Tom Hayden : Can Obama 'Rein In' His Presidency?

Obama: Who's making the call? Image from TomHayden.com.

Competing forces at play:
Can Obama ‘rein in’ his presidency?

Obama often follows a confusing pattern of leaning toward the military’s preference while planning in his private chambers to later change course.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2013

President Barack Obama’s important speech at the National Defense University on deescalating his drone war should be seen as a window into the state of play among competing forces in the national security state.

Obama is trying, in his own words, to “rein in” the vast executive power directing the secret operations of the Long War, which was originally unleashed by George Bush after 9/11. Obama ended the Iraq phase of American combat and has promised the same by 2014 in Afghanistan while sharply escalating the drone war and special operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and beyond.

So far he has avoided direct intervention in Syria, which would require ground troops, and Iran, which would ignite an unpredictable storm.

In the process, Obama has grown a cancer on his presidency in the form of tens of thousands of disgruntled and difficult-to-control Special Forces, CIA personnel, a legion of spies and mercenaries, mainly in the Middle East and South Asia, but including also a steel defensive ring along the U.S. border with Mexico and Central America.

The apparatus of this Long War is well described by Jeremy Scahill in Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, and his previous work, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Their numbers are classified but, according to Nick Turse, the Special Ops are 60,000 or more, with their personnel deployed abroad quadrupled since 9/11; their budget jumping from $2.3 billion after 9/11 to $6.3 billion today, not including funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Additionally there are 7,000 armed border patrol agents and thousands more in the DEA.

These forces constitute the cancer, and they may not be willing to follow a presidential command to wind it down. They might fight back to the end. According to Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, the generals tried to manipulate Obama into escalating Afghanistan into a “forever war.” The same forces undoubtedly have their objections to much of Obama’s recent speech as well.


Pentagon objections

The purposes of the Obama speech, as parsed by The New York Times on May 28, were to scale back the use of drones, target only those who actually threaten the U.S., remove the CIA from drone and targeting killing, and end the paradigm of the Global War on Terrorism.

The speech and its policies were “two years in the making,” reflecting the depth of unresolved tensions surrounding the administration. Obama, himself, first spoke of “reining in” the national security state in a Jon Stewart interview in October 2012.

There is no doubt that criticisms by Obama supporters, civil liberties lawyers, and many mainstream journalists helped the administration change its calculations. But greater pressures were exerted behind the scenes by the advocates of drones and counterterrorism.

• Obama kept secret until the day before the speech that he was lifting the moratorium on repatriating Guantanamo detainees, many of them on hunger strike, to Yemen, and appointing a new lead person to implement the transfers. Similarly, in 2009, when Obama announced his 33,000 troop escalation in Afghanistan, he slipped in a paragraph at the last minute pledging to begin his withdrawals in 18 months. The military objected.


• Against CIA objections, Obama decided to declassify the fact that U.S. drone strikes had killed Anwar al-Awlaki and three other Americans who “were not intentionally targeted.”


• The CIA and Pentagon “balked” at tighter restrictions on drones, and the CIA’s counterterrorism center resisted the president’s proposal “to take its drones away.”


• A fierce debate broke out over whether “signature strikes” would continue, the drone war version of racial profiling. The new Obama policy remains murky as a result of internal compromise, and the CIA reportedly succeeded in keeping control of the drone war in Pakistan through 2014.


• The criterion for drone strikes was modified from targets that are “significant threats to U.S. interests” to targets representing “a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” No sooner was the tighter standard announced than the CIA killed a Pakistan Taliban leader in apparent revenge for his organizing a suicide bombing which killed seven CIA operatives. Ignored in the militarized targeting criteria was the fact that the same figure was considered a “moderate” Taliban leader favoring a peaceful settlement of Pakistan’s internal bloodshed.


• Obama was unable to use his own speech to endorse a mechanism to carry forward an independent review of how and when drone attacks would occur. He could achieve no consensus in the administration.

Enlisting public opinion

Many will see these compromises and deferrals as evidence of Obama indecisiveness. But this is a leader who campaigned like a man of steel in 2008 and 2012, so the problem more likely lies in the nature of the state itself and the permanent forces contesting for power. If that is so, the Obama speech was designed to enlist public opinion in the internal arguments to come.

Obama often follows a confusing pattern of leaning toward the military’s preference while planning in his private chambers to later change course. Obama escalated in Afghanistan, then deescalated. He escalated the drone attacks, then sharply reduced them this past year.

He escalated deportations, then sued Sheriff Joe Arpaio and legalized the status of 1 million Dreamers by executive order. He dispatched DEA and even CIA agents in Mexico’s bloody drug war, then called for a new “conversation” about shifting to a harm-reduction approach.

In this zigzagging course Obama has sent thousands of largely clandestine troops and police into battles they could not win, causing enormous potential resentment and pushback. When the union representative of 7,000 border patrol agents testifies in defiance against Obama’s relaxed enforcement policies, you can assume that many in the national security state are considering forms of refusal to obey their commander-in-chief. Many will not deescalate quietly or loyally.

There is a disturbing analogy here with the 1960-63 John F. Kennedy era. JFK campaigned on a Cold War pledge to fight a long twilight struggle against communism. Like Obama, JFK became enthralled with special forces as a secret counterforce against radical insurgencies in Latin America.

The counterterrorism policies unleashed by JFK would lead eventually to the CIA’s tracking down Che Guevera, whose assassination was witnessed by a CIA agent in 1967, a parallel with Obama’s raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Kennedy gradually evolved toward a greater wisdom in the three years of his presidency; antagonizing many in what Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. At first, Kennedy went along with the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, conceived by the CIA under Eisenhower. But Kennedy refused to be drawn into sending American ground troops, which doomed the invasion of Cuba and provoked a violent right-wing Cuban backlash in Miami. Those Cuban exiles remained a virulent force in American politics down through the present time.

Then, after the near-apocalypse of the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy moved steadily toward ending the nuclear arms race with the Russians, and turned instead to supporting the domestic goals of the 1963 March on Washington. JFK sent advisers to South Vietnam but showed a strong reluctance to dispatch American ground troops. In November 50 years ago, he was dead, to the unforgettable cheers of the John Birchers and the Cuban exiles, and to the more muted satisfaction of elements in the CIA and military-industrial complex.

It is by no means inevitable or even likely that Obama will meet JFK’s fate, although even the Homeland Security Agency has reported rising assassination threats due to the election of a black president and economic depression for many in the white working class. What is most important is to realize that change can evolve unexpectedly, due first to the experiences of a president while in office -- JFK regarding Cuba and nuclear weapons -- and the persistent pressure of activists demanding change -- the Freedom Riders, SNCC, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the same time, the reaction against the “threat” of change is relentless and explosive -- the Goldwater movement, the Reagan presidency.

In the Republicans' seemingly crazed opposition to everything Obama represents, and their well-organized “fixes” to their electoral deficit -- Citizens United, voter suppression, a partisan Supreme Court, reapportionment to gain Electoral College advantage, etc. -- there is a pattern of resistance that Obama himself may have underestimated.

The Republican intransigence is at least, on the surface, something that can be seen and confronted. But it is also connected to the cancerous tumors of the security state, which citizens hardly encounter and cannot easily access.

The question at hand is what force can be strong enough to offset the power of those wishing to trap Obama in the legacy of an Imperial Executive he does not want to pass to an unpredictable successor. And if there is not a civic power strong enough to put the cancer in remission, what does that say about the state of American democracy?

This article was also published at TomHayden.com.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Politicians Refuse to Protect the Public

Explosion at fertilizer plant in West, Texas, April 17, 2013. Photo by Andy Bartee / KVUE.com.

Texas explosion, guns, and fracking:
Politicians refuse to protect the public

Only a dramatic revolution of values focused on respect for people, creatures great and small, and the natural world can make life worth living for our descendants.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / April 22, 2013

While the safety and welfare of the public should be the minimal standard to judge the actions of politicians, recent events and public debates demonstrate the inadequacies of our political system and the failure of our politicians to assure public safety.

People throughout the U.S. learned in their local newspapers and on television of the April 18 explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, that killed and maimed over a hundred people, and destroyed homes and businesses located in a five-block radius of the plant. Inadequate regulation of such inherently dangerous operations put the people and buildings of the town of just over 2,800 residents in grave danger. The explosion destroyed 50 homes and an apartment building, and it damaged a middle school and a nursing home.

After so many lives are lost, it is not enough merely to declare a state of emergency, as did Gov. Rick Perry, who opposes most government regulation for the safety of citizens. With adequate regulation, most of those lives would have been spared. But saving lives requires a “state of care” before emergencies happen. And most politicians don’t care enough to fix the problem.

A second event, which will cost many more lives, occurred in the United States Senate this past week on the same day as the West explosion. An ineffective bill to address gun violence failed to get enough support to expand background checks for gun buyers (much less ban assault weapons, and ban high-capacity gun magazines). The National Rifle Association (NRA) incited its members to badger senators to oppose the measure through phone calls, e-mails, and letters. The NRA spent $500,000 on the day of the vote alone on an advertising campaign against the pitifully inadequate legislation.

The public safety cannot be adequately protected from gun violence with anything short of total gun registration and severe penalties for possessing an unregistered gun. Registration, reports of all transfers of guns, universal background checks, and mandatory reporting of stolen guns would enable law enforcement agencies to track guns used in criminal activities, arrest and prosecute offenders, and gradually reduce gun possession by criminals and the mentally unstable. None of these measures are unconstitutional under Supreme Court decisions, and they do not violate the Second Amendment.

As Robert Parry explained recently citing (research by Steven Krulick), “the key point about the Second Amendment is that it was never about an individual’s right to possess guns without restrictions. It was framed mostly out of concern that a standing army could become excessively powerful and that the states should maintain their own citizen militias.” Certainly, it had nothing to do with the modern libertarian claim that it is about the right to possess guns so that we can occasionally revolt anew and kill elected representatives.

Nevertheless, four Senate Democrats voted against the weak gun control bill introduced in the Senate: Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mark Begich of Alaska, and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. As Joe Nocera, a New York Times columnist explained it, “The four Democrats -- along with many Republicans -- quake in fear of the National Rifle Association.”

With overwhelming public support for gun control, even among members of the NRA, only the money in politics, focused on selected members of Congress by groups like the NRA, can explain the unwillingness of so many public officials to protect the public from gun violence like that at Sandy Hook Elementary School last year or the persistent gun violence that results in nearly 1,000 intentional deaths each month in the U.S. (over 30 per day).

As reported by journalist Ezra Klein, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center has found “substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. This holds true whether you’re looking at different countries or different states.”

Klein also reports a clear correlation between states with stricter gun control laws and fewer deaths from gun-related violence:

Last year, economist Richard Florida dove deep into the correlations between gun deaths and other kinds of social indicators. Some of what he found was, perhaps, unexpected: Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths. The disclaimer here is that correlation is not causation. But correlations can be suggestive.

Florida explains that states which have one of three gun control restrictions in place -- assault weapons bans, trigger locks, or safe storage requirements -- have firearm death rates that are significantly lower than in states without the stricter gun control.

A third failure to protect the public safety involves the unregulated practice of fracking in the search for oil and gas in the U.S. The recent appearance of biologist, mother, and environmental activist Sandra Steingraber on Moyers & Company was a reminder that we don’t know much about the safety of the many chemicals used in fracking. Many of us have seen the images of water so contaminated with methane as a result of fracking that it can be lit on fire as it comes out of a home’s water faucet.

But Steingraber is concerned, as well, about other toxins she says are threatening our health by contaminating our air, water, and food. She calls these substances “toxic trespassers.” These substances are leading to earlier sexual maturation in girls. They are contaminating breast milk and affecting our children’s bodies at the molecular level. As Steingraber explains, breast milk “now has more dioxins, more toilet deodorizers, more mothproofing agents, dry cleaning fluid, pesticides, and P.C.B.'s than any other human food. And they didn't get there on purpose. They were carried to us by ecological forces outside of our individual control. They represent a form of toxic trespass.”

Toxic trespass occurs because our laws do not require that before a new substance is introduced into our environment (and into our bodies) it be proven safe. Our regulatory system benefits the economic interests of the corporations that produce the toxic trespassers rather than the health of the American people.

All of these matters concern the liberty interests of Americans to be free from human-made threats to our right to life and the pursuit of happiness. Public policy should be decided on the basis of what will protect the liberty of most of us, balanced against the liberty interests of the few. The right to be safe in our homes and neighborhoods can be protected by a government that serves the public interest.

The founders never intended gun ownership to be a personal right, no matter what five right-wingers on the Supreme Court now claim. The right to be free from contaminates in our water and air that may be carcinogenic should not even be a debate -- it should be as self-evident as Euclid’s first common notion.

But our real liberties -- as opposed to those imagined by some people -- are under greater threat today than they were in 1776. These threats are pushing the United States closer to becoming a failed state largely because our politicians have sold their souls to the wealthy who fund their political campaigns or threaten their re-election. This is no less true of Democrats than of Republicans, and involves most of the politicians in Congress and our state legislatures.

The American people don’t know what to do to take back their government from those who serve the wealthy special interests rather than the health, safety, and welfare of the vast majority of people -- the 99% who have insufficient money to buy influence and are not organized to take control of their government.

Perhaps we will become another in a long line of dead empires from Eastern dynasties to the Ottoman, the Roman, the Mongol, and the British empires, to name a few. We will continue to exist in some form, but there will be no luster. We will continue to tell ourselves that we are great and wonderful, but this will be self-delusion.

The so-called “world’s greatest democracy” will be a shell of democratic promise. The peoples of this planet will remember us as having been built first on the exploitation of the indigenous inhabitants of North America and Africa, then on the exploitation of the entire world’s natural resources, and finally on the degradation of human beings everywhere.

Our disrespect for people and nature will exhaust us morally and physically. Neither religion nor science will save us from such a fate. Only a dramatic revolution of values focused on respect for people, creatures great and small, and the natural world can make life worth living for our descendants. I wish I had more hope that such a revolution will occur.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Fear and the NRA

Political cartoon by Mike Luckovich / Atlanta Journal-Constitution / SECFanatics.com.

The NRA:
Perpetrator of 'fear itself'

McClatchy reports that for the last 40 years the NRA has succeeded in limiting and now even preventing research into the effects of gun use, sales, and crime.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / April 16, 2013

For most of my life, the NRA (National Rifle Association) has seemed inconsequential to me. But in the last few years, I have become more interested in its views, especially after the Supreme Court held in 2008 that Washington, D.C., could not prohibit hand guns.

Of course, the Supremes (in a majority opinion written by Antonin Scalia) had to ignore normal grammatical forms to conclude that the prefatory clause, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” did not affect the meaning of the second phrase: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

But I don’t want to quibble about grammar when bigger issues are at stake. Three concerns about gun regulation are at the forefront of the gun debate being dominated by the NRA:

1. Should the federal government conduct research into the public welfare aspects of guns?
2. Should all gun sales and transfers require a background check?
3. Should all guns be registered?

Out of fear -- real or imagined -- the NRA answers “no” to all three questions. Regarding the first question, McClatchy reports that for the last 40 years the NRA has succeeded in limiting and now even preventing research into the effects of gun use, sales, and crime:

Each year, lawmakers quietly tuck language into spending bills that restricts the ability of the federal government to regulate the firearms industry and combat gun crime. It’s the reason the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can’t research gun violence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation can’t use data to detect firearms traffickers, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can’t require background checks on older guns.

The Center for American Progress and Mayors Against Illegal Guns have identified the following major efforts to prevent gun-related research and study, as well as the use of information found in government files, by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and other federal agencies and entities:

• 1979 - a ban on centralizing firearm sales records of federally licensed gun dealers
• 1994 - a ban on transfer of functions, missions or activities of ATF to another agency or department
• 1996 - a prohibition on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to advocate or promote gun control
• 1996 - a prohibition on placing records from federally funded gun dealers that go out of business in an electronic, searchable database
• 1996 - a prohibition on redefining “curio or relic” gun, and prohibiting a curio or relic from being removed from the ATF list
• 2004 - a requirement that records from approved instant background checks must be destroyed within 24 hours
• 2004 - a prohibition on gun trace data being subject to subpoena for any state license revocation, civil lawsuit, or other proceeding unless filed by ATF
• 2004 - a ban on requiring federally licensed gun dealers to keep a physical inventory
• 2004 - a ban on allowing ATF to deny an application or renewal for a federally licensed gun dealer due to lack of activity
• 2005 - a ban on allowing ATF to deny an application for a permit to import “curio or relic” firearms
• 2005 - a prohibition on the admission of gun trace data in evidence
• 2005 - a ban on the need for an export license to export certain firearms parts or accessories to Canada
• 2011 - a denial of the right of the National Institutes of Health to advocate or promote gun control

What the NRA has to fear from public policy research or access to government information is beyond my imagination. But fear is the primary currency they use to buy the support of our politicians for their views and to frighten gun owners.

Research is intended to discover something new, inform citizens and lawmakers, and then use the new knowledge to promote the betterment of us all. But these goals do not serve the interests of the NRA’s primary beneficiary, the gun manufacturers and related industries, which have given almost $15 million to the NRA since 2005.

The NRA spent over $231 million in 2011 on its various activities (including lobbying), and contributes millions to political campaigns every election cycle. Its 4.5 million members, by virtue of their money and organization, dominate the other 310 million people who live in the U.S. to the point that only the NRA’s fears matter.

It is fair to say that the NRA leadership is ruled by people who are selected in a far from democratic process. A person has to be a member of the NRA for five years before becoming eligible to vote on any NRA governance matter or policy. A secretive nine-member board controls who can be nominated for positions of leadership.

Only about seven percent of NRA members participate in its elections, an indication that voting is an exercise in futility because of the tight controls on who gets nominated. Leadership is pretty much a closed shop, where outsiders are unwelcome. But most gun owners and NRA members, unlike the NRA leadership, have no quarrel with the common sense policies that most Americans support.

The second and third questions posed above are linked, at least in the fearful mind of the NRA’s Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre. In February, he said that background checks seem reasonable, but what they are really about is registering guns, and that concept is anathema. LaPierre believes that names and addresses of gun owners cannot be kept secret and would be published for people everywhere to see.

This happened to gun permit holders in two New York counties last December. LaPierre sees this as something approaching Armageddon. He imagines that gun owners would then be targeted by criminal elements intent on stealing the guns from law-abiding citizens, or by foreign governments intent on taking us over.

I find it difficult to imagine this as a reasonable fear because we have had car registration, for instance, almost as long as we have had cars. Cars usually are stolen while they are somewhere out in public, often because they are left unlocked or with the keys in them, not because they are registered. And we register constantly for gym memberships, Facebook, medical services, and a host of other activities with no thought of fear of harm.

Our houses are listed on public records that give their approximate value, but so far as we know, those public records have not led criminals to choose to break into them because of their value. Criminals rarely pick houses based on that criterion. They tend to pick houses to burglarize based on how easy it will be to enter them and get away with a burglary. Far more houses are burglarized during publicly-announced events like funerals and weddings than they are because they are on the tax roles for all to see.

And the government has done a good job preventing access to the home addresses of police officers, for instance, so they and their families will not be harmed by a criminal seeking retribution. It seems reasonable that gun registration data bases could be secured as well. But LaPierre fears that those data bases could easily be hacked and published for all to see.

In contrast to LaPierre’s fear-based views, a 2012 poll by Republican pollster Frank Luntz found that 82% of gun owners, 74% of whom either were or had been NRA members, favored background checks for purchasers of guns. A New England Journal of Medicine poll conducted this past January had almost identical results except that the figure for gun owners favoring background checks was 84%.

Another January poll by the Pew Research Center found that 85% of gun owners were in favor of making all gun sales, including those sold privately and at gun shows, subject to background checks -- what is usually termed “universal background checks.” A CBS/New York Times poll, also in January, found that 85% of those polled who live in a household with an NRA member supported the kind of universal background checks LaPierre finds abhorrent.

Among Americans in general, the Pew poll found 85% in favor of universal background checks, whether the person was Republican, Democrat, or Independent. A CBS/New York Times poll found that that 92% favored universal background checks. Even a Fox News poll conducted in January found that 91% of respondents favored universal background checks.

What LaPierre really fears, based on an interview he gave to Fox News, is that universal background checks, along with registration, would lead to the confiscation of guns by the government. While this could be true for certain types of weapons -- such as assault rifles or large gun clips -- general confiscation of guns would violate the Constitution, something that LaPierre knows well.

LaPierre seems to believe that since we have the Second Amendment in the Constitution giving the people the right to own guns, this should trump the ability of the Congress to require that those constitutionally-approved guns be registered. This is a strange notion, considering that various other constitutional amendments also provide for the right to vote, but people are required in all jurisdictions to register to exercise that right.

Gun registration seems to be well within the parameters of Constitutional governance if only we had a Congress in tune with the will of the people. But we do not.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Bruce Melton : The Climate Change Drought Is Over / 3

Wind turbines on the mainland as seen from the backside of Padre Island National Seashore, at mile 25 on the four wheel drive only beach. Photo © Bruce Melton, 2012.
The Climate Change awareness
drought is over
Part Three: It’s only pollution

For decades, the concept of installing privies in every house, business, and public building, and then piping human waste to a central treatment system, was perceived as lunacy that would bankrupt society.

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / June 14, 2012

[This is the third of a three-part series exploring the recent change in public awareness of climate change issues, the causes behind the change, biases, the latest science showing how much our climate has already changed, and academic support for a vigorous change in messaging.]

AUSTIN, Texas -- The shift in public opinion about climate change will likely only grow larger. This shift has been caused in a large way by an increase in unprecedented extreme weather caused by climate change, as climate scientists have been warning us about for 20 years.

Americans are beginning to disregard what the “voices” have been telling us about the great climate science conspiracy. Some of the most amazing evidence of how much our climate has already shifted has now been published. A vast majority of Americans have been highly supportive of our government acting on climate change, even before the shift in public awareness began.

Analysis of our leaders' positions on “green” issues, vs. their success in 2008 and 2010, shows that vocal support for “green“ issues led to success more often than silence on the issue. It is time to change the climate tone to one of aggressive vocal advocacy for the consensus position.


I would like to begin this final part in the series by repeating a little from Part Two. Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University, one of the lead authors of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Reports, member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and one of the pivotal international researchers in climate science, tells us in his book, Earth the Operators Manual, that about 100 reports have been published concerning the economic impacts of the solutions to climate change and they are focusing in on one thing.

The solutions to fixing our climate pollution problem will cost about one percent of global gross domestic product every year for 100 years. I’ve already told you that Alley says this astronomically sounding $540 billion a year is no more than we have invested in the cost of installing toilets and the infrastructure to collect, clean, and dispose of toilet water.

Here’s more. In the U.S. we need to spend about 0.75 percent of our average household income every year to maintain our sewer and water infrastructure ($375 per family considering the Census Bureau’s median household income of $50,000 per year in 2006). The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development tells us most of the developed world spends 0.5 to 2.4 percent of household income on this task with the U.S. being the lowest.

Other things that show the simplicity of this challenge include: in 2011 we spent $494 billion on marketing across the globe according to eMarketer Digital Intelligence; the U.S. annual military budget (not including wars) is right at a half billion dollars; the Congressional Budget Office says the Bush tax cuts cost about $115 billion a year or approximately the United States share if we are divvying this thing up according to who emits what; an article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in June 2011 tells us that routine weather events such as rain and cooler-than-average days can add up to an annual economic impact of as much as $485 billion in the United States alone; and in 2009 we spent $2.5 trillion in the U.S. on health care.

This is five times what Alley tells us the economics scholars think the cost of worldwide climate pollution control will be.

One more very important thing to consider about what professor Alley tells us is that these economic analyses only considered the costs. Not considered were the profits from the construction of the climate change pollution prevention devices, profits from avoidance once a carbon pollution tax is finally implemented, and benefits from the jobs created to build and maintain this new infrastructure. Also not considered would be the benefits to society of a clean energy economy.

So why is the general public not aware of the relative simplicity of the task of simply cleaning up the largest form of pollution caused by a single species in the known universe? It’s “The Voices”... It’s the voices and their campaign of deceit, discreditation, and disinformation that is almost complete. Their money reigns supreme.

The widely popular Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election on Tuesday, expected to be a closely contested contest, was blown to smithereens as Citizens United allowed just a few moneyed interests to outspend the Democrats by eight to one or $30.5 million to $3.9 million, says CBS News.

At the same time in California, the state with the lowest smoking rate in the country, there was a proposition on the ballot for new anti-smoking dollar-a-pack tax on tobacco products to fund cancer research. Bolstered by $12 million in anti-smoking campaign, it reached a 67 percent support level in March. It was slaughtered by tobacco industry advertising of $47 million in the final weeks. They won by less than a percentage point. Big brother is here, and it ain’t the government.

Let’s return from this world of corporate control and look at the real science some more: The money required to clean up climate pollution considers existing off-the-shelf technologies to do the job. Billionaires around the globe are investing in new technologies to do the job at a fraction of the price and earn billions in profits.

Remember, half a trillion a year is at stake. One of the leading examples is Global Thermostat in California that has developed a prototype that they say, if ramped up, could solve our climate pollution problems in 30 years for only $2 trillion or $70 billion a year. This is an eighth what most of the economic evaluations are saying is needed to do the job with existing technologies.

To finish these optimistic thoughts, there is a lot of messaging around focused on geoengineering and the wrong-headedness of such ventures; that this message will give people permission to emit more greenhouse gases and not reduce emissions.

Atmospheric carbon capture and land-based storage cannot be compared to pumping carbon into space through a hose suspended in the sky, putting bazillions of tiny mirror-like particles in the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun or a sun shade umbrella in deep space or any of the other grand-but-dangerous schemes.

Removing CO2 pollution from our atmosphere is little different from picking up trash on the beach or the side of the road and putting it in a landfill. The scale may be larger, but the comparison cannot be made to geoengineering’s risks.

To think that this type of pollution cleanup is wrong-headed, that it will give people permission to emit more greenhouse gases, is no more wrong-headed than thinking that picking up trash on the side of the road will give people permission to litter even more.

As Lord Nicholas Stern tells us (once chief economic advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair and author of one of the most complete economic evaluations to the solutions to climate pollution -- the Stern Report), we have to do everything we can at the same time to solve this problem.


How valid is the trend?

To be certain that a change in tone can be beneficial we need to know that the trends in awareness and climate change are valid and likely to continue. Because a significant portion of the awareness shift has been created by climate changes that have already happened, it is logical to assume that because the weather is predicted to become more extreme with greater warming, the awareness shift will likely continue to grow.

A really amazing piece of research that was recently published shows how much our climate has changed in the last 30 years. It shows that extreme temperature events are now occurring 10 to 100 times more frequently than during the period 1951 to 1981. This major piece of virtually unknown climate science comes from a paper in-press at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) as submitted by scientists from NASA and Columbia’s Earth Institute.

This change in climate that we have already seen can be related to having a 100-year heat wave every one to 10 years. This is like having the drought of the century -- the drought of record -- every one to 10 years. In another 30 years if the rate stays the same we can expect to see something like the thousand-year heat wave or the 10-thousand year heat wave happening every 10 years.

The authors tell us: “because we can project with a high degree of confidence that the area covered by extremely hot heat waves will continue to increase during the next few decades, even greater extremes will occur.”

This is exactly what we have been warned about by climate scientists for over 20 years. The rate of change is expected to accelerate as we continue to delay emissions reductions. The graphic below from this study by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia shows how markedly, persistently, and increasingly our climate has changed in the last 30 years.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.
To start with, this research evaluates Northern Hemisphere temperature. Northern Hemisphere temperatures have warmed more than the rest of the planet because there is more land in the northern half of our planet. The temperature increase over our oceans is smaller than over land because of what is called thermal inertia, or the ability of water to absorb more heat than land. This absorbed heat is transferred to deep cold water via sinking ocean currents and limits warming over oceans.

This means that the changes that you and I are likely to experience will be greater -- two times more than the global average. This is something that is very important in climate science that rarely gets acknowledged in the media. Up to 9 to 11 degrees of average warming across the planet by 2100 means up to 18 to 22 degrees of warming across large parts of Earth’s land surfaces.

Our climate has not shifted uniformly. High temperature records outpace low temperature records 2 to 1. Extreme temperature events are happening much more often than if our climate had just shifted by the 1.4 degrees of average warming already seen across the globe. There are a lot of important things to be found in this reporting of our changed climate and the statistics are complicated so I will take some time and go through everything. (Or, just check out the caption under the image above and skip ahead to the subtitle “No Reason to Believe.”)

Starting with the image on the left, three decades of temperature extremes in the Northern Hemisphere are graphed (red, orange, and green lines). The similarity between decades is obvious and represents the stability of our climate during this period. The middle graphic adds data for the three most recent decades (cyan, blue and magenta).

Each one of these is shifted to the right (hotter) and if you look carefully you can see the shift increases with each decade. The graphic on the right (green, black and magenta) shows the difference between 1951-1981 and today. There has been a shift of three standard deviations in the extreme temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. (I will get to standard deviations momentarily.)

The right hand side of each decade has shifted farther to the right than the left hand side of each decade which means that hot extremes are increasing more than cold extremes, which are staying about the same. (The graphs of the last two or three decades are cut off on the right as they extend much further than shown. This is the way they came in the paper and the quote below from the research describes three standard deviations, not two as shown. The shift is actually more than three standard deviations, but that’s even more complication that I will leave behind. Sorry for the confusion, this stuff is like rocket science.)

In total the research says the shift is three standard deviations. To simplify what this means, consider the quote below from the paper (I have omitted the extra wording about standard deviations):

A new category of hot summertime outliers has emerged... with the occurrence of these outliers having increased 1-2 orders of magnitude [10 to 100 times] in the past three decades. Thus we can state with a high degree of confidence that extreme summers, such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, are a consequence of global warming, because global warming has dramatically increased their likelihood of occurrence.

A further quote to help:

The perceptive person (old enough to remember the climate of 1951-1980) should recognize the existence of climate change. This is especially true in summer. Summers with [average] temperature in the category defined as "cold" in 1951-1980 . . . which occurred about one-third of the time in 1951-1980, now occur with a frequency about 10%, while those in the "hot" category have increased from about 33% to about 75%.

What we are seeing today is that the coldest summertime temperatures relative to “the normal period represented by 1951 to 1981” happen only one-tenth of the time today compared to one-third of the time back in the day. The “hot” temperatures, instead of happening one-third of the time like in 1951-1981, now happen more than two-thirds of the time (75%). One more quote:

These extreme [hot] temperatures were practically absent in the period of [1951 to 1981], covering only a few tenths of one percent of the land area, but they have occurred over about 10% of land area in recent years.

No reason to believe it will not continue

This work out of NASA is yet another very compelling description of how our climate has already changed and there is no reason, academically or logically, to believe it will not continue to change and that the changes will not continue their trend of acceleration.

Putting two and two together; considering the reason why public perception has changed because of the increase in extreme weather and the likelihood that the extremes will continue to become more extreme faster, there is no reason to believe that awareness will not continue to grow.

This assumption must also consider some decrease in awareness for relatively short periods from hyper press coverage of events/messages that are designed to discredit climate science or possibly support the election of a Republican as president in November. But for the last three years, political cues have changed and these cues have resulted in part of the change in public opinion about climate.

Also related to political cues are these two new movements called Tea Party and Occupy. These two groups are more similar than one might think. Their political and social messages are generally far (way far) apart, but their motivation is a different story. Both groups seem to be motivated by what they feel is a loss of control where government/politics and or big business/big money and their government/political relationships are concerned.

Big business, money and its corresponding political support among conservatives has vastly shaped the world of political “cues” related to American’s beliefs on climate change. As the country’s support of conservative leaders or institutions increases or decreases, awareness of climate change issues also increase or decrease as described by Lieserwitz 2012 (the Yale paper from Part One).

The important concept here is that both the Tea Party and Occupy believe that politics and/or big money have negatively influenced government. These folks do not trust politicians/government and big money. This is a widespread sentiment of the American public that can be seen in polling on banking, insurance, and U.S. lawmakers.

Not surprisingly, these movements are not just American. In Europe they have the Pirate Party, and very similar to both Occupy and the Tea Party, their goals are nebulous and as yet ill-defined. What the Pirate Party can decide on however is they want to see transparency in government and Internet freedom.

The views of conservative vs. liberal politics towards climate change are apparent all around us. Conservatives generally disagree with the climate consensus and liberals generally agree. But the widespread nature of this relationship tells even more of the story.


A Pew Center study of the climate change beliefs of different individuals has looked at eight classifications of conservatives and liberals (in the Graphic “Views of Global Warming,” staunch conservatives are “Tea Partiers”). A more in-depth description of the other types can be seen at the link in the references, but for the most part the rest are somewhat more easily identifiable.

This work shows very graphically that an increase in liberal politics means an increase in the belief of the scientific consensus.

A fall 2011 survey by the Brookings Institute tells us that 78 percent of Democrats believe there is solid evidence supporting the consensus on climate change where only 47 percent of Republicans believe there is solid evidence.

A study out of Yale and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication in March 2012 (in the graphic “Climate Change in the American Mind”) looks at the issue differently. It finds that nearly twice as many (38 percent) of Democratic respondents believe the national priority for global warming should be high to very high vs. Republicans (20 percent). Also of note in this study, 56 percent of Republicans in October 2011 believe global warming priorities should be low vs. 48 percent in March 2012.


A study in Sociological Quarterly from April 2011, carried out by McCright and Dunlap of Oklahoma State University and led by Michigan State, analyzed 10 years of data from Gallup's environmental poll and found that the gap between Republicans and Democrats who believe global warming is happening widened by 30 percent from 2001 to 2010.

The Pew Center’s latest (March 2012) also tells us that 51 percent of Republicans and Independents say it is warmer but it is due to natural causes while 47 percent of Democrats say it is due to manmade global warming. From the March 2012 Gallup survey, 43 percent of Democrats believe warmer than normal temperatures are because of climate change, vs. 19 percent of Republicans.

On the topic of American’s beliefs about government action on climate change: CNN April 2011 tells us that 71 percent of Americans favor funding for the EPA to enforce regulations on greenhouse gases. Gallup says in June 2010 that 42 percent favor the Obama position on climate change vs. 33 percent that favor the Republican position. ABC News/Washington Post in June 2010 finds that 71 percent of Americans think the federal government should regulate the release of greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars, and factories in an effort to reduce global warming.

Virginia Commonwealth University 2010 reveals 51 percent of Americans feel that the federal government is doing too little to reduce global warming. Pew Center 2010 adds that 52 percent of Americans favor setting limits on carbon dioxide emissions and making companies pay for their emissions, even if it may mean higher energy prices. USA Today/Gallup 2009 said that 55 percent of Americans favored the U.S. signing a binding global treaty at the Copenhagen Summit that would require the U.S. to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Finishing off these numbers, the MacInnis, Krosnick and Villar study from Stanford and Woods Institute in 2011 analyzed the 2008 presidential election and the 2010 Congressional/Senate election and found something surprising. Democrats who took “green” positions on climate change won much more often than Dems who remained silent and Republicans who took “not-green” positions on climate change won less often than Republicans who remained silent.

MacInnis tells us his research suggests that elected officials should take vigorous public positions on climate change because most Americans view this favorably.

• Democrats won 69% of the races in which the Democrat took a green position and the Republican was silent/mixed.
• Democrats won 68% of the races in which the Democrat took a green position and the Republican took a not-green position.
• Democrats won 18% of the races in which the Democrat took a green position and the Republican also took a green position.
• Democrats won 17% of the races in which both candidates were silent/mixed.
• Democrats won 4% of the races in which the Democrat was silent/mixed and the Republican took a not-green position.
• Democrats won 0% of the races in which the Democrat was silent/mixed and the Republican took a green position.

Summarizing these findings the paper tells us:

It is interesting to note that these findings have simple implications for Democratic campaign strategies but tricky ones for Republicans. It appears that Democrats enhanced their chances of victory by taking a green position, regardless of what their Republican opponents said on the issue. But the optimal strategy for Republicans appears to have hinged on what their opponents said. If a Republican could be confident that his/her Democratic opponent would remain silent on climate change, then the Republican would have gained by expressing a not green position. But once a Democrat expressed a green position, the Republican would have been wisest to remain silent/mixed, because expressing a not-green position appears to have hurt his/her chances of victory.

From the press release for the study Krosnick tells us: "Our studies show no decline in public belief in the existence and threat of climate change, and that politicians might benefit from taking a 'green' stance."

The Yale study Climate Change in the American Mind, tells us that three Americans to one would be more likely to vote for a candidate that supports a “revenue neutral” shift in taxation increasing fossil fuels taxes and reducing federal income tax by the same amount. Breaking it down by party, Republican respondents would support such a shift by two to one, Independents three to one, Dems five to one (74 percent). In the presidential vote this year, 55 percent of Americans say that global warming will be one of several important issues they use to determine how to cast their vote (60 percent Dems, 41 percent Republicans and 59 percent Independents).


Conclusions:

Awareness about climate change issues is increasing because of political cues and unprecedented weather actually caused by our already changed climate. Republicans overwhelmingly disagree with the scientific consensus whereas Democrats agree. Only 60 percent of climate scientists believed that Earth was warming in 1991, compared to 97 precent today. Americans' views on climate change are about 20 years behind those of the vast majority of climate scientists. Lawmakers voicing an opinion on “green” issues are much more likely to win than if they are silent and Democrats are much more likely to win if they voice a positive “green” opinion.

Climate change impacts happening now are making the case for us. Public opinion is changing directly because, in the backs of our minds, we have been listening all these years. Now we see the predictions coming true and are converting. The extremes are convincing people through messaging work that has already been performed. Not that we don't need to do more. This article has been all about starting new campaigns with a different tone.

The conversions will continue as the extremes continue to ramp up. The majority to the vast majority of Americans already believe and already want our government to act. What needs to be done now is to convince those already convinced that things are bad enough and that the predictions are valid enough that they need to do something about it themselves, or that they and their children will face the balance of the predictions of dangerous climate change.


We can completely circumvent the dissenter’s campaigns. Disassociation is what is needed. Their message is not credible. This is about convincing our leaders that the time has come to do something. And how do we do that? We simply threaten them with un-election. Tried and proven, this tactic can change their votes in mere minutes. But we have to have enough warm bodies engaged. Enough voters need to own this issue to convince our leaders that it's our way or the highway.

With even more dangerous climate changes still in the pipeline, the voting stance of our elected leaders will change organically like the change in public awareness that we have seen in the last several years. But this will take time that we may not have. If we help it along it will come faster.

Twenty-first century social media have had great impacts on politics recently in numerous issues and these include: Obama’s election in 2008, the Tea Party and Congressional elections in 2010, Iranian elections in 2010, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Planned Parenthood and breast cancer screenings, Rush Limbaugh’s feminist comments blowback, KONY 2012. There are about 250 million Internet users, over 100 million smartphone users, 133 million Facebook users and over 24 million Twitter users.

This is no longer the 20th century. “Click” activism is here. What we did back then, and in the early part of this century, before we decided that climate change was a dirty word, is not going to work today. We need to rely on different strategies. The voting statistics tell us that Dems who speak up about green issues win more often than those who remain silent. Why are we not speaking up? Social media has obviously made a difference recently, so why are we not embracing this technology with our message?

The climate change denial tactics of the conservatives have obviously been successful. It is only when Mother Nature's brute force exerts more influence on individuals that the tide has begun to turn. Why are we not using the tactics of the conservatives to help our citizenry understand what they should do? Why are our Democratic Party leaders not refusing to do one single thing conservative politicians want us to do instead of compromising beyond our principles?

Why are we not using emotional issues in aggressive ways, like the Conservatives’ messaging campaigns, to convince the undecided that they need to pay attention to what the climate scientists are saying about our children's future? Why are our Democratic Party leaders not standing on top of the conservatives' misrepresentations of climate change and repeatedly revealing them to the American public for what they are? Why are the vast majority of us “silently” supporting the climate science consensus when an aggressive vocal stance wins more often?

It’s time to come out of the climate closet and take a deliberate stance. The era of politically incorrect climate change messaging is over. Take a stand and urge your leaders to take a stand. We can vote the disbelievers off the climate island and win.


[Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, can be found at this link. More climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog. Images and photographs copyright © Bruce Melton 2012 unless otherwise referenced.]


References:  

For decades, the concept of installing privies in every house... was perceived as lunacy that would bankrupt society: Alley, Earth: The Operators’ Manual, W. W. Norton and Company, 2011, pp. 209-219. These 10 pages offer an excellent discussion of the transition from a toiletless society riddled with cholera to one that has successfully installed toilets and their infrastructure across the world and conquered the cholera challenge. Of the extensive references in Alley’s book, the UCLA website dedicated to John Snow may be the most useful: http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.html
$485 in normal weather damage in the U.S. every year: Lazo et al., U. S. economic sensitivity to weather events, American Meteorological Society, June 2011. http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2011BAMS2928.1
Why the Northern Hemisphere warms more than the Southern Hemisphere: Kang and Seager, Croll Revisited, Why is the Northern Hemisphere Warmer than the Southern Hemisphere? Lamont Dougherty at Columbia University, submitted Journal Climate, 2011. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/pub/seager/Kang_Seager_subm.pdf World Meteorological Organization’s Status of the global climate. http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/wcdmp/statement/wmostatement_en.html
By 2050 (or even 2040) land temperature increases in the Northern Hemisphere will increase by 18 to 22 degrees F, more than double global average projections: Ganguly et al., Higher trends but larger uncertainty and geographic variability in 21st century temperature and heat waves, PNAS September 15, 2009. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/37/15555.full.pdf+html
High temperature records outpace low temperature records 2 to 1: Trenberth et al., Current Extreme, Climate Communication, Science and Outreach, September 2011.pdf http://climatecommunication.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Extreme-Weather-and-Climate-Change.pdf
Moscow (2010) and European (2003) and Texas (2011) heat waves caused by climate change: Feudale and Shukla, Influence of sea surface temperature on the European heat wave of 2003 summer, Part I, an observational study, Climate Dynamics, 2010. http://www.iges.org/people/Shukla%27s%20Articles/2010/Part_II.pdf  Rhamstorf and Coumou, Increase of extreme events in a warming world, PNAS, October 24, 2011. http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_coumou_2011.pdf Hansen et al., Public Perception of Climate Change and the New Climate Dice, PNAS in publication. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1204/1204.1286
Extremes are happening 10 to 100 times more frequently: Hansen, Sato and Ruedy, Public Perception of Climate Change and the New Climate Dice, (in-press) PNAS, 2012. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1204/1204.1286.pdf
The Bias of Fox News: Krosnick and MacInnis, Frequent Viewers of Fox News are Less Likely to Accept Scientists’ Views on Global Warming, NSF grant, Stanford, 2010. http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Fox-News.pdf Press Release: http://woods.stanford.edu/research/climate-views-elections.html Feldman et al., Climate on Cable, Nature and Impact of Global Warming Coverage on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, International Journal of Press/Politics, XX, 2011. http://climateshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/FeldmanStudy.pdf
Pew Center, Political Typology: Pew Center, Beyond Red vs. Blue, Political Typology, May 4, 2011. http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/Beyond-Red-vs-Blue-The-Political-Typology.pdf
Winning more votes: MacInnis, Krosnick and Villar, The Impact of Candidates Statements about Climate Change on Electoral Success in 2008 and 2010, Stanford, August 2011. http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Krosnick-Global-Warming-Voting-Statements.pdf
Revenue neutral tax shift: Yale, Climate Change in the American Mind, Public Support for Climate and Energy Policies in March 2012. http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/Policy-Support-March-2012.pdf
American’s views on climate change are about 20 years behind those of the vast majority of climate scientists’: Climate Scientists Agree on Warming, Disagree on Dangers, and Don’t Trust the Media’s Coverage of Climate Change, George Mason University, STATS, 2008. http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html

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Bruce Melton : The Climate Change Awareness Drought is Over / 1

Photo © Bruce Melton, 2012.
The climate change
awareness drought is over
Part One: It’s time to change the tone

The shift in awareness is very encouraging and seems quite likely to be more or less permanent because the number of unprecedented weather events will very likely continue to increase.

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2012

[This is the first of a three-part series exploring the recent change in public awareness of climate change issues, the causes behind the change, biases, the latest science showing how much our climate has already changed, and academic support for a vigorous change in messaging.]

AUSTIN, Texas -- Polls, surveys and academic evaluations of public opinion are showing a shift in our collective understanding of climate change. Since the turn of the century, belief in the causes of and reality of climate change has fluctuated wildly at levels below those seen in the 1990s.

Some of this change has been caused by political cues. These are the messages that we get from our leaders and interest groups motivated to “advertise” their message. Change in awareness is also caused by actual climate extremes. Because the extremes are here to stay and there is a growing distrust of the “voices” that advertise the message being disproven by the extremes, the increasing change in awareness is grounds for a shift in advocacy policy towards how we urge for climate change action.

In a 2008 report, George Mason University says that only 60 percent of climate scientists believed that Earth was warming in 1991, compared to 97% today. Public understanding of climate issues was fair to poor until the Bush Administration came into office and awareness significantly declined. But President Clinton is not blameless because he first failed to do something about Senate Resolution 98 (in 1997) that refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and for four more years did not sign.

Bush’s subsequent failure to sign and then his premeditated campaign to derail international climate change policy work gave Americans permission to deny. The United States was the only country in the world except for Afghanistan and South Sudan that did not sign Kyoto.

Beginning in 2005 we saw a string of unprecedented blizzards in the northeastern U.S. and northern Europe. The cold weather convinced many that climate change was indeed as the voices were saying, and that they could continue to disregard the message from scientists. In 2009 more political cues penetrated the media deeply with the theft of climate scientists’ emails and attention being drawn to a single error in the 2007 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Report (Known as Himalayagate) -- and a slanderous campaign discrediting the 2007 IPCC reporting on the Amazon was faulty (Amazongate).

The climate science community hoped things would change with Obama’s election in 2008. His message about climate change, although with muted action, was radically different from the Bush Administration’s message. Political cues had radically changed across the country and even the failed Copenhagen Summit kept climate change in the news and was laying the foundation for a change in awareness.

In 2010 it finally happened. The press was paying attention to scientific findings showing that blizzards and snowtastrophes were associated with an unprecedented weather pattern in the Arctic, caused by climate change, sending abnormally severe winter weather far south on a berserk jet stream.

Then unprecedented weather simply exploded in 2010 with the Russian heat wave and Pakistan floods and in 2011 the extremes went off the charts. A study led by Anthony Leiserowitz out of Yale released in February 2012 tells us:

A large majority of Americans believe that global warming made several high profile extreme weather events worse, including the unusually warm winter of December 2011 and January 2012 (72%), record high summer temperatures in the U.S. in 2011 (70%), the drought in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 (69%), record snowfall in the U.S. in 2010 and 2011 (61%), the Mississippi River floods in the spring of 2011 (63%), and Hurricane Irene (59%).

For 20 years, the vast majority of climate scientists have been warning us that changes like these would happen if we did not reduce our emissions. We did not and they did. Now these same scientists (and more) are warning us that the extremes will continue to worsen even if we do stop all emissions, and a longer delay means more danger than otherwise. The message is getting through.

The Yale study tells us that over the past several years, Americans say the weather in the U.S. has been getting worse rather than better by a margin of over 2 to 1 (52% vs. 22%). The National Climatic Data Center tells us that 14 weather disasters costing more than a billion dollars each (inflation adjusted) happened in 2011. This is 56 percent more than the previous record of nine set in just 2005 and three times as many as the average of the last decade (4.8 per year, 3.8 in the 1990s).

Peer reviewed literature is now coming out that shows, in addition to the unprecedented blizzards, things like the Moscow heat wave in 2010, the Pakistan floods in 2010, the European heat wave of 2003, and the Texas heat wave of 2011 (in-press) were caused by climate change. The National Center for Atmospheric Research tells us that across the planet high temperature records are happening twice as often as low temperature records. In a stable climate this ratio should be one to one. The Yale study goes on:

About half of all Americans say that heat waves (53%), droughts (46%) and very heavy rain storms (43%) have become more common in their local area over the past few decades. People in the Northeast and Midwest are more likely to report that heavy rainstorms have become more frequent in their local area, while people in the South and West are more likely to report that droughts have increased.

Many Americans also say that extreme weather has increased the occurrence of other problems in their local area, including harm to crops (46%), floods (39%), problems with air quality (38%), forest fires (34%), problems with water quality (31%), and problems with transportation (23%). People in the Northeast and Midwest are more likely to report that local floods and harm to crops have become more frequent, while people in the South and West are more likely to report that forest fires in their local area have become more frequent.

The shift in awareness is very encouraging and oddly, even more encouraging is the concept that the shift seems quite likely to be more or less permanent because the number of unprecedented weather events will very likely continue to increase. The Brookings Institute tells us the change in awareness began in the spring of 2010.

Americans' environmental priorities have shown global warming at the very bottom since at least 2004. But it’s the relative position of the issue that counts, however (and of course the other issues being measured). When we compare March 2011 to March 2012 we see that those who “worry a great deal” about global warming have increased 5 percent to 30 percent. The lowest it has ever been in this record that dates back to 1989 is 24 percent in 1997.

Gallup’s 1997 to 2011 poll about public belief in the seriousness of global warming shows a 4 percent increase from 2010 to 2011. Pew shows a 6 percent increase in the belief that evidence is ”solid” from 2010 to 2011. Rasmussen is up 4 to 6 percent since 2010. Another Gallup poll from 1989 to 2011, about how much individuals personally worry about climate change, is also up 4 percent in 2011.

The Brookings Institute shows a 10 percent increase in the belief of solid evidence showing Earth’s temperature has been getting warmer in the 18-month period between spring 2010 and fall 2011. And finally, once again looking at Gallup’s long-term list of Americans' environmental concerns, global warming is still on the bottom but that five point increase from 25 to 30 percent is a 20 percent increase in one year.

Overall this is a solid 3 to 5 percent annual increase (or more), which is a very healthy change in overall public perception. Considering that this rate will likely increase, in just two or three years public sentiment could be at an all-time high.


Biased? (The science and/or the polls and petitions and “is this weather or climate we are talking about?”)

Nonbelievers out there would say my evaluation is one-sided or cherry-picked and that I should be looking at “other” sources of information and that public belief is a consequence of the climate scientists’ or government conspiracy. So looking at the three major treatises of the dissenter groups, the most astonishing is the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine Global Warming Petition Project with signatures of more than 31,000 scientists.

The original petition in 1998 that collected 17,000 signatures included a 12-page peer review-like paper that looked exactly like a U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) publication, complete with date, volume, and page numbers (it was not a published paper of any kind). The author of the petition, Frederick Seitz (founder of the Marshall Institute), is a former president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS has taken the extraordinary step of disassociating itself from the Oregon Petition in this statement:

The petition was mailed with an op-ed article from The Wall Street Journal and a manuscript in a format that is nearly identical to that of scientific articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. [the NAS statement goes on]. The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.

This “petition” contains signatures of over 13,000 medical doctors, engineers, and general science majors. Many, if not all, of these good folks could be qualified to say something about climate science, but are they? Generally, expert opinion in science is relegated to those with advanced degrees in specific disciplines. Engineers and medical doctors do not practice fundamental science, they apply fundamental science. There’s a big difference.

Out of all of the signatures that can even be identified, only an exceedingly small fraction are actual climate scientists. From the sidebar of Scientific American's “Climate of Uncertainty” in October 2001:

Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. [of the original 17,000] in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition -- one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages.

As an example of the lack of control in who signs this petition, there are 10,102 in the category of general engineering and general science broken down into I) Engineering (7,280), II) Electrical Engineering (2,169) and III) Metallurgy (384), and General Science (269). Not included in the engineering category are 223 nuclear engineers, 2,169 electrical engineers, 1,693 chemical engineers, and 2,637 mechanical engineers.

Over half (16,555) of the signatures are from engineers. Are engineers capable of understanding climate? Sure. I am an engineer. Are engineers represented in the academic literature publishing about climate? The answer is a resounding “no.” To finish with the Oregon Petition; it includes 81 food scientists and 384 metallurgical scientists.

Climate Change Reconsidered is an 880 page report prepared by the Marshall Institute and co-authored by Fred Singer. The opening remarks of the original video press conference of this 2009 report on their website primarily refers to the 31,000 “scientists” of the Oregon Institute Petition as their scientific support.

The header on their website tells us to “Learn the Benefits of Atmospheric CO2.” Singer is an 83-year-old physicist who made a name for himself studying clouds. Singer also made a name for himself fighting against the anti-smoking movement and he was outspoken against regulations to curb acid rain. Then he fought against global protection for the ozone layer.

Emailgate, Himalayagate, Amazongate, etc.: Theft of personal emails; a single error about Himalayan glacier among thousands of facts in the 2007 IPCC Report, and a Scribner’s citation error about the Amazon are resources that have been considered. The email scientists have been cleared of all charges by four separate independent investigations.

As for public opinion, there are certainly other sources of information on public opinion that I have not cited, and many of them say the same thing that I have reported, like the Public Religion Research Institute. But then there are those sources like The Heartland Institute or the George C. Marshall Institute that have carried out long and expensive campaigns to discredit.

When the Heartland Institute compares those who believe the consensus position on climate change to the Unabomber, a line must be drawn. Rush Limbaugh and the talking heads on Fox News use similar crude tools to frighten and attempt to discredit with their “message.” This is not something that happens in credible science.

Photo © Bruce Melton, 2012.
To conclude part one of this series, the relatively recent increase in unprecedented weather extremes has shaken up an increased public apathy towards climate change that has been prevalent since about the turn of the century. The opinions of the dissenters are well established, prominently advertised, and look enormously authoritative, but they lack hardly any credibility.

Climate scientists have been warning us that weather extremes would happen sooner if we did not reduce emissions. We did not and they did. The American public has broadly taken notice, blamed the unprecedented nature of these weather extremes on climate change, and this is represented by numerous public opinion polls, surveys, and recently published academic work.

It’s time to ramp up the discussion.

[In Part 2 (out of 3) of this series -- titled “Voices Tell Us the Warmists are Dead” -- we will explore academic work showing the lack of credentialed viewpoints in the scientific opinions of the dissenters, and the exceedingly small number of credentialed climate scientists that do not support the consensus.]

[Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, can be found at this link. More climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog. Photography © Bruce Melton, 2012]

References:

Gallup, March 30, 2012 In U.S., Global Warming Views Steady Despite Warm Winter: http://www.gallup.com/poll/153608/global-warming-views-steady-despite-warm-winter.aspx
Pew Center, Modest Rise in Number Saying There Is “Solid Evidence” of Global Warming, November 9-14, 2011 (Published December 1, 2011) : http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/12-1-11%20Global%20warming%20release.pdf
Yale 2012: Weather extremes caused by climate change have changed public awareness: Leiserowitz et al., Extreme-Weather-Climate-Preparedness, Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, April 2012.pdf http://www.climateaccess.org/sites/default/files/Leiserowitz_Extreme%20Weather%20Climate%20Preparedness.pdf
Gallup, March 30, 2012 - Americans' Worries About Global Warming Up Slightly: http://www.gallup.com/poll/153653/americans-worries-global-warming-slightly.aspx
Public belief that climate change is happening has only recently risen above 1991 beliefs of climate scientists: Climate Scientists Agree on Warming, Disagree on Dangers, and Don’t Trust the Media’s Coverage of Climate Change, George Mason University, STATS, 2008. http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html
Climate Change Cues: Brulle et al., Shifting public opinion on climate change. An empirical assessment of factors influencing concern over climate change in the US 2002 to 2010, Climatic Change, Feb 2012. http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~brullerj/02-12ClimateChangeOpinion.Fulltext.pdf

Leaders and interest groups capable of advertising climate misinformation: Cooper, Media Literacy as a Key Strategy Toward Improving Public Acceptance of Climate Change Science, Bioscience, March 2011. http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1525/bio.2011.61.3.8
Change in advocacy policy: Yale, Climate Change in the American Mind, Public Support for Climate and Energy Policies in March 2012. http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/Policy-Support-March-2012.pdf
Weather Extremes Caused by Climate Change: Rhamstorf and Coumou, Increase of extreme events in a warming world, PNAS, October 24, 2011. http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_coumou_2011.pdf
Prominent Dissenter Campaigns: Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine Petition Project: http://www.petitionproject.org/
Climate Change Reconsidered: http://www.nipccreport.org/index.html
Brookings Institute, Fall 2011, National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, Issues in Governance, Feb 2012. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2012/02/climate-change-rabe-borick
Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D.: http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~kotliar/honors/honsem/somalwar/honsem/2002/articles/sciam_uncertainty.html

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