environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility extreme weather Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 27: While You’re Up, Would You Get Me A Beer?
An article in the NYT is picked up by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; apparently some people are actually putting the pieces together. Huh. Who’da thunk it?
Scientists may hesitate to link some of the weather extremes of recent years to global warming — but the public, it seems, is already there.
A poll due for release on Wednesday shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.
The survey, the most detailed to date on the public response to weather extremes, comes atop other polling showing a recent uptick in concern about climate change. Read together, the polls suggest that direct experience of erratic weather may be convincing some people that the problem is no longer just a vague and distant threat.
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along, move along. Sent April 18:
While a majority of Americans are finally accepting the idea that global climate change is real, there’s no corresponding recognition of environmental reality in the air-conditioned halls of Congress. Perhaps our representatives should meet in one of the hundreds of locations across the country that have experienced record-breaking weather extremes this year. Perhaps they should spend less time listening to the corporate lobbyists and conservative “think-tanks” who are dictating fossil-fuel-friendly legislation, and pay more attention to the expertise of climate scientists who have been predicting exactly these sorts of weather anomalies as a consequence of the runaway greenhouse effect.
Yes, Americans are finally connecting the dots between climate change and extreme weather — but it is alarming, astonishing, and ultimately depressing that on this issue, our politicians will be the last to come to their senses. Our representatives aren’t just unwilling to lead — they aren’t even willing to follow.
Warren Senders
Education environment: denialists extreme weather idiots
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 12: And In Related News…
This letter was prompted by the comments on this article in the (upstate NY) TImes-Herald-Record:
A new report by an environmental advocacy group shows our region has been particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events — driven by what it believes is climate change.
The report, compiled by Environment New York Research and Policy Center, shows our nook of the Northeast has had a high number of federal disaster declarations since 2006.
Numbers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency show Ulster County has had six weather-related federal disaster declarations in the last five years, while Orange County has had five and Sullivan County, four.
Related Stories“Catskill, Hudson Valley, and Mohawk River Valley residents have endured extreme weather beyond the usual cold winters during the last five years,” David VanLuven, director of the Center, said in a statement.
Our region stands out for the amount of federal disaster declarations in the past five years.
I figured I’d write a guide for wanna-be “skeptics.” Sent March 6:
Here’s how to simulate a climate-change denialist’s response to the report linking New York state’s increasingly extreme weather to global warming.
First, assert that the climate has always changed over time, so why worry? Second, note that since the report was sponsored by an environmental group its contents are necessarily suspect. Third, point out that scientists predicted global cooling in the 1970s, so why should their opinions be trusted now? Fourth, claim that the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia show climatologists can’t be trusted. Fifth, raise the specter of a socialist New World Order apparently operated for the enrichment of dastardly tree-huggers. And last but not least, make fun of Al Gore.
Leaving aside the last two absurdities, each of these arguments is simply rebutted. Multiple inquiries absolved the “climategate” scientists from any wrongdoing while confirming their results; a substantial majority of climatologists were in fact predicting global warming in the 1970s; most reports on the environment come from environmental groups (surprise!). Finally, nobody suggests Earth’s climate has never changed — just that if climatic shifts that historically lasted a hundred thousand years are now taking a hundred, that’s not a good sign.
It’s easy.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: droughts extreme weather idiots Tar Sands
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Year 2, Month 8, Day 29: The Tip Of A Rapidly Melting Iceberg
The August 25 Hartford Courant runs a piece by Robert Thorson, addressing the reality of drought conditions in the United States as a consequence of climate change:
No part of New England (according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climatic data center) is experiencing drought. In contrast, 61 percent of the southeastern United States is experiencing moderate drought or worse, with Georgia taking the strongest hit. Things are much drier in the Southern Plains between Louisiana, south Texas, Arizona and Colorado. There, 84 percent of the land is experiencing at least moderate drought, with 47 percent experiencing exceptional drought.
Climate records are falling by the wayside: more than 6,100 records for warmer-than-usual nights, and 2,740 for hotter-than-usual days. Centered over west-central Texas is the largest footprint ever recorded for “exceptional” drought, based on the U.S. Drought Monitor. Texas is the launching pad for a presidential hopeful who denies that climate is being changed by human influence, and who seems to have forgotten that having a tea party requires water to make the tea.
I’m going to try and work the tar sands issue into as many of these letters as I can. Sent August 26 — I’m back from India and back at this grimly necessary work.
Increasingly frequent and severe droughts are only a part of the multiple vulnerabilities we and our descendants will have to cope with as climate change escalates. There’ll be heavier rains, too, since storms and extreme weather are part of the long-term forecast for humanity’s carbon-enhanced future. The conservatives’ simplistic caricature of “global warming” is a strawman; the work of climate scientists has predicted for decades that a runaway greenhouse effect won’t simply make the planet uniformly hotter, but will trigger innumerable local and regional effects, potentially disrupting and destroying ecologies, infrastructure and agriculture. While it’s too late to avoid many of the consequences of our civilization’s century-long oil and coal binge, we can still mitigate the severity of the coming storms if we rapidly reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuels from our energy economy. Conversely, projects like the exploitation of Canadian tar sands are a decisive step in the wrong direction; if the Keystone XL pipeline is approved, droughts will be the least of our worries. It’s time to get serious about the reality of climate change.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility extreme weather media irresponsibility United Nations
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 3: Painful.
The June 18 issue of the China Daily sounds an alarm:
Christiana Figueres, the official responsible for overseeing United Nations organized climate negotiations in Bonn, has admitted that a gap in enforcing the emission reduction regime is already unavoidable. Even if countries are willing to sign up to new reduction targets in December, they will still require legislative ratifications by governments around the world, which is unlikely to be completed by 2012.
The discrepancy between the stance adopted by developed and developing nations makes reaching an agreement extremely uncertain. While poor nations have put a high priority on renewing the Kyoto Protocol, some industrialized countries, such as Japan and Canada, have voiced a clear intention to walk away and build up a new architecture for global emission cuts, and the United States, the world’s largest economy and carbon polluter, did not ratify the protocol in the first place.
But the time we have to save the planet from the disastrous consequences of global warming is fast ticking away.
I have been thinking long and hard on the nature of our collective insanity these days. Not much fun. It would be nice to have more music.
Sent June 18:
In the year 3000, as humanity continues its fight to recover from the effects of a huge increase in atmospheric carbon a thousand years before, scholars of ancient history will be baffled by the inability of the world’s nations to act in a timely fashion to avert a grave catastrophe. They will look back and wonder, noting that we had ample notice of the consequences of the greenhouse effect; ample time to change our energy infrastructure, keeping millions of years’ worth of fossil carbon in the ground instead of burning it. They will shake their heads in amazement at the failure of our communications systems — at the globe-spanning media that remained focused on trivialities and gossip rather than a civilizational threat requiring concerted action. For all the technological and cultural accomplishments of this time in human history, we will probably be remembered, and reviled, for what we failed to do.
Warren Senders
environment: common sense extreme weather tornadoes
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 10: Waking Up A Bit.
The Booneville Daily News has a pretty good editorial on the complications attendant on attempts to directly link awful weather with climate change:
You won’t receive a text message alerting you to start worrying about climate change. There will be no ransom note left at your door, warning of the natural disasters that will strike if you fail to comply.
It is the uncertain and ambiguous nature of how rising global average temperatures impact people around the planet that makes arguing for the need to take action on climate change a tough sell and scarier for it.
I’m heartened by voices from the heartlands rejecting denialist propaganda. Sent May 28:
While simplistic attempts to link tornadoes and climate change are easily debunked, so are the equally simplistic attempts to deny correlations between them. Both climate and weather are complex systems, making any attempt to state unambiguous relationships between these global and local phenomena profoundly flawed. But the difficulty of establishing direct causal links between the greenhouse effect and any specific weather event is not a rationale for inaction. The scientific consensus on climate change is overwhelming; the only “expert” voices denying either its dangers or its human causes turn out on examination to be those in the pay of corporations sociopathically reluctant to sacrifice future profits. The danger to us and future generations is very clear. Even if a particular catastrophe cannot be directly tied to your SUV’s CO2 emissions, we know that continuing with “business as usual” will load the climatic dice, making tragedies like Joplin’s ever likelier.
Warren Senders
environment: extreme weather tornadoes
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 8: Auntie Em?
The Charlotte Observer has an editorial connecting some of the dots between the Joplin tornadoes and climate change. But it’s a tricky thing:
No one storm, drought or flood can be proof of global climate change, of course. Weather varies; it takes decades for scientists to document trends. Yet climate scientists for years have warned that climate change will bring more extreme storms, more rain and more drought. Regardless, the very existence of climate change remains politically controversial. This spring the Republican-dominated U.S. House, voting 240-184, rejected a resolution saying “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” Never mind that among the groups accepting that proposition are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
I was very grateful for Greg Laden’s explanation, which gave me the robbery analogy I used in my letter, and which I strongly recommend.
My letter, sent May 27; I am very pleased with my last sentence:
While it’s easy and facile to attempt a direct linkage between devastating tornadoes and global climate change, asking if those destructive storms were “caused” by global warming isn’t going to provide a meaningful answer — because there are many different ways to understand causality. The greenhouse effect impacts climate, a planetary system, while storms, droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and unseasonal precipitation are local and regional. By analogy: just because crimes of robbery increase during economic downturns doesn’t mean your brother-in-law got mugged because times are hard, and just because teen drinking is generally correlated with automobile accidents doesn’t mean that your neighbor’s specific fender-bender was caused by a six-pack in the wrong hands. And just because we can’t claim direct causal relationships between tornadoes and climate change doesn’t relieve us of our responsibilities to our descendants, who will live in a world where such destructive weather is horribly routine. Ignorance of the laws of probability is no excuse.
Warren Senders
environment: atmospheric CO2 extreme weather greenhouse effect
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Year 2, Month 5, Day 30: Wheeeeee!
The Chicago Tribune introduces us to the new “normal”:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Heavy rains, deep snowfalls, monster floods and killing droughts are signs of a “new normal” of extreme U.S. weather events fueled by climate change, scientists and government planners said on Wednesday.
“It’s a new normal and I really do think that global weirding is the best way to describe what we’re seeing,” climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University told reporters.
“We are used to certain conditions and there’s a lot going on these days that is not what we’re used to, that is outside our current frame of reference,” Hayhoe said on a conference call with other experts, organized by the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists.
Sent May 18:
Colder colds, hotter hots. Rainier rains and drier droughts. Stormier storms, disrupting more lives, more and more often. Welcome to the twenty-first century. And the twenty-second. And the twenty-third. Unlike the climate humanity’s been accustomed to for the past ten or twelve thousand years, our new “normal” is the environmental equivalent of a self-destructive alcoholic bender. Atmospheric CO2 will contribute to the greenhouse effect for centuries, which means that even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, we’d feel the effects of climate change for a long time to come. Is the inevitability of catastrophic weather events a rationale for inaction? Hardly. Rather, we’re faced with a crucial choice: every step we take towards reducing our consumption of oil and coal will mitigate the storms of future generations. Will we continue our profligate ways, or wake up and address the greatest threat humanity’s ever faced since the dawn of civilization?
Warren Senders
environment: extreme weather media irresponsibility
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Year 2, Month 5, Day 8: Don’t Blame Me!
USA Today notes the recent insane tornado season, and makes the connection to climate change, with the necessary caveats. Those damned caveats’ll get you every time.
As with any major weather disaster these days — from floods and hurricanes to wildfires and this week’s tornado outbreak in the South — people ask questions about its relation to the huge elephant that’s lurking in the corner, global climate change.
Two separate studies in 2007 reported that global warming could bring a dramatic increase in the frequency of weather conditions that feed severe thunderstorms and tornadoes by the end of the 21st century.
Sent April 29:
As climatologists remind us, no specific fires, floods, droughts or tornadoes can be unequivocally attributed to the effects of climate change. However, scientists’ reluctance to make unilateral statements does not change an all-important fact: by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, we are “loading the dice” in favor of extreme weather. Because the professional punditocracy prefers to remain ignorant about the way probability works, our national discussion has continued to overlook this critical factor. Sure, those storms, tornadoes, droughts and fires may well be triggered by other factors — but do we really want to make them even more likely by continuing to load the atmosphere with carbon dioxide through our profligate consumption of fossil fuels? Just because a particular case of lung cancer wasn’t caused by tobacco doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to smoke five packs a day.
Warren Senders
environment: denialism extreme weather snowfall
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 4, Day 6: The World Of Tomorrow
The Sierra Sun, out of Lake Tahoe (CA), runs an article by Adam Jensen, noting that scientists point out that global warming is going to make it snow more, not less. And, naturally, the comments section is full of denialist blather.
Sent March 28:
The scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming has been overwhelming for quite some time, despite what the professionally ignorant pundits in our news media would have us believe. Arctic ice melt due to the greenhouse effect was predicted in 1953 (in the pages of Popular Mechanics magazine). In the 1960s, “2010” meant a distant future full of technological wonders (I’m still waiting for my personal jetpack!), and a 1962 oil company ad bragged that they supplied “…enough energy to melt seven million tons of glacier.” Since then, science advisers to eight successive presidents predicted that increasing CO2 emissions would lead to climate trouble in the future — only to have political advisers, considering the short-term repercussions of wise long-term policies, decide to ignore the problem instead. We’ve squandered sixty years’ worth of advance notice and wound up with a climate change problem that’s probably already out of control. Buckle your seat belts, folks. It’s going to be one hell of a ride.
Warren Senders
environment: extreme weather media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 11: Never Bet Against The House; The House Always Wins
The Bangkok Post runs a story detailing some of the unambiguous links between global warming and our crazy weather. Newspapers in Asia are overwhelmingly more likely to just print the actual facts without a lot of he-said/she-said false equivalence to muddy up the argument.
*
Climate change is not only making the planet warmer, it is also making snowstorms stronger and more frequent, US scientists said on Tuesday.
“Heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet,” said scientist Jeff Masters, as part of a conference call with reporters and colleagues convened by the Union of Concern Scientists.
“In fact, as the Earth gets warmer and more moisture gets absorbed into the atmosphere, we are steadily loading the dice in favor of more extreme storms in all seasons, capable of causing greater impacts on society.”
Steadily loading the dice. Yup. And we are a species of inveterate and thoughtless gamblers. Hoo boy.
Sent March 3:
The scientific evidence linking global warming to the world’s increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather is accumulating almost as fast as the record-breaking snowfalls that brought large parts of the United States to a standstill over the past six weeks. But it is increasingly clear that there are some whom mountains of incontrovertible evidence cannot convince. With the world’s richest and most powerful corporations in positions of influence in print and broadcast media, a huge array of persuasive technologies is used to undermine the scientific truth of global climate change. It is both a tragedy and a crime, for the sooner the citizens and leaders of all nations are able to take meaningful steps both to slow global warming and to mitigate its effects, the more likely we (all six billion of us) are to survive. In their thirst for short-term profits, these corporate giants may ultimately doom themselves as well.
Warren Senders