Tweetingdonal's Stump

TRMS lays out the reality. Let's start from there.

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 23:19:00 +0000

It's been a rugged couple of decades here in the USA. The transition to a mass media fueled society with an Internet turbo booster has nearly ripped the country apart.

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 14: News Corporation headquarters is seen in Manhattan on July 14, 2011 in New York City. The widening News of the World phone hacking scandal has led to an FBI investigation in the United States. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

In my day job I am part of that Internet Turbo charging phenomenon, pushing change forward, teaching businesses how to use the Internet to reach their objectives. Since most of what I do is set up defenses for organizations to help them fend off criminals and malcontents I don't generally feel too badly about my role in the acceleration, although there are the rare days when my (old style) hacker background reaches out and grabs me by the throat, telling me "Information wants to be free!".

Much like my former work in the US Defense establishment my internet security activities sometimes create a conflict, but in general I have been good with what I've been asked to do. Little did I realize what a poisonous combination the fragmentation of specialty news channels, email, web sites, and blogging could do to wrench a country into pieces.

Over the last couple of decades I've watched, and sometimes inadvertently participated, in ripping our United States into bleeding hunks of a once viable country. I worried about politicians recrossing the Church and State boundary during the late 1970s, not realizing that religious partisanship would begin to raise its blood soaked head again. In the 1980s and 1990s we re-established the witch hunts, but not in the old way. No, now we used mass media as the tool of choice to burn people at the stake.

By the late 1990s it had spread to the once pristine Internet. Now we had mass communication on steroids. Anyone who wanted could put any nonsense up on a web site and claim it was truth, no matter how outrageous. It was like watching the 'Net being taken over by 'snake oil' salesmen. And then in the late 2000s politicians finally overcame their fear of the 'Net and began to employ it to push their agendas.

In our two party system it is terribly important that we have diversity. As most folk who study systems know, diversity is key to any system's survival. Monolithic systems invariably fail at some point from lack of diversity. In the case of a representative federal republic like the United States of America this is particularly true.

In our Republic we permit multiple parties, but we seem to have stabilized around a two party system. We don't form coalitions, we're too combative for that. Instead, it's pretty clearly an "us/them" proposition. When one half of our two party system, a major part of our political system, effectively implodes, turning inward, and begins a pogrom against their own members to root out diversity, it weakens us as a nation. Ideology tests and loyalty oaths have pushed part of the country into an Orwellian nightmare, one that they cannot discriminate from the real world.

We have seen the effects of pogroms on the world stage, in Asia in the 1920s, in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. After a relatively short time those societies were rotting from within because they enforced singular ideologies and suppressed the naturally occurring diversity. Those efforts to "cleanse" their nations of improper ideology resulted in conflicts that the rest of the world has been afflicted with for over 60 years.

We really do NEED the Republican party to return from their bubble of unreality. There are existential threats to our nation out here where the rest of the world lives that must be addressed. Selfishly hiding in their own delusional world is not helping anyone, not even themselves.

The November 7th Rachel Maddow Show aired a segment reviewing the previous nights election results. Part of that episode was a call to the GOP and the Conservative movement to break out of their bubble of self-generated reality and come join the rest of us. Being a fan of Ms. Maddow's clarity of thought and incisive wit I chose a two minute segment of her show that night to summarize our country's situation. Have a look at it here:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Since that broadcast we have seen the same forces, like the Roger Ailes controlled parts of NewsCorp continue efforts to lure members of the GOP and the Conservative political movement back into that alternate reality. They are pushing really hard to keep the "Conservatives" inside their fictional universe. Every tactic is being employed by the "brains" like Karl Rove, and the "leaders" like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, seeking to prove that they were right, and the Liberals are all at fault. They are blaming everything they can think of, even the weather.

We need "real" Republicans to stand up and take back their party. We need them to yank it back out of the grasp of special interests, multinational corporations, extremists, and fools. I can only hope that the Republicans I have met, and those that I work alongside will step up and tell these pretenders like Limbaugh and Hannity to take a hike. The real people need to stand up, take a stand and declare that "the People are back in charge".

Wen Stephenson - A Convenient Excuse

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 04:56:00 +0000

Wen Stephenson has posted a very clear and evocative letter to fellow journalists through the kind agency of The Phoenix in Boston. Unfortunately, the editors at the Phoenix have chosen to break this well thought out piece into about 8 chunks.

Well, like many out there, I use text to speech software to read articles, particularly on days when my vision is giving me fits, and I found having to page through, deal with the "to read more please go to http:// etc" and the hassle of restarting the software detracted from the article's message.

Because I believe this is an important article that should not ave any barriers, I've replicated the article in one long blog entry for the convenience of others like me. I hope the Phoenix and Mr. Stephenson do not mind that I have taken this liberty with the content. If so, I hope they will contact me directly so that I can remove the offending content. The original article can be found here:
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/news/146647-convenient-excuse/

Here is the entire content of the article, with all links intact. Along with a couple that Zemanta added.

A Convenient Excuse

By WEN STEPHENSON | October 31, 2012

On October 2, I led a climate protest inside the offices of the Boston Globe.

OK, it was really a meeting in a small conference room with editorial page editor Peter Canellos and members of his staff. But it was, in essence, a protest.

I used to be a card-carrying member of the mainstream media; just a few years ago, I was the editor of the Globe's Ideas section. Peter is a former colleague.

With me was Craig Altemose, founder and executive director of Better Future Project, a Cambridge-based non-profit dedicated to climate action, on whose working board I serve as a volunteer. We were joined by two members of BFP's advisory board: MIT's Kerry Emanuel, one of the country's leading climate scientists (and, until recently, a Republican); and Boston College's Juliet Schor, a sociologist and economist who is a respected thinker on climate and the economy. Last year, Altemose was arrested protesting the Keystone XL pipeline at the White House along with another advisory board member, Bill McKibben of 350.org, and 1251 other concerned citizens.

After a quick round of introductions, I explained to my former Globe colleagues that I wasn't there to "save the planet" or to protect some abstraction called "the environment." I'm really not an environmentalist, and never have been. No, I said, I was there for my kids: my son, who's 12, and my daughter, who's 8. And not only my kids — all of our kids, everywhere. Because on our current trajectory, it's entirely possible that we'll no longer have a livable climate — one that allows for stable, secure societies to survive — within the lifetimes of today's children.

And I told them that I was there, in that room, because the national conversation we're having about this situation, this emergency, is utterly inadequate —or, really, nonexistent. And I looked Peter in the eye, and told him that I'm sorry, but that's completely unacceptable to me. If we can't speak honestly about this crisis — if we can't lay it on the line — then how can we look at ourselves in the mirror?

Since I had requested the meeting, I told Peter that I hoped to frame the discussion around two points:

First: We need to see a much greater sense of urgency in the media's coverage of climate change, including in the Globe's editorial and opinion pages. This is more than an environmental crisis: it's an existential threat, and it should be treated like one, without fear of sounding alarmist, rather than covered as just another special interest, something only environmentalists care about. And it should be treated as a central issue in this election, regardless of whether the candidates or the political media are talking about it.

Second: Business-as-usual, politics-as-usual, and journalism-as-usual are failing us when it comes to addressing the climate threat. If there's to be any hope for the kind of bold action we need, a great deal of pressure must be brought from outside the system, in the form of a broad-based grassroots movement, in order to break the stranglehold of the big-money fossil fuel lobby on our politics. And in fact, there is a movement emerging on campuses and in communities across the country — especially here in New England — and the Globe should be paying attention to it.

But that wasn't the conversation Peter was prepared to have — and we never got around to having it.

Canellos, the paper's former Washington bureau chief, was more interested in the short-term politics of the Keystone pipeline debate, and the economic impact of natural gas expansion in Massachusetts, and what raising renewable energy standards would mean for regional jobs. Smart, sensible questions. Balanced. Analytical. Above the fray. In short, what counts as serious on the opinion pages of mainstream American newspapers.

And, it has to be said, they were questions that revealed precisely the kind of narrow, incremental, politically straitjacketed mindset that's leading us off the climate cliff. Indeed, they were the kind of questions that make you wonder whether the speaker is even aware of the cliff we're racing toward — or what planet we're living on.

Yes, the Globe's editorial page supports policies to curb greenhouse emissions. It recently called, in the lead editorial on August 26, for lowering the emissions cap imposed by the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which has already reduced carbon emissions from power plants in the Northeast faster than expected.

Good for them. But that same editorial was telling, and representative, in a far more important way. With its underlying message that, hey, we're making real progress here, things are going better than planned — that, in short, we're winning —it revealed an utter failure to grapple with the scale and urgency of the climate crisis. It revealed the same outlook that was on display in that meeting.

But it's not only the Globe. This failure is repeated across the mainstream media landscape — the product of a mindset in which climate change is simply another environmental problem, albeit a particularly complex one for which we'll eventually find a technical fix, mainly by doing more or less the same things we're doing now, only more efficiently and with better technology. It's nothing to get too excited about.

It's certainly not anything to sacrifice your career over.

About a year and a half ago — having left my job as the senior producer of NPR's On Point the year before — I took a deliberate leap of conscience and became a climate activist.

There was no single moment when I knew that I had to jump — any more than there's a single moment when night turns to day. It was a gradual process of coming to see the facts that were right in front of me. In December 2009, while still at On Point (a show that has since done better than most in conveying the urgency of the climate crisis), I watched the collapse of the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, a make-or-break moment for the planet. In the voices of cool-headed climate experts, I now heard the sound of something new: something like fear, and disbelief, and the sound of real anger, bitterness, outrage. Then in the spring and summer of 2010, as it became clear that Congress would fail to pass even the weakest bipartisan climate legislation, and that the president of the United States would fail to lead, and that all the lobbying the environmental movement could muster would fail to match the power of the fossil fuel lobby, I watched the tragedy of our democracy unfold and felt in my gut the futility of a corrupt and paralyzed political system.

But in the end, even more than any play of events, or any rational analysis of the hopeless political situation, perhaps it was this: I found it increasingly difficult to look into my children's eyes.

As an editor and producer covering national and global issues since the mid-1990s, I'd always been relatively well informed about climate change. Or so I thought. In fact, like most of my peers, I'd never really wrapped my head around the full implications of climate science, or internalized how little time we have left to make a difference. As I dove into the subject in 2010 and 2011, going deep in a way that time-pressed editors and producers rarely do, I felt an overriding responsibility — especially in light of my own lackluster record covering climate — to engage. If that meant working outside the bounds of mainstream journalism, then so be it.

I knew that if I was really committed to the path of activism, I would almost certainly never be hired again by a mainstream media outfit like WBUR or the Globe, or PBS Frontline (where I was managing editor of the web edition from 2001 to 2004), or even a magazine like The Atlantic (where I was an editor from 1994 to 2001 and served as editorial director of TheAtlantic.com). I knew that once I'd crossed the line to the "other side," there could be no turning back.

Over the past 18 months, I've helped organize and spoken at rallies, joined the board of Better Future Project, and helped launch 350 Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots network, allied with 350.org. And as I've become deeply involved in the climate movement, I've often thought about what I'd say to my old friends and colleagues in the mainstream media if we were all together in the same room, or if I could address them in an open letter.

Now the Phoenix has offered me that opportunity, and this is what I want to say.

Dear friends and colleagues:

This is hard. Coming to grips with the climate crisis is hard. It's frightening. It's infuriating. It's heartbreaking.

Likewise, what I have to say here is hard. But it's honest, and it's necessary. And it's for real.

Our most respected climate scientists, people like NASA's James Hansen and MIT's Kerry Emanuel, as well as global energy experts such as Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency — people who, it's fair to say, may not always agree on politics and policy — are increasingly clear and vocal about one thing: we're rapidly running out of time to address climate change in any meaningful way and avoid the risk of global climate catastrophe, with the incalculable human suffering that it will bring, quite possibly in this century.

In the face of this situation — as much as it pains me to say this — you are failing. Your so-called "objectivity," your bloodless impartiality, are nothing but a convenient excuse for what amounts to an inexcusable failure to tell the most urgent truth we've ever faced.

Let me be clear: the problem isn't simply a matter of "false balance" — for most of you, that debate is largely over, and you no longer balance the overwhelming scientific consensus with the views of fossil-fuel lobby hacks. No, what I'm talking about is your failure to cover the climate crisis as a crisis — one in which countless millions, even billions, of lives are at stake.

In our current media landscape, it apparently takes a magazine like Rolling Stone — in an issue with Justin Bieber on the cover — to offer a writer like Bill McKibben the opportunity to spell out the facts, in cold hard arithmetic, for a mass audience. McKibben's landmark article this past summer, "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math," boiled the hard truth about climate down to three stark numbers:

Two degrees Celsius: the amount, according to international consensus, that we can raise the global average temperature above preindustrial levels and still maintain a so-called "safe" climate, beyond which all bets are off. "Safe," of course, depends on where you live. We've already raised it almost one degree, with disastrous results; if you live in Africa, or Kiribati, one degree is too much.

565 gigatons: the amount of CO2 scientists agree we can still pump into the atmosphere and hope to remain below the two-degree threshold.

2795 gigatons: the amount of CO2 contained in the world's proven fossil-fuel reserves, which the fossil-fuel industry shows every intention of extracting and burning.

The bottom line: we have to find a way to leave 80 percent of accessible fossil fuels in the ground, forever, and make a rapid shift to clean energy, if we're going to avoid the very real risk of catastrophic climate change within this century. When you get a grip on those numbers, something like the Keystone protest — driven by the idea that the Alberta tar sands, the planet's second-largest pool of carbon, should be off-limits — comes into focus. It's more than math: it's a moral imperative. That's why 1253 people were willing to get arrested in front of the White House in order to stop that pipeline, even temporarily.

"Unsafe" climate change is not a distant threat. It's here, now. We've fundamentally altered the planet's life-support system, and conditions are going to get much worse. If you've enjoyed this year's record heat, wildfires, drought, and spiking global food prices — if you enjoy monster storms like Sandy — get used to it.

Of course there's uncertainty about exactly how these changes will unfold. There will always be uncertainty in anything as complex as climate science. But as MIT's Emanuel has said, "Uncertainty doesn't translate into 'no worries, mate.' " In fact, it's the opposite. Uncertainty, he notes, "is a double-edged sword." It's possible, Emanuel and his colleagues acknowledge, that the impacts of climate change will be less severe, and arrive more slowly, than the most sophisticated models predict. But it's equallyprobable that the impacts will be much more severe, and arrive much faster, than predicted. So far, mounting evidence like the rapid melting of the Arctic ice cap — one of the planet's largest physical features, which reached its lowest extent ever recorded this summer, blowing away all predictions — suggest that the latter may well be the case.

What's more, as Emanuel and others go on to point out, because of the inherent inertia of the planet's climate system, and the sheer amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere, our "window of opportunity" to prevent catastrophic warming is extremely narrow. It may even have already closed. We don't know. According to the IPCC, global emissions need to drop at least 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 — eight years from now — and at least 80 percent by 2050, if we're going to have a shot at maintaining a livable climate.

Yet even as climate scientists sound increasingly alarmed, there's virtual silence in the mainstream media — even in the midst of a crucial election campaign — about the urgency of the threat. This is the case even in places that feature serious coverage of climate science, including the New York Times and NPR. A welcome exception was this quote of Rutgers scientist Jennifer A. Francis in Times reporter Justin Gillis's August 27 piece on Arctic sea ice: "It's hard even for people like me to believe, to see that climate change is actually doing what our worst fears dictated . . . . It's starting to give me chills, to tell you the truth." (The story didn't make the front page.) In the Globe, a piece like David Abel's lead A1 treatment, on June 25, of increasing sea-level rise along the northeastern seaboard, and what it means for Boston — the fact that in coming decades a mere nor'easter could put a half dozen Boston neighborhoods under water — was an all too rare acknowledgment of what's really at stake.

The Atlantic, now edited by an old friend of mine, has failed to run a single in-depth feature, much less a cover story, on the climate crisis in almost two years — since Jim Fallows' December 2010 cover story on the daunting problem of coal. But in the magazine's annual "Ideas" issue this summer, Chrystia Freeland cheerily noted that "fossil fuels are here to stay" — without a hint that she, or the editors, are aware that climate change is happening. (The editors of theatlantic.com seem to know climate change is happening, but true to prevailing Beltway wisdom, they apparently consider it a lower-order concern.) PBS Frontline has just aired the welcome though belated Climate of Doubt, a disturbing look at the people driving the climate-science denial machine. We should be grateful. But it's been almost exactly four years since the series produced a documentary on climate: 2008's Heat. Indeed, even the New Yorker, home to the invaluable climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, has devoted more space and more serious consideration in the past year to the insanity of geo-engineering (in a piece by Michael Specter) than to the kinds of policies, such as an economy-wide price on carbon, that economists across a wide spectrum say are necessary — and the kind of politics that could make them possible.

What's needed now is crisis-level coverage. And you guys know how to cover a crisis. In the weeks and months — nay, years — following 9/11, all sorts of stories made the front pages and homepages and newscasts that never would have been assigned otherwise. The same was true before and after the Iraq invasion, and in the months following the 2008 financial meltdown. In a crisis, the criteria for top news is markedly altered, as long as a story sheds light on the crisis topic. In crisis coverage, there's an assumption that readers want and deserve to know as much as possible. In crisis coverage, you "flood the zone." You shift resources. You make hard choices.

The climate crisis is the biggest story of this, or any, generation — so why the hell aren't you flooding the climate "zone," putting it on the front pages and leading newscasts with it every day? Or even once a week? Why aren't you looking constantly at how the implications of climate change and its impact pervade almost any topic — not just environment and energy stories?

And yet, I'm less worried about the news pages, where editors do seem to be slowly waking up, than about the opinion pages and magazines, the commentariat and wonkish mainstream blogs — the "thought leaders," the Very Serious People who define the conventional wisdom and the parameters of what passes for serious discussion. Because here, there's essentially no debate of any kind that reflects the scale and urgency of the crisis. Forget the pathetic and deeply cynical climate silence in the presidential debates — and forget CNN's Candy Crowley, who can't be bothered to select a question from "all you climate change people." Even on the left and center-left, climate is barely mentioned when the stakes of this election are discussed — and when the topic does come up, it's without any sense of urgency. Witness the recent endorsement issues of The Nation, the New Republic, and the New Yorker. It's as though many of the best journalistic minds of multiple generations quail at the thought of seriously addressing what a crisis of this magnitude implies about their long-held assumptions — the unquestioned primacy of endless economic growth, for example, or the notion that there can be economic justice without climate justice.

The same goes for these pages: why has the Phoenix covered the Occupy movement and not, until now, the climate movement?

At the end of the day, I think we agree, a journalist's ultimate responsibility is to the public. And yet, by that measure, you are failing. You are failing to treat the greatest crisis we've ever faced like the crisis that it is. Why?

Look, unlike most of your critics, I know you. You're not just names on a page or a screen to me: you're living, breathing human beings, with lives and families. I've shared the stresses and anxieties of journalism in this era. I know how hard you work, and how relatively little (most of) you are paid. I know how insecure your jobs are. And I know that your work — even your very best work — is most often thankless. Believe me. I know.

I also know that you take your responsibility as journalists, as public servants, seriously. Why is it, then, that you are so utterly failing on this all-important topic? I could be wrong, but I think I understand. I'm afraid it has to do with self-image and self-censorship.

Nothing is more important to me as a journalist than my independence. Yes, I'm still a journalist. And I'm as independent as I've ever been — maybe, if you can imagine this, even more so. Because leaving behind my mainstream journalism career has freed me to speak and write about climate and politics in ways that were virtually impossible inside the MSM bubble, where I had to worry about perceptions, and about keeping my job, and whether I'd be seen by my peers and superiors as an advocate. God forbid.

In short, I'm freed of an insidious form of self-censorship, based on a deeply misguided self-image all too common among mainstream media types, in which journalists, including "serious" opinion journalists, are supposed to remain detached and above the fray — not to say cynically aloof and perpetually bemused — in order to be taken seriously. Once you've become an advocate, once you've taken an unambiguous moral stand, so the thinking goes, your intellectual honesty is compromised.

Well, I'm sorry, but that's just bullshit.

When I became a journalist, I didn't check my conscience, my citizenship, or my humanity at the door. Nor, when I became an advocate and activist, did I sacrifice my intellectual honesty. If anything, I salvaged it.

It's time to end the self-censorship and get over the idea that journalists are somehow above the fray. You're not above the fray. If you're a human being, you're in the fray whether you like it or not — because on this one, we really are all in it together. And by downplaying or ignoring the severity of the climate crisis — or by simply failing to understand it — you're abdicating your responsibility to your fellow human beings.

What it all comes down to, then, is this: Which side are you on?

If you're on the side of your fellow human beings — and of your own children and grandchildren — then it's time for you to level with the public about the severity, scale, and urgency of the crisis we face.

Bill McKibben recently told me something that hit home: we need to start asking hard questions not only of the climate denialists and obstructionists, but of our friends and allies. For example, he said, we need to ask our universities, such as Harvard (Bill's alma mater and mine) — institutions that have contributed so much to our understanding of climate change — why they invest any portion of their endowments in the fossil fuel industry, the very industry that is standing in the way of climate action and foreclosing our future? Growing numbers of students at Harvard, Brandeis, Tufts, Amherst, and dozens of other schools, are beginning to ask just that — as part of an emerging campus divestment movement —and they deserve your attention.

We also need to ask far tougher questions of progressive political leaders, like Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama, who accept climate science and make various encouraging gestures, but nevertheless fail to spell out how seriously they take the climate crisis — and exactly what they propose we do about it.

Such silence, and near silence, is no longer acceptable. To use a phrase from the heroic struggle for AIDS awareness in the '80s and '90s: silence equals death. For countless millions of people, climate silence equals death.

In other great moral crises — the civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War, the long fight against apartheid, and many others — journalists have had to confront their conscience. So here are my hard questions for all of you, the very same questions I ask myself:

As individuals of conscience, where will you stand? If you don't have what it takes to level with the public about the situation we're in, and what it requires, then what are you doing in this business? Why are you a journalist? How do you get out of bed in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror? How do you look your own children or grandchildren — any children — in the eyes?

Your friend and colleague,

Wen

Wen Stephenson is a former editor at The Atlantic and The Boston Globe and, most recently, was the senior producer of NPR's On Point. He writes frequently about climate and culture for Grist magazine and has written for the Globe, the New York Times, Slate, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter @wenstephenson.

350.ORG'S "DO THE MATH" TOUR |THURSDAY, NOV 15 :: ORPHEUM THEATER, ONE HAMILTON PLACE :: 7 PM, $10 :: MATH.350.ORG

Following up his Rolling Stone article, Bill McKibben brings a nationwide tour to Boston with author Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) and musical guest Charles Neville. Come be part of the historic movement to take on the fossil fuel industry.

The "Greater Good" has become the "Greater Greed": Life Before and After Baytex Moved In - StopBaytex.ca

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 18:50:00 +0000

Life Before and After Baytex Moved In

Posted at September 26, 2012 | By : StopBaytex | Categories : Letters | 2 Comments

My Life Before Baytex Moved In

Looking at the title of my letter, it sounds like when people refer to the time as pre-911 and post-911, the point being your life is changed forever. Damage done, can never be fixed. Although I’m writing this letter for the Stop Baytex website it’s not something I want to do but as I see it, it’s something I have to do. People must understand what happens when Baytex moves in.

I lived on a bush quarter about 8 miles north of the town of Donnelly. I had built myself a modest little cabin in the middle of the quarter in a big spruce patch. It took a couple of years to put together, depending on materials I could buy or people would give me. I would tell people, well if you’re going to throw it away, I can use it. For example, my tin roof probably has 3 or 4 different colours. Suffice to say my wife and I were very happy there. It was our Paradise, 160 acres of it. I enjoyed carving out walking trails, they were anything but straight. I refused to cut down any living tree. I loved them all so I’d go around them taking out only dead ones. But what beautiful trails I had. The place was overrun by moose and deer. Elk were beginning to move in. We all got along just fine; even the squirrels became a constant form of entertainment.

Life was good. A small solar panel provided some lights. A wood stove kept our small cabin cozy. Winter months I did a lot of reading often by candlelight. It was super quiet. I had a small library in the corner. I’m trying to paint a picture for whoever reads this to understand where we came from. Think of it: no power bills, no water bills, no phone line bills, no vehicle bills and no rent. We were basically retired. We had little money but didn’t really need much either. I used to laugh when my wife would walk through the West Ed Mall and say when walking out, there’s nothing I need here. We had it good folks.

Now Our Life After Baytex

When Baytex moved in, there was quite a flurry of activity. Numerous wells being drilled. Drilling sites were being developed, it seemed everywhere around me and I thought, “OK, so our peace and quiet time is over. At least they’re not drilling on my property and my neighbours are profiting from this, so I’ll just mind my own business.” After all when oil is found by your place every one must pay the price one way or the other whether whether it comes in the form of more traffic on your once quiet little gravel road or the 24/7 engine noise around you. So I determined I would just get used to it and make the best of it. After all I was still the master of my 160 acre island. I was soon to learn that these things would be the least of my problems.

Then the big black tanks at the oil sites increased in numbers, heated to over 100 degrees. Just free venting in the air. I’m told this is done to separate the oil from the sand, and helps the oil flow more easily into the tanker trucks. Now if that wasn’t bad enough, they seem to be introducing different chemicals in the tanks (to speed up the process I’m guessing). At any rate, we don’t know exactly what they’re doing. I only know these things by being a human guinea pig or lab rat, whatever you prefer. When we had made a lot of calls to the ERCB about the awful oil stench, it took a few months then the strong oil stench seemed to be masked by a powerful pesticide smell. When we complained about this sometime later we were treated to a new experiment this one left us with the odour of a strong detergent of some sort. By this time, we were leery of complaining again fearing the next new experiment. Please understand that while all this is going on we are experiencing very strange physical effects such as burning sensation of the tongue and nose sometimes accompanied by headaches and extreme fatigue. This spring while I was still living there, I noticed that if I was outside for 30 minutes or so, all these symptoms would intensify. So I called health agencies and described my symptoms and our situation. Some recommended we not go outside and keep our windows shut while others said we should leave the area right away. We were told later to avoid walking in the bush or grass because it stirs up the chemicals or gases on the ground. That was it for us.

If that’s the only solution offered by experts we decided we should heed to their warnings and flee. So on June 1, 2012 we made the painful decision to evacuate. We took the backseats out of our minivan, put a mattress in, and then threw whatever we felt we needed for camping. We had a little money saved up but we felt if we took motel rooms we’d soon be broke. We were fortunate our sons had 5th wheel campers so we could stay in those at times. I went to see our local MD to see if there was any arrangements in case of evacuation. They said there was nothing in place for a case like ours.

Because I worked in the McLennan Extended Care Unit for 21 years I had a pension fund which we had to cash in and consequently lost almost half of it through taxes and penalties for withdrawing it prematurely. But hey, we were able to purchase a used travel trailer in Faust, Alberta. Where we reside at present is a camp ground which closes Sept 30th for the year and will open again May 1, 2013. So on the road again until May 1st. After this experience I have to ask if it’s safe for people in our area to drink the water from a dugout or eat from their gardens or whether hunters should ask themselves if the wild life harvested in this area is safe for consumption. Gone are our family gatherings and BBQs with grandchildren.

I am one of many families with this sort of story and I encourage them to share theirs openly.

~Andy Labrecque

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Comment

Caleb west
September 26, 2012 at 3:16 am

Ths is so friggen stupid, why would you want to work for baytex? I wonder how long this will go until something happens.

DOLORES BASTIEN
September 27, 2012 at 2:07 am

wow what a powerful letter, I can’t believe an oil company is not proud of their company name and that they would do anything to save face. I have a son who works in the industry and they are so proud of what they have accomplished by being Environmental Safe that I am appalled thaf Baytex have not been investigated

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via stopbaytex.ca

Can anyone remember when "for the Greater Good" became "for the richest people"? No? It really did start out as "for the Greater Good" of all the people. Then like most "weapons" it was taken over by the "richest people" to get what they wanted while trampling the rights of everyone else, especially the poorest.

If it wasn't for the fact that there were cheaper, cleaner, more effective ways to do things for that "Greater Good" then there could be a potential basis for these actions. But those days are gone. The "Greater Good" has become the "Greater Greed".

2012 SkS Weekly Digest #39

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 17:49:00 +0000

2012 SkS Weekly Digest #39

Posted on 1 October 2012 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights

Inuit Perspectives on Recent Climate Change could very well be the most important article to be posted on SkS during 2012. How climate change is impacting the Inuits of Nain, Nunatsiavut is eloquently captured by Caitlyn Baikie, an Inuit geography student at Memorial University of Newfoundland and a close personal friend of Robert Way, a key member of the SkS author team. Thank you Caitlyn for sharing this story with us.

Toon of the Week

What say you?

What topical issues would you like to see SkS pay more attention to?

Quote of the Week

Sheikh Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh, said: "A 1C rise in temperature [temperatures have already risen by 0.7C globally since the end of the 19th century] is associated with 10% productivity loss in farming. For us, it means losing about 4m tonnes of food grain, amounting to about $2.5bn. That is about 2% of our GDP. Adding up the damages to property and other losses, we are faced with a total loss of about 3-4% of GDP. Without these losses, we could have easily secured much higher growth."

Source: Climate change is already damaging global economy, report finds by Fiona Harvey, The Guardian, Sep 25, 2012

The Week in Review

2012 SkS Weekly News Round-Up #3 by John Hartz

Loss of Arctic Sea Ice ... and of a 'Giant Parasol' by greenman3610

Sea Level Isn't Level: Ocean Siphoning, Levered Continents and the Holocene Sea Level Highstand by Rob Painting

Rally for Canadian Science in Victoria, BC by Andy S

Inuit Perspectives on Recent Climate Change by Robert Way

Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: Arctic Sea Ice Extent 2012 Update by Dana

New research from last week 38/2012 by Ari Jokimäki

Coming Soon

Fox News Gets Climate Science Wrong 93% of the Time (John Cook)

New research from last week 39/2012 (Ari Jokimäki)

Nate Silver's Climate Chapter - Some Good, Some Major Problems (Dana)

Modelling the permafrost carbon feedback (Andy S)

The Economic Damage of Climate Denial (Dana)

Most coral reefs are at risk unless climate change is drastically limited (John Hartz)

2012 SkS News Roundup #4 (John Hartz)

Fred Singer - not an American Thinker (John Abraham and Dana)

SkS in the News

This week Skeptical Science was referenced by Yahoo News, Live Science, The Huffington Post, and Clean Technica.

Andy's Rally for Canadian Science in Victoria, BC was also reposted by Environmental Guru.

SkS Spotlights

Hot Topic covers climate change and its impacts on New Zealand. It is the companion web site to Hot Topic: Global Warming And The Future Of New Zealand, a recent book by Gareth Renowden, published by AUT Media in August 2007.

Gareth and his co-blogger Bryan Walker blog on climate news as it happens: interesting new science, political developments in NZ and on the international scene, and the antics of climate cranks — with special reference to NZ’s own “Climate Science Coalition”.

via skepticalscience.com

I really appreciated the Toon of the Week at Skeptical Science so I thought I'd share the Digest with everyone in case you don't hang out at John's site.

The rest of the news is quite relevant too! LOL

Skeptical Science has a Roundup!

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:56:00 +0000

Some days it's hard to get started when writing a post.

Long ago and far away, in a galaxy much like ours...

Wait, that's not right.

It was a dark and stormy night...

Yeah, forget that...

Let's try it this way:

Somewhere back around 2010 I started noticing twitter messages from a guy named John Cook in Australia. His web site was great!

Once I managed to sort out that John was providing real, factual information instead of the pseudo-scientific crap being handed out at other blogs with names like "Real Science", or "Climate Depot" it was like an oasis in the desert of fact free claims. Much like an oasis, the problem was finding it to start with.

"'Real Science"

And it wasn't that the others were hard to identify as charlatans. No, if you knew anything at all about science and how the scientific methods worked it was evident that Morano, "Goddard", and Watts were great source material for Onion Network News (The Onion). Confusing "Skeptical Science" with "Real Science" would be like confusing Neil de Grasse Tyson for Sarah Silverman.

John founded the site, and still pays for it out of his pocket, although donations are usually appreciated. Here's the short bio from his site.

John is the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. He originally studied physics at the University of Queensland. After graduating, he majored in solar physics in his post-grad honours year. In 2011, he co-authored the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand with Haydn Washington.

There are lots of reasons why I'm excited by this roundup but I'm wasting column inches babbling about it. Check out the embedded list below, and become better informed.

Tweeting Donal.

2012 SkS Weekly News Round-Up #1 (via Skeptical Science)

Posted on 19 September 2012 by John Hartz Welcome to the inagural edition of the SkS Weekly News Round-Up. It is a spin-off from the SkS Weekly Digest. Enjoy! Note: Given the breadth of issues covered in the articles cited, the comment thread to this post is open ended. All comments posted must…

Taxes Taxes Taxes.... it's enough to give you a headache.

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:24:00 +0000

Could the big argument over the top 1% and their taxes be another false flag operation?

Maybe it's to keep us from paying attention to the other group not paying taxes?

Take a look at this and see what you think.

Via: OnlineMBA.com

Fox's Overflowing Data

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:23:00 +0000

If I told the average reader of this blog that Fox News Channel, or more properly Rupert Murdoch's Fixed Noise Channel, has recently been "Foxifying"... uh, falsifying the numbers and charts in the Presidential races there would be little surprise.

The fine folk at Flowing Data have been staying on top of all this for us and I thought I'd share some of their findings.

It turns out that local affiliates were having a tough time keeping it all straight. Way back in 2009 there was a pretty interesting example of math as done the Murdoch way when Fox Chicago provided us with this pie chart.

Yup, 63 plus 60 plus 70 adds up to 100. Right?

It's tough keeping all those foreign names straight you know, like Murdoch, Lonergan, O'Neil, Obama, Usama... so a while back, Fox 40, a local Fox News Network affiliate provided us with this charming image:

Since the guys in the back spend all day saying bad things about this "Obama" person, I suppose their fingers just automatically typed "Obama" when it should have been "Usama". You know how it is when you spend all day spinning the news, it gets repetitive, almost mindless.

After a feat like that, screwing up other things when referring to a sitting President are easily done. For example, we all know that this Obama bin Laden guy can't get anything right, especially since he's dead. And the chart below proves it!

In December 2011 the jobs data indicated a drop. Now it wasn't a big drop, and these statistics are always subject to differences in opinion. Rupert's troops took matters into their own hands and published this image on their channel:

Having problems spotting the discrepancy? That's OK, it seems as if the Fox anchors and the on air crew didn't see it either or they surely would have corrected it immediately. Right? I mean the November 8.6% number being higher than the 8.8% number in March is all that Obama guy's fault.

Here's how the chart should have looked:

Odd that the shapes don't match. Well, vaguely.

And then there's the really old school tricks. I remember Ross Perot pulling chart magic like this during his presidential bid. The man was sitting there doing Power Point presentations that absolutely lied in nearly every respect. He used this technique and I suppose the Fox folk figured it would work again.

Nothing wrong with that chart, right? Well, right, so long as you want to make a difference look seven times larger than it is. I guess they gave the 35% a full one percent on the chart instead of just leaving it off completely. The idea of bar or column charts is to look at the whole figure for comparison, not just the change.

Flowing Data kindly provided the correct column chart so that you can easily see what the difference implies. Have a look.

OH MY GOD! WE'RE ALL GONNA GO BROKE AND STARVE TO DEATH!

Right?

Business Leaders Urge Congress to Extend Renewable Energy Tax Credit — Ceres

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:05:00 +0000

Today, 19 companies, including major consumer brands and several Fortune 500 firms, wrote to Congressional leaders encouraging them to extend the Production Tax Credit (PTC), a key provision supporting renewable energy.

The PTC provides a tax credit of 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of renewable power generated and, if lawmakers fail to act, is set to expire in 2012. Originally signed into law by George H.W. Bush, the tax credit has helped to strengthen energy diversity, reduce reliance on fossil fuels and keep electricity costs low for homes and businesses across the country.

“For consumers of wind electricity, the economic benefits of the PTC are tremendous. The PTC has enabled the industry to slash wind energy costs – 90% since 1980 – a big reason why companies like ours are buying increasing amounts of renewable energy,” the companies wrote in their letter. “Extending the PTC lowers prices for all consumers, keeps America competitive in a global marketplace and creates homegrown American jobs.”

The signatories of the letter demonstrate how a broad cross-section of U.S. companies are increasingly relying on inexpensive and abundant American wind energy to power their businesses. The signers include: Akamai Technologies; Annie’s, Inc.; Aspen Skiing Company; Ben & Jerry’s; Clif Bar; Johnson & Johnson; Jones Lang LaSalle; Levi Strauss & Co; New Belgium Brewing; The North Face; Pitney Bowes; the Portland Trail Blazers; Seventh Generation; Sprint; Starbucks; Stonyfield Farm; Symantec; Timberland; and Yahoo!. Many of these firms are members of Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP), a project of Ceres.

Sprint, a national top 50 green power purchaser, highlighted the PTC’s importance to meeting its renewable energy goals:

“Sprint has committed to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and increase its use of renewable energy sources for electricity,” said Amy Hargroves, manager, corporate social responsibility at Sprint. “That’s why we have been actively working to meet our goal to secure 10 percent of our total electricity through renewable energy sources by 2017. We support the extension of the Production Tax Credit for wind because it has enabled companies like Sprint to make the shift to abundant, clean, and homegrown wind energy.”

Members of BICEP like New Belgium Brewing also expressed strong support for the PTC:

“New Belgium Brewing has made investing in renewable power a strategic priority because it's the right thing to do for the environment, for our business, and for clean energy employment,” said Jenn Vervier, director, strategic development and sustainability at New Belgium Brewing. “Over the past several years, we've seen clean energy job growth in our home state of Colorado and a vision for building a more resilient power grid by integrating renewables. Extending the Production Tax Credit will help to ensure that those positive trends continue across the nation.”

“The Production Tax Credit helps every business that purchases renewable power: It’s just that simple,” said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, which coordinates BICEP. “Letting the PTC expire now would increase energy costs for homes and businesses at exactly the wrong time. For Congress, the message from business leaders is clear: Extend the PTC and help us build the economy.”

Navigant Consulting estimates that extending the PTC for four additional years would result in 95,000 wind-supported jobs and $16.3 billion in investment by 2016. However, failing to immediately extend the PTC would result in the loss of more than 37,000 American jobs and $10 billion in investment in 2013.

Bolstered by the PTC, wind energy accounted for 35% of new electrical generation capacity installed in the past five years, and now supplies 20% of electricity in states like Iowa and South Dakota. From 2004 through 2011, non-hydroelectric renewable energy more than doubled and now accounts for nearly 5% of electricity generation in the U.S.

---

BICEP is an advocacy coalition of businesses committed to working with policy makers to pass meaningful energy and climate legislation enabling a rapid transition to a low-carbon, 21st century economy – an economy that will create new jobs and stimulate economic growth while stabilizing our planet’s fragile climate. BICEP is a project of Ceres. www.ceres.org/bicep

Ceres is an advocate for sustainability leadership. Ceres mobilizes a powerful coalition of investors, companies and public interest groups to accelerate and expand the adoption of sustainable business practices and solutions to build a healthy global economy. Ceres also directs the Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), a network of 100 institutional investors with collective assets totaling more than $10 trillion.

via ceres.org

Our Congress is choking on 2.2 cents per kW-hr but has no problem with much larger breaks for the coal companies...

What You Can Do About Global Warming | Union of Concerned Scientists

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 01:49:00 +0000

What You Can Do about Global Warming

Take Personal Action

Encourage Community Action

Influence U.S. Action and Policy

Join Others Who Take a Stand

Because emissions of heat-trapping gases in the United States are so high and continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, Americans have a special responsibility and opportunity to reduce global warming. Here are some ways you can help:

Take Personal Action

Reduce your personal contribution to global warming and set an example for others by using less gasoline, natural gas, oil, and electricity (especially electricity generated from coal-fired power plants) in your daily life. Here are three suggestions:

Reduce the amount of gas you burn by choosing a fuel-efficient car or other transportation that uses less (or no) fossil fuel per person, such as trains, subways, and buses; car pools; walking; and biking.

Buy efficient appliances that use less electricity. Look for the Energy Star, awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Reduce every day electrical use. Develop a plan to reduce daily electricity use around your home. Ask each member of your household to take responsibility for a different electricity-saving action, such as turning off lights when leaving the room, unplugging appliances when they are not in use, using compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), and only running dishwashers or washing machines with full loads.

Our 2012 book, Cooler Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living, offers a wealth of science-based advice on how to reduce your global warming impact by "sweating the right stuff." It also inspires and challenges you to become a low-carbon leader in your community—our Cooler Smarter Trivia Night Kit provides you with a fun and engaging way to get started.

Encourage Community Action

Work within your community to promote energy efficiency and use of clean energy. Here are some good places to start:

Make it easier for community members to use energy-efficient transportation. For example, promote community carpooling plans and the construction of bike lanes, and urge local businesses, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations to install bike racks.

Encourage the use of clean, renewable energy in publicly funded projects. For example, suggest that new construction or significant remodeling projects incorporate passive-solar techniques.

Work with your local electric utilities. Encourage them to promote energy efficiency and the use of clean, renewable energy sources.

Check the UCS Activist Resource Center for tips on working with policy makers and the media.

Influence U.S. Action

The United States needs to play a leadership role in addressing global warming, and you can help make this happen.

Write to your local newspaper about the significance of global warming and the need for U.S. leadership, or respond to stories and letters that dismiss global warming.

Write or call President Obama to let him know you expect him to be an international leader on this issue.

Contact your U.S. representatives and senators to encourage them to support actions that reduce the emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Ask your governor, state legislators, and public utility regulators to promote energy efficiency, nonpolluting transportation alternatives, and the development of clean, renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power.

Join Others Who Take a Stand

Help our voices be heard. Join with others who are working to reduce global warming.

Become a member of Union of Concerned Scientists to help us educate and mobilize scientists, economists, and citizens.

If you are a scientist, economist, engineer, or health professional, join our UCS Science Network to influence fast-breaking media and policy developments on global warming issues.

See what our activists have been doing recently and what they've helped us accomplish.

Last Revised: 01/28/11

via ucsusa.org

A great resource, what YOU can do about global warming... each of us can take action.

Our Ridiculously Wasteful Food System, And What To Do About it | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:07:00 +0000

Your mother may have told you not to waste food--but most of us don’t listen. Up to 40% of food produced in the U.S. goes to waste. That’s a massive waste of calories, but also of freshwater, energy, pesticides and manpower that went into production, distribution, and sales. Food accounts for 10% of energy use, and 25% of the methane emitted in landfills. Food waste is contributing to climate change, too.

This all comes from a new report by Dana Gunders, at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The report notes how strange it is that we don’t talk more about food waste, given its importance. The last U.S. Department of Agriculture study on the subject was back in the 1990s. But it concedes a few realities. Food makes up a relatively small percentage of household budgets for most people. Also, growers, distributors, and retailers have obvious incentives to sell more food, and to decry any discussion of waste as some kind of attack on the free market.
Fewer items on the shelves led to less waste, and more customer satisfaction.
The report tracks each phase of the food system--farming, packing, processing, distribution, retail, food service, household, and disposal--analyzing the inefficiencies at each stage, and offering ideas for improvements. For example, the Stop and Shop retail chain saved an estimated $100 million a year by ending its “pile ‘em high, watch ‘em fly” philosophy of food display. It found that fewer items on the shelves led to less waste, less need for intervention by store assistants, and more customer satisfaction.

Gunders also suggests looking to Europe, which has made cutting food waste a priority at European Union and national level. The U.K.'s “Love Food Hate Waste” campaign, which has received backing from 53 retailers and food brands, has cut waste by 18% in five years.

Finally, the report makes four recommendations:

The government should conduct a "a comprehensive study for food losses in our food system," and "clarify the meaning of date labels on food so that consumers stop throwing out items due to misinterpretation." A lot of food gets thrown away because of over-cautious labeling.
State and local governments should set their own targets, "implementing food waste prevention campaigns in their jurisdictions as well as their own operations."

Businesses should try to understand "the extent and opportunity of their own waste streams and adopting best practices," as in the case of Stop and Shop.

And that we all can help reduce waste "by learning when food goes bad, buying imperfect produce, and storing and cooking food with an eye to reducing waste."

Doesn’t sound too hard, does it?

via fastcoexist.com

Gamma-Ray Flashes | Image of the Week, Scientific American Blog Network

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 21:57:00 +0000

Image of the Week #59, September 10th, 2012:

From: The Evolution of a Scientific American Information Graphic: Gamma-Ray Flashes by Jen Christiansen at @ScientificAmerican .

Source: Joseph R. Dwyer, for Thunderclouds Make Gamma Rays—and Shoot Out Antimatter, Too by Joseph R. Dwyer and David M. Smith

How many times have you grabbed a pencil and paper when trying to explain something to someone? Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that clear thinking goes hand in hand with clear graphics, and vice versa. This sketch by Scientific American author Joseph R. Dwyer accompanied his written explanation of the phenomenon known as gamma-ray flashes (August 2012 print issue (“Deadly Rays from Clouds” by By Joseph R. Dwyer and David M. Smith). It’s a great example of clear thinking in a visual form — and proof that you don’t need to be a professional illustrator to convey ideas clearly on paper. See the final version, rendered by illustrator Brian Despain, at Jen Christiansen’s post titled The Evolution of a Scientific American Information Graphic: Gamma-Ray Flashes.

via blogs.scientificamerican.com

One of Bora's always interesting posts... have a look and take a look at the associated article mentioned at the bottom of this one!

CoCoRaHS - Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 01:02:00 +0000

via cocorahs.org

Think it seems drier than you remember, well Join in here, help measure what's going on. You might be surprised.

World Water Monitoring Challenge : Test. Share. Protect.

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:59:00 +0000

via worldwatermonitoringday.org

In case you were wondering, if you don't know where you're at, then it's hard to figure out where to go next.

Monitoring the world around us tells us where we're at, where we're being dragged, and creates the power to do something about our fate.

Attempting a Transformation

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:49:00 +0000

Presently my activities drag my attention all over the Internet. I am constantly exposed to "ideas" about what to do, how to respond to the changes in our global climate.

We know it's Global, and some things will require unified global action. What we frequently don't understand is that we as individual are the drivers of much of that action.

From politics to choices of facial tissue our daily decisions impact EVERYTHING.

So, as I run across ideas about what to do in response to Global Weirding, I'll post them here. I'll vet the ideas as best as I'm able. If I get enough, this might turn into a mini-blog from it's current microblog state, who knows.

Good Luck to All of Us, we're gonna need it!

Tweeting Donal @tweetingdonal

It's not your imagination, it really is getting hotter

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 22:44:00 +0000

I really am trying to learn to be short and direct... and it's very difficult for me.

Here goes:

Yes, it really is getting hotter.

The Sun HPC guys who go by the YouTube name overheardinpdx posted this great video from NASA data. You can go onto YouTube and watch their other fine videos, or you can go directly to the related NASA site for more info.

What do Rachel Carson, James Hanson, and the Authors of "Merchants of Doubt" have in common?

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 14:22:00 +0000

Do those names mean much of anything to you? What about Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth, Phil Jones, or Katharine Hayhoe?

These are names that you really should get to know. They're people who, almost to a person, have had to deal with near daily persecution because they have stood up for you, your children, your grand children, and every future generation of human beings. They could all have already given up, backed away from the confrontations, and gone quietly back to the work that they started out doing. After all, they didn't sign up for this.

But instead they have stood up to powerful coalitions of corporate special interests, gullible and greedy politicians, and outright nut jobs, in an effort to convince us to protect the future of our civilization.

That's what this is really all about you know. It's not about "saving the planet", it's about saving ourselves.

Earth will survive everything that we've done to it perfectly well. It will still be here, orbiting the Sun for billions more years. And if the species that manages to adapt to all of the rapid changes we're creating here is gregarious, then a future civilization might exist. Who knows, it may even involve humans.

Right now though, we're behaving like a bad bacterial infection, something I've just recently survived. In a matter of hours I went from feeling fine to the brink of death from septic shock. The bacteria were winning, and I'm not nearly as tough as our planet is, so I was about to fail at surviving. Fortunately for me our modern civilization has produced the correct drugs, and they were available where I was when I got sick, so I made it.

Cover via Amazon

The Earth is doing pretty much the same thing my body did, heating up as a reaction to the spreading pollution and damage. Much like my body, the heating is having side effects for more benign systems. For me it began spreading destruction to my muscles, my joints, my nerves, many of my vital organs, and even my brain. The analogy between my body and our planet is fairly obvious isn't it? When I was running a fever of 105°F (that's 40.6°C to the rest of the world) all kinds of things were being destroyed. Months later I'm still in physical therapy trying to rebuild things that were destroyed during that week of high fever. Many things will never be the same, my body has been changed.

The planet has an expected lifespan of about 12 billion years, assuming it's destroyed by the sun as expected in about 7.5 billion years. So mapping the planet's expected life span to mine, a week for the planet is about 3.1 million years. So the 30 thousand years or so it would take to pretty much completely clean up the environmental mess we're creating and restore the carbon balance should be slightly over 5 seconds in Earth life terms. A planetary length sneeze. Please note that 30 thousand years is about 5 times as long as we've had a documented civilization.

When my temperature rose by about 3.5°C it dang near killed me. Our business as usual approach to modifying the Earth's atmosphere should raise the temperature by twice that. So far, we've raised the planet's average temperature by 1.5°C. We've got another 5.5°C to go.

This summer has been a practical lesson to North America. Until recently we've been somewhat exempt from the horrors the rest of the world has faced. We're just over half way through the year, and so far we've gotten record heat, buckling road beds, burning forests (and cities), evaporating rivers and lakes, storms more violent than most of us have ever seen, species of fish showing up in the wrong places, ice sheets melting, floods, landslides, coastal property being washed into the ocean, and species going extinct at unimaginable rates. Now it looks like we'll be losing as much as 70% of our grain crop as well.

That's the (pardon the phrase) warm up session. Raising the average temperature on the planet is like that fever I had, it's causing fairly normal things to become more extreme.

What does all that word salad have to do with those names I asked about? Those are just a few of the names of people who have been being stomped on, threatened, harassed, sued, defamed, and stalked because they are trying to warn all of us about what's happening.

And who is being so mean to these scientists? (You did know they're scientists, right?)

It's a relatively small group of people who don't want us to take the necessary actions to save ourselves, not until they've squeezed the last bit of money out of all of us, not until they're absolutely forced to fess up and take responsibility for their part in what's happening. They insist that we delay making the changes we must make so that we can:

keep living,
be healthy,
have food security,
have safe places to live,
try to make a brighter future for our kids.

For many of us, that's the number one goal, for our kids to have it better than we did.

Storms of My Grandchildren (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That "relatively small group of people", the people who put profit over your safety, have hired people to fuzz things up, to delay action, to prevent us from saving ourselves until they've squeezed the last red cent out of us. All of that beating upon the scientists are just part of the delaying tactics. And it's worked.

We have known for 20 years what the Koch Foundation funded Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST)
team has just confirmed (yet again). The planet is warming, the climate is becoming weirder, and we're causing it. Convening the study cost us another two years of prevented action. I'm sure the Koch folks think it was money well spent.

Admittedly we didn't know the detail in the late 1980's the way we know it now, but we knew enough that in 1992 the world's governments got the picture, got together, and promised to take joint action. And in 2000 we in the USA took a turn for the totally selfish and told the rest of the planet to go f*ck itself. Here we are, 12 years later pretending to be surprised that things are breaking bad all over.

English: A comparison between the 1988 global mean temperature projections shown by James Hansen in his 1988 congressional testimony and the subsequent observations. Scenario A assumes rapid exponential growth of GHGs and includes no large volcanic eruptions. Scenario B has continued moderate increase in the rate of GHG emissions and includes three large volcanic eruptions. Scenario C assumes GHGs were to stop increasing after 2000. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oh, by the way, that 12 year stall tactic we used? That locked us in for another 0.5°C no matter how fast we react. The problem with the carbon budget is that it's cumulative, so the bigger the pile of carbon we shove into the sky, the longer it takes to get it back out, and the more extreme our efforts to correct the balance must become.

Since the 1960's we've known that this was coming. I finally understood what was happening in the mid-1980s. James Hansen realized the dangers much earlier and by 1988 was testifying before the US Congress, warning of what was coming. Pretty soon he began being vilified. Gag orders followed.

But the evidence kept piling up, and the people who profited from our energy intensive ways of life started worrying that they might lose money. So they took action.

Estimated climate forcings between 1850 and 2000 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They learned from other big companies, the ones that sell consumer items that will kill, or at the very least sicken you. They learned how to confuse people enough that they won't act to save themselves. Just spread doubt. Claim the experts weren't. Hire people who will say anything for money to make the confusion worse.

I know from personal experience the kinds of stupidity that is being aimed at our scientists daily. Threats, rants, crazy stuff, many encouraged by media figures or "think tanks". But these scientists still persist, they continue, trying to keep us from collapsing our own civilization. Trying to keep the future bright.

Merchants of Doubt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Naomi Oreskes began to see what was happening. It looked familiar. She did her research and put a solid picture together explaining what was going on, triggering harassment and denigration. It got to be so clear that she switched from academic lectures to publishing a book about the subject.

When the world scientific establishment came out in a unified position that we absolutely had to do something to address the impending crisis, Michael Mann ended up directly in the line of fire, as did Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth. The focus of hatred piled against them is a matter of public record.

Katharine Hayhoe had the temerity to be open, clear, and public about the facts, and even worked with her husband (an Evangelical leader) to help reconcile religious conflicts that were developing within their faith community. Name calling, harassment, and even some implied death threats suddenly arrived from people she had never met or even heard of prior to speaking out.

Philip Conkling at the Island Institute recently posted an article that describes the sorts of things these folks have had to put up with so far. It's a short, one might even say terse, summary of how large, rich businesses have reacted to perceived threats to their profits. His observations in "Rachel Carson, James Hanson and the Merchants of Doubt" provides a short, easily understood review of how some industries ("Corporate Persons" to some) react to scientific findings that will put a kink in their bottom line.

Mr. Conkling is a much better writer than I, so I recommend you visit the original blog postinghttp://www.workingwaterfront.com/articles/Rachel-Carson-James-Hanson-and-the-Merchants-of-Doubt/14951/. Once he's done explaining it to you, it will be easier to understand why he says: "The next time someone tries to convince you the science of climate change is uncertain, use your own senses—your eyes, nose and skin—and act on your own common sense."

Little Green Footballs - Mass Murder in Colorado Prompts Full-on Right Wing Victimhood Binge

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 18:16:00 +0000

If you have ever played any version of Dungeons and Dragons, the shrieker is probably the best analog to the far right wing region of the Blogosphere. Have a look at how people are falling all over themselves to disavow any connection to the Aurora theatre shooter.

Little Green Footballs - Mass Murder in Colorado Prompts Full-on Right Wing Victimhood Binge:

'via Blog this'

The world is being treated to fact free knee jerk reactions from all sides, in their race to get the first tweet/post/interview, lots of calories have been burnt in leaping to conclusions, dodging responsibility, and general bad journalism on the part of some, and more calories spent on hysterical shouting.

Information about the shooter and the circumstances do not appear to have anything to do with politics in the US. In fact, information available at the moment provides very nearly zero indication of a motive.

Time to slow down and find out some facts before burning someone at the stake.

While you're waiting, have a look at decent, thoughtful reporting from serious journalists:

http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/uproar-online-after-12-killed-us-theatershooting-0022292

~~TD

Winter 2010 | Momentum | Institute on the Environment | University of Minnesota

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:16:00 +0000

A Survival Guide to Geoengineering

Despite its potential to trigger conflict, geoengineering will likely be part of the global response to climate change. Be prepared.

By Jamais Cascio

Illustration: Mark Thoburn
The idea of geoengineering has been around for some time—often imagined in science fiction and futurist tomes as giant orbiting mirrors blocking the sun. But as the dangers of global warming have become more evident, while efforts to reduce carbon emissions continued to stall, the concept has moved from the scientific fringes to the mainstream.

The tumultuous outcome of the Copenhagen summit drives home two clear facts: The political struggles around how we respond to global climate disruption are enormously complex—and the resulting delays are bringing us dangerously close to disaster.

This disaster may not unfold in the way we expect. Accelerating changes to the global climate may render even the most aggressive carbon reductions insufficient. But there’s a good chance that the action taken will be in the form of geoengineering, or the intentional modification of geophysical systems to reduce the impacts of climate change.

However, the clashes around geoengineering will make COP15 look amicable. Done carelessly,geoengineering could cause unintended environmental damage. It could also undermine the health and security of millions of people, and drive political wedges between powerful nations. Geoengineering could even push us to the brink of war.

While we know geoengineering would be enormously risky, we’re likely to try it anyway. We can’t eliminate the risks entirely, but if we act wisely, we can make the risks more manageable. Here, I lay out a few ideas for making sure that any geoengineering efforts are done in ways that reduce the risks of both environmental harm and political conflict.

Risky Business

The idea of geoengineering has been around for some time—often imagined in science fiction and futurist tomes as giant orbiting mirrors blocking the sun. But as the dangers of global warming have become more evident, while efforts to reduce carbon emissions continued to stall, the concept has moved from the scientific fringes to the mainstream.

Nobel Prize-winning scientists like Paul Crutzen have openly endorsed research into geoengineering—not as a substitute for carbon reductions, but as a stopgap measure to prevent runaway catastrophe. Reports from respected scientific bodies (such as the U.K.’s Royal Society and the American Meteorological Society) have cautiously endorsed research into geoengineering.

The concept is even gaining some popular visibility, appearing in The Atlantic Monthly and the 2009 pop-economics book SuperFreakonomics. It was also the focus of an article I wrote for the Wall Street Journal.

The current version of geoengineering has dispensed with the space mirrors, adopting a variety of more down-to-earth measures. One proposal would seed the oceans with iron to trigger algae blooms, which pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (initial experiments were unsuccessful, but research continues). Another would cool the atmosphere through the use of massive vortexes, mixing colder air from high up with the warmer air near the surface.

The plan that has received the most attention is one where megatons of sulfur dioxide particles would be pumped into the stratosphere, causing a slight dimming of incoming sunlight, cooling the planet by a few degrees. As outlandish as that might sound, it’s an idea that has worked in nature—it’s one of the side effects of a volcanic eruption.

As the most feasible geoengineering proposals do nothing about rising carbon levels, they aren’t considered solutions for global warming. They’re just temporary fixes meant to delay the worst heat-related impacts while the world completes its sluggish transition from fossil fuels. There are currently no known large-scale geoengineering projects underway. Yet, a growing number of scientists support the idea of researching ways to use geoengineering in a global warming crisis.

The appeal of such plans is obvious, as is the environmental risk. Nations desperate to do something about imminent climate disaster would readily embrace mechanisms to slow the disaster’s onset. But the sheer complexity of the ocean-atmosphere system almost guarantees that interventions on this kind of scale will have unexpected and unwanted consequences.

Page 1 | 2

via environment.umn.edu

Yes, it's that time... geoengineering is starting to seem inevitable, time to learn the ins and outs.

Arctic Ocean is a Potent Methane Source Too | Mother Jones

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Thu, 10 May 2012 02:43:00 +0000

Arctic sea ice: NOAA

We've known for a while that a melting Arctic is likely to be a big methane producer, and that methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Until recently we thought the primary sources of Arctic methane were from:

Melting tundra

Melting marine sediments (like gas hydrates)

Now a new paper in Nature Geoscience reports the Arctic Ocean is itself a source of atmospheric methane. Here's how this scientific riddle got cracked. From NASA's Earth Observatory:

During five research flights in 2009–10, [researchers] measured increased methane levels while flying at low altitudes north of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas... The methane level detected during the flights was about one-half percent higher than normal background levels. But where was the methane coming from? The team detected no carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, which would have been a signature of methane coming from the human combustion of fuels. And based on the time of year, the location, and the nature of the emissions, it was unlikely that the methane was coming from high-latitude wetlands or geologic reservoirs.

Thawing on East Siberian Arctic Shelf: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

The researchers eventually pinpointed the source: the Arctic Ocean. But not just any part of the Arctic Ocean. From the paper:

"While the methane levels we detected weren't particularly large," says lead author Eric Kort, "the potential source region, the Arctic Ocean, is vast. So our finding could represent a noticeable new global source of methane."

We further show that high methane concentrations are restricted to areas over open leads and regions with fractional sea-ice cover. Based on the observed gradients in methane concentration, we estimate that sea–air fluxes amount to around 2 mg d−1 m−2, comparable to emissions seen on the Siberian shelf. We suggest that the surface waters of the Arctic Ocean represent a potentially important source of methane, which could prove sensitive to changes in sea-ice cover.

To put that into perspective, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is leaking an amount of methane comparable to all the methane from the rest of the world's oceans put together. In the schematic above, you can how its permafrost is highly porous, allowing methane stored under to burst through cracks into the atmosphere.

According to the new research, now we're talking about a rapidly de-icing Arctic, with methane bursting through its ice cracks, capable of contributing hella big methane to the atmosphere. Talk about a tipping point.

No one's yet sure how the methane is produced, but lead author Eric Kort suspects biological productivity in Arctic surface waters may be the culprit. "It's possible that as large areas of sea ice melt and expose more ocean water," he says, "methane production may increase, leading to larger methane emissions."

The video condenses the rapid changes underway in the Arctic into two minutes (though prior to the new evidence on methane production from the Arctic Ocean).

The paper:

E. A. Kort, et al. Atmospheric observations of Arctic Ocean methane emissions up to 82° north. Nature Geoscience. DOI:10.1038/ngeo1452

via motherjones.com

Nicely done job of presentation. You may wish to see the original for a slightly better view.

lwo

Is this your idea of what the Internet should look like? SOPA Infographic

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:22:00 +0000

via americancensorship.org

If you follow such things, today marks the beginning of the 5115th year of the Kali Yuga

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:40:00 +0000

Kali yuga is known as the age of the male demon, Kali. The scriptures, like Srimad-Bhagavatam 12.2, teach that during the 432,000 year age of Kali, humanity deteriorates and falls into barbarism. “Religion, truthfulness, cleanliness, tolerance, mercy, physical strength and memory diminish with each passing day.” Severe droughts and plagues are everywhere. Slovenliness, illness, hunger and fear spread. Nations are continually at war with one another. People in this age will be lazy, greedy and deceitful. The end of Kali Yuga is marked by the return of the Kalki, the last reincarnation of Vishnu, who will battle the demon Kali.

According to another tale, there are 4 ages, Krita/Satya Yuga (Golden Age), Treta Yaga (Silver Age), Dvapara Yuga (Copper/Bronze Age), and the Kali Yuga (Iron Age). In one of the oldest Vedic writings, attributed to the god-man Manu, the four yugas are said to add up to 24,000 years, but when they are enumerated they only come to 12,000 years. The Krita/Satya Yuga lasts 4,800 years; the Treta Yuga lasts 3,600; the Dvapara lasts 2,400 years and the Kali Yuga lasts 1,200 years. The “descent into darkness”- Kali Yuga – started when the summer solstice (June) Sun was aligned with the apparent Galactic Center, around 10,800 BC. The “Ascent back into light” takes place now, when the winter solstice (December) Sun aligns with the apparent Galactic Center around 2002-2012.

It would seem that no matter who you are or what sort of worship practice you follow, things around the world point to the human race being fed up with current human behaviour.

Keep Shell Out of the Arctic! | Save BioGems

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:07:00 +0000

For years, Shell has been vying for one environmental jewel that has remained off-limits to the company’s drill rigs: the Polar Bear Seas off the northern coast of Alaska, including the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The Obama Administration has just given Shell a tentative go-ahead to begin drilling this summer off the coastline of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—the polar bear's most important denning ground in Alaska. An oil spill is all but assured if the company moves forward with full-scale oil production. Even worse, the oil industry has no proven method for cleaning up oil in the Arctic's ice-filled waters. So the death toll of oil-soaked and poisoned polar bears, whales and seals would be unimaginable.
-Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., NRDC Senior Attorney

via savebiogems.org

Looks like Shell Oil, you know, Royal Dutch Shell?, is finally going to get their way in the Arctic. Despite the fact that they don't have a plan to handle a spill, don't have effective technology to handle an accident, and our government lacks technology or money to handle a problem, we've given them a shot at creating another Deepwater Horizon for the Arctic. Oh, and to make a lot of money exporting petroleum.

In case you think this drilling will cut your gas bill, guess again. Our number 1 export last year was, wait for it, Gasoline! ("Gas, other fuels are top U.S. export – USATODAY.com") We're using less gas, so they're selling it offshore to South America rather than cutting prices. They won't cut prices, they'll keep them high and sell whatever we don't use offshore and pocket the profits.

Which is why they want to drill in the Arctic so badly. Not to reduce our energy dependence on foreign oil. Just to make more money while soaking your wallet.

I do, indeed, have a problem with this. If you do too, have a look at the attached.

KEEP SHELL OUT OF THE ARCTIC! http://www.savebiogems.org/stop-shell/

Despair? Hopelessness? Uh Oh.

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:23:00 +0000

I distributed the Miller-McCune article: "Why Isn't Climate Change on More Lips?"- http://bit.ly/vl17wI - to several very intelligent, very rational people who don't spend much time in the Climate Science world. I asked for feedback about the article and whether it reflected their views.

I'm quoting one of the responses as representative of the general feeling below.

"read it...i think it is right on point. it describes alot of what i personally feel.
not so much denial...but the hopelessness. after you know you are going to die, then you
just wait for it. the sense of powerlessness is overwhelming."

Time to work on messaging, doncha think?

Siberian shelf methane emissions not tied to modern warming

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:26:00 +0000

Abstract

EOS, TRANSACTIONS AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION, VOL. 92, NO. 49, PAGE 464, 2011
doi:10.1029/2011EO490014

RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT

Siberian shelf methane emissions not tied to modern warming

Colin Schultz

American Geophysical Union, Washington, D. C., USA

Eight thousand years ago, a rising sea inundated the vast permafrost regions off the northern coast of Siberia. Comprising the modern east Siberian shelf, the region holds enormous quantities of methane hydrates bottled up in remnant subterranean permafrost zones that are, in turn, trapped beneath the ocean waters. Records of seafloor water temperature showing a 2.1°C rise since 1985, coupled with recent observations of methane emissions from the seabed, have led some scientists to speculate that the rising temperatures have thawed some of the subsurface permafrost, liberating the trapped methane. The connection is compelling, but an investigation by Dmitrenko et al. into the sensitivity of permafrost to rising temperatures suggests the two observations are not connected. Using a permafrost model forced with paleoclimate data to analyze changes in the depth of frozen bottom sediments, the authors found that roughly 1 meter of the subsurface permafrost thawed in the past 25 years, adding to the 25 meters of already thawed soil. Forecasting the expected future permafrost thaw, the authors found that even under the most extreme climatic scenario tested this thawed soil growth will not exceed 10 meters by 2100 or 50 meters by the turn of the next millennium. The authors note that the bulk of the methane stores in the east Siberian shelf are trapped roughly 200 meters below the seafloor, indicating that the recent methane emissions observations were likely not connected to the modest modern permafrost thaw. Instead, they suggest that the current methane emissions are the result of the permafrost's still adjusting to its new aquatic conditions, even after 8000 years. (Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans, doi:10.1029/2011JC007218, 2011)

Published 6 December 2011.

Citation: Schultz, C. (2011), Siberian shelf methane emissions not tied to modern warming, Eos Trans. AGU, 92(49), 464, doi:10.1029/2011EO490014.

via agu.org

This work does not discount the work due to be presented by Drs Semiletov and Shakhova sometime mid-year next year (2012). While the article from December 6th, above, indicates that the current evolution of methane may be from the condition change 8,000 years ago, it does not mean that we aren't seeing some speed up due to localized warming, similar to stirring or scraping the bottom of a pan on the stove.

Regardless, this problem and the apparent acceleration of methane release has to be added to the efforts to deal with carbon gas emissions. So an increase now is not helping.

Peak Oil - Club Of Rome - Ian Dunlop - YouTube

noreply@blogger.com (Larry Oliver) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:18:00 +0000

via youtube.com

Tweetingdonal's Stump

TRMS lays out the reality. Let's start from there.

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