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Some reading for the “anti-warmalists” and “climate-change deniers”

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #950 on: October 21, 2017, 11:22:39 am »

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« Reply #951 on: October 21, 2017, 11:23:42 am »


from Fairfax NZ....

Houses will be ‘red-zoned’ due to climate change
 — Environment Commissioner


Report warns of “big social issues”, with 44,000 New Zealand
homes at risk if high tide rises reach 150cm.


By ROSANNA PRICE | 4:03PM - Thursday, 31 March 2016

Dr Jan Wright's report presented to local government and the environment select committee warns of “big social issues” as a result of climate change.
Dr Jan Wright's report presented to local government and the environment select committee
warns of “big social issues” as a result of climate change.


CLIMATE CHANGE is coming, and with it communities may have to be abandoned or left to deal with major financial costs.

Environment Commissioner Jan Wright said the country would face some “big social issues” because of climate change, identified in a report presented to the local government and environment select committee.

She urged central and local government to improve their planning and have national guidelines.

The report identified 44,000 homes would be affected by flooding when the high-tide rise reached 150 centimetres. An additional 24,000 buildings would also be affected.

It would cost $20 billion to replace them — and the figure did not include any infrastructure or telecommunications.

When considering a 50cm high-tide rise, 9,000 homes would be affected with an additional 4,000 buildings. This would equate to a $3b cost for replacement.

Wright had been in talks with insurance companies and banks about the effects.

“If a particular property is subject to this kind of risk, then insurance companies will start to look at whether they insure it or not,” she said.

“So you might see premiums go up, you might see the co-payments go up. Eventually a house would become uninsurable — probably a lot before it became uninhabitable.”

She said insurance companies “would take themselves quietly out of the picture”.

There could be mortgage holders in the “sad” situation of dealing with negative equity, where their mortgage would be bigger than the value of the house.

“It's kind of like a slowly unfolding red-zone in Christchurch.”


The report claims that 44,000 homes would be affected by flooding when sea level rises reached 150 centimetres. — Photograph: Asleigh Stewart/Fairfax NZ.
The report claims that 44,000 homes would be affected by flooding when sea level rises
reached 150 centimetres. — Photograph: Asleigh Stewart/Fairfax NZ.


The cost of sea-level rise of 50cm would be affect a similar number of houses in Christchurch's evacuated red-zone within the next couple of decades, she said.

Climate Change Minister Paula Bennett said every time you learn a bit more about the science “it is a little more frightening”.

“I worry about future insurance costs for every day households if they're having to deal with those sorts of flooding events,” she said.

“I do think we can put more into the kinds of technology and adaptation that would make a difference.”

However, the advice she had received about Kiwis locked into negative equity was that it would not be the case in the “near future”, but was still an “unknown” in decades to come.

Bennett was confident she could pull together a longer term plan that was not just Government-run, but led across communities.

Finance Minister Bill English said the Government would not budget for the costs of rising sea levels when the report was released in November.

The report includes maps by region of risk areas for flooding, erosion and groundwater issues. Those are available online.

The UN's climate body had predicted up to a one-metre rise by the year 2100.

However, it may be a two-metre rise at the current rate of carbon emissions, according to a study in the journal Nature which took into account Antarctic ice sheets that are melting faster than previously thought.


__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic....

 • Preparing New Zealand for rising seas: Certainty and Uncertainty


http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/78407260
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« Reply #952 on: October 21, 2017, 11:24:02 am »


from Fairfax NZ....

Intensifying sun and increased CO²
a ‘double-whammy’ for climate change


By GED CANN | 11:57AM - Thursday, 06 April 2017

The burning of fossil fuels is releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide, sucked from the atmosphere over millions of years by plants. — Photograph: Lukas Schulze/Getty Images.
The burning of fossil fuels is releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide, sucked from the
atmosphere over millions of years by plants. — Photograph: Lukas Schulze/Getty Images.


THE SUN is getting stronger and Earth has only escaped a frying because plants sucked up the extra carbon dioxide, reducing the heat caught in the atmosphere.

But that's all changing as the burning of fossil fuels ramps concentrations of CO² back up.

A new study, published in Nature Communications, traced how atmospheric CO² changed over the past 420 million years, providing researchers a key clue as to how Earth's delicate heat balance was maintained.

A leading Kiwi researcher said humans had already wound back the clock on CO² by three to four million years, with current estimates at 400 parts-per-million, effectively creating a double-whammy for global warming.

“At that time, temperatures were a couple of degrees or so higher than now, but sea levels were around 10 metres higher than present, worldwide,” Victoria University climate scientist James Renwick said.

Reversal of CO² trends could eventually result in warming of up to 10 degrees Celcius, he said.

“If we keep burning the oil and coal, we would eventually put atmospheric CO² back where it was several hundred million years ago — when the sun was a lot dimmer. With today's intensity of sunlight, the earth could get very warm,” he said.

“Our burning of fossil fuels is emitting, in the space of a century or two, huge quantities of carbon laid down over millions of years. The rate of release is hundreds of times faster than anything we know of from the past.”


Victoria University climate scientist James Renwick says human have already turned back the clock on CO² by up to 4 million years.
Victoria University climate scientist James Renwick says human have already turned back
the clock on CO² by up to 4 million years.


The new study predicting a failure to curb fossil fuel emissions could see atmospheric CO² levels reach concentration not experienced for 50 million years by the end of the century.

Renwick said that could equate to temperatures between 7°C and 8°C higher than present, with sea level rise of 50 metres or more higher than present, a state we would be locked into for several hundred years.

“Essentially all the ice on Antarctica and Greenland would melt,” he said.

“The issue is that tens of metres of sea levels rise, plus wholesale changes in rainfall patterns and heat extremes means that billions of people would be displaced and global food production would fall to a small fraction of what it is at present. That is, many billions of lives would be put at risk.”

Otago University climate scientist Jim Salinger said inaction from the likes of the United States, Australia and New Zealand was creating a dim outlook for the planet.

“There is potential for a runaway effect if we don't curb emissions quickly.”

Salinger said to lock the same CO² back into the ground would likely take hundreds of years, with the need to grow trees, chop them down, and bury them.

“We are going into uncharted territory in terms of human existance.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Sea level rise could swamp some New Zealand cities

 • Editorial: Doubting climate change science is no joke

 • Climate change education missing in New Zealand schools

 • Eating the shore: New Zealand's shrinking coastline


http://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/91200455
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« Reply #953 on: October 21, 2017, 11:24:20 am »


from Fairfax NZ....

Some New Zealand climate change impacts may
already be irreversible, Government report says


By CHARLIE MITCHELL and GED CANN | 2:05PM - Thursday, 19 October 2017



CLIMATE CHANGE may have already had an irreversible impact on New Zealand's natural systems and the effects are likely to worsen, a new Government report says.

Data showed conclusively that temperatures had already risen by one degree in New Zealand, which would have an impact on the economy, extreme weather events, biodiversity and health.

The Our Climate and Atmosphere 2017 report, released by the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) and Statistics New Zealand on Thursday, revealed the country's glaciers had lost nearly a quarter of their ice since 1977, and sea levels had risen between 14 centimetres and 22 centimetres at four main ports since 1916.

Meanwhile, our contribution to global greenhouse emissions had increased and sea level and temperature rises were forecast to gain momentum.

Soils in some areas had become drier and both the acidity and the temperature of the ocean had risen.

Last year was the country's warmest year since records began and the five warmest years on record had occurred in the last 20 years.

The number of extreme weather events had increased, as had the insurance cost of those events, Insurance Council of New Zealand data showed.

New Zealand had the fifth-highest emission levels per person in the OECD, the report said.

Since 1990, gross emissions increased 24 percent, while net emissions increased 64 percent. Net emissions accounted for carbon stored in forests, which was released when they were cut down.

Our high rate of emissions was attributed to an unusually large share of agriculture emissions and high car-ownership rates.

“While New Zealand is not a large contributor of emissions globally, we are certainly affected locally and we need to act on what that means for us,” secretary for the environment Vicky Robertson said.


Flooding in Canterbury this year. Such events are likely to become more frequent due to climate change. — Photograph: Alden Williams.
Flooding in Canterbury this year. Such events are likely to become more frequent due
to climate change. — Photograph: Alden Williams.


The scope of the report did not include recommendations for tackling emissions and Robertson said the purpose was to open the conversation.

“We are working quite significantly to bring together all the public services towards advising collectively and consistently around what government could do to create a pathway to our 2030 targets.”

Current targets were to reduce greenhouse emissions to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

The document singles out transport as a key driver of increased emissions, which had jumped 78 percent since 1990 and now equated to 18 percent overall.

However, agriculture emissions sat far higher, constituting just under half of overall emissions and had also climbed significantly in the same period.

Robertson said the report had not sought to downplay agriculture's impact and she would not be shying away from it in policy advice.

While New Zealand's emissions had continued to climb, the United Kingdom reduced its emissions by 26 percent from 1990 to 2013, Sweden by 25 percent, and France by 11 percent.

Robertson refused to give New Zealand a scorecard on its performance to-date, but said now was the time to make changes.

“The future impacts of climate change on our lives all depend on how fast global emissions are reduced and the extent to which our communities can adapt to change.”

University of Otago environmental epidemiologist Simon Hales said the main takeaway was that the country was not living up to its international obligations on climate change.

“We require a much better, more quantitative understanding of the likely adverse impacts of climate change on human health than the brief, vague statements in the MfE report.”


Fox Glacier in 2014. Our shrinking glaciers are a sign of a warming climate. — Photograph: Ian Fuller.
Fox Glacier in 2014. Our shrinking glaciers are a sign of a warming climate.
 — Photograph: Ian Fuller.


Climate change would likely have an impact on our already struggling biodiversity.

Research showed there was already a growing imbalance in the gender split of tuatara.

Warmer temperatures in tuatara nests were more likely to produce male offspring; on North Brother Island in the Cook Strait, the ratio of male to female tuatara had increased from 1:66 to 2:36 in recent decades.

Warmer temperatures also increased the wasp population in beech forests, which resulted in less food for native species, and the frequency of masts (tree seed dropping), creating food for rodents, which attract predators.

“We can expect to face possibly costly decisions around how we manage the effects of a changing climate for our unique and celebrated native biodiversity,” the report said.

Climate change would also affect the economy and our physical and mental health, although the extent for both was not yet clear.

Rising sea levels and increasing extreme weather events would affect coastal communities, likely requiring some communities to move.

An earlier risk census determined around $19 billion worth of buildings were at risk of rising sea levels.

Drier conditions in some areas would have an impact on agriculture and the rates of some diseases may increase, as well as exposure to heat waves, flooding and fires.

The report also determined the atmosphere's "ozone hole", which was attributed to high levels of melanoma in Australia and New Zealand, was shrinking.

It had decreased 21 percent from its largest size, which was reached in 2006, and may no longer exist mid-way through the century.

It was largely due to a global effort to reduce the usage of ozone depleting substances, such as those in refrigeration and air conditioning equipment.

NIWA atmospheric researcher Richard McKenzie said the report was heartening, but the country still had to be vigilant.

“The situation is delicate at present and we remain at risk from possible effects from future volcanic eruptions.”


Download the “Our Atmosphere and Climate 2017” report. (348KB PDF document)

Download the accompanying Media Release. (80KB PDF document)

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • The seaside town being eaten alive

 • Climate change could spell ‘extreme poverty’ in coastal NZ towns

 • Sea level rise could swamp some New Zealand cities


https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/98020081
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« Reply #954 on: October 21, 2017, 12:13:36 pm »

Clearly KTJ you are just making shit up re "fake scientists" and try to hide your lack of thought through spamming. Get back to me when you've worked out how to think for yourself.
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« Reply #955 on: October 21, 2017, 04:24:48 pm »

Would govt funded scientists get much funding if they said "actually this may not be a problem"?

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« Reply #956 on: November 03, 2017, 01:30:29 pm »


from The Washington Post....

A proposal in New Zealand could trigger the era of ‘climate change refugees’

Victims of climate change are so far not officially recognized as refugees. New Zealand could change that.

By RICK NOACK | 9:45PM EDT — Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Laundry hangs on the edge of a lagoon near Funafuti, Tuvalu, in 2004. — Photograph: Richard Vogel/Associated Press.
Laundry hangs on the edge of a lagoon near Funafuti, Tuvalu, in 2004. — Photograph: Richard Vogel/Associated Press.

NEW ZEALAND could become the world's first country to essentially recognize climate change as an official reason to seek asylum or residence elsewhere, a government minister indicated in an interview on Tuesday. If implemented, up to 100 individuals per year could be admitted to the island nation on a newly created visa category, according to an initial campaign promise the proposal which is now being considered is based on.

This may appear relatively insignificant, given that the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center predicts 150 to 300 million people to be forced out of their homes because of climate change by 2050. Yet the announcement has still stunned environmental activists who have long demanded such resettlement programs but have been blocked by governments and courts — including New Zealand's Supreme Court.

Although New Zealand's approach does not bind other host countries, the experiment could be used as a role model, both in national courts and in the public debate. If implemented, the New Zealand proposal would likely be used by activists in European nations such as Sweden or Germany to pressure their own governments into creating similar schemes.

The 1951 U.N. refugee convention, written long before there was such a thing, does not recognize victims of climate change.

Host nations have so far been reluctant to change the convention, prompting some islands which are expected to be hit hardest by climate change to try to reframe the problem as a solution. The Pacific island of Kiribati launched a “Migration With Dignity” scheme, which trains citizens to be the kind of highly-skilled workers in short supply in New Zealand or elsewhere.

Kiribati's program was created on the assumption that large multinational corporations may hold far more lobbying powers to change visa regulations than poor nations affected by climate change. Companies in richer countries such as New Zealand, the United States or Germany often face difficulties in recruiting skilled workers for certain tasks, and have pressured governments to relax visa restrictions much more successfully than nations such as Tuvalu or Kiribati could have done themselves.

This strategy may work for some smaller islands, but not all climate refugees can become highly skilled workers.

The vast majority of them will likely either face the prospect of staying in their home countries — if they still exist — or becoming “second class” citizens abroad who are not officially recognized as refugees.

Activists in New Zealand have led international efforts to prevent such a scenario, given that their comparatively wealthy country is surrounded by smaller island nations such as Tuvalu or Kiribati, which are just two meters above sea level and could be fully submerged in approximately 30 to 50 years.

In a major step forward for proponents of such efforts, New Zealand's Green Party promised the introduction of a new visa category in the run-up to September elections. The party has now become a coalition partner in the new Labour-led government.

“The lives and livelihoods of many of our Pacific neighbors are already being threatened, and we need to start preparing for the inevitable influx of climate refugees,” New Zealand's UNICEF director Vivien Maidaborn wrote in an op-ed this month, in which she urged the government to make good on that promise.

In June 2014, a family from Tuvalu was granted residency for the first time by the country's Immigration and Protection Tribunal after it claimed to be threatened by climate change there. At the time, experts told me that they were skeptical whether the ruling would have a wider impact, though. The family succeeded because it claimed “exceptional humanitarian grounds,” which is a wording recognized in New Zealand's immigration legislation but not by many other governments, said Vernon Rive, a senior lecturer in law at AUT Law School in Auckland. Others factors, apart from climate change, played into the court's 2014 decision to allow the family to stay, as well. Since then, similar cases have been declined and asylum seekers deported.

Given the resistance of many countries to make changes to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention and the fact that court rulings in other cases don't apply, legal scholars have explored a third alternative: the creation of legal arrangements on a bilateral or regional basis. New Zealand's new proposal would fall into that category. It would mostly be open to climate change refugees from Pacific islands and would necessitate close collaboration between authorities in New Zealand and in the affected nations.

Those island nations have long been open to talks. At least in some richer countries such as New Zealand, there appears to be a growing awareness that time is now indeed running out, as a new report published on Monday by the British medical journal The Lancet warned. Its authors concluded that climate change is essentially a “threat multiplier” for all global health hazards, with manifestations that will be “unequivocal and potentially irreversible.”


• Rick Noack writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post and is based in Europe.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Climate change fueling disasters, disease in ‘potentially irreversible’ ways, report warns


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/10/31/a-proposal-in-new-zealand-could-trigger-the-era-of-climate-change-refugees
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« Reply #957 on: November 03, 2017, 03:44:21 pm »

But sea level rise ISN'T accelerating and there is no proven link between industrial activity and sea level rise. The seas have been gradually rising for the last 12000 years. Just more chicken little hysteria from the usual suspects 🙄
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« Reply #958 on: November 03, 2017, 04:00:05 pm »

The other thing you'll become aware of if you dig a bit deeper than the prevailing politically driven narrative, is that because the ocean is huge it can take centuries for it to show responses to various forcings.That means today's sea changes could be responses to natural events that happened centuries ago.
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« Reply #959 on: November 03, 2017, 05:30:55 pm »


Didn't you just post recently that nobody is reading anything I'm posting at this group?

So how come you're commenting on stuff that nobody reads?

Presumably that includes you?

You're as full-of-shit as that Reality/Donald clown who seems to have buggered off crying now that his beloved Nats are no longer the government.
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« Reply #960 on: November 04, 2017, 07:45:00 am »

Are you OK?
It's not exactly normal spending all that energy posting shit every day that nobody even responds to 😁
Doesn't Kiwirail have EAP? Ring them up and get some counselling 😁


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« Reply #961 on: November 04, 2017, 08:12:56 am »

How come you stopped copy and pasting vacuous verbal diarrhoea artist Mark "lightworker" Morford?
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« Reply #962 on: November 04, 2017, 08:47:07 am »

How's that horrible global warming going for you at the moment? Roasting you arse off with an early summer?? 😁
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« Reply #963 on: November 04, 2017, 09:34:19 am »

How come you stopped copy and pasting vacuous verbal diarrhoea artist Mark "lightworker" Morford?


I can easily correct that and post some BRILLIANT intelligent writings from Mark Morford just for you.


But in the meantime, read the following report and also read how the idiots Donald “zero-brain” Trump and Scott “fucked-in-the-head” Pruitt have their heads firmly buried in the sand, unlike the learned and peer-reviewed US government scientists who have actually got their shit together when it comes to global warming/climate change....


In clash with President Donald Trump, US report says humans cause climate change


And accompanying the article is this photograph of a stupid fuckwit....



For some reason you appear to be trying very hard to emulate his level of stupidity and retardness.


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« Reply #964 on: November 04, 2017, 10:08:11 am »

Morford strikes me as being a consummate wanker. You'll be wasting keystrokes posting his crap.
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« Reply #965 on: November 04, 2017, 11:22:50 am »

How's that Fiji style weather long predicted by the eco prophets of doom working out there?
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« Reply #966 on: November 04, 2017, 11:27:30 am »

Still waiting for the messiah, er I mean coming warming apocalypse?
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« Reply #967 on: November 04, 2017, 04:06:38 pm »

I see climate change every day but nothing is new except this year a very cold wet winter

Mark Morford is a Gay arse clown

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Are you sick of the bullshit from the sewer stream media spewed out from the usual Ken and Barby dickless talking point look a likes.

If you want to know what's going on in the real world...
And the many things that will personally effect you.
Go to
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AND WAKE THE F_ _K UP
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« Reply #968 on: November 05, 2017, 12:04:50 am »


from The Washington Post....

Trump administration releases report finding
no convincing alternative explanation
for climate change


The White House did not seek to prevent the release of the government's
National Climate Assessment, which is mandated by law, despite the fact
that its findings sharply contradict the administration's policies.


By CHRIS MOONEY, JULIET EILPERIN and BRADY DENNIS | 4:00PM EDT - Friday, November 03, 2017



THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION released a dire scientific report on Friday calling human activity the dominant driver of global warming, a conclusion at odds with White House decisions to withdraw from a key international climate accord, champion fossil fuels and reverse Obama-era climate policies.

To the surprise of some scientists, the White House did not seek to prevent the release of the government's National Climate Assessment, which is mandated by law. The report affirms that climate change is driven almost entirely by human action, warns of a worst-case scenario where seas could rise as high as eight feet by the year 2100, and details climate-related damage across the United States that is already unfolding as a result of an average global temperature increase of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900.

“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the document reports. “For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”

The report's release underscores the extent to which the machinery of the federal scientific establishment, operating in multiple agencies across the government, continues to grind on even as top administration officials have minimized or disparaged its findings. Federal scientists have continued to author papers and issue reports on climate change, for example, even as political appointees have altered the wording of news releases or blocked civil servants from speaking about their conclusions in public forums. The climate assessment process is dictated by a 1990 law that Democratic and Republican administrations have followed.

The White House on Friday sought to downplay the significance of the study and its findings.

“The climate has changed and is always changing. As the Climate Science Special Report states, the magnitude of future climate change depends significantly on ‘remaining uncertainty in the sensitivity of Earth's climate to [greenhouse gas] emissions’,” White House spokesman Raj Shah said in a statement. “In the United States, energy related carbon dioxide emissions have been declining, are expected to remain flat through 2040, and will also continue to decline as a share of world emissions.”

Shah added that the Trump administration “supports rigorous scientific analysis and debate.” He said it will continue to “promote access to the affordable and reliable energy needed to grow economically” and to back advancements that improve infrastructure and ultimately reduce emissions.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and President Trump have all questioned the extent of humans' contribution to climate change. One of the EPA's Web pages posted scientific conclusions similar to those in the new report until earlier this year, when Pruitt's deputies ordered it removed.

The report comes as Trump and members of his Cabinet are working to promote U.S. fossil-fuel production and repeal several federal rules aimed at curbing the nation's carbon output, including ones limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants, oil and gas operations on federal land and carbon emissions from cars and trucks. Trump has also announced he will exit the Paris climate agreement, under which the United States has pledged to cut its overall greenhouse-gas emissions between 26 percent and 28 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2025.

The report could have considerable legal and policy significance, providing new and stronger support for the EPA's greenhouse-gas “endangerment finding” under the Clean Air Act, which lays the foundation for regulations on emissions.

“This is a federal government report whose contents completely undercut their policies, completely undercut the statements made by senior members of the administration,” said Phil Duffy, director of the Woods Hole Research Center.

The government is required to produce the national assessment every four years. This time, the report is split into two documents, one that lays out the fundamental science of climate change and the other that shows how the United States is being affected on a regional basis. Combined, the two documents total over 2,000 pages.

The first document, called the Climate Science Special Report, is a finalized report, having been peer-reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences and vetted by experts across government agencies. It was formally unveiled on Friday.

“I think this report is basically the most comprehensive climate science report in the world right now,” said Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers who is an expert on sea-level rise and served as one of the report's lead authors.

It affirms that the United States is already experiencing more extreme heat and rainfall events and more large wildfires in the West, that more than 25 coastal U.S. cities are already experiencing more flooding, and that seas could rise by between 1 and 4 feet by the year 2100, and perhaps even more than that if Antarctica proves to be unstable, as is feared. The report says that a rise of over eight feet is “physically possible” with high levels of greenhouse-gas emissions but that there's no way right now to predict how likely it is to happen.

When it comes to rapidly escalating levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the report states, “there is no climate analog for this century at any time in at least the last 50 million years.”

Most striking, perhaps, the report warns of the unpredictable — changes that scientists cannot foresee that could involve tipping points or fast changes in the climate system. These could switch the climate into “new states that are very different from those experienced in the recent past.”

Some members of the scientific community had speculated that the administration might refuse to publish the report or might alter its conclusions. During the George W. Bush administration, a senior official at the White House Council on Environmental Quality edited aspects of some government science reports.

Yet multiple experts, as well as some administration officials and federal scientists, said Trump political appointees did not change the special report's scientific conclusions. While some edits have been made to its final version — for instance, omitting or softening some references to the Paris climate agreement — those were focused on policy.

“I'm quite confident to say there has been no political interference in the scientific messages from this report,” David Fahey, an atmospheric scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a lead author of the study, told reporters on Friday. “Whatever fears we had weren't realized…. This report says what the scientists want it to say.”




A senior administration official, who asked for anonymity because the process is still underway, said in an interview that top Trump officials decided to put out the assessment without changing the findings of its contributors even if some appointees may have different views.

Glynis Lough, who is deputy director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and had served as chief of staff for the National Climate Assessment at the U.S. Global Change Research Program until mid-2016, said in an interview that the changes made by government officials to the latest report “are consistent with the types of changes that were made in the previous administration for the 2014 National Climate Assessment, to avoid policy prescriptiveness.”

Perhaps no agency under Trump has tried to downplay and undermine climate science more than the EPA. Most recently, political appointees at the EPA instructed two agency scientists and one contractor not to speak as planned at a scientific conference in Rhode Island. The conference marked the culmination of a three-year report on the status of Narragansett Bay, New England's largest estuary, in which climate change featured prominently.

The EPA also has altered parts of its website containing detailed climate data and scientific information. As part of that overhaul, in April the agency took down pages that had existed for years and contained a wealth of information on the scientific causes of global warming, its consequences and ways for communities to mitigate or adapt. The agency said that it was simply making changes to better reflect the new administration's priorities and that any pages taken down would be archived.

Pruitt has repeatedly advocated for the creation of a government-wide “red team/blue team” exercise, in which a group of outside critics would challenge the validity of mainstream scientific conclusions around climate change.

Other departments have also removed climate-change documents online: The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, for example, no longer provides access to documents assessing the danger that future warming poses to deserts in the Southwest.

And when U.S. Geological Survey scientists working with international researchers published an article in the journal Nature evaluating how climate change and human population growth would affect where rain-fed agriculture could thrive, the USGS published a news release that omitted the words “climate change” altogether.

The Agriculture Department's climate hubs, however, remain freely available online. And researchers at the U.S. Forest Service have continued to publish papers this year on how climate change is affecting wildfires, wetlands and aquatic habitat across the country.

The climate science report is already coming under fire from some of the administration's allies.

The day before it was published, Steven Koonin, a New York University physicist who has met with Pruitt and advocated for the “red team/blue team” exercise, pre-emptively criticized the document in The Wall Street Journal, calling it “deceptive”.

Koonin argued that the report “ominously notes that while global sea level rose an average 0.05 inch a year during most of the 20th century, it has risen at about twice that rate since 1993. But it fails to mention that the rate fluctuated by comparable amounts several times during the 20th century.”

But one of the report's authors suggested Koonin is creating a straw man. “The report does not state that the rate since 1993 is the fastest than during any comparable period since 1900 (though in my informal assessment it likely is), which is the non-statement Steve seems to be objecting to,” Kopp countered by email.

Still, the line of criticism could be amplified by conservatives in the coming days.

Joseph Bast, the chief executive of the Heartland Institute, a think tank that has long challenged many aspects of the science of global warming, also strongly critiqued the report in a statement to The Washington Post on Friday.

“This is typical Obama-era political science,” Bast said. “It's all been debunked so many times it's not worth debating anymore. Why are we still wasting taxpayer dollars on green propaganda?”

The administration also released, in draft form, the second volume of the National Climate Assessment, which looks at regional impacts across the United States. This document is available for public comment and will begin a peer review process, with final publication expected in late 2018.

Already, however, it is possible to discern some of what it will conclude. For instance, a peer-reviewed EPA technical document released to inform the assessment finds that the monetary costs of climate change in the United States could be dramatic.

That document, dubbed the Climate Change Impacts and Risk Analysis, finds that high temperatures could lead to the loss per year of “almost 1.9 billion labor hours across the national workforce” by 2090. That would mean $160 billion annually in lost income to workers.

With high levels of warming, coastal property damage in 2090 could total $120 billion annually, and deaths from temperature extremes could reach 9,300 per year, or in monetized terms, $140 billion annually in damage. Additional tens of billions annually could occur in the form of damage to roads, rail lines and electrical infrastructure, the report finds.

This could all be lessened considerably, the report notes, if warming is held to lower levels.


Jason Samenow contributed to this report.

• Chris Mooney reports on science and the environment for The Washington Post.

• Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post's senior national affairs correspondent, covering how the new administration is transforming a range of U.S. policies and the federal government itself. She is the author of two books — one on sharks, and another on Congress, not to be confused with each other — and has worked for The Post since 1998.

• Brady Dennis is a national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on the environment and public health issues.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • VIDEO: Government's dire climate change report blames humans

 • VIDEO: Does the Trump administration believe in climate change?

 • VIDEO: Floods are getting worse and more frequent. Here's why.

 • Scott Pruitt blocks scientists with EPA grants from serving as agency advisers

 • White House reviewing new report that finds strong link between climate change, human activity

 • EPA removes climate pages from public view after two decades

 • Obama left Trump a major climate-change report — and independent scientists just said it's accurate


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/11/03/trump-administration-releases-report-finds-no-convincing-alternative-explanation-for-climate-change
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aDjUsToR
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« Reply #969 on: November 05, 2017, 09:57:03 am »

Here's how a thinking brain works...

You see a headline like that and think "yeah right, better do some digging to find out the real story."

But no, you just buy this shit lock,stock and barrell, without a second thought.
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« Reply #970 on: November 05, 2017, 12:02:29 pm »


Click on the link and download the 2,000-page report from the American government and read it for yourself.

I've downloaded it and although I haven't yet managed to read all of it (it will take weeks), just reading the abstract summary gives one a pretty good idea of what is in the report. Reading the rest of the report will fill in the details.

So go on.....download it and read it....I dare you.....just to demonstrate that you aren't deliberately shutting your eyes, clocking your ears, and playing dumb. That is provided you aren't too dumb to comprehend stuff like that, which I guess is always a possibility. But you can prove that wrong if you dare.
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« Reply #971 on: November 05, 2017, 06:11:10 pm »

http://www.chrismadden.co.uk/images/cartoons/carbon-footprint-climate-change-conference-cartoon.gif
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« Reply #972 on: November 05, 2017, 07:02:35 pm »

You haven't read it.The IPCC and other green/leftoid ideologue astroturfing outfits have a habit of writing conclusions and abstracts that are misleading.
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« Reply #973 on: November 05, 2017, 07:16:24 pm »

You forget that I was once a co2pocalypse believer. I listen to the highly credentialed dissenting voices in the climate science field. They make the most sense.Models are garbage in, garbage out constructs.
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« Reply #974 on: November 06, 2017, 06:18:09 am »


As usual, your selfishness is preventing you from opening your mind to peer-reviewed science.

You don't give a shit about future generations because you only care about yourself NOW.
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