Obama - Crazy like a Fox

Obama has done it again. Attempting to heal wounds and repair relations between previous enemies, he has raised the bee swarm of conservative ire. In a speech to Vietnamese leaders, Obama referenced Ho Chi Minh's letters to then President Truman at the end of World War Two seeking US help in gaining Vietnamese independence after the fall of Japan. The existence of these letters is historical, as is Ho Chi Minh's regard for America's founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson. But to the right, Obama is merely relaying leftist mythology and replaying the political errors that led to our failure to hold onto Vietnam. Some people just can't seem to let go of the past, or work a way out of a hide-bound ideological take on the world.
It's a similar sort of denial that takes over right wingers on the issue of climate change, where Gaia has dared to defy the market system and declared its own self-regulatory mechanisms that pay little heed to individual self-interest. Of course, environmentalists need to understand that it's only been 450 years since Sir Francis Bacon proposed ravishing Nature for the purpose of unlocking her secrets and it's going to take some patience while we get used to living within our limits on the blue-green planet. But don't count on Obama to storm the ramparts of the oil companies. He's way too smart for that. The dragon has its talons dug deep within his own administration, and its going to take a massive effort on the part of a world-wide movement based on generational equity, not race or class, to cut us loose from impending disaster.

(photo credit: Templar 1307/Flickr.com)

The Problem with Activism on Global Warming

This is the time of year that I can't really say I sympathize with nature. They say we humans have an adverse impact on it, but today I really don't see it. The grass has never been more lush. The rain keeps coming down. The mosquitoes have never been healthier. I know that climate change is a problem, but the weather at my place is just fine. We've had some heavy rains, but then the sun comes out and dries us off. It's hard to get worked up about the crisis between man and nature when you're setting up for a barbecue. My biggest problem with the outdoors is picking off the ticks when I get inside. Everything seems just fine. The Amazon has lost 3 percent of itself to fires in the last 12 years, but I think we've balanced that out here with the growth of bittersweet, golden rod, nettles and assorted other impossible to destroy weeds that have taken over our garden. You get my point. Our view as humans is so dependent on local context that despite the best information in the world and the preponderance of scientific reasoning in setting policy, the more we're told about the dangers of climate change and global warming, the more we want to see the evidence. And the evidence for the impacts of human activity on average global temperatures does not happen at the local scale. As activists gear up for a summer of civil disobedience around the issue of the Keystone Pipeline and the need for an immediate shift away from our dependence on fossil fuels, the biggest obstacle will not be the evil oil company barons and their allies in Washington. It will be everyone's natural inclination to judge the severity of any crisis by what they can see before their eyes.

The Hockey Stick of Global Warming

Another beautiful morning in New England, and the only reason I'm writing on the blog instead of hitting the slopes is my snowboarding daughter who promised to go with me hurt her arm on her last outing. Thus I am confined to the home acres and looking out the window at the sun shining on a foot of snow as I write. This picture of natural beauty does not quite square with my feelings of dread, however, and here is why.
I don't have a huge audience for this blog, but it gets a good-sized bunch of readers, it seems, including ones from far-flung places such as Sweden and China, and one of the themes that gets a universal bump in response is the danger posed by global warming. I haven't seen figures, but I would wager that the numbers of climate change deniers are few in other countries where the oil companies and business barons have not spent billions in campaigns to discredit the science that has emerged around this issue in the last decades.
Yesterday we had yet another report, spearheaded by Shaun Marcott, a scientist at Oregon State University, detailing vast amounts of research extending back tens of thousands of years into the fossil record to show the extravagant climb in global temperatures that has occurred just in the last 100 years with the advent of fossil fuel consumption, spurred by economic growth in the West and now the world over.
The research project used oxygen isotopes found in ocean fossils to determine average world temperatures extending back into the prehistory of humanity, 12,000 years, to show that at no time in the vast observable record has the temperature risen so fast and so far as it has in the last 100 years, as an undisputed result of human behavior. The graph yielded by the scientists' work is the by-now familiar hockey stick, with the handle showing temperatures holding relatively steady through the eons and then climbing through the roof over a minute fraction of the recorded time in the upturned blade. This figure of the hockey stick, used to great effect in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, has done more to spur animosity from climate-change deniers than any other symbol of global warming, but yesterday's report seems to be another indictment of their denials, and an incitement to all of us to take immediate steps to reduce our carbon footprint. Has our past behavior put so much carbon into the atmosphere that there is nothing we can do at this point to avoid cataclysmic changes in the environment? No-one can answer that; indeed many scientists and analysts believe we still have a margin of time in which to act. But it is certain, and this is by now a trope, but it bears constant repetition, that our children and our descendants will be cursing us in our graves if we do not immediately put this problem at the top of our collective priorities.

(Global temperatures graph courtesy of Mother Jones magazine)

Climate Change Warning from the USGCRP

We live in strange times. Interconnected, hyper-wired, the global village is real; the power at our fingertips gives us the illusion of super-human prowess, whether we live in a village in Malawi or a skyscraper in New York. At the same time, we are battered by an ever-increasing barrage of natural disasters as if the planet was fighting to put us in our place. There is a disconnect, or some strange feedback mechanism, between the increasing technological prowess that we all benefit from and the growing instability of the natural processes we depend on for our survival. Sometimes I feel like a citizen of the empire in the last waning days of its reign, deluded and anesthetized by the comforts the empire has gained and powerless to do anything while barbarian hordes ravage the land. This week we received one more message written by a hand on the wall, one more mysterious missive from the beyond, one more prophetic warning that our days are numbered. But unlike King Nebuchadnezzar, we don't need a Daniel to decipher its meaning. Instead of Mene, Mene Tekel Parsin, we get the latest report of the United States Global Change Research Program's Climate Assessment. The USGCRP began as a presidential initiative under Bush pere, but was largely silenced during the years of his son's administration. In their latest report, released this week, the research body concludes that the spate of natural disasters, floods, droughts, super-storms, etc,  we have seen in the last few years are unequivocally a result of human induced climate change and warns of much worse to come in the near future. The key takeaway for me, though is this paragraph:


As climate change and its impacts are becoming more prevalent, Americans face choices. As a result of past emissions of heat-trapping gases, some amount of additional climate change and related impacts is now unavoidable. This is due to the long-lived nature of many of these gases,the amount of heat absorbed and retained by the oceans, and other responses within the climate system. However, beyond the next few decades, the amount of climate change will still largely be determined by choices society makes about emissions. Lower emissions mean less future warming and less severe impacts; higher emissions would mean more warming and more severe impacts.

We have a choice. We do something about it or not. The mass of ignorant people, plus the people who will throw up their hands in despair and call it quits, means that it's even more imperative for those who do have enough conscious will to organize and clamor for a way out.

Melting the Freeze on the Arctic Melt

Because the political battles looming with the US election make such great news content we tend to be locked into a very short term horizon in thinking about the issues that matter. Add to this the candidates tendency to want to boil their campaigns down to simplistic sound bites focusing on the one issue that their minders estimate will gain them the most traction, and it can seem that democracy, especially one like ours where the cost of campaigns means political candidates are on message all the time for the sake of their fundraising machinery, does not make for an educated or enlightening public discussion of any issue with a long-term window for action or consequences.

That's why the issue of climate change, despite the worst drought in sixty years and the prospect of food price spikes ahead this winter around the world, is receiving a very muted reception on the campaign trail. Beyond the prospect of jobs or energy independence, there is little mention of what was a central issue in the last two elections, global warming and its attendant climate change, and no mention at all about the news that came out in the last week from the US government itself: the melting of ice in the Arctic has reached an unprecedented rate of speed. Have we reached the point of exhaustion on an issue where our very survival as a society might be at stake?

I remember in the 1990s when environmental; groups first warned that if nothing was done, the North Pole could be ice free by the middle of this century. But this summer the volume of sea ice  as measured by satellites has reached the smallest ever seen, and the remaining ice is so thin that US government scientists are predicting a blue North Pole by the end of the next decade. The implications for coastal regions, wildlife, and the planet's weather patterns are frightening, but the response to the scientific findings have been nothing but underwhelming. For Republicans, who have made it a mantra of their political culture that climate change is a hoax, to walk this particular piece of science denial back will be very difficult. But the Obama administration has also yet to come up with a forceful plan and policy statement beyond their already stated platform calls for a growing reliance on renewable energy to cut our carbon emissions by 28 percent by 2020.

My question is, if the Arctic ice is in a death spiral, do we need to be much more proactive, or just resign ourselves to living in a vastly different, almost uninhabitable planet? And in case you think I am scaremongering, here is the scenario painted by NASA's James Hansen in a recent NYT op-ed:

“Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.”

Aside from commentary on the environmental blogosphere, you would think from observing the mainstream media that the melting Arctic was about on a par with stagnating SAT scores or inner city crime, something designed to elicit politically correct reflex statements and counter-statements on the Sunday talk shows. In fact, the fallout from an ice-free Arctic would be immensely unsettling, and in the worst case scenarios of the meltdown of the Greenland Ice Sheet and a runaway warming, could spell the end to the conditions that have sustained human life on Earth.

But there are calls to action from a wide spectrum of organizations from the League of Women Voters to Greenpeace. It may be that simmering under the surface, there might just be a groundswell of support for a much tougher line on the human activities that are driving the pace of melting.

Overcoming Adversity

Hope it was a great 4th of July. A lot of people are struggling with triple digit heat and no power, so it's a tough one for many. By the way, how weird is it that all the adverse weather situations have Spanish names, el nifio, derecho. I'm waiting for the other shoe to fall when we get hit with derecha, which would be a plague of locusts in the winter...

Summertime is when the climate change deniers really go into overdrive. I doubt many of them are living in the Chicago area. Imagine suffering through record heat waves like the one they are experiencing in the Midwest and maintaining the no-problem-here attitude of the business-as-usual crowd. 

I'm not one for going into panic mode. Being an eternal optimist, I believe that we will blunder our way through, coming to our senses and moving quickly to a fossil fuel-free economy, before the ice caps melt. 

It will not be an easy transition, but we have one ace in the hole. It is the greatest resource any nation possesses: its people, especially its children.

The strange thing is, we are just now realizing what a precious resource our children are. One of the most basic human intuitions is only now being confirmed  by science. Adverse childhood experiences have a tremendous and long-lasting impact on human development.

A new study, known as the Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACE study, examined over 17,000 cases to investigate the link between childhood maltreatment and  health and well-being later in life.

Adverse childhood experience can include physical, sexual or emotional abuse; having a parent abandon the family; having a parent who was a substance abuser; having a parent who went to prison or was institutionalized for mental illness; and witnessing domestic violence.

Almost two-thirds of the study subjects reported at least one ACE factor, while one in five had a score of three or more. Researchers determined that as the ACE score increased, so did the risk of developing serious diseases such as heart and lung disease, liver disease, diabetes, sexually transmitted diseases, chronic depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc..., as well as the likelihood of high risk behaviors including smoking, alcohol or drug abuse, and promiscuity. Those with higher ACE scores are also at increased risk of obesity, adolescent pregnancy, suicide, fetal death, intimate partner violence and sexual assault.

Of course there is a factor that can be easily overlooked, and that is the role of the healing power of relationships in overcoming adversity or trauma. As a society, I believe we will have to commit to a major project of healing, and that will include rebuilding a sense of community and belonging. It does indeed take a village to create healthy children. One of the factors impeding the development of our greatest resource, our children, is the lack of a communal culture. Much like alcoholics, the first step is recognizing that we have a problem.

Anthony Caplan is a teacher, writer and homesteader in New Hampshire. His latest novel Latitudes - A Story of Coming Home, is the story of overcoming an adverse childhood. Find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local bookseller.

Read more here: http://www.theolympian.com/2012/07/04/2163190/the-traumas-of-childhood-can-create.html#storylink=cpy

Just Another Day

America's budget busted space agency, NASA, has staked out new territory for itself convincing the Earth's lunatic fringe that the world will not end any time soon. A video posted by NASA last week, narrated by Don Yeomans, head of NASA's Near-Earth Objects Program Office,  seeks to dispel predictions that Doomsday will happen later this year. This latest round of apocalypse warnings are based on interpretations of the Mayan calendar, along with reports of a giant, invisible planet called Niburu headed our way, solar flares and magnetic pole reversals. They have all featured prominently in blogs, websites and movies recently, heightening the frenzy of the crowd catering to end of the world fantasies.
The two and a half minute video features Yeomans taking down the apocalyptic flights of fancy one at a time. The Mayan calendar does not end in 2012, just a cycle of Mayan time; a planet hurtling our way would never go undetected; solar flares are normal, etc. His calm demeanor is only broken once, when he breaks into laughter at the idea that thousands of scientists around the world have been conspiring to keep the existence of the rogue planet Niburu secret so as to not set off a global panic at our imminent demise.
Is this a worthwhile endeavor for NASA to be embarked upon? While not exactly pushing the boundaries of the known universe, perhaps dispelling the cobwebs of misinformation and ignorance here at home might not be a bad brief for the cadres of scientists and experts who are now wondering what will become of the space agency in the face of austerity measures. Unless Newt Gingrich gets elected this year on the platform of establishing a Mars colony, we might be seeing more NASA video production along similar lines in the years ahead. My hunch is the kooks will call it a conspiracy and get on with the business of scare mongering. How ironic that the real planetary threat whose existence would entail getting off our behinds and doing something other than hoarding cans of Spam, human induced climate change, is called a hoax.

(photo credit: Don Davis/NASA, Wikimedia Commons)

First Snow New Hampshire

Yesterday I was out cutting wood with my new electric chain saw when we got the first snow. The black clouds whipped overhead and the cover blew off the chicken house and the flurry drove down from that middle distance in the northwest sky.
The chain saw was working well, just as well as the gas-powered saws which have bedeviled me through the years. The guys at the saw shop always blame the ethanol in the gasoline. I finally decided to try an electric chain saw and so far so good. It runs quietly, dependably, and I can cut it off and rearrange the logs without fear that it will flood when I go to crank it up again. Internal combustion is on the way out, I hope, and not a moment too soon.
Last night the lights were on at the Peak. They have been for about a week; with cold enough nights to power up the snow-blowing guns, they've been busy, running the shifts of groomers from dusk to dawn. It looks like winter is here. What would the ski resorts do without snow-making? They are increasingly reliant on it to get in a full season of skiing. Life goes on, and it is good, without a doubt.
But anybody that has any doubts about the seriousness of the global warming threat ahead of our children should read the latest NY Times story on the melting of the Arctic. It is an even-handed, sober, scientific appraisal of the adaptations we will have to make to sea levels rising by the end of this century. Goodbye coastlines, in all probability. Futuristic scare tactics on the part of evil scientists intent on illicit fund-raising it is not. A reality check and a sober reminder of how derelict we have been, is what it is. Meanwhile, Obama is playing hoops. Good for him. Nero had a fiddle. We can always build seawalls around Manhattan to protect Wall Street and on the outer banks of the Chesapeake Delta to save that White House basketball court, but what about Bangladesh and Cairo and Indonesia? Those people will be relocating to a shelter near you Jim Boehner, and you, Sarah Palin, won't be seeing Russia from your kitchen because it's going to be under water.
Someone should declare this coming year, 2011, the year of climate change awareness. Maybe I will. People in Washington will be too busy doing the important things, like making sure they win reelection in two years, never mind the long view. That democracy thing, the free market? Doesn't seem to be working for us, I'm afraid. I love what George Carlin used to say about choices. We have two thousand brands of interchangeable toilet paper, but politics? We'll be looking and listening to Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Dee, with only a short time to turn things around and get carbon in the atmosphere down to manageable levels.  On all fronts we could use some immediate action, from the cars we drive to the homes we build and live in to the electricity we rely on to run civilization. We'll be lucky if we get anything but more hot air from our leaders in the foreseeable future.

If Trees Voted

The Senate gave up on efforts to pass a comprehensive energy bill designed to begin a switch away from fossil fuels today, leading me and surely even the eternally optimistic Tom Friedman to question again whether our democracy is equipped to meet 21st century global challenges. The Democrats were not able to muster enough votes to move the bill to the floor, fearing Republicans would point to the measure in the upcoming midterm elections as proof of insensitivity to the needs of ordinary Americans.

Once again, the complexities of the issue have been reduced to the short term dictates of the power game in Washington, and the logic of sustainability and the long term interests of our country have not been able to pierce the miasma of misinformation, rapacious greed and sheer shortsightedness promoted by the Republican party. The situation is untenable, but a strange solace is that it hasn't changed in over a decade, since the Clinton/Gore administration first floated the idea of a BTU tax, which in its elegance and its reliance on basic market forces to do the heavy lifting of engineering us away from carbon poisoning the atmosphere even outdid the idea of a cap and trade system.

The meekness and timidity of the Democrats, reneging on a central plank of the Obama campaign, cannot be excused. It will hurt them in the fall as environmentalists and even uninitiated voters who would have been impressed by basic gumption and a stand on principle will now fail to be motivated to support the vote counters who could not see beyond their plush offices.

What now? One of the faults of this polarized, largely blind populace is a lack of organization and education on this direly important topic. Entire doctoral theses have probably been written, (and if they haven't, here's a good idea for somebody) on why the Europeans are so far ahead of us in supporting the idea of controlling the amount of carbon we are dumping in the air by becoming more energy efficient and switching away from fossil fuels as soon as we can. But having lived in Europe, I can tell you that one difference is a wide-spread, diverse and loud non-profit sector, an organized citizenry, that has banged the drum on climate change and global warming from villages and cities across the Old World for many years. We have nothing like that here, but there is one new group, 350.org that is impressive in its energy and the wealth of interesting campaign ideas they are putting out there. Things like trying to get solar panels installed in the White House might seem like small potatoes, but it is from these beginnings that a critical mass of support for positive change might finally come.

Reseeding the Commons

It's a new day. We are living in a country born again. All of us who voted for Obama in the expectation of sweeping change are finally getting a sip of the long expected cup of victory. The dragon of neo-liberal social and economic ideology had held sway for so long in the decades since Reagan promised that greed would set us free, that many thought it was the stagnant default setting of the American republic. That assumption has been set on its head, and the fierceness of anti-democratic, racist, bullying resistance to the health care reform legislation belies the sea change that has taken place in the space of a few days.

As Obama said, this was about doing what was right, not what was cynically expedient. Yes, the Democrats were up against the wall and strategically it was either sink or swim. But Obama proved he had the correct instincts and fought back and won. For once our leaders are acting the part and making us truly stand taller in the eyes of the world. Does anyone doubt the strategic importance of this week when it comes to battling real enemies convinced we are incapable of ever getting it right? If we can take care of our own here, and continue to stand up for the needy elsewhere, eg. Haiti, Palestine, etc., we will take the momentum back on the world stage that was lost when George Bush strutted the White House grounds.

Many would be critics of the package have pointed to concerns about our mounting deficit, despite projections of cost effectiveness over the long term. The fact is our economy has been tanking for many years, and one of the things that hobbles our businesses in competition with the rest of the world is a health care system that has been left entirely up to the private sector. This Obamacare reform may be the promised first plank in a restructuring of the American economy that will position us for continued leadership in the 21st century.

What is the next heavy lift? Many are pointing to immigration reform, and the fact that the Democrats will want to lock in the Latino vote before the mid-term elections. I think that Obama will take the high road and stick to his election pledges. Tackling climate change, packaged as a drive for energy independence, has the additional holistic advantage of being also about economic positioning and renovation. But there's no doubt the trenches are being dug. According to a U.S. News and World Report story, the Chamber of Commerce has lobbyists fanning out across the country speaking in motels and anywhere they can get an audience, giving the business spin on global warming -- it doesn't exist -- and the outlook for change from the perspective of Exxon Mobil-- cap and trade is a drag on growth. Why isn't there a similar grass roots campaign on behalf of meeting our responsibilities under Obama's Copenhagen pledge to cut CO2 emissions by 17 percent by 2012? When it comes to the likely suspects, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, etc. up against the corporate lobby, it's worse than David vs. Goliath, because at least David was fighting fit and had the advantage of surprise on his side. The national environmental groups are part of the Beltway establishment and have little to no ability to mobilize grass roots support on climate change. We need to take up John Kerry's idea of national community service as a requirement akin to the military draft. Then we'd have an army of Americorps volunteers fanning out across the country to work for volunteer groups, non-profits, schools and municipalities, and the public good might stand a chance against the ideology that says that what's good for business and the bottom line is the only reality that counts.

A Fool's Wager

The Climategate saga goes on, mostly in the conspiracy-fueled imaginations of right wingers who would like to seize on the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia as an excuse to drag through the mud the scientific community's consensus around the theory that anthropogenic global warming could force shifts in climate in the next 50 to 100 years not seen in the entire 10,000 years of human civilization. What the emails do show is that scientists are capable of imagining and even conspiring to misbehave. They do not show that the science behind global warming is off in its entirety at all. There is always a range of scenarios that scientists consider, and in the last ten years the evidence, from institutions and scientists around the world including NASA's esteemed Jim Hansen, not just the above-mentioned Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, has consistently shown that business-as-usual emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas emitted by burning fossil fuels that traps heat in the atmosphere, have the potential of at worst ushering in a temperature regime that would make uninhabitable large parts of the world, and at best lead to increased sea levels, flooding, droughts, increased prevalence of disease, famine, collapse and disappearance of entire nations including the South Pacific islands.

Typical of the commentary is this from Tom Karst, editor of The Packer, the trade journal of the mainstream produce industry:

"But do we really have to do something, NOW, about climate change?

What’s the rush? Let’s leave room for some skepticism.

House Agriculture Committee ranking member Frank Lucas, R-Okla., recently released a statement that American agriculture can’t afford the higher energy prices and operating costs associated with the “cap and tax” climate change bill.

I tend to agree with Lucas. Agriculture and fruit and vegetable growers should not go along to get along.

If Obama is hell-bent on making carbon based fuels prohibitively expensive, let him show the commitment to develop a new generation of nuclear power plants in the U.S."

Notice the whining, NOW? So like the 10 year-old who doesn't want to clean his room because he's playing video games at the moment and what could be more important? So the whole point of raising doubts about the science seems to be to protect the short-term profitability of whatever business. There seems to be a fool's wager going on that makes my blood boil for one because if I was Dante and designing a new Inferno I would reserve a special circle in hell for people who are willing to put my children's future on the line for the sake of their comfort and profit.

Like St. Peter, I prefer this bet: if people like me are wrong, and we invest billions to shift to renewable energy, advanced public transport, denser urban communities, organic agriculture, etc. only to discover years down the road that Mother Nature could in fact take care of herself and had inbuilt negative feedback in the form of clouds or volcanic eruptions or something, then what have we lost? It's just money. But if people like Mr. Karst are wrong and we do nothing because we prefer business as usual than having to get off our backsides and it turns out that we blew it - the ice shelves melt, the permafrost releases its load of methane stored for 50,000 years in a year or two and Earth is no longer blue from outer space - then what have we lost? It was just our planet. It's a no-brainer, folks. We need to do something now a) while we still can, and b) while its relatively affordable and doable to make the switch.

Happy Thanksgiving

Played with the kids after dinner in the living room last night. We were telling each other's fortunes, pretending to read palms.

"You're going to flunk out of high school, be really bad at everything and then work at McDonald's. Then you'll live in a dumpster and move to Nevada where you'll discover a new source of energy and be rich and live in a boat until you're 92 when you get mauled by a panther and die." Michael forecasting his sister's life was quick, certain and big on disaster.

I tried the more traditional route, numbers of kids, lifeline, career, a lot of romance for the girls and motorized toys for Michael. But I kept saying they'd all live near the ocean, preferably somewhere warm where they would invite their parents to visit every year. Then I realized the odds of them living near the ocean were just increased, as scientists are predicting a 2 meter rise in sea levels by 2100.

I'm thinking how desperate this forecast, this real life prognostication is. What happens when Bangladesh goes under is not just lost beach frontage; it's not just the extinction of human and animal life and untold misery of refugees. It's not even just genocide. We don't have a word for the extent of criminality this event implies. It dwarfs colonialism, slavery, all previous inhumanities. What could be worse than condemning entire swaths of the planet, entire nations of people and entire species of animal and plant life to death? I think even the notion of inter-generational equity, which is the result of struggling with how to deal with the implications of what is happening, falls short of the mark.

And then there's the front page headlines made by hacked emails showing the animosity of some climate scientists towards their colleagues, termed skeptics by the press. Many of them are worse than skeptics. Just like the tobacco industry did for many years, paying off so-called scientists to produce reports diminishing the health impacts of nicotine and tobacco smoke, the oil industry has for years now been attempting to "spin" the science to their advantage. And who can blame anybody for feeling a little bit of anger. Scientists are human, too. And sure there must be disagreement on many aspects of the science, the levels of magnitude of change, etc. Certainly there are many variables to consider. But there is one fact that is not variable. Like the hedgehog we must know one thing well in order to survive. Our children only get one planet.

Unreconstructed Krauthammer

I shouldn't be surprised by the unaccountability of right-wing blowhards for the positions they took on a host of issues during the Bush years. But given the demise of the Republican Party leadership as signified by the rise within the GOP of the likes of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk as serious spokesmen and not just media puppeteers, it behooves sober-minded individuals to pay close attention to the rants of fascistas of the airwaves such as Charles Krauthammer. I read his interview in Der Spiegel today on-line and was struck by the clear-minded, yet lunatic espousal of two relics of Bush era dogma, namely the requirement for unilateral exertion of imperial power in order to bring peace to the world, and the scientific uncertainty surrounding and therefore as-yet unclear need to do anything about global warming. Along with these was the underlying, rabid need to belittle any Obama administration leverage on reforming the country. Krauthammer cannot bear to concede the transformative effects of an Obama presidency so far and insists it's all about celebrity hype. Yes, he does foresee some sort of health care reform going forward, but that's the work of an "average" president. The big Maginot line, apparently, in the Republican psyche, is now the global warming crisis, where Obama's efforts to bring US carbon emissions down to acceptable levels must be doomed to failure. I hate to tell him, the writing is on the wall there as well. Cap and trade, baby, bring it on. There is an unfortunate bunch of chatter about geo-engineering from uninformed sources, and the right-wing continues to love the Dr. Strangelove allure of nuclear power, but the simple fact remains that the hard work of avoiding catastrophic climate change involves switching the global industrial economy onto the twin tracks of energy efficiency and renewables.