I triple dog dare anyone here to say you don’t wish you could do this.

I can juggle (3 balls with two hands, 2 balls with either left or right hand, some minor flourishes), and I was about six shades of green 30 seconds into this video clip.

[PLEASE do not just skim this post and then move on to the next thing competing for your time. I normally don’t beg for eyeballs, but I’m going to do that, and more, this time, because of the severity of the situation in Pakistan.]

It’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of the tragedy that’s still unfolding in Pakistan.

Some excerpts from just two of the dozens of articles on the Pakistan floods…

Pakistan floods are a ’slow-motion tsunami’ - Ban Ki-moon (emphasis added):

The United Nations general secretary, Ban Ki-moon, has appealed for swifter aid to provide immediate relief in food, shelter and clean water for the millions affected by the worst monsoon rains on record.

“Make no mistake, this is a global disaster,” Ban told a hurriedly convened session of the UN general assembly. “Pakistan is facing a slow-motion tsunami. Its destructive powers will accumulate and grow with time,” he warned.

Weather forecasts have said there could be four more weeks of rain, which will add to the flood problems.

The UN has appealed for $460m (£295m) in aid and donors have so far given about half that figure. But the secretary-general said all of the money was needed immediately to help victims over the next three months.

…

But tonight Mitchell, who has recently visited Pakistan to inspect the effect British aid has had so far, told the UN general assembly in New York that the international community had to do more. He told the UN it was “deeply depressing” that the international community was “only now waking up to the true scale of this disaster”.

Flood Disaster May Require Largest Aid Effort in Modern History:

One of the largest humanitarian relief efforts ever attempted is now mobilizing to help Pakistan cope with what its government and U.N. agencies are calling the worst natural disaster in modern memory.

The death toll is much smaller than in past disasters: About 1,600 are believed dead so far. But experts say initial assessments show the scale of damage and human suffering left by torrential monsoon rains over the past three weeks dwarfs the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, 2005 Kashmir earthquake, 2008 Cyclone Nargis disaster in Burma, and Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti — combined.

“What we face in Pakistan today is a natural calamity of unprecedented proportions,” Pakistan’s foreign minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, said during a special U.N. session to address the crisis, held here yesterday. “These are the worst monsoon floods in living memory.”

Debate is heating up over what caused the catastrophe, with experts pointing to deforestation, intensive land-use practices or mismanagement of the Indus River as possible causes. But top U.N. and Pakistani government officials are now clearly pointing to climate change as the principal culprit.

“Climate change, with all its severity and unpredictability, has become a reality for 170 million Pakistanis,” said Qureshi in his appeal for aid. “The present situation in Pakistan reconfirms our extreme vulnerability to the adverse impacts of climate change.”

…

Officials say about 800,000 to 900,000 homes have been destroyed or made unlivable. The government believes 4.6 million have been left homeless in just two provinces, Punjab and Sindh.

Areas in the country’s north and northwest have been hardest hit, especially Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where several communities have been cut off from the outside world after floodwaters washed out key bridges. About 70 percent of bridges and roads have been destroyed here, officials report. Pakistan’s government says little transportation infrastructure remains in the Swat valley, the scene of intense fighting between the army and Islamic insurgents in 2009.

Pakistan’s agricultural economy, the source of income for about 70 percent of the population, has borne the brunt of the damage. “This is where we have been hit the most,” said Qureshi.

More than 17 million acres of farmland was inundated, Qureshi said. U.N. officials figure that more than 200,000 head of livestock have been killed in the flooding. And the nation’s cotton crop, an important source of export earnings, has largely been wiped out after 1 million acres of the crop was lost to floods in Punjab.

The flood disaster could also exacerbate global food prices, in particular wheat. The government of Pakistan says the season’s harvest is pretty much gone and 1 million metric tons of wheat that was sitting in storage is now gone. Droughts in Russia, Australia and Canada had already sent wheat prices soaring in recent weeks.

What can you do if you live in the US or Canada or Europe or Japan or any of the other developed countries comfortably detached from the tragedy in Pakistan? Simple: Give money to a worthy relief effort.

My wife and I have always been fans of the American Red Cross, thanks in no small part to the help we saw them give so many people during the 1972 floods that Pennsylvania, among other areas in the NE US. So, we are contributing through their web site. You can also give through the International Committee of the Red Cross. Their article on the Pakistan flooding is here, and there’s a contribution link at the top of that page.

Americans can check the US State Department’s page for contributions, which has two of those “text to contribute” numbers, plus links to several relief organizations.

So don’t just sit there and feel bad about the Pakistan floods for 10 seconds and then go watch YouTube videos or play some brain cell killing game on facebook. Instead, take a couple of minutes and do something that will materially help human beings who are already in dire need and will likely be in even worse shape in the coming months. No one can demand that you get on a plane and fly thousands of miles to Pakistan to help distribute food and medical supplies, but I can demand this of you. If it helps get you over the hump, imagine that for this week this site isn’t free — you have to make a contribution of whatever amount you can afford. Yes, you’re on the honor system here, but I sincerely hope that at least some of you will seize the opportunity to do some good.

I mentioned in the title of this post that we can learn from Pakistan, too. What’s there to learn?

First, you’ll learn something about yourself after you respond (or fail to respond) to my plea for contributions.

Second, look at the world as we know it in August 2010, and think about where we, as in all of us, are headed in the coming decades. You can argue until your voice cracks or your fingers bleed about the degree to which the incredible heat and fires in Russia or the flooding in Pakistan are attributable to climate change, but the bottom line is undeniable: As we continue to pour astonishing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and the climate continues to respond in wildly unpredictable ways, events like these and many more just as awful and worse will happen with rising frequency. That will mean more direct human impact, more pleas for contributions from people lucky enough not to be directly devastated (this time, at least), and endless political debates about proximal vs. root causes of tragedies, e.g. are the deaths from the latest horror due to bad development patterns or climate change.

As the evidence and the terrible costs pile up, will we learn the lesson, exhibit the basic enlightened self-interest that is the hallmark of responsible adults, and take appropriate action? Stay tuned…

Pete Sinclair’s latest Crock video is a must see (as they all are, frankly), even though this one features Christopher Monckton:

The Reality Based Community has done a spectacularly bad job in communicating with the vast middle ground of voters and consumers who don’t really know what’s going on with energy and climate issues. Sure, those people are convinced that it’s a good idea to “go green”, whatever the hell they think that means, and they’re vaguely aware that the US buys a lot of its oil from other countries, but I would wager that only a tiny percentage of them have any clue how much oil that is, in absolute barrel count or percentage, what kind of monetary flows it represents, or who sells us that oil. And as for the true urgency of our climate mess, hell, I know a lot of hardcore enviros who don’t really get it. But almost everyone I know can tell you within a couple of cents what the price of gasoline is at their local filling station after just a moment of thought. Good thing we’re not self-centered and myopic group?

I’ve long said that we need a really kick ass communicator on our side. We have some truly compassionate and brilliant people, including but by no means limited to (in no particular order) Hansen, McKibben, Schmidt, Oreskes, Meadows, Romm, Kolbert, etc. speaking out, but can any of them get up and dance? Can any of them get up in front of an audience that’s not mostly people who already know about climate change and really grab them by the frontal lobes and educate and entertain them? As best I can tell, no.[1]

Even one of my personal heroes, Carl Sagan, who was wildly effective in his time (and criticized by some other scientists for it), wouldn’t do the trick in today’s media saturated world that has the collective attention span of a fruit fly on a triple shot of Red Bull with a cocaine chaser.

If you want a good example of someone I think is an excellent example of expert and communicator in one tidy package, I’ll have to reach beyond energy and climate to astronomy, and Neil deGrasse Tyson:

It’s highly unlikely we can convince Tyson to make a career change, and we can’t trade the three postdocs and a some supercomputer time to the astronomy guys for him a player trade. So what are we to do? How do we grab the mainstreamers’ attention and tell them how gigantic our challenges are, when we have the squadron of flying howler monkeys (a.k.a. the deniers) waiting in the wings to call us “alarmists” or “true believers in the Church of Al Gore” or some other asinine thing, or even worse, simply lie about the state of climate science?

This is not a rhetorical question, and the stakes could not be much higher.

Suggestions?

[1] This is the place where you can no longer contain your frustration with me for overlooking your favorite climate communicator. Good. Get off your metaphorical ass and leave a comment here and tell me who I overlooked. Hint: If I were leaving such a comment, the first person I’d point to would be Greg Craven, because he does videos like this:

The latest Climate Crock of the Week is a two-parter, and easily the best 16 minutes you’ll spend online this week.

The only thing I would add is that if you look at the temperature record:

(which Pete Sinclair does show briefly), you see a long-term increase with a lot of jiggles due to short-term variability plus the odd volcano, as anyone would expect. But there’s no way you can use the 11-year sunspot cycle to explain that 130 year trend.

The energy and climate news hasn’t exactly been great lately, which means we all need a 22-second laugh break.

Here’s yours:

OK, break’s over. Back to the info-mines, you slackers.

To answer the question at the end of the clip: Yes, in fact I have considered how much my world depends on petroleum based products.

Holy crap…

I don’t know about youse guys, but the news lately has left me wandering the back alleys of the Intertubes, looking for anything to restore my faith in humanity, or, minimally, make me smile. Luckily, we lives in a (virtual) world where there’s Topless Robot (which is most definitely safe for work, even if the name sounds like it’s the illegitimate love child resulting from a sweaty tryst between a Radio Shack catalog and an issue of Hustler).

Anywho. They posted this gem today. I double-dog-dare any self-respecting geek or nerd to watch this without smiling.

OK, break’s over. Back to the data mine!

Global Warming Deniers and Their Proven Strategy of Doubt is an absolutely must-read piece from Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway that explains the machinery behind the orchestrated climate change denial we see every day.[1] They are also the authors of the book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, a book that’s very high on my to-be-reviewed list.

I mentioned the other day (see Abraham, Monckton, and the rest of us: Time to rumble) that the participation of people like John Abraham in the climate change non-debate is very bad news for the deniers. Naomi Oreskes is definitely right at the top of that “bad news for deniers” list, and I suspect Conway isn’t far behind her.[2]

From their article:

The recent shift in the community of global warming deniers from merely attacking mainstream climate scientists to alleging their involvement in criminal activity is an unsurprising but alarming development in the long campaign to discredit the established scientific fact that burning fossil fuels is causing the world to warm. This latest escalation fits seamlessly into a decades-old pattern of attempts to deny the reality of environmental ills — smoking, acid rain, ozone depletion, and global warming. Similar or even identical claims have been promoted for decades by other free-market think-tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, and, most persistently, the George C. Marshall Institute. These think tanks all have two things in common: They promote free-market solutions to environmental problems, and all have long been active in challenging the scientific evidence of those problems.

In researching a book on global warming deniers, we often felt demoralized by the efficacy of doubt-mongering tactics and depressed that the American public had been repeatedly fooled by the same strategy and tactics. On the other hand, we felt cautiously optimistic because disputes over other issues — tobacco smoking, acid rain, second-hand smoke, and the ozone hole — ended with the scientific evidence prevailing, and with regulation that (however delayed or weakened) addressed the problem.

…

In the late 1980s, the Marshall Institute turned to the denial of global warming. As scientific evidence emerged that warming was not only going to happen, but was perhaps already happening, the institute’s attacks became stronger and more unprincipled. These “contrarians” — because their positions were contrary to the majority scientific view — began taking evidence out of context, cherry-picking data, and misrepresenting what was actually being published in the scientific literature. For example, they distributed a “white paper” in 1989 falsely claiming that a review from NASA climate scientist James Hansen showed that recent warming was largely due to increased solar activity.

When confronted with incontrovertible evidence that their arguments and cherry-picked facts were incorrect, the deniers refused to correct their mistakes and continued to spread the same misinformation. Indeed, as the science strengthened, and the evidence of the human fingerprint on the climate system began to strongly emerge, the contrarian attacks became more virulent, more unprincipled, and more personal.

…

If all this sounds familiar, it should. Similar attacks were launched against the scientific evidence of the ozone hole, of second-hand smoke, and of the harms of DDT. As one tobacco executive put it in 1969, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.” Casting doubt about climate science is simply part of the effort to prevent regulation of fossil fuels. The point of merchandising doubt was, and remains, the prevention of government regulation.

These opponents of science are free-market fundamentalists, unwilling to accept that global warming and many other pollution-induced ills are market failures, and that government action of some kind will be needed to address it. Market fundamentalists believe that free markets are the solution to social problems and government intervention can only do harm. The reality, however, amply demonstrated by experience, is that pollution is external to the market system — there’s no cost to dumping waste into the air and water. And as Lord Nicholas Stern has recently noted, global warming is the biggest market failure of them all. But this is yet another truth that the free market fundamentalists prefer to ignore.

Meanwhile, the contrarians’ campaigns continue, and with significant success: Many Americans accept the deniers’ allegations as true, or at least are confused by them, and therefore do not know what to think or whom to trust. Science has been effectively undermined, which has eroded public support for the decisive action needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

You can also find videos online of Oreskes presenting similar material. Two good examples:

In my opinion, the big takeaways from this material are:

• Contrary to what many people would assume, much of the denier machinery is not fueled by a direct financial incentive. It’s not just the coal companies simply wanting to keep selling about 1.1 billion short tons of coal in the US every year, but those who look at climate change and see a gigantic problem that is the ultimate example of something governments should do — those things that society wants done but no one else can and will do. There’s more than a little money from the fossil fuel interests enabling these efforts, to be sure, but that money is merely the fuel being fed into the ideological engine propelling the effort.
• I have a very pointed objection to the notion, expressed above, that climate change is a market failure. Expecting the free market (by which I mean the allocation of resources via the price mechanism) to fix climate change is akin to saying evolution should create species that will restrain their own reproduction to avoid running out of food or fouling their environment before those things ever happen. The market is a purely reactive system, which relies entirely on one communication device — sets of relative prices — to influence participants. With few exceptions, buyers and sellers only receive a signal to change after something has already influenced prices, whether that’s a resource shortage or surplus, a change in public policy, or something else. Given the immense latencies involved in climate change, at least relative to the knee-jerk time frames of most market adjustments, it should not surprise anyone that the free market is a conspicuously lousy way for humanity to respond to the self-imposed threat of climate change.[3]
• If we can’t blame the free market, then what can we blame for this colossal mess? I think the blame clearly lies with our culture, including our politics and our values. It is our job to support scientific efforts to find out how our planet works, and then use that information to influence our actions so that we do more than maximize our utility in the short run. This requires a partnership between individuals (as consumers and voters) and large organizations (most notably corporations and governments), with everyone realizing the enormous long-term benefits of enlightened self-interest. We stop ourselves from using ozone-destroying CFCs or lead in paint and gasoline or letting coal plants pour unlimited amounts of sulfur dioxide and particulate matter and (soon) CO2 into the atmosphere not out of some starry eyed, tree-hugging attempt to create a utopia, but the simple knowledge that it’s better for society as a whole if we take such steps. That collective decision making and ultimately self-governance, can only happen through the mechanism of government, from local town boards to the federal level. The more educated voters are about relevant issues and proposed solutions to problems, and the more they participate, the better off we all are. The centralized denier efforts, driven by a combination of ideology and raw financial interest, aim to break that chain at its most vulnerable spot, the ignorance, indifference, and plain old laziness of many mainstream voters and consumers regarding the still quickly evolving field of Earth Science.[4]

[1] I’m tempted to put on my Joe Romm hat here and refer to these centralized deniers as the DIC (denier ideological complex), but will instead show uncharacteristic self control.

[2] I’m not familiar with his work, so this is an educated guess based on the fact that he co-authored Merchants of Doubt.

[3] Please do not misinterpret this as a sign that I’m one of those market worshippers we see running around unsupervised. I consider the free market to be an extremely efficient way to do one thing: Allocate resources according to short-term price signals and the utility functions of market participants. Any hope that this will necessarily yield good results, in terms of meeting human needs and providing a “nice” world that avoids things like climate change and water availability issues and ocean acidification, etc., is somewhere between naive and delusional.

[4] As with the prior footnote, please don’t think I’m saying I like seeing humanity having to make such decisions about our environment and our own behavior via government or any other mechanism you care to invent. I would love to see a world in which we could make government “get out of the way” and let the free market deliver nirvana, shrink wrapped in single serving portions and available in a variety of pleasing designer colors. It would eliminate the chance that we’d screw up our self-governance, and it would also greatly reduce the amount of friction in our public discourse. We’d surely find other things to yell at each other about (political shows still have to fill air time, after all), but demeaning and attacking climate scientists and those who support their work wouldn’t add to the noise level.

Amazing Original Thing To Become Hated Cliché In 6 Months:

An extremely clever and creative new thing will amuse the world for two and a half weeks in June, become passé by mid-September, and wind up as a trite and infuriating cliché by Christmas, sources said Monday. “Positive reviews on Boing Boing will signal the brief ‘happy’ phase of this exciting new thing’s existence, about 11 weeks prior to the first backlash,” said Wired magazine senior writer Stephen Levy. “I look forward to watching America fall in love with, make YouTube parodies of, sour on, forget about, and groan legitimately when hackneyed late-night talk show references are made to the thing.” Levy estimated that the thing’s creator will earn $400,000 from licensing its image for use on T-shirts that will all be donated to Goodwill by next spring.

Yep, sounds about right to me.

Now if only we could vote on which things would disappear from the public sphere that quickly. (Talking on cell phones while driving or in public would be pretty high on my list. I’ve had a few near-accidents lately thanks to morons who don’t realize they don’t have the combination of mental bandwidth and skill needed to maneuver (typically) an SUV, minivan, or pickup while on the phone.)

Fire up the microwave and make a big ol’ bowl of popcorn,’cause the show is just getting started…

Monckton launches vitriolic - but harmless - attack on critic:

University of St. Thomas Professor John Abraham has drawn blood.

Abraham has been getting a lot of attention for his devastating deconstruction of a presentation by Christopher Walter, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley.* And while Monckton first (and wisely) declined to respond, the appearance of Abraham’s work in the Guardian this week, and the praise rendered there by columnist George Monbiot, pushed the lurid Lord over the edge, giving rise to a vicious, petty and insulting rejoinder that is all-but-entirely free of substance.

…

Monckton howls back that one of the graphs in question was clearly sourced to “the SPPI’s well-known global-temperature index, compiled monthly from four separate global-temperature datasets.” And what, pray, is the SPPI? Well that would be the SPPInstitute - the oily Science and Public Policy Institute, of which Christopher Monckton is the Chief Policy Advisor. So, Lord Chris makes up a sloppy graph at the SPPInstitute, references it inadequately in his talk and then defends himself on the basis that he is using “well-known” sources. A perfectly closed, perfectly fallible loop.

…

The funniest part of Monckton’s outburst is he has “initiated the process of having Abraham hauled up before whatever academic panel his Bible College can muster.” Aside from the cheap (and given his own Catholicism, inexplicable) shot at the status of the Catholic University of St. Thomas, Monckton is - what’s the expression? - blowing smoke.

Please go read it all. As best I can tell, Monckton’s act has never been more than a ploy to deceive the ill informed and serve his private ends[1], but now that he’s run into someone with the determination and skills to call him on his nonsense, he’s suddenly in trouble. So, of course he resorts to trying to have Abraham called on the carpet. When all he has to lean on is a sack of lies, what else can he do? Call Abraham a member of the “Hitler youth”? Oh, wait — he’s used that one elsewhere already.

The deniers are going to hate how this turns out.

Pass the popcorn.

[1] Yes, I’m dismissing even the possibility that Monckton actually believes this garbage he keeps shoveling at people. Go to YouTube and find videos of him speaking in public. He is quite obviously a highly educated man with considerable speaking skills, and I find it very hard to believe that his statements regarding climate change are anything but lies, pure and simple. If you want to make the case that he’s batshit crazy or this wrong about virtually every aspect of climate change, I’m willing to listen.

Some of you probably are aware that there was a long, excruciatingly detailed takedown of Christopher Monckton recently that got a fair amount of attention in our little corner of the infosphere. It’s true, and now that the whole presentation has been made available via YouTube, I wanted to bring it to everyone’s attention.

The person doing said dismantling is John Abraham, an engineering professor from Minnesota. The presentation is fairly long, about 83 minutes, and you can find it all in one piece (but with chapter-level access) on Professor Abraham’s web site, or you can see it 10 segments on YouTube.

The first installment:

And the rest:

• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8
• Part 9
• Part 10

Also, see Joe Romm’s short take on this, with copious links to Monckton’s antics.

If you’re offended by Nasty Adult Words like “fuck” and “shit”, click away from this page without reading what I have to say or playing the video embedded below.

Still here? Good. Because you need to see this video. Beginning at about 1:50 into an 8:22 clip, the sound track is an unnamed oil industry expert who lets fly like nothing I’ve seen or heard before.[1] Her (yes, her) topic is proper fucking booming technique, how none of what’s going on in the BP Blowout in the Gulf remotely resembles proper fucking technique, and why this is happening.

I’m begging you all to do your homework on this one. Help spread this video, and hound news organizations for being so utterly clueless that they can’t even figure out that what’s right before their eyes, excuse me — their fucking eyes — and what’s wrong with it.

This is another “put up or shut up” moment, people, just like the one I posted yesterday (see: Deniers on parade: Attacking Michael Mann). Either channel some of that angst you’re carrying around into action that just might help make a difference, or shut your fucking pie hole and go read Dilbert or play some gray cell destroying facebook game.

[1] One possible exception: Ani DiFranco in concert. She has a voice like an angel and a mouth like a drunk longshoreman.