For the Record

The tipping point

Many scientists now believe that global warming has passed the point of no return:

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.

They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.

The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a "tipping point" beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically.

Satellites monitoring the Arctic have found that the extent of the sea ice this August has reached its lowest monthly point on record, dipping an unprecedented 18.2 per cent below the long-term average.

[...]

As more and more sea ice is lost during the summer, greater expanses of open ocean are exposed to the sun which increases the rate at which heat is absorbed in the Arctic region, Dr Serreze said.

Sea ice reflects up to 80 per cent of sunlight hitting it but this "albedo effect" is mostly lost when the sea is uncovered. "We've exposed all this dark ocean to the sun's heat so that the overall heat content increases," he explained.

Current computer models suggest that the Arctic will be entirely ice-free during summer by the year 2070 but some scientists now believe that even this dire prediction may be over-optimistic, said Professor Peter Wadhams, an Arctic ice specialist at Cambridge University.

"When the ice becomes so thin it breaks up mechanically rather than thermodynamically. So these predictions may well be on the over-optimistic side," he said.                                    

                [...]

Sea ice keeps a cap on frigid water, keeping it cold and protecting it from heating up. Losing the sea ice of the Arctic is likely to have major repercussions for the climate, he said. "There could be dramatic changes to the climate of the northern region due to the creation of a vast expanse of open water where there was once effectively land," Professor Wadhams said. "You're essentially changing land into ocean and the creation of a huge area of open ocean where there was once land will have a very big impact on other climate parameters," he said.

Katrina was just the opening act.  And when the shit really hits the fan, guess what?  There won't be any place to evacuate to.

Crescent City, RIP

I. I'm feeling astonishingly sick and angry at the destruction of New Orleans. I'd been to the oldest city in the US twice, and delighted in its bizarreness.

Of course, as my friend Hugh, who lived there for ten years, said, if you're born poor in New Orleans, you'll die poor in New Orleans. Of course the tapdancing kids were slaves. Of course the cops started at $17,000/yr and moonlighted as armed security guards.  Of course every building smelled of mildew, every surface was greasy, and the Summer air was to crawl through. Of course it was gradually being gobbled by a well-organized, fecund invasive termite. Of course Bourbon Street was the haunt of gross white people who had vulgarized mardi gras to death ten years ago. Of course the one night I slept outside of the Quarter was in a scary residence motel with drug dealers in the courtyard and filthy sheets. Of course the Old Absinthe House had its 300 year old interior renovated. Of course someone burned down Peristyle because they didn't pay someone off.

But ah, the French/cajun/African American history, the OJ/beignet/cafe au lait, the mufaletta, the trolleys, the unmodern streets, the lushness, the anarchy, the closeness to swamps,  the statue of Ignatius Reilly. Truly it was the exotic fringe, and I wanted to visit again and again.

II. Then of course there's the question of what will happen to the refugees, who are in numbers twice those of the Afghans who fled the Taliban and drought in 2000--01. Undoubtedly, as always, the rich will get some compensation, the middle classes will be screwed, and the poor will be utterly screwed. Undoubtedly the insurers won't be able to pay off, and compensation will be disbursed to whoever is loudest: namely, the rich. The middle classes will never get adequate compensation for their material losses, and many non-material losses will be uncompensatable -- where will the professors at UNO and Tulane get jobs? The poor of New Orleans were grindingly poor and isolated, and I'm unable to figure out how they will survive now that the social networks that kept them afloat have been smashed (and given that their housing is unlikely to be rebuilt). (Not to mention the unknown destruction of the Bayou people, with an entire parish under water.)

III. It would be a mistake, I think, to think about Katrina as we thought about the tsunami. The tsunami was bizarre, unpredictable, and beyond the power of even the Army Corps of Engineers to defend against.

By contrast, there are a number of reasons why the destruction of the Big Easy was not a natural disaster:

* Storms and hurricanes are inevitable in the Atlantic/Gulf/Caribbean. But thanks to global warming, they've been increasing in frequency and severity.

* Massive interference with water drainage in southern Louisiana increased NO's vulnerability enormously.

* Had the levees been in adequate condition, they might well have held up. But they hadn't been adequately maintained, thanks to the odious Republican party.

* The aftermath has been worsened by unknown amounts due to lack of manpower and organization. Of course the manpower is off in Iraq and the organization doesn't exist in an administration unconcerned with human well-being.

So there are short term and long term factors for which humans can be blamed for this disgusting horror -- those to blame being the usual crop of villains. -- Benj

Oil traders attack peaceful Greenpeace protesters

God forbid anybody get in the way of the henchmen of corporate capitalism fulfilling their earth-destroying duty:

Oil trading was interrupted for more than an hour yesterday in the world's second largest energy market when 35 Greenpeace activists invaded the International Petroleum Exchange in London on the day the Kyoto global warming treaty came into effect.

The exchange, which trades oil worth up to $1,000bn a year and sets the price for as much as 60% of the world's crude supply, was thrown into chaos just before 2pm as traders and security guards clashed with the activists coming through the only door on to the trading floor in the basement of the building.

Carrying foghorns, alarms and whistles, the protesters tried to prevent the trading.

As three Greenpeace climbers hung a banner from the roof declaring "Climate change kills. Stop pushing oil", more than a dozen people were hurt when angry traders pulled a large metal bookcase on top of protesters and guards waded in to punch and kick people trapped in corridors.

Activists expressed shock at the reaction. "They were in a frenzy. They just went wild. They were trying so hard to hit us they were falling over each other," said Peter Mulhall, a commercial manager from Liverpool protesting at the amount of oil being traded.

Stephen Tindale, head of Greenpeace UK, who led the activists into the building, said: "We believe we are stopping trading in oil on the global market. They just laid into us. We were non-violent and we made it clear that's what we were there for. But there were quite a few blows raining down on our heads. There was not much discussion. We decided to retreat for everyone's safety."

Rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary

Digby excerpts an illuminating article by Christopher Hayes, who spent time with undecided voters in Wisconsin and has tried to summarize a bit of what he learned.  The whole thing is interesting, but the following excerpt of the excerpt is a real eye-opener:

Undecided voters don't think in terms of issues. Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the "issues." That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter undecided voters who were genuinely cross-pressured--a couple who was fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for example--but such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I'd just asked them to name their favorite prime number.

[...]

But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to... So I tried other ways of asking the same question: "Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what's been happening in the country in the last four years?"

These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn't the word "issue"; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the "political." The undecideds I spoke to didn't seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief--not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

[...]

In this context, Bush's victory, particularly on the strength of those voters who listed "values" as their number one issue, makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush did this too, but it wasn't the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the president ran on broad themes, like "character" and "morals." Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values--we all know what's right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don't even grasp what issues are?

Liberals like to point out that majorities of Americans agree with the Democratic Party on the issues, so Republicans are forced to run on character and values in order to win. [...] But polls that ask people about issues presuppose a basic familiarity with the concept of issues--a familiarity that may not exist.

As far as I can tell, this leaves Democrats with two options: either abandon "issues" as the lynchpin of political campaigns and adopt the language of values, morals, and character as many have suggested; or begin the long-term and arduous task of rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary--of convincing undecided voters to believe once again in the importance of issues. The former strategy could help the Democrats stop the bleeding in time for 2008. But the latter strategy might be necessary for the Democrats to become a majority party again.

Bush Gang sets back forest protection a century

Times:

For broad impact, though, nothing quite matches the decision to scuttle the roadless rule. Nearly three years in the making, that rule essentially gave blanket protection to some of the last truly wild places in America, critical watersheds for fish and wildlife and important sources of drinking water for metropolitan areas in the West. The Bush administration offers instead a less protective and more uncertain system under which state and local officials would become the moving force in deciding whether to log or conserve forest lands. This represents a big swing in the ideological pendulum, essentially returning control of an important part of national forest policy to the very people from whom Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, both Republicans, wrested it when they established the Forest Service a century ago.

-- Benj

Cornell event: Kurt Gottfried to speak

This Tuesday (details below) Kurt Gottfried, chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Cornell professor emeritus of physics, will speak on 'Science Policy and the Bush Administration'. Professor Gottfried co-authored a recent UCS report on the misuse of science by the Bush administration. The report details the administration’s habits of “censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases” (NYTimes, Feb. 19).

Professor Gottfried will speak on Tuesday, April 13 in the Founders Room of Annabel Taylor Hall at 6:30pm.

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind

Good news from Lester Brown at the Earth Policy Institute, brought to us by Bob Whitson at Howling at a Waning Moon:

Europe is leading the world into the age of wind energy. In its late 2003 projections, the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) shows Europe's wind-generating capacity expanding from 28,400 megawatts in 2003 to 75,000 megawatts in 2010 and 180,000 megawatts in 2020. By 2020, just 16 years from now, wind-generated electricity is projected to satisfy the residential needs of 195 million Europeans, half of the region's population.

Harvard Psychologist: "Marburger ... has become a prostitute"

From "At the Center of the Storm over Bush and Science":

In a recent interview on National Public Radio, Dr. Howard Gardner, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, said, "I actually feel very sorry for Marburger, because I think he probably is enough of a scientist to realize that he basically has become a prostitute."

Later, in an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Gardner said he had made the reference but added, "I wish I'd used it as a verb rather than as a noun."

Ah yes, the Stepford Prostitutes get their own instructions: DENY ALL FACTS:

"From all the evidence I can find," [Marburger] said, "it's certainly not true that science is being manipulated by this administration to suit its policy. It's simply not the case."

What do you think he gets? $50 bucks a lie?

Park funds slashed; but don't tell the public

From American Footprint, The Price of Giveaways.

Thanks to Bob Whitson for the tip and for the post that served as a basis for the AF post.

Update on Thursday's UM Marburger Protest

Tom O'Donnell has an update on yesterday's protest:

All,
First of all, I just wanted to salute everyone from Michigan SDS who printed up the very nice-looking pamphlet, and from SDS, NWAEG and AWA! who came out to distribute literature and to protest Presidential Science Advisor Marburger's talk on Wed. AM.

His talk was advertised to be on the issue of the Cheney "National Energy Program," and our leaflet hit against him on this, as well as on the Bush Administration's egregious mis-use of science, etc.