I grew up in Lincoln, Massachusetts, a small town most notable in recent years as the origin point of John Linnell and John Flansburgh, better known as the pop group They Might Be Giants. And before you ask, yes — in fact, I knew those guys very well, especially in high school, where we worked together on the school newspaper.
Lincoln, like neighboring Concord and Lexington, was and is heavily invested in local history. We had and have groups dedicated to recreating the events that led off the Revolution, with fife-and-drum companies and families who dressed up in Colonial costume to re-enact the meeting of the Minutemen and the Redcoats. Here's a video from 2009:
My mother had memorized
Longfellow's poem, and the occasion would invariably find her reciting it with aplomb. And
wikipedia notes:
Paul Revere was captured by British soldiers in Lincoln on the night of April 18, 1775. Minutemen from Lincoln were the first to arrive to reinforce the colonists protecting American stores in Concord.
So the foundation had long ago been laid for the material in today's diary (you were wondering when I'd get around to it, weren't you?).
My last Climate Letter diary covered two of my letters which had been published in the Boston area.
Buried in that diary was this comment by FishOutOfWater, who said, in his usual pithy way:
Paul Revere was an alarmist (10+ / 0-)
And the British were coming.
Climate scientists are today's Paul Reveres.
Well, I'm not one to look a gift meme in the mouth, and I've been using the Paul Revere analogy regularly since then.
Three of those letters have been published, suggesting that the connection is a robust one in the minds of editors.
Here they are, in chronological order. Please steal them, file off the serial numbers, reverse the order of the clauses, and send them along. You'll probably have better luck with smaller local & regional papers, which get fewer letters and have higher word limits than the big dailies.
The Merriville (IN) Post-Times runs an AP story on the current heatwave:
Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.
These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it’s far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.
Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and time. Sometimes it isn’t caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.
And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren’t having similar disasters now, although they’ve had their own extreme events in recent years.
But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.
More pounding on the denialists. Sent July 7:
Even as the American Midwest sizzled under a heatwave of staggering proportions, climate-change denialists kept on sounding their message of complacency and inaction. Everything's fine, they say. The planet's actually getting cooler. If Earth's atmosphere is heating up, it's just sunspots, or "natural cycles." Anyway, humans aren't to blame. The climate has always changed. If humans are involved, it's too expensive to do anything about it. Al Gore has a big house. And on and on.
When politicians and media figures mock "climate alarmists," it is part of their pathetic attempt to rationalize an unsustainable status quo — one which now promises massive crop failures, droughts and wildfires throughout America.
We owe our nation's existence to those who woke to the call of a midnight rider bringing the news that the British were coming. Climate scientists are the Paul Reveres of the present day. Will we finally heed their warnings?
Warren Senders
Published.
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More on the "startled by bizarre weather, people are wondering if climate change is real" story, this time from the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Before the financial crisis hit, Americans were pretty sure that the globe was warming, and that humans were causing it, and that it was kind of a big deal. As the economy slumped, Americans decided that climate change wasn't actually happening — and even if it was, it wasn't our fault. And now, after a flurry of wild weather — deadly tornados, floods, droughts, an uncommonly mild winter, and recent heat waves — we're back to believing that global warming is real. But we're still hesitant to take the blame.
These generalizations are based on a series of Yale University studies over the last few years. According to the studies, Americans' belief in global warming fell from 71 percent in November 2008 to just 57 percent in January 2010, but it rebounded to 66 percent by this spring. The findings mirrored those of the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, which showed belief in global warming bouncing from 65 percent in 2009 to 52 percent in 2010 and back up to 62 percent this year.
What accounts for the rebound? It isn't the economy, which has thawed only a little. And it doesn't seem to be science: The share of respondents to the Yale survey who believe "most scientists think global warming is happening" is stuck at 35 percent, down from 48 percent four years ago. (That statement remains just as true now as it was then: It's the public, not the scientists, that keeps changing its mind.)
No, our resurgent belief in global warming seems to be a function of the weather. A separate Yale survey this spring found that 82 percent of Americans had personally experienced extreme weather or natural disasters in the past year. And 52 percent said they believed the weather had been getting worse overall in recent years, compared to just 22 percent who thought it had gotten better.
Whatever wakes you up from your stupor, I suppose. Sent July 15:
While it's encouraging that more Americans are taking the threat of climate change seriously, public attention to the crisis may well fade the next time there's an interlude of balmy weather. Our national case of ADD makes it almost impossible to convey the implications of the accelerating greenhouse effect, something which will affect all human civilization over centuries.
Climatologists are the Paul Reveres of today, sounding a warning that the effects of our civilization's carbon binge are now upon us — but the careful language of scientific discussion doesn't always convey the urgency of the crisis. If the minutemen had ignored the midnight call and gone back to sleep, the redcoats would have won the day.
It behooves all of us to look beyond the latest celebrity scandal and the 24-hour news cycle, and recognize that the climate emergency has profound implications for countless generations yet to come.
Warren Senders
Published, albeit in a truncated form.
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The Iowa City Press-Citizen notes that nobody's talkin' about it:
The 800-pound gorilla in the Mount Pleasant High School Gymnasium Tuesday was the subject of climate change.
Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad called for a public discussion on drought conditions in Iowa, and all of the governmental players were there:
• U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
• Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.
• Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
• And the Farm Services Administration.
The phrase “climate change” or any analysis of causation for the current drought was absent from the public discussion. This was a meeting about row crop agriculture and related agricultural producers and it was intended to deal with the as-is situation.
The obvious problem, as Mark Schouten of Homeland Security and Emergency Response put it, “you can’t snap your fingers and make it rain.”
{snip}
It was the Farm Services Agency that raised the issue of environmental groups, saying a group had sued for an environmental impact statement before releasing CRP acres to haying or grazing.
During the public comment section, a truck driver who had just delivered a load of grain stood at the microphone and demonized the environmental groups for trying to influence food production. It got the biggest applause at the event and the governor jumped on board reminding us of his joining a lawsuit in Nebraska against an environmental group.
Trouble in River City. Sent July 20:
It's unsurprising that people still aren't drawing the connection between the extreme weather hammering America's farmlands and the accelerating greenhouse effect caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but blaming environmentalists for devastated crops while ignoring the role of climate change is like blaming oncologists for cancer.
While scientists have been making increasingly scary predictions for several decades about the consequences of uncontrolled greenhouse emissions, their words have gone unheeded; many who've tried to sound the warning have been mocked, harassed, and threatened for their pains. Meanwhile, our print and broadcast media have maintained a scrupulous false equivalency between genuine expertise and the pronouncements of petroleum-funded denialists.
The United States owes its existence to the Minutemen of Concord and Lexington, who responded unhesitatingly to a midnight rider's call. The Paul Reveres of the present day are climatologists; our nation will owe its future to those who heed their alarms.
Warren Senders
Published.
These and many more letters (one a day since January 1, 2010) can be found at
Running Gamak. Please steal them and make them your own.
And remember: if we fail on climate change, nothing else matters.