environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility corporate personhood media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism United Nations
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 22: You Are Unastonished. I Am Unsurprised.
Sigh. Whocoodanode?:
The largest-ever United Nations conference, a summit billed as a historic opportunity to build a greener future, appears to be going up in smoke.
U.S. President Barack Obama likely won’t be there, and the leaders of Britain and Germany have bowed out. The entire European Parliament delegation has canceled.
And with fewer than six weeks to go until the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, negotiations to produce a final statement have stalled amid squabbling. Logistical snags, too, threaten to derail the event.
Feel that? You’re getting fisted by the invisible hand. Sent May 13:
Even as global climate change brings ever more unpredictable and extreme weather, there’s still something we can count on with near-absolute certainty: as the news from scientists gets steadily worse, so too will the paralysis of our national and global political systems. While hasty geopolitical action is usually ill-advised (as many Iraqis would confirm), the climate crisis demands a far more robust response than platitudes. The United States government can barely even muster tepid affirmations, hamstrung as it is by obstructionist Republicans and their enablers in the mass media.
Cui bono? Any person or organization that stands to benefit from a civilizational disruption of this magnitude would have to be sociopathically focused on short-term returns rather than long-term continuity — oddly enough, an exact description of the corporate “persons” currently bankrolling climate-change denial and undermining any attempts to build an international response commensurate to the magnitude of the emergency.
Warren Senders
Education environment: assholes idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 11: How About Putting In Some Animatronic Reindeer?
Why don’t I watch TV? Oh, right. Now I remember:
Forecast the Facts, the activist group that first confronted GM about its support of climate change doubters the Heartland Institute, now plans to muster a public campaign targeting the Discovery Channel. The purpose: to get Discovery to acknowledge the scientific consensus on man-made climate change in its programming.
The flap follows the recent airing of the final episode of Discovery’s lush exploration of the polar regions, “Frozen Planet.” The last of the seven-hour series, “On Thin Ice,” was devoted specifically to presenting evidence of climate change including discussion of the challenges facing polar bears, collapsing ice shelves, diminishing habitat, and naturalist David Attenborough (Alec Baldwin is the narrator and host of the series) saying, “The days of the Arctic Ocean being covered by a continuous sheet of ice seem to be past. Whether or not that’s a good or bad thing, of course, depends on your point of view.”
Strangely missing from the narration, however, is any mention of the causes of climate change, even presented as theory. An April 20 story in the New York Times revealed that the producers made a deliberate choice not to present this material, anticipating criticism from the small minority of viewers who do not accept scientific opinion about human causes of global warming.
Series producer Vanessa Berlowitz told the New York Times that including the scientific theories “would have undermined the strength of an objective documentary, and would then have become utilized by people with political agendas.”
Whores. Sorry. That’s a libel on whores. Sent May 2:
It is unfortunate but unsurprising that the Discovery Channel has chosen to soft-pedal any mention of the human causes of climate change in their “Frozen Planet” series. In the decades since Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of media ownership, the influence of corporate ownership on news and opinion programming has increased, invariably to the detriment of the truth.
The notion that discussing the facts of anthropogenic global warming would allow the series to be “utilized by people with political agendas” is utterly disingenuous. By omitting the facts of climate science from the documentary programs, the producers had already allowed their work to be “utilized” by corporations — whose political agendas are firmly anchored in the profit motive.
The scientific agreement on climate change is extremely robust. To characterize thousands of dedicated researchers as “people with political agendas” is both journalistically and morally irresponsible. Let us hope the Discovery Channel finds its conscience.
Warren Senders
Education environment: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 8: I’d Like A Triple Oy With Vey-iz-Mir Sauce…
The denialist outlets are all a-twitter over James Lovelock’s recent remarks. The New York Daily News is a fine example:
Talk about an inconvenient truth: One of the scientists who most forcefully sounded the warning bells of climate change now says his predictions were a bit overheated.
Back in 2006, British environmentalist James Lovelock declared that “before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
Lovelock and fellow believers helped lead Al Gore to become the Earth’s most famous climate warrior.
But, in an interview with MSNBC, Lovelock admitted that his dire predictions were, excuse us, hot air.
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing,” he said. “We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.”
Almost wistfully, he noted: “We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.”
Assholes. Idiots. Sent April 29:
Yes, climate scientist James Lovelock, now 92, has drawn back a bit on his earlier apocalyptic forecasts. But it would be a very bad mistake to assume that climate change has now turned out to be a myth. That’s not what he said, that’s not what he meant, and that’s not a sensible response either to his words or to the climate crisis that is unfolding around us.
That Lovelock thinks we probably won’t face gigadeaths in the next few decades doesn’t mean climate change isn’t real. He, like other climatologists, is essentially a “planetary physician.” While it’s good news if your oncologist tells you that a tumor hasn’t spread as far or as fast as the worst-case predictions, that doesn’t mean you should start smoking again. Lovelock’s statement suggests simply that we have a tiny bit more time to change our ways before things get dangerously out of control.
Warren Senders
They published it, albeit in a highly edited form:
Medford, Mass.: Re “Hot air on climate change and the end of the world” (editorial, NYDailyNews.com, April 29): Yes, climate scientist James Lovelock has drawn back from his apocalyptic forecasts. But do not assume climate change is a myth. That Lovelock thinks we probably won’t face gigadeaths in the next few decades doesn’t mean climate change isn’t real. His statement simply suggests we have a bit more time to change our ways before things get out of control. Warren Senders
environment Politics: carbon tax corporate irresponsibility fee and dividend media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 5: What’s Wrong With This Picture?
The Chicago Tribune carries the “people are waking up” story a few steps further:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Three out of four U.S. voters favor regulating carbon dioxide as a greenhouse-gas pollutant, and a majority think global warming should be a priority for the president and Congress, a survey of American attitudes on climate and energy reported on Thursday.
The survey was released one day after Rolling Stone magazine published an interview with President Barack Obama in which he suggested that climate change would become a campaign issue this year.
In results often at odds with the political debate in Washington, the survey conducted for Yale and George Mason University also found most Americans would vote for a candidate who raised taxes on coal, oil and natural gas – fossil fuels that emit climate-warming carbon dioxide when burned – while cutting income tax, in a revenue-neutral “tax swap.”
This maneuver, which would not add to federal revenues but would change where they came from, has long been discussed by such disparate political actors as former Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat, and Bob Inglis, a Republican former congressman.
Sixty-one percent of Americans surveyed said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported the tax swap, while 20 percent said they would be less likely.
When we get to 100 percent of the population, our politicians will finally do what is right. Sent April 26:
While the First Amendment precludes an outright prohibition on the rhetoric of climate-change deniers, it’s increasingly obvious that America’s national conversation would be better off if these voices weren’t so unnaturally amplified. The anti-science statements of conservative politicians and their enablers in the media have helped to make reality-based environmental policies impossible to enact, even when a majority of Americans think they’re desirable. In the current atmosphere of petroleum-funded corruption, any legislative actions toward planetary responsibility are doomed from the start by corporate resistance to shrinking profit margins.
A tax on carbon emissions is an idea whose time has come. If the money raised were returned to the middle class in the form of tax breaks or dividends, its economic effects would be overwhelmingly beneficial. But until we reduce our emissions of denialist hot air, such a policy is unlikely to advance through congress. Too bad we can’t tax lies.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility timescale
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 18: More Pathetic Whining From Aggrieved Hippies
The Lincoln, NE Journal-Star has an editorial. It’s shrill:
Temperatures have retreated to levels closer to the norm in Lincoln, but the heavy green foliage of trees and the profusion of blooming flowers bear witness that March 2012 was the warmest on record in the Capital City.
Pleasant as it was, the numbers represent an extreme.
The average high was 69.5 degrees, 17.2 degrees above normal. The temperature soared to 91 degrees March 31, setting a record for that day and tying the all-time high for March. It was the second record daily high set during the month. A high of 83 degrees on March 13 topped the previous record of 80 degrees.
Still fresh in memory is the weather extreme of 2011, when snow and rain created record runoff of more than 60 million acre-feet of water in the Missouri River basin. The usual runoff is 24.8 million acre-feet. The previous record was 49 million acre-feet.
Such weather extremes should be expected more frequently as global warming continues, according to a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2010, Russia recorded its hottest summer in 500 years. Last year, rainfall in Thailand was 80 percent more than average.
“It’s very clear that heat waves are on the increase both in terms of numbers and duration,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the panel. “Another important finding is the fact that extreme precipitation events are on the increase.”
It’s often been said during the debate on global warming that “weather is not climate.” Weather is short-term. Climate is long-term.
Still, it’s worth remembering that in January the USDA released a new plant hardiness zone map that showed most of Nebraska is in a warmer zone than it was in 1990, the last time the map was updated.
The USDA cautioned that the change was based on only 30 years of weather data gathered from 1976 to 2005, and should not be considered evidence of global warming. The trend would have to persist for 50 or 100 years to be considered climate change, the USDA said.
So, in a long-term sense, the warmest March on record for Lincoln is just another dot that must be connected to many others to be considered a trend. Nonetheless, on a 91-degree March afternoon, it was difficult to believe that some still deny that global warming is real.
I haven’t checked the comments yet. I’m sure they’re full of denialist drivel. Sent April 9:
Yes, the unseasonably warm temperatures are a troubling omen of a future in which climatic extremes become the new norm — but they’re unlikely to change the mind of the climate change denialists who long ago decided global warming is a hoax/conspiracy/liberal plot. A mere plenitude of evidence would hardly be enough to convince people who have repeatedly shown their contempt for scientific truth, and indeed for science itself. The multi-decade effort by the Republican party to base policy on ideology rather than facts has been assisted by a complaisant media establishment that for years has abdicated journalistic responsibility in favor of a specious false equivalency between opposing viewpoints; the result may well be toxic to the survival of our civilization and our species. We — all of us — need to be thinking about the long term; if humanity is to succeed, both our politics and media must be transformed. Ideologically motivated ignorance is a luxury our species can no longer afford.
Warren Senders
Education environment: denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 8: The International Homework Alarmist Conspiracy!
Anne Zammit, in the Times of Malta, notes that the time for denial is long past:
Scepticism is essential for good science but the time for debate has long been over. Scientists (notably climatologists) reached consensus that global warming is happening but it took decades for the problem to penetrate public discourse.
Indications that human activity is having an effect on the climate are nothing new:
In 1896, Swedish Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius presented his findings that human activities releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere could change the earth’s climate.
Scientists Charles Keeling and Roger Revelle demonstrated in the 1950s that a large part of the carbon dioxide released from the burning of coal, oil and gas was remaining in the atmosphere because the oceans couldn’t absorb it fast enough.
A scientific advisory panel warned US President Lyndon Johnson of the dangers of adding greenhouses gases to the atmosphere back in 1965.
By 2007 there were no credible scientific sceptics left to challenge the broad projections and underlying scientific theory of climate change.
Two years later the National Academies of Science of the world’s major industrialised nations issued an unprecedented joint statement on the reality of climate change and the need for immediate action.
Despite overwhelming evidence, a cell of climate change deniers showed up for a debate last month in Valletta, organised by the Euro Media forum, a discussion platform which “celebrates freedom of expression while respecting diversity in society”.
Letters like this one are easy; the media’s incredible irresponsibility is a ludicrous target. Sent April 1:
From schoolchildren shirking homework to cardiac patients disregarding the advice of their doctors, there’s no shortage of people who act as if ignoring a crisis will make it vanish. But the psychological mechanisms of denial are not the only thing to blame for the widespread rejection of the scientific reality of global warming.
Imagine a world in which the simple existence of heart disease was vigorously disputed; a world where the media promulgated an equivalency between concerned pulmonary specialists and those proclaiming that heart attacks and COPD are fabrications of an international conspiracy. It sounds bizarre — but it’s analogous to the way many news outlets address the issue of climate change.
Climate scientists are, in essence, “planetary physicians.” While their diagnosis is scary and their advice inconvenient, we owe it to our descendants to stop pretending that the problem will go away if we don’t acknowledge it.
Warren Senders
And it’s printed.
environment Politics: clueless denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 7: The Door Is Open
The Worcester Telegram (MA) has a columnist named Bill Fortier. Sigh:
They say that as the climate warms, the weather will become more extreme, or, in today’s world of instant communication, perhaps we just see it more often. Although it does seem that when we were kids we never saw summer-like, mid-winter thunderstorms like we’ve had the past three winters.
While that is worrisome, I’m sure I’m not alone in saying there is something good to be said about our changing weather.
To wit, it was most enjoyable to go all winter without putting on layers of winter clothes and clunky boots.
And it was great to hear the spring peepers March 13, the first time I have ever heard them before St. Patrick’s Day.
We spent last week in Washington, D.C., where the cherry blossoms reached their peak March 20, the third earliest date ever.
We wore shorts all week, had dinner outside twice and walked on King Street in Alexandria, Va., eating ice cream like we would on a July night. If the climate is changing, bring it on.
George W. Bush said that, too, inviting attacks on our soldiers. Idiots. Sent March 31:
Bill Fortier asserts that people who know “way, way more” than he does cannot state with certainty whether the greenhouse gases we release affect the climate. Actually, they can, and do. Science is silent on whether the accelerating greenhouse effect is responsible for a specific incidence of extreme weather, simply because that’s not how science works — but there is no doubt whatsoever that extra atmospheric methane and CO2 are having radically destabilizing effects.
Meanwhile, Mr. Fortier wonders what’s wrong with a warmer winter. Rhapsodizing over his ability to wear shorts on a March day, he writes, “If the climate is changing, bring it on.” Maybe he should talk to New England’s fruit farmers, whose trees are blooming too early, or ask foresters what happens when there aren’t enough freezing temperatures to destroy the larvae of insect pests.
Bring it on, huh? Climate change is coming, invited or not.
Warren Senders
environment: agriculture media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 6: Let’s Have Another Cup Of Coffee, Let’s Have Another Piece Of Pie
New Hampshire’s fruit growers are getting worried, reports the Nashua Telegraph:
When you were basking in record warmth last week, farmers were worried. They knew the abnormal weather was making some plants vulnerable when seasonable weather returned.
On Monday night, their fears were realized.
“It got down to 21 degrees in some spots. On apples, we could have lost as much as 10 percent,” said Chip Hardy, owner of Brookdale Fruit Farm in Hollis. “If it had gotten down to 15, we could have lost 90 percent, so we were lucky it didn’t get that cold.”
The problem is that trees and bushes were fooled by a stretch of 80-degree days last week, producing their flowers roughly a month earlier than usual, leaving frost-sensitive buds exposed.
Fruiting plants from apple and peach trees to blueberry bushes and grape vines are vulnerable, as are some decorative plants such as magnolia trees.
We are so fucked. Sent March 30:
Yes, the early spring seems like good news for those who want to get out and bask in the sun. But farmers are right to be worried. When weather is this unpredictable, agriculture is impacted in countless ways, with ripple effects throughout our society. Large monocrops are more vulnerable to extreme weather and invasive insect pests, and food prices inevitably go up as availability goes down.
And yet our society is remarkably resistant to connecting the dots between isolated regional weather events, and the broader transformation of our climate that shows every sign of accelerating into a planetwide disaster. David Brooks’ article downplayed the obvious link between New England’s “winter that wasn’t” and global warming — a connection that we dismiss at our peril.
What is happening in New Hampshire is happening in thousands of regions all over the world; we must wake up to this clear and present danger.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: media irresponsibility timescale
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 2: Relax And Float Downstream / It Is Not Dying…
The Christian Science Monitor runs a Reuters story on a recent study in Nature Climate Change, confirming that yes, we dunnit:
London
Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said on Sunday.
Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heat waves to global warming. The link between warming and storms was less clear.
“It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming,” said the study.
The past decade was probably the warmest globally for at least a millennium. Last year was the eleventh hottest on record, the World Meteorological Organisation said on Friday.
This is essentially a recycling of my usual irresponsible-media letter, with the addition of the mayfly/sequoia analogy. Maybe the CSM will finally publish me. Sent March 27:
Given the disconnect between the “if it bleeds, it leads” style of news reporting and the careful and deliberate style of scientific communication, it’s amazing that our media pays any attention whatever to issues of climate change.
After all, the transformation of the Earth’s climate takes place in long arcs of time: decades, centuries, millennia — while the longest span our media can competently address is the two-year gap between elections. It’s like asking mayflies to comment on sequoias.
What those climate scientists are telling us, in their careful and deliberate way, is that we’re already in a whole lot of trouble — and if we don’t act rapidly, it’s going to get immeasurably worse. While there’s no doubt that sensible energy and environmental policies are essential, it’s also incumbent on our news media to pay more, and better, attention to the gravest existential threat our species has yet faced.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 31: Where There’s A Way, Unfortunately There’s A Will
Well, this is…unsurprising. The Very Serious People at the Washington Post are wondering why Americans don’t seem to care about climate change.
Rising sea levels threaten to inundate low-lying roads in Louisiana, costing billions in port activity, The Post’s Juliet Eilperin reports. Northrop Grumman sees potential damage to billions in shoreline defense infrastructure, such as the imperiled drydock in Hampton Roads built to construct the next generation of aircraft carriers. Other factors are also at work in these examples of rapid coastline loss. But Louisiana and Virginia offer a picture of how further sea-level rise and higher storm surges — just one set of climate-related risks — could seriously disrupt human activity.
America, meanwhile, is fixated on . . . paying an extra buck per gallon at the gas pump.
A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) underscores how myopic the country’s energy debate is — and, consequently, how delinquent the United States has been in leading the world. The organization calculated that the world is on course to increase its carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2050. That’s because global energy use will increase by 80 percent by mid-century, with 85 percent of the energy mix coming from fossil fuels. That would likely raise global temperatures well past the target of 2 degrees Celsius, beyond which scientists say climate change could be extremely dangerous. It would also produce lethal amounts of air pollution, manifested in more heart attacks, asthma and other maladies.
Coming from the paper that has given the odious George Will a platform for decades, that’s pretty rich. Sent March 25:
If Americans are fixated on gas prices and political trivia rather than on the dangers of global climate change, perhaps we should ask how this happened. What influences could let us ignore a threat of unprecedented magnitude for so long?
Politicians averse to having their actions and statements exposed will readily blame the media when reality intrudes on their prefabricated narratives. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, American news media tend to insert political narratives into reality rather than the other way around.
When conservative legislators block sane climate policies, it’s often framed as “a loss for environmentalists,” as if those advocating for our species’ long-term survival were just another special-interest group. If print and broadcast media discussed the real-world consequences of a failure to address climate change (droughts, famines, geopolitical upheavals, megadeaths) rather than treating it as mere political gamesmanship, perhaps more Americans would take the issue seriously.
Warren Senders