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That Sound You Hear, part MCMXLV

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This is, just, hilarious. If you think dumb is funny.

The cover story of this week’s National Journal takes a deeper dive into a question we’ve explored before: What happened to the Republican consensus on climate change?

Three years ago, prominent Republicans including Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), Tim Pawlenty, and Sarah Palin all expressed belief in human-caused climate change. Several even voiced strong support for policies to cap and reduce carbon pollution. Today, all six of these leaders have joined the rest of the Republican Party in a sudden and near-unified retreat to silence or denial.

When contacted by the National Journal, only 65 out of all 289 GOP lawmakers in Congress would agree to be interviewed on the topic. Of those interviewed, only 19 said they believed that human activities are at least partly responsible for climate change. Of the 19, only five (or fewer than 2 percent of GOP lawmakers) attributed a “significant amount” of climate change to human activity.

So, what happened?

It’s not the science that has changed — it’s only gotten stronger. As Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National Research Council, said: The level of scientific certainty that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change is comparable to the strength of our understanding that vaccines prevent measles and polio.

They don’t deserve to lead a line to the port-o-let.

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Ignore This

Don’t even think about the fact that 2010 saw the largest spike in global warming gases in 50 million years:

Harmful carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels made their biggest ever annual jump in 2010, according to the US Department of Energy’s latest world data released this week.

China led the way with a spike of 212 million metric tons of carbon in 2010 over 2009, compared to 59 million metric tons more from the United States and 48 million metric tons more from India in the same period.

“It’s big,” Tom Boden, director of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center Environmental Sciences Division at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, told AFP in an interview.

“Our data go back to 1751, even before the Industrial Revolution. Never before have we seen a 500-million-metric-ton carbon increase in a single year,” he said.

Mm Hmm. So there’s at least two levels here: what you are doing personally to address this fact (it counts) plus what are the useless politicians who represent you doing. Unless I’m mistaken (and/or you’re reading this from another country), that’s two levels of apathy. Blaming China and India isn’t going to do anything about your commute, your inefficient house, the amount of waste you generate. Find some place that seems just beyond manageable and start there. At first, it seems true; you can’t do anything. Until you start doing something, even a little, and wanting to do more. Nothing to gain but a little superiority and the transferable right to bitch.

via Juan Cole.

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Texas Burning

Prayers and overly-stylized prayer services aside, this is not funny.

Raging wildfires destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Texas over the weekend and thousands of residents were evacuated from the most-threatened areas. Ten new fires labeled “large” by theTexas Forest Service cropped up Monday night across the state.

Drought conditions, high winds, and large amounts of dry, combustible brush are ultimately to blame for some 21,000 wildfires that have hit the state since December.

The loss of homes in the rocky hill country highlights how the addition of 2 million residents every five years has pushed urban sprawl into wildfire danger zones, or as former Austin assistant fire chief Kevin Baum calls it, the “top of a matchstick.”

Apparently, Dallas, Houston and SA are all in some extreme fire zone. And housing developments sprawling into wildfire zones does not a sustainable economy make. It doesn’t even do much for a non-on-fire economy. These failings are indicative of many thing, not the least of which is the easy-to-mischaracterize issue of climate change. Easy to demagogue. Easy to childishly refute (It’s freezing in Florida! in February!). But the earth is just as dry and the fires just as hot, as the climate changes and the effects thereof are just as severe and damaging – whether they choose to believe in it or not.

What externalities?!

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The Wearing of the Funny Hat

The Vatican is shrill.

We call on all people and nations to recognise the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, and by changes in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other land uses. We appeal to all nations to develop and implement, without delay, effective and fair policies to reduce the causes and impacts of climate change on communities and ecosystems, including mountain glaciers and their watersheds, aware that we all live in the same home. By acting now, in the spirit of common but differentiated responsibility, we accept our duty to one another and to the stewardship of a planet blessed with the gift of life. We are committed to ensuring that all inhabitants of this planet receive their daily bread, fresh air to breathe and clean water to drink as we are aware that, if we want justice and peace, we must protect the habitat that sustains us. The believers among us ask God to grant us this wish.

So there’s that. The Pontiff makes all kinds of pronouncements all the time and is also against birth control of any kind, so I’m not sure what kind of impact this will have. And besides, I don’t endorse his/their views on all things just because he agrees with me on this one thing.

But you do wonder about the role this kind of endorsement has on the low-lying populace. JR calls it the ‘pray for science’ approach.

Saw it first here.

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Green Culture Wars

Sure, Republican presidential contenders are going to roll out the DADT/Abortion carpet all over Iowa in their quest to be the Rightest of the Wrong. It’s what they do. It’s all they do. And Democrats might welcome their inclination to secure the 27-percenters.

But as this keeps happening over and over again, it might occur to us that the culture war idea is in need of expansion. After all, if the Kochs are going to fund movements and candidates to secure their right to pollute, they’re probably happy to keep people focused on these supposedly ‘values-oriented’ issues – that motivate the base of one side, and use up limited resources on the other – instead of fighting back in the green ground game.

Do you believe global warming is real? Do you support wind and solar energy projects? Should we incentive utilities and reward them for getting us to use less electricity? These are questions worth sparring over. And developing this ‘culture of life’ will probably be funner.

We’re playing catch- up on refocusing the big questions. Abortion? Or stabilizing atmospheric carbon levels? Culture of Life?

Just sayin’.

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Renewable You

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AFP – Getty Images

The whole idea of renewable energy sources – wind, solar, tidal, pedal – has only been in our viewfinder for a short while. This is because fossil fuels have become increasing problematic – not only in terms of long-term ecological catastrophe, but also human error-plagued bottom line-oriented short cutting and, not to be left out, geopolitical events that compromise our ability to secure said fuels. On top of this and not unrelated to the last point, the physical infrastructure, economy and energy policy of the United States were all developed when the country was a net exporter of fossil fuels.

Needless to say, nothing has changed and we continue to do things the same way, perhaps not even yet expecting different results, as one way of hanging to the last vestiges of any semblance of sanity.

And yet an expectation of different results is very much needed. As the above plus the nuclear meltdowns as a result of the devastating earthquakes in Japan attest, the need to pick up the pace in advancing toward a renewable energy present will not wait. The low-info dead-enders rising political stars waste capital and human resources debating settled issues at our collective peril and should be considered armed clueless and dangerous.

To repeat an unpopular refrain: these things are connected.

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Spending their Dime

Climate Progress has both the skinny and the ‘gras’ on what the Koch brothers are getting for the quarter mil they dropped on members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee:

The House Energy and Commerce Committee plans to hold a hearing Wednesday to discuss blocking the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to reduce carbon dioxide pollution.  We can expect the same old half-truths, misstatements, and outright lies from the new majority, with an extra dose of special interest pandering.

So… they line up a slew of paid contestants people to testify that it’s all a hoax, but how does this come off? What does it look like to the average non-Fox viewer, non-Rush listener? What about the perception that they might be protesting a little too much? Do they begin attacking teh Globalwarmingisrealism as a threat to America that must be eliminated? Into the mike? You and I might think this is already happening but… this is a formal committee process where these charlatans have to speak clearly  and on the record. I think it will take more than a mere refutation of the facts as construed to get the Koch brothers’ point across; they’ll feel the need to go on the attack to stop the traitorous EPA from protecting the common right of access to clean water and air. Because it won’t be enough to merely hold the line and play one side, and because that’s what they actually are paid to believe. And to do.

I smell overreach.

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New Dual Suspension, Now with More Disbelief

The Economist, today:

By itself, as we always say, one hot year doesn’t prove anything. The fact that every one of the twelve hottest years on record has come since 1997 is a little harder to wave away. 2010 was also the wettest year ever, corresponding to the expectation that higher heat means more water vapour. More countries set national high-temperature records in 2010 than ever before, including the biggest one, Russia. Arctic sea ice in December was at its lowest level ever, temperatures across a broad swathe of northern Canada have been 20° C higher than normal for the past month, the record temperatures are coming despite the lowest levels of solar activity in a century and a La Nina effect that should be making Canada colder rather than warmer, and so on. It is of course possible that global warming plateaued this year; it’s also possible that it plateaued this morning. One can always hope!

Complete with a nice graph. But is this thing settled? Far from it apparently. Can’t begin to do anything that might be too expensive until every last numb-nut is convinced, every last remote possibility that nothing is happened vanquished. Then what? A study group? They don’t believe in human-caused global warming because of the same reason they don’t believe in making Medicare universal – it’s un-American. Yes, it’s that incoherent. If you think you’re reasoning with people who can be convinced, you haven’t been listening to what they have been saying. And so amateur deniers and professional politicians continue to propose cuts to clean energy, yell about business regulations strangling growth and about how the debt is the evil to end all evils.

I think Republicans believe that we can keep doing things the way we always have (only with way lower taxes) and get much the same wholesome results. It’s this point that is already frustrating them in ways, besides race, that I don’t believe have actually set it in with the folks who carry the water. And until they can openly say they don’t like the results without another of their team calling them America-haters, they just have to keep professing to love the results.

Meanwhile, ticktock… and the incremental, practically unnoticeable damage will continue until it becomes more noticeable and there’s a special Fox News report on the real news that global warming actually hurts liberals and helps Republicans. And so it must be real and irreversible. And then it finally will be.

Yay?

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Too Things

1. This stuff is easy to miss: China learns at the knee(s) of the master… or do they?

Thanks to the Dandong plant and hundreds others like it, China is in the midst of unprecedented economic growth—and an unprecedented surge in the use of energy, primarily from burning coal. Coal is the fuel of China and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. As a result, China is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, along with all the other noxious by-products of coal burning. At the same time, the Chinese government has committed to reducing its CO2 emissions per economic unit by at least 40 percent by 2020. Tasked with ensuring that the nation delivers on that goal is the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the government agency that essentially sets Chinese energy and industrial policy.

“In Manhattan, lights are lit 24 hours and China will never do that,” says NDRC vice chairman Zhang Guobao via a translator, although the lights of this border town abutting North Korea blaze well into the night, illuminating businesses that tout their names in both Chinese and Korean characters. “China can never learn from the United States in terms of lifestyle. Per capita energy consumption is five times that of China and suppose, one day, that we learn from the U.S.A.: Can you imagine what the world will be?”

And then this talk, by Leslie Hazleton on reading the Qur’an.

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Nothing to See Here

So just move along. Yesterday in L.A.:

Meteorologist Jeff Masters notes “a station in the foothills at 1260? elevation near Beverly Hills owned by the Los Angeles Fire Department hit 119°F yesterday–the hottest temperature ever measured in the Los Angeles area, tying the 119°F reading from Woodland Hills on July 22, 2006.”

Weather historian Christopher C. Burt has a great post at Weather Underground, “The Remarkable Summer of 2010,” which concludes, “it is probable that no warmer summer in the Northern Hemisphere has ever been experienced by so many people in world history.”

Some further encroaching news in the continuing story of how ‘Obama is the greatest danger to our way of life’ brought to you by your friends at Shell, BP, NewsCorp and the Southern Company.