Leaving the Polar Vortex and the Climate Change 'Skepticism' Cult Behind

Somewhere between 11 AM to 2 PM today, I can expect to leave the dreaded polar vortex. We expect a balmy high temperature of 18 degrees Fahrenheit today. This would still seem frigid on any other day, but given the previous few days, it's a heat wave. What follows will be a more actual heat wave --  a January thaw, with above freezing temperatures through the weekend. Believe it or not, this is also dangerous weather, as melting ice and snow freeze at night and into the morning, creating hazardous driving conditions. A lot of salt is going to be sold to keep people's sidewalks clear of ice.

Meanwhile, the vortex drifts east. Meaning that Washington will still be very cold while Wisconsin is very warm. And the people up here in the normally frozen wastes will be treated to DC loudmouths saying that cold weather in the nation's capital means global warming is a hoax -- meanwhile, we'll be watching the snow melt off our roofs in the dead of January. The contrast will be stunning and the climate change deniers will once again look like morons. DC is not the entire world. The "global" in global warming means something; it's not a synonym for "local."

And of course, once the vortex moves on from DC, we won't hear a peep about how the current weather proves global warming wrong, since the east coast gets our weather systems eventually. The weather will seem very much like what you'd expect from global warming, at which point the moron chorus of deniers will fall silent -- just as they do during summer droughts and heat waves. For them, a cold few days proves global warming is a hoax, but a decades-long warming trend is just natural variation in global temperature that real scientists (i.e., Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly) are smart enough to ignore and "fake" scientists (AKA actual scientists) attach way too much significance to.

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The Latest Anti-Science from the Conservative Flat Earth Society

In order to be a global warming denying wingnut, you have to leave logic at the door. This is why climate-deniers crawl out of the woodwork whenever there's a blizzard someplace and laugh at this whole crazy global warming idea. Remember how scientists said that global warming meant it would never snow anywhere ever again? Ha! Libtards...

Never mind that blizzards aren't usually accompanied by especially cold weather and that winter storms, like all storms, are driven by heat energy. Let's all laugh and laugh and laugh. And let's look out for stories like this one, so we can proudly parade our scientific ignorance around.

Telegraph: There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, they equivalent of almost a million square miles.

In a rebound from 2012's record low an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.

The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes.

A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.

According to climate-deniers, decades of data showing a warming planet can be safely ignored, but one season of ice recovery proves beyond all doubt that the planet isn't warming, but cooling. Because that's how rightwing science woks -- you cherrypick the data that seems to back up your argument and ignore the mountains of evidence that don't. And even that cherrypicked data is presented dishonestly.

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Republicans Struggle to Explain Their Opposition to Action on Climate

Part of the problem with the Republican Party is that they approach everything as a business matter. They seldom say what they actually believe, preferring instead to put together a sales pitch that rationalizes their positions. As I've pointed out before, this explains the constant insane Republican rape theories. These Republicans believe that all abortion is murder and that using law to force a woman to give birth to her rapist's baby is just the most sensible thing ever. But experience tells them that this position isn't very popular, so they make up BS sales pitches explaining that rape never results in pregnancy. That they don't actually believe what they're saying is obvious -- if sexual violence can't result in pregnancy, why would they care if exceptions rape and incest are written into abortion bans? They wouldn't. It would make no sense, because it would never happen anyway. They keep getting caught up in these idiotic rape theory firestorms for a reason -- explaining what they really believe would actually be worse, from a PR standpoint. So they lie and take their beating for it. It's simply their best option.

Steve Benen spots a similar situation in global warming. Republicans believe -- in shockingly large percentages -- that global warming is a massive conspiracy among scientist to either soak institutions for grant money or to actually somehow bring the world to communism. The science of climate change is part of this conspiracy, meaning the scientific consensus is likewise BS. Whenever reality butts heads with their ideology, conservatives seem to cook up a conspiracy theory to explain why they're still right -- and worse, they tend to believe that theory.

However, the capital newspaper The Hill reported yesterday that Republicans are not attacking the science of global warming in response to the president's new climate push. Instead, Republicans are "battering Obama’s wide-ranging new climate plan with arguments it will cost jobs and hurt the economy." Another case of what they really believe being a political loser? It would seem so.

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Can Gun Laws and Gun Ownership Coexist? Yes, and I Can Prove It

Wisconsin is a gun-owning state. All you need to do to prove that to yourself is show up around November. The woods are crawling with guys in orange snowsuits and hats, in search of whitetail deer. Or ask about wild turkeys when you stop in a roadside tavern. It's like asking about the Packers -- everyone's an expert. It's not at all unusual for people to be extremely familiar and comfortable around firearms and stories about hunting trips are part of many family get-togethers. In fact, we're number twelve in the top twenty gun-owning states. In the latest available figures from 2007, our percentage of gun owners was 44.4%. That means we beat out rootin'-tootin' shootin' Texas -- by a country mile. The Lone Star state's percentage of gun ownership was a measly 35.9%. We also beat out other southern states -- i.e., those supposedly immersed in "gun culture" -- such as Georgia (40%), North Carolina (41.3%), South Carolina (42.3%), Arizona (31.1%), and Florida (24.5%). Don't talk to us about your "gun culture" -- we've got a culture. You've got a hobby.

Now take a look at this map from a study on state gun deaths. In 2010 we were one of the states with the fewest gun deaths per capita. How can this be? Simple. All it takes is common sense gun laws.

Reuters:

States that have more laws restricting gun ownership have lower rates of death from shootings, both suicides and homicides, a study by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard University found.

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GOP Crazies Tell GOP Crazies to Stop Being So Crazy

It's a case of the message being correct, but delivered by a perfectly inappropriate messenger. As Republicans sort through the rubble left behind by the 2012 election cycle, they're beginning to divide into two camps: "we've got to stop being so danged crazy!" and "we weren't even close to crazy enough." It's pretty clear who's right here. After all, Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, and Allen West didn't lose their races because everyone thought they were big ol' flaming liberals. They lost because their electorates were obviously tired of rightwing frootloops.

The problem with this intra-party division is that one group bleeds over into the other. Crazy people are demanding other crazy people stop being so darned crazy.

Politico:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Monday called on Republicans to “stop being the stupid party” and make a concerted effort to reach a broader swath of voters with an inclusive economic message that pre-empts efforts to caricature the GOP as the party of the rich.

In his first interview since his party’s electoral thumping last week, Jindal urged Republicans to both reject anti-intellectualism and embrace a populist-tinged reform approach that he said would mitigate what exit polls show was one of President Barack Obama’s most effective lines of attack against Mitt Romney.

“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything,” Jindal told POLITICO in a 45-minute telephone interview. “We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.”

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Global Warming: Which Future Do You Choose?

How urgent is global warming? This urgent, according to NASA scientist physicist and climatologist James E. Hansen:

Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

Given that scenario, the statement "civilization would be at risk" seems an understatement. A better way to put it might be, "Civilization will be struggling to maintain itself -- if we're really, really lucky."

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As Science is Politicized, One Scientist Thinks Politically

As shocking revelations go, it wasn't much of one; leaked documents showed that a rightwing thinktank had a detailed PR strategy to get everyone to believe that global warming is a hoax. Among other things, the Heartland Institute would produce "modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact," with the goal of teaching the controversy, not the science.

"The scientific debate remains open," one memo reads. "Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field."

It's a strategy pioneered by creationists, which really ought to tell you all you need to know about its educational and scientific value. At first, the climate deniers claimed that the documents were forgeries. But then environmental scientist and writer Peter Gleick came out as the leaker and put that lie to bed. Gleick says he first received a document in the mail from an anonymous source, then requested more documents from Heartland using a fake name. He got them.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.

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Republicans Repeal the Existence of Climate Change

Global warming is just some crap scientists made up to get that sweet, sweet grant money, right? Never mind that this money goes to the research, not the scientists themselves, so researchers would have nothing to gain here; it's obvious (to Republicans, at least) that scientists are pulling a hoax to get grant money, which allows them to spend their days researching something that doesn't exist. I guess because it's fun.

Well, the gravy train stops here. The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday voted climate change out of existence. Problem solved. Add it to the other huge problems facing our nation that the GOP is working hard to solve, like the microscopic fraction of federal money spent on NPR or making sure the words "In God We Trust" are plastered over every blank square inch of America. You know, all that important "fiddling while Rome burns" stuff.

Sean Pool, ClimateProgress:

House Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee demonstrated their commitment to science denial yesterday by unanimously voting down three separate amendments offered by Democrats to reaffirm basic facts about climate science. They then unanimously voted to pass the Upton-Inhofe bill to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific endangerment finding on greenhouse pollution.

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Major Insurer Sounds Global Warming Alert

There are a lot of industries that would be adversely affected by global warming -- agriculture, fishing, real estate development, tourism, and timber all come immediately to mind. Shifting weather patterns means greater uncertainty for industries that rely on weather and a rising sea level means the redrawing of maps. As the world changes, the ancient evolutionary law kicks in -- adapt or die. Many of these industries may be able to adapt, but behind them all stands a second industry; the insurance industry.

As we all know from the dragged out healthcare debate, insurance isn't about avoiding risk, so much as it is shared risk. It's simple math -- bad things happen, but they don't happen to everyone. If only X in ten people suffer a heart attack in their lives, for example, those who don't have heart attacks pay into a fund that helps pay for the victim's treatment. It's like a bet -- you bet you'll have a heart attack, even though the odds are against it. And, because the insurer is willing to give you odds, the money is worth it, since the payout is the only way you'd be able to afford the consequences of winning the bet.

This is also the reason why you can't buy insurance for some eventualities. You can't insure your car against rust or the paint on your house against peeling. These are things that happen to almost everyone and are practically unavoidable. You can insure against death, but the bet there is that you'll die earlier than most people, before you've paid in the amount that the insurer pays out, not that you'll die eventually. The concept of insurance is, at its heart, mathematical and rational.

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Blizzard Knocks Out the Right's Powers of Reasoning

It's always entertaining to see the rampant stupidity that a winter storm brings out in conservatives. A big blizzard really brings out the dumb. For them, snow means there's no such thing as climate change. But it's called global warming for a reason -- it effects the entire globe. Yet a weather event over a tiny fraction of that globe means it's snowing everywhere. Or something. Seriously, I can't work up enough ignorance to get the argument to make any damned sense at all. Apparently, being a wingnut requires a special talent for idiocy that I lack.

Add in the news that scientists now believe that global warming means more snow and, perhaps, lower temperatures in the winter and the right becomes insufferable.

Robert Stacy McCain:

Global warming is a hoax, a dishonest racket. a crooked scam whose chief purpose is to provide taxpayer-funded employment for "environmental science" majors. In a truly just society, the perpetrators of this hoax would be treated like Bernie Madoff.

That's right, the fact that it snows in the winter is solid proof that global warming is a crock and that scientists should be prosecuted. Never mind that warming is predicted to raise global temperatures only by low single digits and that no climate scientist anywhere has predicted the end of snowfalls, if there isn't actually fire raining down out of the sky, the whole thing is obviously hooey.

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Every GOP Senate Candidate a Flatearther

I've decided that exercise is bad for you. Every time you light a candle, it gets shorter. Every time you take a drink of water, the glass gets emptier. Every time you draw off a battery, it's useful life gets shorter. Besides, I'm not the world's biggest fan of exercise, so this works out better for me.

Of course, this requires ignoring decades of research and the established opinion of the medical community. But I don't need some fancy-pants, ivory tower elitist medical degree. Common sense tells me that the more I work out, the worse off I'll be. It's a declaration I feel totally qualified to make: stop exercising everyone, it's killing you. It's all just a big scam to sell gym memberships and Gatorade. I don't care what your doctor might tell you, I'm just relying on good old American horse sense. And isn't that always better? It's certainly easier to understand than this pie-in-the-sky science stuff.

The above is basically the argument offered by global warming deniers. Sure, there are a few actual scientists who don't believe in global warming, but the vast, vast majority accept it. And the majority of people offering opinions contrary to the scientific consensus aren't scientists. So the odds are extremely good that anyone speaking against anthropogenic global warming is basically making my "no exercise" argument -- I'm ignoring decades of research, I'm ignoring the opinions of experts, and I'm going with my gut on this one. Besides, global warming is just as inconvenient for me as Al Gore said it was, so the science must be wrong. End of story.

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Fanaticism Disguised as Skepticism

If you've got a question about religion, ask an atheist. That's the short version of the findings of a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life poll. Pew polled 3,400 Americans and asked questions about broad religious knowledge. Of 32 factual questions, the average atheist was able to answer 20.9. Meanwhile, the talk-about-God-all-the-damned-time people -- white evangelical protestants -- managed to get only 17.6 correct. If you want to know about religion, don't ask the religious -- they don't know crap.

This is one of those "man bites dog" stories that isn't as surprising as you'd think. Most atheists become atheist after being born into some faith tradition. Atheism isn't really a religious belief (disbelief can't logically be belief), so much as it's a conclusion. And it's a conclusion reached after investigation.

I'm not posting this to blow my own atheist horn. Rather, I'm making a point about skepticism. Atheists come to their disbelief for a reason. And we do it in spite of a culture that makes faith a virtue. It's the end of a process; we look at all the facts and come to a conclusion. You can't say that an atheist wants to believe in atheism, because most religions promise a lot better things than atheism does. "You get to be worm food!" isn't the best sales pitch in the world. Atheism is what you're left with after you've eliminated all the other possibilities.

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It's Hot and It's Just Going to Get Hotter

Around the world, people are facing record heat. The UK's Guardian newspaper reports, "Record highs have occurred in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine -- the three nations at the centre of the present eastern European heatwave which has continued for more than three weeks -- but also many African, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries." In all, 17 nations globally have set records, with only one nation -- the west African nation of Guinea -- having reached a record low so far this year. In Russia, the heatwave is contributing to wildfires with the potential of becoming a nuclear disaster.

All of this follows a year that, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, tied for the second warmest on record. NASA also tells us that 2009 marked the end of the "warmest decade on record." Long story short, it's freakin' hot. And a new study by the National Wildlife Federation shows that it's not going to get any better. What we call a "heat wave" today, we'll call the normal tomorrow.

"Global warming is bringing more frequent and severe heat waves and the result will be serious for vulnerable populations," says Dr. Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist with the National Wildlife Federation. "That means air pollution in urban areas could get worse, bringing increased risk of heart attacks, strokes and asthma attacks. Children, the elderly, poor, and people of color are especially vulnerable to these effects." And, of course, this trend brings with it a cyclical problem; more heat means more energy usage. As the mercury rises, thermostats are turned down. We can't be blamed for this really -- excessive heat is extremely dangerous.

"The science confirms that the frequency and duration of heat waves has increased significantly over the last 50 years. In the United States, heat waves already kill more people during a typical year than floods, tornadoes and earthquakes combined," says Peter Wilk, MD, executive director, Physicians for Social Responsibility. "Given these worsening trends, taking decisive action to stop global warming becomes a medical necessity."

In short, we're in the middle of a slow-motion emergency. And this is what it looks like:


Click for full-size graph

That's the trend for arctic sea ice volume from July 1979 to July 2010. As you can see, it's dropping and most recently that drop has become drastic. The world is losing ice because it's getting warmer and warmer and warmer. At this point, the global warmer deniers are operating on pure faith -- the evidence contradicts their wingnut religion.

But hey, look on the bright side. Pretty soon you'll be able to bake a cake by locking a bowl of batter in your car. So that's something. It's not all bad news.

Here's a crazy idea: let's actually do something about this. Do you have any idea what tackling CO2 emissions could do -- especially now? We're talking about new markets and industries. We're talking about bringing manufacturing back to the United States. We're talking about moving from an unsustainable economy where everyone is a paper-shuffler and becoming a nation that actually produces something again. We're talking about the production of actual, real-world, tangible gears and wires and turbines and solar cells, not fancy -- but stupid -- ways to resell our own personal debt to each other.

We need to change our economy and bring back jobs. At the same time, we need to avoid a future where global temperatures are uniformly dangerous. We can kill two birds with one stone. Economically and environmentally, we can't afford not to.

Which begs the question; why aren't we?

-Wisco


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EPA Declares Global Warming Debate Over

One thing that global warming deniers really hate is being told that the debate is over. Of course, that's because the "debate" is just a stall -- at this point, they add nothing to the science and only try to find fault with the consensus. Like creationists, they only attack the science, while offering no evidence of their own. If you want proof the debate is over, then consider that even the deniers have stopped debating. But it's one thing to recognize that the debate is over and another to stop it. The Environmental Protection Agency recently took that step.

The EPA has the authority to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. And they plan to. At the end of last month, the EPA rejected petitions to reconsider the effect of carbon dioxide on the climate, saying the arguments presented were without merit. While the petitioners argued that the ginned-up "Climategate" was a good reason to back off research that showed global warming has a human cause, the EPA -- like every other scientific body that had investigated the issue -- found that the critics, not the scientists, were misrepresenting the science. The final word from the EPA; the debate is over. CO2 is a pollutant in need of regulation, the EPA is the regulatory agency to do it, and you get to shut up about it.

"Climate change is already happening, and human activity is a contributor," the agency said in a statement. "The global warming trend over the past 100 years is confirmed by three separate records of surface temperature, all of which are confirmed by satellite data. Beyond this, evidence of climate change is seen in melting ice in the Arctic, melting glaciers around the world, increasing ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, shifting precipitation patterns, and changing ecosystems and wildlife habitats." It's over, we're done here, please close the door on your way out.





Sadly, the EPA's strong response may have provided cover to allow this to happen:

Union of Concerned Scientists:

The Senate will adjourn for its August recess today without passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill -- inaction the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) called "infuriating, distressing and inexcusable."

"Too many senators put the oil and coal industries' near-term financial considerations ahead of the environment, public health, national security and economic future of the nation," said Kevin Knobloch, president of UCS. "It's distressing that the oil and coal lobbies, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and conservative news media apparently have an iron grip on our elected officials."

[...]

If the Senate fails to act -- as is expected -- it is paramount that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proceed with its plan to limit power plant, transportation, industrial and agricultural heat-trapping emissions, Knobloch said. UCS will continue to fight efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act and prevent the EPA from setting pollution standards.

There's probably not much danger of "efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act and prevent the EPA from setting pollution standards" succeeding in the short-term. Republicans are concentrating almost solely on sabotaging economic recovery to increase their chances in November. They don't give a damn about climate change. At least, not right now. In fact, all evidence points to Republicans lying low on issues other than the economy. A lot of their candidates are way outside the mainstream on other issues, so they want to limit debate to safe territory. Get off the scripted talking points and these people have a habit of wandering off into crazy land. After November, the GOP will gear up for 2012, so most of their legislative efforts will be aimed at making the president look bad. Again, wedge issues seem to be losing their "wedginess" and the GOP will probably steer clear of anything other than making the president seem ineffective.

So we've got an EPA willing to regulate CO2 as a pollutant, we've got a Republican Party all but abandoning the warming deniers... What do we need climate legislation for?

Think Progress, 2008:

In December, EPA administration Stephen Johnson rejected "California's long-standing request for a waiver from federal law to be able to implement its own landmark regulations to slash greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles."

According to new documents released today by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Johnson, a political appointee, overruled his own staff, who in October recommended that California receive the waiver. According to the case laid out in briefing slides, EPA staff believed that legally, the agency could not deny California's waiver...

The EPA, like any other executive branch agency, is not apolitical. If the president says, "We don't want CO2 regulated," then CO2 emissions will not be regulated. And, as the Bush administration so ably demonstrated, they can go out of their way to keep states from regulating CO2 on their own. As they do with constitutional principles, Republicans like to talk a lot about the importance of state and local control in governance, but they really don't walk the walk. They like it until they don't.

We need climate legislation because repealing a law is a lot harder than Republicans would have their base believe. And because we can't count on having an administration unwilling to be stupid about climate science forever. Sooner or later, an idiot or an ideologue is going to be sitting in the Oval Office and the EPA's ability to regulate carbon dioxide isn't going to mean squat.

-Wisco


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Republicans Filibustering Our Future

Global warming is a hoax. Before you buy that line, it pays to consider which side of the aisle is making that claim. If the fact that these people come from the same side as those who believe that Barack Obama is an illegal alien, that creationism makes more sense than evolution, and that George W. Bush was a perfectly competent president doesn't convince you that they're either crazy or dishonest, then consider that many of the "climate skeptics" are formerly out-of-work tobacco lobbyists. These are not the most level-headed or trustworthy people.

But these people were the winners last week, when the Senate killed cap-and-trade legislation. Opposing the legislation was the minority position in Washington, but in the Senate, the minority rules. "We've always known from Day One that to pass comprehensive energy reform you've got to have 60 votes," said Sen. John Kerry. "As we stand here today we don't have one Republican vote."

Which makes the timing of a report by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration pretty bad. A week too late to influence the debate, the new report calls global warming "undeniable."

Reuters:

Melting glaciers, more humid air and eight other key indicators show that global warming is undeniable, scientists said on Wednesday, citing a new comprehensive review of the last decade of climate data.

Without addressing why this is happening, the researchers said there was no doubt that every decade on Earth since the 1980s has been hotter than the previous one, and that the planet has been warming for the last half-century.

This confirms the findings of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which reported in 2007 with 90 percent certainty that climate change is occurring. The IPCC also said that human activities contribute to this phenomenon.

"The new report was released after US Senate Democrats delayed any possible legislation to curb climate change until September at the earliest," the article goes on. "Prospects for U.S. climate change legislation this year are considered slim."

Just great...

The report cites 10 key indicators that show that the planet is warming:


-- Higher temperatures over land

-- Higher temperatures over oceans

-- Higher ocean heat content

-- Higher near-surface air temperatures (temperatures in the troposphere, where Earth's weather occurs)

-- Higher humidity

-- Higher sea surface temperatures

-- Higher sea levels

-- Less sea ice

-- Less snow cover

-- Shrinking glaciers


This was all predicted by the "junk science" of climate researchers. "The seven indicators expected to rise in a warming world rose over the last decade, the report said," Reuters reported, "the three indicators expected to decline did so over that same period." If climate change is a bunch of hooey, how is it that climate scientists always seem to get it right in the end? Weird... It's almost like they're correct or something.

There's a move to reform the filibuster in the Senate right now. It's long passed time for a fix. There is no way that the founders of the nation intended for the Senate minority to be given a de facto veto. The prospects for reform are reportedly mixed, but I don't think there's any doubt that something needs to change. For those who'd make the "what comes around, goes around" argument, I'd point out that the filibuster is currently causing more problems than it solves.

This has got to stop.

-Wisco


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Cap-and-Trade is Dead. Now What?

Cap-and-trade is the purest form of socialism. It would be a tremendous destructive force on our market and a hidden tax that would destroy the economy. This is why Republicans and "centrist" Democrats killed it dead, dead, dead yesterday. Common sense conservatives just can't get behind it. This is why George H.W. Bush instituted a cap-and-trade system to fight acid rain -- because Ronald Reagan's Vice President was a Marxist. It's why it was the solution offered by McCain/Palin in 2008 -- because Sarah Palin is a commie. Never mind that Bush Sr's program worked, the economy didn't collapse, and unbridled socialism didn't run rampant throughout the land. Those are facts and facts are for elitists.

As we all know, conservatives hate history. If tax cuts have never worked as a way to reduce the deficit, that's irrelevant -- this time they will for sure. So by the same token, if cap-and-trade as a market-based solution was a success story in the past, this time it won't be. They have the zen of a cow in the field munching grass; always in the "now," without any past or future. The only real difference is that where cows are incapable of learning from the past, Republicans refuse to. The past is filled with facts and facts are the greatest enemy of the modern conservative, so the past is the enemy. Maybe even a lie.

But are Senate conservatives the only ones to blame here? As is always the case these days, the answer is no. By now, you know how they're going to react to something. They're going to react negatively. Without fail. Never mind that cap-and-trade was their own damned idea, Republicans are 100% guaranteed to hate it if it comes from a Democrat. Because they're children. You don't have to be a psychic to see this coming a mile away. What was missing on this issue is the same thing that's been missing on so many issues; leadership.

Andrew Revkin, New York Times:

On a host of issues, Obama campaigned as a voice of reason, willing to listen to all views, amid all the polarized shouting. But on climate and energy, he has not yet, apparently, found the strength to break free of the 20th-century-style left-right fight to forge a positive path that is true to the scope and time scale of the climate and energy challenge and could resonate with Americans, particularly the young generation that will inherit the environment being shaped by decisions, or indecision, now.

Revkin points out that Obama has given no major address on the issue, has not "invited a variegated stream of researchers and analysts of climate science and policy to the White House," and has failed to counter congressional voices of idiocy like Sen. James Inhofe's. In short, the administration has been MIA on this issue -- an issue of the utmost importance to our future.

But that may be the glass-half-empty point of view. As Revkin points out, "Could it be that the White House has concluded what some political analysts have quietly told me -- that only a Republican president could muster the Senate votes to pass a meaningful climate bill?" If that's the case, I wouldn't hold my breath. Given the '12 GOP field so far, they're going to have a hard time offering a serious challenge. And none of the nutjobs lining up for the job seems to be very interested in reality. Even if one were to wake up out of their stupor and admit that global warming was real, they'd probably blame it on illegal immigrants or abortion.

We'll pass it off to Time's Joe Klein now:

[A] Supreme Court ruling, now three years old, [says] carbon dioxide is a poison that needs to be cleaned up. Next year, the Environmental Protection Agency will begin regulating the hell out of CO2. The business community won't like that, nor will many Republicans. "Putting a price on carbon is the only alternative," says Senator Maria Cantwell, who has offered a bill--with Maine Republican Susan Collins as co-sponsor--that would force the 2000 top polluters to participate in an auction to purchase the right to spew; 75% of the income would be returned as a "dividend" to taxpayers, the other 25% would go to alternative energy...

And so, yesterday's death of environmental legislation should be considered a pre-election maneuver. Given a choice between taxes and potentially punitive regulations, the wise--the more elegant; the less expensive--choice is a tax every time.

The administration can use the EPA as a hammer to force a legislative solution and, if that fails, continue to use it as a hammer to force CO2 reduction. Reducing CO2 is not optional, it's not something we can just give up on because Republicans have chosen to be idiots about it. If they need to be forced into a corner, then release the border collies and herd them into a corner.

I just wish that border collies weren't to sweet to bite.

-Wisco


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Hillbilly Windpower vs. Gleaming Super-Science

Something that's been kind of distracting me lately is wind power. By now, we've all seen the giant wind generators, but what about smaller ones? What got me started on this line of thinking was an online argument about nuclear energy. We're going to have to look at nuclear, the argument went, because other sources of energy were either way to expensive or not viable yet. Ironically, when I brought up the problem of nuclear waste, it was countered with "generation IV" reactors -- these recycle the waste. I say this was ironic because generation IV reactors aren't viable yet either. But the proponent was a nuke disciple and soldiered on with the argument anyway. I also pointed out that nuclear is stupid-expensive -- something I knew a little about, since I'd written about it before. But the disciple countered that wind power costs between $1,200 to $1,300 per kilowatt, which is comparable to nuclear. This struck me as insane. There's no reason wind power should cost that much. It's way too easy to do.

See, you set up a wind generator and you're done, for the most part. There's some maintenance and storage batteries need to be replaced occasionally, but the fuel itself is free. Meanwhile, everything that's true of wind is true of nuclear -- minus the free fuel. You've got to mine it, refine, and enrich it -- none of which are free. And besides, how difficult can it be to generate power from the wind? Turns out, not very difficult at all.

OK, so this is a small generator, but I want you to get a few points from it. First, you could build one. And I don't mean the hypothetical "you" as in "you can buy a 747 if you've got the money," I mean you personally. You could build one. And the reason for this is also my second point: you can make one out of junk. Mr. SlickVideo here made one out of an old treadmill motor and leftover PVC pipe. You could use a washing machine motor or a pump motor or an old car alternator... You get the idea. When it comes to wind -- or solar, for that matter -- we don't need the centralized generation as much. We'd still need it, but mostly as a back up.

So what would it take to generate enough electricity for a home? Let's take a look. We'll forget about Mr. SlickVideo and observe some geeks in their natural habitat.

Did you catch the cost there? About four hundred bucks for the generator, because it's made from the wheel bearing of a junkyard van.

Now I'm not asking anyone to go out and build a wind generator (although, if you want to, knock yourself out). But what I am asking you to do is think about energy differently. Do you know how a nuclear plant generates power? All electrical generators could be called energy converters -- they take one kind of energy and convert it to electricity. In the case of a nuclear plant, the reactor creates heat, which is turned to kinetic energy, which is then converted to electrical energy. The plant is basically a steam engine, which turns a generator. In other words, it works exactly the same way a coal or natural gas plant does. Put as simply as I can, you build a huge radioactive triumph of modern science and technology and you use it to boil water. This strikes me as overkill.

On the other hand, you can use some old crap you found at the junkyard to turn the generator. Either way, miracle of super-science or Sanford & Son, you're turning that generator. Now I ask you, which makes the most sense?

Yes, we're still going to need that centralized power grid and we probably always will -- multiple residence buildings, office buildings, schools, hospitals, etc. are probably too big for the junkyard solution. And everyone else is going to want that grid in times of what I guess we'll have to call "wind drought." But the goal is to reduce carbon emissions, not to eliminate them. Get enough of these things up and running in backyards and parks and parking lots and you'll have gone quite a way toward that goal of reduction. And when they finally break down, you just tear it down and build another one -- using some of the parts of the dead turbine -- because it's all crap that's lying around anyway. If there isn't enough room for a windmill-style generator, stick a vertical turbine on a roof.

I think part of the problem here is that we have a prejudiced view of the future. We grew up thinking it would be ultra-high-tech and shiny, gleaming white and stately. Nuclear looks a lot like the future we imagined. But it may be that the wiser future is steel rods and axle grease, some PVC pipe and the wheel hub from an old tractor. It may be that going green means the ultimate in recycling -- going hillbilly.

And, if it comes down to which future I'd rather live in, I'll take a roofing tin turbine over the gleaming white mystery. The wind generator is simple. I understand it. I've understood it since I built an electric motor in science class in the sixth grade. Like the guys in the second video, I might have built even the generator myself -- and this runs into a simple circuit I wired, into a couple of old motorcycle batteries, and then into a transformer I got for twenty bucks off eBay. It's not nuclear science and that's the beauty. It's no more complicated than it has to be. Nuclear power or wind power, all we're doing here is turning an axle.

-Wisco


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For a Lot of People, Facts Don't Matter

In his Sunday column, Washington Post's Dana Milbank wrote about Arizona Governor Jan Brewer's recent claim that illegal immigrants were responsible for a crime wave that included beheadings. So Milbank did what journalists do -- he checked the story with the facts. And it was at this point that Brewer's story fell apart.

But those in fear of losing parts north of the neckline can relax. There's not a follicle of evidence to support Brewer's claim.

The Arizona Guardian Web site checked with medical examiners in Arizona's border counties, and the coroners said they had never seen an immigration-related beheading. I called and e-mailed Brewer's press office requesting documentation of decapitation; no reply.

Brewer's mindlessness about headlessness is just one of the immigration falsehoods being spread by Arizona politicians. Border violence on the rise? Phoenix becoming the world's No. 2 kidnapping capital? Illegal immigrants responsible for most police killings? The majority of those crossing the border are drug mules? All wrong.

Wow, a Republican executive fearmongering to shore up her political position. How unsurprising. Since Bush, scaring the bejeezus out of people to get what you want is often the first resort. Replace "terrorist" with "illegal alien" and you can almost quote from the exact same script.

Well, Milbank's debunking of a favorite urban legend was too much for the Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott. Sure, reporters checked with Arizona coroners and came up empty, but that's because they didn't dig deep enough. Milbank's column was BS, according to Tapscott. See, he had the best expert witnesses in the world -- cowboys.

Tapscott points to letter to Jan Brewer from rancher J. David Lowell. It seems a ranch hand was out riding on the ridge where the west commences, where he found a human head. "Although the head was missing the lower jaw, it was immediately apparent that much of the mass and flesh of the head was still present," the letter relates. "The cowboy searched the area in hopes of finding the remainder of the body to no avail."

The letter says that the head was found along a trail that many believe is used by drug runners and human smugglers. "We suspect that the head may have been placed along side the trail as a warning to other drug and alien traffickers using the trail," Lowell writes.

Here's the thing though, if you find a body part and no body, the most likely explanation is predation of a corpse, not beheading by drug smugglers. It's a sad fact that people crossing the border illegally sometimes die in the desert. Drug runners leaving the head would have absolutely no reason at all to dispose of the rest of the body elsewhere -- it's just extra work in a crime whose purpose is to leave evidence. It's much more likely that wild animals dragged the body off someplace safe to consume it -- because that's the sort of thing predators and scavengers do all the time. On the other hand, beheading people is most definitely not the sort of thing that people do all the time. Just playing the odds, predation is the most likely explanation. And, if we assume that this head was reported and examined by one of the coroners reporting no beheadings (which they all reported), those odds leap to certainty. The disembodied head was the result of natural predation, not murder. Despite the expert testimony of Roy Rogers here, I'm going to go with the coroner on this one.

But you and I both know that logic and facts won't have any effect on the opinions of Tapscott or many of his readers. Experience with political opinion tells us that many people believe what they want to believe, the facts be damned. "Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information," writes Joe Keohane for the Boston Globe. "It's this: Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."

This is related to something called "confirmation bias," which, put as simply as possible, is the tendency of people to be skeptical of information that contradicts their beliefs and far too credulous of information that reinforces them. Creationists, global warming deniers, Holocaust deniers, birthers, etc. are all guilty of this -- if the science says one thing and the true believers say another, then the scientists are wrong. If the facts contradict the hypothesis, then the facts are flawed... or even lies.

But this takes it further. We can drop scientific terms like "confirmation bias" and get a lot more earthy here -- this is pigheadedness. If I argue with a creationist, I not only accomplish nothing, I actually get him or her to dig in their heels even more deeply. In his piece, Keohane describes this as a "threat to democracy," but I think that's overstating things immensely. I'm not alone.

"The good news and bad news is that democracy has never involved a well-informed citizenry reflecting on the issues of the day," writes Matthew Yglesias. "I think the misinformation literature needs to be read in tandem with the research indicating that overall levels of political information are extremely low. Two thirds of Americans can't name any Supreme Court justices and only one perent can name all nine. The reason the system functions is that democratic accountability doesn't depend on voters knowing what they're talking about. Most people have strong partisan identities, and just vote for the same team. And swing voters' views are driven overwhelmingly by economic performance."

Put another way, the study offers a psychological truth. And, as a psychological truth, it has always been the case. There have always been pigheaded people and democracy has survived. If this tendency to believe what you want to believe in a completely fact-free bubble were a threat to democracy, we wouldn't talking about voters today. All it would take would be a few elections to destroy the nation. Democracy is resilient and can survive even stupid, willfully ignorant voters.

People may not be losing their heads out there in the Arizona desert, but they're definitely losing them in the realm of politics. The good news is that if cooler heads don't always prevail, history shows they prevail often enough.

-Wisco


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Further: Dana Milbank and Brendan Nyhan, a Robert Wood Johnson scholar in health policy research with the University of Michigan, discuss the issue of political pigheadedness on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Climategate Dies, But No One Will Run the Obit

I want you to consider what I think is an undeniable and uncomfortable fact; that many so-called "climate change skeptics" are not skeptics at all. They're like the people in the tobacco or asbestos industries denying their products caused cancer. Most of them knew what they were saying wasn't true, but went ahead with the defense anyway, believing their bottom line was more important than your life. It's not a word I use often with any seriousness, but "evil" seems to be the best word to apply here. People were dying a terrible and expensive death, people continue to die that terrible and expensive death and, if these deniers had had their way, people would always die those deaths. Meanwhile, the money would keep rolling in.

As I said, evil.

Now consider how evil it would be if that denial didn't impact a just percentage of the population, but everyone in the world. If you disagree that evil applied before, your argument just got a lot harder to sustain. If climate change deniers' campaign of BS is successful, we can expect that "Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world." What granola-crunching, hippie alarmists warned about that? The pentagon, in 2004. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," a pentagon report warned the Bush administration. "Once again, warfare would define human life." This puts the knowing denier in the position of putting civilization itself in danger and deciding that it's worth it to keep making money in the short term.

I'm not going to perform a mind-reading act and start trying to figure out who the charlatans are and who are the chumps. In terms of consequence, it hardly makes any difference. I just want you to be aware that there are people on the "skeptic" side of the argument who aren't just wrong, but willfully wrong. The rest are ideologues and idiots, either unable to think outside their little worldview-box or unable to think much of anything at all.





One problem we've been facing has been that the media has been more than happy to play the role of chump on this issue. Sticking by their foolish theory of "balance," they've approached the issue skeptically themselves, bending over backwards to tell "both sides of the story." In the beginning, there might have been some merit to this approach, but as time went on, it became more and more idiotic. The only parallel that pops into my head at the moment is showing up with a news crew at a burning building and asking, "Is it really burning?" then interviewing some lunatic who claims the fire isn't happening at all. The evidence has become so overwhelming that today 97% of scientists agree that global warming is happening and humans are causing it. Need a consensus before you'll believe something? There you go. Among the experts, the debate is over.

But don't expect the media to go along with that consensus. For websites, controversy draws traffic, for newspapers, it brings readers, for television, it brings viewers. When you stop playing to their side of the argument, the deniers stop showing up. They'll go to the wingnut media where they can be sure their biases will be confirmed. And the media isn't in the informing business, so much as they are in the money-making business. If they share something with the knowing deniers, it's that bottom line. There is no sadder day in the corporate boardroom of a media empire than the day a controversy is settled, the day a scandal dies, the day the fighting stops.

Which would make last Friday a very sad day.

Newsweek:

A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on, as Mark Twain said (or "before the truth gets a chance to put its pants on," in Winston Churchill’s version), and nowhere has that been more true than in "climategate." In that highly orchestrated, manufactured scandal, e-mails hacked from computers at the University of East Anglia’s climate-research group were spread around the Web by activists who deny that human activity is altering the world’s climate in a dangerous way, and spun so as to suggest that the scientists had been lying, cheating, and generally cooking the books.

But not only did British investigators clear the East Anglia scientist at the center of it all, Phil Jones, of scientific impropriety and dishonesty in April, an investigation at Penn State cleared PSU climatologist Michael Mann of "falsifying or suppressing data, intending to delete or conceal e-mails and information, and misusing privileged or confidential information" in February. In perhaps the biggest backpedaling, The Sunday Times of London, which led the media pack in charging that IPCC reports were full of egregious (and probably intentional) errors, retracted its central claim—namely, that the IPCC statement that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rainforest could be vulnerable to climate change was "unsubstantiated." The Times also admitted that it had totally twisted the remarks of one forest expert to make it sound as if he agreed that the IPCC had screwed up, when he said no such thing.

Big news, right? "Climategate," the one thing left to the deniers to hang their hats on, has collapsed under the weight of its own BS.

Tell it to CNN, who -- as far as I can tell -- has yet to run a story about the death of "Climategate." Yet the big news!! that Obama called Twitter "Twitters" makes CNN's front page.

News you can use.

MSNBC is no better. They don't seem to have caught the story either. Of course, if you go to their "Science and Tech news" page, you will learn about the newest video games. And FOX News? Pfffft! You're kidding, right?

Climategate may be technically dead, but that information is useless if no one knows about it. And, so far, the major TV news outlets couldn't be doing a better job of keeping that information to themselves. If knowing human-caused warming is true and arguing that the opposite is the case is evil, what is it when you know the truth and don't make any argument at all?

-Wisco


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The Nightmare Scenario

As I write, BP CEO Tony Hayward is just beginning his grilling by the Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on oversight and investigations. It's not going well. Capital Police have already pulled a protester out of the audience. If you missed it, Huffington Post has his prepared testimony here. It's not especially enlightening. This is bad, BP's doing everything they can, they're drilling relief wells and catching a bunch of oil and blah, blah, blah. I didn't learn anything new. If you care, Tony says he's "personally devastated" by this whole thing. I'm sure that makes everyone feel much better.

It's against this backdrop that I bring something extremely disturbing to your attention. Sharon Astyk at ScienceBlogs directs us to a comment in a comment thread at a popular oil news blog:

Reader Stephen B. pointed me to this comment at The Oil Drum by someone who argues that there's more going on under the Gulf that we think. For those who think it is strange that I be highlighting a comment in a thread, I should note that TOD attracts many, many petroleum geologists and other professionals, and while sometimes the comments are the same "pulled it out of my ass" as on every other website, often, the technical knowledge on offer is pretty astounding. This one passes my smell test, which is usually pretty good -- that doesn't mean I claim commenter Doug R is right -- it means I think his information is interesting enough to be worth exposing to a wider audience for clarification or correction.

I wouldn't normally pass something like this on. But the comment is detailed, sourced, and thorough enough to qualify as its own blog post and it's caught the attention of both Astyk and Mother Jones environmental journalist Julia Whitty. What Doug R argues is that all of the actions BP has taken so far are consistent with an escalating problem. And that problem is that the well site is basically collapsing into the well, which would result in an unstoppable gusher. "It's a race now," he writes, "a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it's last gasp in a horrific crescendo."

It's not my intention to pass on rumor, especially from an anonymous comment in a blog -- no matter how knowledgeable that commenter seems to be. If he's right, even capturing a significant percentage of the oil as it escapes would be impossible -- and somewhere around 2 billion gallons will spew out into the Gulf before the well finally gives up the ghost. We'd think of the Gulf Coast as it is right now -- oil-soaked birds, poisoned marshes, and all -- as the good old days. I'm not suggesting that this is happening, but I want to point out that this is possible.

And if it's possible at Deepwater Horizon, it's possible at any other of the deepwater sites out there. This could happen and, no matter how unlikely the odds, each rig increases them. How much of a risk is it wise to take -- especially when the consequences can be so catastrophic?

If this did happen, no corporation in the world would be able to cover the damage. You could liquidate the entire company and it wouldn't make a dent. The Gulf of Mexico would be become the graveyard of extinct species and the coastlines would have to be evacuated. The cost would fall on the taxpayers and the economy would take a massive hit.

Right now, I'm working on the assumption that Doug R is either wrong or needlessly pessimistic. Mostly because I've still got to get through the day. But ask yourself how badly it is that we actually need oil. Ask yourself how long we're going to keep taking this risk. Ask yourself how bad the consequences have to be before it's not worth it anymore.

-Wisco


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