Senator Sheldon Whitehouse Calls Out Climate Change Deniers

I am just going to post this in its entirety - we need more politicians like this:

Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Mr. President, last week I spoke about our nation’s military and intelligence leaders acknowledging, along with our nation’s scientific leaders, the clear evidence that carbon pollution is changing our climate. Unfortunately, there is confusion among many Americans regarding this scientific consensus, confusion caused by deliberate and coordinated attempts to mislead the American people.

For more than two decades the climate denial movement has been well organized and funded by the fossil fuel industry and conservative ideologues and foundations. The mission of these paid-for deniers is to “manufacture uncertainty,” to manufacture doubt, so the polluters can keep polluting.

This isn’t new. We’ve seen self-serving strategies like this one before: they questioned the merits of requiring seatbelts; they questioned CFCs causing the deterioration of the ozone layer; they questioned the toxic effects of lead exposure; and they questioned whether tobacco was bad for you—same strategy to manufacture doubt; often the same cast of characters. While the Congress of the United State has been distracted and deceived by these ploys, climate change marches on. Precious time is wasting. In the balance hang lives and jobs. This nonsense has gone on long enough.

The public is being misled. Special interest dollars pull the strings of sophisticated campaigns to give the public the impression that there is a real scientific debate regarding whether or not climate change is happening. There isn’t. The scientific debate is about how bad the changes will be. To manufacture the doubt, skeptics with little training in climate science are promoted as “experts.” Front groups such as the Global Climate Coalition, Information Council for the Environment, Heartland Institute, Annapolis Center, and Cooler Heads Coalition are created or enlisted to propagate the message of doubt. They question the motives and engage in harassment of the real, credentialed climate scientists.

For the record, there has been scientific debate regarding climate change. Ideas have been tested, theories have been ventured, and the evidence keeps coming back to the same conclusion: increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human-related sources is strengthening the greenhouse effect, adding to recent warming, and acidifying the oceans. Actually, the evidence coming in tends to confirm the worst and most dangerous projections.
Claims that solar activity is causing recent global warming, and about whether the atmosphere is really warming, have been settled.

When the scientific research doesn’t work out for the skeptics, they turn to straw man arguments. One straw man is that extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and droughts, aren’t proof of climate change. Let’s be clear. No credible source is arguing that extreme events are proof that our climate is changing. But they are associated with what has been staring us in the face for years: the average global temperature is increasing; average sea level is rising; and average ocean acidity is increasing. When averages change extremes usually change with them; the warming climate “loads the dice” for extreme weather.

One gimmick they have reverted to is the observation that there has been no warming trend in the last ten years. In 2010 a Republican Senator said “I don’t think that anyone disagrees with the fact that we actually are in a cold period that started about nine years ago.” Let’s look at the facts. [Show chart with fitted trend] The green line is the global surface temperature data. The red line shows the trend. The trend line is the product of basic and undeniable mathematics, by the way. [Show chart with stepped line] But here’s how the deniers manipulate the same data: the last step is the cold period my Republican colleague mentioned.

This is only a recent portion of the temperature record. When skeptics look deeper into the past, they find even more straw men: the earth’s climate always changes; it’s been warmer in the past. Yes, the earth has seen different climates in the past, not ones we’d want to live in necessarily! The reason we know about these climates is because of the excellent work done by scientists, the same scientists who tell us recent climate change can only be explained by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

And then there is this classic: more carbon in the atmosphere is good because it provides more food for plants. Ah, the Plant Food Theory. The fact is that we have changed the composition of our atmosphere, pushing the concentration of carbon dioxide beyond where it has been for 8000 centuries. To give you a timescale of 8000 centuries: the practice of agriculture has been around for 100 centuries; modern humans began to migrate out of Africa about 600 centuries ago; Homo sapiens have been around about 2000 centuries. 8000 centuries. For all that time, we never reached carbon dioxide concentrations like what we’ve caused now, through human activity.

Deniers tend to ignore facts they can’t explain away. For example, the increasing acidification of the oceans is simple to measure and undeniably, chemically linked to carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. So we hear nothing about ocean acidification from the deniers. Ocean acidification is possibly the most disastrous consequence of carbon pollution. The rate of change in acidity of our oceans is already thought to be faster than any time in the past 50 million years. A paper published this March in Science concluded that the current rate of carbon dioxide emissions could drive chemical changes in the ocean unparalleled in the last 300 million years. When you consider the implications for food security, biodiversity, and ocean-based industries, we cannot ignore these changes in our oceans. Just last Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration proposed listing 66 species of coral as endangered or threatened -- and cited climate change as driving three key threats: disease, warmer seas and more acidic seas.

Here’s what I think is worth reminding the deniers, in the words of NASA:
On global temperature rise: “All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880. Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years. Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase.”
On ocean temperature and sea level rise: “The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 2,300 feet… showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969. Global sea level rose about 6.7 inches in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.”
On ocean acidification: “Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent. This increase is the result of humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere... The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the upper layer of the oceans is increasing by about 2 billion tons per year.”
NASA scientists put a man on moon and a rover on Mars. They’re not the quacks. Our nation’s best and brightest minds accept the evidence of climate change, and are urging us to act. Yet still for some in this body, the deniers carry the day.

Why? Well, in a weekend editorial titled Flight from Facts, my home-state Providence Journal said: “[The] GOP is winning the race to avoid evidence – some of this escapism based on a desire to hold on to what had been comforting, if error-based, traditional beliefs, and some of it to avoid policies that might be economically and otherwise inconvenient.” And the price of our folly will be very, very high for future generations.
When it is a question of putting the cost on our children and grandchildren of taking care of their grandparents, how the Republican crocodile tears of intergenerational equity flow! In one of their attacks on Medicare and Social Security, which the Republicans like to call “entitlements,” we heard this: “We have got a serious spending problem here… And we need to have an impact on entitlements...If we're going to have entitlements for our children and grandchildren when they reach retirement age, we have got to change the trajectory.”

The Minority Leader has also spoken about what appears to be the health care bill, and worried about it “creating a more precarious future for our children.”
He’s said about the stimulus effort to get our economy back on its feet: “This needs to stop for the future of our country and for our children and for our grandchildren.”
When it’s the deficit, he’s urged us “to make sure that we have the same kind of country for our children and our grandchildren that our parents left for us.” He’s even talked about, and I quote, “the Europeanization of America,” and as a result of that Europeanization of America “our children and grandchildren could no longer expect to have the same opportunities that we’ve had.”
On virtually every traditional anti-Obama Republican Tea Party bugbear – Medicare, Obamacare, the stimulus, the deficit – even this Europeanization of America – out come the children and grandchildren. Let’s assume they are sincere; let’s assume they have a sincere concern for what is left for our children and grandchildren.
So, when it comes to big corporate polluters of today leaving our children and grandchildren a damaged and more dangerous world, where then is the concern for those children and grandchildren? To have children and grandchildren pay for the care of their grandparents through Medicare and Social Security is a sin and an outrage. To force on them the untold costs and consequences of the harms done by today’s corporate polluters? For that, the future generations’ interests receive nothing from the Republicans but stony silence, or phony and calculated denial.

But the cost will be on them; and the shame will be on us.

I yield the floor.

from: http://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/sheldon-calls-out-climate-deniers-in-senate-speech

Take Action Now

A bill has been passed by the House of Representatives to cut funding to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other public health protection agencies. You can contact your local Senator to show support for protection of public health and ask the Senators to reinstate the funding. Go to the American Lung Association (ALA) Website to email your Senators.

Visit the ALA website.

Must Read: Climate Change And The Integrity Of Science

I will post the text of the letter below with the link to it and the signatures here. Signed by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel laureates, this is the lead letter in the journal Science, one of the most prestigious journals in the world. By using words like; "lies", "dogma", and "McCarthy-like", Scientists are finally showing they are tired of being smeared by politicians who don't like the results of certain research, and it's about time.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE INTEGRITY OF SCIENCE
Lead Letter Published in Science magazine, May 7, 2010
From 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences:

We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.

Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial— scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That's what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of "well-established theories" and are often spoken of as "facts."

For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5bn years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14bn years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today's organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into this category: there is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected.
But there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change:

(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.
(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.
(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.
(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

Much more can be, and has been, said by the world's scientific societies, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusions should be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned about what future generations will face from business- as-usual practices. We urge our policymakers and the public to move forward immediately to address the causes of climate change, including the unrestrained burning of fossil fuels.

We also call for an end to McCarthy- like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: we can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option.

What Do Lung Cancer and Climate Change Have in Common?

The answer is that both have powerful propaganda efforts working to deny any human caused link to them. In the case of lung cancer they deny links to smoking, in the case of climate change they deny any links to human-caused CO2 emissions. In both cases they bring out the same arguments from the same think tanks that try to find any small error to discredit researchers or even the scientific peer-review process itself.

From the Guardian:

The fact is that the critics — who are few in number but aggressive in their attacks — are deploying tactics that they have honed for more than 25 years. During their long campaign, they have greatly exaggerated scientific disagreements in order to stop action on climate change, with special interests like Exxon Mobil footing the bill.

Many books have recently documented the games played by the climate-change deniers. Merchants of Doubt, a new book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway set for release in mid-2010, will be an authoritative account of their misbehaviour. The authors show that the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.

Today's campaigners against action on climate change are in many cases backed by the same lobbies, individuals, and organisations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer. Later, they fought the scientific evidence that sulphur oxides from coal-fired power plants were causing "acid rain." Then, when it was discovered that certain chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, the same groups launched a nasty campaign to discredit that science, too.

Later still, the group defended the tobacco giants against charges that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. And then, starting mainly in the 1980s, this same group took on the battle against climate change.

What is amazing is that, although these attacks on science have been wrong for 30 years, they still sow doubts about established facts. The truth is that there is big money backing the climate-change deniers, whether it is companies that don't want to pay the extra costs of regulation, or free-market ideologues opposed to any government controls...

But then I recalled that this line of attack — charging a scientific conspiracy to drum up "business" for science — was almost identical to that used by The Wall Street Journal and others in the past, when they fought controls on tobacco, acid rain, ozone depletion, second-hand smoke, and other dangerous pollutants. In other words, their arguments were systematic and contrived, not at all original to the circumstances.

We are witnessing a predictable process by ideologues and right-wing think tanks and publications to discredit the scientific process. Their arguments have been repeatedly disproved for 30 years — time after time — but their aggressive methods of public propaganda succeed in causing delay and confusion.

Happy Solstice!

Happy solstice everyone! Today is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, so from now on we will be getting a few more minutes of daylight each day as we begin the long, slow climb towards summer. There was a nice light snowfall last night, enough to make the forest here look like a Christmas card. Many species of plants and animals that call Grand Portage home depend on having enough snow during the winter, so I welcome it. It also adds some insulation for the ground against the cold yet to come, so it will help keep wells and septic systems from freezing.

There has been a lot of news and analysis about the climate change summit last week in Copenhagen, and if President Obama has done enough to push deeper cuts in carbon emissions. I think it is a major step to get China and India and the other major emitters on board with a framework to cut emissions, but there needs to be a strong and binding agreement ready for next years summit in Mexico City. Sorry deniers but the existence of snow does not disprove global warming any more than night disproves the existence of the sun. In fact we can expect even heavier snow events in the future because warmer air can hold more water vapor. The desperation of the defenders of business as usual is clearly shown by the hacking of the CRU e-mails. There is nothing in those e-mails that undercuts the science of climate change, because it is a robust theory with thousands of scientific papers as a foundation. Scientists take great care to get the science right, since they know that a sloppy paper will get eviscerated by other scientists. I am sure most of them would love to be proved wrong about climate change since the consequences are so dire. Science is a powerful tool that can show us how our planetary systems operate, and while it is not perfect, it is still the best method our civilization has devised to understand our world.

Year End Musings

2008 has come and gone, what will 2009 bring?

I am optimistic for a new President that believes in science and who appoints actual scientists to top positions, but the challenges he will face are daunting. Renewable energy should be a top priority, as well as bringing climate change to the top of the agenda. Unfortunately a couple of La Nina assisted cold winters in North America have given ammunition to those who want to continue business as ususal, but there is a difference between weather and climate, and delay could be catastrophic.

I want to read Mark Lynas' book Six Degrees - I recently saw the National Geographic show based on it and it was very good and very frightening. I like how it showed the differences in the climate and ecology one degree at a time. Think about it - six degrees doesn't sound like much, but if your body temperature was raised by that amount you would be dead.

But it's a new year, and time to be optimistic that our species has more sense than bacteria (which will use up all their resources in a closed environment until they die).

And since it is cold and windy today in Grand Portage with snow everywhere, Here is a photo I took at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica.

Good News for Cleaner Air

In spite of intense efforts by the Bush administration to loosen rules on emissions, the EPA has dropped plans that would have allowed expansion of power plants without triggering the New Source Review portion of the Clean Air Act.

The EPA has also dropped another proposed rule change that would have allowed polluters near National Parks and other Class 1 airsheds to use computer models to average annual emissions for new air permits. Critics charge that this would mask shorter term spikes in pollutants.

By dropping these proposed changes the EPA is clearing the way for the Obama administration to set its own agenda with regards to industrial pollution controls, and I for one am looking forward to seeing who the new EPA administrator will be. Judging by the quality of appointments so far I am sure it will be someone who values science over ideology.