environment Politics: analogies false equivalency media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 31: I Know Nothink!
The Iowa City Press-Citizen notes that nobody’s talkin’ about it:
The 800-pound gorilla in the Mount Pleasant High School Gymnasium Tuesday was the subject of climate change.
Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad called for a public discussion on drought conditions in Iowa, and all of the governmental players were there:
• U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
• Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.
• Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
• And the Farm Services Administration.
The phrase “climate change” or any analysis of causation for the current drought was absent from the public discussion. This was a meeting about row crop agriculture and related agricultural producers and it was intended to deal with the as-is situation.
The obvious problem, as Mark Schouten of Homeland Security and Emergency Response put it, “you can’t snap your fingers and make it rain.”
{snip}
It was the Farm Services Agency that raised the issue of environmental groups, saying a group had sued for an environmental impact statement before releasing CRP acres to haying or grazing.
During the public comment section, a truck driver who had just delivered a load of grain stood at the microphone and demonized the environmental groups for trying to influence food production. It got the biggest applause at the event and the governor jumped on board reminding us of his joining a lawsuit in Nebraska against an environmental group.
Trouble in River City. Sent July 20:
It’s unsurprising that people still aren’t drawing the connection between the extreme weather hammering America’s farmlands and the accelerating greenhouse effect caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but blaming environmentalists for devastated crops while ignoring the role of climate change is like blaming oncologists for cancer.
While scientists have been making increasingly scary predictions for several decades about the consequences of uncontrolled greenhouse emissions, their words have gone unheeded; many who’ve tried to sound the warning have been mocked, harassed, and threatened for their pains. Meanwhile, our print and broadcast media have maintained a scrupulous false equivalency between genuine expertise and the pronouncements of petroleum-funded denialists.
The United States owes its existence to the Minutemen of Concord and Lexington, who responded unhesitatingly to a midnight rider’s call. The Paul Reveres of the present day are climatologists; our nation will owe its future to those who heed their alarms.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 30: After The Break, The 8th Anniversary Of Janet Jackson’s Nipple!
More on the “Generation X doesn’t give a shit” story, this time from U.S. News And World Report:
If each season was progressively a little bit warmer, people might be able to more easily understand climate change, but “if it’s perturbed, it’s hard for people to grasp,” he says. “I’m not sure common sense alone will ever carry the day on this. The pattern is not likely to be consistent.”
Climate change, besides being controversial, isn’t something that can be easily solved with a couple of regulatory changes, and behavioral changes today will take decades to reduce the atmosphere’s carbon levels, Miller says.
“It’s a challenging political problem because it won’t cause a lot of problems in [Generation X’s] lifetimes,” he says.
In the study, he writes that “adults have a limited attention span for public policy issues and tend to grow tired of the same issues if they persist over a number of years. This argument was made in regard to the public reaction to both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and it may be applicable to a long-term issue such as climate change.”
So, in a world that expects quick responses to imminent problems, people are ambivalent towards climate change. Miller says that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as elected politicians take the long view and don’t let the issue die. According to the study, just 10 people are “doubtful” or “dismissive” about climate change, and that most are simply “disengaged.”
I wonder why that is? Sent July 19:
In an informational environment dominated by celebrity scandals and the manufactured hysteria of the 24-hour news cycle, Generation X’s dismissal of climate change is understandable if unforgivable. The difficulty of explaining statistical correlation to an audience fixated on Missing White Women means that the dangers of an accelerating greenhouse effect are still not part of the national conversation. Our media and political establishments reap profits and accrue power through exploiting America’s national case of ADD.
The NSF survey confirms that 37-40 year olds are too preoccupied with immediate issues to worry about the decades-away effects of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and an acidifying ocean — but their troubling indifference to the issue is a single symptom of a systemic problem. When it comes to the future of our planet and our civilization, the broadcast and print media have made it easy for all of us to evade our responsibilities.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies ignorance media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 28: Smile When You Say That, Punk.
Buncha slackers:
Amid a summer of record-setting heat, most of Generation X ‘s young and middle-aged adults are uninformed and unconcerned about climate change, says a survey today.
Only about 5% of Gen Xers, now 32 to 52 years old, are “alarmed” and 18% “concerned” about climate change, reports the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Two-thirds, or 66%, of those surveyed last year said they aren’t sure global warming is happening and 10% said they don’t believe it’s occurring.
“Most Generation Xers are surprisingly disengaged, dismissive or doubtful about whether global climate change is happening and they don’t spend much time worrying about it,” said author Jon D. Miller.
I’ve used the Arabic translation motif before. This one works pretty well, I think. Sent July 17:
It’d be easier if “climate change” had a scarier name. If we said it in Arabic, jingoistic politicians could warn their constituents that “Aletgheyrat Alemnakheyh” would devastate American agriculture and infrastructure. Flag-waving pundits on cable news could discuss the threat to our way of life, drumming up support for an all-out national effort against an unpronounceable enemy — an epic struggle to preserve our civilization. Young people would be patriotically inspired to enlist.
But as the NSF survey shows, America’s youth are understandably too preoccupied with shorter-term, more immediate issues — paying for their education, finding jobs — to consider the threats posed by climate change. And who can blame them? It is the job of a society’s elders to think in the long term, to avoid convenient falsehoods and easy generalizations. Our generation has evaded its responsibilities to the future; it is theirs that will pay the price.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 26: Quiet Out There! Don’t You Know What Time It Is?!?!
More on the “startled by bizarre weather, people are wondering if climate change is real” story, this time from the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Before the financial crisis hit, Americans were pretty sure that the globe was warming, and that humans were causing it, and that it was kind of a big deal. As the economy slumped, Americans decided that climate change wasn’t actually happening — and even if it was, it wasn’t our fault. And now, after a flurry of wild weather — deadly tornados, floods, droughts, an uncommonly mild winter, and recent heat waves — we’re back to believing that global warming is real. But we’re still hesitant to take the blame.
These generalizations are based on a series of Yale University studies over the last few years. According to the studies, Americans’ belief in global warming fell from 71 percent in November 2008 to just 57 percent in January 2010, but it rebounded to 66 percent by this spring. The findings mirrored those of the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, which showed belief in global warming bouncing from 65 percent in 2009 to 52 percent in 2010 and back up to 62 percent this year.
What accounts for the rebound? It isn’t the economy, which has thawed only a little. And it doesn’t seem to be science: The share of respondents to the Yale survey who believe “most scientists think global warming is happening” is stuck at 35 percent, down from 48 percent four years ago. (That statement remains just as true now as it was then: It’s the public, not the scientists, that keeps changing its mind.)
No, our resurgent belief in global warming seems to be a function of the weather. A separate Yale survey this spring found that 82 percent of Americans had personally experienced extreme weather or natural disasters in the past year. And 52 percent said they believed the weather had been getting worse overall in recent years, compared to just 22 percent who thought it had gotten better.
Whatever wakes you up from your stupor, I suppose. Sent July 15:
While it’s encouraging that more Americans are taking the threat of climate change seriously, public attention to the crisis may well fade the next time there’s an interlude of balmy weather. Our national case of ADD makes it almost impossible to convey the implications of the accelerating greenhouse effect, something which will affect all human civilization over centuries.
Climatologists are the Paul Reveres of today, sounding a warning that the effects of our civilization’s carbon binge are now upon us — but the careful language of scientific discussion doesn’t always convey the urgency of the crisis. If the minutemen had ignored the midnight call and gone back to sleep, the redcoats would have won the day.
It behooves all of us to look beyond the latest celebrity scandal and the 24-hour news cycle, and recognize that the climate emergency has profound implications for countless generations yet to come.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 23: I Wonder Why THAT Keeps Happening?
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette runs an editorial column ruing the lackadaisical attitude of the common people:
This should be the summer of our discontent, with heat waves, drought and other troublesome weather affecting large parts of the nation. Instead, Americans are hot but apparently not bothered about what it all might mean.
According to a new Washington Post-Stanford University poll, just 18 percent of Americans interviewed named climate change as the world’s top environmental problem. In 2007, when Al Gore’s warning documentary and a United Nations report were making headlines, 33 percent called climate change the top issue.
Like so much on this topic, the findings of the poll are contradictory. It’s not as if people don’t care about the environment; the top concern, as expressed by 27 percent of those surveyed, was polluted water and air — certainly real challenges.
And those polled don’t dismiss climate change or even mankind’s hand in it; in fact, nearly three-quarters believe that the Earth is warming and approximately the same number think temperatures will continue to rise if nothing is done. Many want government and businesses to do more.
The poll and follow-up interviews suggest that people are looking to Washington, D.C., for leadership and action, although, after seeing little or none, they are not consumed by a sense of urgency.
Somebody better do something. I wonder who? Sent July 12:
The disconnect between the facts of global climate change and American public concern about the issue can be laid at the feet of our country’s politicians, who are too focused on short-term electoral exigencies to address long-term problems — and at the feet of our irresponsible media establishment, which has spent decades fostering the notion that simply reporting two sides of every argument constitutes the whole of journalism.
In a common-sense world, the looming climate crisis would be story number one, day after day. But we live in twenty-first century America, where there is no crisis bigger than the latest celebrity scandal du jour. Now there is no time left for equivocation. If we are to preserve our agriculture, our infrastructure, and ultimately our civilization, our leaders must accept the responsibility of leadership — and our media must accept the responsibility to inform the public about the gravest threat our species has faced in recorded history.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility morons
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 21: Red Scare Edition
Never heard of Dennis Byrne before, but he’s left a big floater in the Chicago Tribune’s bowl:
As surely as stink follows a garbage truck, the deadly national heat wave brought forth predictable and terrifying scenarios from global warming alarmists.
Triumphantly, the alarmists proclaimed that global warming (or climate change, or extreme weather, or whatever is their latest rendition of Earth’s frightful fate) was back high on the list of everyone’s worst fears.
Told-ya-sos flowed. Denunciations of global warming “skeptics” and “deniers” were renewed. The threadbare mantra — “the science is in, the debate is over” — was re-energized.
Reliably, a Washington Post story about Colorado’s destructive wildfires waved away fact with speculation: “Lightning and suspected arson ignited them four weeks ago, but scientists and federal officials say the table was set by a culprit that will probably contribute to bigger and more frequent wildfires for years to come: climate change.”
And thus the unconscionable corruption of real science by global warming propagandists continues unabated. It’s unconscionable because they are using the loss of life and destruction of property as a prop to get you to believe that the worst is yet to come. It’s unconscionable because making such predictions is not what real science does. For all the condemnation about “anti-science deniers” on the right, the truth is that actual anti-science folks are the ones on the left using bad science to try to scare the bejabbers out of us.
(facepalm). Sent July 10:
One of the cardinal principles of science is that good theories provide verifiable predictions.
Several decades ago, climatologists began predicting what would happen to Earth’s weather as the greenhouse effect intensified. While a few researchers considered the possibility of global cooling, the vast majority agreed that rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would trigger chaotic weather patterns, with regional and local effects including heatwaves, droughts, and intensified storms. When they pointed out that these phenomena would have negative impacts on humanity, they were ignored, censored, and derided by politicians and media figures.
Now, after a decade of record high temperatures, those dire predictions are coming true. The “alarmists” Dennis Byrne derides include the US Armed Forces, the CIA, and insurance companies all over the world.
Paul Revere was an alarmist, too. If he’d been living in Concord in April, 1775, Mr. Byrne would’ve turned over and gone right back to sleep.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus wildfires
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 19: Strike Anywhere…
The Tehama County Daily News (CA) notes that things are sorta kinda on fire:
LOS ANGELES (MCT) After several years of relatively benign fire seasons, the West is headed into a hot dry summer of potentially ferocious blazes like the ones that have scorched Colorado in recent weeks.
The wildfires that have already destroyed more than 700 homes and outbuildings along Colorado’s Front Range and blackened hundreds of thousands of acres of New Mexico wilderness are not likely to be the season’s last for one simple reason: drought.
“This year, fires are going big,” Tom Harbour, fire and aviation director for the U.S. Forest Service, said last week. “We’ve had some really extraordinary runs … fires that are running 10 miles in lighter fuels.
Fires that are running miles in forested areas.”
A dry La Nina winter and a paltry, quick-melting snowpack in much of the West have set the stage for another incendiary summer, compounding the effects of a long-term drought that has gripped the seven-state Colorado River basin for more than a decade.
“The reason Colorado is burning is they’ve had prolonged drought,” said Bob Keane, a forest service research ecologist based in Montana.
Add the high temperatures and gusting winds that hit the state last week, and you have a recipe for combustion.
Quick and dirty. Sent July 8:
No single event can be unambiguously linked to global climate change, because climate science doesn’t work that way. But any attempt to claim that the wildfires devastating America’s West aren’t connected to Earth’s burgeoning greenhouse effect is statistically absurd.
Climatologists have been predicting for years that the consequences of increased CO2 emissions would include weather that was hotter, weirder, fiercer, and less predictable. And while some of their forecasts were erroneous, most of those mistakes were underestimations of the speed and magnitude of the transformation in our environment.
Despite an ongoing campaign of climate-change denial, the atmosphere is still getting hotter. We’d mock any Colorado residents who refuse to heed the gathering flames — why, then, are climatologists and environmentalists whose decades of predictions on climate change have been overwhelmingly vindicated still treated with derision by the petroleum-funded professionals in our politics and media?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 18: If You’ll Say “You Told Me So,” I Won’t Say “I Told You So”
The Merriville (IN) Post-Times runs an AP story on the current heatwave:
Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.
These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it’s far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.
Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and time. Sometimes it isn’t caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.
And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren’t having similar disasters now, although they’ve had their own extreme events in recent years.
But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.
More pounding on the denialists. Sent July 7:
Even as the American Midwest sizzled under a heatwave of staggering proportions, climate-change denialists kept on sounding their message of complacency and inaction. Everything’s fine, they say. The planet’s actually getting cooler. If Earth’s atmosphere is heating up, it’s just sunspots, or “natural cycles.” Anyway, humans aren’t to blame. The climate has always changed. If humans are involved, it’s too expensive to do anything about it. Al Gore has a big house. And on and on.
When politicians and media figures mock “climate alarmists,” it is part of their pathetic attempt to rationalize an unsustainable status quo — one which now promises massive crop failures, droughts and wildfires throughout America.
We owe our nation’s existence to those who woke to the call of a midnight rider bringing the news that the British were coming. Climate scientists are the Paul Reveres of the present day. Will we finally heed their warnings?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 7, Month 7, Day 17: DFH! NIMBY?
The Washington Post acknowledges the hippies:
Wildfires? Record thunderstorms? Blast furnace heat? An earthquake, even?
At least that’s what one group of folks is thinking, even if they don’t voice it quite so crassly.
“We don’t want to do it in an I-told-you-so kind of way,” demurs John Topping, who is the president of the Washington-based Climate Institute.
But see, people! This is what all the global-warming Paul Reveres have been shouting about.
Now some are finally paying attention, at least in the Washington region.
“Granted, we’ve only lived in the area for 25 years,” one reader wrote to me. “But the first 15 left an impression that this was not one of Dante’s circles. The last ten: approaching inner circle quickly.”
Apparently, a tree falling on a house hits much closer to home than a melting ice cap.
Because it will be sooooo excellent to be smug while we circle the bowl on our way to the Venus effect. Sent July 6:
For decades, climatologists warned us that increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases would trigger chaotic and destructive weather. We’ve were warned of rising temperatures and rising seas, of droughts, invasive species, wildfires, tropical storms — all consequences of global climate change.
And for decades our media and politics have ignored and derided those scientific specialists and their findings. Whether it’s tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists convinced that Al Gore is out to confiscate their SUVs, petroleum-backed politicians protecting their puppetmasters, or ordinary citizens with more immediate concerns, the unavoidable fact is that Americans have too long assumed that climate change is a problem for other people, other places, other times.
No more. While we’ll always pay more attention to what’s happening in our own backyards, there is no escaping that this is a crisis of planetary scope and millennial span. Earth is the new neighborhood, and a century is the new now.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 16: I Do Not Think About Things I Do Not Think About.
The Washington Post notes that people don’t seem to care all that much:
Climate change no longer ranks first on the list of what Americans see as the world’s biggest environmental problem, according to a new Washington Post-Stanford University poll.
Just 18 percent of those polled name it as their top environmental concern. That compares with 33 percent who said so in 2007, amid publicity about a major U.N. climate report and Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary about global warming. Today, 29 percent identify water and air pollution as the world’s most pressing environmental issue.
Still, Americans continue to see climate change as a threat, caused in part by human activity, and they think government and businesses should do more to address it. Nearly three-quarters say the Earth is warming, and just as many say they believe that temperatures will continue to rise if nothing is done, according to the poll.
The findings, along with follow-up interviews with some respondents, indicate that Washington’s decision to shelve action on climate policy means that the issue has receded — even though many people link recent dramatic weather events to global warming. And they may help explain why elected officials feel little pressure to impose curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.
“I really don’t give it a thought,” said Wendy Stewart, a 46-year-old bookkeeper in New York. Although she thinks warmer winters and summers are signs of climate change, she has noticed that political leaders don’t bring up the subject. “I’ve never heard them speak on global warming,” she said. “I’ve never heard them elaborate on it.”
But noticing the media’s irresponsible coverage of this issue is terribly uncivil. Can’t have that, now, can we? Sent July 5:
If climate change has lost its first-place position among Americans’ environmental worries, that’s because politicians and media figures would rather ignore any problem that can’t be resolved within an election cycle or two. After all, since rising temperatures are probably irreversible at this point, we’re probably better off focusing on problems we know we can fix, like air and water pollution. No politician craves electoral martyrdom, even in the service of a noble cause.
The problem with this attitude, of course, is that the unfolding disaster of global warming remains the preeminent environmental concern of our century. Colorado’s metastasizing wildfires and the country-wide heat wave are just two symptoms of a crisis that is planetary in scope and multi-generational in timespan — something which requires political will and genuine leadership, rather than the evasions and platitudes which have persuaded millions of Americans that there’s really nothing much to worry about.
Warren Senders