As some of y'all know, I maintain a daily ritual of writing a LTE on climate change issues. This started on January 1st, 2010, and I'm now approaching the end of my second year.
Frankly, it's a real pain in the ass. Most days of the week I would rather do just about anything than write that damn letter. On the other hand, I've gotten good at it, and I can now turn out a pretty snappy 150-word statement in 20 minutes or less, so the agony abates fairly rapidly. Some days I spend longer hunting for an appropriate hook than I do writing the letter itself.
I maintain a pretty respectable rate of publication — I usually get 3-4 letters in print every month. I've occupied column inches in Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Djakarta, the Solomon Islands, Ireland, England, and Baffin Island(!) along with countless news outlets in the USA and Canada. All my letters can be found online at my blog, and it makes my day when someone becomes inspired to write as a result of something I've done (hint, hint!).
A few days ago, Time Magazine offered a woman named Dominique Browning a chance to explain why people don't talk too much about climate — and while her piece is reasonable enough, it largely ignores the elephant in the room:
There’s been much hand-wringing — but perhaps not enough soul-searching — among environmentalists about how climate change got to be the political third rail. The New York Times ran a lengthy piece asking “Where Did Global Warming Go?” which raised more questions than it answered.
Here is some more explicit finger-pointing, along with a few proposals. I speak as an informed, and deeply concerned, citizen; as a grumpy environmentalist fatoosted by my tribe; and as a person who has had a lifelong career in “communications.” But mainly, I’m up at night worrying about global warming because I’m a mom who hopes someday to have grandchildren. And I don’t like the terrifying mess my kids will face. (By the way, “climate change” is yesterday’s weak phrase; it doesn’t begin to convey the intensity of trouble that is now upon us. I’m going with “climate chaos.”)
{snip}
We know exactly why climate chaos has fallen off the national agenda. We’ve let it happen. And by “we” I mean everyone from environmentalists to doctors to scientists to teachers to politicians, to parents. There’s no one else to blame. We care about this issue. But we’ll be more ardent, and more focused, when the message is more urgent: we should fight global warming because our lives depend on it.
It's a good piece, but I noticed there was something missing in her heartfelt critique. I sent the following letter on October 22:
Dominique Browning barely touches on the pivotal role of the corporatized news system in her attribution of causes for the decline in robust discussion of climate change in the United States. The deregulation begun under Ronald Reagan has put our media increasingly under corporate control, and the national interest has suffered dramatically thereby. Nowhere is this more telling than in the media's handling of climate change, where false equivalency — the "balancing" of each scientifically-informed voice with a petroleum-funded one — has helped convince the public that the debate is "still open."
With each new study (even ones funded by conservative climate denialists) confirming the planetary scientific consensus, any debate we should be having about climate change is no longer whether it's real and dangerous, but what to do about this increasingly immediate threat. And any action on climate that ignores media reform condemns itself to ineffectuality.
Warren Senders
Aaaaaaand................they published it! It is remarkable in that letters criticizing the media's handling of the issue rarely break through, so I must have done something right.
Now, finally breaking into Time would have made my week anyway, but I also hit the Baltimore Sun, which recently wasted paper on a denialist named Richard Haddad, whose buffoonery goes under the title, "Moving Past Man-Made Global Warming Alarmism." Heh:
It seems that the man-made global warming scare, long promoted by those opposed to the burning of fossil fuel, is now behind us.
It turns out that there is no unanimity of scientists supporting man-made global warming theory and never has been. It's also now becoming widely recognized that there is no incontrovertible evidence that global warming is caused by human activity, and that there is quite a bit of evidence that human activity is not a primary cause of such warming.
It's becoming better known that for at least 240,000 years, a rise in CO2 has followed rather than preceded global warming. This squares with the reality that the oceans hold the vast majority of the Earth's carbon, and when the oceans warm, they release some of their gases into the atmosphere.
Guys like this give the rest of the world's idiots a bad name, y'know? Mr. Haddad triggered a wave of, um, nostalgia...and I sent this on October 25:
Richard Haddad's anti-science screed reminds me uncannily of the previous White House's readiness to disregard well-grounded warnings from their political opponents, as when Bush officials treated the briefings they'd received from Clinton staffers about Osama Bin Laden and Al Quaeda as unwarranted alarmism. 9/11, of course, brought us the infamous Cheney doctrine: even a one-percent chance that Saddam had WMDs was sufficient reason to mount a military offensive.
Notice that beforehand, justified warnings were dismissed, and afterward, no evidence was required to justify action.
Mr. Haddad needs to hear a few plain facts: the earth is in fact getting hotter; the scientific consensus on human causes of global warming is exceptionally strong; the "climategate" scandal has been repeatedly debunked; the economic consequences of shifting to renewable energy are overwhelmingly positive. When scientific expertise is politicized by conservatives who prefer to deny inconvenient facts, our country and the world are the losers.
Warren Senders
And they printed it. Interestingly, that letter attracted a flock of denialist teabaggers who posted a bunch of petulant stuff about how Democrats thought there were WMDs, too, so there, you DFH! But revisiting the site, I can't seem to find any of those comments. I wonder why.
And that's all for today, except for a special request in the tip jar.
Go write some letters, 'k?
And please drop in at Running Gamak, where you can find a Letter to the Editor on Climate Change for every day since January 1, 2010.