environment: Australia Queensland
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 13: Talkin’ The Talk
The Sydney Morning Herald has an excellent article on the need for realism in the climate debate.
The floods that have led to most of Queensland being declared a disaster zone are a disturbing reminder that living in one of the richest countries in the world does not shield us from the devastation of natural disasters.
The footage of death and destruction we are seeing on our TV screens is gut-wrenching. Most dinner table conversations in Australia this week will undoubtedly focus on these floods and their horrific consequences. But while we are talking about the immense loss and what we can do to help, there is another conversation that we should be having: the conversation about climate change.
When we talk about climate change, we mostly talk about complicated economic policy, markets and reports. But we need to start talking about what climate change actually looks like – and we don’t need to look much further than Queensland.
So they get a letter. A new rhetorical flourish here is something I borrowed from a science-fiction short story I read a few years ago. I forget the author (Kornbluth, perhaps?), but it concerned a bunch of different groups involved in weather modification technology and the failure of communications between them. Hence the penultimate sentence of my letter, which is going to appear fairly often as 2011 waddles onward.
To any who’ve been following the slowly unfolding catastrophe of climate change, it’s not surprising that 2010 was a record-breaking year. And likewise, it will be no surprise when this year’s numbers are regularly surpassed. Since the nineteen-fifties, when scientists began talking about the climate-altering potential of increased atmospheric CO2, the consequences were always scheduled for some indefinite time in the relatively distant future. It was always our descendants who’d have to contend with a world in a state of environmental upheaval.
Until now. Queensland’s floods are far from an isolated case; all over the planet the weather is less predictable, more extreme, and more dangerous. For over fifty years, as our greenhouse emissions have steadily increased, we’ve avoided discussing their climatic consequences: everybody’s doing something about the weather, but nobody’s talking about it. This must end; denial is a luxury we can no longer afford.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists idiots ignorance Texas
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 13: I’m Gonna Build A Big Fence Around Texas
The Dallas Morning News has a piece on Texas’ ongoing struggle to block the Environmental Protection Agency from doing its job.
In attempting to block the regulatory initiatives of the Environmental Protection Agency, Texas is leading the way. Perhaps the rest of America will eventually follow — but to where? On the one hand, the state’s attempt to limit the EPA’s authority will make it easier for major polluters to continue their ongoing destruction of the planetary environment; increasing greenhouse emissions will soon bring Earth to levels of CO2 last seen hundreds of millions of years ago. On the other hand, the level of scientific ignorance used to justify anti-EPA lawsuits demonstrates that in at least some quarters, prehistoric ways of thinking already dominate. Unable or unwilling to grasp the relevance and reality of climatological data, the conservative groups attempting to stop the EPA’s work are leading Texas backward — all the way to the Carboniferous Period.
Warren Senders
environment: public health tropical diseases
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 12: Sick As A Brick
The Kansas City Star notes that a warming climate will bring a change in disease vectors, with a greater likelihood of catching things that were previously the exclusive province of tropical explorers.
The increased prevalence of uncommon diseases triggered by climate change is another example of the long-term consequences of two mutually reinforcing human behaviors: wastefulness and denial. Our efforts to mitigate the escalating climate crisis are hampered by our collective unwillingness to make needed systemic changes in our energy economy — while the rising levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are matched by those of scientific illiteracy in our public discourse. While the scientific consensus on global warming is overwhelming, you wouldn’t know it from the news, where every perturbed climatologist is “balanced” by a petroleum-industry shill, conveying the impression that “the science isn’t settled.” As the world warms, we’ll meet quite a few unpleasant tropical diseases — perhaps when our kids have to stay out of school because of Dengue fever or malaria, we’ll realize that our national ignorance of the facts of climate change has made us sick.
Warren Senders
environment: long-term prediction millennium forecasts Shawn Marshall
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 11: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
The Marshall study is an excellent hook for letters. This one went to the Montreal Gazette, which did a pretty good report on the team’s work.
Dr. Shawn Marshall and the rest of his team are optimists, which is hard to remember when we read their study on the likely long-term effects of climate change over the next millennium. Their forecasts presume that our planet’s politicians begin acting like thoughtful adults facing a serious problem, rather than squabbling ten-year-olds attempting to avoid responsibility. If (and it’s a mighty big “if”) our leaders were ready to make genuine commitments to significant reductions in greenhouse emissions, we can expect nothing more severe than Marshall’s best-case scenario (no more Venice, no more Manhattan). Failure to curb our world-consuming ways, on the other hand, may lead to what biologists euphemistically call an “evolutionary bottleneck,” with our own species one of the likely victims. We must act responsibly and rapidly to ensure that the ravaged world of Marshall’s predictions is a worst-case future rather than humanity’s last, best or only hope.
Warren Senders
environment: long-term future millennium forecasts
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 10: Y3K Edition
The London Metro reports on a new study projecting climate change’s effects a thousand years in the future. Hint: it’s not pretty.
Obviously, a lot can happen between now and the year 3000, so the scary thousand-year forecasts of a team of climate scientists should not be misunderstood as constituting an inevitable future. But we must recognize that their prognostications are based on a set of best-case starting points in which the entire world community begins to act like a community, reducing CO2 emissions rapidly and responsibly. If Shawn Marshall and his team were to run the worst-case numbers, they would foretell horrifying prospects for our species and our planet. Ultimately, it’s up to us; as private citizens, we must become aware of the climate crisis’ immediacy; as civic actors, we must pressure our politicians to do the right thing for the long term, rather than bow to the inevitable exigencies of the electoral cycle. After all, why make dire predictions if all we do is wait for them to come true?
Warren Senders
environment: conservative scientist denialists scientific method
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 9: The Rarest of the Rare
Stop the presses! Neela Banerjee has a story in the Seattle Times about Dr. Kerry Emanuel, a responsible climatologist who is also a political conservative.
Unsurprisingly, the guy’s a little baffled these days. Where is the Republican party of yore?
As a politically conservative climatologist who accepts the broad scientific consensus on global warming, Emanuel occupies a position shared by few scientists.
“There was never a light-bulb moment but a gradual realization based on the evidence,” Emanuel said. “I became convinced by the basic physics and by the better and better observation of the climate that it was changing and it was a risk that had to be considered.”
He sounds like a pretty good guy.
“I’ve always rebelled against the thinking that ideology can trump fact,” said Emanuel, 55. “The people who call themselves conservative these days aren’t conservative by my definition. I think they’re quite radical.”
Paradoxically, conservative Republican administrations in the past four decades pushed through the creation of the EPA and the signing of the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act.
And only a Republican could have opened Communist China to the world. See how this works? The Republicans used to have a Jekyll/Hyde thing, where they’d do tons of dirty tricks and then occasionally allow some decent legislation to pass so they could get credit for it later, as witness Richard Nixon’s EPA. But the last vestiges of Jekyll have been thoroughly expunged; we’re now all-Hyde, all the time.
Naturally, he’s horrified by the behavior of the politicians he’s supported in the past, although he still “reveres Ronald Reagan.” But the current gang of crooks and thugs was too much for him. He supported Obama in 2008, which automatically makes him a far-left DFH.
Once upon a time it was possible for scientific integrity and conservative political views to coexist in the same individual. Charles Keeling, the climatologist whose detailed records of atmospheric CO2 made it possible to measure the greenhouse effect, was, like Kerry Emanuel, a lifelong Republican. The contemporary GOP, however, is deeply antipathetic to the principles that underlie scientific thinking. Ideologically-driven and devoid of scruples, wearing intellectual dishonesty as a badge of honor, the Republican party of today is a danger to the nation and to the planet.
There is no logical reason to deny climate science; the greenhouse effect is indifferent to ideological affiliation. The only reasons are rooted in the profit motive; as they fulfill the wishes of their corporate sponsors, Republican politicians show a near-sociopathic disregard for the common good. Alas, (as Dr. Emanuel has discovered) the phrase “Republican scientist” now sounds sadly oxymoronic, and a tad embarrassing.
Warren Senders
And for your viewing pleasure, here are some old-style Republicans transforming into new-style Republicans before your very eyes:
And here’s one featuring some modern-day Democrats, too!
environment: endangered species media irresponsibility
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 8: More On Our Failed Media Experiment
The title of this post is one of the regular tags at John Cole’s blog, “Balloon Juice.”
The San Francisco Chronicle notes a newly released report from the Endangered Species Coalition detailing the likelihood that climate change is going to cause big, big, big problems for a lot of creatures. If the past is any indication, this report will be handled like all the other reports which say the same thing: a newspaper article and a couple of blog posts followed by a lapse into innocuous desuetude (kind of like first performances of modern classical compositions).
It’s definitely “Getting Hot Out There,” as the Endangered Species Coalition notes in its just-released report on the implications of climate change for many of the world’s most fragile natural ecosystems. While the impending extinction of a significant number of species should be sounding alarm bells throughout our society, we can expect this news to be received with a collective shrug by our distracted and economically frayed society. Why would we ignore such an ominous augury? The answer lies in another type of extinction. Over the past decade, responsible, scientifically-informed coverage of climate change issues by our news media has become increasingly rare. Even as the atmosphere has been steadily heating up, American broadcast news has treated global warming with cool dismissal, regularly giving more on-air minutes to tea-party political theater and the latest celebrity scandal du jour than to the single greatest existential threat our species has ever faced.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists Iowa media irresponsibility
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 7: As Falls Wichita…
There’s been a new report released on climate change’s projected effects on Iowa, and the WCF Courier is all over it. Naturally, the comments on the article are a fount of stupid.
Earlier I had read this piece at Daily Kos, which points out that our media have (surprise!) done an absolutely wretched job of covering what is, y’know, actually a major threat to our country and our world. Now watch this drive!
So I put the two together, and sent this off to the WCF Courier:
The university scientists who’ve just released a report on climate change’s impact on Iowa in the years to come are hopeful that their work will “inform future discussions” — a hope that is, alas, sadly naive. While the effects of global warming are by now well understood, and the role of human beings and their greenhouse emissions established beyond doubt, there’s something else taking place across America that bodes ill for our nation’s future. While the planet has been steadily heating up, our news media have been steadily less inclined to cover any issues related to climate change (unless it’s to run stories that tout an anomalous snowfall as somehow “disproving global warming”). In 2010, newspaper coverage of climate change in Europe was double that in the USA, according to researchers at the University of Colorado. Robert Brule, a researcher at Drexel University, points out that television news networks’ December coverage of the crucial Cancun conference added up to exactly ten seconds — a single clip. The result of this drop in coverage has been exactly what you’d expect: an increase in ignorance. The authors of “Climate Change Impacts on Iowa” will have their work cut out for them.
Warren Senders
environment: bumblebees colony collapse disorder scary
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 6: Not Good News At All
Hey, kids! Wanna get the shit scared out of you?
Dear Representative Markey, Senator Kerry and Senator Brown,
A recent report from the National Academy of Sciences, “Patterns of widespread decline in North American bumble bees” (Authors: Sydney A. Cameron, Jeffrey D. Lozier, James P. Strange, Jonathan B. Koch, Nils Cordes, Leellen F. Solter, and Terry L. Griswold) outlines in disturbing detail the declining population of bumble bees in our country and on our continent.
Among the authors’ findings:
“…the relative abundances of four species have declined by up to 96% and that their surveyed geographic ranges have contracted by 23–87%, some within the last 20 years.
We also show that declining populations have significantly higher infection levels of the microsporidian pathogen Nosema bombi and lower genetic diversity compared with co-occurring populations of the stable (nondeclining) species. Higher pathogen prevalence and reduced genetic diversity are, thus, realistic predictors of these alarming patterns of decline in North America, although cause and effect remain uncertain.”
While “cause and effect remain uncertain” it seems overwhelmingly likely that much of the population decline was triggered by a disease organism in populations of commercially raised bumble bees, which had been distributed for greenhouse pollination in the western U.S.
Indigenous pollinators are integral to our country’s agriculture, and thus to its food supply. When whole populations of some of the most industrious and effective insects decline so precipitously, it bodes ill for all of us.
Just under a year ago, a group of concerned scientists sent a petition to Agriculture Secretary Vilsack; the opening paragraph read:
The undersigned scientists respectfully request that the USDA-APHIS take action to regulate the movement and health of commercial bumble bees in order to safeguard wild, native bumble bee pollinators.
I am attaching a copy of the petition for your records. I wish to go on record as strongly supporting the petition’s aims and goals, and I sincerely request you to do the same.
While the decline in native pollinating insect populations is not, strictly speaking, a “climate-change” issue, it is another aspect of the same problem: human beings have been interfering with beautifully functioning natural systems for the sake of profits. How much more of this can we (our species, our planet) take?
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists EPA
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 5: Stop Them Before They Stop Us!
The Lewiston Sun/Times reprints an editorial from the Miami Herald, with some good words for the Environmental Protection Agency.
As we keep taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere, our planet continues to heat up. The long-term consequences of this unplanned experiment in geoengineering are likely to be disastrous for our children and their children in turn, as we face a future of disrupted seasons, wild fluctuations and ever-more-frequent “once-in-a-lifetime” weather events. Those who pay attention to the consequences of our civilization’s environmental disruption would have liked nothing better than a robust climate bill to emerge from the previous Congress — but thanks to nihilistic Republicans and timid coal-state Democrats, even the ludicrously watered-down Kerry/Lieberman effort was unable to advance. Hence it is up to the EPA. The kneejerk opposition to this agency in the newly GOP-dominated House is a three-part failure: of our politics, dominated by corporate cash; of our schools, dumbed-down and pandering to anti-science factionalism, and of our news media, whose specious false equivalence enables the claim that “the science of global warming isn’t settled.” We’re headed for a world of hurt in the coming centuries unless we get our carbon emissions under control; Republicans who seek to hamper the EPA are increasing the likelihood of disaster.
Warren Senders