A Revolution to Fight the Science Deniers

Posted on by

We need a lot of political change in this country, and a lot of media change too. Both modern media and politics focus far too much on contentious debate, and not enough on facts.  Starting now, everyone reading this has to devote some time every day fighting  the lies and the false statements coming out of the mouths of media pundits, right-wing politicians, and their fans, online and everywhere else, or we’re going to have an even worse climate crisis than we have now. We have to call them out on their misleading or deliberately false statements on climate change,  especially their attacks on the EPA.   Climate change deniers are not armed with the facts — we are.   Climate change deniers are like Bill O’Reilly of FOX News.   He’s a person so uninformed he didn’t  even know that tides are caused by the moon, and he has no idea how the moon got where it is.  (He thinks tides, and the moon, were created by magic, outside of the normal realm of science and facts.)  We can’t let people like O’Reilly and others like him (and there are many others) continue to say ridiculously  ignorant things and go unchallenged. If they go unchallenged, people will believe them.

Climate Cranks is a new term used to describe people who deliberately mislead the public about climate change for political reasons. Some of them even get paid for it.  Some of them even send bloggers like myself offers to write “guest articles” in order to lie about fossil fuels.  Some of them simply want the EPA to fail so oil and coal profits remain intact.  They stand for the worst things you can think of:  pollution that leads to serious health problems, including asthma and cancer.  Overall, they are a deceptive lot and they need to be fought against much harder than has been the case in the last couple of years.   The health of Americans and everyone is literally at stake.  It’s important to note that many of these “climate cranks” are in our government and actually deny obvious things happening in the world around them (their slim grasp on reality versus fantasy should be remembered for the next election.)

Here is an excerpt from The Nation on dealing with climate and science deniers.  This article is adapted from Mark Hertsgaard’s HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my daughter was born at a momentous turning point in history. She arrived on a sunny San Francisco afternoon in April 2005. All the nurses kept remarking on how alert this baby was, so her mother and I decided to name her Chiara, which means “clear and bright” in Italian.

I had been covering the climate story for fifteen years by then, and when Chiara was almost six months old, I went to London to interview Sir David King, then the British government’s chief science adviser. The interview changed my [...]

Unstable Climate, Adaptation and Rising Food Prices

Posted on by

Food shortages and rising food prices are getting more intense  around the world.  What will it take for prices to stabilize?  The answer to that is probably “a stable climate”, and we don’t have that anywhere on earth.

Global food supplies will face “massive disruptions” from climate change, Olam International Ltd. predicted, as Agrocorp International Pte. said corn will gain to a record, stoking food inflation and increasing hunger.

“The fact is that climate around the world is changing and that will cause massive disruptions,” Sunny Verghese, chief executive officer at Olam, among the world’s three biggest suppliers of rice and cotton, said in a Bloomberg Television interview today. “We’re friendly to wheat, corn and soybeans and bearish on rice.” — Bloomberg

Yesterday on the “Morning Joe” show on MSNBC, the group of pundits that gather every morning were discussing rising food prices around the world. They decided there was no explanation for it, it’s just happening.   It really had them stumped.  That’s because  “climate change” is not in their vocabulary — yet.  Soon, it should be unavoidable.

The food shortages are only beginning and it will get much worse over the next 10 years unless something is done as soon as possible.  All my reading has led me to believe that adapting to a 4 degree C rise in global average temps is not something we can expect to be able to do.

The analysis below was recently written, and it’s about this question: could we actually adapt to a 4 degree C temp. rise, or even worse, and should we believe that we can? If we can, can animals? Can plants? Can insects? It’s probably not reasonable to assume anything alive today could necessarily adapt to such extreme changes.  If adaption is unlikely, countries have to act fast to try to stop the instability of the climate, which is beginning to be noticed by nearly everyone at this point. It’s important to note that the survival of the rich is not the same thing as “adaptation” for the rest of us. Individual wealth will be a factor in “adaptation” because it will determine if a person can move to another location or not, and afford food and water.

From 4 Degrees Hotter, a new report by David Spratt of Climate Code Red, Australia.

Global political failure to reach agreement on greenhouse gas reduction measures in accord with the scientific imperatives will result in 4 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2100, if only the present levels of commitments by nations are achieved.

But is talk of, and planning for, adaptation to a 4-degree warmer world realistic, or delusional?

4 degrees became a sensitive issue in 2008 when an influential and controversial paper by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows of the UK Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research concluded that:

“…it is increasingly unlikely any global agreement will deliver the radical reversal in emission trends required for stabilization at 450 parts per [...]

Ron Paul and the Environment

Posted on by

There has been a lot of speculation lately about what kind of a President Congressman Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican, would be.  From my research, it’s clear he would not support any EPA action on climate change, and in fact the EPA is a part of our government that he wants to eliminate.  He’s not in favor of EPA authority, even that given to them by the Supreme Court. Paul even wants to eliminate the Department of Energy.  He won the CPAC straw poll vote last weekend, for the second time, so it’s clear he has quite a bit of grass roots support within the Republican party, but he would not be good for the country’s environment as a whole because he relies almost entirely on a philosophy of “free markets”. Free markets is where the climate change problem started in the first place.

Ron Paul would be a good alternative to Obama and most other candidates in a couple of respects, such as ending war. Our current wars are not just wrong and counterproductive, they are incredibly damaging to the environment. These military adventures also waste an awful lot of money that could be spent on scientific and technological research for renewable energy and other things.  (The Afghanistan “war” is costing American taxpayers over $2 billion dollars a week, or about $10 billion a month). Congressman Paul would put an end to the wars we are in as well as the hundreds of military bases we have all over the world. That is a big plus in his column.  (See Raw Story’s article).

There are many negatives to Paul’s philosophy, especially on the environment and on women’s reproductive rights. On the environment, Paul says he wants to protect clean air and clean water, but he doesn’t support any sort of government power or EPA power to enforce that.  That would be a huge problem.  In this video, he discusses some of his viewpoints on environmental issues.

Because climate change is such an important issue, most environmentalists will not support Ron Paul in 2012.  See his previous statements and votes on environmental matters below:

From On the Issues

Big Oil profits ok; Big Oil subsidies are not. (Jun 2007)
Voted NO on enforcing limits on CO2 global warming pollution. (Jun 2009)
Voted NO on tax credits for renewable electricity, with PAYGO offsets. (Sep 2008)
Voted NO on tax incentives for energy production and conservation. (May 2008)
Voted NO on tax incentives for renewable energy. (Feb 2008)
Voted NO on criminalizing oil cartels like OPEC. (May 2007)
Voted NO on removing oil & gas exploration subsidies. (Jan 2007)
Voted NO on keeping moratorium on drilling for oil offshore. (Jun 2006)
Voted YES on scheduling permitting for new oil refinieries. (Jun 2006)

Voted NO on passage of the Bush Administration national energy policy. (Jun 2004)
Voted NO on implementing Bush-Cheney national energy policy. (Nov 2003)
Voted NO on raising CAFE standards; incentives for alternative fuels. (Aug 2001) [...]

US House of Representatives Are Trying to Block Net Neutrality [Politics]

Posted on by

On a rampage against anything that remotely smells like regulation, the House of Representatives have voted to block funding for the FCC's Net Neutrality plan, which would ensure that ISPs couldn't restrict certain users from accessing select content. Of course, this would have to pass through senate and survive President Obama's desk, so the chance of this becoming a bill is unlikely. But the anti-tech sentiment coming from one half of our congress makes me all sadface. [Reuters] More »


Spiders Won’t Bite [Factoids]

Posted on by

Spiders are often portrayed as malicious, bloodthirsty creatures looking for anything with a pulse to sink its fangs into—especially us humans. Look no further than movies like Arachnophobia, Arachnid or even Eight Legged Freaks. Even Peter Parker was the victim of a random spider bite. But the truth is, spiders don't really bite. I mean, sure they bite, but only if you really provoke them to do so. More »


Fixing The Thinker With 3D Printing [3D Printing]

Posted on by

In 2007, some goons looted a casting of Rodin's The Thinker (one of many castings that exist of the iconic piece) from the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands, intending to sell it as scrap metal. I'm not sure why you'd want to sell a multi-million dollar work of art as scrap metal, but hey, that's on them. Though six other works from the museum were destroyed in the looting, The Thinker was recovered, though badly damaged. The museum asked the Belgian 3D printing company Materialise to help them fix it up. More »


Why This Man Could Spend 20 Years In Jail For a YouTube Video [Wtf]

Posted on by

This is Evan Emory. This past Monday, he posted a video on YouTube that showed (through some simple editing) him singing a sexually explicit song to a classroom full of elementary school students. He didn't actually sing anything offensive in front of the kids. But he's still facing 20 years in prison, on a felony charge of manufacturing child sexual abusive material. More »