atheism Education environment: idiots morality religion scientific consensus scientific method timescale
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 1, Day 21: I Do Not Believe You Are An Idiot. My Choice Of Verb Is More Accurate: I KNOW You’re An Idiot.
The Anchorage (AK) Daily News reprints an Op-Ed from the Kansas City Star of a few days ago, titling it “The Costly Ignorance Of Climate”:
The overwhelming number of scientists who believe in climate change scored another “victory” in 2012.
Unfortunately, because of timid political leadership in the United States and around the world, the war against global warming is still being lost.
Scientists have long warned that man-made greenhouse gases are heating up the Earth. They added more evidence to their arsenal when the contiguous United States recorded its hottest year ever in 2012. The average temperature was 55.3 degrees, smashing the 1998 record by one full degree, an incredible leap given the usually small changes in these kinds of measurements.
The New York Times reported other worrisome facts: 34,008 daily high records were established at U.S. weather stations but only 6,664 record lows in 2012.
Worldwide, the average temperature is expected to come in as one of the 10 warmest ever, with all of those occurring in the last 15 years.
Always happy to mock the faithful. January 14:
There’s no doubt among people who pay attention to the evidence that climate change is a dangerous reality. Self-styled “skeptics” confuse incomprehension with intellectual honesty; the root of the problem lies in a word we hear too often in the discussion of the burgeoning greenhouse effect and its consequences. “Believe.”
Scientists’ relationship with reality is vastly different from the faithful’s relationship to their religions. You’ll never hear a religious adherent say that they’ve evaluated the data and are prepared to accept their creed’s validity within two standard deviations, and you’ll never hear a climatologist say they “believe” in climate change. Scientists accept the evidence for climate change because they understand how that evidence was collected and analyzed, and their evaluation of other possible explanations for that evidence suggests that the consensus explanation is the correct one.
To conflate the concepts of belief and understanding is to do both science and religion a disservice. And when this confusion makes concerted international action on global climate change less likely, it makes risible religion’s claims to moral ascendancy.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 1, Day 12: ‘Twas In Another Lifetime, One Of Toil And Blood
A doctor dude named Howard Frumkin waxes shrill on the pages of the Seattle Times, discussing the large-scale health impacts of climate change:
HERE’S a riddle: What do the Oklahoma dust bowl, smoke in Wenatchee, mold on Long Island and Washington’s oyster industry have in common?
And why would a doctor, like me, care?
The common link is climate change. We must act now to stop it.
Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, “The Dust Bowl,” recounts how reckless land management, combined with severe heat waves and drought during the 1930s, triggered a catastrophe — loss of soil, destruction of farms, displacement of people.
Record-breaking wildfires dominated the news last summer. Vast tracts of forest and grassland in central Washington and across the west were destroyed. People breathed higher levels of smoke than on the most polluted days in Beijing or Mexico City.
“Rockaway cough,” not to mention rashes, asthma, injuries and carbon-monoxide poisoning, are filling the emergency departments and relief centers of Long Island and New Jersey, as the victims of Superstorm Sandy endure numerous hazardous exposures in their efforts to clean up and rebuild.
The guy is obviously a supporter of the Kenyan usurper, so we should discount everything he says. Sent January 7:
Dr. Howard Frumkin’s column is a crucial reminder of what the climate crisis portends for our future. That this includes a diverse array of public-health impacts is undeniable to any who can examine the evidence without first donning the distorting lenses of anti-science conservatism. Unfortunately, the Republican climate-denial mechanism is well-funded (thanks to the generosity of the oil and coal industries) and well-promoted (thanks to a complaisant media which values irrelevant controversy over facts and expertise).
A physician like Dr. Frumkin will recognize this behavior. Just as a patient may vehemently reject a frightening diagnosis, the GOP’s blustery avoidance of an inconvenient reality is merely a childlike form of magical thinking. But climate-change denial is no match for the obdurate, implacable laws of physics; the sooner conservatives realize this, the more chance we have of rising to meet the challenges of the coming centuries.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: clouds economics geo-engineering scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 1, Day 11: Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on one of our technological back-up plans:
One afternoon last fall, Armand Neukermans, a tall engineer with a sweep of silver bangs, flipped on a noisy pump in the back corner of a Sunnyvale lab. Within moments, a fine mist emerged from a tiny nozzle, a haze of salt water under high pressure and heat.
It didn’t look like much. But this seemingly simple vapor carries a lot of hope – and inspires a lot of fear. If Neukermans’ team of researchers can fine-tune the mechanism to spray just the right size and quantity of salt particles into the sky, scientists might be able to make coastal clouds more reflective.
The hope is that by doing so, humankind could send more heat and light back into space, wielding clouds as shields against climate change.
The fear, at least the one cited most often, is that altering the atmosphere this way could also unleash dangerous side effects.
“Ten years ago, people would have said this is totally wacky,” Neukermans said. “But it could give us some time if global warming really becomes catastrophic.”
When, not if. Sent January 6:
While the prospect of geoengineering technologies for mitigating climate change’s effects is terrifying, the crisis allows for no non-terrifying outcomes. We’re midway through a mass extinction of a magnitude unprecedented in human history; our greenhouse emissions have achieved a critical mass sufficient to forestall an ice age 50,000 years from now (even if we completely stopped burning fossil fuels today); melting methane in the Arctic has transformed the “Venus effect” from a never-in-a-million-years nightmare to a statistically significant probability.
There’s no single cause of the climate disaster, and no single solution. But the business-as-usual approach which has brought us to this point must be rejected; we humans must transform ourselves, our communities, and our nations — putting the survival of our species above our short-term gratification. Armand Neukermans’ work on increasing cloud reflectivity could never as dangerously uncontrolled an experiment on Earth’s atmosphere as the multi-century endeavor known as industrial civilization.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment: atheism Jesus religion sustainability timescales
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 1, Day 10: The Moans Of The Damned
The Whittier Daily News (CA) speaks about the question of faith and the environment:
Throughout all of California and the rest of the country, the faith community has been working for many years to preach the gospel of good stewardship of our shared environment.
Amid theological differences, we have fostered a shared sense of purpose and urgency that unites us in solidarity with our local and global communities, especially those most vulnerable to climate change.
The action that results from this shared sense of purpose goes far beyond a congregation’s four walls. People of faith bring shared principles – such as working for the common good, caring for our neighbors, and working for economic justice – into the public policy arena.
For example, the California faith community strongly supported the passage and implementation of Assembly Bill 32, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. This bill, which was fully implemented on Jan. 1, 2013, aims to cut carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, addressing both global -climate change as well as regional air pollution.
But even policy change in itself is not enough to address the crisis we are currently facing as people of faith struggle with the power to indelibly alter God’s Creation and affect the lives of many generations that come after us.
The environmental crisis is at root a spiritual crisis. To remedy this we must begin to build a new relationship with the earth. That means answering the call to be good stewards of Creation and understanding that the “environment” is not a nebulous “out-there” reality; rather it is intimately connected with our lives and our spiritual development.
This value system is not incompatible with economic growth. On the contrary, the clean technology sector is a major factor in building California’s economy. According to a recent Next 10 report, the clean tech sector grew by 53 percent from 1995-2010, while jobs in the wider economy grew by 12 percent. When we care for the environment, we are caring for the health, livelihood and economic situation of our neighbors and ourselves.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning. Sent January 5:
Attempts to reconcile the demands of long-term sustainability with Christian theology are more complex and problematic than they seem at first blush. While many modern Christians have rejected the notion of Armageddon, a substantial number still advocate for a final apocalypse; a concluding spasm of terrifying violence yielding to a paradisical afterlife for true believers.
The sustainability so desired by environmentalists is predicated on the notion that humanity’s future is open-ended, that our species has a place in the web of Earthly life and a part to play in the long-term history of our universe. These wholly laudable concepts are on a collision course with the notion that the world is destined to end conclusively and explosively, providing an eventual reward for the faithful. For the “faith community” to credibly preach environmental stewardship, it must direct its attention to the many self-described Christians who still hew to End Times theology.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes Conservatives denialists idiots
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 1, Day 5: They Seek The Truth, Before They Can Die
The Capitol Times (Madison, WI) has a nuanced discussion of climate denial in the educational system. What’s happening in WI is happening everywhere.
The far right dominates the world of “climate change denial,” which Wikipedia defines as: “A set of organized attempts to downplay, deny or dismiss the scientific consensus on the extent of global warming, its significance, and its connection to human behavior, especially for commercial or ideological reasons.”
You don’t even need to leave the state to find one of the nation’s leading practitioners. In a PBS “Frontline” program titled “Climate of Doubt” that aired in October, U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Menomonee Falls, argued that scientists have failed to convince Congress about global warming.
Which brings me to Casey Meehan, born in Janesville and educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For six years, Meehan taught high school psychology and history in the Janesville and Monona Grove school districts before returning to UW-Madison to pursue a Ph.D. in education.
Meehan has just finished his dissertation on how climate change is taught in Wisconsin schools. You might not be surprised by his conclusion: Unlike most subjects on which there is scientific consensus, with climate change the human role typically is taught as an open question.
Meehan’s initial focus upon returning to school was environmental education, but he says he noticed that not much had been written about the teaching of climate change.
“I started thinking more about how climate change is such an ideologically polarizing topic, and I was just curious about how schools were dealing with that,” he told me in an interview. “How are they teaching this topic that the public thinks a range of things about, but scientists think something very specifically about?”
Yup. December 31:
Once upon a time, political conservatives were simply cautious people who feared change — especially change that threatened their economic security or social position, as witness their early opposition to such mainstays of American society as Social Security. But somehow over the past few decades, conservatism has become resistant, not to change, but to reality itself. While this is evident in their responses to issues like marriage equality and immigration policy, nowhere does it do so much harm as in the politicized discussion of the climate crisis.
Thanks to the Right’s relentless demonization of scientists and environmentalists, even the most anodyne statements about the natural world are now considered too controversial for free discussion in schools, as demonstrated by Casey Meehan’s illuminating study of the problems Wisconsin teachers face in addressing climate change. The fact that educators cannot address scientific reality in their classrooms without risking parental backlash is a sad commentary on the scientific literacy in America — and a demonstration that conservatism has become a grotesque parody of its former self.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: denialism extreme weather innumeracy scientific consensus Storms systemic causation
by Warren
1 comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
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
atheism Education environment Politics: assholes denialists Education idiots scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
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
Education environment Gardening: agriculture biology corporate irresponsibility ecology sustainability symbiosis
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 8, Day 26: Big Bee Gets The Honey
The Kitsap Sun (WA) is one of a number of papers running a Seattle Times story about a scientist who studies flowers:
SEATTLE (AP) — University of Washington researcher Elinore Theobald is studying the relationship between flowers and their pollinators on Washington’s highest mountain. And what she is finding so far — avalanche lilies at higher elevation set seed at one-third the rate of lilies elsewhere on the mountain — points to troubling questions.
Is it possible that the lilies are struggling because of a mismatch in their timing with their pollinators? And does that, in turn, point to trouble as the climate changes?
Theobald, a doctoral candidate, is working with field assistants Natasha Lozanoff and Margot Tsakonas to understand not just how a single species might be affected by even small changes in temperature, but how biological interactions between species respond to changing climates.
It is, if you will, a burning question: The average annual temperature in the Pacific Northwest has increased 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1920, and is projected to increase an additional 3.6 to 7.2 degrees or more by the end of the century, according to the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington.
What might that mean for plant and animal communities? One way to find out is to head to the mountain, Theobald figured, where the range in elevation can be a proxy for the shifts in climate that are forecast.
She posits that understanding how plant and pollinator interactions are playing out at those different elevations today might be a clue to what will occur in the future. And if you love avalanche lilies, it might not be good.
A flower is a lovesome thing. Sent August 21:
One of the most important things to be learned from studying ecological relationships is that every living thing on the planet is connected intricately with countless other living things. Humanity’s perch at the high end of the food chain depends on the millions of complex symbiotic relationships that collectively form Earth’s biosphere — like those between flowers and their pollinators. The University of Washington’s Elinore Theobald and her team of researchers have uncovered some very troubling evidence suggesting that these examples of nature’s genius in fostering teamwork may be at considerable risk due to the rapid acceleration of global climate change.
Just as individual achievements depend on the infrastructure created by a well-functioning society, so is our species’ collective progress built on an environmental “infrastructure” millions of years in the making. While the past century of industrial growth has brought our civilization to a level of remarkable accomplishment, it has also disrupted the climate in ways that seem likely to have disastrous consequences.
If our internet goes out for an hour, we feel sorely inconvenienced. But the planetary environment is a larger, older, and far more essential kind of “world-wide web” — one we cannot afford to lose.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots morons Republicans
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 6, Day 24: If There’s A Hole Behind Your Face, Why Not Rent Out The Empty Space?
The STUPID is really thick on the ground in North Carolina. The Charlotte Observer for June 13:
With virtually no debate, the state Senate on Tuesday nixed restricting development on the state’s coast based on global warming science.
Lawmakers passed a bill that restricts local planning agencies’ abilities to use climate change science to predict sea-level rise in 20 coastal counties. The bill’s supporters said that relying on climate change forecasts would stifle economic development and depress property values in Eastern North Carolina.
The bill has sparked outrage in some circles. It was ridiculed this month on the television show “The Colbert Report.” Despite the controversy, it has repeatedly cleared every hurdle in the GOP-led legislature. In the Senate Tuesday, the only comments were a few brief remarks in favor of the measure as a victory of common sense over alarmist research.
The practical result of the legislation would be that for the purposes of coastal development, local governments could only assume that the sea level will rise 8 inches by 2100, as opposed to the 39 inches predicted by a science panel.
This story will never get old. Sent June 13:
It is easy enough to mock the ludicrous attempts of North Carolina politicians to legislate measurement, and certainly the property owners and residents of coastal areas will need something to laugh about after four or five decades of steadily rising sea levels. But it is also important to recognize that this is part of a long-standing battle: ideologically-driven conservative politicians — versus facts and experts.
Republicans have embraced anti-intellectualism with steadily increasing fervor for decades. Science, once extolled as the source of American technological might, is now viewed with fear and suspicion. Nowhere is this more evident than in the GOP’s rejection of climate scientists — whose inconvenient predictions have a habit of turning into inconvenient realities.
A Bush administration official once mocked writer Ron Suskind as a member of the “reality-based community,” noting, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” While the North Carolina legislature has learned Karl Rove’s lesson well, the Atlantic Ocean may not be so obliging.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: Arctic biodiversity ecology timescale tundra
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 6, Day 14: Sixteen Tundras?
The New York Times notes that things are changing in the soon-to-be-not-so-very-much Frozen North:
Even as insect infestations and other factors accompanying warming have led to the “browning” of some stretches of boreal forest between temperate regions and the Arctic tundra, the tundra appears to be greening in a big way, various studies have shown. The newest such work, focused on scrubby windswept regions along Russia’s northwest Arctic coast, has found a particularly noteworthy shift is under way.
In this part of the Arctic, which could be a bellwether for changes to come elsewhere with greenhouse-driven warming, what might be called pop-up forests are forming. Low tundra shrubs, many of which are willow and alder species, have rapidly grown into small trees over the last 50 years, according to the study, led by scientists from the Biodiversity Institute at the University of Oxford and the Arctic Center of the University of Lapland. The researchers foresee a substantial additional local warming influence from this change in landscapes, with the darker foliage absorbing sunlight that would otherwise be reflected back to space. But the fast-motion shift to forests will likely absorb carbon dioxide, as well.
A particularly interesting aspect of this work, to my eye, is how it reveals the potential for fast-motion responses of ecosystems to environmental change in the far north. In work I covered in 2007, botanists found that Arctic plant species were extremely responsive to fairly rapid climate shifts in the past.
Short-term thinking will whack us seriously. We get too soon old and too late smart. Sent June 4:
If you’ve got a short attention span, climate change seems to be offering all kinds of unexpected bonuses in the natural world. When Arctic bushes turn into trees far faster than scientists expected, that’s a pleasing turn of affairs at first glance — after all, trees are good. Everyone likes trees.
It’s only when your perception goes beyond a five-to-ten year span that things take an ominous turn. If climate change keeps accelerating, many plant and animal species will die out, unable to keep up with the rapid environmental transformations. While humans are famously adaptable and have shown themselves capable of survival in very extreme circumstances, we have never in recorded history experienced anything like the chaos climatologists are now nervously anticipating.
But this is only worrying if you think in decades, centuries, and millennia. Our politicians, who do their thinking in two-year election cycles, aren’t worried. They should be.
Warren Senders