Climate Zombie Note

By John Ballard

A shocking map  appeared last week which dramatizes a depth of scientific ignorance on the part of elected representatives that defies description. At a time when science and technology are reaching historic peaks the results remain as obscure to most people as the mysteries of wireless communication. Like gulls or bears living on garbage, we presume no problem is so serious that science and technology cannot find a remedy.

This trend has been helped in part by a media more focused on profitability than information (think Sara Palin's Alaska on the Discovery Channel which has everything to do with ratings but virtually nothing to do with Discovery) but the real underlying problem is a cultural deficit affecting a tragic number of everyday people. Not only do too many people not care, they have been led to disbelieve scientific evidence when it hits them in the face. Beliefs, we are finding out the hard way, trump facts. Why else did so many climate zombies get elected into the next Congress?

The climate zombie caucus of the 112th Congress

Here is a link to the original at Climateprogress.org.

The map at the link is interactive.  You can also find there a list of the Senators and Congressmen and their various positions regarding climate change.

Well over half (55 percent) of the incoming Republican caucus are climate zombies. Thirty-five of the 46 (76 percent) Republicans in the U.S. Senate next year publicly question the science of global warming. Of the 240 Republicans elected to the House of Representatives, 125 (52 percent) publicly question the science.

Of the freshmen Republicans � marked in boldface below � 36 of 85 in the House and 11 of 13 in the Senate have publicly questioned the science. There are no freshmen Republicans, in the House or Senate, who publicly accept the scientific consensus that greenhouse pollution is an immediate threat.

Nearly all the rest of the Republicans in the 112th Caucus either signed the �No Climate Tax� pledge from the climate-denier Koch Industries front group Americans For Prosperity, the �No Cap-And-Tax� Tea Party pledge, or co-sponsored a resolution to overturn the EPA�s scientific finding that greenhouse pollution threatens the American public�s health and welfare.

Johann Hari blogged yesterday about the same phenomenon but his observation is that the level of indifference is not confined to the US. Countries most at risk for the downside results of climate change are very much alive to the threat, but global indifference overall echoes that of the US.

Why are the world's governments bothering? Why are they jetting to Cancun next week to discuss what to do now about global warming? The vogue has passed. The fad has faded. Global warming is yesterday's apocalypse. Didn't somebody leak an email that showed it was all made up? Doesn't it sometimes snow in the winter? Didn't Al Gore get fat, or molest a masseur, or something?

Alas, the biosphere doesn't read Vogue. Nobody thought to tell it that global warming is so 2007. All it knows is three facts. 2010 is globally the hottest year since records began.   2010 is the year humanity's emissions of planet-warming gases reached its highest level ever. And exactly as the climate scientists predicted, we are seeing a rapid increase in catastrophic weather events, from the choking of Moscow by gigantic unprecedented forest fires to the drowning of one quarter of Pakistan.

Before the Great Crash of 2008, the people who warned about the injection of huge destabilizing risk into our financial system seemed like arcane, anal bores. Now we all sit in the rubble and wish we had listened. The great ecological crash will be worse, because nature doesn't do bailouts.

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If the data are inconclusive one might think NASA would not be on the bandwagon, but the National Aeronautics an Space Administration has a link to a summary of the evidence.

The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years.

Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. Studying these climate data collected over many years reveal the signals of a changing climate.

Certain facts about Earth's climate are not in dispute:

• The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century. Their ability to affect the transfer of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many JPL-designed instruments, such as AIRS. Increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.


• Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth�s climate responds to changes in solar output, in the Earth�s orbit, and in greenhouse gas levels. They also show that in the past, large changes in climate have happened very quickly, geologically-speaking: in tens of years, not in millions or even thousands.

More, as usual, at the link.
Be sure to drill into the sidebar links. They have amassed a ton of information.
The facts are documented and explained in a way that only the dimmest of minds might not be able to follow.

Twain said it best:.. "Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."