Environmentalists Accused of Climate Denialism

Great to see a writer without a famous name roil the blogosphere, as Adam Sacks sets off a storm with an accusation flung in the face of fellow environmentalists on Grist:

We're deniers every time we say “80 percent by 2050,” or
even “80 percent by 2020”; every time we refer to tipping points in the
future tense; every time we advocate substituting “clean” energy for
“dirty” energy; every time we buy a squiggly light bulb or a hybrid
vehicle; every time we advocate for cap-and-trade, or even a carbon tax; every
time we countenance the mention of loopy geoengineering schemes;
every time we invoke the future of our children and grandchildren and ignore
the widespread suffering from global climate disruption today.

Every time we say these things and more, we’re promoting
denial of dire climate reality, the reality that’s spinning out of our grasp so
fast that we conduct our frenetic climate “solutions” efforts in a
kind of stupor, obsessing with parts-per-million statistics, keeping
desperately busy to ward off our own utter collapse borne of despair.

The reality we’re denying? 
We’re denying that we’ve put so much carbon into the atmosphere already that
positive feedback loops are well on their way to amplification hell.[1] We’re denying that time lags between carbon
emissions and their effects are frighteningly relevant, and that the disastrous
effects we’re seeing now are from emissions of 30 years ago.  We’re denying that non-linear responses of
physical systems cannot be calculated and therefore are perilously ignored.
We’re denying that our consumption and waste have far exceeded planetary
capacity, possibly irreparably so.

He's got a point. If it's up to environmentalists to preserve our current climate, we may have a problem.

At one time we could claim that it's not our fault, we weren't driving…but we've been driving for approaching a year now, and hardly seem to have changed course. As Ted Rall impolitely points out:

Democratladyandrepublicanfriend

Who Will Be the Last Human to Eat Bluefin Tuna?

Barry Estabrook asks a great question:

There is a strong likelihood that someone in this generation will be
the last human to eat a bluefin tuna. By most scientific accounts, the
species hovers on the brink of extinction, if it hasn’t already crossed that line.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Probably it will be a Japanese person…the Bluefin Tuna is loved to death there.

h/t: Mark Bittman's great food blog

Why China Needs to Think About Climate

James Fallows, a wonderful writer and blogger for the Atlantic, is not one to panic, but when it comes to the ice at the roof of the world — upon which hundreds of millions of people depend — he sounds scared.

Here's his post from today, on what Obama should be talking about on his trip to China, but isn't:

Thirty years from now, the most important aspect of Barack Obama's
interaction with China will be whether the two countries, together, can
do anything about environmental and climate issues. If they can, in
2039 we'll look back on this as something like the Silent Spring/Clean
Air Act moment in American history, which began a change toward broad
environmental improvement. If they can't….

Today the Asia
Society's "China Green" project ran a full-page ad in the New York
Times — good to see support for the print media! — and launched
another online display dramatizing why such cooperation matters. This
one is called On Thinner Ice
and documents the accelerating disappearance of the glaciers on the
Tibetan plateau that feed nearly all the major rivers of Asia.
(Previous Asia Society displays on this topic here.)

The "On Thinnner Ice" video is very good, about eight minutes long, but being the impatient sort that would rather read than sit and watch, I'm going to link instead to one of the featured speakers in the mini-doc, China expert Orville Schell, and a piece he had in August in The New York Times.

He makes the same point Fallows does, from the other side of the problem:

President Hu, by promising this week to try to cut carbon dioxide
emissions per unit of gross domestic product and to increase the share
of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption, signaled his
willingness to act. China can’t solve this problem alone, and President
Obama’s scheduled visit to Beijing in November presents an opportunity
to forge a bilateral alliance on climate change. After all, the ice
fields in the majestic arc of peaks that runs from China to Afghanistan
are melting in large part because of greenhouse gases emitted thousands
of miles away.

It's called The Thaw at the Roof of the World. 

Sadly, Obama seems to feel he cannot raise the question, because Congress won't follow his lead.

Seems we the people need to lead on this issue…by reducing our carbon footprint, and thus showing that we care about the planet. So argues TreePeople founder Andy Lipkis argues in his most recent post. 

Palin’s Little Sister Goes Rogue on the Appalachian Trail

The insta-celebrity Carrie Prejean, right-wing heroine and defrocked beauty queen, has been brought low by that most embarrassing of all self-destructive acts…a sex tape.

According to Google Trends, her (unreleased) sex tape was the hottest search item on Google Trends a couple of days ago, and the chart still looks like a rocket going up.  

Believe it or don't, newspaper editor Rod Dreher reports she made this tape…while hiking the Appalachian Trail!

Defying Google and the nation, Prejean claims she wasn't having sex, by which she means apparently sex with other people. 

"It was me by myself. There was no one else with me. I was not having
sex," the controversial beauty queen told TODAY's Meredith Vieira in
New York.

Prejean admitted to making the video of herself and sending it to her boyfriend when she was 17 years old. Sounds almost Clintonian, doesn't it? Sex with yourself for someone else is not sex.

Oh, okay.

Here's how Marin Cojan of Double XX put it, more thoughtfully:

Conservatives love their beauty queens, I think, in part for the
obvious reasons—the pageant fetishizes the traditional values
conservatives go gaga over—not only strictly prescribed gender roles
but also moral rectitude, patriotism, and charity. But there’s a
victimization element at work here, too: Prejean is the brave and
besieged outsider standing up to the know-it-all elites. It’s an image
they see as representative of, and mirrored in, themselves. This was evident in the ad
that the National Organization for Marriage cut with Prejean when it
tried to portray the controversy as a case of liberal intolerance, as
it is portrayed in the title of her book, Still Standing: The Untold Story of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate, and Political Attacks.

Of course, as John McCain learned the hard way, there are great
risks in aligning yourself with the right’s flame-throwing bombshells.
Like Palin, Prejean can always be counted on to fire up a crowd, but no
one can keep her from going rogue—as evidenced by last night’s tantrum
or, more obviously, the sex tape itself, which reportedly caused her to be dropped from a “Defenders of the Family” event last week.

Anyhow!

What is it with Republicans and the Appalachian Trail?

They hit the trail — real or virtual — and turn into sexpots!

Bewildering, one might say…here's Carrie indoors, on her way to great fame:

Miss_california_celebrity_01_0006_Layer_5_full
 

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

Is urban farming really a sustainable lifestyle?

This is a question Novella Carpenter spent ten years of her life trying to figure out in Oakland, California, and it's a question she answers in her new book Farm City.

Here's a picture of the writer on her urban farm:

Novella

The book gets a favorable mention on Maud Newton's site, and the interview that goes with the mention is great.

Carpenter describes the nature of urban farming this way:

I want to send a cautiously optimistic message. Urban farming is really
intense and requires discipline, thrift, and a strong back (just like
“real” farming). While I did make some mistakes that rendered some of
my farming experiments economically unfeasible (hundred-dollar turkey),
over the years I did learn ways to make it sustainable. I think urban
farming does have the chance to change the way we eat. You know, I
finish narrating my book in December of 2007. That moment was the end
of an era of massive cultural bloat—a time when urban farming was
considered fringe-y and outsider. My how times have changed! But, I do
want people to be realistic. If you look at places like Detroit, which
has the most advanced urban agricultural scene in the US, they still
only grow 3% of the city’s produce. So it can’t replace, it just
supplements, rural farms.

Another book to read, but it sounds like a good one…

Farmcity

Sunbathing in Scotland by 2060?

From the staid London Times:

The government’s chief scientific adviser has warned that climate change could
destabilise populations across Europe, potentially triggering a wave of
migrants heading for cooler regions such as the British Isles and
Scandinavia.

Professor John Beddington believes that, without deep cuts in greenhouse gas
emissions, average temperatures could rise by about 6C by 2060 in countries
including Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey.

This would make most cities unbearably hot in summer, while destroying
agriculture and turning much of southern Europe into a desert. The result
could be that millions of people will migrate northwards.

“It is going to be extremely unpleasant to live in southern Europe and may not
be feasible for the current level of population so many people may need to
move,” said Beddington. “Northern Europe will be a far more attractive place
to live.”

But summering in Scotland may be a vain hope on my part. Recently the rains in summer there have been awful, I hear from visitors and reporters alike. Aberdeen had its wettest summer since l943, with the equivalent of a month's rain in a singe day, according to the BBC.

Here's a picture of an Aberdeen street in early September from Mark McHardy:

Aberdeenfloods

Water Deal: Delta Savior, or Unworkable Mess?

Yours truly has been trying to make sense of the massive California water deal headed for the Governor's desk. Haven't made a whole lot of progress yet; it's so big that apparently most of the legislators who voted on it, either pro or con, didn't even try to read it.

But I have come across a greatly helpful site, Aquafornia, which is a gold-mine of information from California papers of all sorts, and included this "leak of the week" chart from Capitol Weekly circulated by lobbyists showing on a proposed structure for Delta governance.

Is this intended to show how ineffective the Delta Stewardship Council will be in improving the Delta? Because it looks to me like a model for gridlock and inaction…

Deltaflow

Sarah Palin: A Job in Heels with Cross-Eyes

If you find the Palin phenomenon fascinating, if alarmingly irrational, you will want to read the astounding rant on the subject from Matt Taibii, not published by Rolling Stone, but available via True/Slant. Here's a selection:

Palin’s paranoid ramblings and self-pitying tantrums on the way out
of office not only didn’t injure her chances for national office, they
actually appeared to help, as polls taken in the week after her
resignation showed that 71% of Republicans were now prepared to vote
for her for president in 2012. Just as she had during the campaign last
fall, Palin defied rational analysis by making a primal connection with
the subterranean resentments of white middle America, which is
apparently so pissed off now at the rest of the planet for not coddling
its hurt feelings in the multicultural age that it is willing to
embrace any politician who validates its insane sense of
fucked-overness.

Nobody understands this political reality quite like Palin, even if
she doesn’t actually understand it in the sense of someone who thinks
her way to a conclusion, but merely lives it, unconsciously, with the
unerring instinct of a herd animal. Palin’s supporters don’t judge her
according to her almost completely nonexistent qualifications for
serious office, they perceive her as they would a character in a
Biblical narrative, a Job in heels with cross-eyes and a
mashed-potato-brained husband who happens to spend a lot of time
getting shat upon by Letterman and Maureen Dowd and the other
modern-day Enemies of Christ.

Here's Palin becoming famous, second by second, at the GOP convention, via an AP photo by Susan Walsh.

Palinatconvention

For Those Who Hate Daylight Savings Time

Hopper

That's from PostSecret.

For thoughtful sorts who like a little reasoning to go with their instinctive hatreds, here's Ryan Sager from True/Slant, making a shocking amount of sense.

I'll just mention his first of ten reasons to dump daylight savings time:

Daylight Saving Time (DST) was sold as an energy-saving measure. But it
doesn’t save energy. The results of a natural experiment in Indiana
(where the state was moved onto DST by a change in the law in 2006)
showed that DST actually increased residential energy demand by 1% overall — and by 2%-4% in October.

If you need more, take a look at his other arguments. 

But if you ask me, put simply and factually, Daylight Savings Time is an Orwellian exercise in hubris.

It's the all-powerful us attempting to control time, and promising to exercise this power solely for good.

But regardless of our intentions, the claim that we have the power to make time run backwards is absurd. Preposterous, Ridiculous. Deserving of mockery.

We keep our promises small, regarding the reversal of time, and so think we have gotten away with it, but small absurdities, like small mistakes in arithmetic, remain mistakes.  

Daylight Savings Time is nonsense, plain and simple.

What additional argument is required?