Groundhog Day 2012

Hear Ye, Hear Ye Hear Ye

On Gobbler’s Knob on this magnificent Groundhog Day, February 2^nd, 2012, Punxsutawney Phill, the Seer of Seers, the Prognosticator of all Prognosticators was summoned from his burrow in the old oak stump…After casting an appreciative glance towards thousands of his faithful followers, Phil proclaimed “As I look at the crowd on Gobbler’s Knob many shadows do I see. So six more weeks of winter it must be.”

OK, that’s it, Punxsutawney Phil is officially outted as a global climate change denier.

I don’t know about you, but here in Texas we are in a drought. Half the state burned up last summer and this winter is the mildest in recent memory. It is all due to global climate change that is slowly warming up the planet. Now who knows? It could be a natural cycle that has occurred so many times in the past.

The seas go in the seas go out, as they say.

But globally the greenhouse gas content in our atmosphere has escalated and the arctic sea ice is melting.

NASA makes a strong case for mankind’s role in global climate change. Something they were not allowed to do under the previous Republican administration.

So Phil, the groundhog of Punxsutawney PA has joined the crowd of ignoramuses in the Republican Party who are willing to sell their children’s and grandchildren’s futures down the river just so that we can continue to bow to present-day corporate greed and parsimony.

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, Phil.

First Global Climate Change Casualty: The PB & J

Despite what the Tea Party and other conservatives assert, global climate change is underway. Whether it is manmade or not, it is a fact that glaciers are in retreat, sea ice is melting, and Antarctica is losing its ice shelves as they calve off into the surrounding ocean.

My point has always been that yes, climate fluctuations is a fact. The seas came in, the seas went out. Go to coastal southern California, the Palos Verdes Peninsula to be precise, and look at the multiple wave-cut terraces that decorate the coastal hills.

Go to Crete and observe submerged harbor wharves.

Or google this: Haq, Hardenbol and Vail (or just click on the hypertext).

But my point is also this: in the event that a natural global climate change is underway, is it really within the realm of sanity to continue to pump greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, something that will only exacerbate the situation?

No one really knows why the climate has fluctuated over geologic time, only that it has.

But everyone who works in climatology knows that industrialized civilization is a contributing factor.

And now we have our first casualty of global climate change: the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

According to this AP article, this past summer’s blistering heat has been a contributing factor in a decline in this year’s peanut harvest. A decline that means that the cost of a jar of peanut butter in your local grocery store is set to rise.

Not known, at this time is whether Georgia’s new anti-immigrant law has contributed to the problem, as farm workers fled the state that threatened to arrest and deport them.

But we can all count on this: the price of a PB and J sandwich is going up, and one of the root causes of that is melting ice.

TCEQ Censoring a Scientific Document

Galveston Bay, and Galveston Island which forms the bay has recently been reviewed in a scientific paper issued by the Houston Advanced Research Center, a nonprofit organization that has dealt with Galveston Bay sustainability issues for 10 years now. The study, funded by the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality, the local EPA, apparently mentioned an unmentionable theory: that global sea levels were on the rise and that it is partially due to human activity.

So they decided to revise the chapter dealing with this issue. A clear case of governmental censorship of a scientific analysis for political ends. You need to read the entire article here. I have another take on it, which follows.

Texas governor, Rick Perry, denies the nearly 100% agreement in the climatology and oceanography community that Earth is undergoing a global climate change, and a part of the reason is the rise in greenhouse gasses generated by human fossil fuel energy consumption.

And Rick Perry appoints the TCEQ, so guess what? The TCEQ is trying to suppress a scientific finding.

The effect of even a 20 centimeter rise in global sea level would be catastrophic to Galveston Island. It would disappear. Wave action would eat it up in only a few decades, leaving no sand behind for the TCEQ commissioners to bury their collective heads in.

This issue is too serious to sweep under the rug. The effects of a global sea level rise will seriously impact our heavily populated coastlines, especially our system of barrier islands, something that the state of Texas has a whole lot of. And this is not just my opinion, or the opinion of nearly 100% of people who work in this field, it is the majority opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States.

In a 5 to 4 decision, SCOTUS ruled that despite what some people might think, despite the economic effects of cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions, the disastrous effects of global sea level rise is serious enough to make people err on the side of caution. Even if global climate change by greenhouse gas emissions is a complete myth, we cannot afford to ignore the data that supports it.

In this the Supreme Court got it exact, and the TCEQ is full of methane.