Climate Denial Crock of the Week

In “Confessions of a Climate Change Convert”,  D. R. Tucker explained the change in consciousness that came to a conservative writer after seriously looking at the evidence for  anthropogenic climate change.
Today, he offers another insight into the conservative’s climate quandary.

The first book I read after completing the IPCC report that changed my philosophical climate on global warming was Chris Mooney’s “The Republican War on Science.” I remember when the book first came out in 2005; I was curious about reading it at the time, but never actually found the time to do so. When I saw the book’s title back then, I thought to myself that such a book should never have been written, because the GOP should never have allowed itself to be viewed as “anti-science” by the general population. (Don’t ask how I squared that view with my belief that Al Gore made up global warming; to be a conservative in America is to embrace extreme ideological contradictions.) Five years later, I couldn’t wait to read the book.

“The Republican War on Science” enlightened me in a way no other book on political science has. With rhetorical skill and intellectual vigor, Mooney traced how the GOP began to scorn scientific principles and findings in the name of fulfilling specific ideological and fiscal goals. Dogma had replaced reality in the Republican brain, Mooney forcefully argued, and the country and the world had suffered as a result.

The late environmentalist and businessman Ray Anderson once said that reading Paul Hawken’s “The Ecology of Commerce” was a “spear in the chest” moment that made him realize the error of his philosophical ways. “The Republican War on Science” was my “spear in the chest” moment, making me realize just how much anti-science claptrap I had absorbed in my years of listening to conservative talk radio and reading right-wing punditry.

Despite extreme weather events predicted by climate scientists, and despite Charles Koch’s accidental validation (by way of physicist Richard Muller) of the accuracy of the global temperature record that came under attack in the “Climategate” pseudo-scandal, the denial demon continues to possess the GOP, causing Republicans in the House and Senate to do and say very strange things. The Republican presidential candidates aren’t much better, with contender after contender embracing the drill-baby-drill vision that the Deepwater Horizon spill should have dimmed.

What’s a Republican “warmist” to say, when the GOP tells green folks to go away?

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Shouldn’t someone in the GOP be concerned that broadsides like this practically write themselves?

Paul Begala

How did we devolve to the point where a leading Republican candidate for the presidency can’t count to three? Whatever happened to conservative intellectuals?

John Stuart Mill famously dismissed mid-19th-century British conservatives as the “stupid party.” But in the America of my youth, it wasn’t true. Conservatives looked up to intellectuals. William F. Buckley set the tone with his sesquipedalian erudition. George F. Will was a must-read, and my conservative classmates at the University of Texas in the Age of Reagan could all quote Milton Friedman.

No more. Today’s conservatives are more likely to mimic Rush Limbaugh than Buckley, and they probably know more of the work of Salma Hayek than Friedrich Hayek. To be sure, Will still commands respect, and intellectuals like David Frum and Bill Kristol carry the torch ably. But today’s Republican Party is more the party of Sarah Palin’s defiant know-nothingness than the brainy conservatism of Bill Bennett. The GOP is a party of ideologues, not ideas.

Climate Questions from the Minnesota GOP’s Tractor Pull Parson. Hilarity begins at about :35.

Don Shelby in the Minnesota Post:

The Minnesota Senate’s most notable authority on global warming comes from East Bethel. Michael Jungbauer was once its mayor. He is in his third term at the state Legislature and he has fashioned himself into a force of nature when it comes to the environment.

But Jungbauer doesn’t believe the planet is warming. In fact, he told me, “I think the earth is going to cool.” From his position on the Senate Energy, Utilities and Telecommunications Committee, he has the power to change the way Minnesota approaches the issue. And his influence is apparent. The Minnesota Legislature has been busy undoing much of Minnesota’s nation-leading policies enacted to deal with global warming.

Sen. Jungbauer is fond of making pronouncements from on high regarding the scientific weakness of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He takes positions in direct opposition to 98 percent of published and peer-reviewed climate, atmospheric scientists and glaciologists. But the water and sewer treatment specialist by day is, apparently, quite knowledgeable on all manner of science. It certainly appears to be. He uses big words and cites studies in his lectures.

No scientist
The problem is, he is not a scientist. Even though his published biography lists his higher education credits from Moody Bible Institute, Anoka Ramsey Community College and Metropolitan State University and that he is working on his master’s degree in environmental policy and that he has a background in biochemistry, it turns out he has never graduated from college. He doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree.

He is an ordained minister, of sorts. But, although his official biography says he has a degree from Moody, he does not. In direct answer to my question, Jungbauer responded: “No I did not graduate. But I have a certificate.”

Science:

Scrat, the fictional saber-toothed squirrel from the Ice Age films, may not be so fictional after all. Researchers have discovered the fossil remains of a 94-million-year-old squirrel-like critter with a long, narrow snout and a pair of curved saber-fangs that it would have likely used to pierce its insect prey. The creature, pieced together from skull fragments unearthed in Argentina and dubbed Cronopio dentiacutus, was not ancestral to us or any living mammal. Instead, researchers report online today in Nature, it belonged to an extinct group called dryolestoids, a cadre of fuzzy mammals that scurried about in the shadow of long-necked dinosaurs, as in the artist’s impression above. The new discovery extends the known record of the dryolestoid mammals in South America back 60 million years from what was previously known. There were no acorns around at the time though, so Cronopio—like Scrat—would have had to do without them.

The “Scrat” character, of course, plays a pivotal role in one of my recent videos, below:

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If you haven’t seen one of Paul Stamets talks, or even if you have, – get some coffee, settle in, and prepare to have. your. mind. blown.

Stamets is a mycologist. Yup, a mushroom guy. That’s all I’m gonna say. You can thank me later.

I was going to like, edit this thing down and use some part of it, but, sometimes you see something that’s so perfect,  well, you just don’t want to touch it.

You saw it here first.

Wind energy is just getting started. We’re a long way from moving beyond large, ground or ocean based turbines, but its inspiring to see the variations on a theme that technologists are currently developing.

This starts out as a run of the mill, generic, good-morning-america tour of a Minnesota wind farm, but the cool part is about 3 minutes in. A rare, brief, look at the heart and brain of the world’s biggest machine, the US power grid.

MISO is the Midwest Independent System Operator, where the pedal meets the metal for deciding which electrons get bought, sold, and moved, and to where.  There are regional hubs like this in other parts of the country, that operate in similar manner, and this is ground zero for the deployment of the smart, distributed grid that will be built with renewables in mind, rather than piggybacked on top of a creaking system.

When climate deniers tell you that we can’t deal with carbon because it will “cost trillions of dollars”, they are simply demonstrating ignorance. The US MUST and WILL spend trillions of dollars to upgrade its grid in the coming decades, because the current one is inadequate for the coming revolution. If we wish to remain competitive in the world, if we wish to move out of the 19th century and catch up with a world that is increasingly deploying 21st century technologies, massive expenditures are not optional.