And We're Back!

Fell way behind in everything and had to temporarily abandon doing this blog which was essentially about American politics, international news and global warming science. I missed it and so I'm back to pick up where I left off. I'm still over at our Canadian blog most every day and at the radio station too. Check them out if you have time.

Starting with what should be a huge story so far as global warming is concerned but so far has received very little coverage in the media, Antarctic waters are warming and a citadel of ice is melting. It's completely remarkable when you consider that the fringes of the world's coldest continent are warming faster virtually than any place on earth. This represents what is essentially the first breech in an area that holds 90% of the world's ice. Steady warming has the potential to raise ocean sea levels many feet.
Here's a link to the indispensable Climate Progress's pretty thorough wrap on global warming and green energy news that includes stories about how the World Bank has been talking about focusing its support on clean energy projects, the UK is negotiating a central role for business at the Cancun climate summit next week, hybrid tugboats, an organic farming system geared for homeowners, schools, restaurants and commercial growers, optimizing wind farms, China hitting their energy efficiency and pollution targets and at the cost of one Tim Horton's donut per month Ontario's solar PV industry will have created 72,000 person-years of jobs.

The people at Motor Trend take on the hate-mongering, drug addicted blowhard Limbaugh over his uninformed stance on the new Chevy Volt and remind him that driving and Oxycontin don't mix!

Some insight from Harold Meyerson about how Germany got it right on the economy and why theirs is the strongest in the world with a trade balance second only to China's.

 So, on to the overseas wars, and it is notable that the US is shrugging off Afghan anger at civilian killings. They're just being ungrateful and have no appreciation for the freedom the US and NATO forces are bringing them. The US denies the allegation of such killings, but admitted that they don’t both the investigate the vast majority of the complaints because they assume them to be “Taliban propaganda.” The commander of the Marines is the district says that the Taliban are to blame for “every single instance” of a civilian casualty in the district. In direct contradiction to such claims by the US, airstrikes are the single largest cause of civilian deaths by foreign and Afghan government forces during the first half of 2010, accounting for 31 percent, said the U.N..

US envoys are being forced to apologize in advance of the upcoming WikiLeaks document dump that promises to be an embarrassment to the US and the Pentagon is being described as "hyperventilating over being held to account" for its actions. According to the Independent, "Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public." A thought to which I have a one word response, Good!

Of course as always the US is claiming that the release will put lives in danger -- I think it'll put politicians careers in danger. The US's unending war efforts are what puts lives in danger. Shining a light on what they're up to is merely holding the accountable for their actions. Something there needs to be more of.

Okay, that's enough for one post! Will do my best to come back and post on right-wing American wankery which will no doubt be just as long a post.

The question now, as humanity pours greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate, is not whether Antarctica will begin to warm in earnest, but how rapidly.

Is This Is Just The Beginning?

I'm pretty happy to see the MSM covering the changing climate this week the way it should have been covered these last few years. I'm afraid the so-called tipping points are long past but there's always hope. It might be a lot more difficult to be glib or optimistic if I were in Moscow where toxic smoke has now enveloped a rain-soaked Moscow and doctors have warned that this summer's heat wave could drive more people to alcohol and suicide. Or in Pakistan where the scale of Pakistan's floods are considered to be worse than the 2004 tsunami, Haiti and Kashmir quakes combined.

As former US Army Chief of Staff, General Gordon Sullivan says, we can argue about the metrics of climate change (exact consequences , when where, how, etc) but the trends and indicators all point to it happening now. In his estimation it also points to likely wars for oil, food water and mass migrations of a kind and on a scale heretofore unseen in modern history. This is pretty dire stuff - the kind of thing that usually results in people being called alarmists. The people in the re-posted video below are not the kind prone to being alarmists. They are men who rose to the very top of their profession in a very conservative organization: the US Military.



Sadly, there's not much hope for this spate of recent disasters moving the powers that be to take the action necessary to change the current dynamics. Let's hope they're wrong.

So while the MSM sorts out how they're going to report on all these natural catastrophes and their possible causes, I thought it might be a good time to look at sea level rise, what's predicted and what it might mean in the near and long term future.

Starting with this report from October of 2009, where researchers reporting in the journal Geology, found that 20th-century sea-level rise to be three times higher than the rate of sea-level rise during the last 500 years. Then in December of the same year, a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warned that sea levels could rise much faster than previously expected, and by the year 2100, global sea level could rise between 75 and 190 centimetres (30 to 74 inches).

In April of this year research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, made what is the first assessment of how quickly floating ice is being lost today. This is causing sea levels to rise -- by a mere hair's breadth today, but possibly much more if melting trends continue.

And the most recent research predicts sea levels rising by as much as one metre before the end of this century. Melting glaciers, it is now believed,  may contribute more to the rise in sea levels than scientists have previously realised.

Melting glaciers and the melting ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic will account for 75% of the rise in sea levels, while expansion of the water as it warms will account for 25 %," said Director Jan-Gunnar Winther of the Norwegian Polar Institute.

Anti-Science Cowards Know No Decency

The anti-climate-science crowd are apparently incapable of using the internet for anything other than surfing from one echo-chamber to the next and threatening people they disagree with. The so called "climategate" scandal has long since been debunked, and was in fact not a scandal at all - unless you think they shouldn't have stolen people's personal e-mails. Michael Mann's much maligned hockey-stick graph has been exonerated and while there were some MSM retractions there were no apologies. In fact two stalwart members of the MSM, the New York Times and The Washington Post, actually refused to print an op-ed that was signed by 255 National Academy of Science members defending climate science integrity.

Small wonder then there's so much confusion. The media are only too happy to run with any story that assaults global warming science. Sure they'll retract it later but by then the damage is already done. The narrative has been created and a lot of people are not around when the story is debunked - that's how zombie lies are created.

Those threats I mentioned in the first sentence? A story over at the Guardian chronicles what life has been like for the scientists whose names were mentioned in the stolen emails from the University of East Anglia. They have subsequently faced ...a torrent of death threats and hate mail, leaving them fearing for their lives and one to contemplate arming himself with a handgun. Professor Phil Jones, the UEA scientist at the centre of the hacked email controversy, revealed in February he had been receiving two death threats a week. As scientist Stephen Schneider notes, this is obviously the work of cowards. Go read some of the mails for yourself and see if you don't come to the same conclusion. (Caution: vile and threatening language)

The Psychology of Denialists

From Debora MacKenzie at New Scientist comes an article on the psychology of denialists. It's illuminating and helps to explain how we can be in the middle of a crisis - Global Warming - and the concrete steps necessary to mitigate this imminent disaster are for the most part not being taken.

I have never been able to get my head around the deniers of anthropogenic global warming, and the science behind it. I understand why people in the fossil fuels business are fighting it tooth and nail but the followers, the believers in this tripe have always left me cold. I tend to get extremely dismissive and condescending. It makes absolutely no sense - not because the science couldn't be wrong, it could be - but because the deniers objections always rely on anecdote and science produced by people with vested interests. The conspiracy part of the equation is just goofy. That scientists from all over the world could all be in on the climate change fix is so absurd as to be beyond ludicrous.

In discussion just a couple of days ago someone sneered at me that I was one of those who believed the science produced by NASA the NOAA and the IPCC as if these were organizations were staffed by ducks, and mad ones at that. I lost my temper, not because I was sneered at or even because he was disparaging organizations whose integrity I believe in - certainly more than the word of profit driven corporations - but because an otherwise sane human being could advance a line of reasoning so obtuse.

To believe that global warming is not happening bizarre judgements are being made. Firstly, that the intuition of the denier trumps the hard work and study of tens of thousands of scientists and hundreds of thousands of man hours of research. Second, that the evidence visible before all our eyes is somehow all part of the normal vagaries of weather patterns when there is ample proof from around the globe that things are changing markedly, rapidly and dangerously. Lastly, to make these arguments at all, one has to have come to the conclusion that the constant stream of CO2 that humankind is pumping into the atmosphere from cars and factories all around the globe are of little or no consequence (9.5 billion tons so far this year, and it's only June!).

Ms. MacKenzie points out that I should consider being less judgemental of deniers: Whatever they are denying, denial movements have much in common with one another, not least the use of similar tactics. All set themselves up as courageous underdogs fighting a corrupt elite engaged in a conspiracy to suppress the truth or foist a malicious lie on ordinary people. This conspiracy is usually claimed to be promoting a sinister agenda: the nanny state, takeover of the world economy, government power over individuals, financial gain, atheism. They're just trying to be do-gooders in their own strange way.

She also says these people are neither ...malicious, or even explicitly anti-science. Indeed, the alternative explanations are usually portrayed as scientific. Nor is it willfully dishonest. It only requires people to think the way most people do: in terms of anecdote, emotion and cognitive short cuts. Denialist explanations may be couched in sciency language, but they rest on anecdotal evidence and the emotional appeal of regaining control.

And there's the rub, scientific evidence and facts will not dissuade the denier, ...against emotion and anecdote, dry statements of evidence have little power. To make matters worse, scientists usually react to denial with anger and disdain, which makes them seem even more arrogant.

She does a great job of describing the crossover of corporate interests funding groups that play into these beliefs for their own benefit and gives the very definition of what are commonly referred to in the blogosphere as 'asrto-turf' movements (fake grass-roots): Many denialist movements originate as cynical efforts by corporations to cast doubt on findings that threaten their bottom line. Big Tobacco started it in the 1970s, recruiting scientists willing to produce favourable data and bankrolling ostensibly independent think tanks and bogus grass-roots movements. One such think tank was The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), set up in 1993 by tobacco company Philip Morris. TASSC didn't confine itself to tobacco for long. After getting funds from Exxon, it started casting doubt on climate science.

The consequences of denialist movements have cost people their lives and this one may cost many more. This is not some quaint discussion about people who believe in anecdote and those who believe in science, it's about preserving a livable environment for our descendants.