Earth Blues

And we're back! Seventeen minutes past the big hour and we've got lots of stories but rapidly running out of time here tonight.

Starting with a story that should be getting way more ink, Pakistani government officials admitted that they deliberately sabotaged secret peace talks between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban because they resented being excluded from those talks. And in some news from the middle-east that actually might be called good news, turns out the prospect of an alliance between the Iraqiya and Iraqi National Alliance (INA) blocs and the formation of a coalition government could be closer than anyone realized.

Sadly that's where the good news ends for Iraq, as the country has between 25 and 50 percent unemployment, a dysfunctional parliament, rampant disease, an epidemic of mental illness, and sprawling slums. The killing of innocent people has become part of daily life.  All brought about by the havoc the United States has wreaked in Iraq.



The right has the brothers David and Charles Koch, heirs to the oil and chemical conglomerate Koch Industries the Koch family to orchestrate not only the Tea Party movement, but much of the modern right-wing infrastructure. They have founded or funded dozens of conservative or libertarian publications, think tanks, and attack groups. Grass roots my ass! The New Yorker goes further in exposing the Koch brothers.

The Koch brothers delight in misleading and muddying the waters about the nature of climate change -- they are not alone in this endeavor and there are a myriad of ways to do so. To paraphrase a song I heard, you don't believe in climate change, you understand it or you don't. The above link from Skeptical Science, in an article entitled How Climate Skeptics Mislead, looks at some of things that help us understand climate change. The point to signs of warming that are found all over the globe:

•From space and the Earth’s surface, we see more heat being trapped by carbon dioxide

•Nights are warming faster than days
•The upper atmosphere is cooling while the lower atmosphere is warming
•Ice sheets are melting
•Sea levels are rising
•Biological changes in tens of thousands of species
•Glaciers are retreating
•Seasons are shifting
•Species are becoming extinct

Also from Skeptical Science, in an article about Arctic sea ice volume, they ask the question why do skeptics only think in two dimensions?

To close out on some troubling environmentally related stories, starting with a story from Julia Whitty over at Mother Jones, the IWC (International Whaling Commission) has granted Greenland an aboriginal quota to kill 27 humpback whales starting in October. But (maddeningly) the hunters aren't waiting for the season to start.

From Science Daily, A previously undefined expanse of the western North Atlantic has been found to contain high concentrations of plastic debris, comparable to those observed in the region of the Pacific commonly referred to as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

And from Nigeria, what happens when sweet crude turns sour.

Brief Hiatus

Had to take a couple of days off. Between the radio show and the blogging I got a bit burnt. Not so's you'd notice just enough for me to. I'm going on vacation next week and will spend the entire week doing research of a different kind. This morning's radio show was a mixed bag beginning with the hate-spewing monsters of talk radio in the US. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

When discussing the crazy propaganda the aforementioned hate-meisters spew, what's important to remember is no matter how crazy or untrue it may sound to you, it's effective if it's heard often enough and it will be believed. The right-wing media absolutely relies on that to be true. The conservative media dreamland, for instance, ensconces its audience in an impregnable bubble -- you eat breakfast with the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, you drive to the office with right-wing radio, you flit between Breitbart and Drudge at work, you come home to Fox News. The ideas bouncing around in this world -- say, ideas about the Obama administration allegedly favoring blacks -- don't seem like propaganda to those inside the bubble.

This holds true for the so-called debate about anthropogenic global warming. There is little debate about the science within the scientific community - 97% of scientists believe it is settled science. You can debate the models and the minutiae but global warming has a human footprint. To the public at large, it's not so cut and dried where only 26% are convinced and as you can see in the chart the media coverage mirrors public perception.

For those who don't have time to read the science or vet all the claims, you can understand their confusion. In the same day you can have an excellent must-read article about climate change, cause and effects published in the Washington Post, and something completely moronic printed in the former paper of record, The New York Times. The reverse could also happen. The MSM are driving people's understanding of the issue (or lack thereof) and as such are responsible for the lack of action taken thus far to stem the worst effects.

Of course they couldn't do it alone, there are organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce to help spread the disinformation. Increasingly there are signs that some within the Chamber want to distance themselves from their policies:  a breakaway group of local chambers is getting ready to publicly split with the business lobby's hardline stance against climate legislation. The new climate coalition, known as the Chambers for Innovation and Clean Energy (CICE), will press Congress to take stronger action on climate and energy issues. It has already signed up about a dozen chambers and will officially launch later this year. Hooray for a little sanity!

In economic news I went back down the memory hole to have another look at Robert Reich's Nation article  about how the wealthy are raking in an absurd portion of the wealth -- Median wages are continuing their downward slide, and those at the top continue to rake in the lion's share of income. That's why the middle class still doesn't have the purchasing power it needs to reboot the economy, and why the so-called recovery will be so tepid—maybe even leading to a double dip. It's also why America will be vulnerable to even larger speculative booms and deeper busts in the years to come.

About economists, Dean Baker over at Truthout writes:  It is amazing that angry mobs have not risen up and chased all the economists out of the country. While the greed of the Wall Street gang provided the fuel for the bubble, the economists played an essential role as enablers. This was most directly true for economists in policymaking positions, like Alan Greenspan at the Fed.

It's hard to summarize what's been going on in the Gulf this past week (Truthout gives it a good go) but the oil has been dispersed by toxic chemicals and everyone's trying to pretend that's a good thing. Recall that dispersant and oil are more lethal to the environment than just plain oil. So now as they get ready to kill the spill once and for all there are reports that there is a dead zone in the Gulf the size of Massachusetts.

Climate Science Deniers Getting Desperate

With the once and for all debunking of "climategate" earlier this week - there were editorials around the country telling their readers that the integrity of the science was solid in spite of all that had been alleged over the months since last November when the scientists private e-mails were hacked into - it seems that the anti-science crowd has become far more bellicose.

There are calls for violence from swift-boater Marc Marano who apparently believes climate scientists should be publicly beaten.

There's a denier that goes by the name of Lord Moncton and his sorry act was thoroughly debunked by John Abraham (absolute must listening!). From Lord Moncton we have cyber-bullying, lies and hate-speech.

He's a heck of a guy huh?

Those Craaaazy Believers in Global Warming

I was reading a post over at Climate Progress about vanishing sea ice in the Arctic, and how in June it was at its' lowest extent and had gone through the fastest rate of decline in the satellite record and was thinking, "What does it matter?" The deniers will either claim it's not happening, or it's a one-off, or it's all part of some master plan to sandbag us all and they'll be loud enough and strident enough to continue to prevent real action from being taken. "Who the hell would these idiots listen to?" was the question that came to mind. Other than Jeebus, I mean.

Then I got lucky. I found a video with former Army Chief of Staff, General Gordon Sulllivan, discussing national security and climate change. Turns out he was once a skeptic but having looked at tall the data, he changed his mind and he wasn't alone. The military leaders who agree with him are many and include Rear Admiral David Titley, Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, James Woolsey former director of the CIA and former undersecretary of the US Navy, General Ron Keyes former Commander Air Combat Command, Wesley Clark former Supreme Allied commander of NATO, General Chuck Wald USAF and former Deputy Commander US European Command, and General Anthony Zinni former Chief US Central Command. These are not the kinds of people that are prone to being alarmists nor did they rise to the very top of the conservative military chain of command by being free-thinkers who rely on their intuition. They are the kinds of people who, when making decisions, had to rely on facts to guide their actions. If you watch you'll see they are all worried about wars for water, wars for oil, mass migrations and food insecurity all as a direct result of climate change. See for yourself... and be alarmed.



HT: A Few Things Ill Considered