By Brian Howey
FREMONT, Ind. – The solitude on the lakes this Fourth of July was eerie. Nary a rocket’s red glare or mortar exploding in air.
Accuweather measured the degree of heat: 101 on July 1, 98 on July 2, 95 on July 3, 101 on the holiday, followed by 103, 104 and 106. Driving between Columbus and Edinburgh a week earlier I watched the thermometer on my Ford Escape flicker between 107 and 108.
Evansville set heat records on nine consecutive days. Indianapolis had the second driest June on record. Bloomberg Businessweek reported “tumbling” corn yields of 35 percent below the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s June 12 forecast, potentially the biggest reduction since 1973. Accuweather is describing a “corn belt catastrophe.”
This week, NOAA reported that the July 2011-June 2012 period was the warmest 12-month period for the contiguous U.S., narrowly surpassing the record broken last month for the June 2011-May 2012 period by 0.05°F. When you look at the top 10 warmest 12-month periods in U.S. history, there is a cluster beginning in 1999 and 2000, in 2005, 2006 and now these past two years. There were 170 all-time heat records broken last month, and the U.S. Drought Monitor now covers 56 percent of the U.S., a record.
Climate experts from the National Weather Service to Purdue University are now using the phrase the "new normal" to describe a series of extreme weather events ranging from droughts and floods, to catastrophic tornadoes and hurricanes. It comes on the heels of the extreme weather of 2011 affected millions of people, including 1,600 tornadoes, along with droughts and floods that claimed 1,000 lives, resulted in 8,000 injuries and totaled more than $52 billion in economic losses.
The political question therefore is that while it’s apparent we are experiencing “climate change,” is it man-made? Does man impact the environment?
Well, the Asian carp didn’t swim over from China to find a new home in the Wabash. Anyone who has sailed the oceans finds vast swathes of garbage thousands of miles from nowhere. In the three days following the Sept. 11 terror attacks when all flights were grounded, temperatures rose. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2002: Because thousands of commercial flights were canceled after the disaster, the researchers said, a thin blanket of cirrus clouds that often forms from water vapor exiting jet engines in high traffic corridors was absent. The lack of clouds allowed daytime temperatures at ground level to rise and nighttime temperatures to fall.
In the Indiana U.S. Senate race, the Republican nominee Richard Mourdock is a notable skeptic, hewing the Tea Party line. In May, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that climate change was a potential national security threat. The Arab Spring is a classic example. The revolts that took place in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria were primarily political, but lengthy droughts and crop failures fueled the public to act in ways they wouldn't have before. The catalyst for the Tunisia revolt was a self-immolation and food riots, lending credence to the old adage: When the water hole shrinks, the animals act differently.
As the climate changes, humans are facing adaptation to increasingly more frequent and severe weather events. Hoosier farmers will tell you that weather events are becoming more extreme.
Mourdock reacted to the Panetta comments, saying, "The irony here is that our energy policy is in fact a threat to our national security. We are basing our energy policy on the greatest hoax of all time, which is that mankind is changing the climate."
Those who believe that man is having an impact on the climate cite a steady rise in CO2 levels since the Industrial Revolution began in 1800 to now historic levels. Scientists have been able to take air samples from drilled ice cores that reveal what was in the atmosphere tens of millions of years ago. The most dramatic increase has occurred in the past 60 years.
Mourdock noted that a monument near his home in Vanderburgh County marks the spot where the glacial ice made its furthest southern advance prior to the warming of the climate 10,000 years ago, allowing mankind to begin to cultivate crops and form communities. The climate has changed and will always change, but he dispels the notion that mankind is even partially responsible.
His opponent, U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly, takes a different approach that ties energy and environmental policy together. "While I believe that climate change is real and should be addressed as part of a comprehensive reform of our nation's energy policy, I do not believe an approach that asks Indiana's economy to bear undue high costs to cut our nation's carbon emissions is the right way to go," Donnelly explained.
Last year, Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman observed, “The minute that the Republican Party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012.”
In a December 2011 Pew poll, 63 percent of Americans say there is “solid evidence” that the earth’s temperature has increased in past decades, but only 30 percent of conservative Republicans believe that.
On the Fourth of July, I sat immersed in Big Otter Lake with cold beer and a Sox hat atop . . . for hours, my man-made answer to climate change.
Richard Mourdock is a criminal who is being paid by criminals to refute sound science.
He's hardly alone. The Republicans would rather you didn't notice the damage that their criminal friends are causing.
When the food shortages come, and the food riots, these people will have their own private security.
The police are also here to protect the rich from the poor.
The rich know that climate change is occurring, and criminals like T. Boone Pickens have gone and bought up land over water aquifers so they can sell it at outrageous prices when it is needed the most. Fresh water will be what the next robber barons are selling. Mark my words.
Posted by: Ryan | July 14, 2012 at 02:08 AM
“The minute that the Republican Party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012.”
Found a clip on Youtube of a new HBO series called Newsroom...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16K6m3Ua2nw
Maybe the Republicans aren't too stupid in going after people who don't understand what is happening to this country and have no appreciation of science.
A lot of these TEA Party people are a joke, they are almost all white, almost all of them are living in poverty, and a lot of them have medical problems and live on oxygen and ride around on mobility scooters *PAID FOR BY THE GOVERNMENT* while they are arguing the government should be shut down.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-on-the-tea-party-20100928
http://www.urantiansojourn.com/2010/10/tea-party-mobilizes/ (My favorite)
I especially like how the author in the second one ended his article about the Teabaggers.
"As of now, any Americans found sitting out an election on the sidelines of our electorate...deserves to be run over and crushed to death by some tea bagger on a mobility scooter. May others learn from their stupid sacrifice."
The Occupy movement is legitimate but alarmingly uncoordinated. We don't have criminals that are behind the scenes calling our shots. We're in misery, and it's partially because we have all these Teabaggers obstructing anything that our president and the Democratic Party could honestly try to do to get the economy going again.
The Teabaggers have resulted in a House of Representatives that is the most unqualified to govern in the history of the United States. They won't compromise to reach reasonable goals, and so we are about to be hit with the largest middle class tax increase EVER (The Paul Ryan Budget) if they get even more of themselves elected, and our economy is about to get bowled over by the budget sequestration they made necessary (which won't make a dent in the federal budget, but WILL harm many people on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps.).
If they really want to get people off of government assistance, they shouldn't be doing what it is they are trying to do. (Starve them to death.) They should point at minimum wage employers like Walmart who throw all of their employees onto the public system.
Many jobs, like the ones at Walmart, are ones where a person *could* work 40 hours a week and still end up on Medicaid and Food Stamps.
The former CEO of Walmart, H. Lee Scott, said "There are government assistance programs out there that are so lucrative it's hard to be competitive, and it's expensive to be competitive,"
http://www.ufcw.org/press_room/index.cfm?pressReleaseID=135
The Occupy movement needs to get out of their tents, put down the protest signs for a few minutes, and Occupy the voting booths.
We might not have a global revolution, but we can start by taking back Wisconsin...
Posted by: Ryan | July 14, 2012 at 05:43 PM