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

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #975 on: November 06, 2017, 06:18:54 am »

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« Reply #976 on: November 06, 2017, 06:19:47 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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« Reply #977 on: November 06, 2017, 12:22:06 pm »

CONCLUSIONS

Steve Koonin, Under Secretary for Science during President Obama’s first term, also finds the Report misleading, writing in an article for the Wall Street Journal:

The world’s response to climate changing under natural and human influences is best founded upon a complete portrayal of the science. The U.S. government’s Climate Science Special Report, to be released Friday, does not provide that foundation. Instead, it reinforces alarm with incomplete information and highlights the need for more-rigorous review of climate assessments.

A team of some 30 authors chartered by the U.S. Global Change Research Program began work in spring 2016 on the report, “designed to be an authoritative assessment of the science of climate change.” An early draft was released for public comment in January and reviewed by the National Academies this spring. I, together with thousands of other scientists, had the opportunity to scrutinize and discuss the final draft when it was publicized in August by the New York Times . While much is right in the report, it is misleading in more than a few important places.

One notable example of alarm-raising is the description of sea-level rise, one of the greatest climate concerns. 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. The same research papers the report cites show that recent rates are statistically indistinguishable from peak rates earlier in the 20th century, when human influences on the climate were much smaller. The report thus misleads by omission.

This isn’t the only example of highlighting a recent trend but failing to place it in complete historical context. The report’s executive summary declares that U.S. heat waves have become more common since the mid-1960s, although acknowledging the 1930s Dust Bowl as the peak period for extreme heat. Yet buried deep in the report is a figure showing that heat waves are no more frequent today than in 1900.

Such data misrepresentations violate basic scientific norms. In his celebrated 1974 “Cargo Cult” lecture, the late Richard Feynman admonished scientists to discuss objectively all the relevant evidence, even that which does not support the narrative. That’s the difference between science and advocacy.

These deficiencies in the new climate report are typical of many others that set the report’s tone. Consider the different perception that results from “sea level is rising no more rapidly than it did in 1940” instead of “sea level rise has accelerated in recent decades,” or from “heat waves are no more common now than they were in 1900” versus “heat waves have become more frequent since 1960.” Both statements in each pair are true, but each alone fails to tell the full story.
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« Reply #978 on: November 07, 2017, 06:45:11 pm »

Who Is Qualified To Be A Climate Spokesperson?

Published on May 4, 2017

Written by Duane Thresher PhD, Climate Expert



It all started with Al Gore. Coming off a gig as Vice President, an ignoble job to begin with, to the most embarrassing President in US history, Bill Clinton, he then proceeded to lose the Presidential election to a political lightweight, George W. Bush.

After that Gore was desperate to be taken seriously but wondered how. Science was his solution. And “global warming” (see terminology note at bottom) was a hot topic at the time (no pun intended). It didn’t matter that he did badly in the two “science for poets” courses he took in college or that he didn’t even take any math courses there.


How could this happen? Because by nature most scientists hate talking to the public and anyone who wants to speak for them is welcome to do so. No qualifications necessary and no restrictions on what you say. If you’re famous, that’s even better since it makes getting funded and published so much less time-consuming. This is truly the only scientific consensus there is. Among themselves scientists agree about nothing else.

By the way, “most scientists” includes me. I went into climate science just because I was very interested in chaos theory, modeling on supercomputers, and the role of climate in history and pre-history, which are all important parts of climate science. I just wanted to be paid for studying what I was interested in and be left alone. Nothing noble about it. More about me later.

Once Gore had revitalized his failing entertainment career with the global warming saga “An Inconvenient Truth” (inspired by actual events!) and a Nobel Peace Prize (not a Nobel Science Prize!) every other failing entertainer wanted to use global warming to revitalize their careers.

Ivanka Trump has promoted as a spokesman for global warming Leonardo DiCaprio, who has pretended to know a lot about the subject. Ivanka Trump is well-educated, but not in any STEM field (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). DiCaprio is a high school dropout.

More recently, and getting to failing entertainer climate spokespeople with at least some sort of science background, there is Bill Nye, the Science Guy. Nye actually has a BS in mechanical engineering and worked for a time as a Boeing engineer. However, after winning a Steve Martin look-alike contest (no joke) he found that he was more interested in, and better at, standup comedy than engineering.

You could argue that at least Nye has done some good for children’s science education, although my wife, also a climate scientist, and I would argue that he has done more harm than good. Learning science and math — they have to go together — is not usually the fun Nye misleads children to expect them to be. It’s hard work over many years and children have to have some inner drive to do it and become good scientists. Otherwise, as has occurred, you have to lower the standards to become a scientist, often replacing them with political ideology requirements, and drive out some of the good ones. (Plus I always thought Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker on The Muppet Show had cooler experiments and were much funnier than Nye.)

But you can’t convincingly argue that Bill Nye knows enough about climate science to be a credible spokesperson for it. And you would have to agree that it would be better to have an actual climate scientist as a climate spokesperson. Unfortunately, that leads back to the reality that by nature most scientists hate talking to the public … with some exceptions.

Dr. James Hansen is the father of global warming. Given his tactics he is sometimes called the godfather of global warming. On June 23, 1988 he made history by convincingly testifying before Congress about the dangers of global warming. Why convincingly? Because, as luck would have it, on June 23, 1988 in Washington DC they were in the middle of a heat wave. Similar heat waves had been seen there once in a while in the 200 years before and in the years since but people have bad weather memories so this one seemed significant. It was more than just luck though: the global warming alarmists in Congress who had called Hansen scheduled him to testify during the heat wave and turned the air conditioning off that day.

Hansen got a BA in Physics and Math, an MS in Astronomy, and a PhD in Physics — no climate or even earth science degrees — from the relatively obscure University of Iowa. Earth scientists tend to be weak in math and physics and can be cowed by those with degrees in them from any college.

For most of his career Hansen was the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, near Columbia University and over Tom’s Restaurant from the comedy Seinfeld. In 1988 he was 47 years old and his work before then in his own field was not going to win him any Nobel Science Prizes. He became famous after he testified about global warming.

Dr. Gavin Schmidt is the global warming entertainer, being a media interview favorite, and is the current head of NASA GISS, having been anointed by Hansen. He has a BA in Math from Jesus College Oxford and a PhD in Math from University College London. He has no climate or even earth science degrees.

As of 2004 Schmidt was still a British citizen and he may still be one. After 9/11 he was barred from using the NASA supercomputers until, as a foreigner, he had a security clearance background check done. Interestingly for the head of NASA GISS, as a foreigner he would not be eligible for some government grants, which require US citizenship. Not to mention that global warming has been touted as a national security issue.

Schmidt is a media interview favorite because he is quite personable — as long as you admit he is smarter than you — and enjoys being an entertainer. For example, he’s a juggler. I’ve been with him juggling in public and he’s quite good.

One of Schmidt’s favorite sayings is “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”. This doesn’t seem to be applied to global warming though.

So who am I? I have a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and NASA, an MS in Atmospheric Science from the University of Arizona and NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) and a PhD in Earth & Environmental Sciences from Columbia University and NASA GISS.

I was at NASA GISS while Dr. James Hansen was its head and I worked closely with Dr. Gavin Schmidt (I’d say we were friends). I am a coauthor with both on several publications.

My graduate and postdoc work was in climate modeling (on supercomputers) AND climate proxies (records of past climate). This is unusual breadth for a climate scientist. I was teased by my climate modeller colleagues about so much hands-on work with climate proxies (e.g., tree rings and ocean sediment cores) and was considered askance by my climate proxy colleagues.

I am not particularly well-published. I resisted publishing a lot of little papers (“islands of minutiae in a sea of trivia”) and my few big papers were in opposition to climate dogma so were unpublishable.

A few years ago I became so disgusted with what climate science had become I quit. It wasn’t until Trump was elected that I decided to speak out. It would have been pointless before then. If I had stayed in climate science and spoke out people would have said that if I thought climate science was so terrible why did I stay and take the money? When I quit I was no longer a “working climate scientist” and my credibility is attacked that way.

I created a website, www.RealClimatologists.org, to state simply why global warming is not irrefutable. Religious dogma is irrefutable, not science. Science is by design refutable. (For nitpickers, interchange “refutable” with “falsifiable”.) Labeling global warming skeptics as climate change deniers by analogy to Holocaust deniers is evil itself. Recently I sent an open letter to President Trump about his daughter and climate change, which got quite a bit of press. This letter is available at www.RealClimatologists.org.

I am now an IT consultant, specializing in IT security, partly because my daughter’s medical records were lost to hackers not once but twice by two IT-incompetent health insurance organizations. Despite appeals the US Government did nothing about this (I thus have my own reasons for not liking FBI’s Comey). I don’t get paid by the oil companies to question global warming, although I really don’t see anything wrong with that. Global warming alarmists have been funded by the taxpayers for years. In fact I even wonder if James Hansen was forced out of NASA GISS for violations of the Hatch Act, which forbids government officials from spending government time and money on political activities.

I’ll be writing more about climate and IT incompetence.

Note: The term “global warming” got a bad reputation so it was changed to “climate change”. I refuse to be part of this reputation repair so I refer to it by its original meaningful name.

*****

Dr. Duane Thresher is a climate expert who has done postdoctoral research on climate proxy modeling at University of Alaska  and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany. He holds a PhD in Earth & Environmental Sciences from  Columbia University, an MS in Atmospheric Science from  the University of Arizona, and a BS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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« Reply #979 on: November 07, 2017, 07:00:46 pm »


A photograph gallery which is well worth opening and viewing:

A photographer selects images that visualize the impact of climate change



Residents protect their homes from rising sea levels with sandbags at Betio. Due to rising sea levels and a higher frequency of storms, the reef is not the natural protection that it used to be. Betio island is the most populated part of Tarawa, and due to sea water intrusion and the large population, there is a serious lack of drinking water and agricultural land. — Photograph: Kadir van Lohuizen/The New York Times.
Residents protect their homes from rising sea levels with sandbags at Betio. Due to rising sea levels and a higher frequency of storms, the reef
is not the natural protection that it used to be. Betio island is the most populated part of Tarawa, and due to sea water intrusion and the large
population, there is a serious lack of drinking water and agricultural land. — Photograph: Kadir van Lohuizen/The New York Times.

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« Reply #980 on: November 07, 2017, 07:09:32 pm »

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« Reply #981 on: November 07, 2017, 07:13:24 pm »


Hahaha.....Mr Selfish Twat (I don't give a shit about my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren and my great-great-grandchildren) is showing his selfish narcissistic tendencies again by posting a video clip.
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« Reply #982 on: November 07, 2017, 08:43:23 pm »

It can easily be shown that the selfish (not to mention delusional) twats who care least about the poor and "their grandchildren" are those deluded souls who believe toy power solutions like wind and solar can power civilisation. Deindustrialising through intermittent and expensive  power generation WILL cause the most harm.
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« Reply #983 on: November 07, 2017, 08:44:58 pm »

Watch the movie then report back to me. Best not to watch it stoned 😀
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« Reply #984 on: November 07, 2017, 08:53:08 pm »

You are like a fundy religious fanatic who says people will go to hell for not believing. Snap out of it and start looking into this stuff for yourself.
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« Reply #985 on: November 07, 2017, 09:00:05 pm »

Disclaimer. One ocean scientist in the movie (Wunch) subsequently said he was misquoted (perhaps he was, or perhaps he was scared of being smeared and rolled by the climate propaganda machine)
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« Reply #986 on: November 07, 2017, 09:06:44 pm »


WOW.....four posts (all full of self-serving bullshit) one after another.

I guess this means that after each post, you woke up to the fact that you were posting shit, so tried to cover it up by chucking in another post.
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« Reply #987 on: November 08, 2017, 08:50:02 am »

Yeah yeah... Watch the movie then report back to me. Best not to watch it stoned 😀
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« Reply #988 on: November 08, 2017, 11:50:34 am »


from The Washington Post....

As Syria embraces Paris climate deal,
it's the United States against the world


About 200 other countries have signed onto the agreement.
Now, only one country has disavowed it.


By BRADY DENNIS | 1:30PM EST - Tuesday, November 07, 2017

California Governor Jerry Brown, in Rome before the Bonn climate meeting, is one of the most prominent U.S. delegates. — Photograph: Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press.
California Governor Jerry Brown, in Rome before the Bonn climate meeting, is one of the most prominent U.S. delegates.
 — Photograph: Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press.


PRESIDENT TRUMP has put America at odds with the rest of the world, literally, when it comes to the goal of combating climate change.

At an international climate conference in Bonn on Tuesday, Syria announced its plans to join the Paris climate accord — an agreement forged in 2015 for nations to band together to slash global carbon emissions. That now leaves the United States as the only country to disavow the deal, after Trump this year announced intentions to withdraw from the agreement.

According to news reports and people who were present on Tuesday, the Syrian delegation to the talks announced the war-torn country's intention to ratify the Paris agreement. Separately, according to the Syrian Arab News Agency, lawmakers in Damascus last month “approved a draft law on ratifying Syria's accession to the Paris Climate Agreement.”

The move comes after the only other holdout, Nicaragua, announced plans to join the Paris agreement in September. Nicaragua initially had refused to join the agreement in 2015 because its leaders felt the accord did not go far enough in compelling nations to reduce their carbon emissions. But in joining the deal this fall, the country's president noted that it is the “only instrument we have” to unite the world around the goal of staving off the most catastrophic effects of global warming.

“They said at the plenary that they will join Paris agreement,” said Safa' Al Jayoussi, executive director of IndyACT, a nongovernmental organization working on climate change policies in the Arab world, of Syria.

“It only shows how urgent is the climate change solution for us in the region, with the severe drought that is hitting,” she said.

Syria's decision to join the accord brought another round of rebukes for the Trump administration.

“As if it wasn't already crystal clear, every single other country in the world is moving forward together to tackle the climate crisis, while Donald Trump's has isolated the United States on the world stage in an embarrassing and dangerous position,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in a statement.

Trump in June announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the climate agreement, an extraordinary move that baffled American allies and threatened to undermine global efforts to slow the warming of the Earth's atmosphere.

Trump's decision drew swift, sharp condemnation from foreign leaders, environmental groups and corporate titans, who argued that the U.S. exit from the Paris accord would represent a failure of American leadership in the face of irrefutable scientific evidence.

Trump, who has labeled climate change a “hoax” and appointed climate change skeptics to top administration posts, argued the Paris agreement and Obama-era regulations to curb emissions were crippling businesses and killing jobs.

“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Trump proclaimed at the time. He added that he would consider rejoining the deal if the United States could re-enter on more favorable terms. Other countries rejected that notion, saying individual countries already have the freedom to alter their pledges to reduce emissions.

The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement cannot actually be finalized until near the end of Trump's term because of the legal structure and language of the accord.

But with the world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases essentially walking away from the pact, scientists and policymakers have said it would be nearly impossible for the world to realize its goal of limiting global warming to below a 2-degree Celsius (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) rise above pre-industrial temperatures.

The withdrawal also marked a staggering reversal from the previous administration. President Barack Obama considered the accord a signature and critical diplomatic achievement, and during his second term made it a top priority to persuade other world leaders to embrace the deal.


Chris Mooney contributed to this report.

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

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Related to this topic:

 • The U.S. will be the only country not part of the Paris climate agreement

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/11/07/as-syria-embraces-paris-climate-deal-its-the-united-states-against-the-world
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« Reply #989 on: November 08, 2017, 11:53:47 am »


So there we have it.....all of the countries of the world.....and one PARIAH, GREEDY, SELFISH COUNTRY holding out.

Time for the climate talks to include TRADE SANCTIONS against the hold-out.

A 1,000% tariff on ALL products imported from any country which refuses to ratify the agreement should do the trick.

Make an exception for individual states of any federal country if those individual states ratify the agreement.

Individual states such as California, Oregon and Washington, as well as the enlightened north-eastern states should be rewarded for their enlightened attitudes towards doing the right thing at the same time as the rest of the United States of America is severely punished for being the arseholes of the planet. And the rest of the world should cancel the citizenship of, and deport to America those clowns amongst them who are anit-warmalists and climate-change-deniers.
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« Reply #990 on: November 08, 2017, 04:59:14 pm »

Are you aware that if all industrial activity halted, it would make fuck all difference to the climate?
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« Reply #991 on: November 12, 2017, 12:41:03 pm »

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« Reply #992 on: November 12, 2017, 01:03:02 pm »

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« Reply #993 on: November 12, 2017, 01:12:25 pm »


The ENTIRE WORLD versus Donald Trump.

That's how it is now.

And guess what?

California and many other American states and cities have given Trump the one-finger salute and are enacting policies to mitigate against greenhouse gases.

So American car manufacturers who have lobbied Trump to axe federal emissions standards will suddenly find their cars will be banned from sale in 20 American states.

Haw haw haw.....that will get Trump frothing at the mouth and going on a twitter masturbation session, eh?
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« Reply #994 on: November 12, 2017, 01:13:47 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

U.S. cities, states defy Trump, still back Paris climate deal

By ERIK KIRACHBAUM | 3:05PM PST - Saturday, November 11, 2017

California Governor Jerry Brown speaks in the U.S. Climate Action Center at the COP 23 Climate Change Conference on Saturday in Bonn, Germany. — Photograph: Martin Meissner/Associated Press.
California Governor Jerry Brown speaks in the U.S. Climate Action Center at the COP 23 Climate Change Conference on Saturday in Bonn, Germany.
 — Photograph: Martin Meissner/Associated Press.


DETERMINED TO demonstrate that large numbers of Americans remain committed to fighting climate change, a loose alliance of cities, states, companies and universities from across the United States gathered on the fringes of a United Nations climate conference in Bonn on Saturday to pledge their support for the Paris agreement.

California Governor Jerry Brown, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore were among the leaders of the U.S. coalition during a series of speeches and panel discussions in a grand pavilion named the “U.S. Climate Action Center”. It was set up just outside the building where the U.N. climate conference is taking place. The American political and business figures told the audience that states, cities and businesses have real power that they can leverage in the fight against climate change even though the federal government wants to bail out.

“It is important for the world to know — the American government may have pulled out of the Paris agreement, but the American people are committed to its goals, and there is nothing Washington can do to stop us,” Bloomberg told the audience in the packed tent. He noted that the alliance of 20 states, 110 cities and 1,400 businesses would be the world's third-largest economy and represented about half of the U.S. economy.

President Trump announced in June that the United States will withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement at the first possible date in 2020, arguing it was detrimental to U.S. business. Trump has expressed doubt about climate change, questioning how much human activity has contributed.

The Trump administration is represented at the Bonn talks of nearly 200 nations by a senior diplomat but has taken a low-key approach — in stark contrast to the attention-grabbing U.S. Climate Action Center.

Brown, who is on a whirlwind 10-day trip to four countries promoting climate change and California, was one of the featured speakers on Saturday that faced dozens of hecklers in the crowd who demanded his state do even more to fight pollution, stop fracking and oil drilling, and slow global warming.

After some good-natured jousting with the green activists, Brown praised them for their dissent and announced he would “reframe my speech”. He also told them he was a former cheerleader in college and that he liked their rallying cry “We're still in” so much that he led the whole audience in a cheering: “We're still in, we're still in”.

“Only in California can we stimulate this kind of opposition with strong advocates on all sides — [even though] we're doing more than anyone else,” Brown said. “This is one of the reasons why California has the most aggressive goals: no matter what we do, we're being challenged to do more, and I agree with that. We'll do a lot more.”

Brown then diverted from the rest of his planned “America's Pledge” speech to say:

“California is the most aggressive, most far-reaching climate action state in the country and in the Western Hemisphere. Is it enough? No. Do we have a lot of pollutants? Yes. Do we have 32 million cars driving 335 billion miles every year? Yes. Are we going to stop them today? No. Are we going to stop them in time? Yes, if America's pledge is picked up by the rest of the country and rest of the world. If we can take some of that noise and bottle it into energy, we'll get the job done. America, we're here, we're in and we're not going away.”

Bloomberg and Brown appeared along with Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, who presiding over the U.N. conference at its climate headquarters in Bonn that runs until Friday. The talks are focused on designing a detailed set of rules to help guide forward the 2015 Paris climate agreement that established a goal of ending the fossil-fuel era by the end of the century.

Earlier on Saturday, Senator Edward J. Markey (Democrat-Massachusetts) promised the United States would remain committed to its climate change goals.

“We are here in Bonn to say we are not saying ‘bon voyage to our commitment on climate’,” he said.


• Erik Kirschbaum is a correspondent for the Reuters International News Agency, a non-fiction author, a long-time Springsteen fan, and an unabashed crusader for renewable energy. He has written about topics anywhere from entertainment to climate change in over 20 countries for many news organisations including the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Berlin.

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-climate-change-conference-20171111-story.html
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« Reply #995 on: November 13, 2017, 08:37:09 pm »

Except California and other hipster States AREN'T "mitigating against greenhouse gases". They are simply wasting huge amounts of other people's money on ineffective greenwash schemes that give the true believers a hard on but actually do nothing to the climate.
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« Reply #996 on: November 14, 2017, 12:34:35 pm »


Ah, yes.....duck-shove and use every tactic to avoid dealing with the REAL issue, which is global warming causing climate change with negative effects, such as increasing number and increasing severity of storms.

Stick the head in the sand after first screwing the eyes tightly shut and blocking the ears.
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« Reply #997 on: November 14, 2017, 06:24:47 pm »

Scientists don't actually know whether co2 will cause more severe storms, or less syorms, or for all intents and purposes be completely irrelevent to storm severity.
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« Reply #998 on: November 14, 2017, 06:43:07 pm »


Actually, REAL climate scientists DO know.

It's only the “fake scientists” quoted by “anti-warmalists” and “climate-change deniers” who don't know because they are FAKE SCIENTISTS for the DESPERATE.
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« Reply #999 on: November 14, 2017, 06:43:51 pm »

ALL CO2 in the atmosphere is only .04% of the atmosphere.

97% of that total atmospheric CO2 came from natural sources.

So, only .0012% of the atmosphere is CO2 put there by human activity.

AND the "green house effect" of CO2 doesn't just keep increasing heat as co2 increases. It's effect becomes logarithmically less. Think of painting a raw wood barn red. The first coat adds a red effect. Adding more coats of  red paint... you just get the same same...red. You can't make it any more red.

AND ancient air bubbles trapped in ice cores show that as the earth warms, more co2 is released, NOT the other way around.😁
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