environment: false equivalency media irresponsibility scientific literacy tropical diseases
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 1, Day 29: Talk To The Scientists, Mike.
Randall Parkinson and Scott Mandia take on columnist Mike Thomas’s volleys of idiocy in the Orlando Sentinel. It is excellent to see actual scientists doing this work; Mandia and Parkinson are both smart and dedicated people.
I am informed that this letter has been published. Yay, me.
As Parkinson and Mandia point out, our media’s relentless preoccupation with short-term phenomena has made it all but impossible for the general public to become well informed about the slow-motion disaster of climate change. When broadcasters and columnists offer an anomalous snowfall as “proof” that global warming isn’t happening, they are contributing to a climate of ignorance and irresponsibility. When that same media plays the game of false equivalency, where each genuinely worried climate scientist is “balanced” by at least two spokespeople from petroleum-funded conservative think tanks, they are acting recklessly and endangering all of us. What we need is education; a population that understands a few basic principles of science won’t be so easily misled. What we get, of course, is something different and much more damaging. As our warming world makes climate change’s effects ever harder to ignore, will our media begin trying to keep pace with reality?
Warren Senders
environment: Australia media irresponsibility
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 1, Day 28: Denialism Is Going To Require More And More Energy As This Goes On.
The Brisbane Times speaks sooth on the changes in our climate. So I figured I’d speak some sooth back.
Some of these newspaper sites are set up in a way that makes sending an LTE very difficult; I spent more time looking for a letter submission address than I did writing the damn letter. In the end I gave up and sent it to one of the support addresses, hoping that it will get somewhere, somehow.
The most alarming thing about the Earth’s accelerating warming is the fact that, statistically, we don’t seem to be worried about it. Has the anesthetizing effect of our mass media taken hold to such an extent that people cannot be troubled to notice what’s happening right outside their windows? It is saddening to realize that those with the most access to information are also the most prone to denial and rejection of inconvenient truths; while this is changing as the worsening climate crisis affects prosperous and industrialized countries, it’s not happening fast enough. Modern man is in a complex predicament; extricating ourselves requires admitting that we’re in trouble in the first place. If humanity survives the coming centuries, our descendants will have harsh words for the irresponsible media outlets (and the petroleum industries backing them) that have left us unprepared for the gravest threat we’ve ever faced.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: CO2 emissions measurement science
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 1, Day 27: How Do You Know That You Know What You Know?
The Scripps Oceanographic Institution is starting a new five-year project in carbon emissions tracking, underwritten to the tune of twenty-five million from Earth Networks.
The $25 million project in emissions tracking to be undertaken by the Scripps Institution is important for several reasons. From the perspective of the countries and organizations seeking to mitigate the impact of climate change throughout the world, accurate measurements are essential, since we cannot reduce greenhouse emissions intelligently unless we know where they’re coming from. But there’s another factor that merits consideration and appreciation: cost. Twenty-five million dollars sounds like a lot until we compare it to some America’s larger expenses; based on estimates from the American Friends Service Committee, the entire Scripps program (a full five years’ worth of global emissions monitoring) will cost less than a one hour of the war in Iraq, which exposes Republican eagerness to gut critical climate change programs in the name of deficit reduction as absurd and hypocritical. The GOP appears to think that problems will go away if they can’t be measured.
Warren Senders
Indian music music vocalists: Bhimsen Joshi
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
A Radio Moment
My appearance on PRI’s “The World” discussing Bhimsen Joshi.
environment: biodiversity endangered species
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 1, Day 26: Bellwethers
The Taipei Times runs a piece from the NYT’s Elizabeth Rosenthal, discussing the fate of endangered species in a climate-changed future. I have a cold and I’m sniffling constantly, which doesn’t help my mood.
The next few decades will see increasing loss of animal and plant species due to climate change. These localized tragedies, unintended consequences of humanity’s ongoing environmental transformation, are harbingers of our own future. Biodiversity is a planetary survival strategy; the greater variety of life exists, the more likely it is that something will always survive. Similarly, cultural diversity is under threat from the same forces that are wreaking havoc on our climate. Pervasive industrialization and consumerism are homogenizing our humanity, making it ever harder for indigenous cultures to sustain themselves, and making our own lives ever less integrated with the global ecosystems of which they are a part. We human beings are doing to ourselves what we are doing to animals like the Hartlaub’s turaco and Aberdare cisticola; their endangerment is saddening for its own sake, and for what it foretells about our own future.
Warren Senders
environment: denialism idiots IPCC NOAA
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 1, Day 25: We’re Telling You So
The Idaho Mountain Press joins the ranks of global warming alarmists with an article noting that things are getting hotter and it’s going to start hurting us, like, really soon. And the comments on this article are extraordinarily stupid, which prompted this response:
The pattern of online comments responding to articles discussing the very real threat of climate change is predictable. First there are the reflexive deniers — those whose talking points come directly from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. They can be recognized by their reliance on uninformed mockery (ridiculing Al Gore, for example). Then come the conspiracy theorists who would have us believe that all the world’s scientists are attempting to seize our assets, criminalize SUV ownership, and usher in a new socialist world order — a notion especially ludicrous to anyone who’s ever actually known a scientist. Close behind them are the “Climategate” afficionadi, who cling to the notion that a multiply-debunked non-scandal somehow invalidates decades of measurement and analysis. And when a voice of reason points out that the wealthy and powerful petroleum industry is far more likely to distort unwelcome data than climate scientists, he or she is treated to a stream of insults and derision. Meanwhile, the world grows ever hotter.
Warren Senders
India Indian music music Personal vocalists: obituary
by Warren
31 comments
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Bhimsen Joshi, 1922-2011. R.I.P.
At 8 AM on Monday the great Hindustani vocalist Bhimsen Joshi died in Sayahadri Hospital in his home city of Pune. He was 89, and a few weeks shy of his 90th birthday.
One of the most celebrated musicians of the twentieth century, Pandit Joshi was known as an impassioned and technically brilliant singer whose voice could execute anything that came to his mercurial and visionary imagination. His renditions of the traditional ragas of Hindustani music were filled with unexpected twists and turns, and he excelled at the expression of emotional nuance; his uniquely recognizable voice seemed to have its own built-in echo chamber. His last public performance was in 2007, sixty-six years after his stage debut at age 19.
Originally from a small town in Karnataka state, he ran away from home at age eleven, searching for music. more »
environment Gardening: agriculture denialism farming
by Warren
3 comments
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 1, Day 24: The Farmer Is The Man Who Feeds Us All
The Montreal Gazette reports on a new study by the Universal Ecological Fund (sounds like hippie tree-huggers to me) that predicts higher food costs as a consequence of climate change. Damn. Jeez, that’s counterintuitive, all right.
One wonders how many warnings can be ignored by climate-change deniers. The Universal Ecological Fund report simply applies common sense to the relationship of agriculture and weather patterns; while alarming, its analysis is hardly surprising. If the weather is more unusual and extreme, crop failures will be more likely. Climatologists’ predictions have been repeatedly vindicated over the past several decades; any errors are almost invariably ones of underestimation. At this point ignoring climate science requires a readiness to embrace a bewilderingly complex conspiracy theory in which scientists all over the globe are attempting to “usher in a socialist world order” or some similar farrago of nonsense. The facts are in: climate change is here; it’s real; humans (especially industrialized humans) are causing it; it will make our lives enormously more complex, inconvenient and expensive in the coming centuries — and the costs of action are dwarfed by those of inaction.
Warren Senders
environment: denialism idiots NIMBY
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 1, Day 23: The P.O.E. Principle
Based on his other writing, I’m going to assume that William Collins’ piece on climate change (which I found in the Youngstown News (OH), but which was originally published at OtherWords) is in fact written from a scientifically informed position. But the second half reads like…well, go check it out yourself.
Anyway, my letter:
William Collins’ analysis of the climate change issue is a remarkable feat. In the first half of his piece, he explicitly states that the warming atmosphere is a “truly alarming” problem, but his conclusion reads like a skillful parody of conservative thinking. Even assuming that Collins’ final paragraphs don’t represent his core beliefs, they deserve a careful response — because a statement like “we’re not about to inconvenience ourselves over some half-baked fad that says we’re damaging the world’s atmosphere” is representative of much current conventional opinion on the subject. The failure of our media to convey the magnitude of the climate crisis is perhaps the single most damaging consequence of the false-equivalence stenography that we’ve come to call “journalism,” just as the inability of our political system to address the very real possibility of a climate-triggered civilizational collapse is arguably the nadir of the American democratic experiment. Mr. Collins says, snarkily, “In 50 years, we’ll know what we should have done today.” Given that scientists (and politicians) have known about the greenhouse effect and its consequences for Arctic ice (to name just one affected area) since the early 1950s, that statement is a superb summary of a thoughtful position on climate change — from 1960. Our fifty years are already up. Over the next fifty, we’re going to discover that a world racked by water wars, droughts, wildfires and severe political instability (often in nuclear-armed nations) is not something Americans can ignore.
Warren Senders
Education: phonetics spelling
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
The UNIFON Surprise Zoo
This is a children’s book written in the UNIFON alphabet, a phonetic reimagining of English that was developed in the 1950s. I found this in my files a while ago and occasionally pass it out to my students, asking them first to decipher it (takes about 3 minutes), then to imagine a similar approach to music notation (nobody’s gotten very far).
The confusions of English orthography are well known, and complaints about them are hardly new. The UNIFON system is a little more than fifty years old, and while I’m not crazy about all the symbols themselves, I do like the idea — especially as a transitional alphabet for people who are just learning to read English for the first time — either adult illiterates, non-Anglophones, or children.
On the other hand, the glorious mish-mash of English spelling can be wonderfully revealing to the etymologically inclined; I’d hate to think of all the clues to a word’s provenance and semantic overtones being homogenized by a new symbol set that cares not whether the phonemes it’s grinding are originally Latin, Greek, Old Norse, Sanskrit or whatever.
Anyway, here’s a word on UNIFON’s creator:
John R. Malone, a Chicago economist, first developed the UNIFON alphabet in the 1950’s. He was working for the Bendix Corporation and was commissioned to develop a universal phonemic code for International Air Services. As a result of a tragic air crash and an immediate demand for quick communication in the air, English was adopted as the universal language among pilots and ground control. John R. Malone’s contract was cancelled. Instead, he then used his newly developed alphabet to teach his young son to read in one afternoon thereby recognizing the valuable tool he had created for teaching children to read. For many years he worked to pass on this new method of learning and it was used in a number of schools in the Indianapolis and Chicago area. John R. Malone continues to live in the Chicago area and is a devout supporter of UNIFON. He has seen the success of this reading method in classrooms and with individuals.
Here’s the complete symbol set — one symbol per sound with no overlaps or ambiguities.
