A bucket full of awesomeness

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Touching strangers

A photographer went to public places and asked strangers (meaning people who didn’t know each other, not just people who didn’t know him) to stand together for a photo and touch each other. Great results:

http://visboo.com/touching-strangers.html

Sounds about right

The nature of climate deniers

A pretty good (albeit depressing) piece about the toxic alloy of beliefs that includes climate change denial: Who is orchestrating the cyber-bullying?:

The floods of offensive and threatening emails aimed at intimidating climate scientists have all the signs of an orchestrated campaign by sceptics groups. The links are well-hidden because mobilizing people to send abuse and threats is well outside the accepted bounds of democratic participation; indeed, some of it is illegal. And an apparently spontaneous expression of citizen concern carries more weight than an organised operation by a zealous group.

Without access to ISP logs, it is difficult to trace the emails to a source. However, it is clear that hard-line denialists congregate electronically at a number of internet nodes where they engage in mutual reinforcement of their opinions and stoke the rage that lies behind them.

Those who operate these sites retail the “information” that reinforces the assertions made by their followers. They often post highly personal attacks on individuals who speak in favour of mainstream science and measures to combat global warming, knowing from experience that they will stimulate a stream of vituperation from their supporters.

The posts on these sites often provoke an outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and vilification of individuals. There is no restraining influence and, in the middle of one of these frenzies, it would be a brave sceptic who called for caution and moderation in the ideas expressed or the language used.

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On these sites discussion of the “global warming conspiracy” seamlessly segues into a hodge-podge of right-wing populist grievances and causes, including defending rural property rights, the martyrdom of farming hunger-striker Peter Spencer, the errors of the Club of Rome, blood on the hands of Rachel Carson for causing DDT to be banned, the evils of Al Gore, the plan by the United Nations to dominate the world, and the need to defend freedom and democracy from these threats. Sceptics are explicitly or implicitly portrayed as freedom fighters battling attempts by scheming elites to shore up their power or impose a world government.

Go read it all.

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One sign says it all

Substance beats style

The nature of deniers

In glitzy shadows, a health reform foe lurks (emphasis added):

IN EARLY November, thousands of protesters descended on Capitol Hill to hear Representative Michele Bachmann decry House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “takeover’’ of health care. As they disembarked from their buses, they were greeted with doughnuts and coffee, and handed protest signs and talking points about socialized medicine. Few of the protesters were aware that a right-wing billionaire had paid for the meals, buses, or salaries of the helpful guides. On the same day, this rich proprietor was toasted by Manhattan’s fashionable socialites during the City Opera’s opening night, where he was lauded for his support.

David Koch, an oil and gas billionaire who is the ninth-richest person in the United States, according to Forbes magazine, was simultaneously responsible for a $100 million refurbished opera house and a protest that featured signs comparing health reform to the Holocaust. The two sides to Koch’s activism aren’t unique – they harken to a long tradition of conservative tycoons who were great philanthropists with one hand and ruthless powerbrokers with the other. But Koch’s hidden presence in the health care debate illustrates the extent to which the Old Right is creating – and then hiding behind – the grassroots fervor of middle-class opponents of health reform.

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Americans for Prosperity is leading the way in channeling recession-era distress into anger at President Obama. This “grassroots’’ group has orchestrated many of the tea party protests, as well as steering activists into disrupting town hall meetings of Democratic members of Congress. Americans for Prosperity’s tactics are not new. Just as Koch inherited his oil business from his father, Americans for Prosperity borrows from the ultra-right group also founded in part by his dad, the John Birch Society.

Conceived by Robert Welch and a small group of conservative industrialists, including Fred Koch – David’s father and the namesake of the family firm of Koch Industries – the John Birch Society cloaked its pro-business, anti-civil rights agenda in the rhetoric of the Cold War.

The Birch Society battled communism by labeling President Kennedy a traitor who had to be impeached, denounced taxes as a creeping red menace, and attacked the forces of racial integration as being directed by the Kremlin.

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Shortly after the Birch Society faded, David Koch founded Americans for Prosperity in 1984 (then known as Citizens for a Sound Economy). Americans for Prosperity still portrays itself as a defender of freedom and the average Joe. On the Americans for Prosperity website, financial regulations, health reform, net neutrality, and the estate tax are all assailed as forms of socialism.

While David Koch is celebrated as a patron of New York opera, his Americans for Prosperity donations have gone largely unsung. With his millions, he will not only have saved this year’s performance of the “Nutcracker,’’ but also contributed greatly to the obstruction of universal health care, the denial of climate change, and the derailment of much of President Obama’s domestic agenda.

His dad would be pleased.

Stormtroopers dance

For pure jaw-dropping weirdness, but in a totally innocent way, you can’t beat this clip from South Korea:

Der Khan, indeed

Why we fight

(If the above video doesn’t appear/play, it’s on YouTube here.)

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War is peace, indeed

Lawrence M. Krauss asks some very uncomfortable questions in his Scientific American column, War Is Peace: Can Science Fight Media Disinformation? (emphasis added):

When I saw the statement repeated online that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge would be dead by now if he lived in the U.K. and had to depend on the National Health Service (he, of course, is alive and working in the U.K., where he always has), I reflected on something I had written a dozen years ago, in one of my first published commentaries:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

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The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped such free and open access to information would have had. It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation. Nonsense claims had more difficulty gaining traction in the days when print journalism held sway and newspaper editors had the final word on what made its way into homes and when television news consisted of a half-hour summary of what a trained producer thought were the most essential stories of the day.

Now fabrications about “death panels” and oxymoronic claims that ”government needs to keep its hands off of Medicare” flow freely on the Internet, driving thousands of zombielike protesters to Washington to argue that access to health care will undermine their fundamental freedom to have their insurance canceled if they get sick. And 24-hour news channels, desperate to provide ”breaking” coverage at all hours, end up serving as public relations vehicles for any celebrity who happens to make an outrageous claim or, worse, decide that the competition for ratings requires them to be anything but ”fair and balanced” in their reporting.

“Fair and balanced,” however, doesn’t mean putting all viewpoints, regardless of their underlying logic or validity, on an equal footing. Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by observation and experiment, gets thrown out like yesterday’s newspaper. One doesn’t need to debate about whether the earth is flat or 6,000 years old. These claims can safely be discarded, and have been, by the scientific method.

Obviously this applies equally well to the climate change mess. I’m sure many of you have as much trouble keeping yourself from screaming at the TV or radio or newspaper when accosted by yet another example of “faux balance”.

Whether it’s blogs, a.k.a. the Wild West of speech, or letters to the editor in a newspaper, where even the most obviously incorrect statement is left unchallenged by the people who decided to print it in that day’s edition. In more blunt terms, if the editors won’t edit, then what are they being paid for? Oh, I can hear the objections now–”You’re advocating censorship! If those letters agreed with your views, you’d love to see them published!”–and so on, ad inifinitum, ad nauseum, ad givemeafreakingbreakeum.

If you’re one of Those people, let me suggest a little mental experiment. You’re HIV positive, and so is everyone you care about, with a small portion of them already exhibiting signs of AIDS. In fact, every person currently alive or yet to be born is/will be HIV positive. We’re all literally in a race for your lives. We have to hope that some combination of science and public policy can find a way to not only cure that wretched disease but roll out the cure without wrecking the economies of entire countries.

It sure won’t be easy. Even in the best case the costs will be high, and therefore everyone will be impacted, and it will take an effort unprecedented in the history of public health to pull it off. Many poor countries won’t be able to afford even a relatively cheap cure, so the wealthier countries will be asked to contribute enough to close the gap.

Now, with this existential clock ticking in the back of all our minds, someone wants to keep telling the world via blogs and letters to newspapers that there is no HIV/AIDS connection, we should not spend a single cent on further research or public health efforts. These postings and letters are loaded with nonsense that’s been debunked endlessly, but the people pushing this particularly despicable world view are relentless. Would refusing to publish their letters in your local newspaper be “censorship”, or would it be an act of common sense and even, if I may be so left-wingy-warm-and-cuddly for a moment, decency?

Yes, I know, this is not a perfect analogy for our situation. We’re not searching for a single silver bullet solution for our interlocked climate and energy messes. We already have nearly all the solutions we need (much cheaper EV batteries would be a nice addition to our tool box, as would workable CCS (carbon capture and sequestration), not that I think the latter will ever appear). And I suspect that rolling out our multiple climates solutions will be a lot tougher than issuing a bottle of pills or set of injections to every person on the planet, even without taking into account the infection of political stupidity some countries (like the US, China, and India) are exhibiting.

But as analogies go, it’s close enough, and just as senseless and infuriating as our real-world mess.

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Happy holidays

More from Oreskes

I’m quickly, if belatedly, coming to the conclusion that Naomi Oreskes should be right near the top of my People To Whom I Must Pay Attention list.

Case in point is one of her presentations about the campaigns to cast doubt on climate change, in which she shines a light on the Western Fuels Association, a group of Western US coal companies that test marketed various ways to try to convince people that lots of CO2 in the atmosphere wasn’t a bad thing, after all.

You can get her presentation here [PowerPoint format].

The true nature of deniers

Fifty eight minutes and 37 seconds that will change your life, all in one handy, dandy video that lays out in crushing detail the link between the people who tried to deny the tobacco/cancer link and keep American consumers smoking and dying prematurely, and the people trying to convince you that climate chaos isn’t real. Hint: The link is they’re the same people.

This video is also highly recommended for the first part, which traces the history of when and how we figured out that pouring hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere will eventually trigger a climate catastrophe. The second half is where the presenter, Naomi Oreskes, follows the money and slime trail of the deniers.

One cartoon says it all

I think this nicely sums up not only the climate change denier wackjobs, but the insanely supportive behavior of the media:

(If you can’t read the text, see the original web page here.)

Superfreaks smackdown

The greatly deserved brow-beating of Levitt and Dubner, the authors of the hysterically wrong (at least regarding climate change) book Superfreakonomics continue. The best example I’ve seen to date is over at RealClimate, An open letter to Steve Levitt. The author is exceedingly polite, yet still manages to beat L and D like a rented drum. Tis a thing of beauty.

The one problem I have with all this is not that these two authors produced this Superdrivel, or that their publisher saw fit to print it on a few bazillion dead trees, but that the environmentalists and other members of the reality enhanced community are (so far) helping these people turn incredibly and intentionally shoddy work into even more money, which is exactly what they want. These guys are suddenly getting all manner of interview requests, and their book will be embraced as The Truth by the usual suspects who value markets ahead of truth and money ahead of people.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the dynamic duo has already signed a deal for their third freak book, Turbofreakonomics: Why you’re so stupid you’ll keep making us rich by buying this crap.

The one possibility for a happy ending is if the reality enhanced community makes the stink around this book so bad that it actually hurts the reputation of the authors and the publisher. In other words, they might sell more book and get more paid speaking engagements, but the overall price they’ll pay will be too high for that benefit.

Selling gold and not getting ripped off

I’m getting ready to sell some old gold jewelry that has no sentimental or other value. I stopped in a local jewelry store that advertises on the TV machine that they buy gold, and asked them what my college ring was worth. It’s a men’s ring, size 11 or 12, and it’s quite a lump of yellow metal. The price they gave me sounded ridiculously low, so I left with the ring in hand.

When I got home, I did some math and found that at the weight of the ring (given to me by the jeweler) and accounting for its composition and subtracting an allowance for the stone (which is valueless), they were offering me an insultingly low price.

Next step, of course, was to fire up ye olde Google machine and see what I could find about the right way to do this.

By far the best thing I found was damnportlanders: The more you know…Selling your gold and not getting ripped off. I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone in a similar position, or anyone who just wants to know ow such things really work.

Just as enlightening was Cash4Gold Will Offer One-Third of the Actual Value for your Gold, in which someone relates a story of that operation (Cash4Gold) offering someone a pittance and then offering him thousands of dollars to change his web site because the story he posted was popping up in Google’s search results. (It still is, too.)

Since I have just enough gold to make it worth my time to do the extra work to avoid being ripped off by a jewelry store or one of these by-mail places we all see advertise on TV constantly.

Just wondering…

When did Halloween go from being a dumb excuse for kids to dress up in costumes and eat way too much candy, to a dumb excuse for adults to dress up in costumes and have kinky sex? And what the hell took them so long???

(This was prompted by a recent decision to kill a few minutes by browsing in one of those Halloween stores that pop up everywhere in the US this time of year. I swear, less than 5% of the merchandise was for a customer under about the age of 18. And just about all of it gave me the vapors.)

The oceans are cookin’

World’s oceans warmest on record:

Sea-surface temperatures worldwide have been the hottest on record over the last three months, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Ocean temperatures averaged 62.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the June-August period, 1 degree higher than normal.

Last month also saw the warmest August sea-surface temperatures on record at an average of 62.4 degrees, also 1 degree higher than usual, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center said.

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Meteorologists said there’s a combination of forces at work: A natural El Nino system just getting started on top of worsening man-made carbon emissions tied to global warming, and a dash of random weather variations.

The resulting ocean heat is already harming threatened coral reefs. It could also hasten the melting of Arctic sea ice and help hurricanes strengthen.

Anyone care to guess how the climate change deniers will try to spin this?

loudGizmo — the store!?

I’ve just launched not just an experiment, but one from deeeeeep left field.

The experiment is a CafePress store, also named loudGizmo, dedicated to spreading the idea that it’s not just “acceptable” for those of us concerned about climate chaos to be impatient, frustrated, and even mad about humanity’s (so far) lousy response to that enormous threat, but it’s actually a responsible and productive reaction. You’ve heard the saying, “If you’re not mad, then you’re just not paying attention.” This project is a viral marketing effort to get more people to pay attention, get mad, and then take action.

The general approach of most products I’ll offer over time, where space on each item allows, will include two-stages: In-your-face, eye-catching design and some accurate energy and/or environmental statistics. For example, some of the first designs feature data about how much coal the US burns every day or second and how much CO2 that consumption produces.

Right now, the store has one section with various designs for T-shirts, mugs, stickers, magnets, all built around the theme “Coal Sucks”, although I have quite a few other designs in the works (because oil sucks, too, among other observations), at varying levels of in-your-faceness.

So, stop over, check out the designs, and feel free to send me suggestions for new designs (lougrinzo [silly little at sign] rochester.rr.com) and pass the link on to your friends.

Disgusting deniers on parade

As Lily Tomlin once observed, “I grow more cynical every day, but it’s still hard to keep up”.

Why so glum, you may ask? Try this one on for size:

Dirty coal group’s 14th forgery impersonated American veterans. Real vets support strong efforts to action on climate and clean energy — as does GOP Senator John Warner, former Armed Services Committee chair:

As Brad Johnson reports at Think Progress:

Congressional investigators have discovered that the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity’s (ACCCE) astroturfing effort has impersonated American military veterans in a forged letter sent to Congress. Thirteen other forgeries purporting to be from organizations representing blacks, Hispanics, women and senior citizens. This latest letter, sent in June to influence a swing Democratic legislator on his vote on the American Clean Energy and Security Act, impersonates a local American Legion official in Rocky Mount, VA:

The letter, sent to the office of Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA), asks Perriello to “make sure the Waxman-Markey bill includes provisions to promote American energy independence, while protecting already cash-strapped constituents from increases in electricity prices.” It concludes, “Thank you for listening to concerns of vets in your district.”

Yesterday, Alstom joined Duke Energy, Alcoa, and First Energy by abandoning the scandal-ridden organization, as “questions that have been raised about ACCCE’s support for climate legislation.”

Honestly, I don’t know what to say about this that wouldn’t be considered in extremely poor taste.

Seriously warped

“Seriously warped” is the best way I can describe several things that have come to my attention today…

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TreeHugger: ‘Global Cooling’ Exhibit Still on Display at the Smithsonian:

he Smithsonian boasts one of the nation’s most respected, most visited, and most famous group of museums. So what’s it doing still displaying an exhibit based on 1970s-era science–that the earth is undergoing ‘global cooling’–in its Natural History Museum in 2009?

You’re probably most likely to hear about global cooling these days from climate change deniers who sometimes say something along the lines of: “Well, scientists said that there was global cooling in the ’70s. Now it’s global warming?”

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Which brings us back to the question of why there’s a display pushing the idea of global cooling in one of the nation’s most prestigious natural history museums.

Evidently, it’s out of sheer laziness: there’s been a note up next to the placard for the last two years saying that the exhibit is going to be updated, but no changes have been made. Elsewhere in the museum, there are displays showing recent, up-to-date climate science, and explanations of the current understanding of climate change. Looks like it’s about time to update the exhibit–come on fellas, you’re the Smithsonian.

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Only In It For The Gold: Please Support Andrew Feedman!:

Eli points us to the latest round from Andrew Freedman at the Washington Post:

Andrew Freedman who posts on the Capital Weather Gang has been visited by a plague of Moranos. He wrote, not so long ago, that Obama needs to give a speech on the need for climate legislation which will control greenhouse gas emissions. For his efforts he has been visited by the banshees.

The most extreme example of the many nonsensical contributions already appearing on this thread is that of CoSyBob, who claims:

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Freedman himself believes the common howler that Venus’s extreme temperature is the result of some “runaway greenhouse effect” . I have NEVER seen an AGWer disavow that idiocy . FYI , Venus is more than twice as hot as any object in its orbit could be heated by the sun . Therefore by basic physics it is radiating 16 times as much energy as it is receiving from the sun.”

In fact, the surface of Venus is in radiative balance with the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is in radiative balance with the sun and space. How energy piles up at the surface is accessible as an undergraduate level calculation.

To suggest that a body the size of Venus is actually an energy source goes totally against astrophysical principles. So to hold on to his political philosophy, CoSyBob is inclined to abandon several sciences.

Looked at in detail, it’s an absurd argument, beyond circular. “The greenhouse effect is unreal. Look at Venus! Venus couldn’t possibly be that hot because of the greenhouuse effect, which is unreal! Therefore it’s unreal!”

How many mainstreamers do you think could you fool with that ridiculous claim about Venus and the greenhouse effect, if you repeated it endlessly on as many web sites as possible?

And not for nothing, but “banshees” is pretty good. In my less than charitable moments I’ve been calling them things like hordes of flying howler monkeys. To-MAY-to, to-MAH-to, and all that.

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Fox News blurts out its agenda: “Now that Jones has resigned, we need to follow through…. First, stop cap-and-trade, which could send these groups trillions,” and then put “the whole corrupt ‘green jobs’ concept outside the bounds of the political mainstream.”:

Having taken Van Jones down, the job destroyers and climate destroyers of the right wing most certainly smell blood (see Beck: “Almost everyone who does believe in global warming is a socialist”).

Now Phil Kerpen, policy director for Americans for Prosperity, has laid out the right-wing strategy for how “the Van Jones affair could be an important turning point in the Obama administration,” in a piece on FOXNews.com. AFP is “pro-tobacco industry” group that “worked around the U.S. in recent years to defeat” smokefree workplace laws (as SourceWatch notes) — and is now fighting for the big corporate polluters to block climate and clean energy action. Brad Johnson at WonkRoom has documented how Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a front group for billionaire polluters, pushing the most inane pro-pollution ads you’ll ever see (here).

But what Fox News and AFP would like to achieve is no joke:

The Van Jones affair is, as President Obama likes to say, a “teachable moment,” and we need to put not just him but the whole corrupt “green jobs” concept outside the bounds of the political mainstream.

Conservatives hate the notion of green clean energy jobs because their entire anti-science, anti-climate, anti-environment message is built around the (false) notion of a trade-off between reducing pollution and jobs (see “Mything in action: Why conservatives hate green clean energy jobs“). If you don’t care about the health and well-being of future generations, you certainly don’t care if they have good jobs (or any jobs, for that matter).

I don’t even know what to say about that one, at least not in public.

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Have we reached the state yet where enough people are not just “concerned” about climate chaos or peak oil that we’ll do more than type at each other in this positive feedback loop of memes known as the blogosphere and actually do something about it? I’ve long believed that anger can be a very positive response to a situation, as long as the determination and focus and energy it generates are channeled in a positive way. I’m just wondering where our collective tipping point is; I passed mine a long time ago.

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The highest hurdle

There are times when I think all the US-based activists trying to spread the word about peak oil or climate chaos are fooling ourselves. The biggest challenge is not getting mainstream Americans to pull their heads out of their butts, but international politics. If the major oil consuming and CO2 producing countries can’t find a way to reach agreements, we’re so screwed I don’t even know how to express it.

I covered this in a couple of recent posts over on TCOE, Us vs. Them and China: No change.

The one group that seems to have a very bright future is anyone positioned to benefit from a massive geo-engineering effort. Climate chaos is coming on so much quicker than expected, and there’s so little sign of sufficient progress being made on emissions reductions, that it’s now virtually certain that we’ll have to resort to one or more geo-engineering hacks to try to save ourselves from our own excesses.

Of course, anything that reduces warming without actually reducing the CO2 level in the atmosphere (e.g. orbiting sunshades) still leaves the horrors of ocean acidification on the table, which will be one hell of a problem all by itself.

At least in the mean time we’ll have the peak oil and climate change deniers, a.k.a the marching morons/squadrons of flying monkeys, to keep us “amused”.

To fight or surrender?

The Guardian has a longish exchange between George Monbiot (a highly recommended author) and Paul Kingsnorth over the issue of the value of fighting the good fight. I recommend you take the few minutes to read it all.

My position is simple: Fight! Fight the deniers and delayers (whether they’re motivated by money or ideology or a mix of the two), fight to change public policy and private consumption patterns (starting in your own household, of course). Anything else dooms future generations, beginning with the kids running around the planet as you read this, to a very horrible future. To do that without even trying to improve their situation would be an overt, horrible act of inter-generational cruelty, one that I certainly am not willing to engage in.

Just wondering…

…is “Lomborg” Swedish for “howling at the moon crazy”?

This is the thought I had just now after reading Cheap Climate-Change Fix Needed, Lomborg Center Says, which says, in part:

Cheap solutions are needed to slow global warming such as painting roofs white rather than programs to cut carbon emissions that may cost countries $250 billion a year, a study released by Danish professor Bjoern Lomborg said.

Taking a contrarian view to government research papers on climate change, the report challenged plans favored by the United Nations to force industrial polluters to reduce carbon dioxide, the main manmade gas blamed for climate change.

The paper, which explored a CO2 tax as an alternative, was prepared for the Danish research group Copenhagen Consensus Center that’s headed by Lomborg, a Copenhagen Business School professor who has garnered attention for criticizing UN-led efforts to tackle global warming.

“We’ve locked ourselves into a conversation that’s almost exclusively about cutting carbon emissions,” Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” published by Cambridge University Press, said in an interview. “Unfortunately it’s an expensive and inefficient way to deal with climate change.”

Lomborg, 44, doesn´t deny global warming is under way and already is harming many developed countries. He does say higher temperatures will mostly benefit northern developed nations at least until about 2050: Europe and parts of North America will likely see more agricultural output and lower heating costs.

The white roof thing gets a lot of flack, but I’m convinced it could be a positive, but minor, contributor to addressing climate chaos.

The problem is that you can take all of these “simple and cheap” solutions, roll them up together and do them all at once, and they still won’t be nearly enough. Is we keep emitting CO2 at anywhere near the level we’re doing so now, we’re in almost unfathomable trouble. The warming will keep coming, and so will the other half of our climate nightmare, ocean acidification.