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The GOP war on science, courtesy of the Daily Show

October 29, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment 

A must-see clip via Sheril Kirshenbaum, who writes: “While this segment is done brilliantly, it also accurately reflects the mounting partisan, anti-science, anti-reality stance of certain groups that threaten to send the United States back into the Dark Ages.”

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Climate change: our generation’s great failure

October 24, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment 

Future generations will look back with anger and disbelief at our recklessness. Not only are we  turning our planet into a garbage dump, but a good number of people are denying the undeniable effects of our actions: car fumes, bus fumes, truck fumes, airplane fumes, factory fumes, chemical waste, human waste, toxins coursing through our waterways and in our food, forests burned, species going extinct, oceans dying, filth we create in immense quantities turning our atmosphere into a repository of poisonous exhaust.

The following compendium of articles and blog posts summarizes where things stand on climate change, our generation’s great failure…

Miami Herald:

The rising sea will wash across great swaths of South Florida. Salt water will contaminate the well fields. Roads and farmland and low-lying neighborhoods will be inundated. The soil will no longer absorb the kind of heavy rainfalls that drenched South Florida last weekend. Septic tanks will fail. Drainage canals won’t drain. Sewers will back up. Intense storms will pummel the beachfront. Mighty rainfalls, in between droughts, will bring more floods. The economic losses and the mitigation costs associated with the effects of global warming over the next few decades will be overwhelming. It will cost a medium-sized town like Pompano Beach hundreds of millions just to salvage its water and sewage systems.

A sobering study released by Florida Atlantic University contemplated the effects of global warming in specific terms, particularly for South Florida, considered one of the more vulnerable metropolitan areas in the world, with six million residents clustered by the ocean, living barely above sea level. The study from FAU’s Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions, adding to an overwhelming scientific consensus about the disastrous effects of global warming, and along with growing hard evidence that temperature changes are already altering the environment, ought to have sent tremors through the halls of government.

Except it didn’t. Perhaps the most peculiar phenomenon associated with global warming has been a burgeoning disdain for climate science even as scientific consensus grows more urgent. … “It is really quite an unbelievable time,” said Harold Wanless, chairman of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami. Wanless, who contributed to the FAU study, described the “dramatically accelerating melt from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.” He said, “We have forced the greenhouse gasses to levels that have not been reached since sea level was about 100 feet higher than present.”

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GOP radicals and the end of American exceptionalism

August 9, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment 

Last November, Karen Tumulty wrote an interesting article titled American exceptionalism: an old idea and a new political battle:

[T]he idea that the United States is inherently superior to the world’s other nations has become the battle cry from a new front in the ongoing culture wars. Lately, it seems to be on the lips of just about every Republican who is giving any thought to running for president in 2012.

The proposition of American exceptionalism, which goes at least as far back as the writing of French aristocrat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, asserts that this country has a unique character. It is also rooted in religious belief. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 58 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: “God has granted America a special role in human history.“

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The ugly truth about climate denial

May 18, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment 

Little should surprise us in a world where intolerable injustices are widely ignored, from preventable hunger, poverty and disease to irreversible environmental destruction to the global oppression of girls and women; where wealth disparities are at record levels and wealthy bankers are bailed out by the people they’ve bankrupted; where huge corporations pay no taxes and get subsidized by the public; where a war based on lies and deceptions that resulted in unimaginable carnage is heralded as a success; where the assault on basic rights and liberties is greeted with a yawn — if not a cheer; where sports games arouse more passion and emotion than a million babies dying; where a minor celebrity infraction receives more attention than an epidemic of sexual violence in which young girls have their insides shredded with broken bottles and sticks of wood.

In this atmosphere of denial and self-destruction, few things capture the zeitgeist better than the American right’s reckless dismissal of climate change:

Late last week, the nation’s pre-eminent scientific advisory group, the National Research Council arm of the National Academy of Sciences, issued a report called “America’s Climate Choices.” As scientific reports go, its key findings were straightforward and unequivocal: “Climate change is occurring, is very likely caused primarily by human activities, and poses significant risks to humans and the environment.” Among those risks in the USA: more intense and frequent heat waves, threats to coastal communities from rising sea levels, and greater drying of the arid Southwest.

Coincidentally, USA TODAY’s Dan Vergano reported Monday, a statistics journal retracted a federally funded study that had become a touchstone among climate-change deniers. The retraction followed complaints of plagiarism and use of unreliable sources, such as Wikipedia. Taken together, these developments ought to leave the deniers in the same position as the “birthers,” who continue to challenge President Obama’s American citizenship — a vocal minority that refuses to accept overwhelming evidence.

Here are the facts:

The more carbon that gets released into the atmosphere, the higher the average temperature rises. That’s a scientific fact. Human activities, such as driving, flying, building and even turning on the lights, are the biggest contributor to the release of carbon. That too, is a fact.

Yet millions of Americans, including most Republican officials, are in absolute denial.

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Witnessing history

May 2, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment 

Every age has its historic events and moments, but it’s hard to deny that we’re living through an epic time in history. Here are just a handful of the things we’ve seen in the past few years:

The slaughter of thousands and amputation of Manhattan’s skyline on 9/11 (and now the killing of Osama Bin Laden)

One of the most destructive tsunamis ever recorded (Indian Ocean)

One of the deadliest earthquakes ever recorded (Haiti)

One of the worst environmental disasters of all time (Gulf spill)

The virtual drowning of a US city (Katrina)

The emergence – and denial – of the biggest threat to human life (climate change)

The most successful U.S. presidential campaign ever by a woman

The election of the first U.S. black president

The 2011 Middle East and North Africa uprisings

Japan’s monster earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster

Let’s hope this list stays small in the years to come…

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