Our Oceans are Under Attack

The end of the year is nigh and it's a time for Christmas and New Year parties and gatherings. In the southern hemisphere that means barbecues and beaches. In the northern hemisphere it's mulled wine and cosy fireplaces.

But for all of us, it probably means we'll be subjected to at least one ranting, fact-free sermon by a Typical Climate Change Denier (TCCD).


12 ways to deal with a climate change denier


1. Pick your audience

Most TCCDs will not change their mind. It's cheaper - intellectually and socially - for them to stand their ground than it is to change their views. Actually, your arguing may even reinforce their beliefs.

But remember - you might convince their friends listening in.


2. Find some common ground


Just because your TCCD thinks they know better than pretty much all of science, doesn't mean they're a bad person. They value things and are probably well-intentioned at heart.

So try finding out what they care about: democracy or economics, knitting or veggie gardening. You may even have some shared interests. You'll never get them to change their values, but you might be able to talk about climate change in terms of things they care about.


3. Certainty isn't the issue


Your TCCD may say we don't understand the climate change with 100% certainty, so we shouldn't do anything. They're right about the first point, but utterly wrong about the second.

Climate science isn't 100% certain, but neither is medicine, the law, child-rearing or pretty much anything else. We make decisions without certainty every day.

Complete certainty is pretty much never required for action.


4. Talk in terms of risk and inaction


Ask them this: "What's worse, the majority of climate change scientists being wrong but we act anyway, or climate change deniers being wrong and we don't?"

Challenge them to be specific, to go beyond vague assertions of terribleness or repeating empty tabloid slogans.






5. Compare the risk to something more tangible


Do they trust doctors? Try saying: "So, have you ever taken a doctor's advice, like if they recommended you lose some weight or get that weird growth biopsied?"

Doctors rarely guarantee that bad things will happen if you ignore their advice, but it's pretty damned risky to gamble that they won't.


6. Speaking of doctors and second opinions


It's not just one opinion here. Research says 97% of climate doctors believe the planet has a bad case of human-induced climate change, and the prognosis isn't great.

While there is likely to be some wiggle room in the exact percentage, it's fair to say that consensus is very high.

And if 97 (or even nine) doctors told you that you had life-threatening but treatable cancer, would you act? Or would you keep looking until you found one doctor who told you not to worry about it, that the cancer isn't serious, and that it's all just a medical conspiracy to sell you chemotherapy?


7. The TCCD with an inkling of scientific knowledge


This trickster knows not all scientific discoveries were immediately accepted by mainstream science. Plate tectonics and the Earth orbiting the sun leap to mind.

While scientific mavericks are few and far between, they do exist. But simply being a maverick doesn't make anyone right. Most of the time it just makes them wrong.


8. Wait for them to say 'It's all a big conspiracy'


Sigh.

There are those who claim climate change is the lab-coat version of the John F Kennedy assassination or the moon landing "hoax".

Really?

The idea of an international conspiracy across dozens of disciplines, hundreds of institutions and thousands of individuals is honestly laughable.

If the world's climate scientists were so good at conspiracy, they'd be better off using their astounding Machiavellian skills to rig an election or clean up on the stock market.

Also, anyone who actually uncovered such a scam would win all of the Nobel prizes at once.


9. Climate scientists are in it for the money


Have you seen the pay scale of a typical research scientist in Australia? Tell the TCCD to go to any university car park and count the luxury vehicles parked near science buildings. They won't even need all their fingers to keep track.

A related gem is the line that Al Gore and co. are doing this because they invested in renewable energy companies and want to make money.

Okay, what makes more financial sense?

1. create a bogus scare requiring a global conspiracy of academics and scientists and grand appeals for huge amounts of controversial and untested R&D in countries all over the world and then wait for that to gain traction in financial markets and eventually drag in wads of cash.

2. invest money in existing, lucrative and proved enterprises today and cash in right now.


10. Why pick on climate science?


The odds are they will happily accept - even applaud - any science that isn't climate change related.

Ask them if they accept gravity, nutrition, internal combustion engines or maths? If they say "yes", probe them on why climate science is different. If they say "no", back away slowly.

Interestingly, TCCDs often endorse mitigation options that support business-as-usual use of fossil fuels, even while asserting human-induced climate change isn't happening. That's a fun little "gotcha" if you're in the mood.


11. Scientists don't actually want it to be true


Challenge them to find a single, legitimate source that shows a bona fide climate change scientist who is happy about what they are finding and what their findings mean.

We've been working around such folks for years and have not even heard of one. Seriously, not one.


12. CO2 isn't a pollutant


This is another claim touted by TCCDs - that CO2 itself isn't inherently poisonous. It's important for plants so therefore it can't be bad.

Their underlying logic is that you can never have too much of a good thing - ask them if they realise that's what they're arguing, then give them your best scornful school teacher stare.

Too much of anything can be dangerous, hence the phrase "too much". You can even be killed by drinking too much water.


Now get back to the BBQ


Anyone who's challenged a TCCD knows that trying to turn them is usually frustrating and annoying. They are rarely part of the solution and probably never will be.

But that doesn't mean challenging them is always futile.

You can sometimes encounter someone who's genuinely interested in ground-truthing their position (yes, it does happen). You could also be inspiring nearby party-goers to think more - or differently - about the climate situation.

In the end, every little bit counts. If you have even a small influence in a positive direction, that's not a bad thing to come out of Christmas drinks.
Cheers and good luck!
The Conversation

 

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/21/the_surprising_reason_why_the_animal_rights_movement_is_failing/

The way we treat nonhuman animals has never been worse, say activists Lori Marino and Michael Mountain

Yet despite their efforts, and those of many others, both say that the situation for nonhuman animals has never been worse.


After all, for every national chain that announces it’s going to start treating its livestock more humanely, there are countless factory farms where deplorable conditions are still the norm. And that’s not to mention this whole matter of our being on the brink of a sixth mass extinction, in which we stand to lose 41 percent of all amphibians, 26 percent of mammals and 13 percent of birds, according to one analysis.

Where have we gone wrong? For one thing, there are so many more of us, and many of us have an insatiable appetite for meat. But Marino and Mountain have a doozy of a theory, to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Anthrozoos, that they think gets to the heart of the matter. It’s based on the work of a social anthropologist, later taken into the lab by social psychologists, called Terror Management Theory. And what it comes down to is basically this: humans are afraid of death. That fear, encompassing as it is, compels us to think of ourselves as being different from the other animals — even though, really, we aren’t — and as a way of expressing that difference, we treat them like… well, animals. Or, worse than that, like “spare parts, commodities and property,” further disguising the similarities between us all.

 

Climate change will require major transformation in farming system to tackle drastic drop in production | International Business Times

 

New study shows South Florida soft corals may withstand climate change | Miami Herald

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/23/age-of-fossil-fuel-year-one-climate-revolution.

To use Le Guin’s language, physics is inevitable: if you put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet warms, and as the planet warms, various kinds of chaos and ruin are let loose. Politics, on the other hand, is not inevitable. For example, not so many years ago it would have seemed inevitable that Chevron, currently the third biggest corporation in the country, would run the refinery town of Richmond, California, as its own private fiefdom. You could say that the divine right of Chevron seemed like a given. Except that people in Richmond refused to accept it, and so this town of 107,000 mostly poor non-white people pushed back.

In recent years, a group of progressives won election to the city council and the mayor’s seat, despite huge expenditures by Chevron, the corporation that also brought you gigantic oil spills onshore in Ecuador and offshore in Brazil, massive contamination from half a century of oil extraction in Nigeria, and Canadian tar-sands bitumen sent by rail to the Richmond refinery. Mayor Gayle McLaughin and her cohorts organized a little revolution in a town that had mostly been famous for its crime rate and for Chevron’s toxic refinery emissions, which periodically create emergencies, sometimes requiring everyone to take shelter (and pretend that they are not being poisoned indoors), sometimes said – by Chevron – to be harmless, as with last Thursday’s flames that lit up the sky, visible as far away as Oakland.

As McLaughin put it of her era as mayor:


We’ve accomplished so much, including breathing better air, reducing the pollution, and building a cleaner environment and cleaner jobs, and reducing our crime rate. Our homicide number is the lowest in 33 years and we became a leading city in the Bay Area for solar installed per capita. We’re a sanctuary city. And we’re defending our homeowners to prevent foreclosures and evictions. And we also got Chevron to pay $114m extra dollars in taxes.

For this November’s election, the second-largest oil company on Earth officially spent $3.1m to defeat McLaughin and other progressive candidates and install a mayor and council more to its liking. That sum worked out to about $180 per Richmond voter, but my brother David, who’s long been connected to Richmond politics, points out that, if you look at all the other ways the company spends to influence local politics, it might be roughly ten times that.

Nonetheless, Chevron lost. None of its candidates were elected and all the grassroots progressives it fought with billboards, mailers, television ads, websites and everything else a lavishly funded smear campaign can come up with, won.



The billionaires and corporations engage in politics all the time, everywhere. They count on us to stay on the sidelines

If a small coalition like that can win locally against a corporation that had revenues of $228.9bn in 2013, imagine what a large global coalition could do against the fossil-fuel giants. It wasn’t easy in Richmond and it won’t be easy on the largest scale either, but it’s not impossible. The Richmond progressives won by imagining that the status quo was not inevitable, no less an eternal way of life. They showed up to do the work to dent that inevitability. The billionaires and fossil fuel corporations are intensely engaged in politics all the time, everywhere, and they count on us to stay on the sidelines. If you look at their response to various movements, you can see that they fear the moment we wake up, show up and exercise our power to counter theirs.

That power operated on a larger scale last week, when local activists and public health professionals applied sufficient pressure to get New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign legislation banning fracking statewide. Until the news broke on last week, the outcome had seemed uncertain. It’s a landmark, a watershed decision: a state has decided that its considerable reserves of fossil fuel will not be extracted for the foreseeable future, that other things – the health of its people, the purity of its water – matter more. And once again, the power of citizens turned out to be greater than that of industry.

Just a few days before the huge victory in New York, the nations of the world ended their most recent talks in Lima, Peru, about a global climate treaty – and they actually reached a tentative deal, one that for the first time asks all nations, not just the developed ones, to reduce emissions. The agreement has to get better – to do more, demand more of every nation – by the global climate summit in Paris in December of 2015.

It’s hard to see how we’ll get there from here, but easy to see that activists and citizens will have to push their nations hard. We need to end the age of fossil fuels the way the French ended the age of absolute monarchy. As New York state and the town of Richmond just demonstrated, what is possible has been changing rapidly.

 

The 7 psychological reasons that are stopping us from acting on climate change | Washington Post

 

Worst 'coral bleaching' in nearly 20 years may be underway, scientists warn | Mashable

 

A Price Tag on Carbon as a Climate Rescue Plan | New York Times

 

Will Climate Change Make Us More Religious? | io9

Read the whole thing over at BBC Future.

 

Coral Clues Hint at Looming Global Warming Spike | Scientific American

 

Is there a link between deniers and religion?

 

Katharine Hayhoe | TIME's The 100 Most Influential People - 2014

Katharine Hayhoe, Climate Scientist/Climate Change Evangelist | PBS

 

Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/27/pope-francis-edict-climate-change-us-rightwing

In recent months, the pope has argued for a radical new financial and economic system to avoid human inequality and ecological devastation. In October he told a meeting of Latin American and Asian landless peasants and other social movements: “An economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it.

“The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands.

“The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said.

In Lima last month, bishops from every continent expressed their frustration with the stalled climate talks and, for the first time, urged rich countries to act.

However, Francis’s environmental radicalism is likely to attract resistance from Vatican conservatives and in rightwing church circles, particularly in the US – where Catholic climate sceptics also include John Boehner, Republican leader of the House of Representatives and Rick Santorum, the former Republican presidential candidate.

Cardinal George Pell, a former archbishop of Sydney who has been placed in charge of the Vatican’s budget, is a climate change sceptic who has been criticised for claiming that global warming has ceased and that if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were doubled, then “plants would love it”.

 

Why I’ll Talk Policy With Climate Change Deniers But Not Science | Science 2.0

 

Why are some Antarctic ice shelves feeling warmer than others? | ars technica