The Earth’s Vertebrate Wildlife Population has Halved in 40 Years

And that doesn't even include members of congress (bada-BING!).

Actually, this story from The Independent makes me very ashamed of my own species:

The world’s wildlife population is less than half the size it was just four decades ago, with unsustainable human consumption and damage from climate change destroying valuable habitats at a faster rate than previously thought, a new report has warned.

The number of vertebrates, which make up the bulk of Earth’s visible animals, has dived by 52 per cent over the past 40 years. Biodiversity loss has now reached “critical levels”, the report warns.

But some populations of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians have suffered much bigger losses, with fresh water species declining by 76 per cent since 1974, according to the Living Planet Report by the conservation campaign group WWF.

There's not really a whole lot I can add to this awful report other than to say you're either a person who actually gives a fuck about the problem or you're one that doesn't. And even if you reside squarely in the former camp, there isn't really fuck all you can do about any of it.

Reduce your carbon footprint as much as possible? Yes, absolutely. Just living below your financial means, which is a smart thing to do anyway if you are able, will help in that regard. But never believe it will add up to anything so much as a cure for what we human beings are doing to the natural world.


Bonus: "Come closer and see...see into the dark"

Another Disaster "Saves" Obama

Just how lucky can one smug asshole be? Four years ago, President Hopey-Changey was propelled into office in large measure by the financial market crash, which finally discredited eight grueling years of Bushonomics. Then, after a whole presidential term of repeatedly pissing on the heads of his liberal and progressive base and telling them it was raining, to say nothing of not doing a damn thing to punish the big banks and Wall Street who crashed the economy in the first place, yet another miraculous disaster has appeared and stopped Mittmentum dead in its tracks and, if the way the polls are now swinging is any indication, is likely going to win President Sellout a second term that he most decidedly does NOT deserve.

More amazingly, just last week Obama's people were setting Hurricane Sandy up as a convenient excuse as to why they might lose the election that would deflect blame from their hero's own culpability and complacency. The storm was going to disrupt balloting in key Obama states, so they said, and essentially blow the Republican challenger across the finish line to an undeserved victory. In such a manner, just like after the 2000 debacle with Ralph Nader, do the Democrats try to deflect attention from the fact that it is their me-too, corporatist sellout politics which causes many of the potential voters to stay home on election day, resulting in defeat often being snatched from the jaws of victory.

But something funny happened on the way to the disaster at the polls. Governor 47%-er shot himself in the foot in the worst way by blasting FEMA and threatening to privatize it just in time to see Obama use the agency the way it is supposed to be used to mitigate the disastrous effects of Hurricane Sandy. Because you see, that is the one remaining area where Democrats and Republicans do actually differ. When they get elected president, Democrats tend to appoint technocrats to important positions like the head of FEMA whereas Republicans appoint unqualified cronies like the infamous "Brownie." Just this past weekend, I saw a really stupid online "news" article claiming that Sandy would be "Obama's Katrina." I had to laugh, for as much as I loathe the man the one thing I knew he wouldn't do is hang out at his ranch clearing brush for meaningless photo-ops, leaving the disaster response to the fired head of the Arabian Horse Association while America's most important city drowned in its own hubris.

But what it really comes down to is a simple fact about the American body politic that the Republicans are constantly forgetting to their peril: most everyone says they are against "big government" until they really need it. Heck, even crazy old Ayn Rand went on Social Security during her declining years, the mere fact of which ought to have totally discredited every word she ever wrote for any person who has more than two brain cells to rub together. So buck up, Democrats, Sandy has likely saved your sorry asses so that you can spend four more years slowly legitimizing every horrible policy of the Chimpy Bush years. You win and the country loses, just not as quickly as it would have lost under President Romney.


Bonus: How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?

The Truth About Climate Change? It's All in a Name

The power is still on here in my little corner of NOVA. If we make it through the night, we might just be among the lucky ones. The DC area as a whole has fared quite well as "only" a couple of hundred thousand people have lost electricity to this point with the worst of the winds expected to start to die down in a few hours. I guess the power companies around here actually learned something from last summer's massive derecho.

Anyway, in between being glued to the incredible updates coming out of NYC and surrounding areas tonight, I idly checked the National Hurricane Center's list of retired Atlantic basin hurricane names in the assumption that Sandy will be soon joining it. In looking at the list, something suddenly struck me. As you know, the annual hurricane names list goes in alphabetical order, so the further down the alphabet, the later the number of that year's storm. The list began in 1954, but prior to 1995, Hurricane Janet, a "J" storm, was the furthest down the alphabet to be retired.

Amazingly, since 1995, by my count Sandy will be the 17th storm to be retired whose name begins with a letter later than "J," including notorious blowouts like Katrina, Rita and Wilma. That means that not only are their more total hurricanes and more destructive hurricanes than there used to be, but they are coming later in the season than ever before. And yet I will bet you right now that the giant black eye Sandy just delivered to DC, NYC and most points in between still won't be enough to break the total political inertia on combatting climate change.


Bonus: "Rock you like a hurricane"

The New York Stock Exchange is Reportedly Under Three Feet of Water

The good news for me is that I haven't lost power yet. The silver lining news is that according to The Weather Channel's live blog, the New York Stock Exchange has been inundated with floodwaters.

From other reports, New York City sounds like it is in chaos. Sandy actually turned out to be WORSE than expected. Tomorrow is going to be interesting.

Update: Disregard. TWC is now saying that the first report about the NYSE was erroneous. As usual, the little people suffer while Wall Street gets off the hook.


Bonus: "New York City's killing me"

Hurricane Sandy NOVA Update

Well, the power just flickered on and off here and the winds are really picking up. If the electricity goes out as I expect I'll be offline for an indefinite period. I took a quick drive around the area about an hour ago while it was still light enough to see any potential road hazards. No flooding here yet and not much in the way of downed trees. I imagine that will change overnight.

Good luck to everyone who is riding this thing out. Hopefully, property will be the only loss. It can be replaced, after all.

Bonus: By reader request



But if you want to go retro and cheesy

No Gas in NOVA

The worst of Sandy is supposed to strike us here in Northern Virginia within the next 12 hours. So far, we've had steady rain since about midnight and right now it's a bit breezy. Apparently, the storm strengthened overnight, with the pressure dropping even further. Pretty much the whole area is shut down mode.

Interestingly, my wife got caught in an actual gas line yesterday evening when going to top off one of our cars. The station was one of the few that was still open around here and had gasoline to sell. Most of the others were out of fuel and closed. And that was with the worst of the storm nearly 24 hours away.

No matter how this plays out, it does appear that most people in the region are taking the storm seriously. More updates later, if the power stays on. Be safe everyone.


Bonus: Pressure drop

Storm Warning

During the next 72 hours or so, the DC area is expected to get hit by Hurricane Sandy, a storm of unprecedented strength, fury and duration. As for me, I'm not terribly worried. I don't live near the coast, nor in any kind of a flood zone. I figure the worst that will happen is we lose power for a few days again, but that wouldn't be the first time that's happened even this year.

Because I don't expect it to affect me that much, my interest in this storm is more academic. I've been living in the national capital region for just over two decades now, which, of course, is also the home of most of the folks who have the power to actually do something to address the building crisis that is climate change. Amazingly, the DC-area has experienced more extreme weather events in the past three years than it did in my first 17 years of living here:

1). In February 2010, the area was hit by two massive Nor'easters in rapid succession which coupled with a third such storm the previous December to set a seasonal snowfall record. The three massive snow storms in just two months' time matched the total of three such storms to hit this area between 1993 and 2009.

2). In August 2011, Hurricane Irene struck the region before moving on to create catastrophic damage in Vermont and upstate New York.

3). In September 2011, Northern Virginia was hit with a record breaking one day rainstorm that caused a 1000-year flash flood in some areas.

4). In October 2011, almost exactly one year ago, the area was struck by the same massive Nor'easter that dumped over two feet of snow on portions of New England, though it was mostly rain here.

5). In March 2012, at the tail end of a record breaking warm winter, the DC area experienced the same freaky early summer type weather that blanketed much of the Midwest.

6). In June 2012, towards the end of one of the hottest Junes on record, the DC area was struck with a powerful derecho that knocked out power to over 3.7 million homes.

And yet climate change has been hardly mentioned at all during the presidential campaign and Congress will not even seriously consider any legislation that might be aimed at attempting to address it. If I were of a religious bent, I would almost be inclined to say that God is punishing the nation's capital for its sins of inaction. I know that may sound silly, but what the fuck, wingnut conservatives are always dragging His name into their political arguments so why can't I?

If nothing else, this storm is going to serve as a massive distraction from the horrible presidential election for a few days. Who said I don't know how to find silver linings?


Bonus: "Sandy, the angels have lost their desire for us...I spoke to 'em just last night and they said they won't set themselves on fire for us anymore"

A Wild Weekend

As I'm sure everyone is aware by now, it was quite a wild weekend in the Washington, DC, area as we got hit with something called a derecho, which despite being a bit of a weather geek I will nevertheless admit was a term I had never heard of prior to now. Supposedly, "derecho" means a wide band of powerful thunderstorms that can travel over long distances. But it could just as easily mean, "nasty, global warming fueled weather phenomenon," as that is what it amounted to.

All that said, my wife and I got pretty lucky. About a month ago, we reserved a room at a bed & breakfast over on Maryland's eastern shore for this weekend and were safely on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge about twelve hours before Mr. Derecho took direct aim at the nation's capital. The storm's power was still pretty astonishing where we were, but fortunately it failed to knock out the electricity there. Incredibly, we returned home this morning about one hour after the juice got turned back on in our neighborhood.

The DC area as a whole, however, is still pretty shaken up. There are dozens of trees down all around my neighborhood, including one that clobbered my next door neighbor's back fence and deck. As of this evening, 60% of the residents and businesses in Montgomery County, Maryland, are still without power and it was announced that some may not get it back until next weekend.

Throughout it all, I was wondering what the smarmy family of Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma was doing, they who got such a kick out of building an igloo to mock Al Gore during the February 2010 blizzards. Al Gore may be a fraud, a hypocrite and an opportunist, but even a broken clock is right twice a day provided that the hour and minute hands haven't fallen off its face. I sincerely hope that Senator Inhofe's family were among those denizens of the nation's capital who had the unfortunate experience of having tree limbs crash down onto their cars or houses on Friday night.

Look, I'm no scientist, and I would never claim to have any special knowledge of matters climatological, but I would really like to know how anyone who is not on the payroll of the Koch brothers and who does not have their head planted firmly up their ass can look at the recent events in Colorado, Florida and now here in jolly old DC and NOT recognize that something very extreme and potentially very dangerous is happening with the weather. Just last August in the DC area, we had a 1,000 year flood from a series of thunderstorms that decided to camp out over the area and pour down rain for hours on end, and now less than a year later we've been struck by the equivalent of inland hurricane.

What the fuck does it take, a derecho-generated giant hailstone to land on the deniers' fucking heads? It's bad enough that the effects of peak oil and resource depletion are already causing stress to the systems we depend out to sustain our modern way of living, and events like this weekend serve as just a little preview of the chaos the planet likely has in store for us going forward even as we gradually lose our ability to deal with them.


Bonus: From my You Tube channel, a special song uploaded just for the derecho

U.S. Environmental Satellite System ‘Is At Risk Of Collapse’ And Could Decline 75% By 2020

Hat tip to Vinland of Silent Country for alerting me to this story.

Despite spending nearly a trillion and a half dollars more than it has taken it from taxes every year for the past four years, the federal government is still having difficulties maintaining its basic services. Here is Think Progress with the story:

The Nation’s leading scientists have issued a stark warning: America’s ability to monitor the environment is rapidly diminishing. And if we don’t properly fund our satellite capabilities, the country could lose three quarters of its Earth observation systems by 2020.

That alarming conclusion comes from the National Research Council in a new report assessing the progress of the nation’s Earth observation programs. In short: our leading scientific institutions aren’t actually making much progress.

Rather, a lack of funding and infrastructure will result in “a rapid decline” in our ability to monitor extreme weather and changes to the climate.

Like everything else, it all comes back to money...in this case, the lack of money for anything other than entitlement programs and defense war contractors:

There are three major factors contributing to this unprecedented decline in Earth monitoring capabilities: budget cuts, a rapidly aging fleet of satellites, and a lack of launch capabilities.

The budgetary issues have been ongoing. According to the NSA progress report, NASA’s Earth science program still hasn’t been funded to the requested $2 billion to meet future objectives.

And as Climate Progress reported last year, Republican lawmakers proposed slashing $1.2 billion from NOAA’s funding levels, cutting into satellite programs. The satellite programs were eventually funded to requested levels, but future funding is uncertain. Senate lawmakers have proposed moving NOAA’s satellite program over to NASA where operational efficiencies could potentially save money.

Officials at these agencies say that more money is needed to replace the fleet of aging satellites that will inevitably fail in the coming years. According to the NSA report, there’s also a severe lack of launch vehicles for Earth satellites that “directly threatens programmatic robustness.”

After all, satellites aren’t much good without a way to launch them.

If this story doesn't portend a society in the early stages of collapse, I don't know what would.

Storm Chasing 'Morons' Hinder Rescues

The headline above is not mine, but the one that actually appeared above this article from the Maine Sunday Telegram:

Given life-threatening wind, hail, lightning and flying debris, chasing tornadoes would seem harrowing enough.

Now add to that what many agree is a new and growing danger on the edge of the violent vortexes: people -- hundreds and hundreds of regular people.

People risking their lives, gawkers clogging roadways, some with kids in the backseats of their cars or in the beds of their pickups. They sit poised with cellphone cameras, stop dead in the middle of lanes beneath roadway bridges, travel at breakneck speeds for the chance to get up close and personal with one of nature's most awesome and awful displays.

Kansas' Chancy Smith, the director of emergency medical services for Dickinson County -- raked by a series of tornadoes April 14 -- caused a minor storm of his own when, after the tornadoes, he publicly called the throng of chasers who flooded his county "morons" for risking their lives and possibly the lives of others by impeding emergency services.

Raked by quick rebuke, Smith has since said he did not mean to malign legitimate storm spotters and chasers or scientists who do much to help the National Weather Service predict and track major storms.

Experienced, longtime storm chasers have expressed similar worries.

They're talking about the others, the hundreds of rubberneckers, gawkers and severe-storm shutterbugs who clogged the exit off Interstate 70 as the tornado swept past Solomon, Kan., parked as if they were at a drive-in movie.

Meanwhile, he said, his firefighters clocked others tearing 60 mph and more through the tiny town in pursuit of the twister like they were kids after a lost balloon. He said some drove, rumbling past fire trucks and over downed, live power lines where a damaged natural gas facility was spewing the explosive gas.

"There were morons out there. There were plenty," Smith reiterated to The Kansas City Star on Wednesday. "I was a police officer for 17 years and a director of emergency services for seven, and I have never, ever seen that many people converge on a storm. There were hundreds and hundreds ...

"My cohorts in other communities are saying, 'Don't apologize for what you said. We have all had this problem.' "

It has certainly hit a nerve among emergency services people and longtime storm chasers who concede that, in recent years, it seems that witnessing tornadoes up close has turned from a risky endeavor attempted by adrenalin addicts to a family spectator sport. Local high school students looking for tornadoes using apps and websites on their smartphones have become common.

"I really couldn't tell you why it's occurring," said S. Joe Koch II, the emergency management director in Saline County, Kan. "It is becoming more common for people to go out and see these tornadoes."

So common, in fact, that when the National Weather Service issued its early warning for last weekend, alerting the public that scores of tornadoes were likely to sweep through Tornado Alley -- the area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Rocky Mountains where tornadoes are most frequent – Koch sent out an alert of his own to emergency personnel: Expect an influx of people.

Meteorologists and others said the reason is clear: technology, TV news and entertainment.

It is no doubt just a matter of time before one of these idiots causes a fatal accident or gets killed getting too close to one of these storms. Because that's what natural disasters have become in this addle-minded, entertainment obsessed culture of ours--just another spectacle to be treated as if it were on a teevee screen and not a very real tragedy for those whose lives are torn apart right in front of the morons who are chasing the storms. This almost makes me root for higher gasoline prices to help put an end to such stupidity.


Bonus: "And as it came towards me, I swear, it sounded like a train"

U.S. Water Wars Heating Up

Warnings about potential future water shortages have been sounded repeatedly for many years now, but we are only just beginning to see their reality starting rear its ugly head. The Weather Channel just this week posted a story outlining the regional water war flare ups that are already occurring within the United States:

Americans have enjoyed centuries of abundant natural resources, but when it comes to fresh water that may no longer be the case. Recent droughts in the southern and western United States have exposed a mismanagement of nature's most valuable resource. Now the fight for clean water is heating up.

States have always fought over rivers and lakes, but lawsuits don't yield more water. Early laws and agreements were based on the assumption there would always be enough water to go around, but Americans are quickly learning that's not the case.

Many reservoirs were built to control flooding, and help farmers irrigate their crops. But those reservoirs became popular places to live and recreate, increasing the demand for water to stay locally to sustain the booming economies.

There may never be a definitive resolution to this conflict, but one thing is clear. Americans will soon be forced to decide how to allocate our most valuable resource, and adapt to the ensuing culture shift.

The article then goes on to describe each in detail. Here are the ones they identified:

Chattahoochee River
Source: Blue Ridge Mountains, Northeast Georgia
Flows To: Apalachicola Bay (Gulf of Mexico)
Length: 430 miles
Passes Through: 3 States

Klamath River
Source: Upper Klamath Lake, Oregon
Flows To: Pacific Ocean
Length: 263 miles
Passes Through: Oregon and California

Colorado River
Source: Rocky Mountains, Colorado
Flows To: Gulf of California
Length: 1450 miles
Passes Through: 5 States and Mexico

Colorado River Watershed
Source: Texas Panhandle
Flows To: Matagorda Bay (Gulf of Mexico)
Length: 862 miles
Passes Through: Texas

More details are available at the link for the story.


Bonus: Visions of a drought...with SWEET guitar work

Welch’s: 95 Percent Of Grapes In Southwest Michigan Destroyed

Here is another reminder that climate change doesn't mean just warming, but a greater frequency of weather EXTREMES. It was just a month ago when Michigan was basking in unprecedented late-winter 80 degree weather. And then came the reversal, as reported by a local Michigan television station:

SAINT JOSEPH, Mich. - For Welch’s grape growers, it was the most devastating frost in Michigan’s history. That’s according to the National Grape Cooperation, better known as Welch’s Foods.

Cold temperatures wiped out 95 percent of all the juice grapes in Berrien, Cass and Van Buren County.

“You know it’s a complete wipeout,” said John Jasper, a surveyor for Welch’s Foods. Jasper said more than 10,000 acres of juice grapes were destroyed Thursday morning across Southwest Michigan.

Jasper had a difficult job Friday. He and two other Welch’s surveyors tried to figure out how many grapes the company could expect this year at harvest. “I went through hundreds of acres before I found a spot that had a live bud,” he said.

“I’ve probably been to 100 farms in the last two days,” said Jasper. “The majority (are destroyed) 95 percent.”

According to the National Grape Cooperation, Berrien, Cass and Van Buren farmers collected $24 million in 2011. Jasper said in 2012 they would be lucky to net $2 million.

The situation gets worse for Paul Bixby of Bixby Orchards in Berrien Springs. “Mostly on this tree, everything is gone,” Bixby said pointing out a devastated apple orchard.

Bixby didn’t only lose the grapes. He estimates Thursday’s frost killed half of his apple crop. “You can see the black and you can see five in that cluster. All of them look the same.”
“A lot of these guys know the numbers and they know they’re in trouble,” said Jasper. He said so many juice grapes are gone it’s not cost effective for farmers to harvest the grapes that survived.

Jasper said Welch’s Foods gets one-sixth of their grapes from Southwest Michigan. “This is probably our worst year,” he said. The frost could force the company to change its recipe for some of its products.

I guess we should prepare for higher grape juice prices, among other things.


Bonus: Why Moby Grape, of course...what else?

The East Coast Is Burning

The downside of the recent wave of unprecedented warm weather in U.S. is now making itself felt in the form of widespread outbreak of wildfires. Here is CBS News with the details:

Along the Eastern Seaboard, firefighters are battling a string of wildfires after weeks of unusually warm and dry weather. Fires are burning in nine states - from New Hampshire to Florida - where it is, ironically, "Wildfire Awareness Week."

Wildfires broke out up and down the East Coast Monday, fueled by whipping winds and dry conditions.

On New York's Long Island, hundreds of firefighters raced to keep flames from closing in on Brookhaven National Lab, a nuclear physics facility. The blaze swallowed up 1,000 acres, destroyed at least two homes and sent three firefighters to the hospital.

Steve Bellone, a Suffolk County executive, told CBS News, "This fire is as serious as it gets. It is not yet under control."

Neal Coleman's son shot video of the fire as it crept dangerously close to their home. "I'm telling you the fire was over 100 foot tall," Coleman said. "It was unbelievable. You see it in the movies and on TV, but until you're there, you're like, 'Wow, I think I'm in trouble.'"

Officials say the fire is 50 percent contained, but they warn homes there are still in jeopardy. Firefighters say they have no idea when they will have the fire there under control.

In New Jersey, another inferno - which officials are calling suspicious - is on track to burn through 1,000 acres. On Monday, it came within just a few feet of some homes.

Resident Nick Sama said, "It was very horrifying. It was too close for comfort. It was literally behind our home."

The dry, windy weather also helped feed flames in Pennsylvania and Connecticut where a brush fire lined a railroad track. Nearby homes and businesses were evacuated.

But it wasn't just the Northeast on alert. The National Weather Service issued fire warnings throughout the Mid-Atlantic region along with parts of the Midwest and South.

In Virginia, helicopters dumped water from high above to try to douse flames.

The wildfire outbreak stretched all the way down to Miami where a fast-moving fire caught residents by surprise.

One resident there said, ""Actually that's the biggest fire I've ever seen in my life."

Government forecasters say 2012 has started out warmer than any year on record. Last month was 8.6 degrees warmer than normal, and there were more than 15,000 record high temperatures in March. Every state had at least one.

Here in Virginia where I live, we have had very little rainfall since the unusually warm weather began a month ago, and that was after a virtually snow free winter. I recall that back in 2008 we suffered through a severe drought that lasted all summer and into the early autumn. Given how dry it is already, if that happens again it could be a very interesting summer in these parts.


Bonus: Sorry, Jimi, but you may not want to stand next to these fires

March 2012 Sets Record For Warmest On Record In The U.S.

Deniers are gonna deny and haters are gonna hate...but reality doesn't give a good Goddamn. Here is the Weather Channel with the details:

Last week we revealed the dozens of cities that had their warmest March on record. Now we have the official word from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that March 2012 was the warmest March on record in the contiguous United States. In addition, the January through March period of 2012 was the warmest first quarter of the year on record. Records date back to 1895 in both cases.

NOAA also released information stating that the early March tornado outbreak in the Ohio Valley and Southeast was the first billion-dollar weather disaster of 2012.

Also, check out this amusingly ignorant reader comment that was posted with the article:

Jim Tappendorf · Coleman, Wisconsin
this winter was one we'll probably never see again. I was riding my motorcycle with only a T-shirt on March 17 th and 18th in Coleman Wi. about 45 miles north of Green Bay. Go global warming.

What's the matter with Wisconsin?

The REAL Lesson From Obama's "Keystone Cave-In"

Last Friday, in the wake of President Hopey-Changey abruptly changing course on the Keystone Pipeline project, Rolling Stone political writer Jeff Goodell wrote a piece called, "Lessons from Obama's Keystone Cave-In," which was particularly notable because it demonstrated yet again that if you don't understand the dire implications of peak oil you are hardly going to learn the right lessons from any energy-related decision made by our so-called "leaders." Just for the heck of it, I thought I'd go through the four lessons listed by Goodell and offer a rebuttal for each of them:

1. "All of the above" = "Drill, Baby, Drill"
Obama talks a good game about developing "green" energy sources, but here he is, doubling down on oil. Although this speech was clearly political theater, I expected him to appease anti-pipeline activists by using his visit to Cushing – the belly of the fossil-fuel beast – to remind Big Oil that not only has he promised to yank away $4 billion in subsidies, but that oil is, as he said the other day, "the fuel of the past." Ha! Instead, Obama offered up a speech that would make Sarah Palin proud, reminding us how, over the last three years, "I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore." And he crowed: "We are drilling all over the place now." And as for pipelines, he bragged that "we’ve added enough new oil and gas pipelines to encircle the earth." Climate blogger Joe Romm rightly called the address "Obama's worst speech ever."

Okay, so Obama seemingly contradicted himself in two different speeches before two different audiences. That happens all the time with politicians. So which time do you suppose he was lying? The time he mouthed an empty platitude about oil being "the fuel of the past," or when he started bragging about his administration's pro-drilling record?

As the old saying goes, Money Talks and Bullshit Walks. In this case, the latter example was money while the former was the bullshit.

2. If Obama gets re-elected, the northern half of the Keystone pipeline is going to get built.
He did not say this explicitly in his speech yesterday, but the political code is perfectly clear. Obama is essentially endorsing tar sands oil production, with all the environmental wreckage it causes, as well as dooming the Midwest to more pipeline spills. It also means that investment dollars will now flow to boosting the production capacity of the tar sands operations, which in turn will pump up the industry's political clout even more. In effect, there’s no stopping the tar sands now. The dirty bitumen is gonna get dug up and refined and piped down to the Gulf and slimed across the world.

It should have been perfectly obvious even before Obama gave his speech that the whole damn pipeline was eventually going to be approved. All along, he was just trying to run the clock out until after the 2012 election and hoping there wasn't another spike in gasoline prices to force his hand before he was safe from ever facing the voters again. Well, the spike happened as you might have noticed, and Obama quickly realized there were more votes to be lost from being seen by Spoiled Rotten Nation to be standing in the way of America accessing another major source of oil (even if it will do nothing to bring down prices in the short term) than he will likely lose in support from environmentalists. Speaking of which:

3. Enviros have no muscle.
When the State Department last year decided to block the pipeline at least temporarily, enviros cheered. Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called it "a victory of truth over misinformation," and writer/activist Bill McKibben said "it isn’t just the right call, it’s the brave call." But that bravery wilted quickly in the face of high gas prices and Republican attacks, lame as they have been (the pipeline will have no measureable impact on gas prices in America today, tomorrow, or ever). The unmistakable subtext of this speech was: Tough shit, Frances and Bill and all your earnest followers. Are you really gonna vote for Romney in November?

Of course environmentalists won't be voting for Romney, and that is exactly why Obama was able to make the political calculation I outlined in my response to lesson 2. Yeah, a lot of environmentalists might stay home in November, or they might choose to throw away their votes by casting them for the Green Party, but they WON'T be voting for Romney and that will blunt any political effect their protest might have. Some of them will no doubt even cave in and vote for Hopey-Changey anyway, using the totally self-defeating lesser of two evils "logic."

The real lesson on this point ought to be obvious. The environmentalists, as well as those who believe in economic justice and those who are opposed to America's big business, war and empire foreign policy, DO NOT LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY. In a democracy you have real choices at the ballot box. As non-elite Americans living in a full blown corporatocracy, we most assuredly do not have any choice on issues of real importance that affect the economy or our future other than to throw our votes away on third party candidates who stand zero chance of ever being elected.

4. Obama is still wimping out on climate change.
Duh. But people had hopes. During the 2008 campaign, Obama talked about slowing the rising seas and putting a price on carbon pollution. After the election, he hired John Holdren as science advisor and Steven Chu to run to the Department of Energy, both of whom understand the dangers of climate change as well as anyone. Didn’t help. Today, despite the fact that global carbon pollution is accelerating and extreme weather is becoming the norm (it’s a sad but revealing irony that, as Brad Johnson points out, Cushing has been ground zero for climate disasters in the U.S.), Obama won’t even mention the words "climate" or "global warming," much less demonstrate any leadership on the single most dangerous threat that civilization has ever faced. Instead, he has shifted the conversation to energy independence. That may be a worthy goal, but if it’s pursued without regard to the risks of climate change, it will only increase the danger of future catastrophes.

Obama most certainly is "wimping out" on climate change. Why? Because he is a product of a system that is completely dependent upon never ending economic growth for its very survival, and curtailing the burning of fossil fuels would destroy that system pretty quickly. Obama would have to be politically suicidal NOT to wimp out on climate change, and the world only very rarely ever sees the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev achieving high political office.

Goodell then concludes his piece with this:

In any crass political calculation, drilling for oil will always win more votes than putting a price on carbon. But if I recall what I was taught in fifth-grade American government class, we elect presidents to do more than crass political calculations. Obama wants to be thought of as the president who freed us from foreign oil. But if he doesn’t show some political courage, he may well be remembered as the president who cooked the planet.

Excuse me for being so blunt, but what a childish statement. I don't know how old Mr. Goodell is, but the last president I can recall who didn't make every single decision based upon "crass political calculation" was Jimmy Carter, and we all know how well that worked out for him.

So many environmentalists just refuse to get it into their heads that humanity has painted itself into the tightest of corners. Beginning in earnest about a century ago, we tapped into the greatest energy resource nature could have possibly bestowed upon us. Instead of wisely managing that very nonrenewable resource, we exploited it as quickly as we could and allowed our population to expand in a very short time to well beyond what the planet can possibly sustain when that resource runs out, even if the resulting environmental damage from burning that resource wasn't also a hugely negative factor.

Not only America, but all of humanity is barreling towards the cliff at breakneck speed, and it is likely already too late to put on the breaks. "Leaders" like Obama have been put into place by his billionaire backers in order to pull the wool over the eyes of the masses and keep the game going for as long as possible. That is the real lesson to be learned from Obama's Keystone cave-in, and accepting it is the key to becoming part of the reality-based community.


Bonus: "I believe before the world ever got that bad, I'd be on my knees a-crying"

AccuWeather's Excuse For A Horribly Blown Seasonal Forecast: The Tsunami Did It

If Rick Santorum were to get his way, private company AccuWeather would no doubt replace the "socialist" National Weather Service as the nation's primary forecaster of weather. So what is the problem with a corporation doing on a for profit basis what the government already does for "free?" Just that you know damn well that a private company won't give predictions that its clients don't want to hear, such as telling an oil company that yes, Virginia, climate change is both real and manmade.

But the other problem is that corporations are always motivated to provide a service at the lowest possible cost, which mean the products they produce often suck balls. And AccuWeather just recently proved how badly it can actually suck balls. Here is the Chicago Tribune with the story:

A meteorologist for AccuWeather — the forecasting company that predicted a winter so bad, "people in Chicago are going to want to move" — has a theory for the recent Midwest heat wave: Japanese tsunami debris.

AccuWeather.com made headlines last fall, you may recall, with breathlessly apocalyptic predictions for the season ahead.

Five months later, winter 2011-12 is in the books as the ninth warmest on record, punctuated by a stretch of historically high temperatures over the last week, and the Chicago area remains remarkably populous.

"We're wrong sometimes; we can admit it," meteorologist and AccuWeather.com news director Henry Margusity said. "It was not exactly the best forecast."

Specifically, AccuWeather said we were in for a fifth consecutive winter with more than 50 inches of snow. In reality, just 19.8 inches of the white stuff has fallen, according to WGN chief meteorologist Tom Skilling, not only well below AccuWeather's prediction, but also 14.3 inches below the yearly average.

And of course, the company's excuse for blowing the forecast so badly is a real doozy:

Margusity was a good sport about AccuWeather's swing and miss, even offering up a retroactive long-shot theory for the warm winter and recent heat wave — the drifting debris field from last year's devastating Japanese tsunami seems to be sending warm air aloft above the Pacific Ocean, which could be contributing to warmer temperatures here, Margusity said.

"If you match up where that debris field is right now with where the warmer-than-normal water temperatures are, they match up perfectly," he said, also citing what proved to be a weakening La Nina pattern last fall and the lack of expected so-called Greenland blocking.

Oh sure, that makes perfect sense. Nope, it couldn't possibly have been the result of a rapidly changing climate...you know, the same factor that likely greatly contributed to Chicago experiencing nearly two full weeks of 80 degree temperatures this March. The same city which averages only one 80 degree March day EVERY 14 YEARS. Perish the thought. The tsunami did it. Must have been all of the radioactivity from the Fukushima accident that got dumped into the ocean that somehow warmed up the air or something.

Oh, and not to be a contrarian or anything, but you AccuWeather guys do know that the tsunami happened six months BEFORE you made that ridiculous forecast, right? So how come you didn't think of the "tsunami effect" at the time? Bit of an oversight, I'd say.

The good news is that the aforementioned Santorum, who in the past has received campaign contributions from AccuWeather's president, is seeing his presidential campaign slowly sinking beneath the waves (ha! a tsunami pun!). The bad news is, as I posted on March 16th, that the National Weather Service is already experiencing budget cuts that will no doubt hamper its effectiveness going forward. But hey, take comfort. AccuWeather is now predicting a "warmer than normal" summer, so maybe given the company's track record it won't be as bad as everybody is expecting after the unprecedented March heat wave.


Bonus: "Well, there's gonna be a snowstorm...and the teevee is going wild. They got nothing else to think of...and they're letting me go home"

National Weather Service Facing A Proposed $39 Million Budget Cut

You would have to have been living under a very deeply buried rock not to notice that the weather in America has been increasingly volatile in recent years. The record breaking March tornado outbreak of last week drove that point home yet again. Unfortunately, it appears as though the agency charged with getting warnings out to the public of impending severe weather is about to take a hit to its budget. Here is a South Carolina television station with the details:

The National Weather Service is facing a different kind of storm.

It's not a hurricane or tornado, but instead a proposed budget cut of $39 million dollars. The government agency that issues daily forecasts, in addition to severe weather warnings, could have their budget cut by as much as four percent.

National Weather Service offices across the country, including the one in Charleston, have had to gradually cut back on travel over the last four or five years.

"It makes it difficult for conferences when we are trying to get technology and things going, but we cut back about 75 percent on travel, so we are pretty limited now in what we can do," said Frank Alsheimer, meteorologist at the National Weather Service.

"Fortunately, technology helps us in some respects in that with the use of things like webinars that we are producing over the Internet that we don't lose as much training as you would if we just took 75 percent off the top."

If the budget reduction is passed, Alsheimer said it's likely that there will be a delay in getting some new technology.

"One of the issues that will come up is the fact that these new technologies that we introduce help increase our lead times, help give the forecasters more tools to do a better and better service for the American people," said Alsheimer. "As these new technologies are delayed, it means we all have to wait for these improvements that we are expecting as years go by."

The budget cut proposal also includes cutting the number of information technology officers, across the country.

"Each forecast office has an ITO or information technology officer, which essentially helps us transition new data, new information to the forecasters to help make their decisions," said Alsheimer. "The thought is that a fair amount of that can be done remotely rather than on station. Whether that can be cleanly done remains to be seen."

Without an information technology officer at each office, he said there could be several issues.

"It will start from simply not being able to get technology installed as quickly in our office as to a worse case scenario where during a severe weather event, we have a failure and we don't have someone on site to correct that failure and we wind up not being able to perform our mission."

The mission at the National Weather Service is to protect life and property; a mission that could be challenged if the $39 million dollar budget cut is approved.

Like so many other similar reports recently, the real story here is that this is just the beginning. Right now, the federal government is merely trimming the fat around the edges as it takes its first tentative steps to address its massive budget imbalance. Much deeper cuts will be coming in the future, and when that happens the National Weather Service will slowly lose its ability to warn about the development of severe weather even as the climate grows increasingly volatile. As Americans, we have a hard time imagining there ever being less available technology servicing any aspect of our lives, but those days are rapidly approaching nonetheless.


Bonus: "It's strange how hard it rains now"

Hey, Senator Inhofe, It Was 67 Degrees Fahrenheit in DC Yesterday

Back on August 19th of last year, I posted a Friday Rant called, "Hey, Senator Inhofe, It's HOT Outside," in which I called out the senior Senator from Oklahoma for his family's dumbass publicity stunt of building an igloo during one of the blizzards that struck DC two winters ago in order to mock Al Gore and others who are concerned about climate change. Specifically, I blasted the global warming denying Inhofe for not subsequently acknowledging this past summer's record breaking heat wave in The Sooner State:

So to recap, Okalahoma's record for the highest monthly temperature ever recorded was just smashed by an astonishing one full degree Fahrenheit. And yet, there was nary a peep about it from the esteemed Senator Inhofe and his merry band of inbreds.

All of this almost makes me wish I lived in Oklahoma. During July I would have had this very strong desire to go find Senator Inhofe's house, wait until about four o'clock in the afternoon, and then break open a couple of eggs and fry them right on his front walk. Then I would have held up my own sign for all passersby to see: "Pray for Cooler Weather...Maybe that Will Help."

Well, guess what? After Oklahoma suffered through a summer season right out of Dante's Inferno, the locale where the "Honorable" Senator Inhofe spends the lion's share of his time is literally going through a year without a winter. We've had exactly one truly cold night so far here in the DC area during this non-winter of 2011-2012, just this past week when the temps dipped into the teens. Other than that we've had maybe three or four nights when it has been below 30 degrees, and the current 10-day forecast is for more of the same through mid-January.

Yesterday, the mercury soared all the way to 67 degrees, and it felt more like early May than January. Even more pertinent is a factoid I read just this past week that DC has not experienced a temperature reading below zero degrees Fahrenheit since 1994, which is astonishing since before that time it was not all that uncommon an occurrence during the coldest months of the year.

So what I want to know is what does Senator Inhofe's family have to say about this run of extremely warm weather we are now experiencing? The silence on that front has been deafening. If you're going to be assholes whenever there is a snowstorm, you're setting yourself up for this kind of criticism. Even at the time their little publicity stunt was monumentally stupid because despite the fact that DC experienced three major winter storms two years ago, each time the temperatures rebounded into the 30s and 40s almost immediately afterward rather than going into a deep freeze, which used to be the norm.

I guess it's true what Stephen Colbert told George Bush the Lesser years ago at the White House Correspondent's Dinner: reality does have a well known liberal bias.


Bonus: John Fogerty knows what's going on

Up to a Half Billion Trees Killed by the Texas Drought

The reports just keep rolling in about effects of the hellish drought Texas suffered through this past year. Here is Reuters with yet another horrible story:

The massive drought that has dried out Texas over the past year has killed as many as half a billion trees, according to new estimates from the Texas Forest Service.

"In 2011, Texas experienced an exceptional drought, prolonged high winds, and record-setting temperatures," Forest Service Sustainable Forestry chief Burl Carraway told Reuters on Tuesday. "Together, those conditions took a severe toll on trees across the state."

He said that between 100 million and 500 million trees were lost. That figure does not include trees killed in wildfires that have scorched an estimated 4 million acres in Texas since the beginning of 2011. A massive wildfire in Bastrop, east of Austin in September that destroyed 1,600 homes, is blamed for killing 1.5 million trees.

The tree loss is in both urban and rural areas and represents as much as 10 percent of all the trees in the state, Carraway said.

"This is a generational event," Barry Ward, executive director of the nonprofit Trees for Houston, which supports forestry efforts, told Reuters on Tuesday. "Mature trees take 20 or 30 years to re-grow. This will make an aesthetic difference for decades to come."

He said the loss will affect the state in many ways. For example, there is increased fire danger because all the dead trees are now fuel, Ward said.

There's little doubt that should Texas suffer a series of summers like this past one that the quality of life, to say nothing of the ability of the landscape to support life, is going to plummet fast. And yet hope still prevails:

Forest Resource Analyst Chris Edgar said that trees and forests are amazingly resilient.

"Loss of trees due to adverse weather conditions is something that is a part of the natural process of the forest," said Edgar, who works for the Texas Forest Service.

One of the worst areas of die-off occurred in the part of east Texas known as the Piney Woods, he said. That is one of the country's leading producers of wood and paper products. It is still unclear what the long-term damage may be to that industry, which is one of the largest agricultural employers in the state.

Carraway said that what Mother Nature has damaged, Mother Nature can repair.

"Assuming the rainfall levels get back to normal, I certainly see the forest being able to recover," he said.

That's an iffy assumption at this point, Mr. Edgar. I hope for the sake of you and everyone else living in Texas that you are proven correct. But I sure wouldn't invest in any money in Texas woodlands right about now.


Bonus: Seems like an appropriate time for this song

Texas Drought Causing Thousands of Horses and Donkeys to Be Abandoned

Here's a sad story, as reported by Reuters:

The yearlong Texas drought is taking a heartbreaking toll on horses and donkeys, thousands of which have been abandoned by owners who can no longer afford the skyrocketing price of the hay needed to feed them.

“We get 20 to 40 calls a week that horses are alongside the road and left; nobody’s claimed them,” Richard Fincher of Safe Haven Equine Rescue in Gilmer, in east Texas, told Reuters. “Sheriffs are calling us all the time.”

Before this year, he would get more like three or four calls a week, he said.

The problem, according to Dennis Sigler, a horse specialist at Texas A&M University, is that the drought has dried up the hay fields, leaving horse owners having to pay double or triple the prices they are used to paying for hay, if they can find hay at all.

“The price of hay and feed today is at levels we have never experienced before because of the drought,” Sigler said. “In addition to that, pastures are short, and folks who have horses on pasture have no grass for their horses. There is just no market for horses this year.”

In addition, Sigler said, the drought has forced Texas ranchers to sell some of their cattle herds, leaving them with horses that are no longer needed to ride the range.

What makes this particularly galling is that Texas is a (ahem) hotbed of climate change denial. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that anyone should just blindly accept the global warming message of pop culture sources like Al Gore's, An Inconvenient Truth. What I'm saying is that if you live in an area that is particularly vulnerable to a potential change in climate, or in an area where your economic livelihood could potentially be destroyed by increasingly volatile weather events, you at least owe it to yourself to be open-minded on the subject.

The Texas "heat dome" this past summer was a phenomenal weather event in terms of the number of temperature records set and the utter lack of rainfall. If summers like this one become the "new normal" in the near future then the state of Texas will not be able to support its large population for very long. As it stands, it's having a hard time just maintaining its population of horses and donkeys.


Bonus: An outstanding James McMurtry music video tribute to his home state of Texas