Tag Archives: climate desk

This Is Why You’re So Damn Cold Right Now

by BradlyRizzo Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

To get an idea why wind chills will plummet to 45 degrees below zero in the US this week, look no farther than this unreal image of a colossal polar system cutting through the country like the icy scythe of a rancorous Norse god.

A NOAA satellite caught the coast-to-coast eyeball-freezer on Tuesday as it was revving up for an icy romp across America. Writes the agency:

The weather pattern over the next few days will feature a massive surface high settling southward from Canada to the Great Plains on Wednesday, following by another large surface high by the end of the week. Both of these features are of Arctic origin, and will bring bitterly cold weather from the western High Plains to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast US In addition to the frigid temperatures, the cold air advection over the Great Lakes along with upper-level shortwave energy moving over the region is expected to produce significant lake effect snow downwind from the Great Lakes through midweek.

Areas east of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario are predicted to get the worst of the accumulations, which must be a comfort to Buffalo residents who are probably almost finished digging out from the last winter storm. NOAA says these regions will be served with snowfalls that “will easily exceed one foot.”

As for the other weather misery afflicting the nation, take a peek at these expected wind chills. It’s not a great time to be outside in the northern states, where the government is advising travelers to pack winter-survival kits.

NOAA

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This Is Why You’re So Damn Cold Right Now

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We Finally Found a GOP Congressman Who Believes in Science. Too Bad He’s a Felon Who Just Resigned.

by MohammeLemberg Posted on January 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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As the new Congress is sworn in today, New York’s 11th district, comprising Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, has been left without a lawmaker in the House of Representatives. The missing member: Republican Michael Grimm. The disgraced politician announced his resignation last month after pleading guilty to tax evasion—a federal felony. He officially left Congress yesterday and will be sentenced in June.

If New York’s tabloid headline writers are anything to go by (“Good Riddance!” said the Daily News), the city won’t muster much sympathy for a man who cheated on his taxes when he ran a restaurant (before running for Congress). Nor will it miss his aggressive style: “I’ll break you in half. Like a boy,” he once told a television reporter.

Oh yeah, and there was that time he allegedly waved a gun around at a nightclub in Queens when he was an F.B.I. agent. (Grimm has denied doing this.)

But there is one lesser known fact about Michael Grimm worth taking a moment to mourn as he leaves office: He was one of a precious few Republican politicians who actually accepted the science of climate change.

That wasn’t always the case. During a campaign debate in 2010, Grimm told the audience that “the jury is obviously still out on it. We see nothing but conflicting reports from across the globe.” He added, “I’m not sure, I’m not a scientist”—that now-familiar line deployed by a number of Republican politicians.

But then Grimm had his come-to-science moment, which was documented in last year’s award-winning Showtime docu-series, Years of Living Dangerously. In a segment exploring the impacts of Superstorm Sandy on Grimm’s New York district (you can watch part of it above), the congressman recounted how his thinking had changed. Here’s a transcript (via The Huffington Post), featuring interviewer Chris Hayes, from MSNBC:

HAYES: Last time you and I spoke, you said the jury was still out on climate science. Do you still feel that way?
GRIMM: After speaking with Bob Inglis, it made me do some of my own research, you know, I looked at some of the stuff that he sent over, my staff looked at it. But the vast majority of respected scientists say that it’s conclusive, the evidence is clear. So I don’t think the jury is out.
HAYES: The basic story of—we’re putting carbon in the atmosphere, the planet’s getting warmer, that’s gonna make the sea levels rise—like, the basic story of that, you pretty much agree with, right?
GRIMM: Sure, I mean there’s no question that, um, you know, the oceans have risen, right? And the climate change part is, is a real part of it. The problem that we’re gonna have right now—there’s no oxygen left in the room in Washington for another big debate, that’s the reality.

It’s an otherwise pretty depressing interview, in which Grimm says that science is “irrelevant” when it comes to politics on the Hill.

In a separate segment below, Grimm elaborated on the intractable political divides that prevent lawmakers from discussing climate change. He’s speaking here to former GOP Rep. Bob Inglis, who experienced first-hand the negative impact that believing in science can have on a Republican’s career: Inglis lost his seat in South Carolina after a tea party revolt in 2010, in part because he wouldn’t publicly deny that humans were causing the globe to warm. This exchange is representative of what Years of Living Dangerously did so well in this episode. It revealed something that you or I rarely see: a frank discussion between politicians about the risk on taking on the establishment:

Republicans now control both houses of Congress for the first time since 2007, and incoming GOP lawmakers largely fall into the climate skeptic camp, as my Climate Desk colleague Tim McDonnell recently illustrated. James Inhofe, the party’s climate denial standard barer from Oklahoma, will likely be the chair of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works committee, for example.

In the House, there are a few Republicans who provide a modicum of hope, including Chris Gibson (R-NY), who assumed office in 2013, and who said last month that he plans to introduce a resolution to rally Congress to “recognize the reality” of climate change.

But for the moment, what Grimm tells Inglis in the clip above seems to be the rule among Republicans on Capitol Hill: “Let’s say that they did agree with the science, and they were bold enough, and had the political courage…and then they lose?” he said. “They’re not all lemmings. Okay? They’re not just going to go right off that cliff. So the political constraints I think are a lot bigger than most people would understand, and they’re very real.”

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We Finally Found a GOP Congressman Who Believes in Science. Too Bad He’s a Felon Who Just Resigned.

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BREAKING: President Obama Will Veto Congress’ Keystone XL Pipeline Bill

by VilmaHerrmann Posted on January 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama is planning to veto a bill that would force approval of the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline, according to the Associated Press:

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that the president’s position hasn’t changed since November, when pipeline supporters in Congress last attempted to push through its approval—an effort that fell just one vote shy of the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate. Obama was adamant then that approval for the pipeline come not from Congress, but from the State Department, which normally has jurisdiction over international infrastructure projects like this one. A final decision from State has been delayed pending the outcome of a Nebraska State Supreme Court case, expected sometime early this year, that could alter the pipeline’s route.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McDonnell and other Republicans have vowed to make passage of a new Keystone XL bill a top priority for the new year, and they seem prepared to move forward with a vote later this week. The bill is likely to pass. But the challenge for Republicans is to garner enough support from Democratic senators to achieve the 67 votes required to override a presidential veto. Yesterday, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) told reporters he had just 63 votes.

Even if Congress fails to override Obama’s veto, it still won’t be the end of what has become the flagship issue for US climate activists; the possibility remains that the State Department could still approve the project. But the Obama administration may be leaning against approval. In December, the president said the pipeline is “not even going to be a nominal benefit to US consumers.”

This post has been updated.

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BREAKING: President Obama Will Veto Congress’ Keystone XL Pipeline Bill

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Louie Gohmert Thinks Global Warming Is Good Because It Will Mean "More Plants"

by WandaRoygqir Posted on January 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert (R) announced his intention to challenge John Boehner (R-Ohio) for his position as Speaker of the House. Gohmert is a tea party hero, and in the (highly unlikely) event that he wins the support of his peers on Tuesday, he would join the swelling ranks of vocal climate change deniers in prominent congressional leadership roles.

Boehner is certainly no climate hawk himself; recently he’s taken up the increasingly popular “I’m not a scientist” deflection when asked about the issue. But Gohmert’s views are even more fringe. Take, for example, the 2009 interview above wherein Gohmert cites Washington, D.C.’s, cold weather as proof that global warming is fake. He then thanks Al Gore for driving Suburbans so their carbon dioxide emissions can warm things up and help grow “more plants.” Gohmert has also criticized President Obama for prioritizing climate action at the expense of veterans, Ebola patients, and terrorism victims.

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Louie Gohmert Thinks Global Warming Is Good Because It Will Mean "More Plants"

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This Is What Every Fire Season Could Soon Look Like

by ReginalJobe Posted on January 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jane Derijcke sorts through her burnt possessions in Hastings, Victoria, after a wildfire destroyed her home. Mike Keating/Newspix/Rex Features via AP

Australian fire crews are battling some of the worst wildfires the state of South Australia has seen in decades. The South Australian Country Fire Service, the agency in charge of response, says 22 firefighters have been injured so far. The service says the conditions over the weekend are rivaled only by those experienced during the notorious “Ash Wednesday” fires of 1983, which killed 75 people.

The South Australian blazes, centered in the Adelaide Hills that surround the state capital, began last Friday. Since then, the fires have consumed more than 46 square miles, and destroyed or damaged 26 homes, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. While residents have begun the tortuous process of picking through the rubble of burnt-out houses, the battle across southern Australia, including in the neighboring state of Victoria, is far from over. On Monday, roughly 700 firefighters took advantage of relatively cooler temperatures—they are currently battling fires into the night. But conditions are expected to worsen on Tuesday and Wednesday, with temperatures likely to soar above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The fires have reignited the country’s ongoing debate about how best to tackle climate change, which is helping fuel an ever-increasing number of wildfires, and lengthening Australia’s fire seasons. “Every year we are going to face these extreme weather events, which are going to cost lives and infrastructure, and enough is enough,” said Christine Milne, the leader of the country’s Greens party.

Here are some photos from this weekend:

Columns of smoke rise from the Adelaide Hills in this photo taken on January 2. More than 30 homes are already feared destroyed. Hewitt Wang/Xinhua/ZUMA

Firefighter Lukas Lane-Geldmacher rescues a dog from the Tea Tree Gully Boarding Kennel and Cattery during the Adelaide Hills fire on January 3. Dylan Coker/Newspix/Rex Features via AP

Fire crews battle a wildfire in Kersbrook, outside Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. Campbell Brodie/Newspix/Rex Features via AP

South Australia wasn’t the only state impacted by fires. Here, John Gaylor stands amid the wreckage of his firewood business in Hastings, Victoria. Mike Keating/Newspix/Rex Features via AP

Trees blackened by this weekend’s fires in the Adelaide Hills. Hewitt Wang/Xinhua/ZUMA

This spectacular and frightening photo, taken by Ben Goode, and shared on his Facebook page, Earth Art Photography:

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Post by Earth Art Photography.

And finally, these firefighters have a pointed message for the Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, who is known for scrapping the nation’s cap-and-trade program, and gutting various government agencies tasked with fighting climate change:

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This Is What Every Fire Season Could Soon Look Like

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How Science Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

by RozellaMccune Posted on January 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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We’ve all heard this advice before. We might have even passed it on to encourage a struggling friend or to mentor a younger person: Follow your dreams. Imagine the future that you want, and it will come to pass. And yet, we still struggle to lose that weight, or finish that project, or improve that relationship. When we make resolutions at the start of each new year, it’s easy to feel optimistic that this time it will be different. But deep down we know that if it didn’t work in the past, it’s unlikely to work in the future.

Believe it or not, there’s substantial scientific evidence that fantasizing about a bright future can actually make us less likely to achieve our goals. “We have found that the more positively people daydream about the future, the less well they do over time,” explains Gabriele Oettingen on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg, has been studying the science of motivation for more than 20 years. And her new book, Rethinking Positive Thinking, challenges the conventional wisdom about optimism.

In one early study, for example, Oettingen and her colleagues tracked the progress that a group of obese women made as they attempted to lose weight. The researchers recorded the extent to which these women fantasized about their svelte future selves. The results were surprising: It turned out that women who had frequent positive daydreams about being thin were actually less likely to lose weight.

And in a more recent study, Oettingen and her colleagues asked undergraduates to daydream about a future in which they had positive, negative, or neutral experiences. Once again, the results were striking—positive fantasizing led to poorer achievement outcomes. “And the more positively they fantasized about an easy transition into work life, the less well they did in the future,” says Oettingen. Why was this the case? The study suggested one possible mechanism by which positive daydreams can affect productivity: Using physiological instruments and behavioral indicators, the researchers found that these types of thoughts actually sap a person’s energy. (Exactly why that happens remains a mystery.)

So is the link between positive thinking and achieving one’s goals completely spurious? Can we finally just agree that you can’t dream your way to success? Well, not so fast.

As scientists disentangle the different ways in which we can engage in positive thinking, an interesting distinction between positive expectations and positive fantasies has emerged. Positive expectations based on past experience are generally a good thing. For example, “you expect that you do well in a meeting because, in past meetings, you did well, especially in this specific context,” explains Oettingen. But daydreams about the future, in which we indulge in optimistic fantasizing that isn’t based on solid evidence, can be counterproductive.

Remember the women in Oettingen’s early study who wanted to lose weight? It turns out that if they had a positive expectation of success, but realistic or negative daydreams (perhaps imagining what it would be like to bulge out of a favorite pair of jeans), they were more likely to shed pounds.

What’s more, Oettingen has found that a specific method of positive thinking can lead to better outcomes. She calls it mental contrasting. “It starts with identifying a wish,” she explains. The wish can be big or small—a major life change or just a task that needs to be completed today. “And then,” she says, “you identify the best outcome if you fulfill that wish.” That’s where the daydreaming comes in. You fantasize about what your future will be like if you attain your wish.

But don’t stop there, even though it’s enjoyable. Instead, make a serious effort to think about the obstacles that stand in your way. “Now what is it in me that holds me back?” Oettingen says. “What is it actually that stops me from fulfilling that wish and experiencing that outcome?” This is the “contrasting” portion of mental contrasting. Once you identify the obstacle, you go back to fantasy land and imagine what you need to do to overcome that barrier. The last step is to lay out a plan—either by writing it down or simply by thinking about it—that includes both your desired outcome and the ways in which you can overcome the obstacles that have thwarted you in the past.

“We have plenty of experiments which show that this mental contrasting is effective,” says Oettingen. And not just in one domain—mental contrasting works for problems related to your work, your family life, and even your interpersonal relationships.

But careful! Oettingen says the order of your directed thinking matters. For example, she points to one study in which her participants hoped to become more physically fit. She divided them up into two groups: Both groups fantasized about a future in which they were more fit, and both thought about the obstacles that stood in their way. But one group used mental contrasting—that is, they first imagined their future accomplishments, and then they thought about the obstacles they needed to overcome. The other group reversed the process: They imagined the obstacles first and then fantasized about the future.

After this exercise, Oettingen asked participants to go from the ground floor of the building to the fourth floor, where they would meet to discuss the experiment. Then she counted how many of them rode the elevator to get there. And sure enough, the people who used mental contrasting in the correct order were more likely to take the stairs.

Click below to listen to the full interview with Oettingen:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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How Science Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

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2014 Was the Year We Finally Started to Do Something About Climate Change

by ElisaXLWGh Posted on December 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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2014 was a big year for climate news, good and bad. In June, the Obama administration took its biggest step yet in the fight against global warming by introducing regulations to limit greenhouse gases from existing power plants. And while there was plenty of anti-science rhetoric and opposition to climate action (no, the polar vortex does not disprove climate change), the year came to a dramatic end with at least three landmark climate-related stories: In September, hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world marched to demand climate action. November’s historic deal between the US and China to curb greenhouse emissions breathed new life into international climate negotiations. And finally, after a series of last-minute compromises, leaders from nearly 200 countries produced the Lima Accord, which, for the first time, calls on all nations to develop plans to limit their emissions. All eyes are now on Paris, where next year world leaders will meet in an attempt to work out a major global warming deal.

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2014 Was the Year We Finally Started to Do Something About Climate Change

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How You Can Fake Solving a Rubik’s Cube

by Bonita2376 Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Matt Parker isn’t your average stand-up comedian. He doesn’t draw his material from the banalities of everyday life, like many of his peers. His routine substitutes equations and mathematical concepts for toilet humor and political jabs. And the audience loves it.

So how did he become a mathematical comedian? “During the day, I was teaching math to teenagers, and then in the evening, I was telling jokes to drunk people in comedy clubs—which actually is a surprisingly similar skill set,” explains Parker on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. He says he gradually began to work bits about “what it’s like to be a nerd” into his routines, and eventually “people started showing up expecting me to talk about math.”

“This is my ideal Venn diagram,” adds Parker. “If I can do math and stand-up at the same time, that’s brilliant.”

Parker has also just released a book—Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension—packed full of clever jokes and a lot of really interesting math. What sets it apart from a number of other recent math books is the fact that the reader is encouraged to actually do some math, rather than just read about it. “I put in loads of puzzles, hands-on activities, things you can build,” says Parker. “And you can read the book without doing them, but if you want to, you can get your hands dirty.”

This is the appeal of Parker’s brand of math: He wants you to not just understand the concepts, but to be able to use them to impress your friends. Take a look at the video above, for example, in which he describes how to cheat your way into “solving” a Rubik’s Cube in fewer than three minutes. (It might even help you get into Princeton.)

If that isn’t impressive enough, try this hack: Tell your buddies that you have the magical ability to recognize fake credit card numbers. Have them write down a series 16-digit numbers, one that they copy from an actual credit card and several that they just make up. Now, starting with the first digit in each sequence, take every second digit and double it. If doubling a digit produces a two-digit answer, add those two digits together. You should now have eight new digits. Add up all these new digits along with the eight remaining digits that you didn’t double. If the result is a multiple of 10, it could be a real credit card number. If not, you have one of your friends’ randomly-generated foils. “The reason we put that strange pattern in there,” explains Parker, is that “when you type it into a website, the website can do that calculation. If the answer is not a multiple of 10, it knows it’s not a real card.”

Parker bemoans the fact that many people don’t realize how much math affects their daily lives. “They think that math isn’t helping when, in fact, it is!” he exclaims. “It’s making their lives possible.”

But even Parker took a detour in his education before committing to a life in mathematics—the “dark days” in college when he was studying mechanical engineering. “I got about halfway through a mech-eng degree before I realized that if I finished it, it would leave me dangerously employable,” he jokes. “And I also realized that what I really liked was just doing the equations—that it was the actual math behind the engineering that set my world on fire.”

So what is it about math that ignites Parker’s passion? “It’s basically like a murder mystery,” he says. What can make an otherwise decent thriller turn sour is if there’s a nonsensical ending—if the author just brings in a random character at the very end and calls him the murderer, the reader will lose interest in that author’s work. “But a good book, you get to the end and go, ‘Oh, that makes sense, there were hints all along,'” says Parker. “And that’s mathematics. You get to the end, you go, ‘That was hard work, but it’s great.'”

Listen to the full interview with Matt Parker below:

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How You Can Fake Solving a Rubik’s Cube

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Jim Webb Wants to Be President. Too Bad He’s Awful on Climate Change.

by LouellaNewcomer Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Hillary Clinton may be dominating every poll of potential Democratic hopefuls for the White House, but some progressives are desperate to find a candidate who will challenge her from the left. Groups have sprung up to encourage Elizabeth Warren to take a stab at the nomination, but with the Massachusetts senator repeatedly saying she isn’t running, liberal activists will likely have to turn elsewhere—perhaps to socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) or Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley—if they aren’t satisfied with Clinton. But so far, the only Democratic alternative officially in the race is former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, who launched an exploratory committee in November.

A former Secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan, Webb is being touted by some on the left as an Appalachian populist who could champion causes Clinton would rather ignore. The Nation‘s William Greider, for example, lauded Webb’s presidential ambitions in a column headlined “Why Jim Webb Could be Hillary Clinton’s Worst Nightmare.” Greider praised Webb’s non-interventionist tendencies in foreign policy (Webb was a vocal opponent of the Iraq War). “I think of him as a vanguard politician—that rare type who is way out ahead of conventional wisdom and free to express big ideas the media herd regards as taboo,” Greider wrote, while acknowledging that Webb was unlikely to win.

There’s at least one key issue, however, on which Webb’s record is far from progressive: global warming. That’s a big deal. Unlike Obamacare and financial reform, much of the progress President Barack Obama has made on climate change rests on executive actions that his successor could undo. At first glance, Webb might look like a typical Democrat when it comes to environmental policy. The League of Conservation Voters gives him a lifetime score of 81 percent—on par with Hillary Clinton’s 82 percent rating, though far below Sanders at 95 percent. And unlike most of the Republican presidential hopefuls, he acknowledges that humans are causing climate change. He even supports solving the problem—at least in theory.

But when it came to actual legislation, Webb used his six years in the US Senate to stand in the way of Democratic efforts to combat climate change. Virginia, after all, is a coal state, and Webb regularly stood up for the coal industry, earning the ire of environmentalists. As Grist‘s Ben Adler succinctly summed it up, “Jim Webb sucks on climate change.”

Perhaps Webb’s biggest break with the standard Democratic position on climate is his vocal opposition to the use of EPA rules under the Clean Air Act to limit carbon emissions from coal power plants. Earlier this year, the Obama administration proposed regulations that could cut existing coal plant emissions by as much as 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Those new rules became a key factor in the historic climate deal Obama recently reached with China, and they will almost certainly figure prominently in next year’s Paris climate negotiations. But back in 2011, Webb went to the floor of the Senate to denounce the idea that the federal government has the power to regulate carbon emissions under existing law. “I am not convinced the Clean Air Act was ever intended to regulate or classify as a dangerous pollutant something as basic and ubiquitous in our atmosphere as carbon dioxide,” he said.

Webb also supported legislation from fellow coal-state Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) that would have delayed the EPA’s authority to add new rules governing coal plant emissions. “This regulatory framework is so broad and potentially far reaching that it could eventually touch nearly every facet of this nation’s economy, putting unnecessary burdens on our industries and driving many businesses overseas through policies that have been implemented purely at the discretion of the executive branch and absent the clearly stated intent of the Congress,” he said in a release.

But Webb’s opposition to major climate initiatives wasn’t limited to executive action. In 2008, Democrats (and a few Republicans) in Congress tried to pass a cap-and-trade bill that was intended to slow global warming by putting a price on carbon emissions. The bill would have likely been vetoed by then-President George W. Bush, but it never got that far. Webb was part of a cohort of Senate Democrats who blocked the measure. “We need to be able to address a national energy strategy and then try to work on environmental efficiencies as part of that plan,” Webb told Politico at the time. “We can’t just start with things like emission standards at a time when we’re at a crisis with the entire national energy policy.”

When cap and trade came up again in 2009—this time with Barack Obama in the Oval Office—Webb again played a major role in preventing the bill from passing the Senate. “It’s an enormously complex thing to implement,” Webb said of the 2009 bill. “There are a lot of people in the middle between the ‘cap’ and the ‘trade’ that are going to make a lot of money.” Webb also voted to prevent Senate Democrats from using budget reconciliation procedures to pass a cap and trade bill with simple majority, essentially dooming any hope for serious climate legislation during the first years of Obama’s presidency.

That same year, Obama attended a United Nations summit in Copenhagen in a failed bid to hammer out an international climate accord. Obama sought a limited, nonbinding agreement in which the US and other countries would pledge to reduce their CO2 output. Webb wasn’t having it. Before Obama went abroad, Webb sent the president a letter asserting that he lacked the “unilateral power” to make such a deal.

Coal wasn’t the only polluting industry that found an ally in Webb. After the BP oil spill in 2010, the Obama administration put a hold on new offshore oil drilling, which provoked Webb. “In placing such a broad moratorium on offshore drilling, the Obama Administration has over-reacted to the circumstances surrounding the Deepwater Horizon disaster,” Webb said in a press release. At other times, Webb championed drilling projects off Virginia’s coasts and voted regularly for bills that would expand the territory in which oil companies could plant rigs offshore. “Unbelievable,” the Sierra Club once remarked of Webb’s support for offshore drilling. In 2012, Webb was one of just four Democrats in the Senate who voted to keep tax loopholes for oil companies.

But it’s Webb’s support for coal that most concerns environmentalists. “Jim Webb is an apologist for the coal industry,” says Brad Johnson, a climate activist who runs the website Hill Heat. “Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to realize that greenhouse pollution is the greatest threat we face to economic justice in this nation.”

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Jim Webb Wants to Be President. Too Bad He’s Awful on Climate Change.

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This Is the Stupidest Anti-Science Bullshit of 2014

by BaileyD94oaqflt Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

2014 had its fair share of landmark scientific accomplishments: dramatic cuts to the cost of sequencing a genome; sweeping investigations of climate change impacts in the US; advances in private-sector space travel, and plenty more. But there was also no shortage of high-profile figures eager to publicly and shamelessly denounce well-established science—sometimes with serious consequences for public policy. So without further ado, the most egregious science denial of 2014:

Basically everything said by Donald Trump:

You can always count on The Donald to pull no punches. He got started early this year, when he pointed to freezing temperatures in parts of the country as evidence that “this very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop” and then told Fox News that the global warming “hoax” was merely the result of scientists “having a lot of fun.”

In September, Trump went on a Twitter screed linking vaccines to autism. A month earlier, he fanned the flames of unscientific Ebola panic when he objected to efforts to bring American health care workers infected with the virus back the the US for treatment. “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back,” he tweeted. “People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!” Health care experts, meanwhile, insisted that the risk was minimal; the two patients Trump was talking about were ultimately brought back to the US and successfully treated without infecting anyone else. Let’s just stick to real estate and beauty pageants, Donald, shall we?

Unnecessary Ebola quarantines:

Reporters and state police keep watch outside of nurse Kaci Hickox’s house in Maine. Robert F. Bukaty/AP

Trump wasn’t the only one to catch a heavy dose of science denial fever in the midst of the Ebola crisis. The plague of denial started in West Africa, as efforts to stem the outbreak were stymied by persistent rumors that Ebola was a myth propagated by the World Health Organization and Western powers. When Ebola hopped the Atlantic and landed in the United States, a host of (mostly Republican) lawmakers clamored for travel bans and visa restrictions—even though America’s leading public health officials repeatedly explained that those steps would be ineffective. In October, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) forced Kaci Hickox, a nurse who had been treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, to stay in an isolation tent in a Newark hostpital for two-and-a-half days, despite the fact that she had no symptoms of the disease and therefore posed no threat to others. When Hickox finally escaped New Jersey, she was quarantined again in her home state of Maine. Doctors Without Borders, an NGO on the front lines of the Ebola crisis, issued a statement at the time declaring that the “forced quarantine of asymptomatic health workers…is not grounded on scientific evidence and could undermine efforts to curb the epidemic at its source.”

Lamar Smith’s war on the National Science Foundation:

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) Jay Mallin/ZUMA

Republican Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas took his opposition to basic science straight to the source: The grant-writing archives of the National Science Foundation. In an unprecedented violation of the historic firewall between the lawmakers who set the NSF’s budget and the top scientists who decide where to direct it, Smith’s researchers pulled the files on at least 47 grants that they believed were not in the “public interest.” Some of the biggest-ticket projects they took issue with related to climate change research; the committee apparently intended to single out these projects as examples of the NSF frittering money away on research that won’t come back to benefit taxpayers. The investigation is ongoing, and the precedent it sets—that scientific research projects are only worthwhile if they directly benefit the American economy—is unsettling.

Battles over Texas textbooks:

Citizens gathered outside a 2010 Texas State Board of Education meeting to protest changes to the state’s social studies standards. Larry Kolvoord/Austin American-Statesman/AP

The Texas Board of Education has long been a hotbed for science denial, as conservative activists and a handful of textbook reviewers have sought to influence textbook-writing standards in an effort to muddle the basic science around issues such as evolution and climate change. What happens within the pages of Texas textbooks matters because the publishing market there is among the nation’s largest; what gets printed in Texas is likely to wind up in classrooms nationwide. Early this year advocates for better textbook oversight won a victory when the board announced it would give teachers’ input priority in determining curricula. But by September, the battle was back on, with a raft of revisions that contained obvious biases against mainstream climate science—one McGraw-Hill textbook inaccurately claimed that scientists “do not agree on what is causing the change,” and a Pearson text similarly alluded to scientific disagreement. Bowing to public pressure, in November Pearson altered its text to more accurately reflect the scientific consensus on climate change, but the McGraw-Hill text still portrays climate science as an open debate. Meanwhile, a parallel battle played out in Oklahoma over new standards to improve climate science education.

Bill Nye schools creationist Ken Ham; John Holdren schools Congress:

Veteran science educator Bill Nye’s live-streamed takedown of outspoken creationist Ken Ham was perhaps the year’s most amazing barrage of scientific badassery. Nye piled on the evidence for why the Earth can’t possibly be just a few thousand years old (as Ham believes) and why the fossil record does, in fact, prove the theory of evolution. That spectacle was followed by another killer takedown, as White House science adviser John Holdren explained elementary school-level concepts related to climate change to members of the House Science Committee:

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Senate overrun by climate deniers:

James Inhofe (R-Okla.) Louie Palu/ZUMA

Science denial on Capitol Hill is set to get even crazier next year. When Democrats (and environmentalists) got a sound whooping in the midterm elections, a new caucus of climate change-denying senators swept in. Almost every new Republican senator has taken a position against mainstream climate science, ranging from hardline denial to cautious skepticism. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the incoming majority leader, has vowed to make forcing through an approval of the Keystone XL pipeline his top agenda item in the new year; he also wants to block the Obama administration’s efforts to reign in carbon pollution from coal plants. And the incoming chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is none other than James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who actually believes that global warming is a hoax orchestrated by Barbra Streisand. You can’t make this stuff up.

“I’m not a scientist”:

2014 saw the proliferation of a particularly insidious talking point for those politicians who have realized that denying climate science is untenable but are unable to publicly accept the scientific consensus: “I’m not a scientist.” Possible 2016 presidential contender Jeb Bush used that line back in 2009, and in 2014 it reached new heights: McConnell, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), and Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) are among the guilty parties. It’s a cop-out that is at best exhausting, and at worst dangerous.

Anti-vaxxers are still a thing:

Marlon Lopez MMG1 Design/Shutterstock

The first five months of 2014 saw the more measles cases than comparable time periods in any year since 1994; the CDC reported that 90 percent of those cases were among people who hadn’t been vaccinated. In May, a Tennessee hospital reported a disturbing spike in cases of infants with a rare bleeding condition that could have been prevented with a routine vitamin injection; doctors there blamed anti-vaccination fears for parents avoiding the injection. Yes, it’s not just Jenny McCarthy—a surprising number of people across the country continue to be preoccupied with the totally debunked fear that vaccines will lead to autism or other maladies.

Contraception ≠ abortion:

A Hobby Lobby location in Stow, Ohio. DangApricot/Wikimedia Commons

The year’s biggest court battle over reproductive rights, in which the craft store Hobby Lobby objected to the Obamacare requirement that it provide contraceptive coverage for its employees, was premised on terrible science. The company’s owners, who have a religious objection to abortion, claimed that intrauterine devices and the “morning-after” pills Ella and Plan B cause abortions. But scientists say that these methods of contraception work by preventing pregnancy; they don’t result in abortion. If it’s not surprising that Hobby Lobby’s owners would come out against the science, it is a surprise that conservative justices on the Supreme Court would back them up, despite ample testimony from leading gynecologists. As Molly Redden reports, battles over science denial in reproductive rights are only going to heat up in 2015.

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This Is the Stupidest Anti-Science Bullshit of 2014

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