environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots James Hansen James Inhofe media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 22: Admitting Error Would Cause Me To Lose Face. Therefore Global Warming Is A Hoax.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review offers a forum to arch-denialist Marc Morano:
Marc Morano operates Climatedepot.com, an Internet clearinghouse for information on climate, environmental and energy news. Morano, a former aide to U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., spoke to the Trib on the latest developments in the climate-change debate.
Q: It’s the hottest year on record so far in the Northeast. Must be global warming, right?
A: Globally, it’s not the hottest. In fact, here is the problem: The heat they are touting as proof of man-made global warming is occurring in the continental United States, which is less than 2 percent of the Earth’s surface. So far in 2012, (global) temperatures have been slightly below the average for the last 15 years. So if the Earth isn’t actually in record warmth globally, why are we looking at 2 percent (of its surface) and then trying to draw extrapolations?
Q: Why are we?
A: It’s politics, pure and simple. When James Hansen (director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies) announces this week, as he has done in previous years, that we’re having (record heat), it sounds so impressive and scary. It sounds like proof of their theory, except for one problem: The (record) temperatures are within hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit difference between (ordinary) years and the years they are claiming are the hottest years.
Q: So you consider such pronouncements scare tactics?
A: Yes, these are hard-core ideological activists at work posing as neutral scientists. It’s not that Hansen is lying; it’s that he’s excluding any information he doesn’t find convenient. Satellite temperature data for July (indicated the month was the) coolest globally since 2008. So not only was it not impressively warm globally, it was actually somewhat cooler. We are not looking at unprecedented warmth. They (global-warming activists) are cherry-picking.
Assholes. Sent August 11:
Marc Morano, the alter ego of Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, offers a textbook example of projection in his interview with Eric Heyl. Offering no foundation for his accusation that climatologists are “playing politics” in their research, Mr. Morano’s overheated rhetoric implies that such gamesmanship is to be expected from anyone who participates in a discussion of climate change. In other words, it’s not scientists, but Mr. Morano and Senator Inhofe who “play politics” with science.
In March, Senator Inhofe told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow that “I was actually on your side of this issue…I thought it must be true until I found out what it cost.” The Senator’s reason for changing his mind was fiscal, not factual. By analogy, rejecting your biopsy results because chemotherapy is too expensive may be an understandable first reaction to a poor prognosis, but beating the disease necessarily begins with acknowledging the truth.
Climatologists have delivered their diagnosis. Now it’s time for us to face the facts. Morano, Inhofe and their compatriots in climate-change denial are exemplars of irresponsibility, in the face of a crisis of historic proportions.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots James Hansen media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 21: He’s Just Not A Very Serious Person.
James Hansen again, this time reprinted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.
There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.
The future is now. And it is hot.
So right…he’s wrong. What? Sent August 10:
Has anyone noticed that our politicians and media figures are determined to avoid acknowledging anyone who had it right from the get-go? Those who protested the disastrous and costly Iraq invasion are ignored in all subsequent formulation of foreign affairs. Those who knew from the beginning that Bush’s tax cuts were a fiscal disaster are marginalized in any discussion of economic issues. And, most importantly for all of us, the scientists and environmentalists who’ve been warning us for years about climate change are systematically excluded from any influence on environmental and energy policy.
After being silenced by the Bush administration, NASA climatologist Dr. James Hansen is speaking out with increasing fervor and eloquence, hoping against hope that we can address the looming climate crisis before time runs out. Since Dr. Hansen recognized and understood the danger early on, it seems all too likely he’ll be ignored again. Why?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists greenhouse effect idiots James Hansen media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 17: Quiet Out There! Do You Have Any Idea What Time It Is?
James Hansen again, this time reprinted in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988, I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.
But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.
My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.
In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.
This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.
The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.
These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.
Another Paul Revere letter. Sent August 6:
As far back as the Kennedy administration, scientists have warned that consequences of our CO2 emissions had the potential to transform Earth in potentially devastating ways — and politicians chose to leave the problem for someone else to solve. By the 1980s, climate science had grown more sophisticated, and experts predicted that genuine disaster loomed unless action was taken to limit our greenhouse emissions. Instead, the can was kicked again and again; the public was kept in the dark. During the Bush administration, NASA climatologist James Hansen’s report on the situation was blocked by politically-motivated censorship — and increasingly unhinged conservative media figures whipped up anti-science zealotry among their audiences. Climate scientists like Hansen, Michael Mann and many others routinely receive hate mail and death threats for reporting their findings.
Over two centuries ago, the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord responded unhesitatingly to a midnight warning, and our nation remains grateful. Now, a modern-day Paul Revere is trying to wake us up. Where would America be if the patriots of 1775 had hurled abuse and calumnies at that midnight rider before they rolled over and went back to sleep? And where will we be two centuries from now if we ignore James Hansen’s clear and urgent warnings?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 23: I Wonder Why THAT Keeps Happening?
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette runs an editorial column ruing the lackadaisical attitude of the common people:
This should be the summer of our discontent, with heat waves, drought and other troublesome weather affecting large parts of the nation. Instead, Americans are hot but apparently not bothered about what it all might mean.
According to a new Washington Post-Stanford University poll, just 18 percent of Americans interviewed named climate change as the world’s top environmental problem. In 2007, when Al Gore’s warning documentary and a United Nations report were making headlines, 33 percent called climate change the top issue.
Like so much on this topic, the findings of the poll are contradictory. It’s not as if people don’t care about the environment; the top concern, as expressed by 27 percent of those surveyed, was polluted water and air — certainly real challenges.
And those polled don’t dismiss climate change or even mankind’s hand in it; in fact, nearly three-quarters believe that the Earth is warming and approximately the same number think temperatures will continue to rise if nothing is done. Many want government and businesses to do more.
The poll and follow-up interviews suggest that people are looking to Washington, D.C., for leadership and action, although, after seeing little or none, they are not consumed by a sense of urgency.
Somebody better do something. I wonder who? Sent July 12:
The disconnect between the facts of global climate change and American public concern about the issue can be laid at the feet of our country’s politicians, who are too focused on short-term electoral exigencies to address long-term problems — and at the feet of our irresponsible media establishment, which has spent decades fostering the notion that simply reporting two sides of every argument constitutes the whole of journalism.
In a common-sense world, the looming climate crisis would be story number one, day after day. But we live in twenty-first century America, where there is no crisis bigger than the latest celebrity scandal du jour. Now there is no time left for equivocation. If we are to preserve our agriculture, our infrastructure, and ultimately our civilization, our leaders must accept the responsibility of leadership — and our media must accept the responsibility to inform the public about the gravest threat our species has faced in recorded history.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots Republican obstructionism rising ocean levels rising sea levels
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 6: Keep Your Eyes Wide
The Boston Globe:
As temperatures are projected to climb, polar ice to melt, and oceans to swell over the coming decades, Boston is likely to bear a disproportionate impact of rising sea levels, government scientists report in a new study.
The seas along the East Coast from North Carolina to New England are rising three to four times faster than the global average, and coastal cities, utilities, beaches, and wetlands are increasingly vulnerable to flooding, especially from storm surges, according to the US Geological Survey study published Sunday.
“Cities in the hot spot, like Norfolk, New York, and Boston, already experience damaging floods during relatively low-intensity storms,” said Asbury Sallenger, a Geological Survey oceanographer and lead author of the study in the journal Nature Climate Change. “Accelerated sea-level rise,” he said, will add to “the height that storm surges and breaking waves reach on the coast.”
Figured the times were ripe for a little bit of old Prophet Bob. Sent June 25:
The times they are indeed a’changin’. Climate-change denialists must be finding it difficult to cling to their bizarre conspiracy theories in the face of the latest reports from the U.S. Geological Survey, predicting that rising ocean levels will radically alter the East coast of the United States over the next few decades, a forecast entirely congruent with other scientific analyses of the effects from a melting Arctic ice cap.
The insurance industry’s changing its coverage model to account for damages caused by climate change; the American military’s developing new strategic protocols for a post-greenhouse-effect world; US intelligence agencies are trying to anticipate the geopolitical impact of global warming. These bastions of liberalism are all following Bob Dylan’s advice to “…admit that the waters around you have grown, and accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone.”
When will our Senators and Congressmen “please heed the call”?
Warren Senders
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
environment Politics: agriculture conservation infrastructure Republican obstructionism Water
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 6: Here’s Your Allowance For The Next Decade, Sweetheart. It’s All In Pennies.
The New York Times reports on a scary new study:
New research suggests that global warming is causing the cycle of evaporation and rainfall over the oceans to intensify more than scientists had expected, an ominous finding that may indicate a higher potential for extreme weather in coming decades.
By measuring changes in salinity on the ocean’s surface, the researchers inferred that the water cycle had accelerated by about 4 percent over the last half century. That does not sound particularly large, but it is twice the figure generated from computerized analyses of the climate.
If the estimate holds up, it implies that the water cycle could quicken by as much as 20 percent later in this century as the planet warms, potentially leading to more droughts and floods.
That’s pretty fucking alarming. Sent April 27:
A projected twenty percent acceleration in Earth’s water cycle holds the potential for catastrophic ripple effects throughout our lives and those of our posterity. Without a steady supply of water throughout the growing season, agriculture on civilization-feeding scales will become exponentially more difficult. While its impacts on farming will be profound, the drought-or-deluge model predicted by Paul Durack and his colleagues can be expected to transform beyond recognition many of the local and regional ecosystems our forbears took for granted.
To avoid the worst-case scenarios implicit in these findings, we must begin planning for a future in which water supplies will be irregular and extreme. We’ll need expanded and reinforced storage and conservation, water-stingy techniques of manufacturing, a completely re-imagined waste-processing system, and the infrastructure required by a host of other functions. Most difficult of all, we need to make our paralyzed political system respond constructively to an imminent crisis.
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: corporate irresponsibility extreme weather Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 27: While You’re Up, Would You Get Me A Beer?
An article in the NYT is picked up by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; apparently some people are actually putting the pieces together. Huh. Who’da thunk it?
Scientists may hesitate to link some of the weather extremes of recent years to global warming — but the public, it seems, is already there.
A poll due for release on Wednesday shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.
The survey, the most detailed to date on the public response to weather extremes, comes atop other polling showing a recent uptick in concern about climate change. Read together, the polls suggest that direct experience of erratic weather may be convincing some people that the problem is no longer just a vague and distant threat.
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along, move along. Sent April 18:
While a majority of Americans are finally accepting the idea that global climate change is real, there’s no corresponding recognition of environmental reality in the air-conditioned halls of Congress. Perhaps our representatives should meet in one of the hundreds of locations across the country that have experienced record-breaking weather extremes this year. Perhaps they should spend less time listening to the corporate lobbyists and conservative “think-tanks” who are dictating fossil-fuel-friendly legislation, and pay more attention to the expertise of climate scientists who have been predicting exactly these sorts of weather anomalies as a consequence of the runaway greenhouse effect.
Yes, Americans are finally connecting the dots between climate change and extreme weather — but it is alarming, astonishing, and ultimately depressing that on this issue, our politicians will be the last to come to their senses. Our representatives aren’t just unwilling to lead — they aren’t even willing to follow.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 27: More Like This, Please
The Kansas City Star offers a platform to some scientists who have a few words about James Inhofe:
We are scientists who agree with critics such as Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., that there is a climate change “hoax” being perpetrated on the American people.
We just don’t agree on what the hoax is and who is being fooled.
Sen. Inhofe and his associates want us to believe that the science of climate change is the contrived “hoax.” Their claims cannot withstand even the most cursory scrutiny. Does this “hoax” date back to 1896, when Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius presented his findings that human activities releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere could change Earth’s climate? Did it start when 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? Did an evil cabal of “warmists” trick a science advisory panel into warning President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 of the dangers of adding greenhouses gases to the atmosphere?
In 2009, the National Academies of Science of the world’s major industrialized nations (including China, India and Brazil) issued an unprecedented joint statement on the reality of climate change and the need for immediate action. Do those who claim climate change is a hoax expect us to believe this was a put on by an international bunch of con men with doctoral degrees? The U.S. Evangelical Environmental Network tells us that global warming is one of the major challenges of our time, and Pope Benedict XVI has called for coordinated global action to address dangers of climate change – have they too joined the conspiracy?
Of course not.
Always fun to mock one of the biggest idiots in American politics, which is really saying a lot, these days. Sent March 21:
Senator Inhofe recently admitted on national television that he once accepted the scientific consensus on global warming — until he learned how much it would cost to deal with it, at which point he became the go-to guy for climate denial. The idea that ignoring a costly problem will make it disappear is bizarre, to say the least, but entirely typical of much twenty-first-century American politics. The Oklahoma senator has certainly made it pay; he’s handsomely funded by extractive industries apprehensive over the prospect of shrinking profit margins in a sustainable-energy economy.
Mr. Inhofe’s recipe for environmental and energy politics? Equal parts of big oil’s obscene greed and the apocalyptic imaginings of dominionist Christian sects, liberally flavored with hippie-punching and wacky conspiracy theories.
Although addressing climate change now will save trillions of dollars in the future, the Senator’s position has hardened. Don’t burden him with facts; his mind’s made up.
Warren Senders