environment Politics: assholes idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus Storms
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 14: Semolina Pilchard?
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s energy writer, Thomas Content, is one of many to stir the climate-change pot a bit. His column for November 10 is titled “Climate change is here, even if election skipped it.” Indeed:
Neither climate change nor the wacky weather of 2012 stirred much attention during the presidential campaign – a couple of conflicting snippets during the political conventions, a brief line in President Barack Obama’s election night victory speech, a mention here or there.
But climate scientists say the record warm weather of the past year, punctuated by extreme events such as superstorm Sandy in the Northeast, provides a glimpse of things to come and should push the issue higher on the list of national priorities.
Already, businesses, households and governments in Wisconsin are dealing with some of the climate-related changes that scientists expect to proliferate as the planet warms.
The extremes that Wisconsin has experienced this year include a record warm winter, a severe drought that gripped much of the country, and widespread flash flooding in far northwestern Wisconsin.
“A lot of these things that we’re seeing are the kinds of things that we might expect more of in the future,” said Dan Vimont, climate scientist and leader of an ongoing research and public outreach project, the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts.
One can hope our culture will wake up. The comments on the article, however, are not encouraging. Sent November 12:
As climate change disrupts the regional ecologies in which they flourished, innumerable species of animals are migrating to new territories in search of food and resources. We can observe these shifts dispassionately, through the eyes of science — while recognizing that many of these adaptive behaviors are bad news for our own species and for the civilization we’ve built. While millions of acres of new territory to colonize is great news for the mountain pine beetle, there’s no upside for us in watching once-green forests turn into dessicated matchsticks waiting for a spark to surrender their trapped carbon to the atmosphere.
Our inability to address climate change — or even simply to acknowledge its existence in our national discussion — is the central failure of our age. While an insect or mammal species can move onward to a new ecological niche, humanity’s “niche” is Earth itself. Where shall we go when our planetary home no longer welcomes us?
It’s time for our politicians to do the math on climate change. Further delay is unacceptable.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 13: POW! ZAP! SPLAT!
The Kansas City Star asks, “Post-Sandy and post-election, will political taboo on climate change be lifted?” Gee, what do you think?
Even before President Barack Obama took the stage for his victory speech Tuesday night, environmentalists were laying out their expectations for his second term: act on climate change, whether it’s through sweeping legislative action, regulatory rules or decisions like blocking the Keystone XL pipeline.
Just minutes after the race was called Tuesday, the group 350.org announced a Keystone XL protest on Nov. 18. Young climate activists who joined the celebration outside the White House held up a sign saying “Sandy Demands Climate Action Now,” a reference to the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy.
One line in Obama’s victory speech gave the green groups hope that he might act.
“We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt, that isn’t weakened by inequality, that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet,” the president said.
But taking action to achieve those goals isn’t going to be easy. While more than a dozen legislators targeted by environmental groups for their votes on clean energy and climate change bills were defeated in the election, neither chamber switched parties. With the status quo likely to continue in Congress, environmental groups say they’ll pressure the White House to continue, or amplify, its work of the last four years.
We’ve got a lot of work ahead. Sent November 11:
The mere existence of a “political taboo” on discussion of climate change is a shameful indictment of our news media and our systems of governance. Because of the atmosphere of hyper-partisanship artificially generated over the last several decades by conservative commentators and politicians, rational discussion has been all but impossible either in the halls of Congress or on our national news networks. Perhaps the nationwide rejection of conservative ideology in the recent election will bring this paralysis to an end; a recent survey reveals that more than two-thirds of Americans believe global warming poses a serious threat to our future.
It’s time for conservative legislators to stop interfering with principled policies designed to address the accelerating greenhouse effect and its consequences. Simple cost-benefit calculations reveal that, when it comes to the climate crisis, a billion spent in prevention and mitigation is worth a trillion spent in after-the-fact cleanup and repair.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 10: Got To Get You Into My Life
Eugene Robinson of the WaPo, printed here in the Richmond, Indiana, Palladium-Item:
WASHINGTON — We’ve had two once-in-a-century storms within the span of a decade. Hurricane Sandy seems likely to be the second-costliest storm in U.S. history, behind Hurricane Katrina. Lower Manhattan is struggling to recover from an unprecedented flood and the New Jersey coast is smashed beyond recognition.
Will we finally get the message?
How, at this point, can anyone deny the scientific consensus about climate change? The traditional dodge — that no one weather event can definitively be attributed to global warming — doesn’t work anymore. If something looks, walks and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Especially if the waterfowl in question is floating through your living room.
For decades now, researchers have been telling us that one of the effects of climate change would be to make the weather more volatile and violent. Well, here we are.
And here we will remain, perhaps for the rest of our lives. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humans began burning fossil fuels in earnest, the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by an incredible 40 percent. We have altered the composition of the air.
Nate Silver:Dick Morris — James Hansen:Willie Soon. Reality rox:
Now that the post-election period of reflection has arrived, we can begin to understand how number-crunchers like the New York Times’ Nate Silver got it right, while conservative pundits without exception got it so wrong. By relying exclusively on data that confirmed their own preconceptions, the prognosticators of the right wing built a bubble of denial that was finally shattered by a flood of real, irrefutable, data — votes. The statisticians were right all along.
And what if those math-and-science types are also right on climate change? If the research and analyses of respected climatologists like James Hansen and Michael Mann weren’t part of a liberal hoax after all? Why, that would mean that the GOP’s reality-rejection strategy has cost America (and the world) over twelve years of preparation and mitigation — years we’ll never get back. When it comes to climate change, it’s time for conservatives to face the facts — and the future.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism false equivalency media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 9: Fair And Balanced: 50% Truth, 50% Lies
The Arizona Daily Star reprints Eugene Robinson’s column from the Washington Post, in which he wonders:
We’ve had two once-in-a-century storms within the span of a decade. Hurricane Sandy seems likely to be the second-costliest storm in U.S. history, behind Hurricane Katrina. Lower Manhattan is struggling to recover from an unprecedented flood and the New Jersey coast is smashed beyond recognition.
Will we finally get the message?
How, at this point, can anyone deny the scientific consensus about climate change? The traditional dodge – that no one weather event can definitively be attributed to global warming – doesn’t work anymore. If something looks, walks and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Especially if the waterfowl in question is floating through your living room.
For decades now, researchers have been telling us that one of the effects of climate change would be to make the weather more volatile and violent. Well, here we are.
And here we will remain, perhaps for the rest of our lives. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humans began burning fossil fuels in earnest, the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by an incredible 40 percent. We have altered the composition of the air.
Rupert Murdoch has a lot to answer for. He’s not the only one, but he’s a biggie on the list of climate criminals. Sent November 3:
Hurricane Sandy’s devastation has indeed brought the metastasizing greenhouse effect back in the national spotlight. But is our chronically distracted American media up to the challenge of addressing a long-term issue fraught with compounded interdependencies and complex variables? Because this country’s politicians are for the most part creatures of the media, taking their cues from the opinions of well-paid professional pundits, this is a crucial question.
Any scientist who’s experienced media coverage of his or her work can attest that the standard of scientific literacy in our print and broadcast media is shockingly low. Statistics are misunderstood, misrepresented and misreported; tentative conclusions are broadcast as breathless fact; robust correlations are dismissed; false equivalencies are rampant.
Can an accelerating planetary crisis motivate our news establishment to handle climate change with higher standards of reportorial accuracy and integrity? Far beyond Tuesday’s election, this is the crucial question of our time.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: capitalism economics media irresponsibility rising sea levels scientific consensus Storms
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 8: When You Need Advice On Running An Army, Be Sure To Ask A Hippie
Well, it looks like Wall Street got wet. Forbes Magazine asks, “What If Mike Bloomberg Is Right And A Climate Change Nightmare Is Here?”
Lower Manhattan was almost entirely without power, probably until tomorrow. Staten Island was devastated. At least 38 New Yorkers are dead. The devastation in the nearby Jersey Shore is even worse. Nobody knows when the subway system will be running between Manhattan and other boroughs again. It’s true, as ProPublica pointed out, that the hospital evacuations are part of an epidemic of hospital generators failing during natural disasters, and that the generators were, in the words of NYU Langone trustee Gary Cohn, “not state-of-the art and not in the most state-of-the art location.” We couldn’t come to emotional terms with the destruction a fourteen foot wall of water could do to this city. Now we don’t have any choice.
“In just 14 months, two hurricanes have forced us to evacuate neighborhoods — something our city government had never done before. If this is a trend, it is simply not sustainable,” wrote New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in his endorsement of President Barack Obama. “Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be — given this week’s devastation — should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.”
Why not ask some climatologists for advice on your investment strategies? That’d probably work as well or better than asking an apologist for capitalism for his opinion on climate. Sheesh. Better late than never, I suppose. Sent November 2:
What if Mike Bloomberg is right on climate change? A very good question indeed, but not the one that really needs asking.
If it takes an extreme weather event of Sandy’s magnitude to get him to recognize that climate scientists knew what they’ve been talking about all along, what does that say about the ability of the private sector to recognize and acknowledge expertise in any area? If environmentalists’ predictions are coming true, can the business community even realize that it’s been on the wrong side of both science and history?
If business leaders finally acknowledge that climate change is real, human-caused and dangerous to humanity, can they take the next step, and recognize that our planet’s resources and resilience are finite, and cannot support an economic model predicated on continuous growth? Can market capitalism transform itself into an agent of long-term sustainability rather than accelerating consumption and waste?
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: denialism extreme weather innumeracy scientific consensus Storms systemic causation
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 6: Because…Freedom!
The Erie Times-News is one of a number of papers featuring this article about the scientific perspective on our recent FrankenStorm:
WASHINGTON — Climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer stood along the Hudson River and watched his research come to life as Hurricane Sandy blew through New York.
Just eight months earlier, the Princeton University professor reported that what used to be once-in-a-century devastating floods in New York City would soon happen every three to 20 years. He blamed global warming for pushing up sea levels and changing hurricane patterns.
New York “is now highly vulnerable to extreme hurricane-surge flooding,” he wrote.
For more than a dozen years, Oppenheimer and other climate scientists have been warning about the risk for big storms and serious flooding in New York.
Still, they say it’s unfair to blame climate change for Sandy and the destruction it left behind. They cautioned that they cannot yet conclusively link a single storm to global warming, and any connection is not as clear and simple as environmental activists might contend.
It would be a good thing to learn about systemic causation. Sent October 31:
When it comes to climate change and the increasing likelihood of catastrophic storms like Hurricane Sandy, we need a new way of discussing causation. It is absurd to say that global warming “caused” Sandy — but it’s also absurd to say that a particular cigarette “caused” a case of lung cancer. There are direct causes (the baseball that caused your broken window), and there are “systemic” causes, which are no less real for being harder to isolate. The relationship between smoking and lung cancer is one example of systemic causation, as is that between drunk driving and auto accidents, and that between increased atmospheric CO2 and the likelihood of extreme weather.
While precise scientific language won’t allow responsible climatologists to claim direct causation, hardly any doubt that global heating systemically causes events like Hurricane Sandy.
Here’s another example of systemic causation: the relationship between statistical ignorance and climate-change denialism.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility scientific consensus Storms
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 4: I Know You Are, But What Am I?
The L.A. Times wonders whether Hurricane Sandy is possibly related to, you know, that climate change thingy?
As Hurricane Sandy bears down on the Eastern seaboard — laden with predictions of drenching rains, fierce winds, snow and extensive damage — some scientists are pointing out ways that climate change might be influencing hurricanes.
No single weather event, be it drought, snowfall or hurricane, is caused by climate change, climatologists say. Rather, climate change amplifies the intensity or duration of extreme weather, akin to “putting hurricanes on steroids,” writes Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist for the National Wildlife Federation, an environmental advocacy group.
“The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question,” writes Kevin E. Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”
Hurricane Sandy poses several threats. Vast and slow-moving, it is expected to pour drenching rains and unleash powerful winds in the Northeast over a protracted period, perhaps several days.
No way they’re going to print this one. Sent October 28:
Despite sober and careful analyses from climatologists pointing out that a heating atmosphere makes extreme storms and anomalous weather increasingly likely, the conservative voices in politics and the media are certain to tell us that Sandy is an “isolated incident,” which cannot be definitively attributed to the accelerating greenhouse effect — even when specific triggering factors (such as a warming ocean) are obviously present.
Indeed. And as those same pundits and politicians hasten to reassure us, the steady drumbeat of right-wing hate on talk radio has nothing to do with the frequent outbursts of violence from the ultra-conservative fringe. Each gun-toting lunatic is an “isolated incident” which cannot be definitively attributed to the accelerating atmosphere of apocalyptic hatred generated by shock jocks and their enablers — even when specific triggering factors (such as a shelf of books by those same polarizing figures) are obviously present.
No connection. None at all.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: assholes denialists Education idiots scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 3: Don’t Think Of An Elephant!
Those crazy Kansans are at it again:
Kansas State Board of Education races this year are shadowed by an emerging conflict over science standards for public schools — and it’s not all about evolution.
Climate change is emerging as a potential political flashpoint in Kansas and possibly 25 other states working with the National Research Council on common standards. If adopted, the guidelines could encourage public schools to spend far more time teaching students about the Earth’s climate and how human activity affects it.
Kansas state school board candidates are used to questions about the state’s science standards because of past debates about how evolution should be taught, but the possibility of a similar debate about climate change is a new twist as the Nov. 6 election approaches. Five of the board’s 10 seats are on the ballot, and three races are contested.
The winners, along with the hold-over board members, are expected to vote on new science standards early next year. At least a few conservative Republicans in Kansas are wary of what the standards will say about climate change amid support from educators and scientists for addressing the topic more thoroughly than in the past.
“When you’re looking at 100 scientists, you’ve got 90-some, high 90s, that have no question about climate change, and so for them, they have no problem with that being in,” said John Richard Schrock, a veteran biology professor at Emporia State University.
But, he acknowledged, to others, “It looks political.”
We are sooooooo fucked. Sent October 27:
As the East coast prepares for an oncoming superstorm, and the corn belt struggles to recover from a season of devastating drought, it beggars belief that climate-change denialist positions are under serious consideration for inclusion in Kansas’ science curricula. If, as the Emporia biology professor notes, the subject “looks political,” that’s not because it’s under any serious scientific dispute, but because a group of cynical, profit-hungry opportunists have exploited a complacent and complaisant media to push the spurious notion that there still remains any meaningful dispute about the existence, causes and genuine dangers presented by climate change.
Conservatives’ conflation of scientific methodology with religious doctrine is revealing. For these folk, the notion of a gradually-strengthening scientific consensus supported by empirical evidence and the logical analysis of data is simply another dogma. Americans should reject such thinking as more appropriate to an earlier, and far more barbaric, chapter in human history.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama idiots media irresponsibility Mitt Romney Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 2: But They Say There’s A Hell. What The Hell? What The Hell Do They Think THIS Is?
The Dallas Daily News runs a NYT article on climate ignorage in the Presidential campaign:
WASHINGTON — For all their disputes, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney agree that the world is warming and that humans are at least partly to blame. It remains wholly unclear what either of them plans to do about it.
Even after a year of record-smashing temperatures, drought and Arctic ice melt, none of the moderators of the four general election debates asked about climate change, nor did any of the candidates broach the topic.
Throughout the campaign, Obama and Romney have seemed most intent on trying to outdo each other as lovers of coal, oil and natural gas — the very fuels most responsible for rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Obama has supported broad climate change legislation, financed extensive clean energy projects and pushed new regulations to reduce global warming emissions from cars and power plants. But neither he nor Romney has laid out a legislative or regulatory program to address the fundamental questions arising from one of the most vexing economic, environmental, political and humanitarian issues to face the planet.
Should the United States cut its greenhouse gas emissions, and, if so, how far and how fast? Should fossil fuels be more heavily taxed? Should any form of clean energy be subsidized, and for how long? Should the United States lead international mitigation efforts? Should the nation pour billions of new dollars into basic energy research? Is the climate system so fraught with uncertainty that the rational response is to do nothing?
Many scientists and policy experts say the lack of a serious discussion of climate change in the presidential contest represents a lost opportunity to engage the public and to signal to the rest of the world U.S. intentions for dealing with what is, by definition, a global problem that requires global cooperation.
“On climate change, the political discourse here is massively out of step with the rest of the world, but also with the citizens of this country,” said Andrew Steer, the president of the World Resources Institute and a former special envoy for climate change at the World Bank. “Polls show very clearly that two-thirds of Americans think this is a real problem and needs to be addressed.”
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along, move along. Sent October 26:
It must be difficult to be Mitt Romney — agreeing on one hand with the scientists who’ve studied the problem of climate change, yet prevented from stating his agreement definitively in public by the anti-intellectual intransigence of the tea-party conservatives who comprise his (not entirely willing) electoral base. Given Romney’s pathological aversion to a definite commitment on anything beyond the idea that he deserves to be president, such cowardice is understandable, although hardly a recommendation for the position he seeks.
President Obama’s reluctance to discuss climate change, however, most likely springs from a strategic avoidance of controversy. Given the firestorm of opprobrium engendered by his adoption of Republican ideas about health care, one can only imagine the howls of outrage from conservatives were he to actually make the long-term future of our civilization a legislative priority. Through judicious executive orders, he has made significant strides on energy efficiency and environmental responsibility without engaging our know-nothing congress the futile and ugly wrangling that characterized the eventual passage of the Affordable Care Act.
While neither candidate represents an optimal choice for those cognizant of the magnitude of the climate crisis, there is no equivalence between their respective silences on the subject.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists droughts Rex Tillerson scientific consensus sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 25: Also Younger Than The Sun
The Belleville News-Democrat (IL) runs an opinion piece on the need for a transformation in our way of thinking about the environment:
For decades environmentalists have been guided in their work by what became known as the “precautionary principle.” This decision-making guide was first put forward in environmental terms by pioneering naturalist and biologist Aldo Leopold in his landmark 1940s essay “Round River.”
His focus was the complexity of the environment.
“If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering,” Leopold wrote.
This is the major logic behind the Endangered Species Act, the strongest environmental law ever written. For the United States to allow a species to go extinct, it must go through an exhaustive process that is politically perilous.
This imperative has strong support. John Turner, the director of the U.S. Wildlife Service under George H.W. Bush, was a Republican president of the Wyoming Senate and a rancher. He regularly told a story of how his grandfather had kept all of the broken farm equipment he ever owned.
“My granddad and my dad used to say ‘It’s important to save all the parts,’ ” Turner said. “You never know when you’re going to need them.”
Protecting all the parts was a daunting task before. In the face of climate change that could dramatically transform or destroy ecosystems across the globe, it has become impossible.
This is a fairly generic letter; it could go to any source that admits the existence of the problem. Sent October 18:
Earlier this year, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson finally admitted that climate change was both real and caused by human activity. But the oil baron also blithely asserted that humanity would adapt; the problem, he said, was essentially one of “engineering.”
Well, maybe so. Our innovative, forward-looking, technological species will undoubtedly find ways of fixing some of what we’ve broken and restoring some of the things we’ve destroyed. But as environmentalist Bill McKibben asked recently, “What are you going to develop that replaces Iowa?” Global warming is going to drastically reduce agricultural yields, which is hard to reconcile with our expanding global population. Unless we address the causes of the climate crisis, adopting better farming practices essentially amounts to putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
And if climate change can actually be “solved by engineering,” isn’t it time for our fossil-fueled politicians to stop denying the existence of the crisis — and instead aggressively fund the engineers and scientists we’ll be needing more than ever over the coming decades?
Warren Senders