environment Politics: media irresponsibility scientific consensus seasons
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 20: All Russet Brown
The Easton Star-Democrat (DE) tells us about a study of changing leaves that reinforces what should now be absolutely common knowledge:
COLLEGE PARK – Fall colors are arriving later and are fading more quickly because of climate change, according to researchers.
The climate-driven changes are already visible in some forests in New England. Scientists worry that leaf-peeping hotspots in Maryland also could eventually see duller foliage and delays in the start of leaf season.
“It [climate change] certainly could have an impact here, as well,” said Saran Twombly, a researcher at the National Science Foundation, who studies the impact of climate change on foliage.
In Massachusetts’ Harvard Forest, data collected by retired Harvard professor John O’Keefe suggests that leaves are changing color four days later than they did in 1993.
In New Hampshire, sugar maples are shedding their leaves two to five days later than two decades ago, according to data collected by the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in Woodstock, N.H.
Warmer temperatures and erratic weather patterns driven by climate change have an adverse affect on tree health, according to phenologists – those who study the effects of seasonal changes on plants.
Peepers away! Sent October 13:
At first blush, the news that autumn leaves are changing color a few days ahead of schedule doesn’t seem like much to worry about. But the climate crisis requires long-term thinking; it requires us to extrapolate from current trends, and to integrate scientific data from as many sources as possible.
The deniers in our media and politics who claim the science of climate change “isn’t settled” should have no more credibility than flat-Earthers or those who believe the moon landings were faked; the climatological evidence confirming global warming is overwhelmingly conclusive and extremely alarming.
For millennia, Earth’s steady, predictable, and hospitable climate has allowed our species to prosper, our civilization to develop, and our capacity to understand our universe to expand a millionfold. Now that’s changing; those early autumn leaves are one of countless harbingers of a new and less welcoming future we’ve inadvertently created for our descendants. We can no longer afford to ignore these signs.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: media irresponsibility rising sea levels scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 19: Shut Up He Explained
The Naples Daily News (FL) wonders about something:
NAPLES — A national organization of scientists wants President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney to turn their attention to the sea during the final presidential debate in Florida later this month.
The Union of Concerned Scientists on Thursday sent a letter to the candidates, urging them to address rising sea levels during campaign stops across the state. The letter, which was signed by more than 120 Florida city and county government officials and scientists, also asks the candidates to address the issue during their last presidential debate on Oct. 22 at Lynn University in Boca Raton.
Lee County Commissioner Ray Judah was the only Southwest Florida elected official who signed the letter. Judah declined to comment about his decision to sign the letter.
According to the letter, Florida already is feeling the effects of sea level rise, and it “jeopardizes the health, safety and economic well-being of our communities.” The letter points to increased flooding, salt water intrusion of inland water storage and failing flood control structures as signs that rising sea levels need to be addressed at all levels of government.
Not gonna happen. Because FREEDOM, bitches! Sent October 12:
It would be wonderful to see the candidates asked substantial questions about climate change in their upcoming debates. Given the undeniable threat posed by the runaway greenhouse effect (to say nothing of oceanic acidification and thawing Arctic methane, two other nightmares emerging from our past century of CO2 emissions), it would seem absurd to ignore the problem.
And yet this is all too likely what will happen. The sad fact of the matter is that America’s economy is more like an overloaded Hummer than a nimble Prius, with multinational fossil fuel corporations in the driver’s seat. These organizations are loath to relinquish even a tiny bit of their extraordinary profit margins, even if it means denying the existence of a problem far greater in scope, and graver in consequences, than any of the issues currently occupying the attention of our media and political establishments.
This is irresponsibility of unprecedented magnitude.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists drought idiots Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 16: Our Love Is Here To Stay?
The McCook Daily Gazette (NE) reports on a panel discussion featuring a bunch of frantic hippies:
LINCOLN, Nebraska — Things are about to start heating up.
So say a panel of five environmental scholars and professionals, who presented “Climate Change and Nebraska: What Does Our Future Hold?” Saturday at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to warn of the dangers of a potential four-to-10 degree temperature increase in the state.
The speakers examined the scientific evidence for climate change, the impact this could have on the future and the steps that can be taken to assuage it. Robert Oglesby, a professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at UNL, said after considering all the factors, the one that is the cause for most alarm in Nebraska is the reduction of snowpack in the Rocky Mountains.
“We need that steady release of water due to the slow, steady melt of the snow in the spring through early summer to maintain river flow of the Platte,” Oglesby said.
Song Feng, of the School of Natural Resources at UNL, offered a study into the effect droughts have had in the United States and the likelihood of their continuation in the future.
“The drought will become the normal condition by the end of the century,” Feng said.
It’s going to get harder and harder to be a denialist in the years ahead. Won’t stop ’em, though. Sent October 9:
While it makes a good opening for an article on the findings of climate scientists, “things are about to start heating up” is a pretty misleading sentence. The mercury’s been rising for quite a while now, as witness this single statistic: July 2012 was the 329th consecutive month to exceed the global average temperature for the twentieth century. While this increase is bad news for us all, we can still make it worse — by rejecting the reality of global warming, and by blocking action until catastrophic consequences are unavoidable.
It’s impossible to imagine a more cynical and destructive approach to governance than the deny-and-delay strategy that is the modus operandi of conservative politicians when it comes to addressing the climate crisis. Self-styled “deficit hawks” who claim that reducing our greenhouse emissions would be prohibitively expensive are essentially telling us that prevention costs more than cure — a notion both logically absurd and morally bankrupt.
We cannot afford further inaction on climate change.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Gore denialists Education greenhouse effect ignorance scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 6: What The Framp?
The Monterey County Weekly runs a devastating piece by Dan Linehan titled, “We are almost completely f%#&ed— Al Gore rallies citizen deputies to break through climate-change denial while there’s still (a little) hope.” Read the whole thing. Excerpt:
If Al Gore’s environmental truth was inconvenient before, now it’s outright uncomfortable.
Last year was the earth’s hottest on record. Ever.
That triggered extremes: A drought-generated dust storm reached 50 miles wide and 6,000 feet tall, engulfing Phoenix, Ariz. Tropical Storm Irene hit Killington, Vt., which has a ski mountain tall enough to see Canada – and it’s not too often you see the words “tropical” and “Canada” in the same sentence. Typhoon Megi dumped 45 inches of rain on Taiwan in 48 hours, forcing more than 350,000 people to evacuate.
And this year has scorched 2011. Over a recent month-and-a-half stretch, the U.S. Department of Agriculture designated 1,692 counties disaster areas due to drought, with about 80 percent of the country’s agricultural land affected. This comes after Russia stopped exporting food due to weather-related crop failures and resulting shortages. The worst drought in more than 100 years hit both North Korea and South Korea. On July 15, Kuwait hit an all-time high of 128.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
National Geographic reports that between 1998 and 2011, there have been 87 severe weather events in the U.S., and each caused at least $1 billion in damages, though they were comparatively modest economically compared to Hurricane Katrina, which topped out at $146 billion. The total disaster price tag nearly doubled the cost of the previous 16-year period.
Severe weather events, like stronger hurricanes, harsher droughts, wilder floods and fiercer firestorms, are happening with greater frequency. Scientists have been warning us that this – the wallop of planet warming hitting harder and more frequently – was coming.
Good, if agonizing, stuff. Sent September 29:
There is no “solution” to global climate change, because the metastasizing greenhouse effect and its epiphenomena are not one, but a multitude of problems. What we face is a richly complex set of puzzles: how to survive in a rapidly transforming environment, how to slow (and perhaps reverse) that transformation, and how to recognize the processes that have brought us to this point in our civilization’s history.
The key, as always, is education. We as individuals and as a society must understand the factors contributing to climate change: the physics of the greenhouse effect, the chemistry of methane and carbon dioxide, the immediate and long-term costs of fossil fuels, the inherent contradictions of an economy built on a model of continuous growth, and the relentless pressure of an increasing human population.
And, while learning, we must act — as individuals, as families, as communities, as states, as nations, and as a species under threat. Oherwise, the climate crisis will offer only a “final solution.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots Mitt Romney scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 27: Suck On This!
The Bend Bulletin (OR) runs the same McClatchy story on the two campaigns’ approaches to climate issues:
Romney has said previously that he believes climate change is occurring and that human activity is a contributing factor.
During the Republican primary season, though, he said he didn’t believe it was the right course to spend “trillions and trillions” to reduce carbon emissions.
More recently, he said in a questionnaire submitted to Science Debate, a nonprofit organization focusing on science issues in the presidential campaign, that he believes human activity contributes to global warming and that policymakers should consider the risk of negative consequences.
Frank Maisano, a lobbyist whose firm represents energy interests and who has been involved in climate change discussions for 15 years, cautioned not to read too much into Romney’s dig about the rise of the oceans. It was designed to show Obama is “a little bit out of touch,” he said.
“Right now, you need someone who cares about you rather than these larger, soaring rhetorical issues,” Maisano said.
Sheesh. Sent September 20:
So according to a representative of the energy industry, climate change is a “soaring rhetorical issue.” How bizarre. When Frank Maisano suggests that discussion of our civilization’s future happiness and prosperity of our civilization is “rhetoric,” he’s really saying that the short-term profitability of his clients in the oil and coal business is more important than the world our children and grandchildren will inhabit.
When ocean acidification has broken the food chain, when extreme weather has devastated agriculture, when vanishing glaciers have ended water supplies for innumerable cultures everywhere around the planet, when rising seas have wiped entire nations off the map — will Mr. Maisano and his colleagues finally put down their quarterly reports and address the catastrophic transformations they have wrought?
To be sure, we need action even more than “soaring rhetoric.” But Republicans and energy lobbyists offer only a toxic blend of legislative paralysis and mendacious misrepresentations.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots scientific consensus tobacco industry
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 23: Show Us Your Lark Pack!
The Tri-City News (Vancouver, BC) has an excellent editorial highlighting the venal and mendacious nature of the denial industry:
There were times this summer when I thought I didn’t need science to tell me global warming is real: sweating in my seat at Theatre Under the Stars, watching the frightening heat waves in the east and avoiding golf because it was too hot.
But luckily, most of us base our conclusions about global warming not on anecdotes about extreme summer weather but on scientific research and consensus.
But not my colleague, who, thanks partly to Exxon Mobil, is one of a group of environmental deniers not swayed by the overwhelming scientific consensus about climate change.
Deniers don’t believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the internationally mandated IPCC, which has, over the last 10 years, compiled four scientific reports based on the work of 2,500 scientists from 130 countries. Each IPCC report warns of the dangers of global warming caused by man-made greenhouse gases.
And deniers don’t believe the body of literature in scientific journals, which, over the past decade, contained 928 articles on global warming, none of which included a scientific denial that man is hastening global warming.
Climate change-denying groups are convinced that global warming is a scientific hoax, a scare tactic dreamed up by environmentalists to frighten us into supporting anti-business laws and regulations.
I agree that there is a conspiracy to misrepresent the facts about climate change but 2,500 environmental scientists from 130 countries aren’t in on it. Exxon Mobil is.
Since 1998, Exxon has doled out $22,123,456 to climate change-denying groups. The Heritage Foundation ($730,000), Frontiers of Freedom, ($1.2 million) and 40 other groups received money from Exxon to help deny climate change. Even B.C.’s Fraser Institute has bagged $120,000 from Exxon since 1998.
Tareyton is Better. Charcoal Is Why.
Sent September 16:
The climate-change denial industry has worked hard for the past couple of decades, spreading confusion and misinformation about the reality, causes, and consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect. These people — the same characters who reassured us for years that nicotine wasn’t addictive and the link between smoking and lung cancer was inconclusive — are skillful, well-funded, and unencumbered by any responsibility to the truth.
But tobacco addiction’s public health consequences were limited to the smokers and their neighbors, with no multi-generational impacts. Climate change is an entirely different story, with effects that will still be felt a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years from now. It is as if cigarette smoking brought cancer, heart disease, and emphysema not just to the smokers but to a hundred generations of their descendants. In an odious bargain, the denialists are sacrificing the future of human civilization for short-term personal gain.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 19: Sunny Days I Thought Would Never End
The Orange County Register (CA) is a wingnut outpost, and they’re true to form in an editorial published on September 11:
For years, President Barack Obama has been curiously low-key about global warming, or climate change, as politically correct terminology now prefers. Perhaps that’s because, when running for office in 2008 he overpromised, declaring that his nomination would mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal.”
It wasn’t quite passing the buck, but the president altered his climate-change rhetoric slightly last week in accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for a second term. “More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke,” Mr. Obama said. “And in this election, you can do something about it.”
The president’s assurance that a vote for him will “do something about” droughts, floods and wildfires is reminiscent of his 2008 hyperbole. Climate alarmism relies on connecting disparate and often-unrelated dots in a hypothetical chain of cause and effect that is far from proven.
When climate alarmists declare the Earth is experiencing unprecedented horrific weather because of global warming and man-made greenhouse gases, it’s just so much hot air.
When Hurricane Isaac hit Louisiana, “the storm provided a rare break in one of the longest periods of hurricane inactivity in U.S. history,” said James Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute, Indeed, 2012 also is breaking records for the lack of tornado activity, according to the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration records. Ditto for droughts and floods, records show.
James Taylor, huh? I tend to lean a little more in the direction of Fire and Rain. Sent September 12:
When your dismissal of the world’s climate scientists is built around a statement from a Heartland Institute spokesman, you know you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. After all, they’re the same people who equated genuine environmentalists with the Unabomber in a scurrilous billboard campaign that was only halted after a huge public outcry. These are the same people who instituted a massively-funded campaign to insert misleading science curricula in our nation’s public schools, with the express aim of muddying public understanding of the climate crisis. Given their public record of mendacity and character assassination, Heartland’s reliability as a source of meaningful data and analysis is close to zero.
Despite the pronouncements of a few contrarians, the conclusions of the world scientific community about climate change are pretty darned alarming. They agree that we’re facing a complex and extremely dangerous period in our civilization’s history — one that will require every ounce of foresight and preparation we can muster. “Alarmism” under these circumstances is just plain common sense.
Remember that the CIA’s warnings about Osama Bin Laden in the spring of 2001 were repeatedly dismissed as “alarmism” by the Bush administration — and we all know how that turned out.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility Democratic timidity media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 13: What Was The Question Again?
The New York Times reports on the Sciencedebate questions to the presidential aspirants:
Sciencedebate.org, which counts among its members the National Academies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Scientific American magazine and dozens of other professional and academic scientific societies, was created with the goal of raising the profile of scientific and technical questions in the presidential campaign.
In his response to the group’s question on climate change, Mr. Obama called it “one of the biggest issues of this generation” but stopped short of calling for a cap and trade system or other broad national policy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, something that he had favored during the 2008 campaign. He said his administration had set stricter limits on emissions from vehicles, invested billions in clean energy research and proposed the first limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. He also said that the United States was leading international negotiations on climate change, although those talks have so far had little impact on greenhouse gas levels worldwide.
Mr. Romney, whose views – or at least, his language – on climate change have shifted somewhat over the years, gave one of his most forceful statements on the question yet. “I am not a scientist myself, but my best assessment of the data is that the world is getting warmer, that human activity contributes to that warming and that policymakers should therefore consider the risk of negative consequences,” he wrote.
I’m far from satisfied with Obama’s handling of this issue…but Romney is truly, truly terrifying. Sent September 6:
The president’s reluctance to make climate change an issue in his campaign is the result of three mutually reinforcing factors in American politics: Republican intransigence, Democratic timidity, and the pervasive influence of corporate dollars. In their obsessive rejection of environmental common sense, the GOP has turned the survival of our civilization into a partisan issue. In shying away from anything that might trigger Republican outrage, the Democrats have acknowledged the political toxicity of reality-based energy and environmental policies. And by injecting mountains of cash into the electoral and legislative processes, the world’s most powerful corporations have rigged the game in their favor.
And the erstwhile Massachusetts moderate? Romney cannot acknowledge scientific consensus without angering the tea-party voters who’ve adopted the rejection of facts and expertise as a political philosophy.
Both approaches are bad news for humanity. Politicians of both parties must start recognizing reality, not running from it.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 12: There Is No Gravity; The Earth Sucks.
The L.A. Times records both candidates’ responses on climate change issues from the online Science Debate:
WASHINGTON — At the Republican National Convention last week and in at least one stump speech over the weekend, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney used climate change as a laugh line ridiculing President Obama’s priorities.
But in comments to the Science Debate website Tuesday as part of an online debate organized by a consortium of scientific organizations, the Republican candidate took another position, similar to the more moderate stance he struck last year, when he conceded that the planet was getting warmer.
“I am not a scientist myself, but my best assessment of the data is that the world is getting warmer, that human activity contributes to that warming, and that policymakers should therefore consider the risk of negative consequences,” Romney said in response to a question about climate change.
Obama for his part seldom utters the words climate change, although his administration has taken several significant steps to combat it. Yet, as he has worked the last few weeks to draw clear contrasts between himself and Romney, the president has talked about climate change to younger audiences, often at colleges. To Science Debate, Obama identifies climate change as one of the most pressing concerns of the era and lists the steps he has taken during his term to mitigate it — and what he might do next.
“Climate change is one of the biggest issues of this generation, and we have to meet this challenge by driving smart policies that lead to greater growth in clean energy generation and result in a range of economic and social benefits,” Obama said.
We are soooooo fucked. Sent September 5:
In a political environment dominated by scandals du jour and the demands of the chattering class, it is inevitable that science in general — and climate science in particular — will get short shrift. However, it is fascinating to observe the responses from Mr. Romney and President Obama to questions about climate change.
While Mr. Romney typically says one thing to his scientific interlocutors and something else to his tea-party constituency, who regard any acknowledgement of global warming as apostasy, one can only speculate about the President’s reluctance to use climate change as a campaign issue. He may be correct in feeling that a crisis unfolding over decades lacks the emotional immediacy required for a modern electoral campaign. Perhaps as planetary extreme weather intensifies, the greenhouse effect’s epiphenomena will no longer fall outside the purview of the 24-hour news cycle. That would be good news — of a very bad kind.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsbility Richard Lindzen Richard Muller Roy Spencer scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 28: Nice Work If You Can Get It
The Arizona Star discusses the problem and tries to be even-handed, while simultaneously pointing out that the denialists are full of shit:
The following appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Friday:
It’s official: July was the hottest month in the continental U.S. since the government began keeping those records in 1895.
For years, scientists have warned that climate change is happening. They reached that conclusion not because of a hot summer like this one, but from decades of data that show slowly rising temperatures.
In 2010, the National Academy of Sciences unequivocally warned: “A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”
Americans have heard similar alarms before, and no doubt many have become adept at tuning them out, which is why we’d like to draw attention to physicist Richard Muller, a prominent climate-change skeptic who has changed his mind. Here’s what Muller wrote in a July 28 New York Times op-ed:
“Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that in my mind threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”
One reason Muller’s conversion is drawing attention: His Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project was heavily funded by the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, which has a history of supporting groups that deny climate change.
Muller’s latest scientific paper will be pawed and poked by climate scientists – skeptics and believers alike. We’ll see how well it holds up.
One thing we can predict with certainty: Muller will not convince all climate doubters. But complete agreement usually isn’t necessary or achievable in science. Heck, there are still physicists who don’t think Einstein got it right.
Climate is complex and doesn’t yield easily to computer models and scientific calculations. Scientists won’t ever be able to predict with 100 percent certainty how bad warming will get and when.
And let’s acknowledge this isn’t just about data. Somewhere along the way, what started out as a scientific debate turned into a political, even ideological, spat. Highhanded advocates for slashing our use of fossil fuels backed extreme restrictions that would damage the world’s developed economies – America’s included. Skeptics pushed back, as aggravated by the righteousness of the climate-change Cassandras as by their doubts about the underlying – and incomplete – science.
Sent August 23:
Now that erstwhile skeptic Richard Muller has satisfied himself that the science of global warming is real and indisputable, the doubters are running out of scientists to reassure them that the greenhouse effect isn’t really happening. Leaving aside the voices of a few television weather forecasters and a phalanx of conservative pundits, the only scientists still supporting the denialist side are MIT’s Richard Lindzen and the University of Alabama’s Roy Spencer — names certain to appear frequently in the coming months as the evidence confirming climate change continues to accumulate.
Lindzen is notorious for his continued refusal to accept a causal relationship between cigarettes and lung cancer, and Spencer’s papers have been repeatedly debunked. Sure, these two contrarians could still be right, and thousands of climatologists could be wrong. But American energy and environmental policies should be based on the worldwide scientific consensus, not a handful of extreme minority opinions.