Maple Syrup and Climate Change

Mother Jones reports on the unreported story of the warming effect of climate change on maple trees. This is the story of a "maple farmer, retired teacher, and citizen-scientist who is documenting and publicizing the declining state of maple trees in New Hampshire."

For many of us, climate change is an abstract topic, as tedious as a droning Al Gore lecture complete with wonky charts.

But not if you're a maple farmer in New England. The region has long provided a robust ecological niche for maple trees. But just a few decades of steadily warming weather has changed all that. Once-flourishing trees are shedding leaves too early in the season and producing sub-par sap.

Maple syrup—dark, minerally, its sweetness cut by a caramel edge—surely ranks among the great traditional foods on planet Earth. Climate change means we can no longer take it for granted. If current trends continue, maple syrup production could well be an historical memory by 2100.

In this video, Climate Desk's James West profiles Martha Carlson, a 65-five-year-old maple farmer, retired teacher, and citizen-scientist who is documenting and publicizing the declining state of maple trees in New Hampshire. "We need lots of citizens to observe nature," Carlson says at one point. I bet if we all opened our eyes like Carlson has, we'd find that climate change is affecting our own landscapes, too. And then maybe we'd be able to motivate our political class to actually do something about climate change.

GOP-Tea Party Attaches Strings to Hurricane Irene Assistance

The GOP-Tea Party Republicans have developed a new procedure, a new approach, a new policy for responding to disasters. When money is needed as a remedy for a potential disaster, the GOP-Tea Party Republicans will not lend support for the needed money or assistance unless the agenda that they want is also attached. This tactic was used during the debt-ceiling crisis. Eric Cantor has now says that "the GOP approach would break from how U.S. policymakers have operated." AlterNet has the story of GOP's Callous, Money-Oriented Response to Storm Damage: "It is Sinful"

Hurricane Irene made landfall this morning, hitting North Carolina with sustained winds of 90 miles per hour. Irene was downgraded overnight to a Category 1 hurricane, but it remains a powerful storm capable of doing serious harm.

Obviously, we can all hope the severity of the damage is limited. Regrettably, though, the line on federal disaster aid from congressional Republicans has not changed.

This week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said the GOP approach would break from how U.S. policymakers have operated. Whereas Congress used to provide emergency funds after a disaster, without regard for budget caps or offsets, Republicans have said they will no longer accept such an approach -- if Democrats want emergency assistance in the wake of a natural disaster, Republicans will insist on attaching some strings to the relief funds.

In this case, the strings are cuts elsewhere in the budget. Or as Cantor's spokesperson put it, GOP leaders expect "additional funds for federal disaster relief" to be "offset with spending cuts."

The Republican position is already drawing fire.

"It is sinful to require us to cut somewhere ... in order to provide emergency disaster assistance for American citizens," Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) told The Huffington Post on Friday.

The Louisiana Democrat pointed out that this weekend is the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated his district and cost the federal government more than $100 billion. That recovery effort would have been delayed "by years" if Congress had required the same kind of spending cuts to offset aid, he said.

"I have been one who has been preparing for the hurricane, trying to give people some comfort. One thing they need to know is the federal government can come to their aid," Richmond said. "I don't think we're in a position, given the rules set up by the majority, that we're going to be able to come to their aid quickly."

Perhaps realizing the potential for a political nightmare -- Republicans are already unpopular; just wait until they hold hostage relief funds for communities hit by a hurricane -- GOP leaders weren't eager to talk about their position yesterday.

But they didn't disavow it, either. Cantor's office rejected questions about "hypothetical federal aid caused by hypothetical damage," despite the fact that the Majority Leader and his spokesperson were more than willing to discuss the position 24 hours earlier.

House Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office was also cagey, saying policymakers will "discuss costs when and if they occur."

Neither Republican leader offered the correct response, which is, "Of course we'll do whatever it takes to help the affected communities."

With any luck, this will be a moot point. If the damage isn't severe, Congress won't have to approve emergency relief. At this point, we just don't know.

But in the event of extensive damage, there's a real possibility that the first question from congressional Republicans won't be, "How can we help?" but rather, "What will Democrats give us in exchange for disaster aid?

Paul Krugman has astutely observed that this behavior is analogous to a hostage situation.

Six months ago President Obama faced a hostage situation. Republicans threatened to block an extension of middle-class tax cuts unless Mr. Obama gave in and extended tax cuts for the rich too. And the president essentially folded, giving the G.O.P. everything it wanted.

Now, predictably, the hostage-takers are back: blackmail worked well last December, so why not try it again? This time House Republicans say they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling — a step that could inflict major economic damage — unless Mr. Obama agrees to large spending cuts, even as they rule out any tax increase whatsoever.

Legislators have historically been willing to compromise. Krugman notes what has changed?

The answer is the radicalization of the Republican Party. Normally, a party controlling neither the White House nor the Senate would acknowledge that it isn’t in a position to impose its agenda on the nation. But the modern G.O.P. doesn’t believe in following normal rules. [...] At some point — and sooner rather than later — the president has to draw a line. Otherwise, he might as well move out of the White House, and hand the keys over to the Tea Party.

The President did give in to the GOP-Tea Party agenda with tax cuts and the debt-ceiling. Now, there are catastrophic costs for disaster relief. The response of the GOP-Tea Party is to have another hissy fit, hold their breath till they turn blue and claim there will be no money unless their strings are attached.

I hear conservatives continually criticism liberals for a negative attitude toward them. But sometimes, truth is merely truth. And if negativity stems from the truth, then one should look at the behavior emanating from the actor or participant of the action rather than the observer of the facts. It is time to put the children to bed without their supper and just say NO to being held hostage. Yell as loud as you can, "Right back at you Cantor!!!!"

GOP Science Deniers - Déjà vu

An anti-science mania has taken over the GOP! Law Professor Robert Benson argues that "being vocally anti-science has become the defining mark of a current style of politics, an intentional ignorance that recalls the Scopes Monkey Trial."

The Second Coming of Science

You’ve got to go back to the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 for a precedent to the anti-science mania that is currently sweeping the GOP. Then, the issue was teaching Darwin’s work on evolution in the schools. Today, the issue is global warming. Then, as now, large numbers of politicians tapped into the stratum of popular culture that simply rejects science as the basis for public or personal decisions. The chief prosecutor of high school teacher John Scopes, William Jennings Bryan, gloated that literal interpretation of the Bible trumped scientific knowledge. This resonated with large masses of ordinary folks, the ones H. L. Mencken and the liberal press were calling “yokels” and “morons.”

Turns out the yokels and morons won, at least for a generation. Scopes was found guilty of violating the Tennessee law that prohibited teaching evolution, and his conviction (though later overturned on a technicality) galvanized the anti-evolution movement for years. Politicians came pouring in. Scores of resolutions were introduced in state legislatures and school boards all over the country, setting back the teaching of evolution for decades until logic and reason and the scientific method gradually reasserted themselves in the culture.

The 1925 Anti-Science Climate of Today

Today, Republicans are falling over themselves in a rush to ridicule the science that shows our use of fossil fuels is producing greenhouse gases that are warming the planet to disastrous levels. These findings were confirmed even by the Bush administration before it left office, as well as by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and every other significant scientific academy around the world, not to mention the unpaid global work of hundreds of volunteer scientists for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Republicans Ceny Climate Change

But anti-scientists are undaunted by facts. More than half of the incoming Republican caucus denies the validity of climate change science. Some 74 percent of Republicans in the U.S. Senate now take that stance, as do 53 percent of GOP in the House. Here’s a sampler of what some of their leading illuminati have to say about it:

“I personally believe that the solar flares are more responsible for climatic cycles than anything that human beings do. …” — Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin

“Nobody really knows the cause. The earth cools, the earth warms … It could be caused by carbon dioxide or methane. Maybe we should kill the cows to stop the methane, or stop breathing to stop the CO2 … Thousands of people die every year of cold, so if we had global warming it would save lives … We ought to look out for people. The earth can take care of itself.” — Rep. Duncan Hunter, California

“There was a report a couple of weeks ago that in fact you look at this last year, it was the warmest year in the last decade, I think was the numbers that came out. I don’t — I accept that. I do not say that it is man-made.”Rep. Fred Upton, Michigan —

“The greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people.” — Sen. James Inhofe, Oklahoma

Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois says we need not worry about the planet being destroyed because, citing chapter 8, verse 22 of the Book of Genesis, God promised Noah it wouldn’t happen again after the great flood.

Sen. John McCain co-authored a good global warming bill when running for president in 2008. But he did a 180-degree turnabout when running for re-election to Arizona’s Senate seat two years later, suddenly saying, “There’s great questions about it that need to be resolved.”

What Happened?

The Tea Party and its allies had made it unacceptable to the GOP base to be anywhere except pandering to the anti-science crowd.

None of this would have surprised historian Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer in 1964 for his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Starting with the colonies, Hofstadter shows how the vast underlying stratum of anti-elite, anti-reason, anti-science Americans has frequently erupted into political and cultural action. These are folks who never heard of the Enlightenment of the 18th century, and do not experience a lot of reason, logic or the empirical method in their daily lives. They live by “common sense,” personal relationships and superstition. They have always been with us, and there are a lot of them.

Their outburst into today’s anti-science global warming mania would just be the latest chapter in Hofstadter’s book.

The Rise of Idiot America Today

You might think that the revolution of Internet-blogging-networking technology would work to spread sound scientific knowledge more broadly, but you would be wrong. The new technology spreads a cacophony of voices in which the pre-Enlightenment folks are not only equal but more numerous and dominant than the voices of reason.

Journalist Charles Pierce not long ago wrote an essay on “Idiot America,” followed by a book of that name, in which he argued that “the rise of Idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.”

Think Tanks and Lobbyists

Moreover, the new technology is not working alone. You have the likes of oil interests such as Koch Industries and Exxon Mobil funding a phalanx of anti-science spokesmen, think tanks and lobbyists. They put their money into sowing doubt about the scientific consensus, as many of these same people did on tobacco, ozone and acid rain, playing on the fact that the way science works is to set up repeated challenges of the evidence by peers but ignoring that scientific consensuses do indeed exist — otherwise, we would not have made the progress we did on tobacco, ozone and acid rain.

Sheltered by the technological cacophony and the big money available, politicians feel unashamed to stand in front of the National Academy of Sciences and virtually every climate scientist in the world and utter irrational things like “God promised Noah …,” or “solar flares,” or “nobody really knows,” “not man-made” or “hoax.”

Creating Controversy

“[The deniers’] goal is to create the perception that fundamental aspects of climate science are controversial,” write several scientists connected to the National Academy. “They are not.”

“All their claims, all the studies cited and all the evidence they have presented has been thoroughly reviewed by climate scientists. There is no scientific basis for contesting the academy’s finding.”

We are in Tennessee again, 1925, in the grip of the anti-scientists and their politicians. We will lose a generation in dealing with greenhouse gases. Yet the science says we have only a few years.

Clarence Darrow, defense lawyer and William Bryan, prosecutor, during the Scopes Monkey Trial, circa 1925.

Climate Change Sucks!

The following videos have been made for Oxfam GB as part of the YouTube Cannes Young Lions Ad Contest 2009.

This is what it is about. The 48 hour Ad Contest:

For more info:

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/campaign/climate_change/youtube-young-lions.html