In defense of the rational — or — DAMN, it’s hot out there!

September 27th, 2006

Science is based on that which is provable … it’s very exact, highly skeptical. Since my own nature and experience is much more mystical/majikal, I have not had much truck with science. I made quite a study of it early on and then came to that wall beyond which it couldn’t go … I went on, it stayed put. Now that quantum physics is leading the way into extraordinary new territory, we’ve reacquainted. I think we’re still friends — mostly because while I was out there exploring unproven phenomenon, I wasn’t hostile to that which was “known.”

What is “known” today, is that global warming is upon us — it may be the greatest threat to our continuance. In the United States, England too, “truthiness” is more important than science on this topic … reports are stalled, experts are silenced, facts are disputed … and it always boils down to greed and profit.

I don’t understand this consciousness — the people who refuse to look at the facts on the ground have children, have grandchildren … the climate, the air, the water — all these will be left to them. Don’t they see it? Is fattening their personal piggy bank today more important than the world they leave their OWN?

Reminds me of Fagin’s lyric from Oliver!:

When you’re old and it’s cold
who cares if you live or you die?
The one consolation’s the MONEY
you may have put by!

All this flies in the face of Republican “us/them”ism, as well … the big “Them” they SHOULD be fighting is the one that could kill us all. But then — “safer” doesn’t seem to be their style, does it. “Richer” suits them best.

Jude

Inhofe: Global-Warming Scientists, Media “Doomsayers” and Tools of “Hysterical Left”
Bob Geiger
09.27.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-geiger/inhofe-globalwarming-sc_b_30358.html

It seems somewhat appropriate that a social dinosaur like Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) would find it hard to believe that the earth’s climate has changed since the Jurassic Period, but there he was on the floor of the United States Senate earlier this week, like a crazy man on a street corner, decrying the focus these days on the effects of climate change — or, as Inhofe calls it, “the most media-hyped environmental issue of all time.”

Inhofe gave a speech on Monday to vent his frustration over what he believes is an overblown non-issue and to take the media to task for covering it.

“I want to challenge the news media to reverse course and report on the objective science of climate change, stop ignoring legitimate voices in this scientific debate, and stop being used by the hysterical left,” said Inhofe. “Breaking the cycles of media hysteria will not be easy since hysteria sells and it is very profitable, but I really believe the issue is getting worn out.”

The Oklahoma Republican also took a considerable amount of time to minimize former Vice President Al Gore’s work on climate change and, in particular, to thoroughly ridicule Gore’s new film, An Inconvenient Truth.

“In May, our nation was exposed to perhaps one of the slickest science propaganda films of all time — former Vice President Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’” said Inhofe, who, in what typifies the twisted, GOP-led Congress, chairs the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. “In addition to having the backing of Paramount Pictures to market this film, it had the full backing of the media, and leading the cheerleading charge was none other than the Associated Press, and of course they had the elitists, from Hollywood.”

I won’t even bother to refute Inhofe’s babbling by quoting Gore and the Climate Crisis web site extensively. After all, people like Inhofe will only sneer at Gore and the filmmakers saying things like “the vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is real, it’s already happening and that it is the result of our activities and not a natural occurrence.” And having Al Gore cite facts such as the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes almost doubling in the last 30 years is just plain tiresome to a guy like Inhofe.

Instead, I’ll go straight to the Bush Administration’s own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is clearly also in bed with Gore on this one. Apparently — and obviously unbeknownst to the crack research team in Inhofe’s legislative/climatological office — the EPA’s web site gives a description of global warming that could very well have come right out of one of Gore’s books.

“There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities. Human activities have altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere through the buildup of greenhouse gases - primarily carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide,” says the EPA web site. “Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased nearly 30 percent, methane concentrations have more than doubled, and nitrous oxide concentrations have risen by about 15 percent.”

Those hysterical leftists at Bush’s EPA go on to say that “The 20th century’s 10 warmest years all occurred in the last 15 years of the century. Of these, 1998 was the warmest year on record. The snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere and floating ice in the Arctic Ocean have decreased. If emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, scientists say we may change global temperature and our planet’s climate at an unprecedented rate for our society.”

And even if Inhofe manages to smear the EPA’s analysis, we can take a look at the scientific research the EPA cites in their Global Warming and Our Changing Climate FAQ. For that document, they use as their primary authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which, according to the EPA, “brings together the world’s top scientists in all relevant fields, synthesizes peer-reviewed scientific literature on global warming studies, and produces authoritative assessments of the current state of knowledge of climate change.”

Which leads to the following answer from the EPA when their frequently-asked-questions document addresses this question: “What are the potential impacts of global warming and a changing climate?” Here’s their answer:

“Our health, agriculture, water resources, forests, wildlife and coastal areas are vulnerable to global warming and the climatic changes it will bring. The IPCC concluded that ‘climate change is likely to have wide-ranging and mostly adverse impacts on human health, with significant loss of life.’”

Now, I’m not trying to get any of the young College Republicans on Senator Inhofe’s staff fired, but it’s got to be tough enough on Inhofe to look like such a nut case when his rantings on the Senate floor are taken at face value — much less, when compared to the government’s own assertions as reported from within the Bush administration.

But that doesn’t stop Chief Climatologist Inhofe.

“During the past year, the American people have been served up an unprecedented parade of environmental alarmism by the media and entertainment industry, which links every possible weather event to global warming,” said Inhofe on Monday, adding “I firmly believe that when the history of our era is written, future generations will look back with puzzlement and wonder why we spent so much time and effort on global warming fears and pointless solutions, such as the Kyoto Protocol.”

Of course, what’s got to add to the Senator’s ire is the Clinton Global Initiative, which just last week, raised $7.3 billion from 215 wealthy donors to help with the “most serious issues affecting the world today” including Energy and Climate Change. And, among those contributing, were those wacky liberals Laura Bush and Rupert Murdoch.

It’s a world gone mad, isn’t it, Senator Inhofe? ++

White House said to bar hurricane report
RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP
9/26/06
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060926/ap_on_sc/hurricane_report

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported Tuesday. The possibility that warming conditions may cause storms to become stronger has generated debate among climate and weather experts, particularly in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

In the new case, Nature said weather experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — part of the Commerce Department — in February set up a seven-member panel to prepare a consensus report on the views of agency scientists about global warming and hurricanes.

According to Nature, a draft of the statement said that warming may be having an effect.

In May, when the report was expected to be released, panel chair Ants Leetmaa received an e-mail from a Commerce official saying the report needed to be made less technical and was not to be released, Nature reported.

Leetmaa, head of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey, did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment.

NOAA spokesman Jordan St. John said he had no details of the report.

NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher is currently out of the country, but Nature quoted him as saying the report was merely an internal document and could not be released because the agency could not take an official position on the issue.

However, the journal said in its online report that the study was merely a discussion of the current state of hurricane science and did not contain any policy or position statements.

A series of studies over the past year or so have shown an increase in the power of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a strengthening that many storm experts say is tied to rising sea-surface temperatures.

Just two weeks ago, researchers said that most of the increase in ocean temperature that feeds more intense hurricanes is a result of human-induced global warming, a study one researcher said “closes the loop” between climate change and powerful storms like Katrina.

Not all agree, however, with opponents arguing that many other factors affect storms, which can increase and decrease in cycles.

The possibility of global warming affecting hurricanes is politically sensitive because the administration has resisted proposals to restrict release of gases that can cause warming conditions.

In February, a NASA political appointee who worked in the space agency’s public relations department resigned after reportedly trying to restrict access to Jim Hansen, a NASA climate scientist who has been active in global warming research. ++

Global Temperature Highest in Millennia
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 by the Associated Press
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0926-06.htm

WASHINGTON - The planet’s temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers report in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degree Fahrenheit per decade for the last 30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

That brings the overall temperature to the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago.

The researchers noted that a report in the journal Nature found that 1,700 plant, animal and insect species moved poleward at an average rate of about 4 miles per decade in the last half of the 20th century.

The warming has been stronger in the far north, where melting ice and snow expose darker land and rocks beneath allowing more warmth from the sun to be absorbed, and more over land than water.

Water changes temperature more slowly than land because of its great capacity to hold heat, but the researchers noted that the warming has been marked in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. Those oceans have a major effect on climate and warming that could lead to more El Nino episodes affecting the weather.

“This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution,” Hansen said in a statement.

Few scientists doubt that the planet has warmed, though some question the causes of the change.

Hansen, who first warned of the danger of climate change decades ago, said that human-made greenhouse gases have become the dominant climate change factor.

The study said the recent warming has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree Celsius - 1.8 degree Fahrenheit - of the maximum temperature of the past million years.

“If further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today,” Hansen said. ++

Science Hindered, Hurt by Bush Administration
Tammy Baldwin
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 by the Madison Capital Times (Wisconsin)
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0926-21.htm

My grandfather, who was a UW-Madison biochemistry professor, taught me about the importance of science and the integrity of the scientific process. I learned at an early age that pure science should always be just that pure, untainted and uninfluenced by political agendas.

In my grandfather’s lab, scientists did independent research, and peers reviewed and commented on its merits. Politics, he taught me, had no place in the scientific process.

Consequently, I find it greatly disturbing that the Bush administration has used political and religious ideologies to influence national policy on science and medicine. In Congress, I have taken on the role of watchdog, alerting my colleagues and the public to instances of this type of interference and seeking to remedy the situation when it occurs.

For example, as far back as December 2003, two independent, expert Food and Drug Administration advisory panels overwhelmingly recommended making the Plan B emergency contraceptive the morning-after pill available over the counter. Based on scientific and medical evidence, they determined that Plan B should be offered over the counter; it was safe, effective and easily self-administered. Yet this recommendation was ignored.

The manufacturers of Plan B continued their quest to make this safe, effective product more readily available. In September 2005, when a final decision had still not been issued, the top FDA official in charge of women’s health issues, Susan Wood, resigned in protest.

Wood said at the time, “I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, has been overruled.”

In January 2005 I wrote the FDA commissioner and urged him to make Plan B available over the counter. And I continued to voice my concern until approval was finally granted, this summer, just months before an election. Coincidence? I think not.

Eight years ago UW-Madison researchers, led by Dr. James Thomson, made scientific history by being the first to create embryonic stem cells in the laboratory research that may result in treatments or cures for many diseases and conditions, including juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and spinal cord injury.

But ongoing research is restricted due to an irrational federal policy. In 2001, President Bush declared that no federal dollars could be used for research on embryonic stem cell lines that were derived after that time. This arbitrary restriction, politically motivated to appease special interests, ties the hands of our scientists, hinders scientific progress and, most sadly and grievously, hurts patients and their families.

In Congress, I co-sponsored H.R. 810, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005. The bill sought tocreate strong new safeguards and guidelines concerning research on human embryonic stem cells and open up the number of lines available to researchers beyond the limitations imposed by President Bush in 2001.

As a member of the leadership team assigned to muster enough votes for passage, I spoke of the work being done here at UW-Madison and of the people I’ve met who seek cures for the diseases that afflict them.I’m proud to say this bill passed in both the House and the Senate. Yet to appease his conservative political base, President Bush chose to issue his first veto, preventing the bill from becoming law. Politics trumped science; and the restrictions on stem cell research remain.

The Bush administration has also squelched action seeking to counter the effects of global warming on our environment. On that issue, a Washington Post columnist observed, “Woe unto any administration official who becomes so concerned about global warming that he actually tries to sound the alarm. As far back as 2004, Hansen stated: “In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now.” Hansen said the administration wants to hear only scientific results that “fit predetermined, inflexible positions.”

He called this “a recipe for environmental disaster,” and I agree.

I remain deeply concerned about the politicization of science and its ramifications. To preserve the health and well-being of our people, our environment and our great research institutions, we must respect the scientific peer-reviewed process; we must ensure that our scientists are not being silenced or censored; and we must carefully weigh scientific evidence in the policymaking process. ++

Tammy Baldwin represents the Wisconsin’s 2nd District in Congress.

Pundits Who Contest Climate Change Should Tell Us Who is Paying Them
Covert lobbying, in the UK as well as the US, has severely set back efforts to combat the world’s biggest problem
George Monbiot
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 by the Guardian (London)
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0926-35.htm

On the letters page of the Guardian last week, a Dr Alan Kendall attacked the Royal Society for “smearing” its opponents. The society had sent an official letter to Exxon, complaining about the oil company’s “inaccurate and misleading” portrayal of the science of climate change and about its funding of lobby groups that deny global warming is taking place. The letter, Kendall argued, was an attempt to “stifle legitimate discussion”.

Perhaps he is unaware of what has been happening. The campaign of dissuasion funded by Exxon and the tobacco company Philip Morris has been devastatingly effective. By insisting that man-made global warming is either a “myth” or not worth tackling, it has given the media and politicians the excuses for inaction they wanted. Partly as a result, in the US at least, these companies have helped to delay attempts to tackle the world’s most important problem by a decade or more.

Should we not confront this? If, as Kendall seems to suggest, we should refrain from exposing and criticising these groups, would that not be to “stifle legitimate discussion”?

There is still much more to discover. It is unclear how much covert corporate lobbying has been taking place in the UK. But the little I have been able to find so far suggests that here, as in the US, there seems to be some overlap between Exxon and the groups it has funded and the operations of the tobacco industry.

The story begins with a body called the International Policy Network (IPN). Like many other organisations that have received money from Exxon, it describes itself as a thinktank or an independent educational charity, but a more accurate description, it seems to me, would be “lobby group”. While the BBC would seldom allow someone from Bell Pottinger or Burson-Marsteller on air to discuss an issue of concern to their sponsors without revealing the sponsors’ identity, the BBC has frequently allowed IPN’s executive director, Julian Morris, to present IPN’s case without declaring its backers. IPN has so far received $295,000 from Exxon’s corporate headquarters in the US. Morris told me that he runs his US office “solely for funding purposes”.

IPN argues that attempts to prevent (or mitigate) man-made climate change are a waste of money. It would be better to let it happen and adapt to its effects. The Network published a book this year arguing that “humanity has until at least 2035 to determine whether or not mitigation will also be a necessary part of our strategy to address climate change … attempting to control it through global regulation of emissions would be counterproductive”. Morris has described the government’s chief scientist, Sir David King - who has campaigned for action on global warming - as “an embarrassment to himself and an embarrassment to his country”.

Like many of the groups that have been funded by ExxonMobil, IPN has also received money from the cigarette industry. Morris admits it has been given £10,000 by a US tobacco company. There is also a question mark about his involvement in a funding application to another tobacco company, RJ Reynolds.

In the archives that the cigarette companies were forced to open as part of the settlement of a class action in the US, there is a document entitled Environmental Risk. It is an application to RJ Reynolds to pay for a book about “the myth of scientific risk assessment”. “The principal objective of this book is to highlight the uncertainties inherent in ’scientific’ estimates of risk to humans and the environment.” Among the myths it would be contesting were the adverse health effects of passive smoking. The application requested £50,000 to publish the book; the editors would be “Roger Bate and Julian Morris”.

Morris insists that his name was added to the document without his consent. He says he had “nothing” to do with the book. It was published in 1997 under the title What Risk?, with a foreword by the MP David Davis. It claims that passive smoking is no more dangerous than “eating 50g of mushrooms a week”, and attacks “politically correct” beliefs such as “passive smoking causes lung cancer” and “mankind’s emissions of carbon dioxide will result in runaway global warming”. Morris is not named as its coeditor, but he is the first person thanked in the acknowledgments, for his “editorial suggestions”.

The book’s editor, Roger Bate, is currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute - which has received $1.6m from ExxonMobil - and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received $2m. Until 2003, he was Morris’s predecessor as head of IPN. When the book was written, he ran the European Science and Environment Forum (Esef), which published What Risk?. The registered owner of Esef’s website is Morris. He claims he had nothing to do with Esef, and registered the name “as a favour to a friend”.

The investigative group PRWatch alleges that Esef was originally called Scientists for Sound Public Policy (SSPP), and was founded by a public relations agency working for the tobacco company Philip Morris. Documents in the tobacco archives show that SSPP was the subject of a fierce turf war between the PR firms Apco and Burson Marsteller, which were vying for Philip Morris’s account.

Burson Marsteller’s proposal argued that “industrial resistance” to regulation is “perceived as protection of commercial self-interests”. A different “countervailing voice” was required, consisting of “international opinion formers supported financially by the industry”. Their role would be “educating opinion leaders, politicians and the media”. The group would also seek funding from other industries. Some of those Esef recruited as “academic members” were people working for US lobby groups later funded by Exxon, who have made false claims about climate change.

Like Morris, Bate has often appeared on radio and television programmes. Interviewed by the Today programme about climate change, he argued that cutting carbon emissions has been “folly all along”. Instead, we should concentrate on adapting to climate change. In 2000, he presented a film on BBC2 called Organic Food: the Modern Myth, on which Morris also appeared. Bate has not yet answered the Guardian’s requests for a response.

There is no law against taking money from corporations, or against advancing arguments in the media that are in tune with theirs. Nor should there be. The problem is what appears to be a failure to declare an interest. When someone speaks on an issue of public importance, we should be allowed to see who has been paying them. This should apply to all advocates, pressure groups and thinktanks, from Greenpeace to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The BBC’s producer guidelines are clear on this point. “We need to ensure that we do not get involved with campaigning programming which is politically contentious. Programmes should not embrace the agenda of a particular campaign or campaigning group …” Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, some of us warned that campaigning groups did not always describe themselves as such. We were ignored.

The BBC now seems to have woken up to the problem. But we have lost 10 years in which climate change could have been tackled. ++

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves