Running Gamak: Warren Senders' Blog

Month 3, Day 22: More Fart Jokes, Please.

I’m listening to health-care debate, so I’ve only got a small fraction of a brain. Here’s the latest terrifying news: more on polar methane. I really wish I could remain ignorant of all this.

Dear Senators Kerry, Lieberman and Graham,

I write to urge you to include language in your proposed climate legislation that specifically addresses the problem of polar methane release. A recent study reported in Science News* indicates that microbes living under ice sheets in the polar regions may be churning out huge amounts of this powerful greenhouse gas. If this wasn’t bad enough, we already know that methane is already entering the atmosphere as the permafrost cap that’s been keeping it underground melts, due to increased atmospheric temperatures.

Climatologists’ projections of global warming haven’t yet taken this methane into account, which means that even the worst of the worst-case estimates are undoubtedly too optimistic. We need a world-wide Manhattan Project, bringing together the top scientific minds of the planet to address these multiple interlocked problems.

Rather than allowing that methane to enter the atmosphere and trigger incalculable damage to planetary ecosystems, we need to solve the problem of harvesting and collecting it for use as fuel. While burning methane also releases CO2 (which means that it is unsuitable as a long-term fuel source) this approach is vastly preferable to allowing it to trigger a greenhouse tipping point that would lead us much closer to the Venusian worst-case scenario outlined by Dr. James Hansen.

Any proposed climate legislation needs to acknowledge the magnitude of this problem, and outline steps to engaging the world’s scientific expertise and imagination on methods of ameliorating it.

There is no time to lose.

Yours Sincerely,

Warren Senders

* – (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/57353/title/Methane-making_microbes_thrive_under_the_ice)

Month 3, Day 8: When the Methane Hits The Fan…

Stickin’ with the North Pole farts for the time being. I’m on my way out to a gig, so my brain is pretty close to empty. When I’m tired and distracted I write workmanlike letters that address the issues without rhetorical flourishes. This is one of them.

Dear Representatives Waxman and Markey,

I write to urge you to initiate action on the extremely troubling news of Arctic methane release. According to a recently-published article in the journal Science, billions of tons of methane under the sub-sea permafrost in the Arctic ocean is now entering the atmosphere. This is certain to accelerate the greenhouse effect even further, since methane is 25 times as powerful as carbon dioxide in trapping heat,

Climatologists’ prediction models haven’t yet been revised to account for the new data, but it’s pretty clear (unless you’re a FOX News commentator, a Republican, or George Will) that our current “worst-case” scenarios are hopelessly optimistic.

While this news is sure to trigger a round of fart jokes from Sean Hannity and his colleagues, it is a sad fact that while some of us strive to ensure humanity a safe and sustainable future, our corporate sector is heavily invested in denying the nature of the threat. With the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United opening up the floodgates to corporate influence in elections, we can look forward to thinly disguised climate denialism saturating our airwaves in the months leading up to November’s election.

Will the American public fall for it? Will our nation’s citizens believe it when they’re told that “Carbon Dioxide is life,” or “Methane is good for you?” Given the precipitous decline in scientific literacy in our country over the past several decades, I think it’s all too likely that this latest news won’t be treated with the respect it deserves.

I urge the two of you to initiate action in the House of Representatives. A sub-committee needs to study the problem and make recommendations for legislative action. America has to lead the world in addressing these crises.

There is no time to waste; no time to lose.

Yours sincerely,

Warren Senders

Month 3, Day 6: POTUS Every Saturday

Yesterday’s letter was a disjointed ramble. I still want to find some Rapture-seeking Dominionists to smite in print, so if you’ve got some suggestions I will welcome them.

In the meantime, I took that letter, stripped out all the crazy, and recast it as a missive to our sober, thoughtful and reasonable CiC.

Dear President Obama,

I write as a concerned citizen and as a scientifically literate layperson to urge you to initiate international action on a previously under-reported and very disturbing component of the global climate crisis. According to a just-published article in the journal Science (and reported in the London Times) the sub-sea permafrost that has kept gigatonnes of CH4 (methane) locked in for millennia is now melting. Because methane is 25 times as powerful as carbon dioxide in trapping heat, this will accelerate the greenhouse effect even further.

The effects of this huge infusion of a potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere have not yet been factored into climatologists’ prediction models. In other words, our current “worst-case” scenarios are hopelessly optimistic.

The news of Arctic methane release is sure to trigger a round of fart jokes from Sean Hannity and his colleagues at Fox News. It is a sad fact that while some of us strive to ensure a safe and sustainable future for all humanity, a significant sector of the media and our corporate sector is heavily invested in denying the nature of the threat, and in persuading our political culture not to take it seriously.

Please, Mr. President: do not let them decide our future. There are millions of people in this country and around the world who are aware of our ongoing climaticide, and who take it very seriously indeed.

We would like to see an international effort to deal with the methane release (and other elements of the climate crisis) before it is too late. We would like to see all the nations of the world form a unified response to this common threat, combining our resources, skills and innovations to keep our planet safe for our children and their children and their children’s children after them. We would like to see the United States of America leading this effort, earning the gratitude of generations to come.

But we can no longer allow this process to be stalled by our dysfunctional Senate and our corrupt media. I urge you to continue to educate the public about the dangers we face: hold a “Climate Summit” where denialists like Senator Inhofe are finally shown to be the empty vessels they are — and where Americans can learn for themselves about a potentially devastating crisis. If we don’t do this, we are all going to learn the hard way, and it’s not going to be pretty.

There is no time to lose.

Thank you for your attention.

Yours Sincerely,

Warren Senders

Month 3, Day 5: Armageddon Out Of Here

I read this article about arctic methane releases in the Times of London this evening. I sat down to write in a very disturbed state, and this is what emerged. At the moment I can’t think who I should send it to…so I’ll send it to the Boston Phoenix for the moment. They probably won’t publish it, so I’ll eventually send it elsewhere. If anyone has a suggestion, I’d welcome it.

Have you written your politicians today? Your media?

The news of ever-increasing methane releases from beneath the Arctic seabed is great news for those wishing an end to human civilization. Dominionists eagerly awaiting the End Times are no doubt delighted to learn that (according to a just-published article in the journal Science, and reported in the London Times) the sub-sea permafrost that has kept gigatonnes of CH4 locked in for millennia is now melting. Because methane is 25 times as powerful as carbon dioxide in trapping heat, this will accelerate the greenhouse effect even further.

Even better news for these folks is that all this methane has not yet been factored into the prediction models of climate scientists. All those silly “worst-case” scenarios presented by Al Gore and the IPCC? Hopelessly optimistic.

As I said, good news for those awaiting Ragnarok or the Armageddon.

Some of us, however, would rather have a good life for our descendants than a climatic Apocalypse, no matter how spectacular.

We would like to see an international effort to deal with the methane release (and other elements of the climate crisis) before it is too late. We would like to see all the nations of the world form a unified response to this common threat, combining our resources, skills and innovations to keep our planet safe for our children and their children and their children’s children after them. We would like to see the United States of America leading this effort, earning the gratitude of generations to come.

With the climate crisis exacerbated by an ignorance crisis, humanity is facing a threat of unimaginable size and severity. Now is not the time to give in to the political posturing of Rapturists eager to meet their Maker in a final conflagration.

Warren Senders

Month 2, Day 25: They Live In A Pimple!

Just finished reading this, both depressing and frustrating. Casting about desperately for something to write and someone to write it to, I decided to take my pissy mood out on our newly elected Senator. It will be interesting to see his response. I bet I don’t get one.

I am going to send Kerry a copy of this, needless to say.

Dear Senator Brown,

I know that the Republican Party’s official position is that there is no such thing as global warming, and that this has been irrefutably proven by the recent snowstorms in Washington, DC. Because I am a Massachusetts resident, you’re my senator, and I need to give you some information; perhaps you may be able to use it someday.

The total surface area of Earth is almost 19,700,000 square miles. The total surface area of Washington DC is about 69 square miles. America’s capitol is 1/285,507th of the world’s surface. Not very much, is it? Let’s put it another way. An adult human being has about 20 square feet of skin, or about 1,858,000 square millimeters. 1/285,507th of a human body is about 6.5 square millimeters; a piece of skin slightly more than 2.5 millimeters to a side — the size of a zit. A small zit, at that.

Let’s look at the world outside Washington, DC. All over the globe, temperatures are rising. The worldwide average temperature has been steadily increasing for many years; perhaps you noticed that in Vancouver the winter Olympics had to import snow?  You may not have noticed that glaciers everywhere in the world are receding faster than climatologists have predicted; likewise, you may not have known that huge reserves of frozen methane in the Siberian arctic are now entering the atmosphere as the long-frozen permafrost “cap” begins to melt. Silly me. Of course you haven’t noticed these things: they’re not in Washington, DC!

While the laws of physics don’t care about the political posturing of U.S. Senators, they most definitely govern the behavior of greenhouse gases like CO2 (carbon dioxide) and CH4 (methane). And there is no disputing the fact that methane is even more effective at retaining the Sun’s heat in the atmosphere than CO2, the main focus of international climate concern for the last two decades. Although it decays more quickly, CH4 has a global warming potential more than 60 times as powerful as CO2.

To put it bluntly: if we don’t act decisively and aggressively to regulate CO2 emissions; if we don’t invest significant amounts of money in research on ways to capture methane before it enters the atmosphere; if we don’t recognize this as the gravest threat humanity has ever faced — our children and their children and their children in turn will live in an unimaginably different world. And they will curse us for our inaction.

Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is real, and that it’s largely caused by human activity. Three percent aren’t completely sure yet. Let me ask you, Senator: if you went to a hundred oncologists, and ninety-seven of them said you had cancer…would you take their diagnoses seriously?

As a Massachusetts resident, I expect you to act responsibly on the issue of climate change; I urge you to study the facts (which does not mean taking Sean Hannity’s word for it) and recognize the gravity of this threat. James Inhofe may make good television, but he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Yours Sincerely,

Warren Senders

cc: Sen. John Kerry

Day 15: Chastising the Washington Post

Daughter announced this morning that she wanted to stay home, and “make up a school at home.” I agreed, with the caveat that she would have to spend a bunch of time alone, as I had work to do and some students later in the morning. In a minute or so I’m going to make some calls for the Coakley campaign. Today’s letter is a remix of several earlier items; I’m now at the point where I have enough material to dissect and reassemble my output in multiple combinations. It’s less work, or it would be if the prose wasn’t on such a harrowing topic.

Each day brings new news about the magnitude of the looming climate crisis; most recently we learn that the Pine Island Glacier, largest of the glaciers making up the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, has passed a “tipping point” and is now inexorably melting. Simultaneously levels of atmospheric methane over the Siberian Shelf in the Arctic Ocean now range between a hundred and a thousand times normal, indicating that gigatonnes of this powerful greenhouse gas which have been frozen under the tundra for tens of thousands of years are now starting to enter the atmosphere. The most significant thing about the predictions of climatologists is that they are without exception too conservative; tipping points projected for the end of this century now loom at the end of this decade.

The best-case scenarios for runaway global warming lead to terrifying dystopias, with millions of displaced climate refugees, worldwide food and water shortages, resource wars and devastatingly unpredictable weather patterns. The worst-case scenarios could lead to global temperatures soaring to levels inhospitable to any life at all. Venus, in short. And the scientific evidence (again, based on conservative projections) suggests that the probability of bad-to-worst-case outcomes is statistically significant. This country’s rush to war in 2002 was based on evidence far less robust than that for human causes of global climate change: if the evidence of Iraqi WMD’s was as strong as that for anthropogenic global warming, our troops would have found stacks of nuclear weapons freely sold in the bazaars of Baghdad.

And where is the Washington Post in all this? Firmly ignoring science and continuing to publish the glib (albeit erudite) misinformation propagated by George Will. The Post should correct this shortsighted policy immediately; there has never been a time in human history when enabling ignorance could have such devastating consequences.

Warren Senders