Climatologists vs. smoke blowers

   Snow blessed Colorado's Front Range last week, roughly a month later than normal. This was not a surprise in what is shaking down as the warmest year on record.

   Even less surprising is the forecast: dry — not just in precipitation, but in any hope of Congress addressing the No. 1 issue facing the planet.

    Any climatologist will tell you not to put too much stock in temporal temperatures when the big picture is the issue. We will have our early blizzards, late deep freezes, oranges sprouting icicles.

    Other indicators are not so temporal — like the incessant, insatiable gorging of pine beetles in the Rockies. The only real remedy: a week or two of 40 below zero where they dine. That isn't coming any time soon.

    Another indicator: reddish summer snowpack way up high, from the dust of increasing desiccation — soil erosion, desert expansion — around the globe. Dirt blown from another hemisphere leaves a telltale film. The ruddiness causes the snow to absorb heat more readily. Summer runoff accelerates.

    Those things have nothing to do with when noses will grow red in Fargo or Tampa. The symptoms up high are the real deal, the real story. The earth is warming, Bubba.

     I may not be able to convince you. Every time my fingers sing this tune, I can expect to be lectured electronically that global warming is a myth. Period. Someone will mention concerns about global cooling back in the '70s. Someone else will cite a list as long as Macy's Parade of scientists who dispute global warming. Check it out, they'll say — the Petition Project. Actually, I have checked it out. It is the work of a bare percentage of actual earth scientists, fluffed up by the names of many who have other areas of expertise entirely.

      The doubters don't want you to know this: The American Geological Institute polled every earth scientist in its Directory of Geoscience Departments who doing actual research on the climate. It found that 97 percent agree global warming is real, and that human activity plays a role.

      Now, 700 climate scientists in the American Geophysical Union have committed to shed clinical anonymity and take that message public whenever and wherever.

      This is going to put new demands on a mobile strike force financed by industry, one so nimble that it inspired Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway's new book: "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming."

       I observed these scientists-to-go at a climate conference a few years ago at the University of Texas. They tumble off another jet plane with charts and graphs in hand, thundering down to the microphone just in time to get their allotted rebuttal. Then they'll pop up at another conference the next day, and on Fox News that night. The per diem obviously is good, and the face time can't be beat.

         These practitioners were hoping the other day that the U.S. Senate would fall into Republican hands so that Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma — he says global warming is a hoax — could again chair the Environment and Public Works Committee. Inhofe had that mighty fulcrum for four years until a Democratic majority supplanted him in 2007. In that period, he made sure that the handful of credentialed doubters who have helped keep an entire political system in denial had a ready microphone under the brightest lights.

         Whatever they say, the truth lies up there in the snow, with less of it being forecast in the winter ahead. A winter is temporal, of course, but so is humanity under certain circumstances.

         Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

How the money machine rolls

     Marva Beck told a reporter that her first priority as a new state representative is a tougher voter identification law.

     Really?

     Not, say, to help Texas schools address ever-accumulating and costly state mandates? Not to better serve the mentally ill? Not to dig the state out of its Texas-sized hole in addressing its transportation needs?

     No, the Centerville Republican will go to Austin banging pots and pans to ward off something that rarely presents itself in real life: the threat to the republic that is illegal voters.

     Don't believe that this is a partisan red-state herring? Don't rely on me. Ask Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott. He did a full-court press to catch illegal voters a couple of years ago. He ended up prosecuting not quite enough of them to have a full-court game of basketball.

     Voter ID efforts stir Republican politicos to song, though they affect average citizens almost not all all. A learned response is that for the GOP it's more about suppressing the participation of a class of voters that trends Democrat  — the poor, the black, the brown — than actually preventing illegal acts.

     I remark on the general puniness of Beck's top priority because she just staged a tremendous upset. The political novice defeated seven-term state Rep. Jim Dunnam of Waco.

     A tremendous effort by moneyed interests successfully targeted Dunnam, leader of the House Democrats. Beck, wholly obscure outside of her Leon County environs, became the vessel to place the TNT in Dunnam's loafers.

      Another reason to remark on this is that Beck's victory so clearly epitomized those across the state and nation, where money spoke every bit as loudly as voting blocs.

      No offense to the fine folks and livestock of Central Texas, but there's not $1.5 million worth of political real estate in House District 57, which Beck now will represent. That's how much money was poured into it by both candidates.

      And while Beck will claim to have staged a door-knocking grassroots revolt, business-interests behemoth Texans for Lawsuit Reform paid for spreading much of the manure — nearly $600,000 worth of it, according to the Texas Ethics Commission. Among other things, this booty helped finance a succession of glossy direct-mail missives seemingly without end. Not cheap.

      Money. Money. Money.

      Nationwide, $4 billion was spent on drilling messages into your brain, mostly through TV. Eduardo Porter in the New York Times calculated that the price of a vote — $33 in an already obscenely costly 2008 campaign, went up to $43 this time.

      "Democracy Now" host Amy Goodman is one who ever has her eyes on the prize of justice for all — in contrast to those who think what's best for the country is to keep marginalized people down. An advocate of public campaign financing and free candidate air time, she points out a truth: "Media corporations are making such a killing . . . Yet the broadcasters are using public airwaves."

      Who was paying for all of this? On national scale, it generally was anonymous donors, dominated by corporations and unions.

      Before this Congress wheezes to a halt, it needs to go strong to the hoop on a bill that would take away this mask of anonymity and make major players stand for the attacks they finance. This interest should cut both ways. In fact, one Republican, new Sen.-elect Mark Kirk, R-Ill., has said he might support the Disclose Act, which would lift the veil on now-nameless campaign funds.

       As for Texas: It is more in the spell of big money than ever before. People without means have less of a voice than ever before. Achingly obvious transportation needs have less of a voice than ever before. Teachers have less of a voice than ever before.

       Now, let's go out and find us some illegal voters. Gotta be some out there somewhere.

       Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. E-mail: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.  

Not a lick of difference — yeah, boy

This is for those in the "not a lick of difference" camp. Yes, you folks in the squishy, independent center, and you folks of the so easily disgusted left.

This is also to you relatively progressive candidates who campaigned as if — yes, 'twas not a lick of difference.

Yeah, boy, there's a difference, and we're about to dine on it.

We're going to see it in the golf-tan visage of House Speaker John Boehner, who rose to power basically by, um, well, doing nothing. Really. The guy could have been writing "Seinfeld" episodes that never aired. Now, he's on the cover of news magazines.

We're going to see one of the most marginally qualified U.S. Senate candidates ever in Kentuckyian (by way of Baylor University) Rand Paul, who at least has the right pigment to say the Civil Rights Act is obsolete.

We're going to see newcomers in Congress like Central Texas' Bill Flores — an oil company executive, natch. Ol' Bill finally made good on Republicans' take-Texas-government-hostage, hook-or-crook redrawing of districts twice with one census. Finally, that GOP boulder fell in the path of wily, hardworking, nimble 20-year veteran Chet Edwards.

We're going to see more of old comers like Rep. "Smokey Joe" Barton, he who never met a polluter from whom he wouldn't take a dollar. With the GOP the House majority again, Barton no doubt will chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee as he was doing when he invited contributors to take a seven-hour train ride from Fort Worth to San Antonio at $2,000 a head. Raised over $100,000.

You might remember Joe as the one who called it a "shakedown" when President Obama told BP it was going to pay for the oil-spill catastrophe in the Gulf.

Be prepared for people like Barton, Boehner and oil man Flores to do all they can to undermine the most far-sighted makeover ever of America's energy policies — a veritable moon shoot declared by Obama. But of course. Those initiatives undermine the very enterprises that paid so much to get these guys into power.

We recall at this moment how "not a lick of difference" served the purposes of presidential candidate George W. Bush. He convinced many in the squishy center that he was a centrist. Good one, George.

Dick Cheney took that blessing as a mandate for industry to write energy and environmental laws.

I have to take a moment here to grouse that presidential candidate Al Gore got so locked in on lock boxes and wonkery that some squishy centrists, independents and disgusted lefties actually had reason to wonder if a lick of difference distinguished he and the W.

And now we've had an election where a lot of Democrats went around trying to convince voters they were no such thing, or any thing meaningful whatever. This, though every election is won at the margins, and the only way to enthuse anyone outside your base is to explain why he or she ought to be enthused.

At least I saw one Democrat, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, win by pointing out that Tea Party darling Ken Buck was a foe of reproductive rights and in dozens of ways too far right to represent a centrist state.

Unfortunately, a lot of the time I saw progressive candidates who could have drawn out such contrasts cede language of the debate to that of the Republican front organization called the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Not a lick of difference. Yeah, boy.

The opportunity for Obama: He has two years to show us. The difference, that is.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. E-mail: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.