hardly surprising.
These attacks are of a piece with similar responses from conservatives in other spheres who feel their world-views are under attack, as in the case of a teenaged girl in Rhode Island who successfully sued to remove a prayer banner from her public school’s wall, and who’s been receiving threats of violence.
Her offense? An accurate understanding of the ideals of her nation’s founding document, and the temerity to hold an institution accountable to them. Dr. Kerry Emmanuel’s offense? Noting some of the plain facts about global climate change: it’s real, it’s our fault, it’s dangerous, and it needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Apparently, conservatives go into grotesque spasms of victimhood the moment they have to deal with logic, reason, and factuality.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots methane Republican obstructionism soot
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 18: Life Is Hard, But….
The State Journal (“West Virginia’s Only Business Newspaper”) notes some relatively simple things we can do to help out:
While working through the expensive problem of reducing carbon dioxide emissions to slow climate change, why not go ahead and tackle emissions of methane and soot — two easier problems that will pay for themselves and then some?
The suggestion, from an international team of 13 researchers lead by a NASA scientist, comes this week in “Simultaneously Mitigating Near-Term Climate Change and Improving Human Health and Food Security” in the journal Science.
The researchers identified 14 measures they say could reduce warming by 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050. It’s a significant part of the 3.6 degrees’ warming that climate negotiators meeting in Copenhagen in 2009 targeted as a goal to stay below.
Measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions seem mainly to be expensive and controversial up front and to yield climate benefits only in the very long run.
But the measures proposed by these researchers for reducing methane and soot cost little and yield a range of substantial benefits in a shorter time frame.
The problem? Aw, hell. You and I both know what the problem is. People with no brains can’t recognize “no-brainers,” can they? Sent January 13:
The menu of things that can be done easily to address the burgeoning climate crisis is actually pretty substantial. Reducing atmospheric methane and soot should be a no-brainer, since such an approach not only makes sense as a strategy for reducing global warming, but offers both economic and public health benefits to the country as a whole.
Unfortunately, as long as one half of our government is controlled by people who reject science when it conflicts with either their electoral prospects or their profit margins, even such a straightforward proposal will be hindered and hamstrung by unnecessary political posturing. What was once a rational voice for business interests in American government has now become an ideologically fixated bloc incapable of adopting even the most obviously sensible policy initiatives. When GOP climate-change denialists pander to extremist elements within their own constituencies, they wind up damaging the communities they purport to serve.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: hippies idiots mitigation rhetoric
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 14: Do The Right Thing?
County legislators in New York are scared to do the right thing, because they might look like they’re agreeing with (gasp!) hippies:
CANTON — St. Lawrence County legislators liked much of what they heard Monday about saving money through energy changes, but stopped short of wanting the projects included in a Climate Action Plan that was shelved earlier for discussion until at least February.
Legislators voted 7-7, with Legislator Vernon D. “Sam” Burns, D-Ogdensburg, absent, not to refer the draft county Climate Action Plan back to staff for revision and then disagreed over whether that meant they wanted to proceed with some of the measures.
{snip}
Some legislators who voted against revising the climate plan — which has been tabled twice — said that the county would be wise to move ahead with cost-saving proposals but that they did not need to be part of a plan they find over-reaching.
The breakdown of the vote was almost exactly along party lines. Sent January 10:
The Republican party’s incessant politicization of science over the past four decades has led to a lot of bad policy decisions. It’s also made it harder to implement good policies. St. Lawrence county lawmakers’ unwillingness to include energy saving strategies under a rubric of climate change adaptation is an excellent example of this phenomenon.
On the face of it, energy efficiency is about the least objectionable policy goal imaginable. But because the word “conservation” has become anathema to conservative legislators and media figures, any move to increase efficiency and reduce waste must be framed in purely financial terms if it is to have any hope of success. Furthermore, any suggestion that such a fiscally sensible policy is in fact consistent with climate change response strategies is ipso facto a kiss of death in the electoral arena.
On the grand scale, Monday’s dispute in Canton may seem small — but it is symptomatic of our broader national inability to act in our own best interests for fear of political consequences.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans scientific method
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 9: Morans.
The L.A. Times runs a story on the Pacific Institute’s “Bad Science” Award, which goes to a deserving cast of characters (Murdoch was runner-up, which will give you an idea):
The 2011 “Climate B.S. of the Year Award” goes to the entire field of candidates currently stumping in New Hampshire for the Republican Party presidential nomination, the Pacific Institute announced Thursday.
The awards, in their second year, are intended to distinguish the most active among so-called climate change deniers.
In this case, “B.S.” stands for bad science, according to hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
“There’s a lot of very serious pushback in the scientific community about bad climate science being pushed by a small group of skeptics,” said Gleick from his office in Oakland. “There’s plenty of formal pushback in the literature. This was an attempt, really, to highlight some of the most egregious examples over the past year in a way that was a little more lighthearted.”
The Republicans seeking the White House won this year’s contest “hands down,” the institute’s announcement says: “Not a single one of the Republican candidates for president has a position on climate change that is consistent with the actual science accepted by 97-98% of all climate scientists and every national academy of sciences on the planet.”
It gave me a chance to use the China Hands reference again. While this letter works fairly well I am not entirely pleased with it; it could be more euphonious if I had more time to devote to its creation. But it’s 149 words. What the hell. Sent January 5:
It is only in the past fifty years that the GOP has made a rejection of science a linchpin of its policies and electoral strategy. Capitalizing on a long-standing undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in American society, Republican politicians have long stigmatized professors, scientists and experts as “liberal elitists.” While they’ve won applause from constituents, these attacks ultimately redound to the detriment of the country as a whole.
The Republican party’s arrogant rejection of the crucial findings of climate scientists is of a piece with the McCarthy-era purge of “China hands” from the State Department, rendering America’s East Asian policy rudderless in the face of Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese nationalism. Ignoring the experts didn’t work out then, did it? It won’t work out well now, either, as GOP presidential aspirants eagerly dismiss scientists’ urgent warnings of runaway climate change. Ignorance may be politically blissful, but it always makes for bad policy.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 5: You Only Gave Me Your Invitation
The Delaware News Journal agrees that we have a problem:
Croze is one of the many citizens, scientists, academics, public officials, business owners and environmentalists we’ve interviewed during our six-month investigation on the impact climate change and rising sea levels are having in Delaware.
We pursued this story because it’s clear that Delaware, which is sinking and has the lowest elevation of any state in America, is highly exposed to sea level rise.
We stayed with it because coastal communities demanding government intervention at taxpayer expense is quickly becoming an important public policy debate – one infused with hope for solutions, heartbreaking loss and unsettling predictions that would dramatically change the lifestyle we cherish in a landscape blessed with beaches, tidal estuaries and marshes rich with wildlife.
The overwhelming majority of scientists say climate change is real, as does Gov. Jack Markell and Colin O’Mara, secretary of Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
They start to call out the mis-informers, although there is still a bit of false equivalency in the piece. Sent December 30:
As one of the states most vulnerable to rising sea levels, Delaware is a perfect example of the importance of including climate change in debates on state development and sustainability policy. Only by recognizing scientific reality can our lawmakers craft legislation that is more than political theater.
For a counter-example, just look at several other East coast states whose politicians have decided that dramatic posturing is more important than the future of their constituencies. Earlier this year, North Carolina passed a law prohibiting estimates of sea level rise from using anything other than historical climate data, effectively banning measurements that recognize the accelerating global warming which climatologists predict. Such willful ignorance highlights climate change’s importance as an educational challenge as well as an environmental and moral issue. The misinformation propagated by petroleum-funded think tanks and a complaisant media has delayed meaningful action on this issue for far too long.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes climate science denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 4: Nattering Nabobs? Pointy-Headed Professors? Experts? We Don’t Need No Steeeeeenkin’ Experts!
The NYT has a year’s-end editorial noting the GOP’s reality problem:
Is there a connection between last year’s extreme weather events and global warming? The answers might be a lot clearer if the Republicans in Congress were less hostile to climate change research.
A typical year in the United States features three or four weather disasters costing more than $1 billion. In 2009 there were nine. Last year brought a dozen, at a cost of $52 billion, making it the most extreme year for weather since accurate record keeping began in the 19th century. There was drought in the Southwest while Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee destroyed homes and rerouted rivers in the Northeast. The most severe tornado ever recorded, and the most tornadoes recorded in a single month, flailed the Southeast. Floods drowned the Midwest.
Climate researchers have been cautious about linking individual events to rising global temperatures. Yet the evidence tells us the earth is warming, largely as a result of the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity. And many of last year’s extreme weather events were consistent with the effects of climate change. A warming atmosphere will hold more water, supplying the fuel for storms; steadily rising temperatures are likely to promote droughts. Climate is a complex subject, and definitive answers will require more study. But as Justin Gillis recently noted in The Times, the political climate for that is not favorable. House Republicans, many of whom reject the scientific consensus about the human causes of global warming, took aim at almost every program that had to do with global warming. Senate negotiators managed to protect most in the 2012 budget, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — the hub of much of the government’s research into the effects of climate change on weather — took a big hit.
If we can’t disprove the evidence, let’s attack the experts! This letter is the first time I’ve specifically linked the China purges to climate denial, which I think is rather clever. Sent December 31:
Just as it’s impossible to link individual weather events to global climate change, we cannot establish direct connections between specific conservative denials of factual evidence and the GOP’s multi-decade crusade against science education. This reluctance to make promiscuous causal links is a feature of rational thought.
Irrational thought, by contrast, finds its political expression in Reaganesque government-by-anecdote, in pandering to religious zealotry, and in the dismissal of expertise as “elitist” (their desperate rejection of climate science has parallels throughout the GOP’s history, as witness the McCarthy-era purges of China experts from the State Department).
Just as climatologists have predicted for years that the world’s climate will be gravely affected by an escalating greenhouse effect, sociologists and political scientists have long suggested that increasing irrationality in American education, media and public discourse will ultimately destroy the Jeffersonian ideal of a “well-educated citizenry.” Unsurprisingly, those elitist experts have been proved correct. Again.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: China corporate irresponsibility idiots Industrialized nations media irresponsibility Republicans sustainability
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 3: TSTS
Florida Today’s Randall Parkinson has a good analysis of our industrial policy paralysis:
This year, China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest investor in green technology.
The country is rapidly emerging as the world’s leader in clean-energy innovation and manufacturing. It now produces more wind turbines and solar panels each year than any other country.
This was accomplished remarkably fast because China recognized its rising economic power can be sustained only by ensuring access to abundant energy, food and water resources. This requires development of noncarbon-based energy and a stable climate.
Many other countries, like Japan, South Korea and India, also are facilitating the commercial development of green technologies.
Unfortunately, efforts to create a similar technology boom in the United States have paled by comparison, thanks to a very small group of lobbyists.
These merchants of doubt have convinced some members of Congress climate change is not real and the country’s long-term energy policy should focus on more, not less, fossil fuel exploration and production. As a consequence, we have ceded growth in green technology, jobs and related income to overseas companies that now profitably export their goods and expertise to the U.S.
I consider myself a proud American. Watching this shit go on (and on and on and on) is an utter embarrassment. Sent December 30:
Those same political candidates fetishizing American exceptionalism enthusiastically advocate policies that would permanently cement our nation’s status as an also-ran. Nowhere is this disconnect between rhetoric and action more evident than in our laggardly response to the challenge of global climate change. Although scientific evidence demonstrates to all but the willfully deluded that the greenhouse effect is wreaking havoc on the planetary ecosystems that sustain our species, self-styled “deficit hawks” relentlessly advocate for failure.
We must fail to develop new energy sources, to mount a robust response to a genuine existential threat, to retool our infrastructure to cope with the extreme weather events triggered by atmospheric warning, to educate our citizens about the dangers ahead, to take responsibility for our century of massive greenhouse emissions.
Why must we fail? The “fiscally conservative” answer: we can’t afford it. Meet the new face of penny-wise, pound-foolish American exceptionalism: too stingy to succeed.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots invasive species NASA Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 23: The Menace From Earth
The Miami Herald notes a new report from NASA detailing ecosystem transformation in the wake of climate change:
Global warming could bring a major transformation for Earth’s plants and animals over the next century, a NASA study says, driving nearly half the planet’s forests, grasslands and other vegetation toward conversion into radically different ecosystems.
The ecological stress could give a boost to invasive species, but at the expense of natives, reducing the diversity of plants and animals overall.
And humans are likely, almost literally, to cut them off at the pass: When plants and animals attempt to survive by shifting their geographical ranges, as they have in past episodes of climate change, they’ll be blocked by farms and cities.
“If half the world is driven to change its vegetation cover, and meanwhile, we’ve fragmented the surface of the Earth by putting in parking lots and monoculture agricultural zones and all these other impediments to natural migration, then there could be problems,” said lead author Jon Bergengren, a global ecologist who was a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech when he did the study.
“When, suddenly, plants and animals aren’t living in habitats to which they’re adapted, then you start to get an unhealthy planet,” he said.
The comments on the article are a mass of stupid. Plus ca change…
Sent December 19:
Conservative politicians routinely ramp up their anti-immigrant rhetoric for the benefit of their xenophobic constituents. Curiously, however, they dismiss the extralegals most likely to cross America’s borders in a post-climate-change future.
Let’s leave aside the obvious fact that climate-driven resource wars and geopolitical instability are likely to lead to vastly increased numbers of refugees in the coming decades. Rather, let’s focus on the immigrant populations which will do the most damage to America: invasive species. Migrating from their customary ecological niches in response to rapid climatic shifts, these visitors will be part of a traumatic environmental transformation over the next century, rendering vast parts of the United States unrecognizable.
While disease-bearing insects, non-native plants and other such unwelcome visitors will have far greater economic impact on our nation than any undocumented human immigrants, you won’t hear any candidates for election mention them at all. I wonder why?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility idiots Keystone XL Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 20: That’s A Libel On The Good Name of Weasels
The Arkansas Times-Record runs a story about purported jobs purportedly at stake from not doing the Keystone XL:
Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., pointed to the fate of 60 employees of Welspun Tubular as reason to support construction of the Keystone pipeline.
“They say miles of pipeline are on the property and that has caused five dozen employees to lose their jobs,” Terry said. “The pipes would be part of the Keystone oil pipeline which is a project running from Canada to Texas.”
“The president has said he would veto the bill,” Terry said. “Mr. President, this is about creating jobs. Please join us.”
Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., brought up the same issue Wednesday on the Senate floor.
“Welspun Tubular Company, which makes pipes for the oil industry, has been producing pipe for the Keystone project. Unfortunately, due to the administration’s delay on Keystone, the company has already begun to lay workers off in Little Rock. They have 500 miles of pipe that was produced for the project, ready to go, that is just sitting at the facility,” Boozman said.
Boozman blamed politics for the delay, noting that the State Department has said a permit decision could not be delivered until after November 2012.
“President Obama needs to quit pandering to the radical environmentalists. He needs to do what is best for the country, not what he perceives is best for his re-election,” Boozman said.
Boozman, has also co-sponsored legislation that would require a construction permit to be issued within 60 days of passage.
Sociopaths. Hypocrites. Weasels. Sent Dec. 16:
In accusing President Obama of “pandering to radical environmentalists,” Senator Boozman’s remarks on the Keystone XL controversy inadvertently describe his own party’s pro-oil strategy. For decades, Republicans have branded many genuinely concerned and patriotic Americans with such grossly misleading descriptions — but the real pandering is taking place on their side of the aisle.
As for the “radical” tag, there are indeed those who espouse extreme action on environmental issues; their positions should be repudiated by any responsible citizen. Perhaps the most drastic thing these malefactors are advocating is the actual physical alteration of the air we breathe; these extremists propose to increase atmospheric CO2 levels to levels last found when dinosaurs walked the Earth. Surely that’s far more radical than the statements of anti-pipeline activists, who are simply pointing out that the long-term health and prosperity of our species should take precedence over the return-on-investment demands of multinational corporations.
Warren Senders