Mourning in America

Wednesday, November 05, 2014 — Election Day plus one. Some pundits predicted we might not know who owned the Senate until after the New Year, until after the runoff election results were in. They were wrong. To our dismay, we found out last night. The only good thing to come out of the evening was, I got to go to bed at a reasonable hour.

My head is flooded with thoughts, and bubbling to the top is climate change, because if there’s anything we can’t postpone any longer, it’s action on climate change. But a short while ago Mitch McConnell addressed the American people and said something that for all practical purposes sealed our doom when he said “energy policy” and “pipeline” in the same sequence of sentences. At a time when we absolutely MUST get off fossil fuels rather than exploit remaining sources, we should not be giving any attention to fracking and oil pipelines.

I’ve written about global warming countless times, and I’ve mentioned the tipping point in at least six previous posts. For the record, the tipping point is the level at which the increase of atmospheric CO₂ can no longer be reversed. Of course we all know what the role of CO₂ in the atmosphere is, don’t we? If not, it’s the principal greenhouse gas, or the gas that holds heat in the atmosphere. Too little — it gets colder. Too much — it gets hotter. And why is the level of CO₂ rising? Well, unlike eras in the past, when levels varied over hundreds of thousands of years, the level in modern history has soared over a short period of time — about 200-odd years, or since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when we started burning the coal that took millions of years to bury. And what is coal but CO₂ in the form of a combustible material, the remains of vegetation that thrived back when there were huge amounts of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

With this kind of Armageddon on the horizon, everything else is probably moot, but life will go on in our remaining few centuries. And what that life will be like depends to a great extent on what else Congress does or doesn’t do. Will Congress start whittling away at Obamacare, until we’re back where we were before, or will they grow it so everyone is covered fairly no matter how much they earn. My feeling? McConnell already gave us a hint: they will start getting rid of parts they think don’t work (read parts insurance companies hate). The end result will be that tens of thousands will still die, as before, and the US will once again be unique among industrialized nations as a country that doesn’t give a shit about its people.

Fair immigration reform? There is too much opposition on the right for any meaningful reform, so we’ll continue to see “illegals” streaming across the border, and we’ll continue to hear the clamor for more border security. There will be no dreams come true for Latinos who came here as children, no guest worker programs that help to control the flow, no pathway to citizenship. Citizenship? Forget it. The last thing Republicans want are more non-Caucasian voters.

There will be no real increase in the minimum wage, so adults will still have to support families on poverty wages. Coupled with cuts in safety-net programs, we will start seeing epidemics of malnutrition and homelessness. And Republicans will not be stirred by human tragedy.

While I see no fall-off in defense spending, I see continued disinterest in veterans, both those who recently sacrificed their youth and health, and those who served a generation or two ago. We will be forgotten, benefits will be cut, and fewer and fewer vets will be eligible for care.

On the economy forefront, look for more deregulation and less oversight as Republicans lay their trademark groundwork for another economic collapse of the kind that occurred in 1929 and 2008, also in the midst of or on the heels of a Republican-dominated government. Of course it takes time for depression conditions to develop, but the way it looks right now Republicans will have the time.

And then there’s education — and if there’s anything Republicans fear more than non-white voters it’s well-educated voters. And if your child’s school bus traverses an overpass, pray it isn’t among the thousands at risk and in need of repairs or replacement.

What else? A lot, but this post is already overly long and I’m getting overly depressed. I guess what’s most depressing of all is that voters have no idea what they did. They wanted to clean house? If so, they got rid of the wrong crowd. They castrated the party that stood up for them, not those who would suck their wealth, their blood, and their freedom.

The tipping point: 2047?

Despite the fact that various media have been discussing the tipping point lately, we’re not talking about it enough — certainly not in places where the tragically uninformed spend their time. (For a refresher, click on the hot link above.) It’s possible to find some encouragement in the results of a Google News search for “tipping point,” although you won’t find much from the mainstream media.

One team of scientists, however (as reported in The Globe And Mail), has conducted a study that suggests 2047 might be D-Year — that is, the year when climate change may become irreversible.

I won’t be around to see it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t suffer the misery of the run-up. I used to love summer, but no longer. The way it is now, I can’t wait for summer to be over. Temperatures are higher, and of course so is humidity, since warmer air can hold more moisture. The springs I used to enjoy have become marred by violent weather, and only fall remained reasonably pleasurable.

Until this year. So far it hasn’t been terrific, and for all practical purposes it’s over. We haven’t had weeks of dry, mild days under a canopy of crisp blue. Fall colors are dull, and foliage season started too early, had an indefinable peak, and overall promises to be a washout, resulting in only a bumper crop of dead leaves. If winter is more tolerable because it’s not as frigid, there’s a flip side to this minor blessing: it isn’t getting cold enough to kill off an assortment of insects. Furthermore, warmer winters don’t rule out the possibility of major snowstorms.

Tipping point notwithstanding, most people don’t get excited about climate change because of phrases like “by the end of the century.” This leaves people thinking they won’t be affected — as in “Hell, I won’t be around on Oct. 31, 2113 when the shit hits the fan.”

This of course is short-sighted and selfish on the face of it, and it ignores the reality of the changes already underway. Yesterday’s Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast might be tomorrow’s super-tornado in Tennessee, or the next crippling drought in America’s breadbasket. How many of those can we afford?

Climate change is not an overnight phenomenon — and because the changes are slow, each generation may be adjusting to a new normal — until we reach the point when people are forced to migrate because conditions have become intolerable.

Even if we were to magically reverse the trend overnight, probably no one alive today would live to experience what I called “normal” when I was young — the seasons we wrote songs about.  But completely ending our use of fossil fuels is magic beyond anyone’s comprehension, so I think it’s inevitable that we reach the tipping point.

An inevitable milestone

When I saw the headline of this NY Times lead article, I knew it meant we had reached an average daily CO₂ level of 400 parts per million. We don’t know if we’ve passed the point of no return, but if we haven’t, it sure won’t be long.

That the US is no longer the leading emitter of carbon dioxide is irrelevant. This distinction falls to China, and it’s possible that we may win back the “honor” before too long because the Chinese are probably smarter about science than we are.

Take this, for example: “The CO₂ levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic,” Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said in a Congressional hearing a few years ago when he tried to play down the role of carbon dioxide in managing our global climate because it only amounts to 0.04 percent of the total atmosphere. Why he wasn’t laughed out of the House is pretty clear: politicians in general and Republicans in particular are dangerously ignorant about atmospheric science — although at least Democrats believe what virtually all the world’s real scientists tell them. But the fact is, this relatively tiny amount of one gas makes the planet habitable and has everything to do with how much heat is trapped close to the earth’s surface — and we’ve known this for a long time. It’s not theory, it’s not subject to debate, it’s a scientific fact.

And as we all know, Republicans are seldom interested in facts. And even if some of them know in their hearts that climate change is real and it’s caused by human activity, they don’t dare let on to their corporate masters. If their constituents are uninformed, they can inform them. They just won’t.

I’ve written about global warming here before — apparently at least 52 times — and here and elsewhere I broke down the science as I understood it. What’s happening now is that we appear to be rushing headlong to return to conditions that prevailed during the Eocene epoch — a world vastly different from today’s.

While China may be the new leader in global carbon emissions, the US still plays a leadership role — and the US certainly cannot preach what it doesn’t practice. But even if the world were to magically able to reduce our avoidable carbon emissions to zero overnight, atmospheric CO₂ would continue to rise for the foreseeable future, and there’s no telling where it would level off and begin to reverse. But I won’t be around to see it, which makes me wonder why I care. Well maybe I care because survival of the species is an instinct all living creatures possess. The problem with some humans, though (the Koch brothers, for instance), is that their instinct to be rich might be stronger — and of course that’s a problem for all mankind.

Inhofe is a clear and present danger

Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) won’t be around long enough to personally destroy our habitat as we know it, but he seems determined to make sure the wheels of destruction will remain in motion.

Inhofe, one of the nation’s most prominent pinheads, recently published a book entitled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. On the Internet you can find a Tulsa World photo of Inhofe signing a copy of his book for an 11-year-old boy. In a world where justice prevailed, Inhofe would be charged with endangering the welfare of a child. You can go to jail for peddling porn to a kid, but you get off scot-free if you poison his mind with dangerous lies.

The premise for Inhofe’s book is that God controls climate, not humans. He believe that it’s arrogant of people to think they can do what only God can do. The senator has often declared global warming to be a hoax, and now he’s recorded his ignorance for the ages.

Like so many conservatives, Inhofe seems to be incapable of embarrassment or chagrin. He is obviously not smart enough to grasp the science that discredits his skewed reasoning. He fails to understand that the God he so reveres gave us minds and the option of using them. Thousands of scientists — God’s creations using their God-given brains, according to Inhofe’s faith — have deduced that global warming is the result of human activity, and to refute this is to allow that God is fallible.

So there it is, Jim. Thousands of God’s children, using the minds He gave them, have correctly assessed the evidence that humans have influenced the earth’s climate. You’re claiming that God made a mistake when he gave them the intelligence required to make this judgment, but you don’t have the reasoning skills required to grasp this either. I think if someone tried to explain that to you, your eyes would glaze over and you’d foam at the mouth.

Sorry to be so cruel, Jim, but you put yourself out there.

Sending the message

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report that says we can expect an increase in severe weather events thanks to global warming. Of course, most Republican policymakers will dismiss the report as deny there’s even a can to kick down the road and continue to bank campaign donations from oil and coal companies.

Boycotts haven’t really been tested as a way to eliminate corporate ownership of our government, but it’s fairly clear that it would be hard to effectively boycott the energy companies. Still, boycotts could send a message and help spur support for efforts to get money out of politics.

While poking around Google for hints on who and what to boycott, I came across this primer on sending a message to the Koch brothers, who are not only buying a lot of lawmakers but manipulating the political conversation by creating fake grassroots public interest groups. While the Kochs’ principal business is oil, they do own a lot of other kinds of businesses, many of which are easily shunned.

Others, meanwhile, are urging people move their money from big banks to smaller local banks or credit unions, which is a good idea for folks with the stamina to deal with all the hurdles involved in moving an account these days.

Choosing targets for boycotts can be complicated. In the first place, it’s almost impossible to find a company that doesn’t belong to a trade association or organization whose job it is to lobby for its clients before Congress. Take the frozen pizza people who persuaded Republicans to declare pizza a vegetable, for example. You can’t just switch from one brand of frozen pizza to another to make a statement — you have to boycott frozen pizza altogether (which might actually be a good thing). And then of course any given frozen pizza brand is probably owned by some conglomerate anyway, so to be really effective you have to do a little research. (Red Baron Pizza, for instance, is owned by the Schwan Food Company.)

One way to pick boycott targets is to watch Fox “News,” then choose from among its advertisers. Of course for the boycott to be effective, you have to get a few million of your friends to join in, or get the word out somehow. It’s also important to be aware of the possible unintended consequences of a boycott — layoffs that might result from slow sales of a particular product or service.

Getting money out of politics is going to take a long time, and in the end it will come down to electing candidates who promise reform, then hold them to it. Meanwhile, finding alternates to the Kochs’ Brawny paper towel brand is easy enough.

No brainer, confirmed

I have to credit PBS for an April 20, 2011, NOVA episode called “Power Surge” for confirming my explanation of how human activity is warming the earth to prehistoric levels — and helping me out with a few useful factoids.

For instance, I can now state specifically that it was about 35 million years ago that the earth’s atmosphere was loaded with carbon dioxide, and that the planet was a verdant tropical orb. There was no ice at the poles, there were forests in Antarctica and alligators in South Dakota, and there were palm trees in the Rocky Mountains.

As was and continues to be part of a natural process, the lush vegetation sucked CO₂ out of the atmosphere, and when trees and plants died the CO₂ was buried. Over the millions of years that followed, the CO₂ compressed into coal, oil, and natural gas — what we now call fossil fuels — and as we release it, we will eventually return the planet to those prehistoric conditions.

Among the other stunning factoids? I learned that one gallon of gasoline represents about 100 tons of ancient plants. Yikes.

I’ve been writing about global warming for over 20 years, and it’s nice to be able to have more to go by than what I know in my gut. It’s even nicer to know that my gut has been right all along. Some of what my gut knows it learned in high school science, and I hope that helps vindicate the American public school system. The rest I’ve picked up along the way.

If I thought it would help, I’d tie our most prominent global warming deniers to chairs — James Inhofe and Rick Perry, for example — and force them to watch “Power Surge.” But I think both of them would squeeze their eyes shut and yell “no-no-no-no-no-no-no —” because the earth is only 6,000 years old and on the sixth day God created gas pumps.

(The conversation about) global warming goes away

Global warming seems to be a dead issue in the United States, which isolates us from the rest of the world. You have to wonder what’s going on in people’s minds when the number of people who believe global warming is real drops from 79 percent in 2006 to 59 percent currently. That’s comparable to 20 percent of the people changing their minds about the sum of two plus two.

Global warming isn’t something to believe in, like God. It’s logical, and it was a logical hypothesis even before the evidence began to mount. It’s supported by more facts than you can shake a stick at. But this seems to be a problem with Americans: when the rest of the world is looking ahead dozens and hundreds of years, we have trouble seeing beyond next week. Shockingly, when renewable, non-carbon energy sources should be our priority, we’re making a big push for a 2,000-mile oil pipeline from Canada and fracking natural gas from deep underground. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry would kill off the EPA and dig up all the coal in the US.

It’s insane and dangerous to think global warming isn’t a settled issue, as Perry and other Republicans claim. While most of us won’t live to see the ultimate penalties for ignoring the climate change crisis, many are already suffering from its consequences. Scientists, always unwilling to make sweeping claims without an abundance of supporting evidence, now seem ready to blame the dramatic increase in violent weather events on global warming.

A colder than usual American winter in 2010 helped to dampen people’s interest in global warming as an issue. It was hardly warmer, right? What people miss is that global warming is bringing about changes in climate patterns. Even as the US experienced more cold and snow last winter, the planet still warmed, and the snowstorms themselves are right in line with what scientists predict — more violent weather, more precipitation. Look at the tornado season that followed. Look at the flooding. Look at the relentless heat in the summer, and the drought that set Texas on fire.

Other countries are looking at global warming as an opportunity to develop and invest in the technologies and industries of tomorrow. Not us. When we finally decide to update our energy infrastructure, we’ll be looking abroad for the parts we need.

After making bold promises about how he would combat global warming during the last presidential campaign, President Obama has gone quiet.  In 2008, discussing the rash of January tornadoes, The Weather Channel’s Severe Weather Expert, Dr. Greg Forbes, wrote that they were once rare — and over the last few years they’re becoming increasingly common. Let’s see what kind of weather January, 2012, brings, then let’s see what Obama has to say about it in his State of the Union speech next January. If he doesn’t bring up global warming in that address, then he’s taken his eye off the future.

Rick Perry — the face of the dark ages

I’m thinking about the possible effect on the future of mankind of a president who thinks global warming is a hoax. It’s hard to understand why an educated person can’t grasp the science behind it. It’s pretty simple. Nature spent millions of years turning carbon-based life forms into fossil fuels beneath the surface of the earth. Humans have dug or pumped up much of it and burned it since the beginning of the first Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, releasing the carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a primary greenhouse gas. It traps heat in the atmosphere, which makes the planet habitable. The more carbon dioxide, the more heat will be trapped. Simple, right? This is something we can measure, and it doesn’t take a genius to link warming with the accelerated combustion of fossil fuels.

Climate change deniers charge that the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists who agree that global warming is real and influenced by human activity are part of some vast conspiracy to delude the world just so they can keep receiving research grants. They prefer to cite instead the handful of dissenting scientists who are in the employ of oil and coal companies.

Real scientists believe that the principal side-effect of global warming is climate change, and we are amassing more and more evidence each year to support that belief. This is the part of the science that’s not exact, but we’re seeing the very dramatic changes in weather patterns that have been predicted since the 1980s and perhaps earlier. The increasing severe weather events and polar melting are two of the most visible indicators.

Right now Rick Perry, the Republican primary frontrunner, is staunchly in the denier camp. This alone should disqualify him as a presidential contender, but there he is at the top of the heap — and he could win, if voter anxiety over jobs and the economy doesn’t ease.

Perry isn’t alone. Global warming denial seems to be at the top of the Republican primary platform, with only John Huntsman firmly on the side of common sense. So imagine a world with its leading democracy firmly entrenched in the dark ages of science.

Climate change? You betcha

This is my 20th year in the mountains of Western North Carolina, and it’s only been the last few years that I’ve wished I’ve had an air conditioner. I guess it was three summers ago when there were maybe a handful of too-hot days, and each year since the number of such days has increased.

This year, I can count the comfortable days on one hand — and for those I can credit overcast and rain. The air was still thick enough to cut with a knife. Last year, we started seeing some relief by mid August or so, and by September the weather was downright nice. It made me wish for autumn all year round.

When winter came, we were again treated to what was abnormal weather for me. In those 20 years, only in 1993 did we have a great deal of snowfall — and that was thanks to a blizzard fed by Gulf moisture on or about the first day of spring. Most other winters, there wasn’t enough of a total accumulation to make a snowman. Again, that changed in the last few years, and by last winter significant snow was becoming routine.

I can’t say with any authority that what I’ve been experiencing here is the result of global warming, but what I can say for sure is that my own personal climate has changed, and I don’t like it.

Manhattan Project II

That human activity is the major factor in the untimely warming of the planet is virtually indisputable. But let’s set that aside for a moment. Let’s pretend it’s 2011, but our atmosphere is still as it was in 1960. Let’s consider our supply of oil itself.

The fact remains, the world’s oil reserves are not infinite, and as oil is depleted it will be increasingly difficult to recover. And finally, we will run out. How soon is anyone’s guess, but we may already be feeling the effects of a diminishing supply. In fact, according to a Mar. 26, 2010 article in Science Daily, world oil reserves may be at a tipping point. In other words, we’re on the downward slope of our oil supplies.

This alone makes a strong case for developing alternative forms of energy — and alternate forms of transportation that do not rely on oil — and we have to plunge into it in earnest now, not in ten or twenty years.  Republicans do us a disservice by suggesting “drill baby drill” can make a dent in our future energy needs. What we need is a Manhattan Project for alternate energy.