environment: oceanic acidification
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 9: Sea Sea Rider, See What You Done Done…
I didn’t want to write about, well, anything. But I found an article in TIME on a climate monitoring project run by the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, and used it as the hook for a pretty standard screed.
Compared to the crisis in Earth’s atmosphere, the increased acidity of our oceans have received scant attention, which makes Bryan Walsh’s article on the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences very welcome. Radically altering the nature of our seas is likely to lead to disastrous consequences for all life everywhere. If the oceanic food chain collapses due to acidification, the lives of billions of people will be jeopardized, along with those of the other creatures with whom we share the Earth. Giant corporations and the climate-change denialists they fund are symptomatic of a short-sighted and ignorant fixation on immediate profits; when a good quarterly report outweighs the long-term health of the planet, humanity becomes an endangered species…which will surely be bad for business. America is the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases; we must take responsibility for the natural systems we are destroying.
Warren Senders
environment: climate change pakistan USA Today
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 8: McNews.
When I did a search on “Pakistan” on the USA Today site, the top three listings all concerned Angelina Jolie. Maybe I should write a letter to her….
They ran an AP story on a farmer who’d gotten badly whacked by the flood, so I hung this letter on that.
Pakistan’s devastated agricultural infrastructure, like the droughts that have destroyed Russia’s wheat fields, is a tragic consequence of global climate change. Since the mid-1980s, climate scientists have predicted that higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will increase the likelihood of catastrophic weather events. Unfortunately, corporate-funded denialists continue to receive equal coverage in our news media, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of climatologists agree on global warming’s human cause. Although stories like Abid Hussein’s put a human face on the disaster in Pakistan, they fail to point out the role of climate change in making that disaster possible. What will it take for Americans to wake up to our responsibilities as the world’s foremost per capita emitter of carbon dioxide? Twenty million people’s lives have been turned upside down in Pakistan — and that’s just a preview of what’s in store for the world in the coming years.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: climate change New York Times pakistan
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 7: By “God,” Do You Mean “The Industrialized West?”
The New York Times had a front page story on Pakistan and its misery. It’s taken them a while.
HATA SIAL, Pakistan — When the governor of Punjab Province arrived recently in this small town with truckloads of relief goods for flood victims, his visit was as much a political mission as a humanitarian one. His message to the hundred or so displaced people gathered under an awning was that the government was there for them. Long after floodwaters subside, Pakistanis will face a lack of housing, food shortages and price spikes, among other hardships.
“The people say this was an act of God,” the governor, Salman Taseer, said in an interview after reassuring the crowd. “But what comes now, they say, is the act of man. If we don’t deliver, they will not forgive us.”
The “act of God/act of man” construction gave me a nice hook for the letter.
To the suffering Pakistanis, the floods that have destroyed their lives may seem an “Act of God,” and their government’s paralysis an “act of man.” But the grim reality is that the greenhouse effect brought about by the West’s profligate consumption of fossil fuels drastically increases the probability of catastrophic weather events. Thus, the floods are as much an act of man as the dysfunctionality of the Pakistani government. And just as Zardari’s administration is stymied and near-helpless in the face of this disaster, America’s national politics is mired in a quicksand of anti-science rhetoric that has rendered it unable to address humanity’s most pressing problem, or even to acknowledge that the problem exists. Global climate chaos is going to give us many Pakistans, each with an overwhelming share of human misery. Will we admit our own responsibilities, or will each new climate disaster still be an “Act of God?”
Warren Senders
environment: Boston Globe idiots
by Warren
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The Boston Globe Publishes Me Again…
…and the comments on my letter (August 28, IIRC) are an awesome repository of stooooooopid.
Third time this year in the Globe. Can the NYT be far behind?
environment Politics: Koch Brothers Proposition 23 scoundrels
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 6: Foulness, Foulness, Foulness.
It’s probably too late for this letter to be published, but I wanted to lend my voice to what I hope is a chorus of outrage triggered by Frank Rich’s description of the unmitigated vileness perpetrated by the Koch Brothers.
Frank Rich’s takedown of the Koch brothers does not go far enough. In their disregard for the continued health of our democracy, these arrogant billionaires reveal themselves as fundamentally anti-American. Even worse is their readiness to disseminate misinformation which is overwhelmingly likely, not just to mislead the the American populace, but to endanger the planet. Their recent donation of a million dollars to the proponents of the anti-environment Proposition 23 in California is an example of their long history of close engagement with the denial of the human contribution to catastrophic climate change. At this time in history, our continued national inability to grasp the genuine science of global warming has profound moral implications. The continued survival of our species is placed at risk by the Kochs’ continued readiness to fund an ideology that rejects robust scientific evidence in favor of fiscally expedient ignorance.
Warren Senders
environment: climate change hurricane Earl Medford Transcript
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 5: Keeping It Local
We appear to have dodged a bullet here on the East Coast. I sent this to my local paper, the Medford Transcript. This one got written early; I’m on my way to a family reunion and don’t expect to be back till late in the day tomorrow.
While it looks as though the Massachusetts coastline has been spared the worst effects of Hurricane Earl, the fact is that over the coming decades, we are going to see more hurricanes, more often. The climatic effects of even a one-degree rise in global atmospheric temperature include dramatic increases in extreme weather, like the catastrophic floods that have rendered Pakistan helpless, and disrupted the lives of more people than live in New England. Of course, it is impossible to say that a specific weather event is directly caused by the greenhouse effect; the laws of physics and probability don’t work that way. But climatologists have predicted for decades that increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases would lead to exactly the kinds of weather we’re seeing all over the globe: heat waves, torrential flooding, anomalous precipitation, droughts, and overall volatility and unpredictability. “Global warming” is an inadequate term; we should call it by its true name: “climate chaos.” And we — all of us — need to wake up to the need for rapid and robust action to mitigate its effects.
Warren Senders
environment: economics United Nations
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 4: Fair is Fair.
The San Francisco Chronicle ran a short AP story on the UN Climate Commission’s position regarding financial aid to poorer countries.
The United Nations has the correct position on additional funding to poorer nations to aid them in coping with climate change. The facts are inescapable: the poorer the country, the lower their per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Compared with the CO2 released into the atmosphere by the United States (five times more than our share of world population), Pakistan’s is little more than a rounding error. While climate change’s effects will be felt everywhere in the world, it is the industrialized West which is overwhelmingly responsible for the increasing atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.
We tell our children to accept responsibility for damage they cause. We grownups must do the same, and face the fact that our fossil-fueled conveniences are destroying the world in which we live — and that it is unfair to make the poorest of the world’s people pay for the destruction the wealthiest have brought them.
environment: 350 Barack Obama Bill McKibben
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 3: Striking While The Irony Is Hot
Since Bill McKibben is going to ask the President to put those damn solar panels up again, I figured I’d give him a little reinforcement.
Dear President Obama,
It’s been thirty years since Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as President and set about undoing all the things that Jimmy Carter set in motion.
Looking back over the past three decades it is astonishing how much President Carter got right, and how much President Reagan got wrong. If we had taken energy independence seriously and devoted the necessary budgetary support to wind and solar energy, America would have stopped giving money to OPEC. Our share of worldwide carbon emissions would have dropped significantly — perhaps keeping the planetary atmosphere below the crucial 350 parts-per-million level (in which case there is increasing evidence to suggest that many of today’s climate catastrophes might never have happened).
America would be a world leader in green technology, rather than lagging behind Europe and China.
We would not have needed all those expensive wars to protect our oil supplies.
The Gulf of Mexico might not be a massive dead zone.
It appears that you’re reluctant to do anything that would excite controversy (although it should be obvious to you by now that the Republicans will gin up controversy over anything), a pusillanimity I am depressed to see in the President I donated, volunteered and voted for. But I digress. The time is now for a full bank of solar panels to be installed on the roof of the White House. Perhaps you should be out there with a hammer yourself on October 10, as part of 350.org’s International Work Party.
It would be a gracious gesture to invite President Carter to the White House roof to pound in a few nails. With the clarity of hindsight, it appears that the only thing he did wrong was to be right.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment: IPCC Philadelphia Inquirer Rajendra Pachauri
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 2: It’s Too Darn Hot.
The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an AP story about the IPCC, with a headline that was not supported by anything in the story.
Corporate-funded denialism went into full-bore attack mode when the IPCC reports were first released. Minor discrepancies were blown up into international scientific scandals, which dissipated under further investigation. Rajendra Pachauri was charged with conflicts of interest — and has been completely exonerated. Evidence for scientific misconduct is extraordinarily flimsy — while evidence confirming human causes of global warming is extraordinarily robust. Ninety-seven percent of climatologists agree on the factuality of anthropogenic climate change— an impressive number (what would you do if ninety-seven out of a hundred oncologists told you a lump was malignant?). Meanwhile, the physical effects of climate chaos are harder and harder to ignore. When we see Pakistan’s floods, Russia’s droughts, a heat wave hammering the country, anomalous rain, snow and storms, we’re getting a picture of what’s in store for us in the years to come. We should be heeding the IPCC’s findings, not quibbling about minutiae.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Charlie Baker Deval Patrick Massachusetts Tim Cahill
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 1: These People CANNOT be Allowed to Have Political Power!
The Boston Globe notes the ignorance and folly of Charlie Baker and Tim Cahill, the two conservative candidates for Governor.
In opposing the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, Charlie Baker and Tim Cahill demonstrate once again the anti-science stance of the Republican party on state and national levels. The scientific consensus on human causes of climate change is overwhelming (over ninety-seven percent of climatologists are firmly in agreement). Let’s put it this way: if the evidence for Iraqi WMD’s was as strong as the evidence for anthropogenic global warming, we could’ve bought loose nukes in the bazaars of Baghdad. Expanding and improving the RGGI will strengthen the Commonwealth’s leadership position on environmental issues. Baker and Cahill’s approach, by contrast, would make a mockery of Massachusetts. Home to M.I.T., Harvard and countless other major universities and research centers, our state cannot afford a governor whose readiness to learn anything about the science of climate change never moves beyond standard Republican talking points.
Warren Senders