Overcast this early Wednesday on California’s north coast, supposedly the rain is gone until the weekend, but those thick, gray clouds hovering overhead right now look more than just a little rain-threatening.
The NWS is calling today ‘mostly sunny,’ which is way better than mostly good, as I’m currently without wheels, two-footing it to Safeway and beyond, so must keep a half-ass eye on weather developments — got to be kinda dry to fly.
Down south, the LA area got drenched in some heavy rain last night and again this morning, but beyond wetting the pavement for awhile, the climate of continuing dry-drought runs unabated, despite quickly-approaching water shortages, of course, first filtered through denial.
(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Harlequin Head,’ found here).
In a time when you’d expect just about everybody would be seeking action on climate change, at least in the US, any kind of movement is going to way-tainted by where you live, and the political bullshit-level on where you live. Out here on the somewhat progressive Left Coast, a new survey shows 70 percent of California folks believe global warming is real, contrast that to coal-crazed West Virginia, where only 54 percent think climate change is happening.
The new study by Yale and Utah State University and published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, and there’s interactive maps, too, to further break down the denial bile — on my turf, Humboldt County, it appears we’re in about the 60 percent range, along with most of the entire California coastline. The interior looks lame, but what the shit.
More on the study via Inside Climate News:
Called “multilevel regression and poststratification,” the method uses information from a series of nationally representative online panels that examined participants’ climate beliefs.
It is blended with other data to strengthen the model’s predictive powers. (For example, data on how many same-sex couples live in a neighborhood might not have much to do with climate, but it can predict the level of liberalism; and data about car-driving habits can give clues about environmental consciousness.)
They tested the model’s predictions of local beliefs with actual polling in four states and two cities, and found them accurate within a few percentage points, just as ordinary polls would be.
“It’s kind of like suddenly having a microscope,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale project on Climate Change Communication, one of the authors.
The tool is being made available online for anybody to use.
…
Nationally, 63 percent of Americans agree that the climate is changing.
A majority think so in every state—even in West Virginia (54 percent) and Wyoming (55 percent), both big coal producers.
The highest percentage (75 percent) is in Hawaii.
In the District of Columbia, 81 percent agree. (There are only 75 counties in the country where more than half the people don’t think climate change is real.)
The swings are greater when you look at smaller circles on the map. And the biggest gap of all is over whether to confront the climate crisis by controlling emissions of carbon dioxide.
These wide differences may make it harder politically to adopt meaningful changes like joining a strong international climate treaty, taxing or capping emissions of carbon dioxide, or spending more on researching alternatives to fossil fuels.
The convergence of public opinion, fossil fuel dependence, and intractable senators is hard to miss when states like Wyoming, Kentucky, and Louisiana sit on one side of an ideological gulf and California, New York and Hawaii perch on the other.
“Geographic patterns in beliefs are often consistent with what one might expect from political patterns, with traditionally blue states such as California and New York, for example, showing relative high concern about climate change, and red states such as Wyoming and Oklahoma showing lower concern,” the study said.
However, summarizing perceptions at the state level obscures variability at finer scales.
In Teton County, Wyoming, for example, we estimate that 64 percent of adults believe that global warming is happening, similar to the national average, despite an estimate for the state as a whole of 55 percent.
Likewise, projected belief in global warming is relatively low in Lewis County, Washington, a blue state, whereas the level of belief in the state as a whole is higher (67 percent).
And this type horror abounds in GOP infestations in the country — per Mashable:
Republican Rep. Robert B. Aderholt represents the fourth district of Alabama, the congressional district with the lowest percentage of people who say they are worried about climate change (40 percent), as well as the lowest percentage of people who say global warming is happening (52 percent).
Perhaps not surprisingly, Aderholt has a 4 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), an environmental group.
A ugly reason Republican deniers are so important — they’re killing any realistic chances to get a handle on the environment. And they’re winning because a little tomfoolery can go a long way.
Like for instance in Wisconsin, where Republicans are trying to make climate change go away by ignoring it — a Florida disease.
Via the Guardian:
State treasurer Matt Adamczyk, a Republican, says his plan to prohibit Tia Nelson, the executive secretary of the state’s Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, from “engaging in global warming or climate change work” on the job is part of an attempt to trim government spending, which has included fighting for his own office to be eliminated.
…
Adamczyk alleges that Nelson’s co-authoring of a report on policy recommendations for the state to address climate change amounted to theft of the state’s time.
…
Adamczyk has taken a special interest in the commission’s spending since he took office in November, reportedly calling for Nelson, who is the daughter of Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, to be removed from BCPL’s letterhead within a week of taking office, and telling Nelson he was “beyond disappointed” that the office maintained a New York Times subscription, and urging its cancellation.
Ain’t that some shit — madness of the idiots.
(Now a slip of time on the InterWebs as it’s afternoon — some eight or so hours after I started this post. Today was laundry day, so I had to hove to on that, and after running errands and paying some bills, it’s currently a windy, sunshine-splashed mid-afternoon. Of course, I’m on foot doing all that, so it sure as shit didn’t include any running.)