Collide-a-scape

This is tops for today, from the master.

Imagine the histrionics when Lou Dobbs figures out the climate change angle to one of his pet causes. In the meantime, with respect to yesterday’s big report, this is a reasonable take on domestic security issues, particularly those related to the border:

As much as the United States will have its hands full dealing with the impacts of climate change, many Latin American countries will face more severe impacts and will face them sooner, motivating increased migration across our borders. If the politics of immigration are difficult today, imagine a decade hence when millions of South Americans suddenly run out of the glacier water they depend on.

When deforestation is covered in places like this, the environmental debate becomes much richer and expansive:

The hyped climate report released today by the Obama Administration is not in itself a “game changer.” As the AP’s Seth Borenstein notes:

The White House document — a climate status report required periodically by Congress — contains no new research.

The real game changer, illustrated by today’s press conference at the White House and the snazzy new website, is that we have a President who is willing to flex political muscle on the climate change issue.  As Borenstein wrote, the report

paints a fuller, more cohesive and darker picture of global warming in the United States than previous studies and brief updates during the George W. Bush years.

But those who think this “darker picture” will be a game changer are probably going to be disappointed. To truly effect a change in public attitude and policy, Obama will have to stay consistently engaged with the issue in a substantive manner.

What Joe Romm touts as “NOAA-led” the Guardian reports as

part of a carefully crafted strategy by the White House.

It’s both. No matter, today’s big climate report is sure to light up the blogosphere.

This is rich, coming from the Global Warming capo on the left, he who relishes rhetorical knee-capping:

ClimateProgress was the victim of a recent such bullying effort, as detailed in this recent post.

The point, of course, is to try to shout down those of us who are warning about the dire nature of the problem and to attempt to paint us as out of the mainstream extremists who advocate violence, when, in fact, historically, progressives have strongly embraced nonviolence as a means of promoting our causes.

My emphasis added. More and more, Romm strikes me as the kind of guy who ruins your pick-up basketball game–you know, the one who bangs you incessantly, then cries foul himself at the slightest tap.

On Friday I received a remarkable press release entitled, “Vaccines and Mercury Related to Tobacco, Asbestos, and Lead?” Here’s the first graph:

We are in an epidemic of chronic diseases — including Autism — that were rare decades ago, but today affect tens of millions of adults and fully one-half of our children. 1 Moreover, thousands of adults and children die each year from sudden unexplained causes. 2 Many doctors and scientists say that clear evidence links these health problems to vaccines and mercury.

The release, from a supposed journalism organization called Public Affairs Media, Inc.,  goes on to suggest that the autism-vaccine link is following a similar historical trajectory as other famous public health storylines, such as the long-disputed link (by cigarette companies) between tobacco and lung cancer. The release promotes a quasi-documentary on autism and vaccines by Public Affairs Media. But if you link to the website and blog, there’s no information on the new non-profit, just a clip of the video, which was made by Richard Milner, a television and film producer.

The PR for the documentary makes this claim:

For some time, substantial evidence has linked vaccines and mercury to death and major chronic diseases, including Autism. Why is this evidence being ignored?

What I find even odder than this utterly false claim is that it was distributed in the form of a “paid” press release via the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), of which I am a member. To be fair, SEJ is a conduit for many paid releases, which members receive in their email. And they all contain the following disclaimer: “The following is a paid press release and does not necessarily reflect views of the Society of Environmental Journalists.”

Still, I have to wonder what the credibility threshold is for SEJ in terms of its press release policy.

Leaving asides questions about Public Media Inc., (are they a real journalism outfit or just a front for some autism advocacy group?), what about the actual substance of the release?  Not only is it poorly written, but it also makes bizzare, vaguely conspiratorial assertions. No red flags there?

As to the thrust of its main claim? Here’s the latest fact page from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which states:

Many studies have looked at whether there is a relationship between vaccines and autism. The weight of the evidence indicates that vaccines are not associated with autism.

Additionally, as the Sunday Times from England reported several months ago, it appears that the researcher who triggered the autism-MMR scare back in 1998 with a study in Lancet, actually falsified his data.

It’ll be interesting to see if Milner gets any press coverage for this latest scare-mongering about vaccines. The real story, though, is the continuing threat to public health with increasing numbers of children not getting immunization shots because their parents have succumbed to the well-publicized and thoroughly unsubstantiated fears that vaccines can trigger autism.

A few years ago, a ranger at Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument told me that this would be a historic trail in fifty years.

In the meantime, the tragedy continues:

Already this year, 79 of the dead have been recovered. The season of death, deep summer, has not even begun.

This could get ugly.

(Hat Tip: John Fleck.)

Liberal bloggers need to get a better grip on why the issue of climate change doesn’t resonate more with the American public. Yesterday, Matt Yglesias lamented that

the political moment of possibility for climate legislation has coincided with an enormous recession.

Yeah, we know that. The fact is, environmental concerns always wane in an economic downturn, which as Yglesias noted, is borne out in this latest Pew report. So I can’t understand why he goes off track when he concludes:

The trouble is that what the public wants is basically a fantasy—a policy that will let us avoid paying the costs involved in coping with the climate crisis.

No, what the public wants more than anything is for the recession to end. The bottom line: people are more worried about finding a job and holding on to their homes than they are about protecting the environment today, much less in fifty years, when the bill for climate change is expected to come due.

So the problem is really twofold: people care less about the environment in hard times and they care even less about what the weather is going to be like in half a century.

That’s the paradox of climate change: it’s widely considered an urgent problem that must be addressed now, but global warming can’t be felt by the average American. Even experts concede that the worst impacts aren’t expected to hit for decades. That’s why there are two-hour prime time TV specials to help us imagine what this distant future may look like.

Curbing carbon dioxide emissions and adapting to climate change is going to be ulta-complicated on so many levels.  But it’ll be that much harder if people don’t tackle the right equation–that being the uniqueness of a pressing environmental problem that can’t be felt today, combined with a harsh economic landscape that reduces the public’s ability and willingness to be more farsighted about this problem.