environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility scientific consensus Storms
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 4: I Know You Are, But What Am I?
The L.A. Times wonders whether Hurricane Sandy is possibly related to, you know, that climate change thingy?
As Hurricane Sandy bears down on the Eastern seaboard — laden with predictions of drenching rains, fierce winds, snow and extensive damage — some scientists are pointing out ways that climate change might be influencing hurricanes.
No single weather event, be it drought, snowfall or hurricane, is caused by climate change, climatologists say. Rather, climate change amplifies the intensity or duration of extreme weather, akin to “putting hurricanes on steroids,” writes Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist for the National Wildlife Federation, an environmental advocacy group.
“The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question,” writes Kevin E. Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”
Hurricane Sandy poses several threats. Vast and slow-moving, it is expected to pour drenching rains and unleash powerful winds in the Northeast over a protracted period, perhaps several days.
No way they’re going to print this one. Sent October 28:
Despite sober and careful analyses from climatologists pointing out that a heating atmosphere makes extreme storms and anomalous weather increasingly likely, the conservative voices in politics and the media are certain to tell us that Sandy is an “isolated incident,” which cannot be definitively attributed to the accelerating greenhouse effect — even when specific triggering factors (such as a warming ocean) are obviously present.
Indeed. And as those same pundits and politicians hasten to reassure us, the steady drumbeat of right-wing hate on talk radio has nothing to do with the frequent outbursts of violence from the ultra-conservative fringe. Each gun-toting lunatic is an “isolated incident” which cannot be definitively attributed to the accelerating atmosphere of apocalyptic hatred generated by shock jocks and their enablers — even when specific triggering factors (such as a shelf of books by those same polarizing figures) are obviously present.
No connection. None at all.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama idiots media irresponsibility Mitt Romney Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 2: But They Say There’s A Hell. What The Hell? What The Hell Do They Think THIS Is?
The Dallas Daily News runs a NYT article on climate ignorage in the Presidential campaign:
WASHINGTON — For all their disputes, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney agree that the world is warming and that humans are at least partly to blame. It remains wholly unclear what either of them plans to do about it.
Even after a year of record-smashing temperatures, drought and Arctic ice melt, none of the moderators of the four general election debates asked about climate change, nor did any of the candidates broach the topic.
Throughout the campaign, Obama and Romney have seemed most intent on trying to outdo each other as lovers of coal, oil and natural gas — the very fuels most responsible for rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Obama has supported broad climate change legislation, financed extensive clean energy projects and pushed new regulations to reduce global warming emissions from cars and power plants. But neither he nor Romney has laid out a legislative or regulatory program to address the fundamental questions arising from one of the most vexing economic, environmental, political and humanitarian issues to face the planet.
Should the United States cut its greenhouse gas emissions, and, if so, how far and how fast? Should fossil fuels be more heavily taxed? Should any form of clean energy be subsidized, and for how long? Should the United States lead international mitigation efforts? Should the nation pour billions of new dollars into basic energy research? Is the climate system so fraught with uncertainty that the rational response is to do nothing?
Many scientists and policy experts say the lack of a serious discussion of climate change in the presidential contest represents a lost opportunity to engage the public and to signal to the rest of the world U.S. intentions for dealing with what is, by definition, a global problem that requires global cooperation.
“On climate change, the political discourse here is massively out of step with the rest of the world, but also with the citizens of this country,” said Andrew Steer, the president of the World Resources Institute and a former special envoy for climate change at the World Bank. “Polls show very clearly that two-thirds of Americans think this is a real problem and needs to be addressed.”
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along, move along. Sent October 26:
It must be difficult to be Mitt Romney — agreeing on one hand with the scientists who’ve studied the problem of climate change, yet prevented from stating his agreement definitively in public by the anti-intellectual intransigence of the tea-party conservatives who comprise his (not entirely willing) electoral base. Given Romney’s pathological aversion to a definite commitment on anything beyond the idea that he deserves to be president, such cowardice is understandable, although hardly a recommendation for the position he seeks.
President Obama’s reluctance to discuss climate change, however, most likely springs from a strategic avoidance of controversy. Given the firestorm of opprobrium engendered by his adoption of Republican ideas about health care, one can only imagine the howls of outrage from conservatives were he to actually make the long-term future of our civilization a legislative priority. Through judicious executive orders, he has made significant strides on energy efficiency and environmental responsibility without engaging our know-nothing congress the futile and ugly wrangling that characterized the eventual passage of the Affordable Care Act.
While neither candidate represents an optimal choice for those cognizant of the magnitude of the climate crisis, there is no equivalence between their respective silences on the subject.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 1: Make Me Wanna Holler…
The Christian Science Monitor wonders why nobody wonders why nobody wonders why nobody wonders why:
Energy and green energy were hot topics during the presidential debates, but climate change didn’t come up once. The candidates may be avoiding the issue because voters don’t want to hear a difficult message.
In four years, climate change has gone from the elephant that blind men are trying to describe to the elephant in the room.
No one wants to talk about it. With a few exceptions, voters don’t ask. And presidential candidates don’t tell.
Now that the 2012 presidential debates are over, commentators have begun to take notice. Not once during the three presidential encounters or the single vice-presidential debate did the subject come up.
“National elections should be a time when our nation considers the great challenges and opportunities the next President will face,” opines the website ClimateSilence.org, a project of Forecast the Facts and Friends of the Earth Action aimed at pushing the issue into campaigns. “But the climate conversation of 2012 has been defined by a deafening silence.”
Sheesh. Sent October 25:
For a major news outlet to assert that “voters don’t want to hear a difficult message” as an explanation for the presidential candidates’ aversion to discussion of climate change is disingenuous. While nobody likes getting bad news, it is (or should be) the responsibility of professional journalists to help the general population understand difficult or complex subjects. This is crucial when the problem is exacerbated by delay, as in the case of the greenhouse effect and its consequences.
Over the past several decades, in fact, our print and broadcast media have shown extraordinary reluctance to cover environmental issues in a scientifically responsible way. Instead we’re offered a neutralized version of the truth, in which scientific findings are falsely equated with predictable denialist tropes. When reporters and analysts tell us that “the public doesn’t care about climate change,” they’re really saying that they don’t want to tackle the subject.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denial idiots media irresponsibility Mitt Romney Republicans
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 30: Put Your Money Where Your Money Is.
Time Magazine wonders “Why Climate Change Has Become the Missing Issue in the Presidential Campaign”. I wonder, too.
We’re in the final few months of what’s shaping up to be the hottest year on record. In September, Arctic sea ice melted to its smallest extent in satellite records, while the Midwest was rocked by a once-in-a-generation level drought. Global carbon dioxide emissions hit a record high in 2011 of 34.83 billion tons, and they will almost certainly be higher this year. Despite that fact, the more than two decade-old international effort to deal with climate change has hit a wall, and the upcoming U.N. global warming summit in the Qatari capital of Doha — whose residents have among the highest per-capita carbon emissions in the world — is unlikely to change that hard fact.
Given all that, it might seem reasonable to think that climate change —a nd how the U.S. should respond to it — would be among the top issues of the 2012 presidential election. We are, after all, talking about a problem that has the potential to alter the fate of the entire planet, one that requires solutions that utterly alter our multi-trillion dollar energy system. Climate change has been a subject at the Presidential or Vice-Presidential debates since 1988, as Brad Johnson, who surveys environmental coverage for ThinkProgress, pointed out this week. Yet through all of the 2012 debates, not a single question was asked about climate change, and on the stump, neither candidate has had much to say about the issue — with Mitt Romney more often using global warming as a punchline, and President Obama mentioning it in passing, at most.
Here are two different reasons. Which do you think it is? Sent October 23:
As the evidence for global heating goes from merely overwhelming to absolutely incontrovertible, look for conservatives to begin their transition into the next phase of climate-change denial: arguing that liberals were the ones to politicize the discussion, thereby making meaningful policy impossible.
In this context, President Obama’s reluctance to raise the subject can be understood as a strategic move; by offering nothing for the anti-science GOP to push against, he’s denied them one of their most convenient rhetorical antagonists. Mr. Romney, who has previously acknowledged the existence and severity of the climate crisis, is now governed entirely by his basest political instincts, and cannot address scientific reality without antagonizing his supporters.
Another interpretation, of course, is that both candidates’ behavior is wholly conditioned by the corrosive influence of fossil fuel corporations, whose profits would be adversely affected by any move toward mitigation of the metastasizing greenhouse effect and its consequences.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 28: Screw It, Let’s Play In Four
The Glens Falls (NY) Post-Star runs Eugene Robinson’s column, “Silence over climate change is deafening”:
WASHINGTON — Not a word has been said in the presidential debates about what may be the most urgent and consequential issue in the world: climate change.
President Obama understands and accepts the scientific consensus the burning of fossil fuels is trapping heat in the atmosphere, with potentially catastrophic long-term effects. Mitt Romney’s view, as on many issues, is pure quicksilver — impossible to pin down — but when he was governor of Massachusetts, climate change activists considered him enlightened and effective.
Yet neither has mentioned the subject in the debates. Instead, they have argued over who is more eager to extract ever-larger quantities of oil, natural gas and coal from beneath our purple mountains’ majesties and fruited plains.
“We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years,” Obama said in Tuesday’s debate. “Natural gas production is the highest it’s been in decades. We have seen increases in coal production and coal employment.”
Romney scoffed Obama “has not been Mr. Oil, or Mr. Gas, or Mr. Coal,” and promised he, if elected, would be all three. “I’ll do it by more drilling, more permits and licenses,” he said, adding later this means “bringing in a pipeline of oil from Canada, taking advantage of the oil and coal we have here, drilling offshore in Alaska, drilling offshore in Virginia, where the people want it.”
If this is a contest to see who can pretend to be more ignorant of the environmental freight train barreling down the tracks toward us, Romney wins narrowly.
Time for another screed on our hopeless media system. Sent October 21:
The candidates’ inability to discuss climate change must be understood as a symptom of a larger malady afflicting our governance. With each passing year, the trivialization of complex policy issues becomes more egregious: government by sound-bite and bumper sticker. Our profit-driven media is an integral part of this malign equation; its irresponsible combination of false equivalence and ADD ensures that the single most crucial issue of our century receives no national attention.
The climate crisis will bring economic, geopolitical and environmental consequences: the likely collapse of agriculture and infrastructure under climatic pressures will impoverish unimaginable numbers of people; we’ll see more drought refugees, submerged nations, famines and governmental instability — not to mention the loss of planetary biodiversity, the extinction of entire species, and the likelihood of devastating “tipping points.”
But for American TV networks, genuine discussions of climate change could be truly catastrophic: people might change the channel.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama foreign policy geopolitics media irresponsibility sapir-whorf hypothesis
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 27: Both Candidates Will Eat A Live Bug, On National Television
By the time this shows up on the blog, the last presidential debate will be in the past. Maybe my letter will have been rendered irrelevant. In any case, as I type this, it’s Saturday, October 20, and the LA Times notes that climate activists are still trying to get somebody (anybody!) to ask some damn questions:
With just 2 1/2 weeks left before election day, there’s an urgency on all fronts in the presidential race. For activists, it’s not just about whether President Obama or Mitt Romney will win, but whether either man will pay attention to their issue.
Perhaps no interest community has been as disappointed as those who worry about global climate change. They have repeatedly called for more attention to the issue and, for the most part, failed to get it.
This week’s presidential debate prompted a new round of regret and demands for Romney and Obama to address the topic, as both candidates spent their most notable time arguing about how much coal they would extract from federal lands.
“Both President Obama and Gov. Romney maintained the silence on climate, again ignoring the growing roster of extreme climate-change induced weather events,” said Maura Cowley, executive director of a consortium of youth-oriented groups called the Energy Action Coalition. “As young voters, and the generation with the most to lose if we don’t address the climate crisis now, we demand both candidates break the silence on climate change by standing up to big oil and gas with ambitious plans for clean energy.”
A political application of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis helps us understand why it’s nahgannahappan. Sent October 20:
Monday’s presidential debate will focus on foreign policy, which ought to provide a perfect opening for questions about global climate change. After all, the accelerating greenhouse effect transcends national boundaries, affecting all life on Earth equally. Furthermore, rising planetary temperatures and increased extreme weather will have humanitarian and geopolitical consequences, often in areas with a long history of conflict. It’d seem that our rapidly transforming climate is an essential subject in any discussion of foreign policy. Why won’t it happen on Monday?
“Foreign policy” as a field is concerned precisely with national boundaries — those human abstractions which surging atmospheric CO2 counts make irrelevant. The hard truth is that America (and the rest of the world) must rise above the narrow strategic concerns which have preoccupied us for centuries. Climate change is a global problem, not a “foreign” one, and there is as yet no scheduled debate on “planetary policy.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Gore denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 26: I Wouldn’t Have Smoked In Bed If We Hadn’t Installed Those Smoke Detectors!
Not that this is news or anything, but the New York Times’ David Brooks is an utter idiot:
The period around 2003 was the golden spring of green technology. John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduced a bipartisan bill to curb global warming. I got my first ride in a Prius from a conservative foreign policy hawk who said that these new technologies were going to help us end our dependence on Middle Eastern despots. You’d go to Silicon Valley and all the venture capitalists, it seemed, were rushing into clean tech.
From that date on the story begins to get a little sadder.
Al Gore released his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. The global warming issue became associated with the highly partisan former vice president. Gore mobilized liberals, but, once he became the global warming spokesman, no Republican could stand shoulder to shoulder with him and survive. Any slim chance of building a bipartisan national consensus was gone.
Then, in 2008, Barack Obama seized upon green technology and decided to make it the centerpiece of his jobs program. During his presidential campaign he promised to create five million green tech jobs. Renewable energy has many virtues, but it is not a jobs program. Obama’s stimulus package set aside $90 billion for renewable energy loans and grants, but the number of actual jobs created has been small. Articles began to appear in the press of green technology grants that were costing $2 million per job created. The program began to look like a wasteful disappointment.
Federal subsidies also created a network of green tech corporations hoping to benefit from taxpayer dollars. One of the players in this network was, again, Al Gore. As Carol Leonnig reported in The Washington Post last week, Gore left public office in 2001 worth less than $2 million. Today his wealth is estimated to be around $100 million.
I’m going to stop doing facepalms and start doing headbricks, I swear. Sent October 19:
As the evidence accumulates all around us, and the scientific consensus reaches near unanimity, we’re going to hear more conservatives acknowledge the reality of global climate change. But because it involves admitting error, this process will involve them in a lot of blame-shifting, equivocating, and historical revisionism. David Brooks offers us a preview of what this will look in his attempt to hold Al Gore responsible for the American epidemic of climate-change denial.
Apparently Mr. Gore couldn’t attract conservative support because he was too…shrill? Too popular among hippies? Too right, too soon? Mr. Brooks blithely ignores both the GOP’s decades-long antipathy to science and their pathological hyper-partisanship in his eagerness to avoid responsibility for what his own ideological allies have wrought. Now that climate change itself is irrefutable, the locus of denial has shifted: Republicans would have done something about climate change, but those pesky environmentalists were in the way.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: media irresponsibility scientific consensus seasons
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 20: All Russet Brown
The Easton Star-Democrat (DE) tells us about a study of changing leaves that reinforces what should now be absolutely common knowledge:
COLLEGE PARK – Fall colors are arriving later and are fading more quickly because of climate change, according to researchers.
The climate-driven changes are already visible in some forests in New England. Scientists worry that leaf-peeping hotspots in Maryland also could eventually see duller foliage and delays in the start of leaf season.
“It [climate change] certainly could have an impact here, as well,” said Saran Twombly, a researcher at the National Science Foundation, who studies the impact of climate change on foliage.
In Massachusetts’ Harvard Forest, data collected by retired Harvard professor John O’Keefe suggests that leaves are changing color four days later than they did in 1993.
In New Hampshire, sugar maples are shedding their leaves two to five days later than two decades ago, according to data collected by the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in Woodstock, N.H.
Warmer temperatures and erratic weather patterns driven by climate change have an adverse affect on tree health, according to phenologists – those who study the effects of seasonal changes on plants.
Peepers away! Sent October 13:
At first blush, the news that autumn leaves are changing color a few days ahead of schedule doesn’t seem like much to worry about. But the climate crisis requires long-term thinking; it requires us to extrapolate from current trends, and to integrate scientific data from as many sources as possible.
The deniers in our media and politics who claim the science of climate change “isn’t settled” should have no more credibility than flat-Earthers or those who believe the moon landings were faked; the climatological evidence confirming global warming is overwhelmingly conclusive and extremely alarming.
For millennia, Earth’s steady, predictable, and hospitable climate has allowed our species to prosper, our civilization to develop, and our capacity to understand our universe to expand a millionfold. Now that’s changing; those early autumn leaves are one of countless harbingers of a new and less welcoming future we’ve inadvertently created for our descendants. We can no longer afford to ignore these signs.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: media irresponsibility rising sea levels scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 19: Shut Up He Explained
The Naples Daily News (FL) wonders about something:
NAPLES — A national organization of scientists wants President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney to turn their attention to the sea during the final presidential debate in Florida later this month.
The Union of Concerned Scientists on Thursday sent a letter to the candidates, urging them to address rising sea levels during campaign stops across the state. The letter, which was signed by more than 120 Florida city and county government officials and scientists, also asks the candidates to address the issue during their last presidential debate on Oct. 22 at Lynn University in Boca Raton.
Lee County Commissioner Ray Judah was the only Southwest Florida elected official who signed the letter. Judah declined to comment about his decision to sign the letter.
According to the letter, Florida already is feeling the effects of sea level rise, and it “jeopardizes the health, safety and economic well-being of our communities.” The letter points to increased flooding, salt water intrusion of inland water storage and failing flood control structures as signs that rising sea levels need to be addressed at all levels of government.
Not gonna happen. Because FREEDOM, bitches! Sent October 12:
It would be wonderful to see the candidates asked substantial questions about climate change in their upcoming debates. Given the undeniable threat posed by the runaway greenhouse effect (to say nothing of oceanic acidification and thawing Arctic methane, two other nightmares emerging from our past century of CO2 emissions), it would seem absurd to ignore the problem.
And yet this is all too likely what will happen. The sad fact of the matter is that America’s economy is more like an overloaded Hummer than a nimble Prius, with multinational fossil fuel corporations in the driver’s seat. These organizations are loath to relinquish even a tiny bit of their extraordinary profit margins, even if it means denying the existence of a problem far greater in scope, and graver in consequences, than any of the issues currently occupying the attention of our media and political establishments.
This is irresponsibility of unprecedented magnitude.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republicans scientific literacy scientific method
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 15: All Right — From Now On, No More Doctor Nice Guy
The Lincoln Journal-Star tells us about some Nebraska climatologists who are speaking out with one well-projected voice:
A warning sign on the first floor directs people to the basement of Bessey Hall in the event of a tornado.
An open door offers a view of an instructor pointing to a video display of the world’s prime monsoon regions.
Upstairs, on the third floor of his City Campus office, Clinton Rowe is dealing with a less familiar task.
He’s explaining why he and four colleagues decided it was time to go proactive, why they needed to issue a joint public statement on the evidence of increasing climate extremes and the potential for more tornadoes, droughts and floods.
The attention they’re getting for raising the alarm about global warming may have less to do with the side they’re on than with their methods.
In his 26 years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Rowe can’t remember a time when his department has chosen a similar course toward group activism.
“Have we ever done anything like this? Not that I can think of.”
It’s been two weeks since he and four other NU faculty members from climate and climate-related ranks offered their shared view.
“The time for debate is over,” they said. “The time for action is here.”
In the next few decades, they warned, average temperatures in Nebraska will rise by 4 to 10 degrees. Because of diminished snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, flows in the Platte River will drop and Lake McConaughy could become “a ditch in midsummer.”
Enviro-nazis! Sent October 8:
The traditional language of science is restrained and cautious, which is a hindrance for climatologists when it comes to spreading the word about global warming and the dangers it poses to America and the world. When climate experts shout, it’s with careful statements using phrases like “statistically significant relationship” and “robust correlation,” which, while accurate, lack the emotional force necessary to galvanize ordinary citizens into action.
Meanwhile, those who oppose responsible climate and energy policies feel free to misrepresent the science and engage in character assassination, as witness the blizzard of obloquy hurled at Dr. Michael Mann and others who have stood up for the future of our species and our civilization. In the aftermath of their forceful statement on the climate crisis, let’s hope Dr. Clinton Rowe and his colleagues at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln receive respect and gratitude from their fellow citizens, rather than the ignorance and mockery we’ve come to expect from the anti-science politicians of the GOP and their enablers in the print and broadcast media.
Warren Senders