The fictional but very popular memes that environmentalists hate humans, humanity and capitalism wouldn’t bother me so much if they didn’t blind their believers to larger truths and sensible policies on environmental protection.
One may argue the history of the environmental movement, how most of the originators were great capitalists and humanitarians — think Carnegie, Laurance Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and all the early medical doctors who warned of the dangers of pollution-caused diseases — but it falls on deaf ears on the other sides.
I stumbled upon this video earlier today. It’s Isaac Asimov, famous science fiction writer and biochemist, talking about global warming — back in January 1989. If you change the coloring of the video, the facial hair style, and switch out Asimov for someone else, the video could pretty much have been made today.
Asimov was giving the keynote address at the first annual meeting of The Humanist Institute. “They wanted me to pick out the most important scientific event of 1988. And I really thought that the most important scientific event of 1988 will only be recognized sometime in the future when you get a little perspective.”
What he was talking about was the greenhouse effect, which, he goes on to explain, is “the story everyone started talking about [in 1988], just because there was a hot summer and a drought.” (Sound familiar, letting individual weather events drive talk of whether the Earth’s long-term climate is heating up or cooling down??)
The greenhouse effect explains how certain heat-trapping (a.k.a. “greenhouse”) gases in our atmosphere keep our planet warm, by trapping infrared rays that Earth would otherwise reflect back out into space. The natural greenhouse effect makes Earth habitable — without our atmosphere acting like an electric blanket, the surface of the earth would be about 30 degrees Celsius cooler than it is now.
The problem comes in when humans tinker with this natural state of affairs. Our burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) constantly pumps out carbon dioxide — a heat-trapping gas — into the atmosphere. Our cutting down of forests reduces the number of trees there are to soak up some of this extra carbon dioxide. All in all, our atmosphere and planet heats up, (by about 0.6 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution) with the electric blanket getting gradually thicker around us.
“I have been talking about the greenhouse effect for 20 years at least,” says Asimov in the video. “And there are other people who have talked about it before I did. I didn’t invent it.” As we’ve stressed here recently, global warming, and the idea that humans can change the climate, is not new.
As one blogger notes, Asimov’s words are as relevant today as they were in 1989. “It’s almost like nothing has happened in all this time.” Except that Isaac Asimov has come and gone, and the climate change he spoke of is continuing.
Scientists have been on the job that long, yes. Al Gore didn’t invent global warming or climate change, contrary to the working beliefs of much of the “no human warming” crowd.
One of the commenters at Jenkins’ blog put things in perspective:
Oddly, the great story on the Texas drought that showed up in the Dallas Morning News last week, does not show up on their website. Because this is a climate change-related issue, I think we should track it.
Which is worse: To be in the depths of a drought, or to deny drought where it exists?
I ask the question because, as one cannot tear one’s eyes away from a train wreck about to occur, I watch Steve Goddard’s blog. Occasionally Steve or one of his fellow travelers says something so contrary to reality or fact that I can’t resist pointing it out.
In some discussion over there, Goddard suggested that because there is above-average snowpack around Salt Lake City and in Northern Utah, Lake Powell’s decade-long struggle with extreme drought is over. Therefore, to Goddard, global warming does not exist.
(No, I’m not really exaggerating. Seriously. Go look. No one there seems to have ever had a course in logic, nor in English composition and essay writing. If Al Gore got svelte, one suspects half the commenters there would never be able to speak again.)
It is true that this year, contrary to the past decade, snowpack is high along the Wasatch Front and in the Uinta Mountains of Utah, and in Wyoming and Colorado areas that drain into the Green and Colorado Rivers. Consequently, forecasters say that Lake Powell may gain a few feet of depth this year. Powell is down about 50 feet, however, and even a record snowpack won’t erase the effects of drought on the lake. (Yeah, I know: The Wasatch doesn’t drain into the Colorado system — it drains to the Great Salt Lake, as indeed do many of the streams that have great snowpack in Utah — so a lot of the record snowpack won’t get within 400 miles of Lake Powell. That’s geography, and it would be one more area that commenters would embarrass themselves in. Don’t ask the pig to sing if you aren’t going to spend the time to teach it; if you need the aphorism on teaching pigs to sing, look it up yourself.)
Since Lake Powell won’t lose a lot of elevation this year, the Goddardites (Goddardians? Goddards? Goddardoons?) pronounce the U.S. free of drought.
Right.
Check it out for yourself, Dear Reader. Here’s an animation from the National Drought Center, showing drought measurements in the contiguous 48 states plus Alaska and Hawaii, over the past 12 weeks:
Drought in the U.S., 12 weeks ending May 17, 2011, National Drought Mitigation Center, U of Nebraska-Lincoln - click on map for a larger version at the Drought Monitor site.
Here’s the drought outlook map from the Climate Prediction Center at NOAA:
U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook Map, released May 19, 2011, NOAA and the Climate Prediction Center - click image for a larger version at NOAA's site.
It would be wonderful were these droughts to break soon. But that is very unlikely.
So, why would anyone deny it?
Then, just to indicate the bait-and-switch logic these guys use, Goddard came back with a claim that the 1956 drought in Texas was worse, as if that means the current drought doesn’t exist. Fore reasons apparent only to those whose heads get pinched by tinfoil hats, he also notes the CO2 levels for 1956. I think I know what point he’s trying to make, but someone should tell him that apples are not oranges, and comparing apples and oranges to pomegranates doesn’t increase the supply of tennis balls.
Let’s just stick to the facts. The experts who must operate the dams and lakes and get water to Mexico on schedule say the drought along the Colorado persists. Who are we to gainsay them?
Upper Colorado snowpack map (it looks good, if you like a surplus of snow, except for the drainage area right around Lake Powell, where the drought is still strong)
The late, great Utah Gov. Scott Matheson commented on snowmelt floods that required Salt Lake City to turn major roads into rivers: “It’s a helluva way to run a desert.”
Jerome Corsi, that serial fictionalizer of vital issues, has a book out promoting his slimy schemes besmirch President Obama. Goddard urges people to buy it.
But they really pile on in the comments. It’s almost as if Casey Luskin had a whole family just like himself, and they got together to whine about Judge Roberts again.
Warming denialism, creationism and birthers — is it all just three minor variations on the same brain-sucking virus? Or could three different diseases produce the same sort of crazy on so many different issues?
I’m reminded of the old saw that you cannot reason a person out of a position he didn’t reach by reason. These guys will never see the light. Heaven knows, it ain’t evidence that gets ’em where they are now.
Every once in a while a factoid crosses the desk and/or mind of an otherwise badly-informed person who denies global warming is a problem, and without bothering to check the significance of the factoid, the denialist world ramps up The Crazy Rant.
Former AGW poster child Lake Powell water levels have been rising rapidly over the last few years.
Goddard’s claim is a grand example of the triumph of ignorance over experience, science, data, history and the law, in discussions of climate change.
Did Goddard read his own chart? It shows a decline in lake level from 2010.
Goddard’s own chart shows a decline in Lake Powell’s March 20 level, from 2010; did he look at the chart? Even Goddard’s source says, “Lake Powell is 89.99 feet below Full Pool (Elevation 3,700).”
“Full pool” level is 3,700 feet elevation (the height of the surface of Lake Powell above sea level). Goddard’s chart shows the lake hasn’t been at that level since 2000 (and it was declining for some time prior to that). Goddard’s chart shows four years of rise compared to seven years of decline.
In the Upper Colorado River Basin during water year 2010, the overall precipitation accumulated through September 30, 2010 was approximately 90% of average based on the 30 year average for the period from 1971 through 2000. For Water Year 2011 thus far, the estimated monthly precipitation within the Upper Colorado River Basin (above Lake Powell) as a percentage of average has been: (October – 135%, November – 95%, December – 225%, January – 50%, February – 100%, March – 90%)
The Climate Prediction Center outlook (dated March 17, 2010) for temperature over the next 3 months indicates that temperatures in the Upper Colorado River Basin are expected to be above average while precipitation over the next 3 months is projected to be near average in the northern reaches of the basin while below average in the southern reaches of the basin.
Upper Colorado River Basin Drought
The Upper Colorado River Basin continues to experience a protracted multi-year drought. Since 1999, inflow to Lake Powell has been below average in every year except water years 2005 and 2008. In the summer of 1999, Lake Powell was close to full with reservoir storage at 23.5 million acre-feet, or 97 percent of capacity. During the next 5 years (2000 through 2004) unregulated inflow to Lake Powell was well below average. This resulted in Lake Powell storage decreasing during this period to 8.0 million acre-feet (33 percent of capacity) which occurred on April 8, 2005. During 2005, 2008 and 2009, drought conditions eased somewhat with near or above average inflow conditions and net gains in storage to Lake Powell. 2011 will be another above average inflow year so drought conditions are easing somewhat in the Colorado River Basin. As of April 18, 2011 the storage in Lake Powell was approximately 12.73 million acre-feet (52.3 % of capacity) which is below desired levels. The overall reservoir storage in the Colorado River Basin as of April 18, 2011 is approximately 31.40 million acre-feet (52.8 % of capacity).
Updated: April 19, 2011
“Desert mirage,” editorial discussion of Lake Powell’s climate-change-fueled dropping levels threatening a water project for St. George, Utah, with discussion of U.S. Research Council report on future levels of Lake Powell; Salt Lake Tribune, January 6, 2010. “Lake Powell’s current water level is 59 percent of capacity. The lake level, around 20 million acre-feet in 2000, dropped to about 8 million acre-feet by 2005. Water levels rebounded a bit over the next two years, but the U.S. National Research Council predicted in 2007 that the American West could see worse droughts in the future than the one Utahns experienced from 1998 to 2005. In fact, the early 20th century, when the Colorado compact was negotiated, was an anomaly, a relatively wet period for an otherwise historically much drier area.”
BuRec says very large snow pack is enough to avert shortages in the Lower Colorado, this year — but the drought continues: “The Colorado River Basin has experienced historic drought, and while this winter’s snowpack will benefit river flows, we cannot say that the drought is over,” cautioned Commissioner Connor. “Given the potential for extended dry years, and the effects of climate change on snowpack and runoff in the Colorado Basin, we must continue to work with the states, tribes and other stakeholders in the Basin to meet the water needs in the future.”
New York Times Green Blog, “A reprieve for Western Water users”; “What if this year is an anomaly — not like the year 1983, a gusher of a rain year that was followed by four more fat years, but like the other above-normal years that came and went in the last decade without really denting the impact of the long-term drought?”
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Here’s one story that critics of science and scientists who study global warming will try to avoid mentioning: Malaria’s spread in Tanzania appears to be due to deforestation plus a warming climate that altered historic rainfall patterns.
It’s anecdotal evidence, partly. The case reinforces the point Al Gore made in An Inconvenient Truth,that climate change can smooth the path for the spread of diseases like malaria.
Mbeya — Tanzania’s southern highlanders have long worried about pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses brought on by the cool, wet weather. But as climate change contributes to warmer temperatures in the region, residents are facing a new health threat: malaria.
In Rungwe, a highland district in the south-western Mbeya region bordering Malawi and Zambia, malaria is fast replacing coughs, fever and pneumonia as the most serious local health problem. The change has taken by surprise the region’s residents, who live over 1,000 metres (3,200 feet) above sea level and outside Tanzania’s traditional malarial zones.
Ms Asha Nsasu, 32, of Isebe village, had no idea she had contracted malaria when she was sent to Makandana District Hospital in late December. “I felt weak. I thought it was pneumonia,” Nsasu said. “Then they told me it was malaria.”
In 2009, health centres in Rungwe district reported 100,966 malaria cases, a jump of 25 per cent from 2006, hospital records show.
Malaria is now the biggest public health threat facing Rungwe district, which lies about 940 kilometres (590 miles) southwest of Dar es Salaam, according to the Tukuyu Medical Research Centre, part of the National Institute for Medical Research. One third of outpatients visiting the hospital were diagnosed with the mosquito-borne illness in 2007, according to records from that year, making it the most common disease for outpatients.
Most highland areas in Tanzania are experiencing a growing burden of malaria cases, officials at the Tukuyu Centre said. Climatic changes brought on in part by local environmental degradation are contributing to the growing prevalence of malaria in the district, said Mr Gideon Ndawala, Rungwe district’s malaria coordinator.
“People have cleared the forests, rain has decreased, temperatures have risen,” Mr Ndawala said in an interview. “(When) I first reported on the district in 1983, it was very cold and it rained throughout the year except from mid-September to early November. The weather was not favourable for mosquito breeding,” he said.
Now, however, temperatures are higher and rain more erratic, he said, and mosquito populations – which thrive on warmer temperatures and breed in pools of stagnant water – are on the rise. Worst hit by the surge in malaria are Tukuyu district town, Ikuti, Rungwe Mission and Ilolo, according to district health officials.
Half a century ago, these traditionally cool areas saw no mosquitoes and did not register any malaria cases, but now the weather is warmer, said Mr Ambakisye Mwakatobe, a 76-year-old man from Bulyaga village in Rungwe.
“In the past, we never saw mosquito nets here. I saw a net for the first time at the age of 20, when I joined Butimba Teachers College in 1957,” he said, in an interview at his village home.
Mzee Mwakatobe said cases of malaria began to appear several decades ago but residents did not relate them to warming temperatures, believing the mosquitoes instead were arriving on buses from lower regions.
“It was in the 1970s when we started getting malaria here. I thought it was the buses from Kyela and Usangu that brought mosquitoes,” he admitted. But “the weather also started to change in those years,” he said.
A half-century ago, “it was very cold here and it rained throughout the year. Three things were compulsory: a sweater, pullover or heavy jacket; an umbrella or raincoat; and gumboots,” he added. “There was frost all day long and cars had to put their lights on.
“But today things have changed,” he said. “Look, now we even put on light shirts. There is no need for sweaters, gumboots or umbrellas.”
Scientists agree that the changing weather is feeding into Rungwe’s worsening malaria problem.
“Up until 1960, districts like Rungwe, Mbeya, Mufindi, Njombe, Makete and Iringa in the southern highland regions were malaria free. Today is quite different – malaria prevalence is high,” said Mr Akili Kalinga, a research scientist at Tukuyu Medical Research Centre.
Malaria accounts for 30 per cent of the burden of disease in Tanzania and is a huge drain on productivity, according to a report produced by research scientists for the Sixth Africa Malaria Day in 2006. In response to the rising malaria caseload, the government is taking steps to stem the disease’s expansion.
Measures include public health education in newly vulnerable districts on home cleanliness and water storage, how to eliminate the places of still water where mosquitoes live and breed, and the use of mosquito nets and fumigation, said Dr Sungwa Ndagabwene, Rungwe’s medical officer.
“The government is taking serious measures to fight malaria. We started with a ‘mosquito nets for all’ campaign – saying every person should sleep under bed nets,” Mr Ndagabwene said.
The government also has begun spraying the inside of homes with insecticide, first in the Kagera Region and now throughout the Lake zone, near Lake Victoria, he said. It plans to expand the spraying programme, which has helped cut malaria transmission in Zanzibar, to the rest of the Tanzania’s malaria-affected regions.
Such spraying programmes aim to kill mosquitoes that land on the inside walls of homes. Spraying can protect homes for between four to ten months depending on the insecticide, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
WHO has approved 12 insecticides it considers safe for such spraying programmes, including DDT – a controversial endocrine disruptor that has proved one of the most effective ways to control mosquito populations but that has also been linked to environmental damage and health problems including cancer.
Mr Ndagabwene said spraying the chemical only indoors limited its environmental impact. WHO officials have said they believe the benefits of using the pesticide outweigh its risks. The Stockholm Convention bans the use of DDT but exempts countries that choose to use the chemical to control malaria.
Tanzania is one of the world’s worst malaria-affected countries, recording 14 to 18 million clinical cases annually and 60,000 deaths, 80 per cent of them in children under five years old, according to a 2010 malaria reduction plan put together by USAID.
Children under five and pregnant women are most affected by the disease, official health figures show. (AlertNet)
The author is a freelance writer based in Dar es Salaam
I Believe: ‘We have a responsibility to learn about climate change
by Joan Knight
“If politicians remain at loggerheads, citizens must lead.” — Dr. James E. Hansen, physicist, director of NASA Goddard Institute
I was impressed when I attended a recent meeting with a group of volunteer activists forming a Vermont chapter of the Citizens Climate Lobby. This group is different, I thought. It might actually work. As a newly retired 72-year-old, I was looking for a new focus, and found it.
Religious groups use the word “creation.” Most people say “nature.” Academics speak of global ecology. Deep ecologists who view Earth as one living being say “Gaia,” in reverential tones, meaning our planet and its atmosphere is a living “body.” Its “cells” include us humans, plants, forests, microbes. All life is tied together by dynamic, interdependent relationships. Most native peoples sense that all beings are like sisters and brothers — members of the same family.
I understand. It started for me as a young child with what Rachel Carlson called a sense of wonder. Grasses back-lit by the setting sun; starfish in tide pools crawling about among colorful mats of living plants and fungi. It was a more spiritual experience than was going to church under parental orders. Nature really mattered.
Growing older, I revered the writing of Rachel Carson, David Brower, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry and so many more. I still feel abiding love for it all. I believe in Earth as a planetary living being.
It is clear that our family of All Beings is suffering.
Climate change. Global warming. Is it real? Is it a problem? Why are the changes happening? There is controversy about the answers to these questions. The collapse of climate and energy legislation last year in Congress was a relief to some in big business.
Natural laws or physics and chemistry are in action. The climate is warming faster than it ever has. Weather patterns are strange and tragic. Species are becoming extinct. Predictions of the end of nature (Bill McKibben’s 1984 book title) are common now. What if the scientists are right? We don’t need all the answers to figure out that something awful is going on.
Can we slow down the rate of change? Yes. Can we stop the climate from warming too much? It’s not likely, but I believe we must try. Should we let it happen while we enjoy our greenhouse-gas-producing lifestyles? Some family members deny the reality that their loved one has a serious illness and is likely to die prematurely. We humans have an interesting default to denial. This does happen. Might some of us, similarly, deny that our planet is critically ill?
Most of us agree that conservation of energy and resources is good for us and for the environment. We are changing our personal lifestyles. We have changed our light bulbs to compact fluorescents; we vacation closer to home; we’re working to improve the efficiency of our buildings.
Many of us also become members of environmental organizations. We read their magazines, put in bird feeders to enjoy nature, donate money and sign petitions in the attempt to show our legislators how we would like them to vote. Here in Vermont, we even talk with state legislators and are proud we are the “green state” — cherishing our remaining cows in pastoral landscapes and our forests for both wildlife and recreation. We’re thankful our delegation to the Congress “gets it.”
There are many grassroots activists successfully influencing lawmakers on a town and state level. But we know that states tend to make changes in laws and budgets in response to constraints brought on by federal legislation and financing. Are there ways to really influence federal representatives and senators? Paid lobbyists do it on a massive scale. Money speaks. But what about us?
The Citizens Climate Lobby believes in an approach by which ordinary people influence the federal “deciders” enough to sometimes change their votes. The influential people take the trouble to learn about and appreciate some things an individual legislator has done, seek to discover common ground, listen respectfully and talk in a collaborative way. After discovering what information would be relevant, they come back to provide it. In this comfortable way of relating, ordinary people do make a difference.
As citizens of this country we have a responsibility to learn about climate change, solutions and how to take part in the democratic process. We can sit down for a conversation and tell our legislators what we care about and why. We can write letters. It’s really our job as citizens to share these thoughts with our legislators, if we ever hope to be truly represented by them.
That’s where the new Citizens’ Climate Lobby comes in. The group gives us the tools we need. There is a monthly conference call with a leading thinker who will help keep us informed of the latest issues, and an opportunity to practice speaking with each other about those issues. We work together to help our legislators hear the non-confrontational message: We want a healthy planet for our kids and grandkids.
If I dare to step forward to lobby my representative, I want to learn how, to practice, to feel supported by kindred spirits, to know it’s OK to make mistakes and keep on gaining new knowledge and skills. I’m up for it. And I hope many of you will consider joining us as we begin making our voices heard where it matters most.
Check out the Citizens Climate Lobby website, and get information about how to join in on the next national conference call. This one will be focused on messaging — the importance of context and delivery. This organization seeks to empower each of us to have breakthroughs in our personal power, to be heard and to be counted. It feels good to be a part of a supportive web of passionate citizens.
Join us. Talk with an active member on the phone, go to the website (www.citizensclimatelobby.org), find the lobby on Facebook.
It’s not too late to make a difference. We have been lazy in hoping someone else would do the right thing, that sending a check to an organization and signing an online petition was enough. It’s time for folks, including myself, to step up and be heard.
Real grass roots politics, from a woman concerned enough about the issue to think historically, and to read broadly about it.
Citizenship is wonderful to behold, when it is practiced so nobly and elegantly.
What else might we learn, if we really listened to the people?
Masthead for the home page of Citizens Climate Lobby - click to see
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Years ago when I staffed a U.S. senator’s office, one of my tasks was to look through all the weekly newspapers in the state. Back then subscriptions were cheap, and most senators would take out a subscription to these weeklies more to flatter the editors and publishers than to read. We put them to use, first checking to see whether the clipping services were getting all the clips (mostly), and then on a hunch, to see what issues were raging in the state, well below the radar of the big city daily newspapers and broadcast outlets.
You can learn a lot.
Many of those old weekly newspapers are gone, now, victims to local populations that turn over in every recession, and to electronic news gathering services — and to general alienation: People are not so sure they want to know what their neighbors are up to, these days. Heck, many people aren’t sure they want to know their neighbors.
My own electronic news gatherers occasionally pull out something to think about from a minor news outlet. For example, below is an opinion piece out of the Carrboro Citizenfrom Dan Coleman, a member of the town council in Carrboro, North Carolina. I gather from the paper it is rather close to Chapel Hill, the home of the University of North Carolina (I haven’t checked a map).
But look at what this guy says. He questions the wisdom of Adam Smith. Adam Smith! It appears Coleman wasn’t led astray by all those Adam Smith neckties that were so popular in the Reagan administration. He questions the true need for profits from corporations, and he wonders if there isn’t a higher duty for a corporation.
How many others like Dan Coleman are there, out there in America, relatively sane on all other accounts, and thinking?
Did you know that Carrboro’s Town Code incorporates a principle devised by Shell Oil? That’s right, the same Shell Oil that has been accused of human rights violations in Nigeria, including summary execution, crimes against humanity, torture, inhumane treatment and collaborating in the execution of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. The same Shell Oil that has despoiled the Niger delta and was responsible for the largest freshwater oil spill ever.
With a record like this, it is little wonder that Shell came up with one of the corporate world’s more effective public relations concepts of recent years: the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), also known as People, Planet, Profit. It’s as if Shell was saying, sure you can criticize our environmental and humanitarian record but don’t forget, we have to make a profit.
Efforts to value people have dogged profiteering for over a century. The late 19th and early-to-mid-20th centuries were marked by many thousands of strikes by workers, more than 1,400 in the year 1886 alone. Many of these were met by violent strikebreakers backed up at times by military force. This is a struggle that continues in 2011 in Wisconsin and other states.
William Blake
Through the efforts of these men and women, much of value was created: the weekend, workplace-safety standards, health care for workers, vacation and sick leave, etc. And each of these was wrested from the one bottom line that corporate America really cares about.
Despite William Blake offering the image of “dark satanic mills” as far back as 1804, the environmental impacts of industrial capitalism began to be understood with Rachel Carson’s 1962 publication of The Silent Spring. Within a decade, there was Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act and much more, each a challenge to the profit-focused priorities of capital.
Given the pre-eminent importance of profit-maximization, it is not surprising that corporations touting the Triple Bottom Line often oppose measures to combat global warming, oppose workers’ rights and oppose regulatory mechanisms to protect the health of people and planet.
History has taught us that Adam Smith was wrong when he offered the justification for prioritizing profit that “by pursuing his own interest [the businessman] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” If Smith were correct, companies like Shell would not have such a devastating impact on society and nature. In part, this impact results from profit being measured in a short timeframe, a year or even a quarter of a year, while sustainability requires a vision spanning, as the Iroquois put it, as much as seven generations.
But Smith was right that profit ought to serve human well-being. Therefore, it must be understood within an ethical system that places people and planet first. This holds true for the vague term “stakeholder value” that some, including Carrboro, use instead of profit. Who are the stakeholders if not people and planet?
The TBL offers nothing to help us navigate the inevitable contradictions between profit on the one hand and people/planet on the other. But, really, why should we have any social or political bottom lines at all?
It was social ecologist Murray Bookchin who bemoaned the cultural turn to the “grubby language” of the market economy, which has “replaced our most hallowed moral and spiritual expressions. We now ‘invest’ in our children, marriages, and relationships. … We live in a world of ‘trade-offs’ and we ask for the ‘bottom line’ of any emotional ‘transaction.’”
There are a variety of frameworks that speak to a more fundamental commitment to the well-being of all life. In an 1854 speech, Chief Seattle offered the notion of a web of life: “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”
Aldo Leopold, in Arizona, Arizona State Parks image
A century after Chief Seattle, Aldo Leopold articulated his land ethic in Sand County Almanac, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” The biotic community, of course, includes humans.
We need the ability to truly place people and planet first and to reject the false, self-serving homilies offered by those who spread pavement and poverty in pursuit of the almighty dollar. Rather than seek simplistic nostrums, we may have to take the time to look hard at each decision, and bring a clear ethical sensibility, like that of Seattle or Leopold, to bear.
Dan Coleman is a member of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen.
Coleman may want to check the provenance of the Chief Seattle quote — but the thought is solid.
What do you think?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory, from NOAA At the Ends of the Earth Collection, 1982 NOAA photo by Commander John Bortniak
John Adams observed, and Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting, “Facts are stubborn things . . .”
Here are the facts on atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2):
Mauna Loa Observatory, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD (University of Calfornia-San Diego); CO2 concentrations in parts per million (ppm)
As described at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography site:
Description:
Monthly average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration versus time at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii (20°N, 156°W) where CO2 concentration is in parts per million in the mole fraction (p.p.m.). The curve is a fit to the data based on a stiff spline plus a 4 harmonic fit to the seasonal cycle with a linear gain factor.
Data from Scripps CO2 Program.
For perspective, here’s a chart from Scripps that shows why there is concern over current levels of CO2:
CO2 over the past 420,000 years - Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Want solid information on climate change (global warming) and the problems it poses?
Several opportunities present themselves, from the National Academies of Science, America’s premiere science advisory group:
America’s Climate Choices Final Report in Review
The final report of the America’s Climate Choices suite of studies is in the final stages of peer review and will be released this Spring. An official release date will be announced as soon as possible. The report is authored by the Committee on America’s Climate Choices, which was responsible for providing overall direction, coordination, and integration of the America’s Climate Choices activities.
Warming World, a publication from the National Academies of Science
“Warming World: Impacts by Degree” Explains Findings of NRC Report
Emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels have ushered in a new epoch, beginning to be called the Anthropocene, during which human activities will largely determine the evolution of Earth’s climate. That’s one of the main conclusions from Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts over Decades to Millennia (NRC, 2011) an expert consensus report released last July and published this year. Now a new 36-page booklet based on the report, “Warming World: Impacts by Degree” is available to help policymakers, students, and the general public better understand the report’s important conclusions.
The report concludes that, because carbon dioxide is so long-lived in the atmosphere, increases in this gas can effectively lock the Earth and many future generations in a range of impacts, some of which could be severe. Therefore, emission reduction choices made today matter in determining impacts that will be experienced not just over the next few decades, but also into the coming centuries and millennia. Policy choices can be informed by recent advances in climate science that show the relationships among increasing carbon dioxide, global warming, related physical changes, and resulting impacts. The report identifies (and quantifies when possible) expected impacts per degree of warming, including those on streamflow, wildfires, crop productivity, the frequency of very hot summers, and sea-level rise and its associated risks and vulnerabilities.
Report Sets Research Agenda to Study Earth’s Past Climate
Without a reduction in emissions, by the end of this century atmospheric carbon dioxide could reach levels that Earth has not experienced for more than 30 million years. Critical insights into how Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and ecosystems would function in this high carbon dioxide environment are contained in the records of Earth’s geological past, concludes Understanding Earth’s Deep Past: Lessons for Our Climate Future, a National Research Council report from the Board on Earth Sciences that was released on March 1, 2011.
“Ancient rocks and sediments hold the only records of major, and at times rapid, transitions across climate states and offer the potential for a much better understanding of the long-term impact of climate change,” said Isabel Montañez, chair of the committee that wrote the report and a professor in the department of geology at the University of California, Davis. The research could also yield information on the tipping points for climate change–the threshold of greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere at which abrupt climate change will occur.
The report sets out a research agenda for an improved understanding of Earth system processes during the transition to a warmer world. High-priority research initiatives include gaining a better understanding of the sensitivity of climate to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, the amount of sea-level rise as the ice sheets melt, and the resilience of ecosystems to climate change.
Webinar on Transportation and Climate Change
On Thursday, March 24 from 2:00-3:00 p.m., the National Academies Transportation Research Board will host the first of a 2-part webinar series that looks the threats of climate change to transportation facilities and operations and at resources for adapting. The cost of the webinar is $109 (the webinars are free to employees of TRB sponsors). To sign up and/or to learn more, please visit http://www.trb.org/ElectronicSessions/Blurbs/164935.aspx.
This week, EPA bashing took front and center on the performance stage that passes as Congress these days. There is a school of thought that thinks EPA should be eviscerated because EPA is carrying out the mandate an earlier Congress gave it, to clean up the air. Especially, the recent assailants claim, EPA should not try to reduce carbon emissions, because clean air might cost something.
Steven Milloy, who makes crude and false claims against William Ruckelshaus, a great lawyer and the hero of the Saturday Night Massacre. Why does Milloy carry such a pathetic grudge?
Wholly apart from the merits, or great lack of merits to those arguments, the anti-EPA crowd is just ugly.
78-year-old William Ruckelshaus, the Hero of the Saturday Night Massacre, a distinguished lawyer and businessman, and the founding Director of EPA who was called back to clean it up after the Reagan administration scandals, granted an interview on EPA bashing to Remapping Debate, an ambitious, independent blog from the Columbia School of Journalism designed to provide information essential to policy debates that too-often gets overlooked or buried. [Remapping Debate sent a note that they are not affiliated with CSJ; my apologies for the error.]
Ruckelshaus, as always, gave gentlemanly answers to questions about playing politics with science, and bashing good, honest and diligent government workers as a method of political discourse.
He’s the 20th century’s only mass murderer to survive and thrive (as a venture capitalist) in the 21st century.
Milloy owes Ruckelshaus an apology and a complete retraction. I rather hope Ruckelshaus sues — while Milloy will claim the standards under New York Times vs. Sullivan as a defense, because Ruckelshaus is a public figure, I think the only question a jury would have to deal with is how much malice aforethought Milloy exhibits. Malice is obvious. Heck, there might not even be a question for a jury — Milloy loses on the law (nothing he claims against Ruckelshaus is accurate or true in any way).
This is much more damning than what got two NPR officials to lose their jobs.
Who will stand up for justice here? Rep. Upton? Rep. Boehner? Anthony Watts?
I tried to offer a correction, and since then have written Milloy demanding an apology and retraction — neither comment has surfaced yet on Milloy’s blog. Here’s the truth Milloy hasn’t printed:
No, Sweeney did not rule that DDT is not a threat to the environment. He said quite the opposite. Sweeney wrote, in his ruling:
20. DDT can have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish and estuarine organisms when directly applied to the water.
21. DDT is used as a rodenticide. [DDT was used to kill bats in homes and office buildings; this was so effective that, coupled with accidental dosing of bats from their eating insects carrying DDT, it actually threatened to wipe out some species of bat in the southwest U.S.]
22. DDT can have an adverse effect on beneficial animals.
23. DDT is concentrated in organisms and can be transferred through food chains.
On that basis, two federal courts ruled that DDT must be taken off the market completely. Sweeney agreed with the findings of the courts precisely, but he determined that the law did not give him the power to order DDT off the market since the newly-proposed labels of the DDT manufacturers restricted use to emergency health-related tasks. With the benefit of rereading the two federal courts’ decisions, Ruckelshaus noted that the courts said the power was already in the old law, and definitely in the new law. [See, for example, EDF v. Ruckelshaus, 439 F. 2d 584 (1971)]
DDT was banned from use on crops in the U.S. as an ecosystem killer. It still is an ecosystem killer, and it still deserves to be banned.
Ruckelshaus’s order never traveled outside the U.S. DDT has never been banned in most nations of the world, and even though DDT has earned a place on the list of Dirty Dozen most dangerous pollutants, even under the Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty of 2001, DDT is available for use to any country who wishes to use it.
Please get your facts straight.
Would you, Dear Reader, help spread the word on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, or any other service you have, that the Brown Lobby has gone too far in it’s error-based propaganda against clean air and those who urge a better environment? Please?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Tuesday morning, March 8, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce opened hearings on global warming, staging an assault on science with a series of witnesses, some of whom recently have made a career out of mau-mauing scientists.
Dr. Donald Roberts’ testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Power, on March 8, 2011, presented a grand collection of Bogus History, coupled with Bogus Science. Roberts has an unfortunate history of presenting doctored data and false claims to Congress.
One witness took after the EPA directly and Rachel Carson by implication, with a specious claim that DDT is harmless. Donald Roberts is a former member of the uniformed public health service. Since retiring, and perhaps for a while before, he started running with a bad crowd. Of late he’s been working with the Merry Hoaxsters of the unrooted Astroturf organization Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM), a group dedicated to publishing editorials tearing down the reputation of Rachel Carson, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
(That would all be purple prose, were it not accurate in its description of people, organizations and their actions.)
Why was Roberts testifying at a hearing on global warming? He’s carrying water for the anti-science, “please-do-nothing” corporate crowd. It’s a tactic from the old tobacco lobbyist book: Roberts claims that scientists got everything wrong about DDT, and that the ban on DDT done in error has wreaked havoc in the third world. Therefore, he says, we should never trust scientists. If scientists say “duck!” don’t bother, in other words.
Roberts is in error. Scientists, especially Rachel Carson, were dead right about DDT. Because corporate interests refused to listen to them, the overuse and abuse of DDT rendered it ineffective in the fight against malaria, and DDT use as part of a very ambitious campaign to eradicate malaria had to be abandoned in 1965. The entire campaign had to be abandoned as a result, and more than 30 million kids have died since.
So don’t grant credence to Roberts now. He’s covering up one of the greatest industrial screw-ups in history, a screw up that, by Roberts’ own count, has killed 30 million kids. What in the world would motivate Roberts to get the story so wrong, to the detriment of so many kids?
Roberts said:
Putting issues of EPA budget aside, I want to introduce my technical comments with a quote from a recent Associated Press article with a lead statement “none of EPA’s actions is as controversial as its rules on global warming.” In my opinion, this is wrong.
Dr. Donald Roberts testifying to the House Energy Committee, March 8, 2011. Screen capture from Committee video.
Roberts is correct here in his opinion. It is simply wrong that EPA’s rules on global warming and controls of the pollutants that cause it should be controversial. Among air pollution scientists the rules are not controversial. Among climate scientists the rules are not controversial. Roberts and his colleagues at the so-called Competitive Enterprise Institute, Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM), and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) work hard to manufacture controversy where the science does not support their case.
It is wrong. Roberts should be ashamed.
Roberts said:
Almost forty years ago EPA banned DDT in the United States. Its action against DDT was extraordinarily controversial, and still is. As activists advanced fearful claims against DDT, the EPA was warned, over and over again, a ban would destroy critically important disease control programs and millions upon millions of poor people in developing countries would die as consequence. Leaders of the World Health and Pan American Health Organizations, and even the U.S. Surgeon General warned against the ban. The EPA banned DDT anyway, and the doomsday predictions of those public health leaders proved prescient.
EPA’s ban on DDT in the U.S. was limited to the United States. Roberts doesn’t say it flat out, but he implies that the U.S. ban on spraying DDT on cotton fields in Texas and Arkansas — and cotton was about the only crop where DDT was still used — somehow caused a ban on DDT in Africa, or Asia, or South America, or other places where malaria still occurs.
I’m also not sure that health officials “pleaded” to stop the U.S. ban on any grounds, but certainly they did not plead with Ruckelshaus to keep spraying DDT on cotton. Roberts is making stuff up in effect, if not in intent.
Probably more to the point, health officials had stopped significant use of DDT in Africa in 1965, seven years before EPA acted in the U.S., because overuse of DDT on crops in Africa had bred mosquitoes that were resistant and immune to the stuff. Since 1955, in close cooperation with the malaria-fighting experts from the Rockefeller Foundation including the great Fred Soper, WHO carried on a methodical, militant campaign to wipe out malaria. The program required that public health care be beefed up to provide accurate malaria diagnoses, and complete treatment of human victims of the parasitic disease. Then an army of house sprayers would move in, dosing the walls of houses and huts with insecticide. Most malaria-carrying mosquitoes at the time would land on the walls of a home or hut after biting a human and getting a blood meal, pausing to squeeze out heavy, excess water to make flight easier. If the wall were coated with an insecticide, the mosquito would die before being able to bite many more people, maybe before becoming capable of spreading malaria.
DDT was Soper’s insecticide of choice because it was long-lasting — six months or more — and astonishingly deadly to all small creatures it contacted.
But, as Malcolm Gladwell related in his 2001 paean to Soper in The New Yorker, Soper and his colleagues well understood they were racing against the day that mosquitoes became resistant enough to DDT that their program would not work. They had hoped the day would not arrive until the late 1970s or so — but DDT is such an effective killer that it greatly speeds evolutionary processes. In the mid-1960s, before an anti-malaria campaign could even be mounted in most of Subsaharan Africa, resistant and immune mosquitoes began to stultify the campaign. By 1965, Soper’s crews worked hard to find a substitute, but had to switch from DDT. By 1972 when the U.S. banned DDT use on cotton in the U.S., it was too late to stop the resistance genes from killing WHO’s anti-malaria program. In 1969 WHO formally abandoned the goal of malaria eradication. The fight against malaria switched to control.
Roberts claims, implicitly, that people like those who worked with Soper told EPA in 1971 that DDT was absolutely essential to their malaria-fighting efforts. That could not be accurate. In 1969 the committee that oversaw the work of the UN voted formally to end the malaria eradication project. In effect, then, Roberts claims UN and other health officials lied to EPA in 1971. It is notable that Soper is credited with eradicating malaria from Brazil by 1942, completely without DDT, since DDT was not then available. Soper’s methods depended on discipline in medical care and pest control, and careful thought as to how to beat the disease — DDT was a help, but not necessary.
Interestingly, the only citation Roberts offers is to his own, nearly-self-published book, in which he indicts almost all serious malaria fighters as liars about DDT.
Can Roberts’ testimony be trusted on this point? I don’t think we should trust him.
In fact, DDT and the eradication campaign had many good effects. In 1959 and 1960, when DDT use was at its peak in the world, malaria deaths numbered about 4 million annually. The eradication campaign ultimately was ended, but it and other malaria-fighting efforts, and general improvements in housing and sanitation, helped cut the annual death toll to 2 million a year by 1972.
After the U.S. stopped spraying DDT on cotton, mosquitoes did not migrate from Texas and Arkansas to Africa. As noted earlier, the EPA order stopping agricultural use, left manufacturing untouched, to increase U.S. exports. So the ban on DDT in the U.S. increased the amount of DDT available to fight malaria.
Malaria fighting, under Soper’s standards, required great discipline among the malaria fighters — the sort of discipline that governments in Subsaharan Africa could not provide. Had WHO not slowed its use of DDT because of mosquito resistance to the stuff, WHO still would not have been able to mount eradication campaigns in nations where 80% of residences could not be sprayed regularly.
Advances in medical care, and better understanding of malaria and the vectors that spread it, helped continue the downward trend of malaria deaths. There was a modest uptick in the 1980s when the parasites themselves developed resistance to the drugs commonly used to treat the disease. With the advent of pharmaceuticals based on Chinese wormwood, or artemisinin-based drugs, therapy for humans has become more effective. Today, the annual death toll to malaria has been cut to under a million, to about 900,000 per year — a 75% drop from DDT’s peak use, a 50% drop from the U.S. ban on farm use of DDT.
With the assistance of WHO, most nations who still suffer from malaria have adopted a strategy known as Integrated Vector Management, or IVM (known as integrated pest management or IPM in the U.S.). Pesticides are used sparingly, and insect pests are monitored regularly and carefully to be sure they are not developing genetic-based resistance or immunity to the pesticides. This is the method that Rachel Carson urged in 1962, in her book, Silent Spring. Unfortunately, much of the malaria-suffering world didn’t come to these methods until after the turn of the century.
Progress against malaria has been good since 2001, using Rachel Carson’s methods.
Don Roberts’ blaming of science, EPA, WHO, and all other malaria fighters is not only misplaced, wrong in its history and wrong in its science, but it is also just nasty. Is there any way Roberts could not know and understand the facts?
These are the facts Roberts works to hide from Congress:
“Science” and scientists were right about DDT. DDT is a dangerous substance, uncontrollable in the wild according to federal court findings and 40 years of subsequent research. If we were to judge the accuracy of scientists about DDT, we would have to conclude that they were deadly accurate in their judgment that use of DDT should be stopped.
If the ban on DDT was controversial in 1972, it should not be now. All research indicates that the judgment of EPA and its director, William Ruckelshaus, was right.
EPA was not warned that a ban on agricultural use of DDT would harm public health programs, in the U.S., nor anywhere else in the world. In any case, EPA’s jurisdiction ends at U.S. borders — why would WHO say anything at all?
DDT use to fight malaria had been curtailed in 1965, years before the U.S. ban on farm use, because overuse of DDT on crops had bred DDT-resistant and DDT-immune mosquitoes. Consequently, there was not a huge nor vociferous lobby who warned that health would be put at risk if DDT were banned. Claims that these warnings were made are either false or grossly misleading.
Malaria death rates declined to less than 50% of what they were when DDT was banned from farm use in the U.S. — there was no “doomsday” because the U.S. stopped spraying DDT on cotton, and there never has been a serious shortage of DDT for use against malaria, anywhere in the world.
How much of the rest of the testimony against doing something about global warming, was complete hoax?
[Editor’s note: My apologies. I put this together on three different machines while conducting other activities. On proofing, I find several paragraphs simply disappeared, and edits to make up for the time of composing and fix tenses, got lost. It should be mostly okay, now, and I’ll add in the links that disappeared shortly . . . oh, the sorry work of the part-time blogger.]
Update, 2015: Video of the hearing, from YouTube:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
In the march to brand all non-fossil fuel use as politically incorrect (at least for those who deny global warming should get our policy making attention), the poobahs and commenters at Watts Up have outdone themselves in seeing conspiracies under the ice, mountains where there are molehills, and molehills where there are mountains.
If you wonder whether global warming deniers are biased, Watts’s blog just confessed.
We’re quite frozen in here in Texas, you know. The unseasonable warm air (high pressure) over the Arctic that warms the sea and melts the ice also pushed the Arctic air south over the U.S. Where that frigid air met wet air coming from the Gulf of Mexico, weather ensued (yeah, warming may have increased the amount of moisture, too — but that just makes the anti-warmists go blind, so we won’t say it).
Texas got hit with rolling power blackouts last week, when the cold weather increased demand for electricity and crimped the ability of several utilities to bring on power plants build to generate to meet such extra demands. Some coal-fired plants were off-line, a couple froze up, and natural gas supplies were not in the right place at the right time, so some natural gas plants couldn’t fire up.
If you’re wondering just what in the world he was thinking, you’d be demonstrating more common sense than the average global warming denier.
Freezing rain had been predicted, but not so much as Texas got. The follow-up snow also surpassed predictions and expectations — for example, the “skiff to 1″ accumulation” predicted for Dallas turned into 5″ to 7″ through much of the area — stopping any hope that the ice might clear so schools could reopen. Texas got slammed by the same enormous storm that slammed much of the Midwest and Northeast, with similar results. For Super Bowl host cities Fort Worth, Arlington and Dallas, that created big problems. Texas is not equipped to deal with much winter weather, let alone so much in so little time.
In cold weather, power plants fail. Sometimes power lines fail when the plants stay up. Sometimes it’s just a question of wheeling power from one part of a local, regional or national grids. Sometimes the wheeling fails because a switch fails or . . . a failure of capacity can have myriad causes. In the past, we covered for these problems with additional generating capacity, in excess of what might be needed at any point — mandated by state and local utility commissions to insure power at all times.
Texas deregulated electrical power more than a decade ago, too — which means that market forces govern what gets built and whether there is any emergency generating capacity.
Free enterprise cannot take any blame in the kingdom of those who deny climate and economics. So when the rolling blackouts plagued Texas, the search for a scapegoat became frenetic. The question was, who could take the blame that could cast what was perceived to be the most aspersional light on Al Gore, the case for global warming, and anything approaching “green energy?”
Ah, there’s the target! Wind power.
Watts Up quickly claimed that Texas windmill-generated electricity had failed, if not in fact, then in economic hypothesis. If the windmills didn’t fail themselves, it must be that the money invested in them could have been better invested in coal-fired power plants, or oil-fired plants, and the blame can be squarely laid at the feet of Michael Mann, or the UN’s IPCC, or Al Gore, or Rachel Carson, or John Muir, or Aeolus — or anyone other than the real trouble, the freakish weather. Avoiding blame on the weather is important to denialists, because such “perfect storm” combinations come astonishingly close to the predictions of some global warming hypotheses.
So blame must be established, far from the house of warming denialists if possible. Watts’ blog attacked windpower all through 2010; ignoring any rebuttals, all Watts had to do was point to his earlier published articles.
The operators of Texas’ electricity grid blamed myriad problems at power plants across Texas for last week’s rolling blackouts. But interviews and a review of documents by The Dallas Morning News reveal that the breakdown of a cluster of coal-fired power plants in Central Texas was at the heart of the problem.
These facts were known days ago. In fact the second comment at Watts’ blog corrected the record:
Could Watts ever concede a possible error? Not yet, not on his blog, nor anywhere else. Texas electric grid officials said early they had coal-fired power plants down; they’ve stuck to that story. Reporting by the state’s major newspapers and other news organizations has borne out that story.
Continuing their leading reporting on energy and environment issues, the Texas Tribune, an on-line publication by a non-profit group, specifically asked about wind power shortages as alleged by Watts:
TT: Were there problems with wind-power plants needing to be shut down for high winds or icing blades, and also did nuclear plants have any problems?
[Trip] Doggett [CEO of the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)]: I’m not aware of any nuclear plant problems, and I’m not aware of any specific issues with wind turbines having to shut down due to icing. I would highlight that we put out a special word of thanks to the wind community because they did contribute significantly through this time frame. Wind was blowing, and we had often 3,500 megawatts of wind generation during that morning peak, which certainly helped us in this situation.
Is there any room for the wind nay-sayers to squirm on this?
One publication which should be keyed into the facts poked fun at Watts’ hypothesis, although in a subtle, implicit fashion. Energy Tribune’s story by Philip E. Lewis, comparing Texas to King Canute, noted that Texas has bragged about its energy reliability and separateness from the rest of the state. What to do in the next energy crisis?
But no worries, I have the perfect solution: Next time power plants are “tripping,” ERCOT (irony alert: Electric Reliability Council of Texas) should issue an order for the wind to blow harder in West Texas. If the wind is reluctant to comply, ERCOT should brook no nonsense and immediately escalate. Surely an order from the governor’s office will do the trick.
Based on little more than antipathy towards wind power, bloggers beginning with Anthony Watts started a hoax rumor that wind power is to blame for Texas’s electricity shortage problems. Very little basis could be found for such a claim, and in the days since the events, that little basis is evaporating. It’s time to put that claim to bed.
Sorta post script: I am aware of the claims at Meteorological Musings that wind generation is, somehow, to blame — if for no other reason than that it could not play Superman and bring a few thousand megawatts online with no notice to save the rest of the grid. As best I can cipher it, the claim is that because not every wind generator was on line, wind generators should have been able to take up the slack. Of course, no other energy source could step in to take up the slack, either, including those who were scheduled to do it. I don’t put a lot of stock in the claim that we need to be particularly stern with wind generating companies when other generating companies fall down on the job. For that matter, there is a Reuters article listed at Watts Up that said a wind shortage added to the problems, but it didn’t suggest in any way that a wind shortage caused the problems — and it’s from 2008, not 2011. I don’t believe problems in 2008 contributed to blackouts in 2011. I’m also aware that Energy Tribune is hostile to wind generated power. Testimony contrary to interest . . .
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 