Tag: global-warming

When We Destroy Forests, People Die

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics, Capitalism, Economic Justice

In Brazil, organized crime and a wave of loggers and prospectors have murdered and raped their way across the Amazon Basin. In Asia, forest destruction and the immense fires that resulted have devestated many lives. These are terrible, terrible crimes but a twenty year study finds that there is collateral damage in the form of heat related illness.

(This is from a book of detective stories from more than 120 years ago. It is dramatic and indicates important issues are about to be resolved. I am using it for my writing on this occasion.)

In the United States, we have the largely unpunished and uninvestigated murders of indigenous women although there is a local, state and federal preference of a kind of quasi-legal seizure and destruction of natural resources. Of course, no intelligent human being can fail to mention the massive corruption of our current regime, its wholesale destructions of regulations and enforcement agencies, not to mention the “open for business” attitude that if a corporation has a problem, arrangements can be made.

I want you to understand that I am well aware that greed and evil are international problems and that while deforestation is a more dramatic crisis in east Asian and South America, the United States and its corruption are in no way exempt for causing and profiting from forest destruction.

What kind of collateral damage are we talking about? Over the last twenty years, over half a million have died from heat related illness and many, many millions more have suffered such illness.

I don’t see much need for a business ethics analysis. Destroying huge swaths of the planet to make money is wrong.

There should fines, imprisonment and shaming. The people who do these horrible things should have their pictures published and their names removed from colleges, dorms and cultural institutions. They should at all times be exposed for the destructive cockroaches that they are. But be well aware, a good and moral society would not just rely on shame but would punish them for their crimes.

James Alan Pilant

Jonathan Watts writing for The Guardian has an article: Deforestation has killed half a million people in past 20 years, study finds.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/27/deforestation-has-killed-half-a-million-people-in-past-20-years-study-finds

Deforestation has killed more than half a million people in the tropics over the past two decades as a result of heat-related illness, a study has found.

Land clearance is raising the temperature in the rainforests of the Amazon, Congo and south-east Asia because it reduces shade, diminishes rainfall and increases the risk of fire, the authors of the paper found.

Deforestation is responsible for more than a third of the warming experienced by people living in the affected regions, which is on top of the effect of global climate disruption.

About 345 million people across the tropics suffered from this localised, deforestation-caused warming between 2001 and 2020. For 2.6 million of them, the additional heating added 3C to their heat exposure.

The Resistance Fights Back

On By southwerkIn moral philosophy

The Climate web site whose staff was fired and operations halted is getting a second shot at life. This time as a private venture,  climate.us.

Anyone with any concern for our future on this planet should add this to their browser as a useful and important web site.

Rebecca Lindsey is quoted in the article linked to below as saying:

“What’s happening can feel so overwhelming that it’s easy to feel like you’re powerless to do anything about it,” said Lindsey’s team member. “But sometimes you have to just look out and see what’s within your reach. And this problem is within our reach, so we just see it as sort of doing our part.”

And she is right. Every day some new horror, some new obscenity, some new assault on justice, on knowledge, on actual Christianity is thrown out there like a stain on white silk by the current administration and it is easy to get exhausted by the flood.

Eric Holthaus writing for the Guardian wrote the following article: Scientists breathe new life into climate website after shutdown under Trump.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/30/climate-gov-website-trump

Earlier this summer, access to climate.gov – one of the most widely used portals of climate information on the internet – was thwarted by the Trump administration, and its production team was fired in the process.

…

Now, a team of climate communication experts – including many members of the former climate.gov team – is working to resurrect its content into a new organization with an expanded mission.

Their effort’s new website, climate.us, would not only offer public-facing interpretations of climate science, but could also begin to directly offer climate-related services, such as assisting local governments with mapping increased flooding risk due to climate change.

This is an important lesson, an act of defiance against the fools and charlatans running the current regime.

We must never give into hopelessness.

Our democracy is at stake.

We must fight. They are fighting for scientific knowledge and a respect for factual data. Look at their courage and hard work and realize that what we do matters.

James Alan Pilant

The Cold Blooded Republican Response to Climate Change

On By southwerkIn business ethics

I was looking at a poll the other day that found that 12% of the members of the Republican Party thought climate change was an important issue.

This is fascinating. I live in the middle of the United States. It is hotter than it has ever been and the weather more dramatic and powerful than it has ever been. You can literally feel climate change in the middle United States.

And yet, the great majority of one of the major political parties in the United States look at the thermostat and mutter, “Oh, no big deal.”

Looking at the news over the last few days, one sees that in the Philippines, it has gotten so hot that schools have been closed and classes moved online. India is in the grip of a huge heatwave.

And just today, now, here is a lead news article that indicates that thirty states are in the midst of record breaking heat wave.

“My Goodness” That looks surprisingly like objective evidence of climate change and maybe even a looming emergency.

So, surely Republicans will notice, right?

That would be nice. It would be part of the duty of a citizen in participative democracy to pay attention to facts and adjust their views accordingly but they will not change their minds. They live in a world where “owning the libs” is much of the meaning in their lives. And you can say, “James, that can’t be much of a life?” Well, yes, it is not much of a life. Thus there is just a ton of hysterical anger.

If you think I’m wrong. Look at the other stuff they are denying. They deny there is any significant racism in the United States (except against white people). Simply, reading the daily new should thoroughly prove that racism continues in America. It seems they don’t read. They deny the evidence of poverty and hunger in the United States to the point of refusing to supplement school lunch programs to feed children during the summer. And I could go on.

Florida has passed legislation removing climate change from consideration when making policy and abandoning a variety of green initiatives while also forbidding the construction of wind turbines on the coast.

To quote the governor of Florida:

“We’re restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots,” DeSantis said in a post on the X social media platform.

The level of irony in the words of the governor are difficult to approach. Florida is in the middle of very serious heat wave, there are coral die offs all along the coast, and insurance companies are fleeing the state like so many rats from an overheated and perhaps burning ship.

I am concerned. Not about the Republicans, their current fantasies are really just silly. Saving them from nonsense is not something I can do. When you surrender your judgment to a cult, an online posting, the rants of hate radio or some weird conspiracy theory, the death of judgment and intelligence follows. What concerns me is that this nation where I make my home will probably be unable to deal intelligently and effectively with climate change. And because of our enormous economic power, we may doom much of the world with us.

It is the greed enshrined in our society’s goals and the way our corporations are set up solely to take money as their sole goal that will probably doom us and our future generations. It is very sad. We live in a nation developed in the ideas of the Enlightenment. We have the words of Lincoln and Thomas Paine to guide us – and all of that history or righteousness and glory is being denied, diminished and attacked.

Oh well, if I am to die of heat stroke or flooding or some other interesting element of climate change, I will die here in the United States. It is my home and I consider myself a patriot.

It is unfortunate that the limitations, foolishness and greed of a some Americans are going to do so much damage to so many.

James Alan Pilant

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tv-meteorologist-blasts-florida-don-152447336.html

https://www.yahoo.com/news/hot-mexico-howler-monkeys-falling-165619685.html

After Covid, now heat forces schools to go online in the Philippines | The Independent

‘Red alert’ in Delhi after temperature soars to 47C as heatwave grips India’s north (msn.com)

Meteorologist rebukes DeSantis for scrubbing climate change from state law: ‘Florida is on fire’ (msn.com)

https://www.themirror.com/news/us-news/terrifying-heatwave-map-shows-30-503037

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/16/1251769080/florida-desantis-climate-change-law

The Deceptive Politics Edition

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

The Deceptive Politics Edition

The best thing I’ve read on the Internet today is from the “History Chick in AZ.” It looks like a major paper on the subject of the misuse of history by advocacy groups in particular, The Federalist Society, although it talks about quite a few others.

These days, if you wander the Internet, it seems there are tidal waves of made up history from Black regiments fighting for the confederacy, to white people being most of the slaves, to Puritans seeking religious freedom, all of them running a muck at all times.

But the paper is talking not about just made up history but made up with a purpose. And the purpose is to change the law by creating an impression of a scholarly take on American history.

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The Deceptive Politics Edition

My first encounter with the phenomenon was an article extolling the idea that the Old West was a paradise of tranquility since everybody carried a gun and it mentioned prominently that Tombstone, Arizona only had two or three murders a year during that wonderful period. Except that Tombstone never had more than 7,000 people in it and the average modern American city of 10,000 has one murder every ten years. I wasn’t impressed by those claims then and I’m not impressed now.

When you don’t have any government and no legal avenues for justice, people get killed and not just a few. The Old West was a time of chaos and crime in American history, and all the spin you can slap on it isn’t going to change what happened.

But there are many other areas where history and simple factual data are under attack – one of them is climate change.

Here’s an excerpt from the article –

One of the more visible examples of the power of these groups to shape policy and public perceptions has been the issue of climate change. Flush with money from oil and gas companies, several political advocacy groups were able to wage a public battle against scientists to successfully create the perception of doubt, when there was none within the scientific community. With public confusion and cowed politicians, they were able to bring any legislation meant to deal with the problem to a halt. (19) The media, sadly concerned more with the appearance of neutrality than with the truth helped create this perception of doubt. In addition, reporters have been too trusting of experts without checking their affiliations and potential conflicts of interest. Realizing the problem the ProPublica reporterRobert Faturechi states, “Reporters and editors need to be more skeptical of experts, and the false sense of security that their name brand affiliations provide. Before we quote them or their studies, or publish their op-eds, we have to ask harder questions about their funding and their outside employment.” (20) We are now all paying the price for this mischief, and it will only get worse.

I recommend to got the “history chick’s” blog and have a good read. The article I’m referring to can be read here.

As always, like, share and subscribe!

James Pilant

Do the American People Need to Become Re-introduced to Science?

On By southwerkIn Opinion7 Comments
Global warming ubx

Image via Wikipedia

Seth Mnookin: The Autism Vaccine Controversy and the Need for Responsible Science Journalism

Last January, Andrew Wakefield, the discredited British gastroenterologist whose 1998 paper sparked the first wave of fears that vaccines might be causally connected to autism, was further disgraced when the editors of the British Medical Journal declared his work “an elaborate fraud.” (By that point, Wakefield had already forfeited his medical license for a litany of moral, ethical, and professional misdeeds — including an incident where he paid children at his young son’s birthday party to donate their blood for his experiments.) With little left to lose, Wakefield seemed to fully embrace the fringe: In June, he headlined a rally titled “The Masterplan: The Hidden Agenda for a Global Scientific Dictatorship” with a cohort of 9/11 Truthers, One World Government conspiracists, and anti-fluoridationists.

So, how are the mighty fallen. This is one of the slender reeds upon with the anti-vaccination movement rests? Has the movement slidden into Internet Conspiracy Theory? (JP)

Seth Mnookin: The Autism Vaccine Controversy and the Need for Responsible Science Journalism

 

Do the American People Need to Become Re-introduced to Science

I’m beginning to wonder.

Last winter, I was getting my haircut during a snow fall and one of the clients said “I guess that global warming is going to get us all; the he hee-hawed like a jackass.

Didn’t hear quite so many jokes during the drought last summer when in the eight county Houston area, 66 million trees are dying roughly 10% of all trees in the area.

The evidence is clear. Get some bad research, a couple of bogus think tanks and compliant media with give you equal credit with internationally renowned scientists. Using this tool, you can confuse enough of the population to keep necessary legislation or in the case in the article above vaccinations from taking place.

I’ve been in college with students studying to be scientists. (My degree is in criminal justice and speech, and I have a law degree.) I was always amazed at how hard they worked to be precise in their conclusions. Their dedication was amazing. For many it was a love of learning, of discovering, and of making a difference. That’s why they became scientists.

Hearing and reading them described as some kind of international plot to disdain God and make people give up their cars is a pretty miserable experience. It’s like hearing a good friend maligned.

Let me tell you something. I was raised in a fundamentalist church. Do you know how many times I was lied to in their literature; how often the material was simply made up whole cloth? Do you know how often when I went and studied history and science and discovered that the things they told me were non-existent or distortions of the facts? It was a regular experience.

When I compare that to the number of times that scientists have deliberately misled me in my lifetime, there is simply no contest.

You make better decisions with facts and science than you do with wishful thinking. Whether it be secondhand smoke or global warming, I’ll line up with the best knowledge available.

James Pilant

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NOAA Makes It Official: 2011 Among Most Extreme Weather Years in History (via madaboutthenews)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Facts are facts. Whether about evolution or climate change, the data is going to just keep accumulating in ever larger stacks of hard to ignore facts.

It’s getting hotter. Now, tornadoes are not very get indicators of climatic change – too many variable. Hurricanes are a little better but not much. The best indicators are average temperatures over time and weather volatility.

However, with the rise of “intelligent design,” more and more science is a matter of opinion. Thus, the United States is gradually losing that key part of the democratic process, critical thinking. If we don’t like what science or history or sociology says, we just get together with a few other disgruntled individuals and rewrite history or science. It’s easy. Pretend there is a controversy, and that you are God’s seekers after truth.

Will we be burning witches soon? Or giving faith healing status to collect insurance for services rendered? I don’t know. Let’s watch. The 14th century awaits.

James Pilant

NOAA Makes It Official: 2011 Among Most Extreme Weather Years in History Just past the halfway point, 2011 has already seen eight weather-related disasters in the U.S. that caused more than $1 billion in damagesAmplify’d from http://www.scientificamerican.comEXTREME WEATHER: Halfway through, 2011 has already seen eight weather-related disasters that caused more than $1 billion in damagesThe devastating string of tornadoes, droughts, wildfires and floods that hit the United States this spring marks 2011 as one of the mo … Read More

via madaboutthenews