< That Weather Channel guy pipes up again / >

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.A story at Politico, written by Erika Lovley and titled "Scientists Urge Caution on Global Warming," requires the kind of close analysis that's done with a hammer and chisel — so that the huge holes beneath it can become more visible.

Summary: According to Lovley, a nonspecific number of "climate change skeptics" in Washington D.C. have begun to notice "a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings" to make carbon limits in the U.S. a "shaky" move.

But on closer read, the nonspecific number of skeptics is quite specific: "both senators from Oklahoma, Republicans Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe," along with "Marc Morano, communications director for the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee."

Which would be, by my count, three people.

Erika Lovley

And what about the "growing accumulation of...science and other findings" — how many scientists are we talking about there? "Weather Channel co-founder Joseph D’Aleo and other scientists" and "Cato Institute senior fellow Patrick Michaels."

Which would be, by my count, two people.

(Forget the "other scientists" part, just like "other findings" earlier; that's just sloppy, lazy writing. Identify it, or delete it.)

And now, watch closely as Lovley provides depth and detail to this deeply flawed Journalism 101 exercise:

Armed with statistics from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center, D’Aleo reported in the 2009 Old Farmer’s Almanac that the U.S. annual mean temperature has fluctuated for decades and has only risen 0.21 degrees since 1930 — which he says is caused by fluctuating solar activity levels and ocean temperatures, not carbon emissions. Data from the same source shows that during five of the past seven decades, including this one, average U.S. temperatures have gone down. And the almanac predicted that the next year will see a period of cooling.

Let's not even discuss the part about D'Aleo publishing his findings in the Old Farmer's Almanac, rather than, say, a refereed and respected science journal employing strict peer reviews of blind submissions and verification of source studies. What's more important is the glaring presence of huge ideological blinders limiting both D'Aleo's and Lovley's views to one place on the planet: the United States. For them, and for far too many Americans, the U.S. is the planet. Beyond its shores, nothing.

It's kind of like The Truman Show or Pleasantville, where the prospect of the world being something more than just here has never occurred to anyone before.

Joseph D'Aleo

“We’re worried that people are too focused on carbon dioxide as the culprit,” D’Aleo continues in the Lovley piece. “Recent warming has stopped since 1998, and we want to stop draconian measures that will hurt already spiraling downward economics. We’re environmentalists and conservationists at heart, but we don’t think that carbon is responsible for hurricanes.”

Hmm... and where do hurricanes occur? Caribbean islands, Mexico, and.. oh, right, the United States! No matter what D'Aleo says or Lovley chooses to quote, the myopia is omnipresent.

It's really too bad about Mr. D'Aleo. He's got what appears to be an impressive resumé, and he could probably do a lot of good with those credentials and that experience. But if nothing else, he might at least disassociate himself from the Weather Channel, where his own argument is countered.

As for Ms. Lovley, it could just be that in her quest to appear objective (impossible, but still the ideological gold standard for journalism), she's going overboard by writing as generally as possible and not asking for, or including, specifics. This might change with time and experience.


Meanwhile, if these fine people could stop acting like draft horses with their snouts pointed at the road and blinders keeping them from getting spooked, and look beyond themselves, their ideologies, their country, their continent, their hemisphere, they might see that a lot of really bad shit is happening to a whole lot of people and animals and fish and plants and trees outside the United States — and all of it due to steadily rising overall temperatures.

As in, like, the cumulative mean, the kind that's used in science.
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< Green Apple (finally) / >

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A couple of years ago I sent a letter off to Apple, letting the company know that it was missing a huge opportunity to promote the environmental benefits of the iTunes Store and iPods. While arguments were (and are still) out there that the iPod was a toxic device going into landfills by the millions, Apple did have a free product recycling program for all of its products. Problem was (and is still) that Apple advertised the program by burying it in the small print of the documentation that came with new Pods and Macs. Rather than shouting the news at customers, the company conveyed details about the recycling program as a mere whisper.

My rebuttal to the "iPod Is Bad Garbage" claim was built on two basic premises: the existence of the product recycling program, and a basic comparison/contrast between digital AAC files and physical CDs, and between iPods and Walkmen or "boomboxes" or stereo recievers and CD players. In the first case, discs and jewel cases that had been made of plastic (oil) for decades were now conceptual pieces of code, and what had been bulky, multi-component, energy-sucking boxes for decades had been distilled to a single battery-powered device the size of a deck of cards.

Sure, there's a sound-quality difference between costly audiophile components and relatively inexpensive iPods, even with a Bose SoundDock to enhance things. And yes, it takes electricity to power the servers hosting the iTunes Store tracks, as well as the desktop and laptop computers at millions of homes that are buying those tracks. But in the photo above, the home system has seven separate components — each of them plugged in and most likely kept that way for instant-on. Recharging an iPod or a laptop, or even powering a basic desktop computer, will win the energy-saving trophy over the components easily.

Even with all of those benefits, the Apple site still buries the word, "Environment," in tiny print at the bottom of the home page:
But in other ways, the company is finally starting to realize what it has. Its new lineup of MacBooks star on their own page under the banner "The World's Greenest Family of Notebooks," and a much more visible link to "environment" on that page leads to the company's overall policies and commitment to green technology. And now, for the first time, Apple's running a TV ad that actually sells product specs — green ones — rather than just flash, cool, and image.



Of course, I'm not claiming that any of this change came from my solitary letter of 2007. But I do think that Apple received a lot more than just one letter, and more importantly, that it's been listening to what people were saying. Now if GM can be convinced that letting a 14-mpg pickup burn Flex Fuel and get 12 mpg on the corn isn't innovation, we'll be getting somewhere.
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< OMG, He's Really Real. / >

Back in August I said that leadership had finally arrived in the form of Al Gore's "ten-year challenge" to create technology to combat climate pollution.

But this trumps that, because it annihilates eight years worth of mumbled malevolent nothings out of the Crawford Cowboy. Listen to the words:



More details here.

I'm stunned. Eight years of wishing, hoping, praying for someone real to say something real... and now it's real.

Here's to a President-Elect who remains the same visionary when he's President.
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< Buy nothing, wreck everything... or not / >

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Got an email from Adbusters today promoting the 2008 edition of Buy Nothing Day — the culture jammers' response to Black Friday, November 28, day after Thanksgiving — the day of retail madness and HUGE SALES hell across the United States.

Buy Nothing Day Confronts the Economic Meltdown, the caption read in this part of the email. Was it possible that Adbusters, defender of everything contracapitalist, would ease up this year, knowing that every large retailer in the nation "needs" a successful Black Friday in order to stay... well, in the black and out of the red?

Luckily, no. The message continued: "As we run out of money, resources and wilderness, and the planet keeps heating up, maybe it’s time to confront the root cause of our global crisis: overconsumption by the most affluent one billion people of the world."

If ever there was an example of ideology pulling out every available device to "correct" "obviously" "wrong" thinking, it's going to show in the response to those few words in italics. Don't be foolish! Consumption is the engine of economic growth! Economic growth is the key to prosperity! Prosperity is the backbone of power! Those are the normalizing narratives that the concept of Buy Nothing Day has to bash its head against.

Want to test it out? Announce to the family, around the Thanksgiving feast table, that you're not going shopping the next day because consumption is out of control. Say that you don't care if half a dozen retail giants announce bankruptcy on Saturday; they should have prepared for a horrid economy when everyone saw the crash coming, roughly two years ago. Share with the group that being a good consumer is not your patriotic duty, and that shifting a huge debt load onto your credit card is not a logical or reasonable way to remedy a problem created by herds of swine in thousand-dollar suits making money from other people's losses.

Go ahead, you marxist, you. You socialist. Turn your back on your country, you loser, and put in with the godless commies from Canada (the home of Adbusters) who would like nothing better than for the American economy to totally tank so that they can take over.

Or maybe you're lucky enough to have a group over to dinner that agrees with your basic position — but damn, have you seen those sale papers? There's just no way to pass up that 70% reduction on [fill in product here]. After all, times are really hard, and people are eating SPAM and macaroni and cheese in record numbers, so it'd be plain stupid to pay top dollar for a Christmas gift on Saturday that can be got for 30% on Friday. It's just basic logic, you know?

Except it isn't. It's ideology.

An idea.

Just a thought, but one made of concrete and crushing down on your skull like a mountain. Resistance is possible, but feels futile. Feels logically flawed. Feels morally wrong. That is the power of ideology.

But it can shift — which, after all, is the whole focus of this blog.

Adbusters gets the last word: On November 28, why not confront your own consumption by going on a consumer fast for 24 hours? Like the millions of people who have done this fast before you, you may be rewarded with a life-changing epiphany.

More information and ideological challenge is available at the BND web site.

Good luck.

< You can't have it both ways.... / >

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In Season Two of NBC's hit show 30 Rock, when the real-life NBC kicked off its real-life "Green Is Universal" theme week of programming, the fictional NBC staff at 30 Rock(efeller Center) hired a cheesy actor to put on a green suit and play a character named Greenzo, who would spread the gospel of environmentalism and enlighten the masses about how badly the system's been screwed up. As played by David Schwimmer and according to that whole episode, environmentalists, personified by Greenzo, are overbearing, egomaniacal, lecturing wackos gone out of control.

And environmentalism is "a fad" to be cashed in on.

And NBC's "green" week is a total joke.

The convoluted message got even more confusing when real-life Al Gore made a guest appearance on the show, as himself, playing it straight for a minute of e-themed conversation with Tina Fey's character, Liz Lemon, before cupping a hand to his ear, frowning, and saying, "A whale is in trouble. I have to go!"

Now it's "Green Is Universal" week at real-life NBC again. The Today Show staff's been once again sent to "the ends of the earth," with Meredith in Australia to experience drought, Matt in Belize to witness eco-tourism's destructiveness, Al in Iceland to see melting glaciers, and Ann in Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro while it still has snows. In the evening, Brian Williams will include e-themed stories in the newscast. And online, NBC's "green" web site is chock full of helpful "save the planet" tips from the stable of network celebs.

But is it serious, or is it a joke? Last year, NBC apparently wanted to play both sides. But now that it's making "green" week an annual event, the network will have to choose. The choice might start with Ann Curry in Africa, who had the opportunity to tell the Associated Press all about the compelling and alarming climate changes that brought her to climb a mountain in an attempt to get millions of viewers to wake up and act. But when asked, did Ann say any of this?

"To be honest with you, I'm not sure I'm going to make it to the top," she said. "But all the pain and suffering is worth it because of the incredible vistas all around me."

Um, okay, but what about the melting snowcap, Ann? What about the quickly-declining water supply for nearby villagers?

"I miss my family," said Curry, whose clothes were clammy and wet from a rainstorm Saturday. "And also warm showers. And I could really use a stiff drink."

If this is a celebrity's idea of helping to create environmental awareness, NBC would be better off hiring Greenzo.
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< Think before you bail... / >

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This blog has a love/hate relationship with the automobile, as the first several installments will show. Cars spew CO2, and car companies put civic responsibility on the last page of their mission statements, as footnotes buried in asterisks. But at the same time, when I heard ABC News announce that one in ten American jobs are auto-related, that old patriotism thing kicked in.

GM might deserve to die, especially for its capital crime of destroying the public transit infrastructure of towns and cities nationwide, but the country doesn't deserve to go into toxic shock after the burial. If Wall Street gets to have $700 billion of our tax dollars (of which I hear my family alone is responsible for about ten grand) to remedy the consequences of its unchecked greed and insane practices, then yes, Detroit should get some assistance for having done exactly the same things.

The car companies are slow, stupid, selfish, negligent, and ignorant, but still deserving. Because they are us.

It's complicated.

The Motley Fool says to hell with them, let 'em rust. Because they're just going to spend their bailout money and we'll get nothing for it. The Los Angeles Times takes a truly radical approach, saying that a bailout should only be given if it's got plenty of conditions — plainly stated in legally binding documents. But the Times goes even further, mentioning several arcane, archaic, and nearly obsolete concepts:

If 300 million Americans are going to borrow money to bail out an industry, then it seems only reasonable to insist that that industry take more socially responsible positions toward energy conservation, safety and the environment.

And Thomas Friedman, whose new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded tackles the issues of climate change, energy revolution, and economic transformation head-on, has weighed in on the automaker bailout issue as well. Since the New York Times requires an account (free, but still time consuming) before articles are accessible, here are highlights from Friedman's column:

How could these companies be so bad for so long? Clearly the combination of a very un-innovative business culture, visionless management and overly generous labor contracts explains a lot of it. It led to a situation whereby General Motors could make money only by selling big, gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s and trucks. Therefore, instead of focusing on making money by innovating around fuel efficiency, productivity and design, G.M. threw way too much energy into lobbying and maneuvering to protect its gas guzzlers.

This included striking special deals with Congress that allowed the Detroit automakers to count the mileage of gas guzzlers as being less than they really were — provided they made some cars flex-fuel capable for ethanol. It included special offers of $1.99-a-gallon gasoline for a year to any customer who purchased a gas guzzler. And it included endless lobbying to block Congress from raising the miles-per-gallon requirements. The result was an industry that became brain dead.

Nothing typified this more than statements like those of Bob Lutz, G.M.’s vice chairman. He has been quoted as saying that hybrids like the Toyota Prius “make no economic sense.” And, in February, D Magazine of Dallas quoted him as saying that global warming “is a total crock of [expletive].”

These are the guys taxpayers are being asked to bail out.

Let's frame that a little less passively and shine the responsibility light straight at the main characters: Those are the guys asking us to bail them out. These are the guys standing there with their palms up, singing "Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?" And we have every right to say Well, that totally depends on the strict and non-debatable conditions you're willing to accept.

Maybe the first of which should be a public acknowledgment that Bob Lutz is a total crock of [expletive].

The Wall Street bastards have already shown that a free handout will only be misused for more of the same corruption. The Feds can't be allowed to screw us the same way by letting the car guys do the same with theirs.
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< Meanwhile, November's been 70 degrees in Michigan / >

Google News:
• 487 articles about the Puppy-Elect of the United States.
• 4,149 articles about the "financial crisis" — aka the Greatest Armed Robbery of All Time.
• Zero articles about the climate crisis.

T.S. Eliot:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper [of a puppy or a corrupt CEO]....
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< Let us not speak ill of the dead / >

Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park and notorious global warming denier, has died of cancer at age 66. May he rest in peace, and may his denials fade into obscurity quickly. The dinosaur books were okay and the movies (at least the first two) were good, but the other stuff we really didn't need at a time where every day of "debate" is one day closer to disaster.