Foxes running the henhouse

I can't remember when I've ever been this worried about our capacity for seriously fucking up the world we live in.

Strong words, I realize.  I'm 56 years old, so I remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.  I remember the BP Gulf oil spill and the Exxon Valdez disaster.  I've read about the collapse of the entire ecosystem around the Aral Sea, and the slow-motion train wreck of deforestation in the Congo, Amazon, and Southeast Asia rainforests.

All of that is peanuts compared to what we face today.

As the most powerful economy in the world, the United States is uniquely poised either to do tremendous good or to accelerate our downward slide beyond the point where it can be halted.  And this weekend I read three horrifying articles that are leading me to believe that our government is choosing the latter option.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The first is a piece in CNN Politics in which we find out that President-elect Donald Trump is still claiming that "no one knows" if climate change is real.  In interview on Fox News, he made the following statement:

I'm still open-minded.  Nobody really knows.  Look, I'm somebody that gets it, and nobody really knows. It's not something that's so hard and fast...  Now, Paris, I'm studying.  I do say this.  I don't want that agreement to put us at a competitive disadvantage with other countries.  And as you know, there are different times and different time limits on that agreement.  I don't want that to give China, or other countries signing agreements an advantage over us.

So we've taken a nine-year step backwards in time to George W. Bush's tired mantra that "we need more data" before we can act.  Which, of course, is simply a way to stall, a way to let corporate interests trump science -- because the fact is, we do know that climate change is real.  We've known for years.  There is no more an argument among the scientists over whether climate change is real than there is over whether evolution is real.

Oh, wait, we're still fighting that battle, too.

Then we have a New York Times piece by Coral Davenport in which we find out that the transition team of President-elect Trump has sent out a 74-piece questionnaire to employees of the Department of Energy asking if they had attended climate change policy conferences -- and if so, who else they might have seen there.  It asks that copies of emails referencing climate change be submitted for review.

If this brings up comparisons in your mind to the McCarthy blacklists, you're spot-on.  But Michael McKenna, a former member of Trump's transition team who stepped down when his status as a lobbyist became known, begs to differ.  "If meetings happened and important stuff was decided, voters have a right to know," McKenna said.  "It’s not a matter of national security.  The transition is not asking about nuclear weapons.  They are asking about meetings about modeling for God’s sake...  The career staff at D.O.E. is great. There’s not a soul in the world who wants to do any harm to those guys."

No?  Take a look at Lamar Smith, head of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, who has spent the last three years harassing administrators at NASA and NOAA for supporting research into climate change.  And Trump's team has already pledged to defund the Earth Sciences Division of NASA -- the department that is in charge of climate research -- calling their findings "politicized science."

So I'm perhaps to be forgiven for thinking that Mr. McKenna's reassurances are horseshit.  And my suspicions only strengthened when I read the report of a Nexus Media reporter, Philip Newell, about his attendance at an all-day Heritage Foundation event last week -- an event that can be summed up as the fossil fuel industry saying over and over, "We're in charge now, we can do whatever the hell we want."

Lamar Smith was in attendance, as were Representatives Gary Palmer and Pete Olson, and Senators Mike Lee and James "Senator Snowball" Inhofe.  All of them heaped praise upon the Trump choice for head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who has been described as "a blunt tool of the fossil fuel industry."

Inhofe was the one who made the most puzzling statement, that he "believed in climate change until he heard about the costs of doing something about it."  Because clearly if your car's transmission is going, and the mechanic says it'll cost $1000 to replace, you can magically make the transmission work again by saying "That's too expensive."

But such a meeting would not be complete without a contribution from climate denialist and general crank Craig Idso, who was the lead author of the cherry-picked and scientifically invalid report from the "Non-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," and who ended his talk by saying that "carbon dioxide is the elixir of life."

So the foxes are running the henhouse, and we're in for a slaughter unless responsible, informed people start confronting corrupt elected officials and corporate interests.  We need ethical congresspeople -- and I know there are some out there -- to make a commitment to fight tooth and nail against the ones who would sell our planet's future to the highest bidder.  The pro-science members of our government, on the local, state, and federal level, need to say to the President-elect, "You are dead wrong.  Anthropogenic climate change is real, and the consequences will be devastating."  They need to stand up to goons like Inhofe and Smith and say "Enough.  Go ahead and add me to your blacklist.  I will fight you every step of the way."

Resisting strong-arm tactics can work.  If you need an example, read this New Yorker piece about the David-vs.-Goliath fight of California state controller John Chiang against then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Schwarzenegger, in an attempt to leverage the Democratic-led state legislature into accepting his budget, issued an executive order reducing the salaries of two hundred thousand state employees to the minimum wage (then $6.55 an hour) until they met his demands.

Chiang stood up and said, "No.  Not on my watch, you won't."  Schwarzenegger sued him, but the suit languished in the courts and found little popular support.  In 2011, Schwarzenegger stepped down, his ratings at near record lows, and the incoming governor, Jerry Brown, dropped the suit entirely.

As for Chiang, far from being hurt by his act of bravery in the face of authority, he became California's State Treasurer and plans to run for governor in 2018.

So it can be done, but it requires backbone, and a willingness to stand up to power being wielded unethically.  And I hope like hell that the Congress has its members who are willing to be this fight's John Chiangs.  Because this time, what is being gambled is not the salaries of state employees, but the long-term habitability of our planet.

Sea change

A couple of weeks ago, I did a post about how scientists are beginning to learn how to talk to the rest of us slobs.  The problem, as I see it, is that scientists are trained to be cautious, not to draw unwarrantedly strong conclusions from the evidence, and to admit up front that future studies could change our understanding.  This leads the lay public to believe that they're uncertain -- which, in many cases, is not true.

One of the fields that has been plagued by this is climate science, which has become not only ridiculously politicized but rife with misunderstandings, deliberate falsifications, and outright idiocy.  (I'm lookin' at you, Senator James "Snowball" Inhofe.)  So it was with a great deal of joy that I read Phil Williamson's amazing takedown of climate change denier James Delingpole in this week's edition of The Marine Biologist. Williamson's piece, entitled, "Two Views of Ocean Acidification: Which is Fatally Flawed?" is a point-by-point response to Delingpole, who in April published an article in The Spectator entitled, "Ocean Acidification: Yet Another Wobbly Pillar of Climate Alarmism."

Delingpole's screed was, Williamson said, so full of factual errors and misquotations that it was completely worthless.  But let me quote Williamson's own words:

James Delingpole considers that ocean acidification is a scare story that is not only ‘fatally flawed’ but also grossly over-hyped by climate alarmists, for political reasons.  To give credibility to these views, information and quotes are given from four scientists (Patrick Moore, Mike Wallace, Matt Ridley and Craig Idso).  However, those sources are unreliable: none has relevant marine expertise, and the evidence they provide is either inaccurate or incorrect.  Three other scientists (Howard Browman, Richard Feely and Christopher Sabine) who do have direct research experience are either mis-quoted or their competence is dismissed.  The wider scientific literature is not considered.  Overall, Delingpole’s arguments are based on exaggeration, false dichotomy, deliberate selectivity and bravado assertion: almost everything that could be factually wrong, is wrong.

Which is ScientificSpeak for "BAM."

So the scientists are now playing hardball.  Which they should.  We're gambling with the long-term habitability of the planet.  There is no bigger threat to security, world-wide, than what we're doing to the climate.

The positive part of this is not that the deniers are being converted.  By and large, they aren't.  The reason, of course, is money and political bias.  Consider, for example, Craig Idso (cited repeatedly by Delingpole as a reputable climate scientist), who is the science advisor for the Science and Public Policy Institute, which is funded in part by -- you guessed it -- Exxon-Mobil.  Idso is also associated with the rabidly pro-fossil-fuel Heartland Institute, and has written papers for them calling into question established climate science.

Oh, and I should add that the SPPI has also questioned the dangers of mercury toxicity, and the Heartland Institute was hand-in-glove with Philip Morris to downplay the risks to children of secondhand smoke and to fight smoking bans in public places.

Tell me again how Idso is a reliable source?

[image courtesy of NOAA]

As for Williamson, he pulls no punches at all.  Which he shouldn't.  What is heartening about all of this is that the scientists are finally calling out the deniers for what they are -- either ignorant, anti-science, or in the pay of fossil fuel interests.  At this point, the evidence is incontrovertible.  Anthropogenic climate change is real.  You can deny it if you like.

But don't expect me, or anyone who has a background in science, to take you seriously.

And I said that deniers aren't changing their minds -- but that's not entirely accurate.  People who were in doubt, but kept their minds open and their understanding focused on the evidence, are coming around.  Just this week, CNN meteorologist Chad Myers, who for years placed himself in the doubtful column, wrote a piece called "Changing Opinions on Climate Change."  He methodically traces the evidence that has been uncovered since climate change was first made an issue in the mid-1980s, and describes how his thinking -- "There may be another explanation" -- eventually changed:

I was no longer a skeptic.  Humans were polluting the atmosphere to a point of no return.  I had finally excluded all other possibilities.  Had I flip-flopped?  Well, that is what it would be called in politics.  But in science, it is just an evolution of understanding.  I concluded that my original theory of "it could be something else" wasn't likely the case. 

As I tell my 11-year-old, "It's OK to be wrong as long as you learn from your mistakes." 

The records continue to be shattered every year.  The 15 hottest years on record have been since 2001 except for 1998.  2016 will likely be the hottest year on record, breaking the old record set in 2015, and the beat goes on.  With each year, with each major disaster, it becomes harder to be a skeptic of man-made climate change -- and that is why I am not one.

Well, exactly.  It's okay to be doubtful.  Being able to maintain a position of uncertainty for a while is a huge piece of being a skeptic.  But once the evidence is in, you're done.  To continue to cover your ears and say "la-la-la-la-la-la, not listening" isn't skepticism, it's anti-science bullheadedness.

So the tides are turning.  With luck, it won't be too late, although we still have the perennial roadblock in congress to deal with.  But it's to be hoped that once the word is passed to the public that the time for doubt and discussion is over, the pressure brought to bear on our leaders will finally force a sea change.