environment Politics: hunting Republican obstructionism sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 29: Squeeeeeeeeze….
The Baltimore Sun notices that hunters are hippies:
Last month, a Republican-aligned polling firm called on hunters and fishermen nationwide to get their views. Some of the results were unsurprising: Outdoorsmen regard themselves as politically conservative and register Republican over Democratic by a more than 2-to-1 ratio.
But here’s one response that may have caught President Barack Obama and his re-election team by surprise, if they noticed it at all: A majority of these sportsmen believe global warming is the cause of this past summer’s high temperatures and want the White House and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.
Watermelons! With guns! Sent October 22:
Unlike the despicable pretenders who inflate their egos by blasting away at tethered game, real sportsmen recognize that their hunting licenses rest on a foundation of genuine respect for the natural world. It’s unsurprising that they are aware of climate change and its impacts on local and regional environments everywhere on Earth. Anyone accustomed to the wild already knows that rising atmospheric temperatures are altering things: animal migration patterns, ranges and habitats; plant flowering schedules and pollination cycles; seasonal freezes and thaws. And scientists tell us that the planetary greenhouse effect will have far more extreme effects in the decades to come.
The readiness of conservative lawmakers and media figures to politicize the question of climate change is profoundly irresponsible. To avert a humanitarian and environmental tragedy, we must work together to forestall the devastating consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect — not play political games while the Earth burns.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists drought idiots Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 16: Our Love Is Here To Stay?
The McCook Daily Gazette (NE) reports on a panel discussion featuring a bunch of frantic hippies:
LINCOLN, Nebraska — Things are about to start heating up.
So say a panel of five environmental scholars and professionals, who presented “Climate Change and Nebraska: What Does Our Future Hold?” Saturday at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to warn of the dangers of a potential four-to-10 degree temperature increase in the state.
The speakers examined the scientific evidence for climate change, the impact this could have on the future and the steps that can be taken to assuage it. Robert Oglesby, a professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at UNL, said after considering all the factors, the one that is the cause for most alarm in Nebraska is the reduction of snowpack in the Rocky Mountains.
“We need that steady release of water due to the slow, steady melt of the snow in the spring through early summer to maintain river flow of the Platte,” Oglesby said.
Song Feng, of the School of Natural Resources at UNL, offered a study into the effect droughts have had in the United States and the likelihood of their continuation in the future.
“The drought will become the normal condition by the end of the century,” Feng said.
It’s going to get harder and harder to be a denialist in the years ahead. Won’t stop ’em, though. Sent October 9:
While it makes a good opening for an article on the findings of climate scientists, “things are about to start heating up” is a pretty misleading sentence. The mercury’s been rising for quite a while now, as witness this single statistic: July 2012 was the 329th consecutive month to exceed the global average temperature for the twentieth century. While this increase is bad news for us all, we can still make it worse — by rejecting the reality of global warming, and by blocking action until catastrophic consequences are unavoidable.
It’s impossible to imagine a more cynical and destructive approach to governance than the deny-and-delay strategy that is the modus operandi of conservative politicians when it comes to addressing the climate crisis. Self-styled “deficit hawks” who claim that reducing our greenhouse emissions would be prohibitively expensive are essentially telling us that prevention costs more than cure — a notion both logically absurd and morally bankrupt.
We cannot afford further inaction on climate change.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism illness media irresponsibility plagues Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 13: Fever!
Charlie Pierce normally writes about politics for Esquire, but he noticed that Hantavirus was showing up in a place it wasn’t expected. You should read the whole piece:
Just to get your weekend off to a happy start, there seems to be an outbreak of the hantavirus in Yosemite, and folks aren’t entirely sure that it will stay there, or that it will be the only little biological horror to visit these shores.
Sent October 6:
The news that climate change has triggered outbreaks of Hantavirus in Yosemite National Park should surprise no one; it is common epidemiological knowledge that a major illness brings minor ones in its wake. The metastasizing greenhouse effect is such an illness, crippling the planetary “immune system” that has allowed both an effulgent biodiversity and a richly complex human civilization to flourish over the past few tens of thousands of years.
Look around carefully and you’ll find similar “sicknesses” at different levels of scale throughout Earth’s interdependent ecologies. Whether it’s acidified oceans, beetle-infested forests, tropical diseases in New England, droughts in Iowa, floods in Pakistan, or methane bubbling from the surface of the Arctic ocean, these manifestations of a grave underlying condition can no longer be denied or ignored.
The widespread rejection of scientific reality in American society is a symptom of another sort, for major illness is often accompanied by cognitive impairment and disorientation. Is not the climate-change denial pervading our media and politics just such a systemic delirium?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 3: Soothly!
David Horsey takes on the ignorati, in a brilliant piece of analysis for the L.A. Times, titled “Republicans have a medieval mindset about climate change.” Aye:
In the U.S., some states have begun to prepare for the inevitable. In California, plans are being made for the decades ahead when coastal highways are swamped, Yosemite waterfalls run dry, agricultural areas turn to dust, the San Francisco airport floods and the famous beaches near Los Angeles are reclaimed by the Pacific. But states cannot do it alone; the federal government needs to become fully engaged.
And that will not happen as long as the Republican Party stands in the way. Partly to do the bidding of the industrialists who are their benefactors and partly because they seem to have abandoned belief in science, Republicans have become climate change deniers. Even in a year when the West is aflame in wildfires and extreme weather batters the East, Republicans continue to insist there is nothing unusual going on – just a little blip in the weather.
If we lived in a rational society, any Republican who insisted climate change is not real would be as shamed and ostracized as the backwoods snake-handlers in the GOP congressional caucus who say a woman cannot be impregnated if she is raped. As a country, we should all be embarrassed. Americans, not the Dutch, should be leading the world in dealing with the imminent calamities being brought on by the rise in global temperatures. But we will not be able to take the lead until one of our two major political parties stops shilling for the big energy companies and abandons its medieval scorn of science.
This guy is goood. Sent September 26:
Over the past twelve years, the GOP has effectively abandoned any pretense of intellectual consistency. Policies developed by Republicans become anathema when promoted by Democrats; experts touted as the embodiments of truth and virtue are anathematized should their opinions change; skepticism is heresy, but “skepticism” is dogma. The erstwhile party of Lincoln, Garfield, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower has become an ideologically contorted conclave of true believers, impervious to reason, logic, data or compassion, incapable of admitting (let alone rectifying) error.
This medieval mindset, as David Horsey suggests, evokes feudalism’s cruelty and the Inquisition’s terror — and when it comes to the slow-motion catastrophe of global warming, it’s a guarantee of planetary disaster. When cultish anti-intellectualism stands in the way of any responsible and meaningful response to climate change, it exacerbates a crisis of unprecedented magnitude in human history. To paraphrase Voltaire, by believing absurdities, the GOP ensures atrocities.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama denialists idiots media irresponsibility Mitt Romney Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 25: She Said She Said…
The Anchorage Daily News runs a McClatchy story comparing the two presidential candidates’ approach to climate change:
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It was just six words, but when President Barack Obama gave a shout-out to global warming in his acceptance speech this month, he reintroduced an issue that had all but disappeared from the political debate.
“Climate change is not a hoax,” Obama said, an assertion that brought Democratic National Convention delegates to their feet, as he pledged to continue approaching energy policy in a way he said would “continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet.”
In a year when the political debate has lacked nearly any discussion of climate change, some environmentalists have struggled to summon enthusiasm for the Democratic president they helped elect in 2008 in part because of his views on global warming. So they rejoiced when the president rebutted a taunt tossed out by Republican candidate Mitt Romney the week before. Romney had quipped in his own acceptance speech in Tampa, Fla., that Obama “promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.”
“My promise is to help you and your family,” Romney added.
It was a rhetorical flourish, an attack line offered to make the point that Romney understands the kitchen table issues that, he says, the president doesn’t. But environmentalists heard it as heresy.
“Twenty years from now, history is going to judge the next generation on how they responded to the destabilization of our climate,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “With a couple of short sentences, Romney made clear what’s at stake in this election.”
It looks increasingly improbable that Mitt is going to get anywhere near the oval office. Good. Sent September 18:
It stretches credulity that a significant percentage of Americans continue to reject the reality of climate change. This is both an environmental and an educational crisis; too many of us spurn the evidence of both science and our senses in favor of the comforting untruths peddled by a fossil-fueled media.
Scientific discourse is couched in careful and meticulous language; responsible climatologists will shy away from definitive statements connecting, say, a particular extreme weather event with the burgeoning greenhouse effect. That’s because science deals with probabilities, correlations and complexities — not in polemics. But there’s a reason these specialists are exceptionally worried: the evidence for runaway atmospheric warming is unequivocal and unambiguous, and the likely effects of even moderate warming are devastating to agriculture, infrastructure, and the integrity of local and regional ecosystems.
By steadily ignoring the science of climate change, both our media and politicians have been profoundly irresponsible. A crisis of planetary magnitude demands a commensurate response — and there can be no moral justification for continued ignorance.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 17: Reality Bites
The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette reprints a WaPo editorial on Arctic ice melt, under the headline “Ice Melt Fuels Need For Climate Change Action.” True enough:
The Arctic is getting warmer faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. The latest evidence came in an announcement from the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center saying that, as of Aug. 26, the Arctic sea ice cover shrank to 1.58 million square miles this summer, the smallest area since satellite measurements began in 1979. The trend is expected to continue in the next few weeks.
Over the past three decades, the average extent of the Arctic sea ice has declined by 25 to 30 percent, and the rate of decline is accelerating. In the past, older, thicker ice would drift away and be replaced by seasonal ice. But now more of the older ice is melting in the Arctic, a phenomenon that had been relatively rare. Also, less seasonal ice is replacing it.
What’s alarming is that in recent years scientists have detected a feedback effect: The seasonal sea ice melts more quickly, and the decline results in more heat absorption by open
I pivoted from this to a direct “Republicans suck” letter. Sent September 10:
Democratic cowardice on the issue of climate change should remind us that there is nothing praiseworthy about inaction in an emergency. But when it comes to moral turpitude on a planetary scale, nothing beats the current Republican stance on energy and global warming. Yes, President Obama’s recent fleeting reference was probably too little, too late — but that’s a far cry from openly mocking the crisis, as Mitt Romney did in his corresponding speech in Tampa.
Today’s GOP is a group of anti-science radicals who would institute policies based not on verifiable reality, but on their own corporatist fever dreams. Science, however, doesn’t do wishful thinking, and the laws of physics and chemistry are immune to Mitt Romney’s celebrated charm (sic) or Paul Ryan’s equally celebrated candor (sic). Democrats are far from perfect, but in the fight against climate change, the Republican dreamworld is a nightmare in the making.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility Democratic timidity media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 13: What Was The Question Again?
The New York Times reports on the Sciencedebate questions to the presidential aspirants:
Sciencedebate.org, which counts among its members the National Academies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Scientific American magazine and dozens of other professional and academic scientific societies, was created with the goal of raising the profile of scientific and technical questions in the presidential campaign.
In his response to the group’s question on climate change, Mr. Obama called it “one of the biggest issues of this generation” but stopped short of calling for a cap and trade system or other broad national policy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, something that he had favored during the 2008 campaign. He said his administration had set stricter limits on emissions from vehicles, invested billions in clean energy research and proposed the first limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. He also said that the United States was leading international negotiations on climate change, although those talks have so far had little impact on greenhouse gas levels worldwide.
Mr. Romney, whose views – or at least, his language – on climate change have shifted somewhat over the years, gave one of his most forceful statements on the question yet. “I am not a scientist myself, but my best assessment of the data is that the world is getting warmer, that human activity contributes to that warming and that policymakers should therefore consider the risk of negative consequences,” he wrote.
I’m far from satisfied with Obama’s handling of this issue…but Romney is truly, truly terrifying. Sent September 6:
The president’s reluctance to make climate change an issue in his campaign is the result of three mutually reinforcing factors in American politics: Republican intransigence, Democratic timidity, and the pervasive influence of corporate dollars. In their obsessive rejection of environmental common sense, the GOP has turned the survival of our civilization into a partisan issue. In shying away from anything that might trigger Republican outrage, the Democrats have acknowledged the political toxicity of reality-based energy and environmental policies. And by injecting mountains of cash into the electoral and legislative processes, the world’s most powerful corporations have rigged the game in their favor.
And the erstwhile Massachusetts moderate? Romney cannot acknowledge scientific consensus without angering the tea-party voters who’ve adopted the rejection of facts and expertise as a political philosophy.
Both approaches are bad news for humanity. Politicians of both parties must start recognizing reality, not running from it.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Arctic ice melt denialists media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 10: Don’t Do That Anymore. Please. Do You Hear Me?
The Gainesville Sun’s John L. Ward is shrill:
The alarm expressed in the Sun editorial of August 26 over the record-breaking Arctic sea ice melt is deserved.
Even before this year’s stunning loss, a study published in the journal Nature last November, based on historical records, ice cores, tree rings, and lake sediments, concluded that “both the duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years” and that human activity “stands out as a very plausible cause.” The record melt not only confirms that the world is warming, it speeds the change. Since everyone, including the yet unborn, will be affected, we should all grasp the significance of the event and the response it requires.
The white surface of ice limits warming by reflecting more of the sun’s rays back into space; darker water absorbs the heat. A feedback loop is created so that the warmed water melts even more ice, and the increased area of dark water warms the water even more.
The warmer Arctic water also warms the air, which increases the melting of glaciers and other land ice. Scientists were startled this summer to find that nearly the entire ice cover of Greenland deposited the previous winter had melted, an event unprecedented since satellite observations began 33 years ago. This ice loss contributes to sea level rise worldwide.
Cue the parade of ignorance. Sent September 3:
Yes, Arctic ice is melting rapidly, but the climate-change denial machinery is already working hard to spin away the most recent set of horrifying numbers. We saw it at the RNC, and we see it daily in the irresponsible pontifications of media figures dutifully repeating the talking points they receive from their petroleum-industry sponsors.
Apparently expertise is no longer persuasive, or we’d consult teachers (not corporations) when it comes to education reform, economists (not corporations) when it comes to economic reform, and doctors (not corporations) when it comes to health-care reform. Since McCarthyite Republicans purged the State Department of China experts (thereby setting the stage for our Vietnam debacle), the GOP has rejected people who actually know something about a subject in favor of those who reinforce their ideological biases. Climate change is one of many such examples — albeit the one upon which our species’ collective future hinges.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots indigenous cultures Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 8: It’s After The End Of The World. Don’t You Know That Yet?
Steve Stajich offers a caustic assessment of the GOP’s resistance to reality, in the Santa Monica Mirror (CA):
At some point years ago, an exhausted demonstrator warning of global warming probably set down his or her protest sign and sighed heavily, adding, “Those who think we’re kidding won’t believe us until they’re knee-deep in flood waters at their own picnic.”
CUT TO: Tampa, Florida. Exterior GOP Convention. Sign on door reads, “Monday is canceled because of violent weather caused by altered climate. The Oil and Coal Lobby Cocktail Hour will be moved to higher ground.”
For those in the GOP, or anywhere, who are still in denial about climate change and global warming I guess the next question is, “I’m sorry but what, exactly, will it take?”
Romney-Ryan (or as I’m starting to think of it, the Kraken…) believes that there is a jackpot of jobs waiting for unemployed Americans in the “development” of domestic energy supplies. Drill, baby, drill. Coal interests tout a “clean coal” that, so far, does not actually exist. “Energy security” trumps any concerns we might have that the weather we’re creating with our use of fossil fuels could ultimately destroy us… for $5 a gallon.
Go ahead. Have your armageddon; let’s just get it over with. Sent September 1:
While the customs of many indigenous peoples are far from infallible (tribal views on medicine, causality and gender are often spectacularly wrong), there’s one area where we post-industrial humans could learn a crucial lesson. The whole world over, traditional cultures recognize the close interdependent relationship between their own survival and the planetary ecosystems surrounding them — an awareness placing a higher priority on societal than individual survival. Our media-saturated culture, by contrast, offers only the fleeting thrills of the moment.
The climate crisis is a profound indictment of a cultural inability to think in the long term. Our political system offers us only Hobson’s choice: whether we select complete denial (the Republican option) or platitudes coupled with inaction (the Democratic approach) the end result is the same. The tribal wisdom reminding us to consider the next seven generations in our decision-making? Now buried beneath a mountain of titillating trash.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 25: Come Back With Your Shield, Or On It.
The San Francisco Examiner notes that California governor Jerry Brown is taking steps on behalf of science-type stuff:
Gov. Jerry Brown isn’t shooting for the moon on this one.
On Monday, the governor used an annual summit in Lake Tahoe to launch a new website to rebut skeptics of climate change, commonly referred to as global warming. California has implemented many programs and laws to lead the fight against emissions that contribute to climate change, and now Brown is using his bully pulpit to counter critics who deny there is a problem.
The issue is especially pressing for California, where miles of coastline, including here in the Bay Area, could be hit by rising sea levels, larger waves and higher storm surges in the coming decades. The best science we have points to the inescapable conclusion that emissions from human activity are preventing heat from escaping the atmosphere, causing our planet to warm. Such higher temperatures have myriad consequences, including altered weather patterns — such as droughts, scorching heat waves and stronger storms — and the rapid melting of polar ice, which adds more water to the oceans.
A recent report from the National Research Council pointed out that a sea level change could affect oceans around the world. But one key highlight was that the sea level along the California coastline could rise by more than 3 feet by 2100. For San Francisco, a city bordered on three sides by water, this is a critical topic to address. Thousands of residents and businesses near the ocean or Bay could be affected, as well as key infrastructure such as San Francisco International Airport.
With an urgent need to focus on the monumental task of working to curb future emissions and to plan for those climate changes that it’s too late to avoid, it is frustrating that effort must still be expended to combat climate change deniers. Too much energy is being wasted on peripheral fights that delay the real work that needs to be done. Many might remember “ClimateGate,” the investigation into emails stolen from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in 2009 that allegedly showed scientists were exaggerating the perils of climate change. Years later, the core of the studies have held up, showing an overall warming of Earth. Fighting against such allegations merely diverts time from solving the real problems.
Good for him. Sent August 14:
Governor Brown’s recent climate-change website launch is a salutary example of a politician advocating on behalf of the truth. There will always be people proclaiming that human-caused global warming is illusory (or a liberal hoax), but this isn’t a valid argument against the scientific consensus. Some people believe the Earth is flat, that aliens abducted their aunts, that Elvis lives in Buenos Aires, that the Moon landing was staged — every absurd notion has its adherents. A responsible news media, however, has no obligation to report on such eccentric “true believers.”
Climate change denialists in politics develop energy and environmental policies rooted not in reality, but in a fantasy world where tax cuts for the rich create jobs, President Obama was born in Kenya, and human CO2 emissions have no impact on the planetary greenhouse effect. Responsible politics, like responsible media, should be based on facts and evidence, not ideology.
Warren Senders