What if (in the vein of Network and “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore”) a weather forecaster went truly off script and expressed, with the passion it merits, the seriousness of our climate situation?
With that question in mind, here is a look at what the Labor Day weekend forecast should have been in a reality-based world.
Full transcript after the fold and a hat tip to the creators.
Forecast the Facts is working to foster more serious climate discussion by meteorologists while shining light who propagate falsehoods about climate science.
In contrast to its total absence from the Republican Party platform (as a sign of the GOP’s anti-science global warming denial), the Democratic Party platform directly engages on climate change issues — with the term appearing 18 times in the platform.
Note: the photo to the right comes from the Democratic Party’s platform page.
For too long, the Democratic Party “machine” has been eerily silent when it comes to the scientific consensus on climate change and the risks that catastrophic climate chaos creates for America and Americans. While much has been said and heard on ‘clean energy’ and ‘green jobs’, the words “climate change” and “global warming” have almost seemed to disappear from the Democratic Party’s lexicon as the Republican Party headed into ever-more extreme rejection of science with embrace and promotion of fossil-foolish global warming denialism. Thus, when it came to political leadership, the voice in the Village Square has been overwhelming shrill rejection of scientific knowledge.
The Democratic Party’s aversion to climate discussions derived from a mistaken ‘Village’ perception that climate change was somehow a losing political issue. This mistaken perception derived, it seemed, from concerns over how Faux-News watchers might react with serious discussion of climate science issues. In fact, as a Yale University report (pdf) recently documented, engaging on climate change is a winning political issue for Democratic politicians. Discussing climate issues won’t get Tea Party-ites any angrier but they will engage with open-minded independent voters concerned about climate issues and motivate Democratic Party activists disheartened by what they see as inadequate engagement on the most critical issue that humanity faces.
Six months ago, those concerned on climate issues saw a ray of hope that Presidential candidate Barack Obama might engage heavily in climate issues. In a Rolling Stone interview, the President correctly noted (in what is actually an understatement) that “those who have looked at the science of climate change are scared and concerned about a general lack of sufficient movement to deal with the problem.” The President also predicted that climate change would become an issue in the 2012 campaign.
After that ray of hope, however, the silence from the White House and Obama-Biden campaign seemed deafening with the slightest of mentions of climate on the campaign’s “environment” webpage (commenting that fuel efficiency measures will reduce carbon emissions and help address climate change) and week following week without campaign commentary or White House press conferences about climate change even as the nation burned (both with high temperatures and fires), faced record droughts, crop yields were being devastated, and … The crickets were thriving amid the stunted corn stalks.
Since then, in multiple campaign events, President Obama has made comments along these lines:
The decisions we make as a country on big issues like the economy and jobs and taxes and education and energy and war and climate change — all these decisions will directly affect your life in very personal ways. And I’ve got to say, this is something I’m acutely aware of when I make these decisions, because they’re decisions that are going to affect Malia and Sasha, my daughters, as well.
….
Governor Romney wants to pass a new $5 trillion tax cut targeted towards the wealthiest Americans. That’s not going to cut our debt. Ignoring inequality doesn’t make it go away. Denying climate change won’t make it stop. These things won’t make for a brighter future. They won’t make your future stronger.
And, the President’s lines in speeches are being echoed in campaign mailings. From an email in my inbox,
Here’s something Mitt Romney actually joked about with pride — and plenty of scorn — while formally accepting the Republican nomination for president of the United States:
“President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.”
And the crowd went wild.
It is nothing short of terrifying to imagine a party that openly mocks climate change taking back the White House.
It is “terrifying to imagine a [major political] party that openly mocks climate change” let alone dealing with the reality that global warming denial dominates one of America’s two major parties and that this energetic anti-science attitude could occupy the Oval Office.
The campaign took the correct measure and moved from climate science to climate change mitigation, highlighting the difference between Obama-Biden and Mittens-LyinRyan when it comes to clean energy programs
The contrast between our candidate and theirs couldn’t be any clearer.
And just this week, while President Obama’s administration finalized historic fuel economy standards to double our vehicles’ mileage by 2025 and cut carbon pollution from vehicles in half, the GOP adopted a platform that could kill investments in clean energy, and calls on Congress to prohibit the EPA from moving forward with new greenhouse gas regulations.
Surprise, surprise — according to the Los Angeles Times, the platform “was written at the direction of the Romney campaign,” making it heavily influenced by Big Oil interests.
So there you have it — the stakes for clean air, clean water, and clean energy jobs couldn’t be higher.
While most Americans wouldn’t, at this time, define the November choice in this way: this is truly an election about science — climate science and what to do about climate change not least of these issues.
Climate change’s emergence into the political dialogue in the past week suggests that the Obama-Biden campaign is waking up to how climate change — and respect for science (and scientists) — is not just an important policy arena but a winning political issue.
As the reality of the arctic ice melt sinks in over coming weeks, and as extreme weather continues, Romney, and the GOP in general, may regret having made this a go-to soundbite in the campaign. There are rumors that Romney will begin trying to walk back the climate rhetoric, more on that later, but the party as a whole is way out on a limb.
The question is, will Obama take advantage of the increasingly obvious disconnect, and begin to make climate an issue?
(Important) NOTE: The difference on climate change when it comes to Party platforms is stark. Climate Change is not in the GOP platform. The term appears 18 times in the Democratic Party Platform with some strong language. See here for extracts and a quickly look analysis.
This guest post comes from SolarMom — a very knowledgeable scientist who I (and I hope you) find worth listening to …
Twenty years ago my parents took their nest egg (attained back when nest eggs were attainable) and retired to a condo a half block from the ocean, in a well-heeled south Florida town. It’s the type of place (“fantasyland”, our 16-year-old daughter calls it) where ladies lunch and men wear Bermuda shorts and supple Italian loafers with no socks; where the local politicians talk of “preserving our way of life”; and where the visiting children and grandchildren mostly hail from Westchester or the upper East Side.
My dad passed on a while back, but mom remains, 80-something and tottering but with critical faculties intact. Each winter break we pack up the minivan and depart our liberal southern college town – yes, there is such a thing – for a spell in fantasyland as soon as school lets out.
I spend a lot of time keeping up with goings-on in the world of clean energy and green jobs, and with the latest Congressional anti-EPA shenanigans. For a while now, I’ve also been reading a lot about the bigger picture outlook for the coming decades: peak oil, resource depletion, food insecurity, and the looming specter of climate change.
Lounging by the beach on our most recent foray to the edge of the continent (as our 14-year-old son likes to put it), my husband and I chatted about the likelihood that the entire town all around us will be underwater in something like 50 years, despite – and in part because of – the obliviousness of the privileged residents and their descendants to that fact. Apres moi le deluge I guess, as hard as it is to imagine while surveying the picturesque vacation scene. (“You’re not going to keep my apartment after I’m gone, are you” Mom has asked wistfully more than once. Well…no.)
Marc Morano is the Andrew Breitbart of the climate science world. Powerful packaging of material that doesn’t stand up well to any serious scrutiny. And, he has been very good at gaining lots of media and other attention with partial truths and utter mistruths about climate issues whether from his current “Climate Depot” hat, supporting Jim Inhofe’s climate denial machine, or otherwise. In essence, Morano is well compensated for his having created a wide network to which he sends out misleading to outright false information in a ‘pretty package’ that captures the slavishly devoted attention of anti-science syndrome sufferers and confuses those who do not have the energy/resources to check behind the false blaring headlines and ever-so convincing lying with statistics.
Amusingly, one of Morano’s recent posting of a title to link to another’s sad post clearly demonstrated that his misunderstanding and misrepresentation is not limited to the physics of climate science but also goes into the social sciences.
Morano’s title — which uses a sad attempt at a pejorative against Forecast the Facts‘ thoughtfully competent Brad Johnson — reads:
And, following his attacking title, Morano gives his doting followers what is supposed to be the killer line to embarrass and demean Brad:
Reality Check: ‘According to Dr. Walt Meier at NSIDC, the Arctic was completely free of ice sometime between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago. Apparently Brad Johnson believes that human history is less than 5,000 years.
And, well, if Brad Johnson “believes that human history is less than 5,000 years” he would only be off by a few hundred years — at most.
There is a very simple guideline when talking about the past — in terms of humanity: history and pre-history.
When does history begin? With the written record.
What about pre-history? Simply put, everything before that written record is “pre-history”.
A complication is that “history” doesn’t begin at the same date for all civilizations and peoples.
The date marking the end of prehistory in a particular culture or region, that is the date when relevant written historical records become a useful academic resource, varies enormously from region to region. For example, in Egypt it is generally accepted that prehistory ended around 3200 BC, whereas in New Guinea the end of the prehistoric era is set much more recently, at around 1900 AD. In Europe the relatively well-documented classical cultures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome had neighbouring cultures, including the Celts and to a lesser extent the Etruscans, with little or no writing, and historians must decide how much weight to give to the often highly prejudiced accounts of the “prehistoric” cultures in Greek and Roman literature.
3200 + 2012 = 5212. That is roughly the number of years in “human history” on the NIle Delta, for example, according to the basic academic definition of the term.
Since Meier states that the Arctic was free of ice somewhere between 5,000 to 15,000 years ago, it seems likely (if the Arctic was actually ice-free) that this occurred in pre-history and not history.
Chalk up yet another of the sadly unending examples of Morano deception about and lack of understanding of science — in this case, social science.
August 23rd, 2012 · Comments Off on Baseball statistics to climate science … insight from advertising
For most of 2012, the following ad has been running.
Sadly, too many take baseball statistics far more seriously than climate change science. (After all, who would put up with George Will’s truthlessness about climate change if thrust into discussions about baseball?)
This ad reminds of me of something …
This ‘doubting’ sounds all too familiar in terms of: let’s not act until the science is 100% settled and “proven”.
Sadly, unlike debates over obscure baseball stats, the demanding of 100% “proven” certainty when it comes to climate chaos has real-world implications.
Comments Off on Baseball statistics to climate science … insight from advertisingTags:Energy
Missing among much of this fanfare is the core symbolism of putting Donald Trump on the stage of a major political event. The Republican Party leadership has, sadly for the nation, been captured by an ideological vision enraptured by conspiracy theories and hateful of expertise (and knowledge and institutions and thinking …) at odds with their policy priorities.
The United Nations Agenda 21 is being covertly pushed into local communities throughout the United States of America through the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) through local “sustainable development” policies such as Smart Growth, Wildlands Project, Resilient Cities, Regional Visioning Projects, and other “Green” or “Alternative” projects
The Republican National Committee recognizes the destructive and insidious nature of United Nations Agenda 21 and hereby exposes to the public and public policy makers the dangerous intent of the plan.
Putting aside the simple reality that ICLEI is an excellent organization worth supporting rather than some form of devilish covert underminer of U.S. security, the RNC embrace of junk conspiracy theory and anti-science concepts is far from limited to just this one resolution.
The anti-science syndrome nature of the current RNC is all too clear with the GOP’s passion for global warming denial. The GOP’s determined denial of basic science and desire for Americans to disregard drought, heat-wave, wild-fire, and other tangible examples of mounting climate chaos is one of the clearest examples in American history of ideology trumping basic common sense and wisdom.
Donald Trump’s Las Vegas-like headline act at the RNC next week is thus fitting for all too many reasons:
Trump, in many ways reminiscent of nominee Mitt Romney’s Bain experience profiting off bankrupting companies, has a long record of huge loses and bankruptcies. Trump has flamboyantly made a speciality trumping others via bankruptcy. Many have lost their shirts off their backs investing with or loaning to him. Trump thus stands as a symbol of how the RNC’s precepts would profit a few even while bankrupting the nation.
Trump, just as with the RNC Agenda 21 Resolution, has promoted conspiracy theories. For example, Trump is a prominent “Birther” (questioning whether — despite the truth being quite different — whether Barack Obama was born in the United States).
“With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore,” the tycoon told members of his Trump National Golf Club.
Americans have learned more about climate change from Rush Limbaugh than from anyone else.
The phrase “climate change” appears 2,780 times in his talk show transcripts, and “global warming” appears almost as often, according to a Google search. With that in mind, would it surprise you to learn that Rush takes the subject so seriously he would abuse an eight year old girl over the issue?
Rush, of course, asserts that the “whole global warming thing is a manufactured left-wing hoax”.
I’ve instinctively known this from the get-go, from 20 years ago! The whole thing is made up, and the reason I know it is because liberals are behind it! When they’re pushing something, folks, it’s always bogus.—Rush Limbaugh
Not just any hoax, this. Limbaugh considers manmade global warming to be “one of the most preposterous hoaxes in the history of the planet.” According to Limbaugh,
Before the ozone hole it was acid rain, and then it was nuclear winter, and it went from global warming to…compact fluorescent lightbulbs! I’m telling you: Every aspect of it is a lie. Every environmental claim, every one that’s apocalyptic, is a lie — full-fledged, 100% through and through.
—Rush Limbaugh
Some credit Limbaugh with forcing Mitt Romney to back away from his acknowledgement of global warming. But he’s not averse to using global warming as a club on the Republican establishment, either:
I frankly don’t know where the Republican establishment is on global warming. My guess is they probably think it’s happening ’cause they want big government. They just want themselves in charge of it.—Rush Limbaugh
Analysis should enable more informed decision-making. Regrettably, economic and fiscal analyses too often occur in a stove-piped fashion that provides only limited perspectives as to real costs and benefits. Energy and environmental analysis, in particular, suffer from this problem. This has been true from the individual household to business to national policy level discussions where, almost, the analytical constructs tend toward exaggerating the cost(s) of action while downplaying the benefits that would accrue from taking action. While there are both legitimate and interest-party driven reasons for this tendency, the inadequate general understanding has weakened support for more effective energy/environmental options and hampered efforts to achieve informed decision-making. We face a serious decision-making challenge: opponents exaggerate costs and proponents understate benefits.
Climate change is the poster child of this problem.
There is a simple truth:
Acting on climate mitigation is an investment …
An investment, which if done right, that will have huge economic benefits.
Acting on climate mitigation is just about the smartest investment society can make — even if we put aside the economic impacts from climate chaos (such as disrupted agricultural production and higher food prices). The entire debate about climate change, when it is in financial terms, almost (and the exceptions are extremely rare) always reverberates about whether ‘the high cost in the near term is worth the uncertain longer term benefits … if those benefits exist’. This is a wrong-headed and erroneous framing based on stove-piped thinking and analysis. More robust analysis changes this equation and leads to a very different understanding of the benefit streams. Very simply: investing in climate mitigation will have huge economic benefits while reducing future risks.
If nothing else from this post, remember this:
Climate-mitigation is an investment that will have huge benefit streams.
Seriously examining the systems-of-systems implications from climate mitigation (increasing energy efficiency, reduced fossil fuel use (and reduced oil imports), reduced pollution, reduced carbon emissions, … ) would show that a wide array of economic benefits that would dwarf costs of taking action in the near, mid, and long term.
Have to say that “Weather Gone Wild” sounds all too close to tasteless (and discomfitting) late-night advertising during repeats of old B movies on obscure cable channels (happily not seen for a long time). This could easily be the title for much of The Weather Channel’s programming. In fact, this is the cover story and focus of National Geographic’s September 2012 issue.
The introductory question:
Disastrous rains. No rain at all. Unexpected heat or cold. Is Earth’s climate changing dangerously?
The editor’s note, Coming Storms, opens with a discussion of ominous weather in Kansas. He ends
[the story’s] author … knows this subject well. In the spring of 1986 he and I spent nearly three months chasing thunderstorms with a team from the National Severe Storms Laboratory for a story on tornadoes that ran in the June 1987 issue. Much has changed since then. Our planet has warmed up, there is more moisture in the atmosphere, heavy rains are more frequent, and droughts are more pronounced. Peter examines the causes and considers the future, which some say looks as ominous as a Kansas supercell in May.
“Looks as ominous” as a Biblical event?
“Weather gone wild” begins:
Rains that are almost biblical, heat waves that don’t end, tornadoes that strike in savage swarms—there’s been a change in the weather lately. What’s going on?
The story opens with a look at the devastating — and unprecedented — spring 2010 Nashville, TN, floods. The author then highlights that “extreme” is increasingly frequent not just on ESPN X-Game emissions. And, then, the trillion dollar questions:
What’s going on? Are these extreme events signals of a dangerous, human-made shift in Earth’s climate? Or are we just going through a natural stretch of bad luck?
The short answer is: probably both.
Two paragraphs follow on ‘natural’ causes and improving scientific understanding of El Niño and La Niña events.
And then … paragraph after paragraph about how a warming planet is driving increased risks of extreme events. From those paragraphs.
“New evidence suggests that warming is altering the polar jet stream, adding lazy north-south meanders to its path around the planet—which might help to explain why North America was so warm last winter and Europe so cold. “
“In the case of some weather extremes, though, the connection is pretty clear. The warmer the atmosphere, the more potential for record-breaking heat waves. “
“As moisture in the atmosphere has increased, rainfall has intensified. The amount of rain falling in intense downpours—the heaviest one percent of rain events—has increased by nearly 20 percent during the past century in the U.S.”
For example, an excellent linkage of weather to steroid use (as per here).
“You’re getting more rain from a given storm now than you would have 30 or 40 years ago,” says Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Global warming, he says, has changed the odds for extreme weather.
“Picture a baseball player on steroids,” Meehl goes on. “This baseball player steps up to the plate and hits a home run. It’s impossible to say if he hit that home run because of the steroids, or whether he would have hit it anyway. The drugs just made it more likely.”
It’s the same with the weather, Meehl says. Greenhouse gases are the steroids of the climate system. “By adding just a little bit more carbon dioxide to the climate, it makes things a little bit warmer and shifts the odds toward these more extreme events,” he says. “What was once a rare event will become less rare.”
When it comes to that drought or flood or Derecho or heat wave …, human-driven climate change “drugs just made it more likely” that “a rare event will become less rare.”
And, the author runs with the analogy. While Nashville opens the story, Texas comes into play just after Meehl’s comments. This begins:
Nobody has lived through more weather on steroids lately than Texans.
And 13 paragraphs follow on Texas’ drought, heat wave, and fires.
“But when there’s no water to evaporate, all that energy goes into heating the ground and consequently heating the air. Given how little rain we had, we probably would have had record warmth in Texas in 2011 even without climate change. But climate change added an additional degree or so of heat to it.”
That extra degree of heat was like an extra shot of gasoline on the state’s forests: By increasing evaporation, it made them even drier. In a drought, said [Texas state climatologist John] Nielsen-Gammon, “every little increase in severity makes a big difference.” Texas in 2011 experienced the worst wildfire season on record. Taken together, the fires blackened an area larger than Connecticut—nearly twice as much acreage as in the previous worst year.
Another excellent example of memorable scientific commentary comes in this paragraph near the end of the story:
Weather disasters are like heart attacks, says [scientist] Jay Gulledge. “When your doctor advises you about how to avoid a heart attack, he doesn’t say, Well, you need to exercise, but it’s OK to keep smoking,” he says. The smart approach to extreme weather is to attack all the risk factors, by designing crops that can survive drought, buildings that can resist floods and high winds, policies that discourage people from building in dangerous places—and of course, by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
For me (and millions of Americans), National Geographic is the iconic (and eloquent) communicator of truth about our planet. A question to consider: Will this iconic truth-teller reach people who have — to date — resisted hearing the truth about climate change?
Again, I recommend reading Weather Gone Wild. Well written, informative, thoughtful — it is worth the time. A hat tip to the author, Peter Miller, and a major hat tip to National Geographic for commissioning and publishing it.
