Year 3, Month 12, Day 22: Can Rat Piss Cure Cancer? Details At Eleven!

The San Francisco Chronicle covers the “More Idiots Are Finally Changing Their Minds” story:

A growing majority of Americans think that global warming is occurring, that it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do something about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds.

Even most people who say they don’t trust scientists on the environment say temperatures are rising.

The poll found 4 out of every 5 Americans said climate change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it. That’s up from 73 percent when the same question was asked in 2009.

Wakey wakey! Probably too latey latey, but better late than never. Idiots. Sent December 16:

It’s good news that more people are finally accepting the truth of planetary climate change, now that the consequences of the rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect are threatening to overwhelm Earth’s ecological defense mechanisms. That the newly converted find actual physical events more persuasive than scientific analyses is also unsurprising. But science offers ways to extend our senses into areas normally beyond human perception; the idea that scientists have become somehow untrustworthy should give prompt us pause to reconsider our media’s handling of science news. Ask any scientist whose work has been covered by broadcast media and you’ll hear story after story of sensationalism, misrepresentation, and exaggeration.

That complex scientific questions are ill-suited to the spectacle-driven news machine should be a motivation to those television and radio outlets to change their approach. When it comes to the looming climate emergency, we need accurate reporting, and we needed it thirty years ago.

Warren Senders

Year 3, Month 12, Day 17: Bring Out Your Dead!

The South Bend Tribune reprints the MacCracken/McCarthy article from a few days ago — two climate scientists respond to the President’s purported invitation to a dialogue — and it’s still excellent stuff:

Having seen the devastating impacts of Sandy, at least a few leaders in Washington seem poised to acknowledge what scientific analyses have clearly shown: Human activities are causing climate disruption. Whether encouraged and forced by regulations, product standards, a cap-and-trade policy, or a carbon tax, we need a national policy to initiate the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Investing in energy efficiency and switching from use of coal, petroleum and natural gas to primary reliance on renewable wind and solar energy is a change that we can make. Switching away from petroleum would also build independence from OPEC and fossil fuel cartels.

According to Bloomberg Finance, the best wind farms in the world already produce power as economically as coal, gas and nuclear generators, and solar energy is proving a good investment in many states. Iowa now generates nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind energy and Colorado and Oregon more than 10 percent.

We saw inspiring political leadership when Sandy struck. Now we need equally bold and visionary action that taps into the best in ingenuity and technology that our country has to offer. Encouraging both economic development and environmental well-being requires creation of a modern, clean energy system that protects both our nation and our environment.

The scientific community is eager to engage in the conversation the president seeks, but we all must recognize that the conversation must turn quickly from talk to action. This story can have an ending we can live with. It is up to us.

There’s an elephant in the room, though. Sent December 11:

It would be a great thing if President Obama got together with some genuine climate scientists, as Michael MacCracken and James McCarthy suggest. If there’s anything in short supply in Washington nowadays, it’s unvarnished facts and figures. Compared with the genuine emergency posed by the looming climate crisis, the brinksmanship around the impending “fiscal cliff” is absurd and irresponsible play-acting.

But it’s not only the President who needs to show scientists some respect. An entire political party has decided that measurable reality is less important than pouting and posturing. The G.O.P.’s reinvention as a vehemently anti-science party means that America is seriously hamstrung when it comes to dealing with any problem that can’t be solved with a photo-op.

Our country, and the world, deserve better. America cannot be a beacon of hope to the world if half of our government has chosen to live in the Dark Ages.

Warren Senders

Year 3, Month 12, Day 12: You Provide The Prose Poems; I’ll Provide The War

The Kansas City Star runs a McClatchy article by two climatologists, Michael MacCracken and James McCarthy. It’s called, “Obama wants to understand climate change? Listen to us and Sandy, too.”

Following two of the most destructive years for climate catastrophes, President Obama is now calling for a “wide-ranging” conversation with scientists. Let’s talk.

As climate scientists who’ve together spent decades studying how and why our climate is changing, we welcome that opportunity. “Frankenstorm” Sandy brought a message for you and all of us: climate change impacts are here now, right now.

Climate change clearly contributed to Hurricane Sandy, one of the most destructive superstorms in U.S. history. On the stretch of the Atlantic Coast where we call home, sea level is rising four times faster than the global average. Global warming is heating the Atlantic Ocean and increasing atmospheric water vapor loading, both of which contributed to Sandy’s power and deluge.

Were Sandy just a single disaster, the story might end there. Unfortunately it is not. The insurance giant Munich Re reports annual weather-related loss events have quintupled in the United States, costing Americans more than a trillion dollars.

This year we have suffered through a string of record-breaking extreme weather events, all worsened by climate change. These included “Summer in March,” the hottest month in U.S. history (July 2012), the worst drought since the 1950s and a wildfire season that is rivaling the worst ever, a record set only six year ago. In 2011, the United States broke its record for the most billion-dollar weather disasters in a year: 14 totaling $47 billion. And this year’s number of disasters puts it on track to be No. 2.

It’s bad news that this is good news. December 7:

It’s good news that President Obama wants to have a discussion with climate scientists on the subject of global warming and its likely impact on the future of our nation and the world. On the other hand, in a reality-based government, idea that scientific expertise is integral to the formation of environmental policies would not be controversial, and the fact that the President is seeking expert advice on climate change wouldn’t merit a single column inch of space.

But let’s not kid ourselves: our government is at least partially based in a fantasy world where the planetary greenhouse effect is (along with evolution, cosmology, and the big bang) a liberal hoax. Mr. Obama’s openness to reality is only good news when contrasted with the the Republican Luddites who will admit neither that climate change is real or that science is relevant to policy. Our nation, and our planet, deserve better.

Warren Senders

Year 3, Month 12, Day 4: Don’t Just Do Something — Stand There!

The LA Times, on the Doha Climate Conference:

More than 17,000 people have converged on the Qatari capital for the latest U.N. climate talks, but the most influential presence may be Sandy.

The superstorm that ravaged the U.S. Northeast a month ago seared into the American consciousness an apocalyptic vision of what climate change could look like. On the heels of devastating wildfires, droughts and floods this year, Sandy’s destructive power snapped Americans to the reality that rising temperatures are a risk to their own well-being, not just a concern for distant lowlands.

Sandy’s fresh reminder of the potential consequences of global warming has been a dominant theme in the first days of the two-week meeting in Doha of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, delegates report.

Still, politicians and environmentalists at the gathering, which began Monday, maintain low expectations for the massive confab to spur swift or dramatic action to combat rising global temperatures. They predict that, at best, the unwieldy forum drawing together 195 countries and nongovernmental parties will bring agreement to formalize plans to negotiate new climate objectives that follow the aims of the 15-year-old Kyoto Protocol, ostensibly to be achieved by 2020. The next pact doesn’t need to be completed until 2015, so the international body is operating without the pressure of a looming deadline, participants said.

No urgency to this. Not at all. Sent November 28:

Superstorm Sandy’s pre-election visit did more than just allow a Republican governor and a Democratic president to work together. It also brought catastrophic climate change back to the national agenda, just in time for the Doha climate conference. While we can be grateful that this grave existential threat is once again on our radar, the fact that it takes a devastating storm to do so is an indictment of our perpetually distracted media and our all-too-distractable politicians.

The conclusions of climatology are as unambiguous as the law of gravity: climate change is real, it’s dangerous — and human industrial civilization is a root cause. What is needed is a sustained global effort to simultaneously reduce our carbon emissions drastically, develop solutions for excess atmospheric CO2, and prepare for the changes we cannot prevent. Will the Doha conference help make this happen? Not while science-denying conservatives remain powerful in our politics.

Warren Senders

Year 3, Month 12, Day 5: A New Pair Of Glasses

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer notes that things are, predictably, worse than predicted:

Deniers of human-caused climate change found themselves burdened with more to deny on Wednesday, with disclosure of new evidence that polar ice caps are melting, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing and sea levels around the planet are rising.

The director of the World Meteorological Organization at the United Nations reported that the Arctic ice pack melted over an area larger than the United States during the summer of 2012. The polar ice pack shrank to a record low in September before slowly beginning its fall and winter growth.

“The alarming rate of its melt this year highlighted the far reaching changes taking place in Earth’s oceans and biosphere: Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records,” Michel Jarraud, director of the WMO, said in a statement.

Have a nice day! Thank you for shopping Walmart! Sent November 29:

Although current scientific studies of global climate change differ dramatically from one another, they share one absolutely predictable element: the recurring phrase, “worse than predicted.” Sea level rise; Arctic ice melt; storm intensity; drought severity; all these and many more are happening faster and harder than experts imagined. Why?

Climatology, like other areas of science, tends to focus narrowly. Individual researchers or teams concentrate on learning as much as possible about specific phenomena. Only recently have we learned that in a complex system like Earth’s climate, these factors interact, building positive feedback loops of terrifying speed and intensity — an environmental “arms race” with a destructive potential matching that of the Cold War’s escalating nuclear arsenals. While climate scientists are only beginning to understand these deadly synergies, unless global climate negotiations start taking them into account, our policy responses will always be a decade late and a trillion dollars short.

Warren Senders

Year 3, Month 12, Day 2: When You Care Enough To Send The Very Best

The Boston Globe reports on a recent Town Hall meeting held by Ed Markey (MA-07) on Boston’s vulnerability to a Sandy-like storm:

There could be enough water in Boston for boats to float through parts of the Back Bay and fish to swim across the Public Garden if a super storm were to hit Boston years from now. That was a worst-case prediction displayed on color-coded maps in Faneuil Hall today as part of a forum on the potential impact of climate change.

The maps detailing potential flooding, on stage as part of a “What If Sandy Happened Here?” forum, factored in rising sea levels and suggested that by 2050 a severe 100-year storm could also send floodwaters lapping into Central Square and Harvard Square in Cambridge.

“Sandy was a warning,” US Representative Edward Markey, a Malden Democrat long active in climate change legislation, said as about 150 people filled the Great Hall, where he led a town hall-style meeting on the costs Greater Boston could face if a super storm hits.

Cast as a gathering to contemplate the havoc climate change could cause, the meeting drew together speakers who focus on the issue and an audience that included many area activists.

“This reaffirms the need to put greater energy and greater effort into convincing others that this issue is significant,” James Kaufman, president and CEO of The Laboratory Safety Institute, a health, safety, and environmental affairs nonprofit in Natick, said after the hour-long meeting.

Maria Cooper, president of the environmental group Green Decade Newton, said the forum was “all the more inspiring because we can see that people are getting it. This is urgent stuff that we need to address in our everyday lives.”

Did I mention that I love my Congressman? Sent November 26:

Representative Markey deserves high praise for his relentless calls for action on global climate change, starting long before Superstorm Sandy returned the accelerating greenhouse effect to the national conversation. It’s particularly galling to compare the Congressman’s work on this issue with the anti-science positions of Republican members of the House of Representatives, who appear to be in a contest to see who can most enthusiastically advocate the most regressive ideas (such as Georgia’s Paul Broun, who recently described evolution, embryology, and cosmology as “lies from the pit of Hell.”).

Based on meticulous computer modeling and the careful analysis of massive amounts of data, climate science is as impartial as it gets. The GOP’s relentless politicizing of the by-now-completely-resolved debate on the causes and dangers of global warming is another symptom of their scientific illiteracy. Ed Markey’s research and advocacy on behalf of humanity’s future isn’t political strategizing, but reality-based humanitarianism.

Warren Senders

Published.

Year 3, Month 11, Day 30: I’d Love To Turn You On…

The San Francisco Chronicle runs an AP story on the upcoming Doha conference, titled, “Will US role at climate talks change after storm?”

STOCKHOLM (AP) — During a year with a monster storm and scorching heat waves, Americans have experienced the kind of freakish weather that many scientists say will occur more often on a warming planet.

And as a re-elected president talks about global warming again, climate activists are cautiously optimistic that the U.S. will be more than a disinterested bystander when the U.N. climate talks resume Monday with a two-week conference in Qatar.

“I think there will be expectations from countries to hear a new voice from the United States,” said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute in Washington.

The climate officials and environment ministers meeting in the Qatari capital of Doha will not come up with an answer to the global temperature rise that is already melting Arctic sea ice and permafrost, raising and acidifying the seas, and shifting rainfall patterns, which has an impact on floods and droughts.

They will focus on side issues, like extending the Kyoto protocol — an expiring emissions pact with a dwindling number of members — and ramping up climate financing for poor nations.

With us in the studio is Senator James Inhofe. Senator? Sent November 24:

One of the most important factors in President Obama’s decisive re-election was the simple truth that Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republican Party were determined to ignore the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. From evolution-denying congressmen to Governor Romney’s mocking reference to rising sea levels, the GOP showed an ideologically-driven rejection of expertise that repelled voters. In 2012, America re-elected science and math.

For the Administration to dismiss this groundswell of popular support for common sense and environmental good-citizenship would be politically as well as globally irresponsible. At the upcoming Doha Climate Conference, America needs to prove to the rest of the world’s nations that our days of denial are over. Superstorm Sandy showed us what rapid climate change really looks like, and Governor Christie’s cooperation with the President demonstrated what a sensible Republican can do in a crisis. Will the rest of his party please pay attention?

Warren Senders

Year 3, Month 11, Day 26: Casey Jones, You’d Better Watch Your Speed.

The Delmarva News (VA) hears some of them expert-ish types predictin’ mighty big troubles comin’ down the pike:

WALLOPS — Coastal communities including the Eastern Shore of Virginia need to begin to prepare for changes in the climate, according to two experts who spoke at the NASA Visitor’s Center at Wallops about adapting to climate change.

The climate is changing at “an increasingly rapid rate,” so much that scientists can no longer use the past to predict the future, said Joel D. Scheraga, Senior Advisor for Climate Adaptation at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Policy. Scheraga in addition to his role at the EPA has worked with the World Health Organization and the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“The bottom line is, climate change is making it more difficult for our communities to attain the goals that they want to get to in their communities. We have to begin to adapt,” he said.

More hippies. Sent November 21:

Given that scientific language is usually conservative and understated, climatologists’ use of phrases like “an increasingly rapid rate” when discussing climate change should be a warning to us all: big troubles ahead. Between rising sea levels brought on by melting Arctic ice and the rising probability of extreme weather events like superstorm Sandy, the twenty-first century is going to be a dangerous one for the Eastern US coastline, which is going to change shape dramatically in the blink of a geological eye.

While an ounce of planning in 2012 will be worth a pound of FEMA in 2030, the grim fact is that the proper time to start preparing for runaway climate change was around 1970. The last forty years of inaction (sponsored by fossil fuel lobbyists in Congress and the White House, along with the increasingly powerful anti-science wing of the GOP) is going to have painful consequences n the decades to come. Any further procrastination may make the difference between serious inconvenience and utter catastrophe.

Warren Senders

Year 3, Month 11, Day 17: You Can Leave Your Hat On

BREAKING: John Boehner is still an asshole:

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER has made some encouraging statements since last week’s election, pointing toward productive policy-making. This was not one of them:

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’ve had climate change over the last 100 years,” he told USA Today. “What has initiated it, though, has sparked a debate that’s gone on now for the last 10 years.”

The Ohio Republican continued: “I don’t think we’re any closer to the answer than we were 10 years ago.”

President Obama recently sounded some positive notes on climate change, perhaps the most neglected big issue of the 2012 campaign. His comments rekindled hopes of environmentalists that his second term will see more aggressive policymaking to combat global warming than did his first. Mr. Boehner’s words, which appear to mischaracterize the scientific debate on global warming, indicate that blinkered Republican opposition to doing much of anything about the problem may persist.

The Great Orange One is an utter waste of space. I can’t believe these Republicans, can you? Sent November 13:

The election is over; the nerds won. Statisticians and data-crunchers combined with a prodigious grass-roots effort brought victories to Democrats all over the US, and provided a spectacular view of conservative pundits and politicians stumbling all over themselves trying to explain how they could have gotten things so wrong.

But there’s another election in two years. In the realm of climate change, by contrast, we’ve only got one planet, and climatology’s statisticians and data-crunchers are unanimously warning us that we’re perilously close to ruining it forever. John Boehner’s years in Washington have taught him the wrong lessons; what’s needed right now is responsible action, not politically expedient procrastination. Once the full ramifications of the climate crisis are upon us, there’ll be no satisfaction for environmentalists in watching conservatives trying to rationalize their failure to take the its seriously. Speaker Boehner needs to lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Warren Senders

Year 3, Month 11, Day 16: Wake Up And Smell The Red Bull

Oregon’s former SoS is one of those reality-based guys:

Bill Bradbury figures you don’t have to be a climate-change expert to know which way the wind is blowing.

The former Oregon secretary of state, who will discuss “Climate Reality” Thursday evening at Southern Oregon University, said he has seen denial over climate change slowly fade since he began giving talks about it in 2006.

“When I first started giving presentations, it was very normal to have a small group of deniers attending,” said Bradbury, 63. “Now I don’t need to convince anyone that climate change is happening.

“The focus has changed to, ‘OK, so what are we going to do about it?’ ” he added. “There are some who believe there is not much we can do to change the direction we are going. But most believe we can change how we act and affect climate change.”

Bradbury was one of the first 50 people trained in Nashville to spread the climate-change gospel according to former Vice President Al Gore. Bradbury has given about 300 presentations on climate change in Oregon, outlining the need to reduce carbon pollution caused by dependence on oil and coal.

In addition to recent weather extremes, including the fact this past July was the hottest on record for the nation, Bradbury will talk about energy needs in Oregon and strategies to reduce carbon pollution. As part of Gore’s Climate Reality Project, he met with leading climate change scientists this past summer.

Recent nationwide polls indicate about 70 percent of the population believes the global climate is changing because of human activity.

Will our talking heads pull out of their own rears? Who the hell knows? Sent November 13:

While the 2012 election forcefully demonstrated the power of statistical analysis, it should also end the mainstreaming of climate-change denial in our media and politics.

While Nate Silver’s prediction models were astonishingly accurate, he and other statisticians were mocked before the election by commentators relying less on science than on their own inscrutable blends of gut reaction and wishful thinking. By midnight Tuesday, however, it was clear: real-life numbers didn’t match those in the Republican bubble of denial. Conservatives’ cognitive dissonance as mathematical reality overwhelmed their expectations was dramatic (and occasionally hilarious).

Well, the world’s climate scientists are numbers-and-facts people, rather like Mr. Silver. And those same Republican pundits and politicians have denied the science of climate change for decades, ignoring the profoundly troubling results of genuine analysts while extolling the expertise of ideologically-convenient denialists. Not any more — a superstorm’s far more tangible than a 100-EV margin, and when climatic reality finally overwhelms conservative preconceptions, the results won’t be funny at all.

Warren Senders