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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Overlooked Earth Day

Given the awful week we just went through, it might be easy to overlook Earth Day. After all, terrorist bombings and exploding fertilizer plants and a congress more interested in saving gun manufacturers' profits than in saving American lives aren't problems to be solved by reducing carbon emissions. But the truth is that we need to remember Earth Day now more than ever. If we don't have a survivable environment, none of these other problems will matter. Earth Day comes at a perfect time -- just when we start to lose sight of the importance of the environment, we're reminded that all other problems are of secondary importance.

Fortunately, we're able to walk and chew gum at the same time -- i.e., we don't have to solve problems one at a time, in order of importance. We can deal with terrorism and corporate anarchy and gun fetishism and the environment at once. It's really not that hard. Or, at least, it shouldn't be. But our media makes it more difficult. It's not that the media can't walk and chew gum at the same time -- newspapers prove the opposite. We don't get a big log of paper devoted to one, single subject  on our doorsteps every day. But the electronic media; now there's an example of a one-track mind. The explosion in West, Texas proves that. In any normal circumstance, it would be the story of the year -- but it was unfortunately overshadowed by another tragedy.

Now, I want you to consider how TV coverage of the Boston bomb attacks went. Think back. When you tuned into your favorite cable news network, you spent one helluva lot of time watching talking heads say nothing. They'd learn something new, take the few minutes it took to report that, then yack and yack and yack about nothing. In fact, if you remember correctly, you'll remember that TV media mostly talked about their own coverage; "We're hearing a lot of conflicting reports, so we'll keep you up-to-date when things get clearer." It's an oddity that cable news won't cut away from a story -- even when they have nothing to say -- but the purpose of that is to keep eyes on screens. If you turn on CNN to get news about The Big Story and they're talking about something else, you're switching over to MSNBC. Ratings bias kicks in and we all wind up watching big piles of nothing.

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Global Warming 'Skepticism' or Willful Ignorance?

In 2009, Pew put out what should have been a wake up call for anyone confused by the politicization of science. In a study of the scientific community, Pew found that a whopping 6% of all scientists were Republican. And no serious person wondered why. Republicans had been anti-science for years; from evolution to global warming to Reagan's missile defense fantasy, conservatives have most always gotten reality dead wrong. For years, it was the argument of many on the right that there should no federal funding for HIV/AIDS research. Why? Because there has never been a "cure" found for a virus. This "we ought to just give up before we even start" attitude wasn't just proven wrong in the long run (AIDS isn't cured, but is not a treatable disease and not a death sentence), but it was deeply unscientific. At a certain point in history, there was no cure for rabies -- to name one of literally thousands of diseases. If we followed the right's line of thinking, no disease in history would ever have been cured, because no one would even have tried. "It's never been done, therefore it's impossible" is what passes for logic among conservatives, not scientists.

But there's still that 6% of scientists who are Republican. There seems to be one main difference between your average Republican and your Republican scientist -- a scientist is, by definition, willing to change their mind. For the rest of the GOP hive-mind, sticking to an argument long after it's been proven wrong is considered a good thing. And so it is that when a conservative scientist changes his mind, it's a case of giving in to reality's liberal bias.

Richard Muller, New York Times:

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.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

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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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Calling the GOP "Anti-Science" is Being Generous

As a noted climatologist and expert on all things geological, Rep. Michele Bachmann can say with some degree of certainty that she knows what caused both Hurricane Irene and the earthquake that shook the east coast last week.

"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians," she told a crowd in Florida yesterday. "We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending." Let me just point out that the right is accusing President Obama of politicizing Irene, then move on.

Shelly's not politicizing Irene, though. She's just spelling out cold, hard facts. All this happened because God has an opinion on government spending in the US. Seems to me that a being capable of miracles would be able to be a lot more clear -- maybe writing "STOP SPENDING SO MUCH MONEY!" across the sky in fire. But never mind that; the guy who supposedly runs the entire cosmos has a problem with the ratio of revenues to expenditures in one of the world's two-hundred-fifty-some nations. Call him detail-oriented.

Of course, it pays to point out that Bachmann rejects climate science. "I don't think it has been established as a fact that global warming is the issue of the day," she said in 2010. "One thing we need to do is look at the science." Think about that for a second. The evidence isn't good enough for her to conclude that global warming in a man-made phenomenon, but the science is solid that an angry god causes earthquakes and hurricanes. Worse, it takes someone of great faith to decipher what these earthquakes and hurricanes actually mean. This is the sort of reasoning that gets virgins thrown into volcanoes.

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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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A Rant Directed at the Average News Consumer

NOTE: Got a bit of a project today -- a little involved, so it's going to take some time. As a result, you get a shorty today.

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You may not know it, but there's an international summit on climate change going on in Cancun right now. Somewhere along the line, saving the world has become less sexy in terms of newsworthiness than Sarah Palin's twitter feed. So you probably haven't heard about it. It's nice to have a media that focuses on what's really important.

Among the un-newsworthy news coming out of Cancun is that global warming is going to create serious problems for the world, by creating a refugee crisis such as the world has never seen.

Guardian:

Devastating changes to sea levels, rainfall, water supplies, weather systems and crop yields are increasingly likely before the end of the century, scientists will warn tomorrow.

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If Corporations are People, They're Very Stupid People

Yesterday, we had two environmental near-disasters. In a saner world, this would serve as a reminder that we're dancing on the edge of disaster every day, with global disaster certain unless we make some changes. But this is not that saner world.

The first near-disaster was an explosion on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico -- shades of Deepwater Horizon. One day before the rig -- Marine Energy's Vermillion Block 380 -- blew, one of that company's officials complained about Barack Obama's crazy deepwater drilling moratorium. "I have been in the oil and gas industry for 40 years, and this administration is trying to break us," Barbara Dianne Hagood said. "The moratorium they imposed is going to be a financial disaster for the gulf coast, gulf coast employees and gulf coast residents."

After warning about financial disaster, Vermillion Block 380 flirted with environmental disaster -- which brings us back to financial disaster again. Maybe Hagood didn't notice, but the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon was really expensive. And it's going to stay expensive for a long time. But corporations are shortsighted -- practically by design. When your top-paid employees do almost nothing but obsess over quarterly returns, spans of five or ten or twenty years become almost foreign concepts. The corporate future lasts about three months.

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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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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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Kicking the Oil Habit

If the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher -- now going into its second month -- isn't enough to get you to start thinking that maybe burning stuff for energy isn't all that high tech or safe, maybe three new reports by the National Academy of Sciences will push you over the edge. Or maybe not.

As part of its most comprehensive study of climate change to date, the National Research Council today issued three reports emphasizing why the U.S. should act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop a national strategy to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change. The reports by the Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering, are part of a congressionally requested suite of five studies known as America's Climate Choices.

"These reports show that the state of climate change science is strong," said Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences. "But the nation also needs the scientific community to expand upon its understanding of why climate change is happening, and focus also on when and where the most severe impacts will occur and what we can do to respond."

"NAS panels study a problem from many angles, include the highest level of relevant expertise, and have their work carefully assessed by peer reviewers," says Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "They are deservedly a premier source of influential scientific guidance."





Let's face it, we've always known that oil and coal weren't the future. When we think of stories and movies set in the future, we don't think of stuff powered by burning other stuff -- unless its Road Warrior. In our heart of hearts, we've always imagined a future that was clean. No smoke, no toxic sludge, no accompanying emphysema, asthma, and cancer. Yet we now have the ability to literally pull power out of thin air and we can't be bothered with it. We need oil, oil, oil and coal, coal, coal.

Why? Because no one owns that thin air. If you can't have a wind spill, neither can you sell it. You can sell the power generated by this wind -- and solar, for that matter -- but no one sells the fuel, which in the cases of both wind and solar power is the sun. An entire industry, huge and powerful, would simply disappear. And, since fossil fuels are a limited resource, this is going to happen eventually anyway. But until that last drop of oil, that last chunk of coal, is extracted from the earth at great expense, that industry has no intention of shutting down.

Ask yourself this; why is it taking BP so long to close off that gusher? Might it be because it is a gusher? There's an unimaginable fortune out there, pouring out into the Gulf of Mexico. It's a stream a liquid gold so massive you can easily see it from space. And it's all still there, not just under the sea bed, but in the sea itself. If BP is very careful and everyone tiptoes around them, they can get a good chunk of that fortune back, while making sure the well is still viable for future drilling. Some of that oil now killing off sea life in the Gulf of Mexico is still going to find it's way into someone's tank. It may take a little longer to do it this way, but we've got to have priorities here.

And this is the problem. We've gotten to the point where the rewards of oil outweigh our own safety. If we spill our drink, we've become such out of control alcoholics that we'll suck the rag we use to clean it up. And, like alcoholics, we won't listen to reason. Everything is fine. We can handle it. This isn't a problem.

So the oil and coal companies -- the fuel industry -- take the role of enabler. We're right, everything is fine. There is no problem. Just have another drink and forget about it. Those scientists? They don't know what they're talking about. They're just trying to get grant money.

Of course, the fuel industry makes one helluva lot more off selling fossil fuels than anyone would ever make getting us off the stuff. In the monetary rewards game, saying scientists have the most to gain is completely insane. But addiction is completely insane as well, so given a choice between a harsh truth and a comforting lie, we'll take the comforting lie every time.

"This is yet another wake-up call on the threat of global climate change," said Sen. John Kerry in a statement. "These studies clearly demonstrate the urgency for Senate action on the American Power Act."

Yeah, they do. But drunks aren't famous for their attraction to reason or fact. Sure, we woke up with our head in the toilet one morning, but it's not like we do that every morning.

Everything is fine. We can handle it. This isn't a problem.

Wisco


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Debunking a Widespread Climate Lie

Tomorrow is Earth Day. The holiday was founded in 1970 and this year will mark the fortieth observance. So what was the original Earth Day all about? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains the catalyst this way:

On June 22, 1969, the Cuyahoga River on the southern shores of Lake Erie caught fire as oil, chemicals, and other materials, which had oozed into the lake, somehow ignited. The fire captured national attention and made the people of the United States aware of the many insults that had been heaped upon the environment of our nation and of our planet. It also helped lay the foundation of NOAA's major coastal resource management responsibilities and usher in the environmental protection or “green” side of NOAA.

As a result of the Cuyahoga River fire and other horrendous environmental insults -– the decline of the bald eagle from the pesticide DDT, whales hunted to near extinction, and the Santa Barbara oil spil -– Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson (1916-2005) began planning in September 1969 for an environmental teach-in known as Earth Day...

That's right. A river caught fire. A river. It was so polluted it was actually inflammable. I distinctly remember this event, along with political cartoons joking that Lake Erie was so polluted you could walk across it; a joke that was only barely untrue. I was just seven, but things like water being on fire tend to stick with you. It's the sort of weird, real-world contradiction that kids -- OK, maybe only kids like me -- find fascinating.

Apparently though, the NOAA and myself remember everything wrong. And even the late Gaylord Nelson himself -- Earth Day's founder -- remembered it incorrectly. Earth Day wasn't about what an environmental nightmare the United States had become by the late sixties and early seventies. It was all about some crazy idea every scientist on the planet had called "global cooling."





See, it comes up somewhere every Earth Day. Here's R. Warren Anderson -- billed as a "research analyst," whatever the hell that means -- and Dan Gainor, a T. Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow, in 2006. Not exactly fresh, I know, but the right brushes the dust off the same old line every year and I know I can't go a month without seeing it repeated on some rightwing blog or twitter.

The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst hysteria about the dangers of a new ice age. The media had been spreading warnings of a cooling period since the 1950s, but those alarms grew louder in the 1970s.

Three months before, on January 11, The Washington Post told readers to “get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come,” in an article titled “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age.” The article quoted climatologist Reid Bryson, who said “there’s no relief in sight” about the cooling trend.

Now I remember the Cuyahoga fire, but I don't remember a lot of "hysteria about the dangers of a new ice age." Of course, as I said, I was only seven. Obviously there's a lot about that time that I either don't remember or didn't pay any attention to in the first place. But here's the weird thing; not only don't I remember it, but neither does anyone else I could find -- that is, other than rightwingers who use this to make fun of climate scientists. And we all know about the right's respect for history.

In fact, it takes a rightwing approach to history (i.e., revisionism) to buy this, because recorded history doesn't remember this widespread global cooling hysteria either. In 2008, the American Meteorological Society went back and checked to see how prevalent this global cooling thing was. Turns out, it wasn't very prevalent at all. In looking back at published papers of the time [original PDF here], the AMS found that global cooling was definitely a minority opinion. They looked at published papers between 1965 and 1979. What they found was climate science in its infancy -- and very little talk of global cooling.

"The survey identified only 7 articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations..." the AMS reported. So, not only were published papers arguing the case for global cooling rare, but -- accounting for only 12% of the citations -- they weren't very influential.

Global cooling "was never more than a minor aspect of the scientific climate change literature of the era, let alone the scientific consensus," the study found. The report goes on to call the idea that people in the climate science community were fixated on global cooling a "myth."

Now maybe it's just me, but this idea that scientists can't make up their minds between global warming and global cooling is starting to look like a bunch of BS. And the idea that global cooling was the reason Earth Day was founded is definitely BS. Remember that tomorrow, because you might hear it and the person you hear it from will either be a liar or a chump.

Feel free to inform them of that fact.

-Wisco


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