Six more weeks?

 

Seems a little odd to be predicting possible additional weeks of winter when Real Winter still hasn't gotten here. There isn't much snow on the ground, the snowmobile trails are more dirt than snow, and the predicted high for the day is above freezing. Ski resorts are hurting because even with snow making equipment it's hard to keep the runs in decent shape. For snowmaking to work, you need below freezing temperatures on a consistent basis. Usually the U.P. can count on lake effect snow, but that hasn't been happening. It's even warm in Canada. 

Why are some jobs more important to save than others?

We were watching "Real Time" with Bill Maher last night, and one of the professional political operatives, one of those people I tend to think of as being akin to whores except practicing a less respectable profession, started regurgitating right wing talking points about how absolutely devastating it's going to be to make it harder for power plants to burn coal. You know the type of political operative I mean, the folks with absolutely no discernible principles of their own -- they simply parrot whatever the latest talking points their party is promoting. Sometimes after the fact they'll concede that the nonsense they cheerfully spouted a few years before was absolute garbage, but of course by then the damage has been. You know, like the various Bush administration officials and advisers who are now willing to admit that invading Iraq in 2003 was a super stupid thing to do. Why didn't any of them speak up at the time? Because they preferred collecting a paycheck for repeating propaganda and lies more than they preferred being honest and retaining a soul.

Anyway, the panel on "Real Time" included Gavin Newsom (Democrat), Mary Matalin (Republican, former member of Dick Cheney's staff), and Steve Schmidt (Republican, and chief strategist for John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign). Not surprisingly, one of the topics discussed was climate change (California is burning), which naturally led to Schmidt and Matalin going into full-scale parrot mode about the economic costs of trying to do anything. That in turn led to talking about fossil fuels and trying to move away from burning coal in power plants. Except, of course, we can't move away from coal because of the "economic costs." Lots and lots of blathering on about how we can't move away from burning coal because it's going to cost miners in Wyoming their jobs or result in BNSF running fewer coal trains or something. The blathering about saving certain jobs always results in me wanting to reach through a tv screen and strangle someone -- or at least put a 2x4 alongside their head. What about the economic cost of sea levels rising to the point where New York subways become unusable? Or big chunks of Florida uninhabitable? And why is it more important to keep coal miners employed doing what has to be one of the nastiest, dirtiest jobs on the planet than it is to provide adequate funding for schools to keep teachers working? It's fine to slash funding for education or maintaining infrastructure, but god forbid some poor miner in West Virginia or Wyoming end up being laid off for lack of work. It's bizarre.

I have ranted on this topic before, like when discussions of the defense budget come up. It's more important to keep machinists employed building useless crap like the F-35 (the airplane pilots refer to as "the Lawn Dart" because it's so unstable in flight) than it is to make sure schools are adequately staffed, for example. This country's priorities are remarkably screwed up. 

As for the talking heads on the panel, Mary Matalin is, of course, not the sharpest tool on the planet. Or the most ethical, despite the way she kept trotting out the fact she's a convert to Catholicism. Her resume does include that stint working for Darth Cheney, and she is married to James Carville, a political operative who prefers to collect his checks from the Democrats. When you have two people sharing a bed but who claim to espouse opposite ends of the political spectrum, common sense says one (and no doubt both) is simply a paid shill who will say anything if she knows the check will clear. As long as the Republicans keep paying her, she'll keep parroting their talking points. I'm not sure how much longer she'll continue to be invited to do that parroting in front of a camera, though, as the woman is not aging well. She's 62 now but looks at least a decade older -- and the main stream media is not fond of women who actually look old. In any case, Matalin's been a paid shill for so many decades now that it's highly unlikely she retains the ability to think for herself.

Steve Schmidt, on the other hand, is a little more intriguing. He retains some shreds of individuality. He has been brutally honest on the subject of the Palin disaster, and he has brief flashes of honesty. Still, watching political operatives in action always reminds me of a line from a Dr. Hook song, "how much soul must a poor man sell just to rub two coins together?" I once worked for a distinctly conservative daily paper. A few times I found myself having to whip together a last minute editorial, a couple hundred words of meaningless right-wing platitudes that would pass muster with our corporate overlords, because the person whose job it normally was to plug that hole on the page was not available. It wasn't hard to do, but it definitely felt weird. I don't think I could have done it on a daily basis. And, in retrospect, I'm rather happy that editorials were anonymous -- it was the voice of the paper, not that of any particular person. I'm not sure I could ever do the type of publicly visible  political hackwork people like Schmidt and Matalin do. Would I have written those editorials if I had to slap my name on them? I don't know.

As for why we were watching "Real Time" on Sunday evening instead of when it was broadcast on Friday, we rarely see anything on its original broadcast date. We watch "Real Time" through the wonders of You Tube, which means we always see it at least a day late.

We're going to need a baler

It is amazing just how fast grass can grow when there's a little bit of rain. A few days ago I was telling the S.O. "Don't mow yet; the forget-me-nots are still blooming." I never want to cut the grass until the forget-me-nots have had a chance to reseed. Then we had a couple wet days. Now I'm wondering how lucrative the hay market might be this year.

On the positive side, when it does stop raining and we can fire up the mowers, we're going to get a lot of mulch for the garden.We have baggers for both mowers so most grass clippings end up as compost. It does make a difference -- we have lousy soil for gardening. It's glacial till, sand and gravel, so although it drains really well it's not particularly fertile.

We have been getting a fair amount of rain this week, which is good. It was a dry Spring; I know from working in the garden that we needed a thorough, prolonged soaking rain. Not sure just what the total rainfall has been in the past 72 hours, but each time we've checked our rain gauge it's been up around at least an inch. Not Texas level rains for sure, but definitely more than a drizzle.

Speaking of Texas, I've noticed as I've listened to NPR that the dread phrase "climate change" is being spoken out loud again. For years scientists have been saying that climate change would lead to what are euphemistically referred to as "extreme weather events." That's another way of saying summers will get hotter, winters could get colder, and when it rains, it won't just rain -- it'll make you start thinking owning an ark might be a good idea.

My personal, purely anecdotal, and totally unscientific observation when it comes to rain locally is that over the past few years we seem to be experiencing more storms that remind me of monsoons --  rain coming down in sheets, truly intense rain that dumps multiple inches of water in a remarkably short time -- and less of what I'd think of as a typical U.P. rainy day, which is cold and drizzly and nasty but not especially dramatic. You know, the type of rain where you're stuck inside all day because it's too cold and wet to do yard work but then when you check the rain gauge it turns out that in 24 hours barely enough rain actually fell to cover the bottom of the gauge. Yesterday the rain was coming down in sheets, really hard intense rain, and, yep, it was measurable in inches. Definitely not typical for this part of the world. It used to be we'd get one or two storms like that per summer; now it seems to happen almost every time it rains.

In other water-related news we finally called the Health Department to set up an appointment for them to come check the water quality on the new well, the one we weren't supposed to use until they'd run the tests to make sure the water was safe to drink. You know, the well we had drilled last August and have been using water from ever since. The Health Department guy was here Tuesday, took samples, verified that the well was indeed more than the required distance from the drain field for the septic tank, and said we'd get a letter in a few days with the results of the tests. He also said we'd hear from them fast if they found something nasty. Well, the phone hasn't run and there's been nothing in the mail yet so I guess we can assume the water we've been drinking for the past 10 months isn't swarming with fecal coliform bacteria. Not that we ever thought it might be. We're in the middle of nowhere at one of the higher elevations in the state. Everyone knows that in water supplies just as in life shit never flows uphill. 

We are so screwed

I probably shouldn't have brought Bill McKibben's Eaarth:Making a Life on a Tough New Planet with me on vacation because it's not exactly beach reading. McKibben points out quite cogently that we've already passed the tipping point, climate change isn't something that future generations will have to figure out how to prevent -- it's already happening, and what we need to be doing now is figuring out how to live with the consequences and maybe, if we're incredibly smart and lucky, managing to reverse some of the damage.

Personally, and I hate to be such a pessimist, I'm thinking more and more that the only thing that could cause a significant reversal would be a major plague. The biggest problem for the planet and the other lifeforms we share it with is too many people and not enough resources to go around: not enough food, not enough water, not enough "green" energy. I was watching the news the other day, and Al Jazeera had an interesting report on the food crisis in Mexico:  prices are climbing, and it's putting a real squeeze on the populace. Mexico's economy isn't exactly booming -- if it was, we wouldn't have undocumented Mexican immigrants picking onions in Georgia or hanging drywall in Omaha -- so people have become economic refugees. Now multiply Mexico's problem by multiple countries: for example, what got the Egyptians so fired up about getting rid of Mubarek? Rising food prices. The news media made a big deal about huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but the on-the-ground reality was a crap economy and the high price of bread. Desperate hungry people do desperate things.

And why are food prices rising? Climate change. Droughts, floods, and other weirdness. Wheat crops get wiped out in Australia, prices on the global market climb, and people go hungry in countries half a planet away and riot in Cairo.

I've never understood the people who want to argue climate change. What is the downside of behaving as though all those scientists who say it's happening are right?  We're stuck with a cleaner, more livable world? We end up with cities that make sense and have decent public transit? We become less dependent on foreign oil?

Climate change and disaster capitalism

I've been reading a great series of articles in the current Mother Jones on the subject of climate change.  Clive Thompson's "Disaster Capitalism" is particularly good. As he notes:

IF YOU LOOKED merely at the realm of politics, it would be easy to believe that the question "Is climate change really happening?" is still unresolved. In the last year, skeptics have attacked climate science with renewed vigor. Doubters seized on "Climategate"—leaked emails from bickering atmospheric scientists—to argue that the evidence in favor of warming is being cooked. Other skeptics unearthed shoddy parts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report, such as the fact that it cited non-peer-reviewed work by an activist group when it predicted that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. And all along, conservative politicians have hissingly denounced global warming as a shady liberal scheme: Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma famously called it "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." These attacks appear to be working. A spring Gallup poll found that Americans' concern over global warming peaked two years ago, and has steadily declined since.

But there's one area where doubt hasn't grown—and where, indeed, people are more and more certain that climate change is not only real, but imminent: the world of industry and commerce.

Companies, of course, exist to make money. That's often what makes them seem so rapacious. But their primal greed also plants them inevitably in the "reality-based community." If a firm's bottom line is going to be affected by a changing climate—say, when its supply chains dry up because of drought, or its real estate gets swamped by sea-level rise (see "Buh-Bye East Coast Beaches," page 40)—then it doesn't particularly matter whether or not the executives want to believe in climate change. Railing at scientists for massaging tree-ring statistics won't stop the globe from warming if the globe is actually, you know, warming. The same applies in reverse, as the folks at Beluga Shipping adroitly realized: If there are serious bucks to be made from the changing climate, then the free market is almost certainly going to jump at it.

The article cites a number of examples of individual companies and industries as a whole (like insurance) that are quite certain climate change is happening and, unlike the dithering politicians in Washington, are doing something about it.  In some cases, like with the shipping company mentioned, they're seeing opportunities to either save or make money.  In others, they're realizing they'd better start adapting now if they want to survive.  I was reminded of a brief news blurb I read someplace else a few months back about the wine industry:  Vintners are establishing vineyards in places where the growing season used to be too short for grapes, but that's no longer true.  One reason for the shift:  they've also realized that the traditional locations for their vines were becoming too hot and dry. 

In fact, if you look around, about the only industries still spouting nonsense about climate change being a hoax are the ones peddling fossil fuels.  Unfortunately, they've got deep pockets and make a lot of noise, so the weather may have to get a lot more erratic before some folks decide it's time for serious policy changes.

Science and climate change

I've been picking up on ripples of climate change denial in the news and the blogosphere lately.  There's been a kerfuffle of some sort (I'll be honest -- I haven't been paying much attention) over hacked e-mails and some research institute in the United Kingdom and climate change deniers trying to use it as evidence that all science is bunk.  I just looked at the timing and got immediately suspicious:  the big conference in Copenhagen is about to happen, policy makers from all over the world are going to be conferring, and the results coming out of that conference are likely to be ones that Exxon-Mobil et al are not going to be happy with.  It's pretty much standard operating procedure for the corporate spinmeisters to find something to use to color a process when they think they've got something to lose otherwise.

Still, two things struck me:  one is that most people truly do not have a clue just how messy science is, and the other is that the deniers' favorite claim ("People aren't changing the climate; it's all just part of a natural cycle") does not, as they seem to think, constitute an argument for the status quo.

Looking at the second point first, lots of things are "natural" or part of a natural cycle.  That doesn't mean we ignore them or pretend they don't exist.  Forest fires are natural, at least when they're caused by lightning strikes.  We still send out firefighters to try to stop them, encourage property owners to reduce fuel loads, and generally try to change the conditions that make fires worse.  We're not always particularly successful in those attempts, but for sure we don't go the other way either:  no one's out there encouraging home owners to use creosote bushes as foundation plantings or telling them to hose down their cedar shakes with kerosene.  People who live in earthquake zones now have to live with building codes that dictate how structures are constructed to prevent them from falling down, and folks in areas prone to tornadoes are  encouraged to have storm shelters.  So why, if climate change is natural and it's going to happen no matter what, do we have the deniers responding with the equivalent of screw it, it's natural, we'll just let whatever happens, happen?

It's a bizarre response.  It's the equivalent of hearing that a fire's coming, but it's not worth your time to bother hooking up a hose.  Natural stuff happens all the time and we don't react by pretending that there isn't a damn thing we can do about it; we prepare.  So what makes a warming planet different?

I don't know enough about the other issue, the controversy over the Climate Research Unit hacked e-mails, to say anything about it -- but I will note that the CRU is only one research institute at one university (and, oh Maude save us all, open phones on C-SPAN just got into global warming and deniers and New World Order tin foil hat sporting lunatics are crawling out of the telephone) . . .  In any case, the CRU may be an influential center, but it's hardly the only one on the planet that's concluded climate change is happening, and human activities may be influencing those changes.

I think the line graph above says it all -- we're in an upward climb when it comes to the planet as a whole.  Now the big question is how we respond to it.  The graph is from ClimateProgress.org, which also has a long explication of the whole e-mail "controversy" and the MSM's usual horrible job of reporting on it.

Personally, I don't find the fact that scientists reportedly "derided climate change skeptics as idiots" particularly shocking, especially in informal communications like e-mails.  If the journal I work for, or its parent agency, for example, was to receive material from scientists who wanted to revive the miasmic theory of disease,* I've no doubt those people would be tagged in personal communications as "dolts," "morons," and "nut jobs" (or worse) unless they could provide really solid empirical evidence to support their claims.  Unfortunately for the skeptics, right now the evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of the climate change accepters. The paradigm has shifted, and the deniers are now on the wrong side of the line. 

[*Miasmic theory -- the idea that illnesses such as yellow fever or malaria were caused by foul odors, like those from decaying vegetation or rotting corpses]

Weather and politics

It's raining this morning.  No real news there -- the drought broke quite a few months ago, and it's rained a lot in Atlanta lately.  Of course, since the record rainfalls and flooding in September (when the above photo was taken), every time rain is predicted now there's a lot of musing on local news about whether or not there might be flooding again. 

There will be, of course.  The only real question is whether or not anyone will have learned anything from the last time.  Probably not.

I finished reading Storm World recently and am currently reading a  theme issue of Mother Jones that focuses on climate change and environmental disaster. It's scary stuff.  California's Central Valley, long viewed as an agricultural Eden, is turning into a dust bowl due to lack of water for irrigation -- and there's no water for irrigation because the snowpack in the mountains irrigation relies isn't as deep as it used to be.  Farmers are clamoring for water and blaming government policies for their woes, but it's real hard to give the farms something that no longer exists. Island nations like Tuvalu and the Maldives are facing possibly vanishing if ocean levels rise very much.

And how are we, as in humanity in general, dealing with the growing body of evidence that's announcing loud and clear that the climate is changing, and changing in unpredictable ways? Even the deniers, the folks who say humans have no influence on the climate, have switched from "it's not happening" to "it's part of a natural cycle."  The way people always cope with bad news:  denial, willful ignorance, and procrastination, both as individuals and as governments.  And then when we do notice, we Americans tend to think we can shop our way out of environmental disaster:  buy a Prius instead of  Hummer, look for the energy star on new appliances, get reusable shopping bags, stop buying bottled water and get a Pur filter for the kitchen faucet.  There are exceptions, like the folks involved with 350.org,  but not as many as there should be.  Politically, of course, the Obama administration isn't doing much better than Bush did -- the big difference seems to be that Obama is at least smart enough to make some noises like he takes climate change seriously.  Doesn't mean the US will do anything substantive, though, because even if Obama wanted to, Congress is going to throw up roadblocks. 

On a purely personal level, the retirement bunker in upper Michigan is looking better all the time.

More climate change bad news

My brother-in-law who's into home brewing isn't going to be thrilled with this news from Secret Ingredients:

Maybe now people will heed the warnings of climate change. A scientist has warned of a possible shortage of beer.

Climate change could cause a drop in beer production within 25 years, warns Dr. Jim Salinger of New Zealand's National Institute of Water
and Atmospheric Research.

In a speech given this morning, Salinger said the weather can cause a decline of malting barley production in parts of New Zealand. Further, The New Zealand Herald reported, "that Australia was likely to be hit harder because the dry areas in that country would become drier and
water shortages were only going to get worse."

There have been reports elsewhere that global beer production is already being affected by a shortage of hops from other growing areas, e.g., Europe, and that prices are going up for grains. Apparently a lot of farmers who had been growing barley or wheat are switching to corn in response to the demand for corn for ethanol fuel production.