The vanishing ice

California and Oregon are, literally, burning up.  A couple of days ago, there were five named tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico simultaneously, something that's only happened one other time since records have been kept.  One of those cyclones is, as I write this, in the process of pummeling coastal Alabama and the panhandle of Florida, and the city of Pensacola is mostly underwater.

And still our "leaders" are claiming climate change doesn't exist.

The issue is settled, folks.  It has been for some time.  There is not a reputable climate scientist out there who denies the reality of anthropogenic global warming.  I know you can't link single events to a climate shift -- saying, for example, that a particular wildfire was directly caused by climate change -- but the overall pattern is absolutely unequivocal.  To deny it is an indicator either of being beholden to the corporate interests who would very much like climate change not to exist, or else abject and inexcusable ignorance. 

Donald Trump, for example.  The man was an amoral, sociopathic narcissist to begin with, and now is illustrating on nearly a daily basis that he is also a catastrophic clod.  Take the briefing he participated in with California Governor Gavin Newsom a couple of days ago, in which the following exchange took place:

Wade Crowfoot, the California Secretary for Natural Resources:  We've had temperatures explode this summer...  We want to work with you to really recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forests and actually work together with that science.  That science is going to be key because if we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it's all about vegetation management, we're not going to succeed in protecting Californians.

Trump:  It'll start getting cooler.  You just — you just watch.

Crowfoot:  I wish science agreed with you.

Trump:  Well, I don't think science knows, actually.

Right.  Same as his statement a few months ago that COVID-19 was going to "disappear, just like a miracle, you'll see."

The fact that Trump has a single supporter left brings home the accuracy of Isaac Asimov's famous essay "The Cult of Ignorance," written all the way back in 1980, in which he said:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Trump may be the best illustration of that poisonous belief that the world has ever produced.

There's malice underlying his ignorance, though.  Trump not only is colossally stupid, he goes out of his way to surround himself with people who either share his views or, at the very least, don't dare challenge him.  Witness the fact that just two days ago, he appointed a well-known climate science denier, David Legates, to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- which oversees funding for climate monitoring and climate research.

All of this is hardly a surprise.  It's just more manifestation of a long-established pattern of science denial by our government.  Nevertheless, if you for some reason needed yet another reason to accept that climate change is occurring as we speak, consider the study that appeared in Nature last week, by Laura Landrum and Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.  In a paper that has the grim title, "Extremes Become Routine in an Emerging New Arctic," Landrum and Holland describe a fundamental shift in the entire climate of the Arctic, where open water and rain is now more common than sea ice and snow.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Pink floyd88 a, Arctic Ice 2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Writing about the research for the New York Times, journalist Henry Fountain paints a devastating picture of the speed of the change:

Using years of observational data from the region and computer models, the researchers found that sea ice is already in a new climate, in effect: The extent of ice in recent years is consistently less than what would be expected in even the worst year for ice in the mid-20th century.

Arctic sea ice has declined by about 12 percent per decade since satellite measurements began in the late 1970s, and the 13 lowest sea-ice years have all occurred since 2007.  This year is expected to be a record or near-record low for ice extent, which will be determined by the end of this month as the summer melt period ends.

I had to read that twice to realize that actually, even Fountain is soft-pedaling it.  The "thirteen sea-ice years since 2007" are every year since 2007.  The first sentence of the second paragraph should end with, "... and each of the last thirteen years has had lower sea ice than any other on record."

That is climate change.  Unmistakable unless you're either mind-blowingly ignorant or else in the pocket of corporate interests.

Or, like in the case of Donald Trump, both.

The time for argument over whether climate change is happening is over.  It has been for some time.  My fear is that the window of opportunity for doing something about it might be closing as well.  I'm not giving up yet, though.  Too much is at stake, like the long-term habitability of the Earth.  Time we elected some leaders who not only care about this, but understand and respect science rather than sneering and scoffing at it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about one of the most terrifying viruses known to man: rabies.

In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, we learn about the history and biology of this tiny bit of protein and DNA that has, once you develop symptoms, a nearly 100% mortality rate.  Not only that, but it is unusual amongst pathogens at having extremely low host specificity.  It's transmissible to most mammal species, and there have been cases of humans contracting rabies not from one of the "big five" -- raccoons, foxes, skunks, bats, and dogs -- but from animals like deer.

Rabid goes through not only what medical science has to say about the virus and the disease it causes, but its history, including the possibility that it gave rise to the legends of lycanthropy and werewolves.  It's a fascinating read.

Even though it'll make you a little more wary of wildlife.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Heavy weather

Some days it seems like it would be a good move to get off social media altogether.

This is largely because I'm so easily pissed off.  Fortunately, at least I've learned the "don't argue with people on the internet" rule, but the "just keep scrolling and don't worry about it" rule hasn't sunk in very well yet.  I ran into a good example of this yesterday, with a conversation that showed up on my Facebook feed that left me fuming for a couple of hours afterward.  It started as follows:

This is a good brief overview that explains how and why human emissions of carbon dioxide are not causing catastrophic climate change. I have been also explaining the same points made in the article to anyone who would listen for the past 10 years.

He then included a link to an article by David Legates, professor of geography and climate science at the University of Delaware, called, "It's Not About the Climate -- It Never Was."  In it, Legates makes a variety of points, including that the climate is not sensitive to carbon dioxide concentration, that a warmer Earth will not generate more numerous or intense weather events, and that higher carbon dioxide concentrations (and a global temperature increase) will be beneficial to the human race and the global ecosystem.

To say Legates is a biased witness is a statement of mammoth proportions.  He's affiliated with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an evangelical group known for rejecting claims of anthropogenic climate change which has been accused of being a "front group for fossil fuel interests" because of its ties to Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which is directly funded by Exxon-Mobil and Chevron.  To give you a flavor of the Cornwall Alliance's philosophy, here's a direct quote from one of their publications:

The world is in the grip of an idea: that burning fossil fuels to provide affordable, abundant energy is causing global warming that will be so dangerous that we must stop it by reducing our use of fossil fuels, no matter the cost. Is that idea true? We believe not. We believe that idea – we'll call it "global warming alarmism" – fails the tests of theology, science, and economics.

The fact that they put theology first -- hell, that they included it at all -- should tell you all you need to know.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NOAA]

Anyhow, Skeptical Science and Climate Science Watch did a good job of taking apart Legates's claims piece by piece, and that's not what I'm here to do.  To get back to the original post -- claiming that Legates is correct and he (the original poster) has been "explaining the same points... for ten years," there were the following replies:

Courageous of you, and I say good job, T____, with posting something that flies in the face of the prevailing face of leftist ideologues -- calling anyone, for example, climate change deniers, which is a reprehensible things [sic] to accuse someone of who has a different opinion that the Neo-Puritanical leftist ideologues -- of the West.  Thousands of scientists disagree with Obama and Leftists on this subject.

The Green New Deal ...now that is pseudo science. Stop cow farts and spend 4x a countries GDP.  Outstanding how a 29 year old bartender could have that drafted and ready so quick. 

Kudos T____ for speaking up on your beliefs based in reality.  Even one of the founders of Greenpeace says ita [sic] a sham.

And so forth and so on.

One of the most maddening things about all of this is how the climate change deniers (okay, I guess that makes me reprehensible -- so be it) set up straw man claims and easily identified biased, cherry-picked statistical arguments, and all the people who would very much like us not to have to change what we're doing just go, "Yup.  That's the truth.  I knew it all along."  The thing is, there is consensus among climatologists, notwithstanding what a handful of rogues like Legates have to say.

And being a rogue is not somehow noble, or courageous, or realistic.  Sometimes when you're flying in the face of consensus, you're simply wrong.  Here, there are mountains of data supporting the connection between fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide levels, between carbon dioxide and climate, and between climate change and increasingly violent weather extremes.  I don't see any way that a truly unbiased individual could evaluate the evidence and not make those connections.

So Legates is obviously biased.  Why is a matter of conjecture, whether it's simple confirmation bias or something more sinister.  (If you still doubt this, go back to the Climate Science Watch article that I linked above, which is well worth a read -- and ends with slamming Legates for "uncritical reiteration of tired and discredited criticisms.")

But again, it's not that I didn't know there were climate change deniers.  Hell, the White House is home to one of 'em.  It's the association of science -- based on hard evidence -- with "leftist ideology," as if climate data had a political opinion, that really torques me.  Even more, labeling this kind of biased pseudoscientific diatribe as "courageous" makes me want to hurl a heavy object across the room.

So honestly, I should probably get off social media, or at least severely curtail how much time I spend on it.  Probably good advice for a lot of us, for a variety of reasons.  Right now the chief of which is that I really don't need anything to make my blood pressure higher.  I've got enough to worry about, such as whether Donald Trump is going to open the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse before or after he's indicted.  The last thing I want is to add infuriating Facebook posts to the list.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]