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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (61588)	12/3/2014 5:37:38 PM
From: Sdgla	1 Recommendation Recommended By Brumar89 Respond to of 86355

CONSENSUS WATCH – 05/07/2014An ongoing series dedicated to vigorously monitoring emerging threats to The Consensus that global warming is real, caused by humans, and must be addressed at all costs.Because without consensus, scientific conclusions would remain vulnerable to new data. Yesterday was a good day for The Consensus. The White House launched a new strategy for furthering its global warming agenda. Gone are the days of trying to foment hysteria by reciting dry data about the ways the planet will be affected by climate change. From now on, they are going to try to foment hysteria by reciting the ways in which you will be personally affected by climate change. We can only speak for ourselves, but we appreciate this more individualized approach to scaremongering. It sends the message, “We care.” As part of this effort, they created a splashy new web site that seems to take into account the effect federal “Common Core” educational standards are going to have on the population’s reading comprehension skills. For example, they conveniently sum up each section with a “key message,” just in case you have difficulty, as many of us do, deciphering simple, short, declarative sentences: Key Message: Stressed Infrastructure Infrastructure will be increasingly compromised by climate-related hazards, including sea level rise, coastal flooding, and intense precipitation events. Frankly, we are concerned that they are unnecessarily complicating the message. More in the spirit of this document might be: Key Message: Global warming bad. Global warming bad bad bad. Incidentally, we are heartened to note that it looks like the people proofreading the site have already gone throughCommon Core: Among the other claims are: Key Message: Climate Risks to People Heat waves, coastal flooding, and river flooding will pose a growing challenge to the region’s environmental, social, and economic systems. This will increase the vulnerability of the region’s residents, especially its most disadvantaged populations. This point can’t be stressed enough: It is our most disadvantaged populations that will find themselves at a disadvantage. It’s just one of the many disadvantages of being disadvantaged. Well, unless, you are a member of a “native community,” in which case you are probably okay given your “deep cultural history of adapting to change.” Key Message: Native Communities The cumulative effects of climate change in Alaska strongly affect Native communities, which are highly vulnerable to these rapid changes but have a deep cultural history of adapting to change. Which, it should be emphasized, is not at all patronizing stereotyping. It would only be patronizing stereotyping if yousaid it. Regardless, the web site is more than just shout outs to Democratic constituency groups. It also contains supporting data. Take this chart, for example. Look at those projections! Wow! Even the lower of the two data sets suggests that temperatures are set to soar! It makes us want to go out and personally dismantle a coal plant with our bare hands. Okay, sure, if you look really, really closely at the actual observational data as charted by the green line, the last 15+ years have experienced absolutely no warming whatsoever. But that is probably all part of an effort to improve temperature projection qualitify. No doubt, while this is all good news for The Consensus, challenges remain. Efforts to try to convince people that they are facing imminent peril from increasing global temperatures, rising sea levels, disappearing polar sea ice and more frequent extreme weather events, will continue to be complicated by the fact that none of these things are true. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is, it’s the Koch brothers’ fault. Key Message: Koch brothers are bad. Koch brothers are bad bad bad.