Education environment: NASA scientific literacy
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 23: Ignorance Vs. Attendance
The Pasadena Star-News has a pretty good article on the recent study from NASA that subtracts most of the non-human drivers of climate change from the equation and finds (surprise!) that we clever apes are in fact responsible.
The crucial paragraphs are buried, of course:
Michael Ghil, a distinguished professor of climate dynamics at UCLA familiar with the research calls the graph “pretty striking.”
But while he says the study “adds another brick in the edifice of the scientific evidence,” he warns, “it’s not going to convince people who don’t want to be convinced.”
“The political controversy about action to be taken is fairly independent of accumulated scientific evidence. The evidence for anthropogenic effects is there,” he said.
Sent March 14, in between watching the disaster in Japan and feeding my daughter and her friend some snacks.
The findings of the JPL study make it clearer that human activity, in particular our relentless transferal of carbon into the atmosphere, is the prime driver of global warming. To anyone who’s followed climate science over the past several decades, this conclusion is hardly surprising — but a disturbing proportion of Americans no longer trust or understand science and scientific method. Even if we ignore the climate crisis, a national loss of scientific literacy is a tragic choking of our hopes for a prosperous future. But when the consequences of runaway climate change are factored into the picture, it’s an intellectual as well as an environmental catastrophe. When ideology supersedes fact, it’s a recipe for disaster. Our nation’s citizens and policymakers cannot afford ignorance’s long-term consequences. Those who derive financial reward or political capital from distorting scientific facts act against the best interests of our nation and our species.
Warren Senders
environment: community denialism survivalism
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 22: Merastan Hamara Jai Jai Jai
The Portland (ME) Sunday Herald reprints an op-ed that first showed up in the Washington Post a little while back. Environmentalist Mike Tidwell talks about his decision to invest more heavily in survivalist accoutrements:
WASHINGTON – Ten years ago, I put solar panels on my roof and began eating locally grown food. I bought an energy-efficient refrigerator that uses the power equivalent of a single light bulb. I started heating my home with a stove that burns organically fertilized corn kernels. I even restored a gas-free lawn mower for manual yardwork.
As a longtime environmental activist, I was deeply alarmed by new studies on global warming, so I went all-out. I did my part.
Now I’m changing my life again. There’s a new set of dead bolt locks on all my doors. There’s a new Honda GX390 portable power generator in my garage, ready to provide backup electricity. And last week I bought a starter kit to raise tomatoes and lettuce behind barred basement windows.
Reading it again, I was struck by a significant omission that speaks volumes as to how deeply the Republican one-for-one and none-for-all ideology has permeated even the thinking of people on our side.
Mailed March 13:
Mike Tidwell’s pragmatic response to the reality of steadily-increasing climatic disruptions over the coming decades is correct — but incomplete. In his description of the steps he’s taken to prepare for what will certainly be a time of compounding difficulties, infrastructural disruptions, and interrupted food supplies, he omits perhaps the single most effective thing we humans can do to prepare for disasters we know are inevitable. Where do Mr. Tidwell’s neighbors figure in his plans? In circumstances where any individual or family unit will be terribly vulnerable, a community of people can persevere. While generators, food supplies, and survival skills are necessary in times of crisis, our capacity for cooperation to extend our influence more widely over time and space may be what rescues us from civilizational collapse. Interestingly, people who reject the notion of the “common good” are overwhelmingly likely to deny the reality of global climate change.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes CIA denialists idiots Navy Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 21: Rep. Upton? It’s David Koch For You, On Line Seven.
The Boston Globe runs an AP piece on a recent study that defines the task of the Navy in coping with a post-global-warming planet:
WASHINGTON—The Navy and Coast Guard need to prepare for more missions in the Arctic, and plan for potential damage to bases from rising sea levels, as global warming increases, the National Research Council said Thursday.
“Naval forces need to monitor more closely and start preparing now for projected challenges climate change will present in the future,” Frank L. Bowman, a retired Navy admiral who was co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report, said in a statement.
The new analysis noted that ocean sea lanes could be regularly open across the Arctic by 2030 as rising temperatures continue to melt the sea ice. It said the Navy needs to increase its cold-weather training and operations programs so it will be able to protect U.S. interests in the region.
Sent to the Boston Globe (my hometown paper!) on March 12:
As evidenced by their recent travesty of a hearing on the future of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives is immune to scientific evidence on the critical issue of climate change. Apparently they are also unaffected by the opinions of experts from the CIA experts, which last year began including global warming and its epiphenomena in its analyses of potential political trouble-spots. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that the GOP will also discount the National Research Council’s advice to the Navy on preparation for a drastically hotter world. In fact, there’s only one source of authority that could transform their reflexive hostility to science. If international oil corporations changed their positions to favor reality-based climate policies, a Republican turnaround would follow as the night the day. Until that day comes, sadly, we can expect more of the same: denial and delusion.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes EPA idiots Republican obstructionism
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 20: A Little Knowledge May Be A Dangerous Thing, But It’s Better Than A Lot Of Republicans On A House Subcommittee
As of March 11, the dingalings in the House have voted to defang the EPA. The Times:
WASHINGTON — A House subcommittee voted on Thursday to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gases, chipping away at a central pillar of the Obama administration’s evolving climate and energy strategy.
The sharply partisan vote was preordained by the Republican takeover of the House. Republicans and their industry allies accuse the administration of levying taxes on traditional energy sources through costly environmental regulations, threatening the economic recovery and driving jobs overseas.
Many Republicans also argue that global warming is an unproven theory and that no action is needed to combat it, and they are backed by lobbies representing manufacturers; small businesses; agriculture; and the chemical, coal and oil industries; all of which have a big financial stake in hamstringing the E.P.A.
Bitter. Bitter and mordant. That’s me.
Sent March 11:
It is a sad irony: as polar icecaps melt faster and faster, as freak weather events seem daily less freakish and more the norm, our House of Representatives escalates its own fight against “climate change.” Note the quotation marks — this is not a battle against a concept rather than a genuine enemy. Rather than develop strategies to ensure that our nation is prepared to cope with the compounding crises triggered by the runaway greenhouse effect, Republican legislators are developing strategies to ensure that we are protected from the dangers of climatological expertise. Just as George W. Bush’s post-9/11 advice was to “go shopping,” our petroleum-controlled congress wants us all to keep buying, driving, and consuming, securely confident that all those heat waves, anomalous storms and rising sea levels are unrelated to our warming atmosphere. Scientific ignorance is a short-lived bliss; our eventual national awakening will be ugly and painful.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists idiots
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 19: Just Because You’re Deluded And Stupid, That Doesn’t Make You Right
The San-Diego Union Tribune runs an article discussing the connections between global warming and all the wacky weather everyone’s been, um, enjoying recently. Reading the comments prompted this letter, sent March 10:
Increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide are certainly linked to the crazy weather everywhere around the globe. And while it’s scientifically impossible to attribute a single weather event to a single cause, the facts have been in for a long time: by contributing ever more to the greenhouse effect, we are “loading the dice” to make extreme weather ever more likely. Global climate change is also linked to another kind of crazy: the increasingly complex mental contortions of denialists attempting to negate mountains of corroborative evidence and an overwhelming worldwide scientific consensus. The online comments to any article on global warming offer glimpses of a bizarro world where President Obama wants to outlaw SUVs, Al Gore heads an international cabal of climatologists, scientific expertise is rejected when it doesn’t fit ideological preconceptions, and the world’s petroleum industries act from altruistic motives, untinged by any trace of greed or avarice.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism media irresponsibility scientific consensus
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 18: I Know Nuzzink!
The Newberg Graphic (Newberg, OR) runs an op-ed from a guy named Brian Doyle, who speaks considerable sooth on climate issues:
While the political winds blow hot and cold, the climate and the weather it drives are oblivious to politics. Political pronouncements aren’t going to affect the climate any more than they can affect the weather, the tides or sunrise in the morning.
Politicians should be deciding what, if anything, to do about climate change rather than debating or denying scientific facts. Nonetheless, some politicians, their appointees and various talk show hosts have presumed to know more about the earth’s climate than scientists with a lifetime of experience and study. It’s as though controlling the climate was the same as swinging the next election.
It’s one thing to spin or misrepresent a political issue and another thing to alter or ignore physical reality. While political victories are temporary (via death or the ballot box) climate change is permanent and the consequences of misrepresenting it are far more serious than an election’s results or next year’s profits.
So I generated the following. The Semmelweis reference is a new twist. With a little luck, I’ll be able to make it tighter and pithier in subsequent iterations.
Sent March 9:
Assuming that our species makes it through the imminent evolutionary bottleneck posed by runaway climate change, future generations will look back at this moment in history with utter incredulity. How is it possible that our media and our politics — the very systems responsible for informing us about problems and addressing them in a timely and cognizant way — have abdicated their responsibilities so completely? The politicization of every aspect of our national discourse has expanded to include scientific fact, as if physical laws could somehow be negated by the right combination of sound bites and photo-ops. In 1847, when Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that handwashing drastically reduced mortality rates in hospitals, other doctors disregarded him, refusing to believe they’d carried infections from freshly-dissected cadavers to living patients. And hundreds of people died needlessly. When it comes to climate change, today’s Republican politicians and media figures are the philosophical heirs to Semmelweis’ colleagues; easily offended, mentally inflexible, always ready to sacrifice the lives of others rather than admit error.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots truth-telling
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 17: Truth Is A Drug
A regional paper in Florida, the Biscayne Times, runs a fabulous editorial by a guy named Jim W. Harper:
The Sun Orbits Our Flat Earth
Written By Jim W. Harper
OH, AND “CLIMATE CHANGE” IS JUST LEFT-WING PROPAGANDA
Wake up, Sen. Marco Rubio. And Gov. Rick Scott, too. You got elected after pretending that climate change doesn’t exist, but that fairy-tale position can’t last. What’s next? Are you going to deny that smoking causes cancer?
The majority of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives likewise wobble in skepticism about climate change. At least Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen got it right in 2009 when she stated that “global warming is real and man-made.”
If you won’t listen to her, ask any elementary school child, because they have ears to hear the truth. They can probably tell you these facts:
Last year was the warmest and wettest year on record.
Last decade was the hottest on record.
Last century the planet warmed by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
Got it? The earth has been getting measurably warmer since modern record-keeping began in 1880. Global warming is a fact. Don’t waste the nation’s time and money debating ideas that have been settled.
And that’s just the beginning. He sounds completely DFH, and genuinely outraged. I figured I’d get his back on this one.
Sent March 8:
Jim Harper’s op-ed is a refreshing dose of truth-telling. Future generations will look back with incredulity on the complacency of our current crop of politicians; rather than recognize what is certainly the gravest threat humanity has faced in recorded history, they’ve abdicated their responsibilities as leaders. Actually, imagining future generations looking back on this era now requires a faith in our species’ survival potential that is no longer automatic. We of the carbon-burning countries are moving the entire planet toward conditions that human beings have never before experienced. Some profess confidence that we can adapt to a radically transformed climate. Sure, given enough time, and a climate that changed gradually over many millennia. Instead, our radical energy consumption has us headed for the geological equivalent of a sudden and catastrophic impact — a planetary car crash, as it were. And the climate-change deniers in our political and media systems are making sure that none of us will be wearing our seat belts.
Warren Senders
environment India: colonialism corporate irresponsibility economic inequities McGill University
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 16: John Company Raj Redux
The Times of India runs an article on the McGill study, which had also provided fodder for yesterday’s letter. One good turn deserves another. In this letter I tried to connect the climate crisis loosely to India’s history of British colonialism.
Sent March 7:
In an ironic coda to the destructive legacy of colonialism, the McGill University study makes painfully clear the fact that those whose lives are already subject to the vagaries of climate and extreme weather will be the first and most painfully affected victims of climate change. Asia, Africa, South America and Oceania are going to bear the brunt of the destruction caused by the industrialized nations’ greenhouse emissions; countries whose “carbon footprint” is little more than a rounding error will be the ones submerged by rising seas, devastated by drought, or inundated by catastrophic flooding. A world-wide initiative to transform the energy economies of both the developed and the developing world is morally, scientifically, economically and socially essential. Alas, in a world dominated by the short-term fiscal interests of multinational corporations, a just and equitable approach to the climate crisis seems likely to remain a planetary fever dream.
Warren Senders
environment: biodiversity cultural diversity economic inequities
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 15: Who Killed Cock Robin?
The Winnipeg Free Press reports on a study which makes explicit something we all knew was the case:
MONTREAL – A new study suggests climate change will have the greatest impact on the populations least responsible for causing the problem.
Researchers at McGill University found what many have long-suspected — countries that produce the least carbon dioxide emissions per-capita also tend to be more vulnerable to climate change.
“Based on our ecological models, we see that the potential impact of climate change will be the greatest in countries that have contributed very little,” lead researcher and PhD candidate Jason Samson said in an interview.
Sent March 6:
The ongoing tragedy of global climate change is exacerbated by the sad ironies of geography, as it becomes ever clearer that those who will pay for the greenhouse emissions of the developed world are those who have benefited least from industrialization and large-scale agriculture. The McGill study makes these gross inequities evident, clarifying the nature of the grotesque injustice that is being perpetrated on thousands of societies everywhere around the world. Countless local, small-scale cultures with rich lodes of traditional knowledge will be extinguished as climate change destroys the ecologies within which they have flourished for thousands of years. Just as biodiversity is essential for the survival of an ecosystem, cultural diversity is key to the survival of our species. Humanity’s ability to adapt to a radically transformed post-climate-change planet will be severely compromised by the loss of these indigenous cultures, obliterated through no fault of their own.
Warren Senders
environment: Australia carbon tax coal corporate irresponsibility
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 14: Coal Makes You Stupid (So Does Oil)
An Australian paper, the Mackay Daily Mercury, runs an article noting, unsurprisingly, that Australian coal companies are opposed to a tax on carbon. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Industries are not known for taking the long view. If corporate charters were set up to encourage century-long thinking, a lot of things might have turned out differently.
Sent March 6:
It’s hardly surprising that higher-ups in Australia’s coal industry are opposed to a carbon tax. Despite their comprehensive and lavishly-funded denial of the facts of climate change, the multinational corporations which have made enormous fortunes from our species’ eagerness to consume fossil fuels are beginning to see the writing on the wall. They’re soon going to confront the limitations of the Earth’s resources and the laws of nature; we’re going to run out of oil and coal — unless the long-term consequences of the greenhouse effect bring our species to an evolutionary bottleneck first. The coal industry needs to be asking how to find ways to employ people once they’re no longer mining coal, not how to avoid paying taxes on carbon emissions. The days when economic actors could easily afford to disregard climatic warning signals are long past; our addiction to cheap energy has become a very expensive habit indeed.
Warren Senders