environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots James Hansen media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 21: He’s Just Not A Very Serious Person.
James Hansen again, this time reprinted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.
There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.
The future is now. And it is hot.
So right…he’s wrong. What? Sent August 10:
Has anyone noticed that our politicians and media figures are determined to avoid acknowledging anyone who had it right from the get-go? Those who protested the disastrous and costly Iraq invasion are ignored in all subsequent formulation of foreign affairs. Those who knew from the beginning that Bush’s tax cuts were a fiscal disaster are marginalized in any discussion of economic issues. And, most importantly for all of us, the scientists and environmentalists who’ve been warning us for years about climate change are systematically excluded from any influence on environmental and energy policy.
After being silenced by the Bush administration, NASA climatologist Dr. James Hansen is speaking out with increasing fervor and eloquence, hoping against hope that we can address the looming climate crisis before time runs out. Since Dr. Hansen recognized and understood the danger early on, it seems all too likely he’ll be ignored again. Why?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: economics elections media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 20: How Do You Know That You Know What You Know When You Don’t Know What You Know At All?
The Winnipeg Star notes that American presidential politics doesn’t seem to care, really:
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Barack Obama promised to tackle climate change when he ran for the White House four years ago, but as he battles for a second term, he says little about the issue, even as the United States suffers through a drought of historic proportions, wild storms, and punishing heat that topples temperature records almost daily.
As late as April, he told Rolling Stone magazine climate change would be a central campaign issue.
“I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way,” he said.
Instead, Obama is fighting Republican challenger Mitt Romney in a tight race over the struggling American economy and stubbornly high unemployment. Gallup polling repeatedly shows the economy is the chief concern among American voters, at 65 per cent, while environmental and pollution issues were mentioned by less than one per cent of those polled.
Even without a big push on climate change, Obama has the support of environmentalists. Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said Obama “has done a substantial amount in his three years to fight the climate crisis.” Romney, he said, “is taking his lead from fossil-fuel companies and does not even acknowledge there is a climate problem.”
Romney has been accused of changing positions on the issue to curry favour with the most conservative Republicans, many of whom deny climate change exists.
La la la la la la. Sent August 9:
This year’s extreme weather may have forced climate change into the public eye, but we still hear that concerns about the economy must necessarily supersede environmental worries. This is a profoundly misleading notion.
We have been able to ignore the crisis for so long because we have not yet recognized that the health of the economy and that of the planet are inextricably linked. The ecological “economy” of planet Earth has been functioning well for many orders of magnitude longer than industrialized humanity’s fiscal economy. To elevate the importance of the latter over the former is to make a profound miscalculation with potentially disastrous consequences.
Ultimately, our prosperity depends on a healthy and consistent climate; if you subtract potable water, clean air, regular weather and flourishing biodiversity from the equation, the result is always going to be catastrophe — regardless of how well the GDP is doing that quarter.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists greenhouse effect idiots James Hansen media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 17: Quiet Out There! Do You Have Any Idea What Time It Is?
James Hansen again, this time reprinted in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988, I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.
But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.
My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.
In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.
This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.
The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.
These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.
Another Paul Revere letter. Sent August 6:
As far back as the Kennedy administration, scientists have warned that consequences of our CO2 emissions had the potential to transform Earth in potentially devastating ways — and politicians chose to leave the problem for someone else to solve. By the 1980s, climate science had grown more sophisticated, and experts predicted that genuine disaster loomed unless action was taken to limit our greenhouse emissions. Instead, the can was kicked again and again; the public was kept in the dark. During the Bush administration, NASA climatologist James Hansen’s report on the situation was blocked by politically-motivated censorship — and increasingly unhinged conservative media figures whipped up anti-science zealotry among their audiences. Climate scientists like Hansen, Michael Mann and many others routinely receive hate mail and death threats for reporting their findings.
Over two centuries ago, the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord responded unhesitatingly to a midnight warning, and our nation remains grateful. Now, a modern-day Paul Revere is trying to wake us up. Where would America be if the patriots of 1775 had hurled abuse and calumnies at that midnight rider before they rolled over and went back to sleep? And where will we be two centuries from now if we ignore James Hansen’s clear and urgent warnings?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies assholes denialists idiots James Hansen media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 15: One If By Land, How Many By Sea?
James Hansen, in the Washington Post: It’s worse than we thought.
When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.
But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.
My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.
In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.
This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.
Time to break out the Paul Revere analogy again. Sent August 4:
If today’s news media had been broadcasting back in 1775, our forebears would have known that there are always two exactly equal sides to every story. Patrick Henry’s inflammatory words would have been “balanced” by an apologist for King George III, and since the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord would have realized that the issue of whether the British were coming wasn’t entirely settled, they’d have ignored the sound of hoofbeats in the dark.
Fortunately, it didn’t happen that way, and we owe our nation’s existence to the early patriots who rolled out of bed and shouldered their muskets in response to the midnight calls of a known “alarmist.”
On the other hand, it’s happening that way now, with many Americans convinced by a complaisant media that there is still a “debate” on the science of climate change. In his stubborn struggle against complacency and denialism, Dr. James Hansen is the Paul Revere of our time. We ignore his warnings at our peril.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialism drought media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 14: The Horns Of A Dilemma
The Coshocton Tribune (Arkansas) runs a column by Gene Lyons, noting that while humans may still be pretty clueless, cows have it all figured out:
Of all the ways nature has to kill you, drought might be the cruelest. The desiccation proceeds day after punishing day. The afternoon sun pounds the earth like a brazen hammer. As I write, the temperature here in Perry County, Ark., has reached 108 degrees.
The countryside is dying. There’s nothing green in my pastures except inedible weeds. Even pigweed is drooping. Our pond dried up six weeks ago. The ground beneath is bare and cracked. Up on the ridge, some hardwoods are shedding leaves and going dormant; oaks are simply dying.
When I’d turned my cows into their new pasture last year, they kicked up their heels and frolicked like calves. So much fresh grass! Last week, they tore down a low-hanging limb from the persimmon tree they rest under most afternoons. They herded in and stripped the leathery leaves within an hour, the first green thing they’d eaten in weeks.
Lucky cows. Mine is basically a hobby farm, so I can afford to keep my small herd intact. Because spring came a month early, I had enough hay left over to see them through the summer. Neighbors who operate close to the margin have hauled thousands of cows to the sale barn — animals they’d planned on breeding. Pastures stand barren and empty throughout the region.
I don’t know about Buddha nature, but they’re smart enough to come in out of the drought. Sent August 3:
When the vast majority of people are totally disconnected from the food they eat, it’s unsurprising that many still can’t find a reason for concern about global climate change. After all, milk and corn both come from the supermarket, right? Eventually, of course, the reality will start hitting home; once our grocery bills go up to reflect the destructive droughts and heatwaves that have devastated American agriculture, we’ll have no choice but to acknowledge that the consequences of a century’s consumption of fossil fuels may well include an end to the abundance we have long taken for granted.
Or will we? We shouldn’t underestimate the strength of denial. The corporations whose profits hinge on our continued use of fossil fuels are working hard with a complaisant news media to ensure that Americans and their elected representatives never learn what a herd of cows already know: climate change is real.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism false equivalency media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 13: Coming Up: More On That Runaway Squirrel Story!
The Santa Cruz Sentinel (CA) regrets that the public is so uninterested in the problem:
Maybe the lack of substance in the presidential campaign reflects a perception by President Barack Obama and Republican erstwhile nominee Mitt Romney that voters aren’t really that plugged in.
If so, that would explain why issues such as climate change seem lost in the ether as the candidates seem content to trade daily attacks.
An illustration: Despite years of gloomy prognostications by scientists and California’s efforts to get out in front on global warming, most people in this state know absolutely nothing about the controversial cap-and-trade program, which is due to be rolled out in November, the same month as the presidential election.
According to new polling by the Public Policy Institute of California, 57 percent of likely voters say they haven’t heard anything about the program, in which the state will be auctioning off emissions permits. Cap and trade is a central part of California’s AB32, signed into law by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. AB32 sets limits on companies’ greenhouse gas emissions, while allowing non-polluters to sell permits to companies that exceed the new limits.
The state will get money from these auctions — with estimates as high as $1 billion annually. Gov. Jerry Brown is already eyeing this revenue to help pay for another controversial project — high speed rail, which might explain why two of three Californians say they have little or no confidence the state will spend the auction money wisely.
Yadda yadda yadda. Sent August 2:
Our species’ survival is absolutely the most important issue of the century — indeed, the most important issue in our entire history on the planet. Right? Right. When surveys show that citizens aren’t that worried about climate change, our media reliably poses the same old question: why not?
The answer is pretty simple: because that same media has for years been hewing to an irresponsible approach that “balances” every genuinely worried climatologist with a petroleum-funded denialist — thus presenting “both sides of the argument.” Our politicians take their cues from the media, so it’s hardly surprising that all but a few of our elected representatives won’t spend any more time on climate change than they have to.
If we want more people to be concerned about this very genuine and very terrifying threat, it is incumbent on our news media to inform them about it without equivocation or false equivalency.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: false equivalency media irresponsibility reality-based community
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 12: What Would You Do If The People You Knew…?
The Monterey County Herald (CA) tells it like it is:
The United States, among the top three emitters of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, cannot hope to confront climate change unless our political leaders stop tiptoeing around the issue. Few scientists doubt that the Earth’s climate is changing and growing warmer. Only a small number of skeptics dispute that humans are a prime cause of the problem, and the ranks of the skeptics just got smaller, with UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller joining the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is real and that human-caused pollution is a major culprit.
Describing his “total turnaround,” Muller wrote in a Sunday column for the New York Times: “Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”
This summer offers a sense of the consequences. We’ve seen huge drought, Colorado on fire, and Atlanta recording its hottest day in history. While it’s impossible to tie specific events to climate change, these are the kinds of extremes we will increasingly see unless emissions are brought under control.
On the campaign trail, there is plenty of vague talk about “energy independence” or “clean energy,” with both presidential candidates ducking what policies they will pursue to reduce greenhouse gases.
J. Lo had TWINS! OMG! Sent August 1:
There is no better demonstration of the complementary dysfunctions of American media and American politics than the failure of both systems to properly address global warming. In a culture where news is a form of entertainment, it makes a bizarre sort of sense that the long-term consequences of atmospheric carbon dioxide are ignored or dismissed in favor of the latest celebrity scandal. When the subject is discussed at all, every genuine climatologist is “balanced” by a petroleum-funded spokesperson, creating the utterly false impression that the science of climate change is still unresolved. This is like including a member of the Flat Earth Society in a segment on the space program.
Things are no better in the political arena. An official in the previous administration famously asserted, in a conversation with journalist Ron Suskind, that “We’re an empire…we make our own reality.” We are indeed making our own reality, and it’s going to include droughts, wildfires, resource wars, steadily rising temperatures, ocean acidification, and all the other epiphenomena of an accelerating greenhouse effect. Pitting the exigencies of political theater against the laws of physics and chemistry is a recipe for disaster.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes idiots media irresponsibility Richard Lindzen Richard Muller scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 11: Tremendous Richard(s)
More on Muller, from the San Francisco Chronicle:
The hot issue of global warming got hotter Monday when a UC Berkeley physicist, once a loud skeptic of human-caused climate change, agreed not only that the Earth is heating up, but also that people are the cause of it all.
Richard Muller converted only a year ago to the idea that the world has been warming for decades. Before then he had argued that global warming data – even figures compiled by U.N. experts – were badly flawed.
Now Muller is going further, blaming the warming almost entirely on human emission of greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide – a conclusion that almost all climate scientists reached long ago.
Muller argued that the evidence from more than 36,000 temperature stations worldwide shows that the global thermometer has risen by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years. The warm-up began with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, Muller said, and has accelerated in recent years.
Watchng the comments pile up is a real education in despair. Sent July 31:
Those seeking scientific opposition to the worldwide consensus on global climate change had their available options significantly reduced by Dr. Richard Muller’s “conversion.” For many years, Muller was one of the go-to guys for media outlets needing a contrarian voice to bolster a “the science isn’t settled” argument. Now, with the release of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project’s results, Muller embraces the science he once scorned, leaving conservative pundits and politicians no choice but Dr. Richard Lindzen, the poster boy not only for climate-change denialists, but also for those who still doubt the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
Like those apocryphal Japanese soldiers still fighting Allied forces on forgotten Pacific islands, Lindzen is a true believer with thoroughly solidified opinions, making him a perfect recipient for the Koch brothers’ next climate-change research grant. The rest of us are pleased to welcome Richard Muller to the reality-based community.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: atmospheric CO2 CO2 denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republicans
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 4: In This Issue Of Tiger Beat: Meet Stephen Hawking!
The New York Daily News reports on a finding from the Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Hence the headline. Note:
Copenhagen, July 24 — The greatest climate change ever recorded by the world over the last 100,000 years has been the transition from the ice age to the warm interglacial period.
New research from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen indicates that, contrary to previous opinion, the rise in temperature and the rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) follow each other closely in terms of time.
In the warmer climate, the atmospheric content of CO2 is naturally higher. CO2 is a green-house gas that absorbs heat radiation from the Earth and thus keeps the planet warm. In the shift between ice ages and interglacial periods the atmospheric content of CO2 helps to intensify the natural climate variations, the journal Climate of the Past reports.
Too many big words for the Daily News, I suppose. Sent July 24:
The close correlation between a warming planet and increased levels of atmospheric CO2 should surprise no one who’s paid attention to the past several decades of climate science — no one, that is, who hasn’t entirely swallowed the zany paranoid fantasy that the world’s climatologists are part of a massive planet-wide plot to confiscate our SUVs.
Research from the Neils Bohr Institute confirms that in the past, CO2 levels have followed planetary warming — a reversal of the present-day situation, in which our industrialized civilization has dumped gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere in a geological instant, putting the Earth on a drastic and potentially devastating course towards climate chaos as the greenhouse effect makes temperatures rise.
There’s no longer any possible excuse for inaction. To reject science on the grounds that it is ideologically inconvenient is to sacrifice the future of our nation on the altar of electoral exigency.
Warren Senders
environment: glacial melt media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 2: “…the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
The Kansas City Star runs a McClatchy intern’s story on climate change’s effects on a place nobody will ever visit:
AYALOMA, Ecuador — Frosts aren’t on time for the 960 people living in this tiny, remote village, hidden on a chilly, windswept mountain ridge in South America.
A minor problem? Maybe for some. But in the Andean community, 8,800 feet above sea level, frosts – and their impact on crop cycles – are kind of a big deal.
In this agricultural community, crops are planted during the full moon, a tradition meant to help ensure a full harvest. But these days, the harvests aren’t as full.
Village residents say it’s the mark of climate change descending upon the Ayaloman people.
“In Ecuador, we’ve really experienced a sudden change in our climate,” said Ana Loja, a professor at the University of Cuenca, in the Andes of southern Ecuador. “We cannot say, ‘Maybe this is not happening,’ but I think everyone is aware it is a real problem.”
It’s always the Other what feels the blow. Sent July 22:
A strong human-interest element is essential to good reporting, and Annika McGinnis’ report on climate change’s impact on a tiny village in Central America is a wonderful example. The story of how these tough mountain people are coping with a radically changing world makes for compelling reading.
But that’s not all there is to news. Ms. McGinnis’ article needs to make the connection to the lives of readers in the United States. For too long, climate change has been the problem of an unspecified “other”, only affecting people and nations far from our own. As Midwest heatwaves and Colorado wildfires make clear, the impact of the burgeoning greenhouse effect is not the exclusive province of the Third World; the climatic consequences of a century-long carbon binge are no respecters of national boundaries. The industrialized West will soon have more in common with Ayaloma’s residents than we can presently imagine.
Warren Senders