Thought Process

I can understand why certain religious people deny evolution and such things as the age of the earth: it conflicts with their need for biblical literalism. And if it's hard to relate to those who claim inerrant word of god in that book, given its multiple self-contradictions, and given the fact that they ignore so many if its demands when it doesn't suit, at least there's consistency of blindness. (I'll give them a pass on not stoning their smart-mouth kids to death.)

Denial of anthropogenic climate change, on the other hand, is simply beyond any understanding at all. It has no religious predilection. To accept it as fact threatens nothing of religious belief (well, some claim god would never allow us to damage his favorite planet. But he's allowed a hell of a lot of mayhem, hasn't he?) Aside from the fact that it may well be literally killing us, there's a level on which it's absolutely fascinating: what is it about humans -- some humans, anyway -- that allows them to rationalize such denial? Where does it come from? Where's the benefit, in terms of survival of the species? How does the mind, which is pretty impressive on so many levels, exist with what seems so fundamental a flaw?

If we're creations of some sort of godly process, did he/she/it/they figure the only way to get people to believe in them was to make them gullible? Seems self-defeatingly paradoxical. Almost if the first premise is false. And, in the US, why is denialism exclusively confined to a particular (and major, as opposed to flat-earthers) political party? What causes that confluence? The fact of climate change is neither religious nor political. Solutions, maybe. But not the thing itself.

Why is it that climate denialism in particular, and science-rejection in general, seem both necessary and sufficient for today's version of Republicans? Gotta be the religionism, you'd think. Or is there something else? Something of right-wing mentation that attracts, or requires, both religious fundamentalism and rejectionism. If so, what could it be? I think about it a lot. And I feel that if I understood it, I'd have figured out everything there is to know about our current political stalemate.

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Problem Solved

[Oops. In case there's an error message with the video, here's the link to it on Hulu.]

A few years back, when I was chairman of the local Surgical Quality Assurance Committee, we got dinged on a visit by JCAHO (the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospital Organizations, pronounced "jaycoe" for reasons unknown.) Our monitoring process was flawed, they told us, because we weren't uncovering unnecessary surgery. When I suggested maybe it was because, in our community, we weren't doing unnecessary operations, the response was "C'mon!!" (Pronounced cuh-maa-hnnn, with the maa scaling downward, and with facial expression to match.)

So I did what any responsible surgeon would do: I sent around a memo (from the fictitious Surgical Utilization Committee, or SUC) to the entire medical staff, detailing the trouble we were in, asking for suggestions how we could increase our amount of unnecessary surgery, and including a few ideas of my own: declaring certain operations always unnecessary, such as left inguinal hernia; designating one surgeon a month to do unnecessary operations; arranging a specific location, such as the newly-opened surgery center as the place to do them.

Sitting in the doctors' lounge as people picked up their staff mail the next morning after I'd gotten there early and deployed the paper, I noticed a certain stratification of responses: internists, seeing the word Surgical, shitcanned the paper without reading it; surgeons read it over and got an excellent laugh out of it; family docs read it with incredulity, saying, "This is terrible! They can't do that!!! They can't DO that!!!"

Anyhow, as I read of the above-Reported typically teabagger response by North Carolina legislators (fresh off marshaling discrimination into their constitution) to worrisome scientific data, I thought of my memo for some reason. Both are incredibly stupid responses; one a seriously deluded and dangerous (if quite emblematic of the current R party) response to an actual problem, and the other a fanciful (let's call it brilliant and hilarious, okay?) response to a non-problem. But in North Carolina, no one's laughing, and, evidently, not enough are saying "They can't do this!!" Revealing much about the teabagger mentality, they actually think they were making a global problem go away, like babies playing peek-a-boo.

Me, I didn't really think I was; but when JCAHO followed up six months later, we passed without having made any changes.

Rising C's

How much more news like this before the permanent party of full-time factlessness will find it too much even for them to deny?

Americans just lived through the hottest 12 months ever recorded, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Tuesday.

The announcement came as NOAA reported that the U.S. also just experienced its third-warmest April on record.

“These temperatures, when added with the first quarter and previous 11 months, calculate to the warmest year-to-date and 12-month periods since recordkeeping began in 1895,” the agency reported.

NOAA said that for the period from May 2011 to April 2012, the nationally averaged temperature was 55.7 degrees, 2.8 degrees higher than the 20th century average. The national average temperature for April was 55 degrees, 3.6 degrees above average.

You'd think there'd be an end-point, a line beyond which it'd be impossible to follow, even when a major political party exclusively counts on and spreads denialism and lies; that eventually there'd be a collective up-wising. And I'm not just talking about climate-change denial: It's everything they say.

But why stop, when it's working so well? When they're cruising comfortably, counting on a carefully created and callously curried crop of clueless contradictors, clearly not capable of calculating the chaos that's coming countrywide; clashing continuously with common sense, countering cogency with calumny. Conservatives? Contrarily. The converse.

Don't Worry

Yep, nothing to worry about. Just keep listening to Fox "news" and turn the sound to eleven.

WASHINGTON — It’s been so warm in the United States this year, especially in March, that national records weren’t just broken, they were deep-fried.

Temperatures in the lower 48 states were 8.6 degrees above normal for March and 6 degrees higher than average for the first three months of the year, according to calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That far exceeds the old records.

The magnitude of how unusual the year has been in the U.S. has alarmed some meteorologists who have warned about global warming. One climate scientist said it’s the weather equivalent of a baseball player on steroids, with old records obliterated.

“Everybody has this uneasy feeling. This is weird. This is not good,” said Jerry Meehl, a climate scientist who specializes in extreme weather at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

(Here's a map of the 15,000 high temperature records set in the US last month.)

If there are humans around in a century or so, or when the alien overlords finally arrive and dig around in the rubble, surely there'll be amazement that on the planet there was one country among all others where climate change denial was dominant, and remained so, the hotter it got. Where it was possible to predict a person's denialism by his or her membership in a single political party; where that party not only rejected the truth in this matter, but, in astounding numbers, rejected science altogether. And they'll stagger away (feet protected from the burbling asphalt), stunned, realizing that this was occurring not in the Dark Ages, nor when the Catholic Church was killing people for saying the earth revolved around the sun; but in a so-called enlightened period, when the discoveries of science were causing a technological revolution, reaching into outer space, wiping out diseases that had killed millions of people for generations.

And yet, here we are, the United States of America, the formerly great, the cradle of discovery and invention, where its universities were once envied around the world, where education was sought after -- and is now derided. Where experts were turned to for their ideas -- and now the whole idea of expertise is laughed at unapologetically, as political strategy, by a party that's hitched its future to ignorance, because its ideas would never be accepted without it. An entire political party whose foundation is disbelief in science. It's simply incomprehensible. Now. In the twenty-first century.

If I didn't have a kid with a fabulous fiancé and the prospect of grandkids, I'd say efforts to save this place were a waste of time.

Theocracy U.S.A

If it's not clear by now why I like to point out the inconsistencies of the biblical view of god, and to rail against religion in the public square, this should tell you all you need to know:

Just published: The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future by Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK).

Inhofe's defense of his thesis is the Bible, not science.

On a radio show yesterday, Inhofe explained: "Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that 'as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night,' my point is, God's still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."

The man is a U.S. Fucking Senator. Any questions?

Well, When You Put It That Way...

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Dumber Still

Well, I guess it doesn't exactly just happen, as a national enterprise anyway. Efforts to make our country dumber, as political strategy, began at least as early as Karl Rove's henching of George Bush. And, undeniably, it continues today as the centerpiece of the right-wing master plan (abandoning subtlety, Rick Santorum wants everyone home-schooled, like he was. Look how well that worked out). Now, funded by the Koch brothers and others, a curriculum will be developed to teach kids to be climate change deniers. Given the financial implications for those funding the current Republican party, it's not hard to figure why.

Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy.” This effort, at a cost of $100,000 a year, will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, a coal-industry consultant.

Well, sure it's a controversy. Like the age of the earth and evolution. Like Obama's birthplace, like the shape of the earth.

I think we're way beyond the proverbial tipping point. Too many people want to be dumb, and they want to be lied to. It's the path of least resistance. They're only too happy to make sure their kids are even dumber. They've fallen victim to the Rovian plan to create a permanently stupefied electorate, pliable and manipulable, subject to whatever propaganda is leveled at them by people whose agenda would be obvious to anyone taught to think.

Whose agenda would be obvious to anyone taught to think.

Think about it.

Dogged Determination

In my continuing self-delusion that, with enough time and evidence, I can convince a couple of commenters of their erroneous beliefs (strangely, both are related to the medical field, which just goes to show you that education doesn't always equate with learning to think objectively), I offer a pretty deep look into the latest thinking on climate change, and that measly one or two degrees that they like to laugh off as inconsequential.

Climate science has not stood still for the last decade. According to the latest research, the level of damages once expected at 2 degrees C is now expected at considerably lower temperatures. Here's a graph that that shows science's evolving understanding:

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A thorough reading of the article might require poring over some data, and following a few links as well.

I don't expect any results, vis a vis the aforementioned critics. But no harm, other than my wasted time, can come from trying.

Or P.T.?

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(If the title reference is too obscure for some readers, this might help.)

Exceptionalism

Pathetic:

An episode of the BBC's Frozen Planet documentary series that looks at climate change has been scrapped in the U.S., where many are hostile to the idea of global warming.

British viewers will see all seven episodes of the multi-million-pound nature series throughout the Autumn.

But U.S. audiences will not be shown the last episode, which looks at the threat posed by man to the natural world.

It is feared a show that preaches global warming could upset viewers in the U.S., where around half of people do not believe in climate change.

Yes, it truly is an exceptional nation we're becoming: a planet-wide embarrassment. Thanks, teabaggRs.

[Update: thanks to a commenter, it's pointed out that the above report is, evidently, wrong. That is indeed good news. Unlike their brethren across the pond, it appears the British are willing to stick to facts. Wonder if it'll change any minds over here when it shows.] [Amusingly, if the commenter is correct, they might be replacing the British voiceover with an American one. Can't have that authoritative diction on a matter such as this.]

Only In America

Here's a good article on America's singular denial of anthropogenic climate change, harbored pretty much exclusively within one formerly useful political party. Between the lines, it speaks volumes. Denying the undeniable. Ignoring the obvious. Rejecting science -- and pretty simple science at that: one party, one mindset, whose selfishness and neediness for magical thinking will destroy us all. The extrapolation to just about everything they believe, and how and why they believe it, is more than obvious. For the life of me -- for the life of us all! -- I simply can't fathom the way some people can do it. Some of them are even, by some standards, smart.

If such mental frailty is part of the human condition -- and, in surprisingly many, it surely is -- there must have been some evolutionary benefit at some point, though it's hard to see what it is. Not now, anyway; that much is clear. And it's even harder to figure how, to the extent that it hasn't been dropped from the gene pool, in the so-called civilized world the ability, the need, to ignore reality seems to have congealed solely in the US of A.

I suppose you could speculate that people who immigrated here against all odds had to have had a certain optimism, a type that comes from believing those odds don't apply to them. In that sense, it could only have been a good thing. On the other hand, to succeed after getting here required a sort of mental toughness and creativity that would seem, to me anyway, at odds with rejecting the obvious. The earliest settlers came here for religious freedom, didn't they? People whose need to believe what they wanted to believe in the unprovable magical realm made them willing to risk it all to maintain it. Maybe Republicans are the spawn of that group. Certainly, they claim exclusive rights to the thoughts of the Founding Fathers.

But those weren't the Pilgrims: those were something else entirely. Voracious readers, skeptics, agnostics, among the religious. Jumping on the "I know what (your choice of dead person) would say" bandwagon, I have no doubt that Thos. Jefferson would be a believer in man-made climate change. Ben Franklin. John Adams. These were seekers of truth, rebels against status quo. Science guys.

From such promising beginning, our country has, nearly inexplicably, descended quite suddenly from one of invention, of risk-taking, of horizon-broadening explorers, into one -- at the level of governance, at least; of politics -- of selfish cocooning into the opposite of thinking. Of close-mindedness in the service of maintaining the immediate comfort of religious or religion-like adherence to nonsense. Of choosing such empty-headed dishonest bigoted stupid (or needing to appear stupid to win teabaggR approval) people as the current crop of Republican presidential candidates.

How I wish I could be around when, much too late, they realize what they've done.

[Added: just this morning, I watched this:]

How It's Done

DOUBT from The Climate Reality Project on Vimeo.

Climate Changer

Some guy named Lord Monkton, with no background in science but who nevertheless is considered an expert and who has actually testified before Congress at the request of Republicans, is a climate change denier. (No surprise that a person who's published not a single paper on the subject is the go-to guy for teabaggRs who want to ignore facts.) For those who have the interest (and willingness to listen to a fairly boring and dysanimated speaker), here's a series of videos comprising a lecture by someone with actual scientific background who takes apart the dear lord, carefully, in detail, factually, piece by piece.

Lunatics/Asylum

The new chair of the House Committee on the Environment marginally believes, with eyes lowered and face turned away, that there's global warming going on, but doesn't think human activity has anything to do with it. Well, I guess it's better than nothing. He can read thermometers.

So all we need to do is convince him of what 97% of scientists in the field say. Which, admittedly, is no walk on exposed shale, given the teabagger propensity to recoil at the very mention of science, like Lestat from a crucifix. In educating (another recoil word) the guy, maybe we should start with ocean acidification: the numbers are there, it's pretty straightforward, doesn't require much in the way of deductive or inductive reasoning -- no ice cores, only a pretty rudimentary knowledge of chemistry. Dissolve CO2 in water, get carbonic acid. Not hard, makes sense. Observe what happens to the calcium in coral reefs as the water becomes more acidic. Then tell us where that CO2 is coming from.

But, heck, it's only fish, right? I mean, who cares about the ocean? Too salty to drink, that's for sure. Or coral. CORAL? What's that all about?

Okay, then let's ask the congressman how he explains the above graph, in which he evidently sort-of slightly kinda believes, and the rise in which -- whaddya know -- coincides with the arrival of the industrial revolution. If he's gonna discount all of science, and given that he's pretty literally in charge of our future, ought he not be expected to produce some alternate explanation? Some way to justify not doing a damn thing about it? (Note to Mr Upton Down: sun spots have already been eliminated.)

No good can come of this. We've handed enormous power to people who lack the most basic rudiments of common sense, let alone the ability to think with any part of their bodies residing in a location above their waistbands. It's not good enough simply not to believe. Not in the halls of Congress. You wanna ignore something that science says has cataclysmic potential, you gotta say why. You gotta learn about the science and tell us why it's wrong. "I don't believe it" might not kill us when it's about evolution (other than the fact that brainwashing kids will make us a nation of dunces that can't compete with anyone on anything). Take to your churches and disbelieve till the cows come home. Or drown. But "I don't believe it" WILL kill us when it comes to climate change, if the scientists are right. So you owe us a lot more, Congressman. Put your mouth where your money is.