environment: corporate irresponsibility idiots IPCC journalistic irresponsibility rising sea levels
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 26: Cluck Old Hen!
The Portsmouth (NH) Herald notes a locally-based conference addressing regional implications of the IPCC report:
PORTSMOUTH — The likelihood of more frequent and severe weather events, increased asthma and the death of crucial plant life in Great Bay are all realities on the Seacoast.
That was among the conclusions reached by experts who were in Portsmouth on Thursday at a conference sponsored by the New Hampshire Carbon Action Alliance.
“Climate Change and New Hampshire’s Seacoast” brought together professors, engineers, doctors and scientists who provided statistical evidence to suggest a correlation between climate change and a number of issues facing the region.
Their talks were framed, many said, by the recent draft document by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change that links man-made climate change to the extreme weather conditions in much of the world in recent years.
I think I come off as a bit of a scold here. On the other hand, who could resist the allure of “carbon dioxide chickens”? Sent Nov. 22:
There have been many failures in our civilization’s handling of the crises posed by global climate change. Our politicians have failed in their responsibility to the common good, and their corporate paymasters have failed to look beyond the demands of their next quarterly profit reports. Our reporters, seduced by the ease of he-said, she-said stenography, have failed to live up to their journalistic responsibilities. And we, as citizens, have sustained a collective failure of imagination: unable to conceive the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect, we have chosen to pretend the carbon dioxide chickens will never come home to roost.
The failure of those who insist that “climate change” is a liberal conspiracy rests in their inability to recognize that scientific reality trumps conservative ideology. But if humanity is to succeed as a species we must stop avoiding the truth of the climate crisis, and start making profound changes in our ways of life. Recent climate studies from organizations such as the International Energy Agency and the IPCC make it clear: the time for failure is past.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists International Energy Agency IPCC NASA New York NOAA
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 25: It Looks Like It’s Climbing Clear Up To The Sky
The Gannett News Service for New York’s Lower Hudson Valley is called Lohud.com; they run an article about the study of climate change’s impact on New York state:
If you lost power after the recent nor’easter or struggled with flooding from Tropical Storm Irene, gear up. There’s more to come.
Scientists at some prestigious New York universities say the recent bizarre weather may be a part of a trend in the coming decades as the state faces an outsize effect of climate change because of its northern latitude and geology.
“It’s certainly an excellent example of what is to come,” said Klaus Jacob, a senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Palisades-based Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, one of several scientists who authored a study on the impact of climate change on New York state.
“It has been relatively rare till now. What will be different is that it will be more frequent. Therefore the impact will be more severe,” Jacob said.
This letter was a little longer than 150 words; I didn’t have time to pare it down due to various domestic exigencies. Sent Nov. 21:
The Energy Research and Development Authority study on climate change’s likely impact on New York State is just one of several recently released documents to discuss the shape of our future in a post-greenhouse-effect world. Along with the globally relevant work of NASA, the International Energy Agency, and the IPCC, regionally-focused climatologists have helped build a pile of scientific evidence far higher than your average denialist’s head. The picture they paint of the coming century is not a pretty one.
Those “once-in-a-lifetime” storms are going to be coming once or twice a decade; maybe even more often. More droughts, heat waves, shattered infrastructure, disrupted agriculture — our children and grandchildren may not be able to forgive us our decades of apathy.
While it will take many centuries for excess atmospheric CO2 to dissipate even if we stopped burning fossil fuel tomorrow, there is no longer any time for temporizing if we are to avoid catastrophic outcomes. Our politicians must stop protecting the oil industry’s profits, and bend their efforts towards protecting all of us from the consequences of climaticide.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots IPCC Rajendra Pachauri
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 24: Who’s That Knocking At My Door?
More on the IPCC report, this time from America’s McNewspaper:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, obtained in draft form by USA TODAY, stresses that expanding cities and populations worldwide, also raise the odds of severe impacts from weather disasters.
“Unprecedented extreme weather and climate events” look likely in coming decades as a result of a changing climate, says the draft report. The final version was released early today by IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri at a meeting hosted by report sponsors, the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Programme, in Kampala, Uganda.
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along. Move along.
Sent November 20:
Climate-change denialists are sounding increasingly desperate these days, as the volume of evidence and analysis mounts ever higher. Coming hard on the heels of a recently-issued study from the International Energy Agency (which gives us about five years to change our fossil-fuelish ways or risk irreversible damage to the Earth’s climate) is the IPCC report, which offers a sobering preview of what that irreversible damage is likely to look like.
Enthusiastic fans of Armageddon will enjoy the IPCC’s predictions, which include droughts, wildfires, unpredictable storms of unprecedented severity, massive disruption of agriculture and infrastructure, and political instability, often in areas of the world that are nuclear-armed and dangerous.
It’s too bad the greenhouse effect doesn’t come with a scary-sounding name that politicians could invoke to mobilize our nation to action, for all that excess atmospheric CO2 is sure to do far more damage than any terrorist group ever could.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots IPCC Republicans Richard Muller scientific consensus
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 23: Defund or Defend?
More on the IPCC report, this time from the Washington Post:
Climate change will make drought and flooding events like those that have battered the United States and other countries in 2011 more frequent, forcing nations to rethink the way they cope with disasters, according to a new report the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued Friday.
The report — the culmination of a two-year process involving 100 scientists and policy experts — suggests that researchers are far more confident about the prospect of more intense heat waves and heavy downpours than they are about how global warming is affecting hurricanes and tornadoes. But the new analysis also speaks to a broader trend: The world is facing a new reality of more extreme weather, and policymakers and business alike are beginning to adjust.
It’s late at night in a hotel room in Madison, Wisconsin. I’ve got a big day tomorrow — four hours of classroom teaching and a concert, so I figured I’d get the letter out of the way before I went to sleep. Sent November 18:
As the case of Dr. Richard Muller case demonstrates, a responsible scientist changes his or her mind when confronted with factual evidence. The past few weeks have seen a plethora of studies demonstrating over and over again that the reality of human-caused climate change is no longer deniable. The newly released report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offers an ominous look at a post-greenhouse-effect future in which extreme weather is the norm, with concomitant effects on agriculture, infrastructure and geopolitics that range from inconvenient to outright terrifying.
Scientific ethics compelled Dr. Muller to revise his opinion once he confirmed the validity of worldwide temperature measurements. Confronted with the same data, conservative politicians would resolve the problem differently — by defunding the IPCC and any other scientific organizations with the temerity to report facts as they are. In Republican politics, electoral exigencies trump the truth, every time.
Warren Senders
I’m Glad I Haven’t Been Forgotten Completely
It’s been a long time since I got one of these in my inbox!
Attn Please:
Payment of your Contract/Inheritance Fund Value US$7.7M.
SORRY FOR THE DELAY OF YOUR PAYMENT.
We have on the 13th of April 2011 received a payment credit instruction from The acting president of the Federal Government of Nigeria and in Collaboration with International Monetary Fund (IMF) to credit your account With your contract funds valued at $7.7m (Seven Million Seven Hundred Thousand United State Dollars) from the government reserve account through ATM CARD or BANK TO BANK transfer.
These funds have been programmed for immediate release but we can not Transfer it directly to you, as we are having a little problem with International Monetary Fund (IMF) and secondly a woman from the united States by name (Mrs. Janet White) came to our office with an application Letter stating that you gave her the power of attorney to be the beneficiary Of your Outstanding Contract/Inheritance fund, she made us to believe that You are dead and that she is your next of kin.
We got your email address from the initial contract file and decided to send You a notice mail through this address hoping to find out if you are dead or Alive and to find out if you, at any time gave this woman the power of Attorney to represent you because we are almost ready to transfer part Payment of US$7.7m part of your outstanding funds to her nominated bank Account stated below:
Bank Name: Washington Mutual Bank
Address: 1723 Palmdale Bulv.
Palmdale Ca. 93550, USA
Acct #: 3573813158
Rout #: 322271627
Swift code #: WMSBUS66
Beneficiary: JANET WHITE.Be informed that every arrangement regarding your cash payment through ATM has been made and will be released to you as soon as you reply this email .
If you are not aware of these above instruction and development, do respond to this email immediately by contacting the Payment Officer for Debt Management Office, Remittance Dept Central Bank Of Nigeria,
Mr.GEORGE GREG
Email Address is:(georgegregmax@gmail.com)
PHONE NUMBER:+234-806-390-4037Finally you are required to forward to him an Acknowledgement email with your full details below:
1) Your Full Name__________________
2) Married/Single_________________________
3) Current Home Address_______________________
4) Your Telephone Number_________________________
5) Age and Sex_______________________
6) Occupation______________________
7) Copy ID or International Passport for IdentificationRegards
The Governor Central Bank of Nigeria
SANUSI LAMIDO SANUSI
Therefore, I offer you this:
environment: assholes capitalism denialists greed idiots IPCC
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 22: If You’re So Rich, How Come You Ain’t Smart?
The Wall Street Journal runs a piece on the latest IPCC report, which is chock full of hideous news:
KAMPALA Uganda—Climate change is leading to at least some cases of more extreme weather events across the globe, according to a report released on Friday by a United Nations-led scientific panel on the subject.
The scientific link between climate change and extreme weather isn’t uniformly clear, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body established in 1988 to assist global policy makers with climate change.
As usual with WSJ articles, the comments on this piece are a critical mass of stupidity. What’s with these people? Sent November 18, from Logan Airport while waiting for my plane:
You’d think that once a critical mass of evidence has accumulated, climate-change denialists would have no choice but to change their minds. Indeed, it’s interesting to ask self-styled “skeptics” what evidence would suffice to convince them that human-caused climate change is genuinely dangerous. Many say that nothing will alter their opinions — in which case they cannot be “skeptics.” Some require proof so definitive as to be unachievable — in which case they misunderstand both scientific consensus and the nature of the situation.
Even before the most recent IPCC report, evidence supporting anthropogenic global warming far exceeded the critical threshold required for unilateral action in other policy areas. The “Cheney doctrine” held that even a 1% chance of Iraqi WMDs was sufficient to justify an invasion, a level of likelihood acknowledged by even the stubbornest denialists. Our only remaining excuse for inaction is a toxic combination of cupidity and willful ignorance.
Warren Senders
environment: cheer up! denialists extinction nacred ladies Santa Claus is coming to town
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 21: Listen Up, All You Swine!
The Washington Post reports on yet another study, this one addressing a much earlier climate change event that effectively wiped the Earthly slate pretty clean — about 252 million years ago last Thursday.
Ick:
WASHINGTON — During the world’s biggest mass extinction, Earth seemed pretty close to a description of hell — fiery, smoky and explosive — created by massive volcanic eruptions, according to research dug up in China.
In geologic terms, it was surprisingly quick, and it may provide a scary lesson about climate change for our future, authors of the new study say. It was the third of five extinctions in world history, occurring even before dinosaurs roamed.
This extinction killed off more than three-quarters of life on the planet in an event scientists have called the Great Dying. The Chinese dig sites provide new dates and details of the event, which occurred at the end of the Permian Era. It happened 252 million years ago and may have lasted less than 100,000 years, far shorter than scientists had thought, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science.
I managed to create a nice metaphor. Enjoy it while you can. Sent November 17:
One of the arguments most commonly hurled against those of us who are justifiably concerned about life in a post-greenhouse-effect future is that, after all, “Climate change has happened previously in Earth’s history.”
Indeed. But such rapid climatic transformations are traumatic, to put it mildly. Just because climate change has happened before is no reason to welcome it back; last time, it appears to have extinguished the overwhelming majority of life on the planet.
A related argument is that climate change “…happens all the time.” As with many denialist shibboleths, a tiny kernel of logic is thickly coated with misleading rhetorical nacre. By analogy, the fact that death is universal among living things is no justification for genocide.
The scientific evidence is overwhelming: human beings are causing climate change. If our species is to avoid what biologists coyly term an “evolutionary bottleneck,” we need to change our ways without delay.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 20: New York, New York — It’s A Helluva Town. The Bronx Is Up And The Battery Down.
The New York Times reports on a new study on climate change’s effects on New York State:
While the long-term outlook for grape-growers in the Finger Lakes region is favorable, it is less than optimal for skiers and other winter sports enthusiasts in the Adirondacks. Fir and spruce trees are expected to die out in the Catskills, and New York City’s backup drinking water supply may well be contaminated as a result of seawater making its way farther up the Hudson River.
These possibilities — modeled deep into this century — are detailed in a new assessment of the impact that climate change will have in New York State. The 600-page report, published on Wednesday, was commissioned by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, a public-benefit corporation, and is a result of three years of work by scientists at state academic institutions, including Columbia and Cornell Universities and the City University of New York.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article on this report also; the comments section of their piece has started to attract the usual denialist stupidity. I almost sent this letter there but finally thought better of it. Sent November 16:
Who could have anticipated that contempt for education and expertise would eventually have negative repercussions? Exploiting the American public’s historically low tolerance for intellectuals has certainly paid off for conservative politicians.
As we approach the 2012 elections there has never been a political organization so firmly dedicated to the notion that reality can be altered by ideology as today’s GOP; the thought of their primary voters offering even the slightest lip service to scientific opinion is utterly risible.
Well, it would be risible, if its consequences weren’t likely to be so tragic. As experts again sound the warning that runaway climate change will wreak unimaginable havoc on our nation’s crumbling infrastructure and vulnerable food supply system, perhaps it’s time to wonder if anti-intellectualism is really the best strategy for America’s long-term happiness and prosperity. What will it take for Republican politicians to once again pay attention to scientists? A submerged Manhattan?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: fee and dividend idiots Pete Stark Republican obstructionism Richard Muller
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 19: Not With A Whim, But A Banker
The Concord Monitor (NH) discusses both Richard Muller’s apostasy and the sensible approach espoused by a few brave Democratic Reps:
A few weeks ago, after conducting a multi-year study funded in fair measure by the ultra-conservative billionaire Koch brothers, University of California professor Richard Muller, one of the more credible skeptics of global warming, announced his findings. The great majority of scientists who claimed that the world’s climate was warming at a fair clip, Muller said, are right.
Muller’s findings produced a gamut of responses. In climate skeptic circles, he had committed apostasy. In the broader scientific community the reaction was essentially, “What took you so long? Didn’t you notice that the glaciers are disappearing, permafrost melting, sea level rising and polar bears drowning?”
Last month, nine Democrats in the U.S. House decided to swim upstream through the sewage that is Washington politics to introduce the Save Our Climate Act, a bill that would impose, at its onset, a $10 per ton tax on carbon dioxide emissions. Their goal is to reduce emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels.
Pete Stark (the only “out” atheist in Congress, just so you know) is a good guy; he’s the originator of this doomed legislative initiative. I’m so tired I can’t even think straight…but my letter appears to make a species of sense, combining a wee dram of S.O.C.A. advocacy with a big glass of Republicans Are Idiots. Sent November 15:
Now that Dr. Richard Muller’s career as a “climate skeptic” has foundered on the facts, one wonders how the GOP can continue to ignore those stubbornly inconvenient truths that have the rest of us losing sleep at night. But they will, they surely will.
Climate change is one of the least ambiguous problems America faces, for the laws of physics and chemistry are utterly oblivious to the exigencies of electoral politics. If we wish to pass a habitable world to our descendants, we need to stop burning carbon and putting it into the atmosphere. Period. And as a spate of recent reports have indicated, our window of opportunity is rapidly closing.
Congressional Republicans should support Rep. Stark’s Save Our Climate Act, which is environmentally sound and fiscally sensible. But they won’t, because their entire ideology is based on the idea that a profitable lie beats a costly truth every time.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Ban ki-Moon Climate Vulnerable Forum United Nations
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 18: It’s Cheap, Considering The Alternative
USA Today runs an AP article on Ban Ki-Moon’s statement to the Climate Vulnerable Forum:
DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged world leaders Monday to finalize the financing for a multibillion-dollar fund to fight the effects of climate change.
Delegates at a U.N.-sponsored climate change conference that starts Nov. 28 in Durban, South Africa, are to consider ways to raise $100 billion a year for the Green Climate Fund created last December to help countries cope with global warming.
Ban told the opening session of a climate meeting in Bangladesh’s capital that the world should make a concerted effort to finance the fund.
Read more about the CVF here. Naturally the only comments on the USA Today website at the time of writing were from wingnuts prating that we should defund the UN, or something. Sheesh.
Sent November 14:
The nations of the Climate Vulnerable Forum are among the world’s least significant contributors to the greenhouse effect — a sad irony, given the fact of their susceptibility to the rising ocean levels and extreme weather events brought in global warming’s wake. It is a further demonstration of the inherent inequity of a globalized consumer economy that the lands and lives of the planet’s poorest citizens are now at profound risk from the activity of the richest.
But while the CVF’s members may be cash-poor, they’re second to none in their moral authority. Countries like Kiribati, Bangladesh and the Maldives are working hard to reduce their own CO2 emissions despite the fact that it is the wealthiest members of the global community who’ve made such a mess of things.
America’s politicians and their corporate masters ignore the simple and obvious principle we all learned as children: clean up after yourself.
Warren Senders