environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 23: It’s Dark In Here
Richard Doak, in the Des Moines Register, speaks sooth:
To date, most foreign policy in regard to climate change has been aimed at achieving international agreements to curb the burning of fossil fuels, so the buildup of heat-trapping CO2 in the atmosphere can be slowed or reversed. That’s all well and good, but even if such agreements can be achieved and implemented, they would take decades to show results.
Meanwhile, the science suggests climate change is unstoppable. The globe will get warmer, ice will melt, seas will rise. There will be more extremes of weather, more disasters like Superstorm Sandy and more turmoil as in Syria.
That’s why climate-change treaties aren’t enough. The United States can’t just sit around and wait for the climate to return to normal. That might never happen.
America needs to be the world leader in making adaptations to climate change and helping others to adapt. Farmers in now-permanent drought regions need help to find new livelihoods. Coastal and riverside cities need help moving to high ground or building protections. Whole populations may need to be relocated. Buildings in storm-prone areas need to be tornado-proofed. Homes in wildfire regions need to be protected or moved. More innovation in drought-resistant and pest-resistant crops will be needed. Breakthroughs in water conservation and reuse will be essential.
In short, there’s a lot of work to be done. America has always been a can-do country. So let’s do it, both abroad and at home.
True enough. And the source of your problem? September 15:
Yes, America was once a “can-do” country, as Richard Doak reminds us. But when it comes to common-sense response to genuine threats like climate change, the new default setting for our political class is no longer so optimistic. It’s now too inconvenient to prepare for imminent disaster; better to reassure ourselves with platitudes and distract ourselves with irrelevancies.
This is the GOP’s new normal, and its implications for our nation and the world are appalling. For Republicans in our government, it’s not just that meaningful responses to the climate crisis are too much trouble, it’s that thinking about the problem is politically unacceptable. After Katrina, President Bush claimed that “no one anticipated” the failure of Louisiana’s levees. In other words, Republicans didn’t listen to the people who predicted correctly; anticipating the problem was too hard.
There’s a great deal we as a nation can do to address the threat of climate change before it becomes a catastrophic emergency. But it all comes down to the science-deniers in the halls of Congress. Can they recognize that anticipating problems and preparing for them is one of the principal responsibilities of government, and that pretending something doesn’t exist won’t make it go away?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus scientific method
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 18: That Thesis Has Been Proven Invalid
The Press-Enterprise (CA) editorializes mendaciously:
Taking the temperature of climate scientists provides no useful information about the Earth’s climate. Yet the claim that “97 percent of scientists agree!” has become the anti-carbon-dioxide crowd’s No. 1 argument for why climate action can wait no longer. Those who set policy would do better to follow the facts than succumb to red herrings and peer pressure.
Environmental Research Letters, an electronic journal of environmental science, in May published a paper by two climate bloggers. The paper, by, Dana Nuccitelli and John Cook, purported to “quantify the consensus” on climate change in scientific literature. They reviewed 12,000 published papers and concluded that 97 percent of the abstracts that took a position “endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
But the “consensus view” into which the survey pigeonholes papers is extremely broad. And given the buzz the paper has generated, the climate czars in Washington should have had a few follow-up questions: “What does this tell us about the role of humans versus natural variability?” “How severe is the phenomenon you identify and what do you recommend that we do about it?” “What data lead you to that conclusion?” And maybe even, “Who are you guys?”
But no. President Obama — or those who fill his Twitter feed — immediately took up the cause, not only accepting the findings uncritically but exaggerating them: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”
It makes me sooooo tired. September 11:
The editorial purporting to demonstrate methodological flaws in a recent study of the consensus among climate scientists is, ironically, far more factually-challenged than the research it tries to criticize. To begin with, the study wasn’t produced by a pair of “bloggers”, but by nine separate authors, all practicing professional scientists. Furthermore, this particular paper was deliberately confined to examining a significant discrepancy between popular perception and scientific opinion on climate change; it is inherent in the nature of such research to tackle one problem at a time.
More significantly, while there are many aspects of climate change which remain still uncertain, human causation isn’t one of them.
In politics and media, pre-existing political orientations often influence “factuality,” as was tragically demonstrated by the buildup to the Iraq war. But science doesn’t work that way: scientific method requires stringent self-correction as a way of getting at the truth. When climatologists all over the planet agree that humans are causing the greenhouse effect, this consensus arises from decades of steady examination and analysis of multiple types of evidence. Widespread agreement doesn’t prove that global warming is anthropogenic; rather, the evidence has created the agreement.
Your column was ill-conceived, irresponsible and without foundation.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: assholes conspiracy theorists denialists idiots paranoia scientific literacy
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 15: I Need A Cigarette
David Suzuki takes apart the conspiracy theorists, in the Timmins Press (Ontario):
TIMMINS – I recently wrote about geoengineering as a strategy to deal with climate change and carbon dioxide emissions.
That drew comments from people who confuse this scientific process with the unscientific theory of “chemtrails.”
Some also claimed the column supported geoengineering, which it didn’t.
The reaction got me wondering why some people believe in phenomena rejected by science, like chemtrails, but deny real problems demonstrated by massive amounts of scientific evidence, like climate change.
Chemtrails believers claim governments around the world are in cahoots with secret organizations to seed the atmosphere with chemicals and materials — aluminum salts, barium crystals, biological agents, polymer fibres, etc. — for a range of nefarious purposes.
These include controlling weather for military purposes, poisoning people for population or mind control and supporting secret weapons programs based on the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP.
Scientists have tested and used cloud and atmospheric seeding for weather modification and considered them as ways to slow global warming.
With so many unknowns and possible unintended consequences, these practices have the potential to cause harm.
But the chemtrails conspiracy theory is much broader, positing that military and commercial airlines are involved in constant massive daily spraying that is harming the physical and mental health of citizens worldwide.
I don’t have space to get into the absurdities of belief in a plot that would require worldwide collusion between governments, scientists and airline company executives and pilots to amass and spray unimaginable amounts of chemicals from altitudes of 10,000 metres or more.
Well, that was fun. September 8:
Even as the factual evidence for catastrophic climate change piles higher and higher, conservative zealots continue to reject its existence, severity, and causes. This dismissal of expertise, insight, facts and physical reality is a long-standing feature of the kind of paranoia which flourishes at the intersection of religious fundamentalism and scientific illiteracy. Those asserting the literal truth of ancient scriptures are trapped at the outset in a web of contradictions, gaining lots of practice in the White Queen’s ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast — while those who reject scientific method are ready to embrace superficially plausible notions at the expense of logic and data.
In the paranoid’s world, the more complex an explanation, the better: climate change is not a result of the greenhouse effect, a physical phenomenon first documented over a century ago, but the fabrication of an international cabal of scientists secretly in league with either the Lizard People or the Illuminati. The fact that there is no evidence for such bizarre assertions is proof that “the conspiracy goes all the way to the top.”
In any other context such delusional thinking would be the stuff of comedy. When the long-term future of Earthly life is at stake, however, it’s no longer a laughing matter.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 12: And So I Quit The Police Department
The Greensboro (NC) News-Record discusses local farming and climate change:
BURLINGTON — Small farmers are some of the most vulnerable people in the country to the effects of climate change, area leaders said Wednesday at a roundtable discussion organized by the American Sustainable Business Council.
“There’s so much about climate change that will affect North Carolina’s ability to function as a prosperous state,” said Rep. Pricey Harrison, a Greensboro Democrat who served on the panel.
She said the state’s large agricultural sector combined with the vulnerability of being a coastal state make it a crucial issue — but one that the Republican-controlled legislature continues to pretend doesn’t exist.
“We can’t even really talk about climate change, which is unfortunate given the current scenario facing our state,” Harrison said.
The “it’s happening to farmers everywhere” letter is one I can do practically in my sleep by now. Sept. 5:
North Carolina’s farmers aren’t the only ones confronting planetary climate change. Agriculturists everywhere on Earth are anticipating a future of increasingly unpredictable weather, disrupted planting, hindered plant growth, and ever more uncertain harvests.
This slow-motion crisis makes a powerful case for diversity in our food systems. Monocrops are vulnerable to disease and pests (for a good example of the problems of relying on a single vulnerable staple, think of the Irish potato famine), and increase the likelihood of catastrophic failures from environmental disruptions.
There are many views about how to prepare for the multiple consequences of the accelerating greenhouse effect — but one thing is certain: the problem will never be successfully addressed by those who refuse to admit its existence, like the scientifically ignorant politicians in North Carolina’s halls of government. The time for denial is past; just like farmers, our politicians and media figures must acknowledge these new climatic realities.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 8: They’d Only Ask Me About You
The San-Antonio Express News takes on Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, who is, mirabile dictu, an idiot:
The newest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, leaked to media last week, is frightening and conclusive.
The panel of several hundred scientists, which won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, says the odds are at least 95 percent that humans are the principal cause of climate change. The panel predicts an increase of 5 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century and warns that a rise of that magnitude would cause “extreme heat waves, difficulty growing food and massive changes in plant and animal life, probably including a wave of extinction,” according to the New York Times.
Yet U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, claims the science is uncertain about how much of the warming is caused by humans.
As a result, he has urged U.S. policy-makers to take a skeptical view of “overheated” rhetoric about climate change. He’s called for relaxing, not strengthening, regulations on carbon emissions from power plants. And he’s urged moving forward with the Keystone XL Pipeline, even though on a daily basis it would carry 830,000 barrels of tar sands oil — one of the world’s dirtiest fuels, which, according to the Congressional Research Service, generates at least 14 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oils do.
Sheesh. September 2:
Would you trust a heart surgeon who believed in the medieval theory of “humours”? Would you fly in a plane with a pilot who didn’t understand aerodynamics? Would you eat in a restaurant whose cook didn’t “believe” in sanitation? Then why would you want a Congressional Committee on Science and Technology to be chaired by someone who rejects the methodology and conclusions of contemporary science?
Lamar Smith is an excellent demonstration of what happens when scientific illiteracy is perceived as a cultural virtue. Five decades ago, America launched the space program in response to a perceived threat from the Soviet Union. We lionized scientists, increased funding for math and science education, and recognized the crucial role scientific understanding plays in our society. And we reached the Moon.
Now we face a far more profound threat than Soviet domination of outer space. The climate crisis is all but certain to bring massive destruction and loss of life on a global scale over the coming decades. Rep. Smith thinks the science is “uncertain,” but an inability to understand climatology is hardly a valid argument. Is it just coincidence that his corporate paymasters would find their astronomical profits reduced if Congress took responsible action to address the threat?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots oceanic acidification oceanic warming Republicans
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 7: Thought We Said Goodbye Last Night
More on oceanic acidification, this time from the Sacramento Bee:
Making a living from the ocean is not for the faint of heart. It’s comparable to farming the soil, in that weather, disease and market conditions can make or break your bottom line. Food production, whether farming on land or in water, is dependent upon a number of factors all working in sync to produce a healthy, resilient crop. If just one factor is off, it can ruin your whole harvest.
A recently recognized threat to ocean health has the potential to do more than just inflict a bad year on shellfish producers. Ocean acidification could put us out of business permanently. Caused by activities that generate pollution from factories, cars and power plants, ocean acidification is physically changing the chemistry in the ocean. The ocean is a tremendous sponge for pollution, soaking up about 30 percent of what we put in the atmosphere. As those emissions are absorbed, it makes seawater more acidic with dire consequences to marine life, dissolving the shells of oysters, mussels and clams, and confusing behavior of fish, like salmon.
This is the “we’re all in it together” letter. Sept. 2:
Oceanic heating and acidification (two consequences of the accelerating greenhouse effect) make catastrophic declines a certainty for California’s shellfish industry. And it’s not just the West coast of the USA, but everywhere humans make their living from the sea, for the climate crisis knows no national boundaries.
Since billions of people (between a quarter and a third of Earth’s population) depend on the ocean for food, this is a humanitarian emergency. Include the likely effects of climate change on agriculture, and the gathering storm clouds are too big to ignore.
Unless, of course, you’re in a position to do something about it, like the many politicians whose myopic climate-change denialism ensures a failure to act in time to avert disaster. It’s never a good idea to bet on ignorance; when our species’ future is at stake, it’s a catastrophe in the making.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots religion
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 6: Be Sure To Hide The Roaches
The Christian Post runs an Op-Ed by two evangelical climate scientists, desperately trying to shake off the Limbaugh-stink:
Rush Limbaugh doesn’t think we exist. In other words that evangelical scientists cannot subscribe to the evidence of global warming.
Specifically, during a recent segment on his radio show Limbaugh stated, “If you believe in God, then intellectually you cannot believe in manmade global warming.”
Talk radio personalities often make hyperbolic statements. It is what their listeners expect and want to hear. But in this instance, Rush’s uninformed rhetoric is demeaning to Christians who care deeply about what humans are doing to God’s Creation and ignorant of the consequences that future generations will face if we don’t respond quickly to the challenge of climate change.
We are both atmospheric scientists who study climate change, having earned advanced degrees in our respective fields and having devoted our lives to increasing knowledge through scientific research. We know climate change is real, that most of it is human-caused, and that it is a threat to future generations that must be addressed by the global community. We are also evangelical Christians who believe that God created the world in which we live.
Good luck with that. Sept. 1:
It’s reassuring that some evangelicals acknowledge the existence of the burgeoning climate crisis, and recognize the urgency of action. On this issue, the nature of one’s faith is a trivial factor in comparison with the magnitude of the emergency.
That said, it is not enough for Katharine Hayhoe and Thomas Ackerman just to rebuke talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh’s assertion that Christianity is incompatible with accepting the evidence of climate science. The evangelical community must recognize the role it has played in supporting those institutions of denial which stand in the way of action. The Republican party owes its current power to evangelicals who were cynically and callously manipulated by politicians far more concerned with their own fortunes and those of their corporate paymasters than with the lives of their constituents. Now these same lawmakers are obstructing meaningful legislation on climate issues, thereby increasing the probability of a catastrophic temperature increase over the coming century — a secular Armaggedon wholly explainable by the laws of physics and chemistry.
And regardless of your faith, that’s not Good News.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists EPA Gina McCarthy idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 4: Unlike The Rest Of You Squares
Gina McCarthy went to Alaska, and the Anchorage Daily News was on the case:
“The climate is changing and we need to adapt to that change and make sure communities are prepared,” she said.
A trip to Iowa two weeks ago highlighted the issues, she said.
“There was no question in discussions with both farmers and ranchers the climate change impacts we’re seeing right now are severe,” she said. “We’re having drought and floods in the same state at the same time.”
McCarthy’s path to the EPA’s top job was rocky. Senate Republicans held up her nomination for more than four months before she was confirmed July 18. They used Obama’s choice of McCarthy to highlight complaints about the agency’s environmental regulations and the president’s agenda. McCarthy was previously head of the EPA’s air pollution office.
Alaska’s senators were divided over her confirmation. Democratic Sen. Mark Begich voted for McCarthy, while Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski opposed her, although she did not support a filibuster attempt. Murkowski, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate energy committee, did not return a message Monday about the new EPA leader.
“Sen. Murkowski agrees that climate change should be addressed, but remains concerned about the administration circumventing Congress to impose costly and unpopular regulations,” her spokesman, Robert Dillon, said in an email.
Sigh. August 31:
So Senator Lisa Murkowski thinks “climate change should be addressed,” but is unhappy that President Obama is “circumventing Congress to impose costly and unpopular regulations.” In other words, she’d be happy to confront a profound threat to our civilization, as long as she’s not actually required to do anything. That’s an easy game, but a deeply cynical one. If Sen. Murkowski isn’t just mouthing platitudes, perhaps she could work to persuade her colleagues in the halls of government to stop denying basic science in the service of short-term political gamesmanship.
Here’s a tip for the Senator and her colleagues in the GOP: failure to move strongly and swiftly on the climate crisis is going to bring results more costly and unpopular than anything you’ve ever imagined. The costs of inaction on this civilizational threat are conservatively reckoned in the trillions; the health of the entire planet is at stake.
Perhaps House and Senate Republicans think Earth should just go to the Emergency Room.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots lakes Republicans
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 3: Twenty-Five Or Six To Four
The Superior Telegram (WI) on Lake Superior’s ongoing transformation:
Researchers say even Lake Superior, the largest lake connected to the state, is feeling the effects of climate change.
Swimming in Lake Superior has never been easy without a wetsuit, but if you’re going in with just a swimsuit late August is usually one of the best times. On a hot day near Marquette, Mich. last weekend, three college students jumped off what are called the Black Rocks and into the relatively cool water. Even a visiting journalist took the plunge.
As refreshing as a brief swim in the big lake might be, scientists and advocates say there appear to be trouble signs for the waters. In some of the last few years Lake Superior’s average daily temperatures in August have been around 70 degrees, well above 30-year averages.
Last year, Marquette had its first ever beach closure tied to E. coli bacteria, which is often linked to warmer lake temperatures. Winter ice cover is also down.
Generating letter after letter today, trying to get ahead of the game. August 29:
The heating of Lake Superior is a local manifestation of a global phenomenon. All across the globe, people are figuring out that things ain’t what they used to be, climatically speaking. Regions that require glacial melt for their water are looking at increasingly arid futures, while citizens of island nations are getting ready for the day rising seas turn their homelands into historical footnotes. And, closer to home, people who live on the shores of America’s largest lake are discovering that industrial civilization’s century-long fossil-fuel binge has some serious consequences right in their own neighborhoods.
But the USA is unique among nations in that many of its citizens reject the existence of climate change entirely. We can sympathize with the denialists’ reluctance to accept that the greenhouse effect will disrupt their lives in countless unpredictable and complex ways (after all, nobody looks forward to planetary catastrophe), but future generations on the shores of an ice-free Lake Superior will deplore their inaction.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 1: Why Cain’t Ya Be True?
The Providence Journal offers Tricia K. Jedele a nice chance to take down a denialist clown:
The only people living in the “land of make believe,” as suggested by Michael Stenhouse in his Aug. 22 Commentary piece (“Global warming alarms deny reality”), are those who contend that we, as human beings, cannot affect the natural world with our choices — those who would rather embrace conspiracy theories than science and reason.
To suggest that the science supporting human-caused climate change is the result of some radical environmental movement determined to spread fear-mongering propaganda is akin to arguing that that there is no evidence that smoking causes cancer, or that the thick black smoke pouring out of the back of diesel-fueled trucks, airplane engines and smoke stacks from fossil-fuel-fired power plants doesn’t cause respiratory illnesses. Not only is it ridiculous to compare environmental advocacy around climate change to a radical fear-mongering movement; it is propaganda itself.
We human beings make all kinds of daily decisions to avoid potential adverse consequences, and we make those decisions with a lot less justification than the scientific-based reasons we have to address the causes of climate change. We bring an umbrella because it looks like rain. We look both ways when crossing a street that rarely has traffic. We buckle up even though we’ve never been in a car accident. We take action because it is within our power to do so and because we can avoid potential negative consequences by taking that action.
I dug out one of my earlier anti-think-tank letters and restructured it a bit. This is easy. August 28:
Tricia Jedele’s pitch-perfect response to Michael Stenhouse’s denialist screed is a fine takedown of a standard example of conservative mendacity. Mr. Stenhouse represents a “conservative think tank” calling itself the “Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity,” which should be a dead giveaway.
Here’s how it works: for decades extractive industries anxious to safeguard their unimaginable profit margins have sunk millions into “think tanks” and “institutes” whose job it is to provide the news media with telegenic, and authoritative-sounding “consultants,” “analysts,” or “research associates” who earn a fine salary for mouthing misinformation in order to counter the findings of (very worried) climate scientists. The more confusion they spread about the very real and increasingly undeniable climate crisis, the less likely it is that our politicians will actually face public pressure to mitigate the runaway greenhouse effect.
Thus corporate malefactors pit their greed against the planet’s need, ensuring a few more quarters of record-breaking returns. Mr. Stenhouse’s confusion about the causes and consequences of climate change is a fine confirmation of Upton Sinclair’s famous quotation, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Warren Senders