Month: January 2012

A tired and recycled shibboleth dear to the hearts of aging climate deniers, as clueless about agriculture as they are about climate  –  “CO2 is good for plants…”  – covered in the video above.  The real world continues to provide tangible evidence of how wrong headed this is….

The Economic Times:

PARIS: More intense heat waves due to global warming could diminish wheat crop yields around the world through premature ageing, according to a study published Sunday in Nature Climate Change.

Nature Asia-Pacific:

Extreme heat can accelerate wheat aging — an effect that reduces crop yields and is currently underestimated in most crop models — according to a study published online this week in Nature Climate Change. These findings imply that climate warming presents even greater challenges to wheat production than current models predict.

An important source of uncertainty in anticipating the effects of climate change on agriculture is limited understanding of crop responses to extremely high temperatures. David Lobell and co-workers used satellite measurements of wheat growth in northern India to monitor the rates of wheat aging — known as senescence — following exposure to temperatures greater than 34 °C (93.2° F)

New Scientist: 

In India’s breadbasket, the Ganges plain, winter wheat is planted in November and harvested as temperatures rise in spring. David Lobell of Stanford University in California used nine years of images from the MODIS Earth-observation satellite to track when wheat in this region turned from green to brown, a sign that the grain is no longer growing.

He found that the wheat turned brown earlier when average temperatures were higher, with spells over 34 ºC having a particularly strong effect. […]

Lobell’s work suggests losses could be sooner and greater. “This is an early indication that a situation that was already bad could be even worse,” says Andy Challinor of the University of Leeds, UK.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting on a separate Indian study with similar implications.

Continue reading “Studies: Climate Change will threaten Global Wheat Harvest”

Dave Roberts is a staff writer for Grist:

During Obama’s State of the Union speech, Democracy Corps ran a dial-test focus group. Fifty swing voters were given devices that let them register approval or disapproval continuously throughout the speech. Two results in particular are worth highlighting.

Overall, there was a striking degree of unanimity, quite in contrast to the polarization in Washington. Reactions to the speech split along party lines on only a few issues. The most interesting split came during the section of the speech on energy:

This section received the highest sustained ratings of the speech from Democrats and independents, but it was also one of the few polarizing sections as Republicans reacted negatively to the President’s call for more support of clean energy (independents, like Democrats, responded very favorably). Overall, Obama gained 22 points on the issue, one of his biggest gains on the evening, as these voters endorsed his appeal to end subsidies for oil companies and instead focus those resources on expanding clean energy in America. [my emphasis]

It seems the Republican attempt to drag clean energy into the culture war has reached only the conservative base. Independents outside the Fox-Limbaugh loop still favor it.

In other words, this is a powerful wedge issue that favors Democrats.

With the Wall Street Journal editorial page beating its chest, Politico making sweet, sweet love to the Solyndra non-scandal, and the Chamber of Commerce dumping money into attack ads, Democrats have gotten unduly spooked. They’ve started believing John Boehner’s trash talk, that energy is a wedge to divide unions from greens.

It’s an empty threat. The fact is, overwhelming majorities of Americans — across party, age, and regional lines — support clean, modern energy. A poll conducted by ORC International in November found that 77 percent of Americans, including 65 percent of Republicans, believe that “the U.S. needs to be a clean energy technology leader and it should invest in the research and domestic manufacturing of wind, solar, and energy efficiency technologies.” Last February, a Gallup poll offered a list of actions Congress might take. The most popular option, with an incredible 83 percent support, was “an energy bill that provides incentives for using solar and other alternative energy resources.”

Americans love clean energy. When they hear about green energy infrastructure, according to the focus-group results …

… participants immediately make the connection between new energy and new jobs. They say, “Alternative energy — good jobs, local jobs — I think we have a tremendous opportunity here — it’s about creating goods and services — invest in infrastructure.”

The new George Lucas movie “Red Tails” is doing unexpectedly boffo box office, much to the chagrin of Hollywood observers who predicted that the lack of a big name white star in the cast would doom the film to a niche audience.

MTV Movie News:

Lucas appeared on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” earlier this month and claimed that major studios showed no interest in the film when he went to pitch it.

“It’s because it’s an all-black movie,” he said. “There’s no major white roles in it at all. It’s one of the first all-black action pictures ever made.”

“We’ve come a long way from when Martin was marching in the streets and getting rocks thrown at him. We’ve come a very, very long way,” Ne-Yo said. “However, even with that being said, we got a long way to go. As a black person, period, we’re kinda constantly in a state of proving, which is something that I came to wraps with a long time ago.”

Despite the studios’ lack of interest in the film, Ne-Yo decided to let the success of “Red Tails” speak for itself. “At the end of the day, you complain about it, or you prove them wrong,” he said. “I feel like this was a matter of just proving them wrong.”

Why is this relevant?

Because today, the military is once again leading the nation in a critically important way, by being early adopters of renewable technology that is saving money, and soldiers lives, by decreasing reliance on fossil fuels.  President Obama doubled down on this theme in his State of the Union address.

Examiner.com 

Another major point President Obama stated in his speech is that the U.S. Department of Defense, the world’s largest consumer of energy, will make one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history, with the Navy purchasing enough capacity to power a quarter of a million homes a year. He did not offer any specifics, but it is possible that he is setting a more aggressive renewable portfolio standard for the military, which currently is set at 25 percent of its power consumed to be derived from renewable energy sources by 2025.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has a tradition of accelerating technological advancements, serving as early adopters and impacting the broader commercial market in such areas as aviation, computing and GPS. For the past several years, the DoD has been playing this same role in the renewable energy space.

The spiritual heirs of the Bull Connor racists who resisted integration of the military are today’s tea-party-troglodyte climate deniers.  A little googling will show the current tea party line is “Clean energy is being Shoved Down the Military’s Throat”. (always the sexual innuendo – its a template that speaks volumes)

They are being pushed back and proved wrong on a daily basis, but history shows ignorance has never ceded  ground without a fight. It won’t happen unless all of us are willing to let our voices be heard above the small, bigoted and backward minority.