Silence is the Enemy

I have the feeds of a few blogs on my desktop. One of them that I have frequently cited here is intersection, co-authored by Chris Mooney (journalist) and Sheril Kirshenbaum (marine biologist). The subject of the blog has always been the action at the intersection of science and politics. This week, Sheril has started a new project called Silence is the Enemy and that takes it beyond the original scope, but for very good reasons.

Kirshenbaum reveals a bit about her own past and takes up the cause of standing up to violence against women. In particular, she references such actions as the mutilations of women such as breast beating and the use of rape as a standard practice of warfare and subjugation. In this regard, I would call attention to Lynn Sherr's story on the women of Liberia that aired as part of PBS's World Focus several weeks ago. Kirshenbaum includes the forced marriage of very young girls to older men as "legalized rape."

There is no freedom unless all are free. There is no justice unless all are honored. All of Kirshenbaum's revenue from this month's ad sales at intersection will be donated to Doctor's Without Borders to continue their work. I don't have any ads on this blog. So, I ask all of you who would want to support Sheril's effort to go to intersection, read her entry and click through to one of the ads placed there. It is the least that you can do.

If you don't like the idea of using the advertisement mechanism this way, consider making a donation directly to Doctors Without Borders.

Obama McCain Energy Smackdown

Sheril Kirshenbaum is both a scientist and a writer with political savvy. She is an active blogger at ScienceBlogs.com, writing both on the Intersection (with Chris Mooney) and on the energy blog, NextGen, an energy blog effort funded by Shell.


In today's posts (both places) Kirshembaum writes about the McCain / Obama Energy Policies. While Obama responded to a questionnaire, McCain has failed to do so. I am not surprised.

I think you all should read the pieces, but I will take the comments that I left at NextGen and paste them here.

I don't get it. McCain says that he wants to address global warming, sets a target that is not going to really do the job, and then comes out with a list of policies that guarantees the fact that we will never achieve the target.

And not one calls him on it?

The Republicans complain about liberal bias in the press and then the press lest him get away with this. Complain about liberal bias, arrest Amy Goodman, and you can get away with saying anything as long as you sound sincere.

I am waiting for a journalist with a real understanding of the science to drill down though the muck and make both of these candidates explain the inconsistencies in their public statements.

The key point that I am getting at is that you can make lowering gas prices and feeding America's energy addiction as your main emphasis, but you will do so at the price of making global warming worse. In the long run, that is one dumb decision.

We don't know how to control nuclear waste. We have no policies at all about controlling nuclear contamination of mining, transportation and storage of uranum before it is used. But, both of these candidates would give even more of our tax dollars to the nuclear industry and McCain does not want to "interfere with the market" by subsidizing renewable systems like solar or wind. This is not the action of anyone who should board a straight talk express.

The same goes for policies regarding coal. Lots of people involved in coal mining and they all vote. Nope, we will not stop burning coal as long as their is a politicians who would rather be elected than stop slow down global warming. I hate the idea of quoting John Stossel but "Give me a break."

The Polar Bear is getting hot

While I normally do not respond well to publicity stunt political action, sometimes they are so spot on that you can only stand up and cheer. In this case Green Party Eco-Action Committee member Jean McMahon takes to spotlight as she dogs Okla. Senator (and well known global warming denier) James Inhofe. The full story is at the Tulsa World.

I note that this is starting to have some legs, as science journalist / blogger Chris Mooney has picked up the same thing.

Go get'em, Ms. Bear.

Would Barry Play in Bangladesh

Interspersed among the wall to wall coverage of Barry Bonds have been a few shots of the flooding in South Asia. That in Bangladesh is perhaps a wake up call that few are hearing.

There is severe flooding in over half the districts in Bangladesh. According to Bloomberg.com:

Estimates of those left homeless varied, with Agence-France Presse reporting 25 million people across the region were forced to flee and that more than 1,400 died.

So, what does this have to do with Barry Bonds? Not much, other than the fact that the local media seems to feel Bonds is more important. There has been very little local coverage of this story. But, there is time. The flooding is not over.

I think that this is only an example of what is going to happen with increasing frequency as we continue our failure to deal with Global Warming. One of my favorite bloggers, Chris Mooney of Intersection, has also started to blog on weather / climate events at The Daily Green. In a recent post at Intersection, Mooney called my attention to an article in Newsweek giving us the Truth About Denial.

If you are reading this blog, I know that you don't need convincing. You are probably not a denier. The real question is that of what you are going to do about it. The policies that are coming from Schwarzenegger, et. al. are relatively comfortable for the petroleum industry. The entire idea of carbon trading is a sham, but that is what the Governator and his new Air Resources Board Chairman, Mary Nichols, are pushing.

The alternative view comes from George Monbiot and is clearly summarized by this column from The Guardian. The headline for this piece is pretty blunt. "Ministers know emissions trading is a red herring and won't work." He goes on to lambaste the British Government of Tony Blair. Doing the same to the US Government of George W. Bush would have been like a Dick Cheney hunting trip: too easy.

I like some of the recent TV Spots from Flex your Power. They have not gone viral on You Tube in the manner of an X-Games wipeout. That should tell you how many of us want to pay attention.

So why did I pick on Bangladesh? Without any rise in sea level, this country has severe flooding problems in years with heavy monsoons. As many as 700,000 hectares of crop land has been damaged or destroyed in this years floods. That is 1.8 million acres. However, I worry about a permanent displacement of the people who live on this land and the ongoing humanitarian crisis that we will face. I don't think that we are prepared for that.

We are not even prepared for the impact of a 1 Meter level sea level change in California. If you want to get a visual sense of that impact, take a look at this map.

The impact here is not so much the loss of farm land, or the displacement of people. It is the loss of fresh water for residential and agricultural use for much of this state.

If you want to understand more of the problem with today's political solutions, start be reading Monbiot's most recent (2006) book, Heat. There are no easy answers and no matter what anyone is pushing, emissions trading is not one of the effective hard answers.

Giving it a thought

Last night, I turned on the tele during the News Hour with Jim Lehrer and listened to Gwen Ifill talk to Al Gore about his new book, The Assault on Reason.

I'm deeply concerned that the role of reason, and facts, and logic in the way we make our decisions in America has been diminished significantly, to the point where we could make a decision to invade a country that didn't attack us, at a time when 70 percent of the American people genuinely had the impression and belief that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks of 9/11.

Then, this morning, I was reading the new material at Chris Mooney's intersection and he is dealing with the same thing. The fact that the political control of the "message" is so tight that one can never allow facts to get in the way.

Maybe it has to do with media that is more concerned about ratings than about news. All of the local channels did a whale of a job this past several weeks, devoting a significant amount of time and resources to the story of two lost whales. They even named one Delta. But the real story of the Delta is that of a small fish called the delta smelt. Maybe, Delta the whale may weigh more than all of the remaining delta smelt combined and the pumping of water from the Delta toward SoCal and the farms of the Central Valley has pulled this species close to extinction.

In each case cited, the political leadership has started with the answer and selected the observations that would fit those facts. They have made a science of language to frame problems that (in the case of 9/11 and Iraq) never existed or (in the case of global warming) are too scary in their implication of political failure to allow the public to believe that they just might be true.

I don't have solutions. I have developed a fairly well calibrated BS-Meter and use it frequently. Gore says that he has some remedies, but I don't think that politicians can be the source of change. If any one institution can perform that function, it is the media and they have steadfastly refused to do more than allow the talking heads to use both sides of their mouths.

Maybe one reason for the decline in newspaper circulation is that we all know they are part of the problem.

I am increasingly convinced that we need to have a Truth Think Tank (since being from a think tank is the one way to get media attention). Anyone want to sign on?

Global Warming is a partisan issue

Chris Mooney, blogging at Intersection today, gives us the ( yawn ) observation that Global Warming is a partisan issue in Washington.

The truth is that there's a strong climate of cowardice in Washington, D.C., when it comes to the subject of partisanship. Everyone wants to cite a few token mavericks from the other side in support of their position and then claim it's "bipartisan," while ignoring the starkly obvious fact that by and large, the two parties split dramatically on that issue. The media reinforces this phenomenon by constantly (and brainlessly) decrying "partisanship," as if it's somehow a bad thing.

As if we did not know that. When we seen our own Representatives like Dana Rohrbacker blabber away rather than seeking to bring out the truth.

We all know the Green Party positions on the issues related to climate change. Many of the those commenting on previous posts have given an account of the steps that they have personally taken to reduce their carbon footprint.

How, then, do we use the extremely partisan nature of this debate to help the Green Party? We know that a Pelosi led congress will only achieve half measures and none that will cause any pain for Democratic corporate backers. Where do we inject Green Party wisdom into the national debate?