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Wildfires are raging — why isn’t concern about climate change?

Earlier this month, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert delivered a provocative Los Angeles Times op-ed explaining why the public is more scared of terrorism than global warming. Gilbert’s basic premise was that human beings are conditioned by evolution to react most strongly to situations that have certain characteristics: they must be personal (have a face or […]

Vicious circle

Records are falling all around in California.

A heat wave has been setting record temperatures. And then on Monday, California set a record for all-time peak electricity usage. From the NYT:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered state agencies to reduce electricity consumption by 25 percent, acting on a prediction from the state's power grid managers that demand would peak at 52,000 megawatts, a mark they had not expected to reach until 2011. Demand peaked at 50,270 megawatts at 2:44 p.m. Pacific time, breaking the record of 49,036 megawatts set last Friday.

More heat = more electricity usage.
More electricity usage = more carbon emissions.
More carbon emissions = ... you get the idea.

Maybe I’m Amazoned at the Way I Really Need You

Drought could turn Amazon into desert, researchers warn The Amazon rainforest — soon to be called The Artist Formerly Known as the Amazon Rainforest, and then just some weird little symbol — appears to be undergoing a second year of drought, and that has researchers seriously alarmed. Starting in 2002, scientists at the Woods Hole […]

Soycott

Big soy companies pledge not to source from recently deforested Amazon Now for some Amazon news that won’t make you want to slit your wrists: Soy producers operating in Brazil — including U.S. agribiz giants Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland — announced yesterday that they will put a two-year stop to buying soybeans grown in […]

Long-Haired Freaky People Need Apply

Green job market heating up After hearing from environment-related employers struggling to fill open positions and green job-seekers receiving multiple offers, Kevin Doyle of the Environmental Careers Organization decided to do some job searching of his own. An examination of job postings at government agencies, nonprofits, green businesses, and environmental consulting firms in the U.S. […]

‘Cane Do Spirit

Hurricane researchers unite in call to curb coastal development The media has made much of the disagreement among hurricane researchers about the effects of global warming on storm strength. So much, in fact, that it’s starting to annoy the hurricane researchers. Yesterday, 10 prominent experts in the field — who have disagreed among themselves about […]

Reps Gone Wild

House approves new wilderness areas in California, Oregon, and Idaho The U.S. House yesterday unanimously approved bills that would create over 1,000 square miles of new wilderness areas and protect 47 miles of rivers in California, Oregon, and Idaho. A bill to ban drilling in New Mexico’s Valle Vidal also passed. All of the bills […]

I’m goin’ back to Noonan, Noonan, Noonan

I am drawn, like a dazed witness to a bloody car wreck, back to Peggy Noonan's column in the Wall Street Journal last week. If you haven't read it, you really, really should. It is a marvel.

(As an aside: Noonan is a fixture of the Romantic wing of the conservative movement. She feels conservatism deeply. How deeply? She once said, "Bush the Younger would breastfeed the military if he could." She said the great truth of 9/11 "is not only that God is back, but that men are back. A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country ..." That's how deeply she feels conservatism.)

Noonan's short snippet on global warming contains a superabundance of dimwittery. There is dimwittery in every paragraph, every line, virtually every word. The syllables, the phonemes ... there is cluelessness at the molecular level.

Let us begin.

She laments ...

... how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers?

Peggy, welcome to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an extensively peer-reviewed report from hundreds of scientists in over 120 nations. When you're done browsing there, please visit the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. EPA ... oops, Bush got to that one.

Is it possible that Peggy's simply not aware of the IPCC, probably the most cited scientific body in the history of scientific bodies? That she lives in an ideological world so hermetically sealed she never stumbled across so much as a mention of any of the major scientific reports on global warming? If that is the case, the WSJ seems almost cruel for broadcasting her cry for help. Were she capable of embarrassment ...

Then, as so often, Noonan veers from plaintive to addlepated:

The hurricane problem

A group of 10 scientists who've disagreed with one another in the past about the influence of climate change on hurricanes has come out with a collective statement saying that the media is obsessing over the climate debate at the expense of the more immediate truth, about which there is widespread consensus: vulnerable places are being overdeveloped, and the U.S. government is subsidizing it.

We are optimistic that continued research will eventually resolve much of the current controversy over the effect of climate change on hurricanes. But the more urgent problem of our lemming-like march to the sea requires immediate and sustained attention. We call upon leaders of government and industry to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of building practices, and insurance, land use, and disaster relief policies that currently serve to promote an ever-increasing vulnerability to hurricanes.

Needed to be said.

Some quasi-philosophical blather

I can't bear to get back into the news just yet, so let's discuss this a little bit.

Are human beings part of the environment? You can answer in two ways.

If you say no, they're not, then you're stuck with the pernicious dichotomy between humans and nature that has bedeviled Western intellectual history and led to the illusion that we can dominate or control nature. Humans are rational creatures, in touch with some sort of Platonic realm beyond the grubby, irrational, violent chaos of nature -- that kind of thinking. Much of environmentalism has been devoted to trying to knock down that false dichotomy.

But if you say the environment does include human beings, then you're left with nothing that the environment doesn't include. "The environment" is thereby synonymous with "everything." But then the term is useless. Saying something is good for the environment becomes tantamount to saying it's good for everything. And that doesn't make any sense.

What can we learn from all this?