environment Politics: idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 12, Day 26: Hit The Snooze Button Again, Willya?
The Chicago Sun-Times says Americans are finally waking up.
Call it change more Americans are starting to believe in.
A recent Associated Press-GfK poll found that a growing majority of Americans not only think global warming is occurring, but also that it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do something about it.
If this fall’s elections were any indication, average Americans are moving ahead of the politicians on this issue. Serious debate on climate change was a lot less noticeable than the melting polar icecaps, Superstorm Sandy and Midwest drought were.
Fashionably late, that’s us. Sent December 20:
The fact that Americans are only now accepting the reality of global climate change demonstrates two things: first, that the United States has been able to avoid the adverse effects of global warming for longer than many other parts of the world, and second, that our national relationship to scientific knowledge has deteriorated grossly since the 1960s and 70s, when our space program brought human beings to the moon and back with the full support, admiration and respect of an engaged public. That was then.
Now, it’s a different story. Thanks to an indifferent media, climatologists are misrepresented when their findings are complex, ignored when their work is misunderstood, and physically threatened when their results are ideologically inconvenient. Since geographical good luck no longer protects our nation from the consequences of the accelerating greenhouse effect, will America’s politicians, media and citizenry finally accord climate scientists the respect they deserve?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 12, Day 22: Can Rat Piss Cure Cancer? Details At Eleven!
The San Francisco Chronicle covers the “More Idiots Are Finally Changing Their Minds” story:
A growing majority of Americans think that global warming is occurring, that it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do something about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds.
Even most people who say they don’t trust scientists on the environment say temperatures are rising.
The poll found 4 out of every 5 Americans said climate change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it. That’s up from 73 percent when the same question was asked in 2009.
Wakey wakey! Probably too latey latey, but better late than never. Idiots. Sent December 16:
It’s good news that more people are finally accepting the truth of planetary climate change, now that the consequences of the rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect are threatening to overwhelm Earth’s ecological defense mechanisms. That the newly converted find actual physical events more persuasive than scientific analyses is also unsurprising. But science offers ways to extend our senses into areas normally beyond human perception; the idea that scientists have become somehow untrustworthy should give prompt us pause to reconsider our media’s handling of science news. Ask any scientist whose work has been covered by broadcast media and you’ll hear story after story of sensationalism, misrepresentation, and exaggeration.
That complex scientific questions are ill-suited to the spectacle-driven news machine should be a motivation to those television and radio outlets to change their approach. When it comes to the looming climate emergency, we need accurate reporting, and we needed it thirty years ago.
Warren Senders
environment: corporate irresponsibility denialists media irresponsibility
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 12, Day 15: Uh Wugga Wug Uh Wugga Wug Uh Wugga Wug Uh Wugga!
The Tallahassee Democrat runs a column from Cynthia Tucker, who thinks, “Weathermen need to understand climate change.” Uh-huh. Here you go:
Here in Atlanta, we’ve had a string of days in which the temperature has hovered around 70 degrees — more representative of late spring than late autumn. The balmy weather has left me in a funk.
Sure, I’ve enjoyed the chance to put my toddler on the back of my bike and take her out for a ride. Yes, it was pleasant to don a short-sleeved shirt to put up my outdoor Christmas lights. Of course, I like the long chats with my neighbors, who walk their dogs at a leisurely pace instead of rushing to get out of the chill.
But I fear the unseasonable temperatures are a harbinger of a slow-moving disaster — a serious threat to my child’s future. What will it take to get people focused on the crisis of climate change?
It would certainly help if TV weather forecasters at least noted the possibility of a link between the un-December-like weather and disastrous global warming. They are popular figures who are embraced by their local viewers as climate authorities. If they helped the public understand the dangers of global warming, the voters, in turn, would demand solutions from their elected officials.
I wonder. Sent December 9:
As a prime source of information about what to expect, television meteorologists have positions of heightened power. So it’s particularly troubling to realize that the talking heads on the tube are disproportionately prone to denying the straightforward (and quite scary) scientific consensus on climate change. Part of this disconnect lies in the simple fact that climatology and meteorology are two very distinct disciplines; one is concerned with whole systems, the other with local effects.
But there’s a more prosaic reason. The roots of climate-change denialism in our mass media lie smack dab in the root of all evil; television costs money, and fossil fuel corporations have more of it than any other economic actor in twenty-first century civilization. Upton Sinclair could have been talking about our broadcast weathermen when he said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: arctic methane assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 12, Day 9: Like A Lizard On The Windowpane
The Columbus Dispatch reprints Eugene Robinson’s recent op-ed from the WaPo:
You might not have noticed that another round of U.N. climate talks is under way, this time in Doha, Qatar. You also might not have noticed that we’re barreling toward a “world … of unprecedented heat waves, severe drought and major floods in many regions.” Here in Washington, we’re too busy to pay attention to such trifles.
We’re too busy arguing about who gets credit or blame for teeny-weeny changes in the tax code. Meanwhile, evidence mounts that the legacy we pass along to future generations will be a parboiled planet.
That quote about heat, drought and flooding comes from a new World Bank report warning of the consequences of warming. The study, titled “Turn Down the Heat,” tries to assess what will happen if temperatures are allowed to rise by 4 degrees Celsius — about 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit — above pre-industrial levels, before humans began spewing massive amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The picture is beyond bleak.
This is some serious shit, people. December 3:
While Washington obsesses about the political brinkmanship around the misleadingly named “fiscal cliff,” the world races towards a far more dangerous line of demarcation. And just as conservatives reject any economic evidence contrary to their ideology, they deny the scientific evidence confirming the very real threat posed by an accelerating greenhouse effect.
While the “climate cliff” — the point when runaway global heating becomes unstoppable — may already be past, this doesn’t excuse political and media figures who deliberately exclude the facts of climate change from legislative deliberation and national discussion. Even more disturbing is the realization that the worst-case scenarios discussed in the recent World Bank report don’t include melting arctic methane, which raises the threat level from dangerous to outright catastrophic. In a planetary crisis of this magnitude, the willful ignorance of the American chattering classes is nothing less than a betrayal of our species’ future.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama economics media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 12, Day 8: You Never Give Me Your Money…
USA Today has an op-ed from Dan Becker & James Gerstenzang, titled: “Column: Obama’s chance to change (political) climate.” Not bad, actually:
9:00AM EST December 2. 2012 – Hurricane Sandy and the 2012 drought drove home the need for President Obama to lead the fight against global warming. Freed from the political constraints of the re-election campaign, he holds three tools. Wielding them successfully, he will make bold action against the world’s most pressing environmental problem a legacy of his second term.
The president can sharply curtail power plants’ emissions of carbon dioxide, the largest global warming pollutant, by using existing law to require that utilities start converting from coal to cleanly extracted natural gas and introduce more renewable energy. To cut demand for electricity, he can set standards that increase the efficiency of power-gobbling appliances.
But scientists warn that far more will be necessary. The deadly hurricane, devastating drought and 332 consecutive months of above-average global temperatures are just the sort of conditions they say will accompany global warming.
So, taking a page from the nation’s first environmental president, Theodore Roosevelt, Obama can use his third tool — the bully pulpit — to change the political climate on climate. He must mobilize public pressure on Congress to adopt far-reaching measures that he cannot enact on his own, including steps that begin to end our addiction to oil.
Meanwhile, the country’s talking heads are talking about something totally different. Details at 11. Sent December 2:
While our news media have gone all out to cover the looming showdown over the “fiscal cliff,” the fact is that we’re facing another deadline with far more serious implications. The “climate cliff,” unlike its economic namesake, is based on hard scientific data and analysis, not political expediency and partisan gamesmanship. The consequences of a failure in climate policy reach far beyond the next election cycle or two and into the next millennium. Unless we can get the rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect under control, questions about a marginally higher tax rate on the wealthiest two percent of Americans will be quaintly irrelevant in the face of catastrophic weather extremes, devastated agriculture, and the geopolitical instabilities triggered by famine, drought, and rising sea levels.
President Obama needs to make climate change a central issue for all Americans. If there’s any issue that transcends the transient boundaries of ideology, this is it.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Doha climate conference media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 12, Day 4: Don’t Just Do Something — Stand There!
The LA Times, on the Doha Climate Conference:
More than 17,000 people have converged on the Qatari capital for the latest U.N. climate talks, but the most influential presence may be Sandy.
The superstorm that ravaged the U.S. Northeast a month ago seared into the American consciousness an apocalyptic vision of what climate change could look like. On the heels of devastating wildfires, droughts and floods this year, Sandy’s destructive power snapped Americans to the reality that rising temperatures are a risk to their own well-being, not just a concern for distant lowlands.
Sandy’s fresh reminder of the potential consequences of global warming has been a dominant theme in the first days of the two-week meeting in Doha of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, delegates report.
Still, politicians and environmentalists at the gathering, which began Monday, maintain low expectations for the massive confab to spur swift or dramatic action to combat rising global temperatures. They predict that, at best, the unwieldy forum drawing together 195 countries and nongovernmental parties will bring agreement to formalize plans to negotiate new climate objectives that follow the aims of the 15-year-old Kyoto Protocol, ostensibly to be achieved by 2020. The next pact doesn’t need to be completed until 2015, so the international body is operating without the pressure of a looming deadline, participants said.
No urgency to this. Not at all. Sent November 28:
Superstorm Sandy’s pre-election visit did more than just allow a Republican governor and a Democratic president to work together. It also brought catastrophic climate change back to the national agenda, just in time for the Doha climate conference. While we can be grateful that this grave existential threat is once again on our radar, the fact that it takes a devastating storm to do so is an indictment of our perpetually distracted media and our all-too-distractable politicians.
The conclusions of climatology are as unambiguous as the law of gravity: climate change is real, it’s dangerous — and human industrial civilization is a root cause. What is needed is a sustained global effort to simultaneously reduce our carbon emissions drastically, develop solutions for excess atmospheric CO2, and prepare for the changes we cannot prevent. Will the Doha conference help make this happen? Not while science-denying conservatives remain powerful in our politics.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility fossil fuels idiots media irresponsibility
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 29: Found My Way Downstairs And Drank A Cup / Looking Up, I Noticed I Was Late…
The Riverside, CA Press-Enterprise notes a recent study suggesting some folks are waking up:
Nothing like a natural disaster to make you believe in global warming.
A post-election survey of voters found that a majority of Americans understand Hurricane Sandy was made worse by climate change. The survey also found strong majorities of voters connecting climate change to the record high summer temperatures witnessed in 2012 as well as this year’s extraordinary drought.
The survey by Penn Schoen Berland found that 60 percent of Americans who voted in the 2012 presidential election agree with the statement that “global warming made Hurricane Sandy worse.” The survey also found that 73 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: “Global warming is affecting extreme weather events in the United States.”
A small but significant number of voters indicated that damage from Hurricane Sandy directly influenced their vote in the presidential election. Twelve percent of respondents said yes when asked, “Did the damage from Hurricane Sandy and the government response influence your vote in the presidential election.” And of those saying yes, 42 percent said it was “a very important factor” in casting their vote.
How much time have we wasted playing pretend games? Sent November 24:
The really troubling part of the Penn Schoen Berland study showing significant change in Americans’ increased awareness of climate change is that fully forty percent of our nation’s citizens don’t recognize a strong correlation even if it’s flooding their basements and dessicating their farmlands. That number testifies to the power of fossil fuel interests and their well-paid media enablers, who have spent enormous time and resources on muddying the debate — fostering confusion where the data instead points overwhelmingly to certainty.
How much more evidence will these doubters require? Clearly the statements of climate scientists won’t do the trick; when conservative politicians must reject even basic science to pass muster with their supporters, the testimony of experts is an irrelevance. Superstorm Sandy hit home for many. Perhaps our nation will only accept the scientific consensus when climate change isn’t just knocking on our doors, but knocking down our homes.
Warren Senders
environment: barges drought media irresponsibility Mississippi rivers
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 27: And The Big Fuel Said To Push On
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch shares a minor local story of no interest to anyone outside the affected area. Oh, wait…
ST. LOUIS • Barge industry leaders on Friday renewed their warnings of far-reaching economic losses in the Midwest if water levels on the Mississippi River continue to drop to levels that disrupt shipping.
Severe drought conditions coupled with the reduced flows expected from the upper Missouri River later this month have prompted the American Waterway Operators and the Waterways Council to warn that river commerce could come to a standstill by early December.
“Slowing down or severing the country’s inland waterway superhighway would imperil the shipment of critical cargo for export, significantly delay products needed for domestic use, threaten manufacturing production and power generation, and negatively impact jobs up and down the river,” said Craig Philip, chief executive officer at Ingram Barge Co., based in Nashville, Tenn.
Philip and other industry officials spoke during a Friday morning news conference in St. Louis, alongside Maj. Gen. John W. Peabody, commander of the Mississippi Valley Division of the Army Corps of Engineers, and Rear Adm. Roy A. Nash, commander of the Coast Guard’s 8th District.
Industry officials are calling on the administration of President Barack Obama to issue a presidential declaration to allow an emergency response to the “crisis.”
Peabody said the Corps of Engineers, which manages the waterways, has been bracing for the latest round of low water since the drought year of 1988. This year, the corps has been involved in “continuous dredging” since July — with up to two dozen dredges operating on the river at one time — and has been storing water where possible.
Move along, folks. Sent November 22:
The Mississippi’s steadily lowering water levels are part of a much larger story. The predicament of barge operators is linked with that of Midwest corn growers who watched helplessly as drought withered their fields, and with Vermont maple trees no longer making enough sap for syrup production. This story includes millions of acres of Colorado forest turned into kindling by invasive pine borer beetles, subsistence farmers in Bangladesh whose meager holdings are submerged by rising sea levels, and island nations now looking at relocating entire populations before their homelands disappear beneath the waves. Don’t forget to include the East coast, still reeling from the impact of superstorm Sandy.
It’s a story of the countless local and regional consequences of global climate change. Each community may feel these impacts differently, but to ignore their connections is to deny our shared humanity — and the future we must all face together.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 25: New Math
The Iowa City Press-Citizen is aware of a problem:
More than 40 University of Iowa scientists — some of them irked by the lack of climate change discussion in the recent presidential election — added their name to a statement released Monday declaring that climate change caused the 2012 drought.
All told, 138 science faculty and research staff from 27 Iowa colleges and universities — 44 from UI — put their stamps of approval on the statement, which conceded that although science can’t with 100 percent certainty pin human activities as the drought’s culprit, such extreme weather events in recent years are symptomatic of a climate that’s growing warmer because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
With Iowa in the midst of an ongoing drought and the recent devastation of the East Coast by the unprecedented Hurricane Sandy, now is a “teachable moment” when it comes to climate change, said Jerry Schnoor, co-director of UI’s Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research and a leader in organizing the statement.
“We wanted to make clear that most scientists and people who teach science in our colleges and universities in Iowa feel quite strongly that climate change is here now and we’re suffering costs as a result of that,” he said. “There are a lot of things we can do to respond, both in terms of adapting to climate change and mitigating it and lowering our own emissions.”
Science, biyotches. Sent November 20:
While it was amusing to watch Republican strategists get sucker-punched by math and facts on election night, the moment of reckoning for climate change’s reality won’t be much to laugh about. Think about it: a major political party in the most powerful nation on Earth has rejected science and expertise in just about every area of policy. The GOP is grimly determined to create their own reality: Damn the experts! Full speed ahead!
This is fine for political reality, which is determined by the demands of the 24-hour news cycle. But climatic reality is determined by other factors, like the amount of CO2 in the upper atmosphere and the albedo of Arctic ice coverage. Carbon dioxide molecules don’t watch TV, and Arctic ice doesn’t care whether Karl Rove’s math is accurate. How much more devastation will it take for Republicans to acknowledge the scary factuality of a radically transforming climate?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility Keystone XL media irresponsibility Tar Sands
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 22: Show Me What You Do And I Will Tell You What You Believe
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune runs a McClatchy article titled, “Pressure builds on Obama over oil pipeline: Jobs vs. climate change.” SOS:
WASHINGTON – President Obama’s decision on whether to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline looms huge now that the election is over, and it could define Obama’s legacy on energy and climate change.
The oil industry, which is pushing hard for approval, describes the choice as the president’s “first test to the American people.”
Environmental groups are promising that thousands of activists will demonstrate against the pipeline on Sunday outside the White House, just the beginning of the efforts that are being planned to sink the project.
Energy analyst Charles Ebinger said he thought two weeks ago that there was little chance Obama would kill the pipeline. But he’s increasingly less sure about that.
Gotta stop the pipeline; gotta stop the “jobs vs. environment” bullshit meme. Sent November 18:
The notion that responsible environmental policies are “job-killers” is one of the most egregious falsehoods promulgated by fossil fuel spokespeople. The economy and the environment are only in opposition to one another if our notion of economic well-being is predicated on continuous consumption and continuous growth — inherently impossible on a finite planet. Wise economic policy recognizes that wealth is derived from the sustainable stewardship of Earth’s natural resources. This self-evident truth is ignored by those whose self-interest depends on maximizing short-term profits.
Coincidentally, theirs are the same voices eagerly pressing for Administration approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, a fossil-fuel exploitation strategy of near-sociopathic irresponsibility. Yes, the Keystone XL will generate jobs: cleanup specialists, leak stoppage crews, and (eventually) oncologists. If fossil fuel corporations could rebrand themselves simply as energy delivery corporations, their technology and resources would make them essential to the sustainable economy our country needs so urgently.
Warren Senders