climate change – Page 14

Who Do You Believe?

Let’s see…..Of the 2,258 peer-reviewed papers that have been published by 9,136 authors on the subject of climate change between November 2012 and December 2013, exactly one, written by a single Russian scientist, rejected the idea that climate change is caused by human activity.

But hey–what do those dorky scientists know?

An organization called the Heartland Institute has announced that its grandiose sounding 9th International Conference on Climate Change will take place at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The venue is appropriate–these are the folks who want the world to gamble on the livability of the planet going forward.

The Institute claims that “hundreds of the world’s most prominent ‘skeptics’ will converge” at the event. As one commentator noted, these “prominent” skeptics have evidently been too busy to publish peer-reviewed papers.

If these are the “world’s most prominent” skeptics, denial is amateur night.

There’s a medical officer from a Texas sheriff’s office, an architecture professor, a climate skeptic blogger named Willis Eschenbach (my personal favorite–he has a certificate in massage therapy and a B.A. in psychology). Among the (many) non-scientists speaking will be Marc Morano, a former staffer for crazy Sen. James Inhofe, and someone named Fred Singer, who has been called the “granddaddy of fake science.” Both Morano and Singer were profiled in Rolling Stone as “climate killers.”

According to the sustainability blog TriplePundit, previous versions of this conference have been funded by ExxonMobil, the Koch Brothers and the Scaife Foundation to the tune of $67 million. (Big Oil cares a lot more about its bottom line than about the world my grandchildren or yours will inhabit.)

Yep–those are the “experts.”

As TriplePundit pointed out, the problem is that millions of people don’t understand or trust science. They lack the resources to evaluate the competing claims. That creates a void, which is then filled with a PR-manufactered “controversy” funded by people with corporate or biblical axes to grind, and repeated and amplified by Fox News and its ilk.

I don’t know about you, but I believe the science. And it scares the crap out of me.

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These Folks Aren’t Climate Denialists–They’re Worse

I recently read one of those blog posts you come across these days–the kind that is so ridiculous, so insane, you assume–usually correctly–that it’s another urban legend. But this one bothered me, so I investigated, and found confirmation in the very reputable Guardian.

Like many countries, Nigeria has already begun to see the effects of climate change. So the wealthy are building a new, privatized city that will be insulated from the effects of the rising waters.

It’s a sight to behold. Just off Lagos, Nigeria’s coast, an artificial island is emerging from the sea. A foundation, built of sand dredged from the ocean floor, stretches over ten kilometres. Promotional videos depict what is to come: a city of soaring buildings, housing for 250,000 people, and a central boulevard to match Paris’ Champs-Élysées and New York’s Fifth Avenue. Privately constructed, it will also be privately administered and supplied with electricity, water, mass transit, sewage and security. It is the “future Hong Kong of Africa,” anticipates Nigeria’s World Bank director.

Welcome to Eko Atlantic, a city whose “whole purpose”, its developers say, is to “arrest the ocean’s encroachment.”

And who will occupy this new, privatized fortress against the elements? Certainly not the millions of poor Nigerians who will be left to fend for themselves–quite literally abandoned to the elements.

Those behind the project – a pair of politically connected Lebanese brothers who run a financial empire called the Chagoury Group, and a slew of African and international banks – give a picture of who will be catered to. Gilbert Chaougry was a close advisor to the notorious Nigerian dictatorship of the mid 1990s, helping the ultra-corrupt general Sani Abacha as he looted billions from public coffers. Abacha killed hundreds of demonstrators and executed environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who rose to fame protesting the despoiling of the country by Shell and other multinational oil corporations. Thus it’s fitting for whom the first 15-story office tower in Eko Atlantic is being built: a British oil and gas trading company. The city proposing to head off environmental devastation will be populated by those most responsible for it in the first place.

Evidently, once it is no longer possible to deny the reality of climate change, the self-identified “makers” of the world–in the US that would be folks like the members of ALEC, the managers and owners of energy companies, and of course the infamous Kochs and their ilk–will simply secede from the earth they’ve polluted.

Welcome to our dystopian future.

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Playing “Let’s Pretend”

There are two kinds of “let’s pretend” games.

The first is intended to illustrate a principle. For example, let’s pretend that you have a teenage son. You don’t have much money–you live in low-wage, “Right to Work” Indiana–so you’ve been saving for several years in order to send him to college. He’s also been depositing money from his part-time job into the joint savings account the two of you have established.

One day, you discover he’s dropped out of high school, and taken all the money to buy a car. He explains that he needs a car now, to get to his job at Burger Heaven, where he makes three dollars an hour more than his friends who work elsewhere. Besides, he argues, the future benefits of a high school diploma (forget college) are speculative.

Would you dismiss the unequivocal data about education and lifetime earning disparities and general well-being? Would you endorse his decision to make more money now and damn the future?

Business groups evidently think the kid is doing the right thing.

According to a story buried a couple of days ago in the Indianapolis Star, a coalition of national and state business groups is fighting new rules on greenhouse gas emissions. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence says Congress should quash the pending regulations because they would hike energy bills and cost jobs.

The new rules will cost businesses and consumers some money now. Those rules, however, are a necessary part of a still-inadequate effort to slow global climate change. It bears repeating that there is no scientific dispute about the reality of that climate change. We are already seeing its effects.

Too bad, say the members of the business coalition.

The business coalition, of course, is playing the other “let’s pretend” game–the one being played by people who prefer keeping an extra buck or so in their pockets now to addressing climate changes that will make life miserable for our children and grandchildren. The game played by pretending that the science is flawed, that the warnings are speculative, or that a heavy winter snow is proof that there is no “global warming.”

As scientists have been telling us for quite some time, a warming planet changes climate patterns. Hurricanes increase in intensity; Alabama and Texas get massive snowstorms while the Arctic ice melts; California has droughts, sea levels rise, species lose their habitats.

All of these things are already occurring. Dealing with them is already costing us a lot more than compliance with federal regulations will cost, and failing to deal with climate change now–pretending that it’s a “hoax” or that the science isn’t settled–is ignorant at best and dishonorable at worst.

When the son who left high school is fifty and still making minimum wage, how will you justify letting him drop out?

When our grandchildren ask why we allowed the seas to swallow New York and Florida, why we failed to prevent the loss of twenty-five percent of the Earth’s species, and why we didn’t protect large areas of the planet from becoming uninhabitable, how will we justify our shortsightedness? Are we going to admit that greed and immaturity–our unwillingness to be even minimally inconvenienced in the here and now–led us to pretend it wasn’t happening?

Playing “let’s pretend” is for children. The businesses fighting for their right to keep polluting need to grow up.

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If Only Today’s Crackpots Would Listen

This morning’s comic strip, Non Sequitor, explains ideology. And Fox News. And the Tea Party.

Unfortunately, a stubborn insistence on an alternate reality is more and more likely to do irreparable damage to the real world we occupy. A couple of days ago, William Ruckleshaus, Lee Thomas, William Riley and Christine Todd Whitman made precisely that argument in the New York Times. All were EPA administrators in Republican Administrations, back when the GOP was a political party rather than a cult.

They point out that there is no longer any credible debate about the reality of climate change (the operative word here being “credible.”) And they endorse President Obama’s climate plan.

The costs of inaction are undeniable. The lines of scientific evidence grow only stronger and more numerous. And the window of time remaining to act is growing smaller: delay could mean that warming becomes “locked in.”

A market-based approach, like a carbon tax, would be the best path to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, but that is unachievable in the current political gridlock in Washington. Dealing with this political reality, President Obama’s June climate action plan lays out achievable actions that would deliver real progress. He will use his executive powers to require reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the nation’s power plants and spur increased investment in clean energy technology, which is inarguably the path we must follow to ensure a strong economy along with a livable climate.

……

Mr. Obama’s plan is just a start. More will be required. But we must continue efforts to reduce the climate-altering pollutants that threaten our planet. The only uncertainty about our warming world is how bad the changes will get, and how soon. What is most clear is that there is no time to waste.

If only the petulant ideologues would listen. But we live in a world best explained by the Non Sequitor cartoon linked to above. The party that gave us Bill Ruckleshaus and Christine Todd Whitman no longer exists; for its current manifestation–the Party of No–blocking anything and everything that Barack Obama proposes is far more important than saving the earth.

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Here’s My Question

A study recently published in The Archives of General Psychiatry adds to a body of evidence linking the growing incidence of autism to early-life exposure to pollution. According to the study, children with autism are two to three times more likely than other children to have been exposed to car exhaust, smog, and other air pollutants during their earliest days.

“We’re not saying that air pollutioncauses autism. We’re saying it may be a risk factor for autism,” says Heather Volk, lead author on the new study and an assistant professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. “Autism is a complex disorder and it’s likely there are many factors contributing,” she says.

Now, I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on TV. (Nor do I have a subscription to the Archives of General Psychiatry–I came across a reference to the study while reading another journal article.) I’m not a climate scientist either. So–just like the deniers who prefer to believe that climate change is a big myth–I do not possess the ability to independently review the evidence and judge its persuasiveness.

I understand the resistance to environmental regulations by those whose economic interests are affected–the oil and gas producers and others whose profits would suffer if we really got serious about carbon emissions. I know those interests have been heavily invested in a campaign of “disinformation” and that they’ve managed to confuse a lot of people who–like me–aren’t scientists able to independently evaluate the evidence.

But let’s just assume that the deniers are right–that 99% of the scientists who are able to evaluate the evidence are wrong, and the other 1% are right. Why wouldn’t it still make sense to clean up the air and water? Even the deniers aren’t arguing that pollution is good. We have plenty of irrefutable evidence linking air pollution to higher incidences of respiratory diseases. There are these growing links to autism and other disorders. And as anyone whose traveled in China can attest, bad air quality can be a real turn-off–I’ve yet to meet anyone who enjoys breathing black air.

Here’s the calculus as I see it: one the one hand, there is no doubt that continuing our polluting ways negatively affects our quality of life. There is evidence that it contributes significantly to a variety of diseases, and overwhelming consensus that it is warming the earth among those who actually know what they’re talking about. On the other hand, there is no benefit whatsoever from continuing to pollute–except to companies whose profits depend upon continued emissions.

On one side, cleaner air, healthier people, and the possibility of saving the planet. On the other side, big oil.

Seems pretty clear-cut to me.

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