environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots oceanic acidification oceanic warming Republicans
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 7: Thought We Said Goodbye Last Night
More on oceanic acidification, this time from the Sacramento Bee:
Making a living from the ocean is not for the faint of heart. It’s comparable to farming the soil, in that weather, disease and market conditions can make or break your bottom line. Food production, whether farming on land or in water, is dependent upon a number of factors all working in sync to produce a healthy, resilient crop. If just one factor is off, it can ruin your whole harvest.
A recently recognized threat to ocean health has the potential to do more than just inflict a bad year on shellfish producers. Ocean acidification could put us out of business permanently. Caused by activities that generate pollution from factories, cars and power plants, ocean acidification is physically changing the chemistry in the ocean. The ocean is a tremendous sponge for pollution, soaking up about 30 percent of what we put in the atmosphere. As those emissions are absorbed, it makes seawater more acidic with dire consequences to marine life, dissolving the shells of oysters, mussels and clams, and confusing behavior of fish, like salmon.
This is the “we’re all in it together” letter. Sept. 2:
Oceanic heating and acidification (two consequences of the accelerating greenhouse effect) make catastrophic declines a certainty for California’s shellfish industry. And it’s not just the West coast of the USA, but everywhere humans make their living from the sea, for the climate crisis knows no national boundaries.
Since billions of people (between a quarter and a third of Earth’s population) depend on the ocean for food, this is a humanitarian emergency. Include the likely effects of climate change on agriculture, and the gathering storm clouds are too big to ignore.
Unless, of course, you’re in a position to do something about it, like the many politicians whose myopic climate-change denialism ensures a failure to act in time to avert disaster. It’s never a good idea to bet on ignorance; when our species’ future is at stake, it’s a catastrophe in the making.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots religion
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 6: Be Sure To Hide The Roaches
The Christian Post runs an Op-Ed by two evangelical climate scientists, desperately trying to shake off the Limbaugh-stink:
Rush Limbaugh doesn’t think we exist. In other words that evangelical scientists cannot subscribe to the evidence of global warming.
Specifically, during a recent segment on his radio show Limbaugh stated, “If you believe in God, then intellectually you cannot believe in manmade global warming.”
Talk radio personalities often make hyperbolic statements. It is what their listeners expect and want to hear. But in this instance, Rush’s uninformed rhetoric is demeaning to Christians who care deeply about what humans are doing to God’s Creation and ignorant of the consequences that future generations will face if we don’t respond quickly to the challenge of climate change.
We are both atmospheric scientists who study climate change, having earned advanced degrees in our respective fields and having devoted our lives to increasing knowledge through scientific research. We know climate change is real, that most of it is human-caused, and that it is a threat to future generations that must be addressed by the global community. We are also evangelical Christians who believe that God created the world in which we live.
Good luck with that. Sept. 1:
It’s reassuring that some evangelicals acknowledge the existence of the burgeoning climate crisis, and recognize the urgency of action. On this issue, the nature of one’s faith is a trivial factor in comparison with the magnitude of the emergency.
That said, it is not enough for Katharine Hayhoe and Thomas Ackerman just to rebuke talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh’s assertion that Christianity is incompatible with accepting the evidence of climate science. The evangelical community must recognize the role it has played in supporting those institutions of denial which stand in the way of action. The Republican party owes its current power to evangelicals who were cynically and callously manipulated by politicians far more concerned with their own fortunes and those of their corporate paymasters than with the lives of their constituents. Now these same lawmakers are obstructing meaningful legislation on climate issues, thereby increasing the probability of a catastrophic temperature increase over the coming century — a secular Armaggedon wholly explainable by the laws of physics and chemistry.
And regardless of your faith, that’s not Good News.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists EPA Gina McCarthy idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 4: Unlike The Rest Of You Squares
Gina McCarthy went to Alaska, and the Anchorage Daily News was on the case:
“The climate is changing and we need to adapt to that change and make sure communities are prepared,” she said.
A trip to Iowa two weeks ago highlighted the issues, she said.
“There was no question in discussions with both farmers and ranchers the climate change impacts we’re seeing right now are severe,” she said. “We’re having drought and floods in the same state at the same time.”
McCarthy’s path to the EPA’s top job was rocky. Senate Republicans held up her nomination for more than four months before she was confirmed July 18. They used Obama’s choice of McCarthy to highlight complaints about the agency’s environmental regulations and the president’s agenda. McCarthy was previously head of the EPA’s air pollution office.
Alaska’s senators were divided over her confirmation. Democratic Sen. Mark Begich voted for McCarthy, while Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski opposed her, although she did not support a filibuster attempt. Murkowski, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate energy committee, did not return a message Monday about the new EPA leader.
“Sen. Murkowski agrees that climate change should be addressed, but remains concerned about the administration circumventing Congress to impose costly and unpopular regulations,” her spokesman, Robert Dillon, said in an email.
Sigh. August 31:
So Senator Lisa Murkowski thinks “climate change should be addressed,” but is unhappy that President Obama is “circumventing Congress to impose costly and unpopular regulations.” In other words, she’d be happy to confront a profound threat to our civilization, as long as she’s not actually required to do anything. That’s an easy game, but a deeply cynical one. If Sen. Murkowski isn’t just mouthing platitudes, perhaps she could work to persuade her colleagues in the halls of government to stop denying basic science in the service of short-term political gamesmanship.
Here’s a tip for the Senator and her colleagues in the GOP: failure to move strongly and swiftly on the climate crisis is going to bring results more costly and unpopular than anything you’ve ever imagined. The costs of inaction on this civilizational threat are conservatively reckoned in the trillions; the health of the entire planet is at stake.
Perhaps House and Senate Republicans think Earth should just go to the Emergency Room.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots lakes Republicans
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 3: Twenty-Five Or Six To Four
The Superior Telegram (WI) on Lake Superior’s ongoing transformation:
Researchers say even Lake Superior, the largest lake connected to the state, is feeling the effects of climate change.
Swimming in Lake Superior has never been easy without a wetsuit, but if you’re going in with just a swimsuit late August is usually one of the best times. On a hot day near Marquette, Mich. last weekend, three college students jumped off what are called the Black Rocks and into the relatively cool water. Even a visiting journalist took the plunge.
As refreshing as a brief swim in the big lake might be, scientists and advocates say there appear to be trouble signs for the waters. In some of the last few years Lake Superior’s average daily temperatures in August have been around 70 degrees, well above 30-year averages.
Last year, Marquette had its first ever beach closure tied to E. coli bacteria, which is often linked to warmer lake temperatures. Winter ice cover is also down.
Generating letter after letter today, trying to get ahead of the game. August 29:
The heating of Lake Superior is a local manifestation of a global phenomenon. All across the globe, people are figuring out that things ain’t what they used to be, climatically speaking. Regions that require glacial melt for their water are looking at increasingly arid futures, while citizens of island nations are getting ready for the day rising seas turn their homelands into historical footnotes. And, closer to home, people who live on the shores of America’s largest lake are discovering that industrial civilization’s century-long fossil-fuel binge has some serious consequences right in their own neighborhoods.
But the USA is unique among nations in that many of its citizens reject the existence of climate change entirely. We can sympathize with the denialists’ reluctance to accept that the greenhouse effect will disrupt their lives in countless unpredictable and complex ways (after all, nobody looks forward to planetary catastrophe), but future generations on the shores of an ice-free Lake Superior will deplore their inaction.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 1: Why Cain’t Ya Be True?
The Providence Journal offers Tricia K. Jedele a nice chance to take down a denialist clown:
The only people living in the “land of make believe,” as suggested by Michael Stenhouse in his Aug. 22 Commentary piece (“Global warming alarms deny reality”), are those who contend that we, as human beings, cannot affect the natural world with our choices — those who would rather embrace conspiracy theories than science and reason.
To suggest that the science supporting human-caused climate change is the result of some radical environmental movement determined to spread fear-mongering propaganda is akin to arguing that that there is no evidence that smoking causes cancer, or that the thick black smoke pouring out of the back of diesel-fueled trucks, airplane engines and smoke stacks from fossil-fuel-fired power plants doesn’t cause respiratory illnesses. Not only is it ridiculous to compare environmental advocacy around climate change to a radical fear-mongering movement; it is propaganda itself.
We human beings make all kinds of daily decisions to avoid potential adverse consequences, and we make those decisions with a lot less justification than the scientific-based reasons we have to address the causes of climate change. We bring an umbrella because it looks like rain. We look both ways when crossing a street that rarely has traffic. We buckle up even though we’ve never been in a car accident. We take action because it is within our power to do so and because we can avoid potential negative consequences by taking that action.
I dug out one of my earlier anti-think-tank letters and restructured it a bit. This is easy. August 28:
Tricia Jedele’s pitch-perfect response to Michael Stenhouse’s denialist screed is a fine takedown of a standard example of conservative mendacity. Mr. Stenhouse represents a “conservative think tank” calling itself the “Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity,” which should be a dead giveaway.
Here’s how it works: for decades extractive industries anxious to safeguard their unimaginable profit margins have sunk millions into “think tanks” and “institutes” whose job it is to provide the news media with telegenic, and authoritative-sounding “consultants,” “analysts,” or “research associates” who earn a fine salary for mouthing misinformation in order to counter the findings of (very worried) climate scientists. The more confusion they spread about the very real and increasingly undeniable climate crisis, the less likely it is that our politicians will actually face public pressure to mitigate the runaway greenhouse effect.
Thus corporate malefactors pit their greed against the planet’s need, ensuring a few more quarters of record-breaking returns. Mr. Stenhouse’s confusion about the causes and consequences of climate change is a fine confirmation of Upton Sinclair’s famous quotation, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots James Inhofe Republicans
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 30: And The Countdown Begins!
The Washington Post is moving slowly to atone for decades of George Will columns:
NEXT MONTH, the international arbiter of the scientific consensus on global warming will release its latest evaluation of the state of the research. A few will dismiss the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) findings as overwrought alarmism. But a draft leaked to reporters last week indicates that, for most people, the report will serve as another stern warning about the risks of continuing to pump carbon dioxide into the air.
The scientists are set to claim that the increasing amount of greenhouse gases that humans have emitted into the atmosphere has almost certainly been the chief driver of the warming of the planet over the past half-century, a finding to which they ascribe 95 percent confidence. That’s the level of likelihood researchers typically consider robust enough to justify drawing very strong conclusions.
Grim. August 27:
The question is not whether humanity’s complex industrial civilization has caused a radical reconfiguration of Earth’s climate. That was resolved long ago, and the answer was “Yes”; the IPCC’s new report is just statistical icing on a well-baked cake of certainty. The real question is how long it’s going to take for this new climatic reality to radically reconfigure the attitudes of those with deeply vested financial and political interests in denial.
It’d be nice to think that the encroaching realities of climate change — burgeoning wildfires, rising ocean levels, increasingly severe storms, historically unprecedented droughts — would be persuasive enough. But it is inherent in the nature of paranoid thinking that mere evidence is inadequate. The only way these politicians will change their entrenched anti-science attitudes is for their corporate sponsors to recognize that rejection of climatological evidence will negatively impact profit margins. Civilizational collapse is bad for business.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism Republicans
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 29: You’ve Just Got To Understand: What Is Its Motivation?
Former GOP Representative Bob Inglis keeps pounding his tocsin. This time it’s in New Jersey:
Gov. Chris Christie listened to the scientists at the National Hurricane Center when they said Hurricane Sandy was coming to New Jersey. It’s time to listen to the scientists warning of the longer-range risks of climate change.
New Jerseyans would have been alarmed had Christie said, “I don’t buy it. I think the National Hurricane Center is exaggerating the threat.” And perhaps he might have found an “expert” or two who might have said the odds of Sandy surging onto New Jersey were lower than the costs of preparing for her wrath.
But Christie did what good leaders do: He listened to the best advice available and then acted to protect New Jersey.
Likewise, folks alive today and folks yet to be born will be grateful for elected officials who listen and act on the science that indicates risk of climate change.
That doesn’t mean acting hysterically or exaggerating the threat. Leaders who would lead on climate change need to talk to us about reasonable risk avoidance, not apocalyptic visions.
Tire rims and anthrax. Tire rims and anthrax. Tire rims and anthrax. August 2:
Bob Inglis’ op-ed recommending that Republican politicians focus on addressing the climate crisis is well-conceived, articulate and factually correct. Indeed, the GOP’s legislators should indeed embrace strategies to mitigate our civilization’s emissions of greenhouse gases, to reinforce our infrastructure in preparation for the coming storms, and to educate the public about the causes and consequences of climate change.
They should. But they won’t. And the reason is simple: today’s Republican party is entirely driven by an ideologically-premised hatred of all things liberal, all things Democratic, and all things Obama. For example, a recent study showed that conservatives only bought compact fluorescent lights if they were marketed as money-saving products — but if the label used the word “environment”, there would be no sale.
When politicians reject responsibility to the greater good in favor of doctrinal rigidity, they no longer deserve the respect — or the votes — of their constituents.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture corporate irresponsibility denialists fishing inappropriate Nazi analogies sustainability
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 26: Two Words.
The Waterville Morning Sentinel (ME) tells us about the problems of their state’s fishing industry:
Maine’s fishermen must be better informed, more communicative about conditions on the water and responsive to change to survive the constant shifts brought by a warming climate and water that is growing warmer and saltier.
That was the message from about 100 marine biologists, fisheries managers, commercial fishermen and others who shared both scientific findings and anecdotal observations on the changes that are occurring in the Gulf of Maine. The fisheries participants gathered Wednesday in Portland at a two-day Island Institute symposium on climate change and its impact on fisheries in the Gulf of Maine.
The consensus on the changes in conditions was predictable, given the roller-coaster ride over catches and pricing for lobstermen in 2012 and the ongoing crisis over groundfish stocks.
Peak Fish. August 1:
Maine’s fishing industry would be facing huge changes even without the looming threat of climate change, since overfishing has made the huge catches of the past increasingly harder to achieve. But adding heating and acidification (the two most tangible oceanic consequences of the accelerating greenhouse effect) to the mix means that fisheries are likely to confront catastrophic declines. In the coming decades, there will be fewer fish, and they’ll be harder and more expensive to find and catch. In other words, we’ve reached Peak Fish.
Given that between a quarter and a third of Earth’s population depends on the ocean directly or indirectly for food, this amounts to a humanitarian emergency. Combined with the likely impacts of climate change on land-based food production, this constitutes a stark warning to our species: get ready, for the storm clouds are gathering, and it’s going to be a rough ride.
Politicians who cater to the fossil-fuel industry and promote climate-change denialism are doing a grave disservice to their constituents, to their fellow citizens, and even to their myopic corporate paymasters.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture corporate irresponsibility denialists media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 25: Eat. Eat. We’re Paying For You Like An Adult!
Under an overcast Saturday morning sky July 27, bright blue and red signs proclaiming “Climate Action: It’s Our Obligation” and “It’s Time to Cut Carbon” were taped to a table boasting equally eye-catching mounds of ripe tomatoes. A cluster of Boise Farmers Market shoppers paused to listen as local-food advocates discussed the intersection of local farming and climate change at a rally dubbed Producing Food, Reducing Carbon: An Event for People Who Grow and Eat Food.
“Probably nobody in our community deals with weather more than farmers; we are always checking the forecast,” said Meadowlark Farm owner Janie Burns. “Is it going to be good for planting? Is it going to rain? Is it going to snow? What’s the wind going to do? And so, when we think about the weather that’s just what’s happening today, sometimes we don’t pay attention much to those very small changes, those insidious changes that are happening in our climate.”
The farmer is the one who feeds us all. July 31:
Climatic transformations are happening everywhere around the planet, affecting local ecosystems and regional agriculture in profound and unpredictable ways. While farmers are always aware of weather conditions, it is a sad fact that many are still prone to rejecting the reality of the climate crisis, even as it unfolds around them.
This tendency to denial stems from several factors. First and foremost is the simple fact that nobody likes to contemplate bad news. And when it’s bad news set at some indefinite point in the future, it’s all too easy to put off responding to another day (a strategy employed by our government on climate issues since the likely consequences of the greenhouse effect were first discussed in the late 1950s).
But there is another element in the equation which is far less forgivable. Fossil-fuel corporations, eager to maintain their mind-bending profitability, have invested millions of dollars in “think tanks” and “institutes” which provide the print and broadcast media with handsome, telegenic, and authoritative-sounding “consultants,” “analysts,” and “research associates.” These people are amply paid to recite misinformation as a counter to the words of increasingly worried climate scientists. By confusing the public discussion, these corporate miscreants ensure their continued profitability, pitting their greed against the planet’s need.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists insects moose parasites Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 20: Eeeeeeeew.
Just eeeeeeeeew. The Concord Monitor:
In 1950, New Hampshire was home to just 50 moose. Today, the count is near 5,000, but state biologists fear that climate change – by way of winter ticks and other parasites – is threatening the herd.
“Shorter winters are a problem for moose because they give ticks a leg up,” said Kristine Rines, moose project leader for the state Fish and Game Department. “People have to recognize that the (climate) changes we are facing are not just changes in the Arctic. It’s not just polar bears that are going to be affected.”
(snip)
It’s hard to imagine ticks taking down one of the state’s largest animals until you consider the magnitude of the problem.
In the recent issue of New Hampshire Wildlife Journal, Fish and Game biologist Dan Bergeron reported that the average number of winter ticks on a single moose in Alberta, Canada, is 32,000 but can be as much as 150,000, all of them feasting on the moose’s blood.
According to Bergeron, the number of winter ticks is directly related to fall and spring weather. If those seasons are mild and nearly snowless, ticks thrive. The winter ticks, which are different than deer or dog ticks, attach to the moose, mate and lay eggs, Bergeron wrote in his piece. That cycle repeats and repeats unless the state gets a traditional, long, cold winter.
Read that number again. 32,000 ticks on average per individual. I’m sooooo squicked out by that. July 29:
When it comes to undocumented immigrants, the most powerful causal factor is global climate change. While it’s obvious that a warming atmosphere, rising sea levels, and increasingly extreme weather are going to create burgeoning populations of climate refugees, these human casualties of the intensifying greenhouse effect are just the tip of a (rapidly melting) iceberg.
If conservatives really cared about illegal aliens they’d be working to address the greenhouse effect and its consequences, for it’s not just people, but non-native mammals, plants and insects that find their way Northward as newly hospitable ecological niches open up. Ask New Hampshire’s moose population, which is now hosting hundreds of millions of winter ticks, thriving in the warmer temperatures that constitute the region’s “new normal.” Unlike the hardworking humans so often targeted by conservative xenophobia and fear-mongering, these debilitating bloodsuckers are genuine parasites whose contribution to the local economy is entirely negative.
Warren Senders