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Last year was the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The average temperature in 2012 was 3.3°F above the average for the last century and was a full degree warmer than 1998, the previous record holder. Perhaps even more importantly it was the second most extreme year. It featured an unusually higher number of droughts, wildfires and severe storms.
There is little doubt that this is in large part the result of man-made climate change. It is a real, present and growing danger. If nothing is done the negative consequences will get significantly worse in the future.
That is why this is the perfect time to point out how incredibly idiotic it is hat Washington has been solely consumed with the issue of long term deficit projections over the past few years. Not only is the long term projected deficit not the most important immediate problem facing the country, which is unemployment/the weak economy. The deficit is not even the most important long term issue facing the country, climate change is.
If the so-called deficit hawks are really so deeply concerned about what they are leaving their “children,” the crisis is the climate, not potentially inaccurate projections about future Medicare spending.
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Wrong.
But then you’d lose credibility if you told the truth. Please quit the theater of power.
Jon, you are a longtime observer of the political horse race between the legacy parties.
How do you explain the “incredibly idiotic” behavior which you describe?
Remember, during the recent presidential election there was virtually NO discussion of climate change, none of ANY substance.
There is no rational doubt that climate change is upon us, whatever the “causes” are imagined to be.
Yet, the political class has successfully ignored ANY substantive debate about it, the media, which are PART of the political class, has provided scant coverage of the issue, and the corporate elite are despoiling the planet at a dangerously accelerating rate.
You have implied, by your coverage of the legacy parties, that there are NO meaningful alternative TO those legacy parties, and most citizens have been LED to think that very thing.
Might you consider that such a “conviction”, such a mindset, has made the current incredible idiocy almost inevitable?
So, assuming that the current political class has FAILED, miserably and intentionally, to face the actual truth of things, what do you, as an observer and a writer about that political class and its “competitions”, consider might, realistically, be done to bring about some sanity, some serious attention to what is happening AND being done to the planet, to the capacity of the planet to support human life?
Clearly the political class has failed to do its necessary job, has failed to serve the best interests of “the people”.
It remains to be seen if those who “report” on that class will manage to do any better … bearing in mind that most who so “report” are part of that class.
Jon, I thank you for trying to remind the political class of their responsibility, not to wealth, to permanent war, to secrecy, to “winning”, but to “the people” and to the planet, which, in the immensity of universe just happens to be our ONLY home.
Please continue to do so, as that might just be the most important thing that you can possibly do. Maybe that is part of your job.
The “job” of the people is to insist upon necessary change … and you can help them understand what such change actually looks like.
DW
It’s the sun.
Wow……just wow!
Adaptation.
I have a living example of the warming trend outside my window. This is supposed to be the second coldest week of the year in Montreal (first week in February is the coldest). The temperature outside is about +1 Celius (33 degrees); tomorrow we are having an ice storm and Saturday the temperature is predicted to be +7. So much for cross-country skiing. To use Valley-speak, it really sucks. I’m off to Moscow Monday night to participate in an Economic Forum on Globalization and Russia. Last year this time the temperature was like it is here: +5 or so. Sidewalks muddy with the dirt thrown down to melt the ice, and damp.
Dry cold winters like the kind we used to have were wonderful, if you got out in the snow and skied, snow-shoed or skated. Now, not so much. Fortunately we have the Laurentians just 45 minutes a way, and the extra elevation provides enough cold to maintain the snow-cover. But it’s not the same.
“If nothing is done the negative consequences will get significantly worse in the future.”
I am not going to argue the reality of climate change or that a public discussion is needed.
The question that I have yet to see a politically feasible answer to is “What should we do about it?”
The world, let alone the United States, is simply not going to reduce power consumption to the levels necessary to reverse climate change.
The only viable answer is substitution, replacing current carbon intensive methods of producing power with alternatives. We need a “Manhattan Project” kind of effort to develop viable replacement technologies.
The current political climate, obsessed with deficit and austerity issues, will not even tolerate a meaningful discussion of stimulus to address the more immediate and pressing issue of unemployment let alone a longer term strategy to address climate change.
Oh my goodness, comrade eCAHN, where’s the due diligence? Piers Corbyn is in it for the profit, no?
Nor is the “current” political climate amenable to Manhattan Projects for green power.
So, I think your question has been answered.
There’s really no need to do anything about it. The “problem” will take care of itself.
When you push something beyond the tipping point, it tips.
This site has been good on some things, but climate change is not one of them.
Sounds like the goof law of the father of that idiot, Ferris Bueller Ben Stein: If something can’t go on forever it’ll stop.
Two fucking great contributions to humanity. /s
That NOAA link has some cool graphs. If you’d like to see how much of an outlier 2012 was compared to all the years back to 1895, check this graph out:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2012/13/supplemental/page-2/
I’m a statistician, and that my friends is an outlier. Probably 2- to 3-sigma above average.
Ooof.
Given the trend, today’s outlier could very well be tomorrow’s average.
And that will definitely warrant an Ooof.
Conservatives like status quo, easy money, and taking care of themselves. When Dick Cheney can’t get water on his Jackson Hole ranch or Blankfein can’t get buluga cavier for his BDay party it will become important but it doesn’t matter how many poor people die in the meantime.
No, conservatives want to be boss. If they have to kill people to do that, they will.
It ain’t gonna be any prettier when Dick goes dry.
No, many conservatives follow, in sheep fashion, down the well trodden path. Narcissists like to be boss and always right.
Off-year Congressional elections have become the principal ones in American politics. Leading examples: 1994 (the Republican landslide caused Clinton to adopt a policy of “triangulation”), 2006 (the turning point for Democratic recovery which led two years later to Obama’s electon), and 2010 (another Republican landslide, described by Obama as a “shellacking”, caused Obama to forsake any hint of the slight progressivism he had shown in his (inadequate) stimulus package and U.S. auto bailout). The presidential elections are in fact much less important than the off-year elections because they involve issues of media hype rather than ideology. Basically, the presidential elections are a celebrity sweepstakes.
The legacy parties did not discuss global warming hardly at all in the 2012 election and the same can be expected in 2014. But the very probable political shakeup caused by the 2014 election (an absolutely crushing defeat of the Democrats that will amount to their near-annihilation in national politics) will completely shake up the political scene and make it possible for global warming to come to the forefront.
Umm, the examples you gave, did you forget to say they were narcissists?
Anyway, your focus on Dick’s discovery is well, just a schtupid blog comment.
So you agree your comment about conservatives wanting to be boss is schtupid as are most of your peanut gallery addons to the postings and comments. The narcissists are leading the conservative sheep.
O, no sah, hoss. I was referrin to your conservative narcissists. The schtupidity of your comment you have still failed to address.
Ain’t that so?
Ain’t no statistician myself, but been wondering why none of the presentations of 2012-heat that I’ve seen has been given in terms of standard devs. Isn’t 117 years of data plenty to estimate how far from normal this was (and probably much less probable than a 1 in 117 chance for a normally distributed variable)?