C200: Climate Change Cartoons

Can you laugh at global warming? Indeed, should you? The Ken Sprague Fund has organised a competition that set out to answer those awkward questions - so if you think that cartoons about climate change could be in poor taste, look away now.
Around 150 artists from more than 50 countries submitted entries. The results, says John Green, secretary of the fund that was set up in memory of cartoonist Ken Sprague, were "bitingly satirical, outrageously funny or exceedingly bitter, and even fatalistic". None were neutral or indifferent, he says, while few took the subject lightly.

Earth family alpha directed me to this post on the winners of this competition with the winning cartoon above.

Green says: "Cartoons can reach parts that other arguments can't. We have been inundated with doom-laden predictions and scientific facts on the inevitability of global warming, but here we can exorcise our fears.

Powerful, uncompromising and uncomfortable images bring home to us what it will really mean - not a Costa del Sol on the Welsh coast and palm trees in the garden, but desertification, hunger and poverty."

First prize was awarded to Coat Star, by Mikhail Zlatkovsky, from Russia. Green says that the judges - chaired by regular Guardian political cartoonist Martin Rowson - felt that the winner "captured the shabbiness and sleazy way our planet is being devastated".

I include some of my favorites. This first could have been used with my post on T. Boone Pickens.

A185: Arrogant Asswipe

The G8 summit ends without any significant change. This is not a surprise. Sadly, this WTF incident also doesn't really surprise us. From the British press we can learn . . .

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

To clarify what I meant 'without significant change' I quote the same article.

Concluding the three-day event, leaders from the G8 and developing countries proclaimed a "shared vision" on climate change. However, they failed to bridge differences between rich and emerging nations on curbing emissions.

Hat tip to Dependable Renegade

Arrogant Asswipe - Vice version
While this was going on, news of Vice President Cheney directing the CDC to edit findings. From Earthfamilyalpha:

He also noted that in the fall of 2007, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Cheney's office asked him to work with the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to remove portions of a report detailing the threats that climate change poses to human health. The document in question was the testimony that Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC, had prepared to give before the Senate environment and public works committee about the human impacts of global warming.

After her testimony in October 2007, it came to light that the White House had edited it down from 14 pages to a mere four, cutting the six pages detailing the diseases and other health problems that would be exacerbated by a warming planet.

Burnett's letter this week was the first evidence, however, that the call for edits came directly from Cheney's office, which he says asked him to "remove from the testimony any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change".

Update: The more I look at that photograph the more it looks photoshopped . . . What is the black panel behind Angela M.? Just sayin' . . .
It doesn't refute the dumbassery of mondo fucko (as Melissa McEwan often calls him).

X159: My response is “X”

How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic

I want to share a fantastic treasure trove of valuable information from Grist. This assembled list represents a handy guide for any of us to keep close by for ‘fill in the blank’ kinds of arguments regarding climate change. As I heard on Democracy Now this week, the Corporate News is still calling this unprecedented weather, Extreme Weather. Headlines, reports, the ‘crawl’ do not connect the dots with Global Warming.

This has gotten personal for me. I have a niece in Cedar Rapids, IA, with two little girls. I found out that they had moved all of their precious belonging up to the top floor, packed up and moved to higher ground at a friend’s home. I googled for articles on connecting the Iowa flood to Climate Change and Global Warming and got nothing.

I have family in the Midwest, and coincidentally relations who are Republican apologists. I know that the kinds of climate skeptics addressed in these hundreds of articles could be from any one of them. The belief in authoritarian framing seems unwavering. It is daunting, but the relentlessness of ‘extreme weather’ is providing the basis for us being able to raise the issue over and over with the skeptics. The Grist article opening and outline follows. Even though I may have gone past fair use limits, I wanted to give the complete outline, stripped of all of the links to make the rationale, the categories apparent. Go to the original source for the complete series list.

Below is a complete listing of the articles in "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic," a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:

• Stages of Denial,
• Scientific Topics,
• Types of Argument, and
• Levels of Sophistication.

Individual articles will appear under multiple headings and may even appear in multiple subcategories in the same heading.

Stages of Denial

1. There's nothing happening
1. Inadequate evidence
2. Contradictory evidence
3. No consensus
2. We don't know why it's happening
1. Models don't work
2. Prediction is impossible
3. We can't be sure
3. Climate change is natural
1. It happened before
2. It's part of a natural change
3. It's not caused by CO2
4. Climate change is not bad
1. The effects are good
2. The effects are minor
3. Change is normal
5. Climate change can't be stopped
1. Too late
2. It's someone else's problem
3. Economically infeasible

Scientific Topics

1. Temperature
2. Atmosphere
3. Extreme events

4. Temperature records
5. Storms
6. Droughts

4. Cryosphere

1. Sea ice
2. Ice sheets

5. Oceans

6. Modeling

1. Uncertainties

7. Climate forcings

1. Greenhouse gases
2. Aerosols

8. Paleo climate

1. Ice ages
2. Geologic history

9. Scientific process

Types of Argument

1. Uninformed
2. Misinformed
3. Cherry Picking
4. Urban Myths
5. FUD
6. Non Scientific
7. Underdog Theories
8. Crackpottery

Levels of Sophistication

1. Silly
2. Naive
3. Specious
4. Scientific