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

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #1175 on: September 21, 2018, 11:42:30 am »

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« Reply #1176 on: September 23, 2018, 02:18:55 pm »



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« Reply #1177 on: September 25, 2018, 08:48:04 pm »

i was a fan of fred flintstone

your cartoons are dumb

does climate change yes get over it nutbar
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« Reply #1178 on: October 08, 2018, 07:08:26 pm »


from The Washington Post…

The world has barely 10 years to get climate change
under control, U.N. scientists say


“There is no documented historic precedent” for the scale of changes required to
hold the planet's warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit),
the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found.


By CHRIS MOONEY and BRADY DENNIS | 9:00PM EDT — Sunday, October 07, 2018

The Eiffel Tower is lit up with the slogan “Action Now” in December 2015, as countries signed the landmark Paris climate accord. — Photograph: Michel Euler/Associated Press.
The Eiffel Tower is lit up with the slogan “Action Now” in December 2015, as countries signed the landmark Paris climate accord.
 — Photograph: Michel Euler/Associated Press.


THE WORLD stands on the brink of failure when it comes to holding global warming to moderate levels, and nations will need to take “unprecedented” actions to cut their carbon emissions over the next decade, according to a landmark report by the top scientific body studying climate change.

With global emissions showing few signs of slowing and the United States — the world's second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide — rolling back a suite of Obama-era climate measures, the prospects for meeting the most ambitious goals of the 2015 Paris agreement look increasingly slim. To avoid racing past warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels would require a “rapid and far-reaching” transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before, the group found.

“There is no documented historic precedent” for the sweeping change to energy, transportation and other systems required to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote in a report requested as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

At the same time, however, the report is being received with hope in some quarters because it affirms that 1.5 degrees Celsius is still possible — if emissions stopped today, for instance, the planet would not reach that temperature. It is also likely to galvanize even stronger climate action by focusing on 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than 2 degrees, as a target that the world cannot afford to miss.

“Frankly, we've delivered a message to the governments,” said Jim Skea, a co-chair of the IPCC panel and professor at Imperial College London, at a press event following the document's release. “It's now their responsibility … to decide whether they can act on it.” He added, “What we've done is said what the world needs to do.”

The transformation described in the document is breathtaking, and the speed of change required raises inevitable questions about its feasibility.

Most strikingly, the document says the world's annual carbon dioxide emissions, which amount to more than 40 billion tons per year, would have to be on an extremely steep downward path by 2030 to either hold the world entirely below 1.5 degrees Celsius, or allow only a brief “overshoot” in temperatures.

Overall reductions in emissions in the next decade would probably need to be more than 1 billion tons per year, larger than the current emissions of all but a few of the very largest emitting countries. By 2050, the report calls for a total or near-total phaseout of the burning of coal.

“It's like a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen. We have to put out the fire,” said Erik Solheim, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program. He added that the need to either stop emissions entirely by 2050 or find some way to remove as much carbon dioxide from the air as humans put there “means net zero must be the new global mantra.”

The radical transformation also would mean that, in a world projected to have more than 2 billion additional people by 2050, large swaths of land currently used to produce food would instead have to be converted to growing trees that store carbon and crops designated for energy use. The latter would be used as part of a currently non-existent program to get power from trees or plants and then bury the resulting carbon dioxide emissions in the ground, leading to a net subtraction of the gas from the air — bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS.

“Such large transitions pose profound challenges for sustainable management of the various demands on land for human settlements, food, livestock feed, fibre, bioenergy, carbon storage, biodiversity and other ecosystem services,” the report states.

The document in question was produced relatively rapidly for the cautious and deliberative IPCC, representing the work of nearly 100 scientists. It went through an elaborate peer-review process involving tens of thousands of comments. The final 34-page “summary for policymakers” was agreed to in a marathon session by scientists and government officials in Incheon, South Korea, over the past week.




The report says the world will need to develop large-scale “negative emissions” programs to remove significant volumes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Although the basic technologies exist, they have not caught on widely, and scientists have strongly questioned whether such a program can be scaled up in the brief period available.

The bottom line, Sunday's report found, is that the world is woefully off target.

Current promises made by countries as part of the Paris climate agreement would lead to about 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the end of the century, and the Trump administration recently released an analysis assuming about 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 if the world takes no action.

The IPCC is considered the definitive source on the state of climate science, but it also tends to be conservative in its conclusions. That's because it is driven by a consensus-finding process, and its results are the product of not only science, but negotiation with governments over its precise language.

In Sunday's report, the body detailed the magnitude and unprecedented nature of the changes that would be required to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but it held back from taking a specific stand on the feasibility of meeting such an ambitious goal. (An early draft had cited a “very high risk” of warming exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius; that language is now gone, even if the basic message is still easily inferred.)

“If you're expecting IPCC to jump up and down and wave red flags, you're going to be disappointed,” said Phil Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center. “They're going to do what they always do, which is to release very cautious reports in extremely dispassionate language.”

Some researchers, including Duffy, are skeptical of the scenarios that the IPCC presents that hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, particularly the reliance on negative-emissions technologies to keep the window open.

“Even if it is technically possible, without aligning the technical, political and social aspects of feasibility, it is not going to happen,” added Glen Peters, research director of the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo. “To limit warming below 1.5 C, or 2 C for that matter, requires all countries and all sectors to act.”

Underscoring the difficulty of interpreting what's possible, the IPCC gave two separate numbers in the report for Earth's remaining “carbon budget,” or how much carbon dioxide humans can emit and still have a reasonable chance of remaining below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The upshot is that humans are allowed either 10 or 14 years of current emissions, and no more, for a two-thirds or better chance of avoiding 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The already limited budget would shrink further if other greenhouse gases, such as methane, aren't controlled, or if and when Arctic permafrost becomes a major source of new emissions.

But either way — in a move that may be contested — researchers have somewhat increased the carbon budget in comparison with where the IPCC set it in 2013, giving another reason for hope.

The new approach buys some time and “resets the clock for 1.5 degrees Celsius to ‘five minutes to midnight’,” said Oliver Geden, head of the research division of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

The report is sure to be the central focus of attention this December in Poland when the next meeting of the parties to the Paris climate agreement is held, and countries begin to contemplate how they can up their ambition levels, as the agreement requires them to do over time.

Meanwhile, the report clearly documents that a warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius would be very damaging and that 2 degrees — which used to be considered a reasonable goal — could approach intolerable in parts of the world.

“1.5 degrees is the new 2 degrees,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, who was in Incheon for the finalization of the report.

Specifically, the document finds that instabilities in Antarctica and Greenland, which could usher in sea-level rise measured in feet rather than inches, “could be triggered around 1.5°C to 2°C of global warming.” Moreover, the total loss of tropical coral reefs is at stake because 70 to 90 percent are expected to vanish at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report finds. At 2 degrees, that number grows to more than 99 percent.

The report found that holding warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius could save an Alaska-size area of the Arctic from permafrost thaw, muting a feedback loop that could lead to still more global emissions. The occurrence of entirely ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean goes from one per century to one per decade between 1.5 and 2 degrees, it found — one of many ways in which the mere half a degree has large real-world consequences.

Risks of extreme heat and weather events just rise and rise as temperatures do, meaning these would be worse worldwide the more it warms.

To avoid that, in barely more than 10 years, the world's percentage of electricity from renewables such as solar and wind power would have to jump from the current 24 percent to something more like 50 or 60 percent. Coal and gas plants that remain in operation would need to be equipped with technologies, collectively called carbon capture and storage (CCS), that prevent them from emitting carbon dioxide into the air and instead funnel it to be buried underground. By 2050, most coal plants would shut down.

Cars and other forms of transportation, meanwhile, would need to be shifting strongly toward being electrified, powered by these same renewable energy sources. At present, transportation is far behind the power sector in the shift to low-carbon fuel sources. Right now, according to the International Energy Agency, only 4 percent of road transportation is powered by renewable fuels, and the agency has projected only a 1 percent increase by 2022.

The report's statements on the need to jettison coal were challenged by the World Coal Association.

“While we are still reviewing the draft, the World Coal Association believes that any credible pathway to meeting the 1.5 degree scenario must focus on emissions rather than fuel,” the group's interim chief executive, Katie Warrick, said in a statement. “That is why CCS is so vital.”

That's an approach largely embraced by the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, which under President Trump has taken numerous steps to roll back regulations on the coal industry.

In an interview with The Washington Post last week, the EPA's acting administrator, Andrew Wheeler, said the United States will “continue to remain engaged in the U.N.'s effort,” despite the fact that Trump has said he intends to withdraw from the Paris climate accord as soon as legally possible.

But asked specifically about what it would take to keep the world below a dangerous level of climate change, Wheeler declined to identify a specific level. The agency's regulatory approach is that it would allow the coal industry “to continue to innovate on clean coal technologies, and those technologies will be exported to other countries."

And turning off most coal plants may not be the most radical change required. For instance, the document also contemplates rapid changes to agriculture, where methane emissions, produced by livestock, rice cultivation and other sources, also would have to plummet even as the world will have to feed a growing population.

Meanwhile, instead of continuing to deforest large areas for livestock and other uses, humans would have to embark on a large-scale program of reforestation, planting or restoring trees over enormous areas.

In the end, “one thing is for sure,” Niklas Hohne, a scientist who heads the New Climate Institute, said in a statement.

“If we give up the goal and do not even try, we will certainly miss it a long way.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

Chris Mooney writes about energy and the environment at The Washington Post. He previously worked at Mother Jones, where he wrote about science and the environment and hosted a weekly podcast. Mooney spent a decade before that as a freelance writer, podcaster and speaker, with his work appearing in Wired, Harper's, Slate, the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, to name a few. He also has published four books about science, politics and climate change.

Brady Dennis is a national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on the environment and public health issues. He previously spent years covering the nation's economy. Dennis was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for a series of explanatory stories about the global financial crisis. Before that, he was a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times (Florida).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/10/08/world-has-only-years-get-climate-change-under-control-un-scientists-say
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« Reply #1179 on: October 09, 2018, 12:17:28 am »

gores beachfront home is still not under water yet wtf
it proves he is full of bullshit just like you

you lie
everybody believes in climate change
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« Reply #1180 on: October 09, 2018, 09:58:27 am »


Go and visit Hector, or Granity, or Carters Beach in the Buller region.

Or go and visit Haumoana, or Te Awanga, or Clifton in Hawke's Bay.

Then stand in front of the residents of those localities and tell them that “they are full of shit and their properties and homes AREN'T being taken by the sea and they are delusional” and I betcha they'll either beat the crap out of you, or else they'll get it a couple of shrinks and get you locked up in a rubber room.

And there are plenty of other places around NZ's coastline in the same predicament. In Palliser Bay, there are even the remains of baches amongst the rocks below where there used to be solid land. Your stupidity and ignorance is astounding. When I die, I shall do so extremely happy in the knowlege that your grandchildren will be destined for a life of hell on this planet, all thanks to their grandfather's ignorance & greed. It will bring a smile to my face as I become extinct.

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« Reply #1181 on: October 09, 2018, 07:42:19 pm »


from The New York Times…

Dire Climate Warning Lands With a Thud on Trump's Desk

A day after the U.N. issued a call to arms for the world to confront climate change, President Trump,
who has mocked the science around it, did not broach the topic, even in vulnerable Florida.


By MARK LANDLER and CORAL DAVENPORT | Monday, October 08, 2018

President Trump on Monday in Orlando, Florida, where he spoke to a convention of police chiefs. He did not mention a United Nations report on the threat of climate change. — Photograph: Tom Brenner/for The New York Times.
President Trump on Monday in Orlando, Florida, where he spoke to a convention of police chiefs. He did not mention a United Nations report
on the threat of climate change. — Photograph: Tom Brenner/for The New York Times.


WASHINGTON D.C. — A day after the United Nations issued its most urgent call to arms yet for the world to confront the threat of climate change, President Trump boarded Air Force One for Florida — a state that lies directly in the path of this coming calamity — and said nothing about it.

It was the latest, most vivid example of Mr. Trump's dissent from an effort that has galvanized much of the world. While the United Nations warned of mass wildfires, food shortages and dying coral reefs as soon as 2040, Mr. Trump discussed his successful Supreme Court battle rather than how rising seawaters are already flooding Miami on sunny days.

The president's isolation is not just from the world: In California, New York, Massachusetts and other states, governments and companies are pushing ahead with regulations and technological innovations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

That bottom-up activism is a source of hope for those who have watched in despair since last year when Mr. Trump declared he would pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord. But experts say it is no substitute for the world's largest economy, and second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, turning its back on the fight.

“You have this enormous discrepancy between the White House and, essentially, everyone else,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “The leadership in Washington is really moving against the whole agenda.”

The United Nations report paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”

It describes a world of worsening food shortages and poverty; more wildfires; and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.

Among climate-change scientists, there were increasing fears that Mr. Trump's withdrawal from the Paris accord, which at first seemed a lonely act of defiance, may embolden other countries to leave it as well.

In Brazil, voters are on track to elect a new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has vowed to withdraw his country, the world's seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, from the pact.

Mr. Trump's announcement last year prompted a show of solidarity from the other 194 countries that signed the accord, not to mention American political and business leaders who rallied under the slogan, “We are still in!” But to populists like Mr. Bolsonaro, Mr. Trump's demands that the United States be given a better deal could prove appealing.

“To the extent that we get these narrow-minded, so-called nationalist, populist leaders, we could have a big problem,” said John P. Holdren, who served as President Barack Obama's chief science adviser. “Brazil, with its huge area of forests, is going to suffer terribly from climate change.”

Beyond the domino effect, Mr. Holdren, who is now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, said there were other immediate costs to what he called “the squandering of U.S. leadership on an acute global issue.”

Mr. Trump, who has mocked the science of human-caused climate change, cut the American contribution to a global fund that supports climate mitigation and assistance efforts in developing countries by two-thirds, to $1 billion. He has tried to cut government funding of climate-related research — an effort that Congress has so far resisted.


A wildfire burning last year near Casitas Springs, California. The United Nations report warns of mass wildfires, food shortages and dying coral reefs as soon as 2040. — Photograph: Hilary Swift/for The New York Times.
A wildfire burning last year near Casitas Springs, California. The United Nations report warns of mass wildfires, food shortages
and dying coral reefs as soon as 2040. — Photograph: Hilary Swift/for The New York Times.


The White House issued no public response to the United Nations report, which was issued on Monday in South Korea at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders.

“Not today,” said Bill Shine, the White House communications director. “It's a Kavanaugh night.”

After Mr. Trump returned on Monday from Orlando, Florida, where he spoke to a convention of police chiefs and referred to the hurricane now approaching that state, he attended a White House ceremony to swear in Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

Following the ceremony, Lindsay E. Walters, a deputy press secretary, said, “The United States is leading the world in providing affordable, abundant and secure energy to our citizens, while protecting the environment and reducing emissions through job-creating innovation.”

She noted that carbon dioxide-related emissions declined 14 percent in the United States from 2005 to 2017, while they rose 21 percent globally during the same period.

On Saturday, an American delegation in South Korea joined more than 180 countries in accepting the report's summary for policymakers, but a statement from the State Department added that it “does not imply endorsement by the United States of the specific findings or underlying contents of the report.”

The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” said Bill Hare, an author of previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a non-profit organization. “We were not aware of this just a few years ago.”

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels by 2040.

The Paris accord set a goal of preventing warming of more than 3.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels — long considered a threshold for the most severe social and economic damage from climate change. But the heads of small island nations, fearful of rising sea levels, had also asked scientists to examine the effects of 2.7 degrees of warming.

Without aggressive action, many effects that scientists once expected to happen further in the future will arrive by 2040, and at the lower temperature, the report shows.

“It's telling us we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime,” said Myles Allen, an Oxford University climate scientist and an author of the report.

To prevent 2.7 degrees of warming, the report said, greenhouse emissions must be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and by 100 percent by 2050. It also found that use of coal as an electricity source would have to drop from nearly 40 percent today to 1 to 7 percent by 2050.

“This report makes it clear: There is no way to mitigate climate change without getting rid of coal,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University and an author of the report. Mr. Trump has vowed to increase the burning of coal.

“It makes me feel angry when I think about the U.S. government,” Mr. Shindell said. “My kids feel like it's their future being destroyed.” He watched as the grounds of his son's high school in Durham, North Carolina, and the roads around it flooded last month after Hurricane Florence.


Flooded homes last month in Lumberton, North Carolina, after Hurricane Florence hit. — Photograph: Johnny Milano/for The New York Times.
Flooded homes last month in Lumberton, North Carolina, after Hurricane Florence hit. — Photograph: Johnny Milano/for The New York Times.

Dr. Allen said there was little question the report will be ignored in Washington. “The current administration doesn't seem interested in it all,” he said, although he added that as a scientist, he takes the long view.

“One way or another,” he said, “the facts do win out.”

Mr. Trump encouraged scientists recently when he nominated Kelvin Droegemeier, a well-respected meteorologist who is an expert on extreme weather, to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The post had been vacant since Mr. Trump took office.

But it is unlikely that Mr. Droegemeier will change the president's views on climate change, and other influential aides are hardly going to challenge him.

For example, the Trump administration's counter-terrorism strategy, released last week, made no mention of climate change as a cause for extremism. The Obama administration regularly cited it in threat assessments because of its effect on migration and the competition for food and water.

“I don't think climate change is a cause of international terrorism,” said the national security adviser, John R. Bolton.

For all that, scientists said that they saw a few rays of sunshine amid the clouds. A Democratic takeover of the House would raise the odds that Congress would continue blocking cuts to research. And despite his criticism of the Paris accord as “very unfair” to the United States, Mr. Trump has left the door open to staying in the deal, if the terms were improved.

“I have been of the opinion all along that we can definitely see the U.S. back in the Paris agreement, even under Trump,” Mr. Rockström said.

Legally, he noted, the United States cannot formally withdraw from the pact until 2020, and the agreement's terms are voluntary.

“He can sit there in the White House and draw up his own plan,” Mr. Rockström said.


__________________________________________________________________________

Mark Landler reported from Washington, and Coral Davenport from Incheon, South Korea. Further reporting was contributed by Somini Sengupta.

Mark Landler is a White House correspondent at The New York Times. In 24 years at The N.Y. Times, he has been diplomatic correspondent, bureau chief in Hong Kong and Frankfurt, European economic correspondent, and a business reporter in New York. He is the author of Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Twilight Struggle over American Power (Random House).

Coral Davenport covers energy and environmental policy for The New York Times, with a focus on climate change, from The Times's Washington bureau. She has covered these issues since 2006, reporting for Congressional Quarterly, Politico and National Journal before joining The N.Y. Times in 2013. Her coverage at The Times has included reporting from atop the Greenland ice sheet, breaking the news of Volkswagen's illegal use of software devices to evade pollution regulations, and a 2016 interview with President Obama about his efforts to build an environmental legacy. Before covering environmental policy, she worked as a freelance reporter and food and travel writer in Athens, Greece, covering culinary trends, arts and culture, the economy, terrorism and security, and the 2004 Athens Olympics for publications from the Christian Science Monitor to Conde Nast Traveler. She got her start at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, after graduating from Smith College with a degree in English literature.

• A version of this article appears in The New York Times on Tuesday, October 9, 2018 of the New York print edition with the headline: “Climate Warning Hits Silent Wall On Trump's Desk”.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/politics/climate-change-united-nations-trump.html
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« Reply #1182 on: October 09, 2018, 10:16:49 pm »


from The New York Times…

EDITORIAL: Coal Is Killing the Planet. Trump Loves It.

Scientists issued a new alarm on the devastating impacts of continued burning of fossil fuels.
But the Trump E.P.A. keeps propping up coal.


By THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD | Monday, October 08, 2018

— Illustration: Celia Jacobs.
— Illustration: Celia Jacobs.

IF WE keep burning coal and petroleum to power our society, we're cooked — and a lot faster than we thought. The United Nations scientific panel on climate change issued a terrifying new warning on Monday that continued emissions of greenhouse gases from power plants and vehicles will bring dire and irreversible changes by 2040, years earlier than previously forecast. The cost will be measured in trillions of dollars and in sweeping societal and environmental damage, including mass die-off of coral reefs and animal species, flooded coastlines, intensified droughts, food shortages, mass migrations and deeper poverty.

The worst impacts can be avoided only by a “far-reaching and unprecedented” transformation of the global energy system, including virtually eliminating the use of coal as a source of electricity, the panel warned.

Yet President Trump, who has questioned the accepted scientific consensus on climate change, continues to praise “clean beautiful coal” and has directed his Environmental Protection Agency to reverse major strides undertaken by the Obama administration to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. This is unbelievably reckless. In addition to undermining the fight against climate change, the president's efforts to prop up the dirtiest of all fuels will also exact a significant toll on public health, on the hearts and lungs of ordinary Americans.

The Environmental Protection Agency's bedrock mission is to protect public health and welfare. Its basic tools are 50 years of federal clean air and water laws meant to limit Americans' exposure to environmental poisons and pollutants.

Every so often an administration comes along that seems to forget this mission. We have one now. Andrew Wheeler, the agency's acting administrator, is clearly a great improvement in moral terms over his ethically challenged and thankfully departed predecessor, Scott Pruitt. Mr. Wheeler's ideology and policies, however, are much the same, weighted in favor of the industries Mr. Wheeler once represented as a handsomely paid lobbyist, and against the health needs of Americans. Like the president he serves, Mr. Wheeler displays little concern for climate change and its epochal challenges.

The latest example is a proposal his agency sent to the White House for review and approval that would, in broadest terms, greatly devalue the public health benefits of reducing air pollution. The proposal is specifically aimed at a 2011 finding by the Obama administration that when the agency devises rules to control a particular pollutant — mercury, in this case — it must take into account not only the compliance costs to industry but the additional health benefits that arise from the reduction in other harmful gases like soot and smog that occur as a side effect. Though the health benefits of controlling mercury alone were quite small, and the costs to industry large, those costs were outweighed by savings to the country in annual health costs and lost workdays when the co-benefits were factored in.

The Wheeler proposal would disallow any calculation of these side benefits and allow only those associated with the regulated pollutant. Mr. Wheeler promises that existing mercury emissions limits will remain in place. He also acknowledges that industry has already invested billions of dollars on new technology to comply with the mercury rule, and that many companies have done so. But weakening the foundation on which that rule was promulgated could invite lawsuits to overturn it entirely, and — even more ominously — could make it easier for the Trump administration or a like-minded one to ignore important ancillary public health benefits when devising other environmental regulations in the future.

So chalk up another win for Robert Murray, the far-right Trump confidante and chief executive of the Murray Energy Corporation, a big coal producer for which Mr. Wheeler served as an attorney and lobbyist. Mr. Murray requested the mercury rollback as one of 16 items on a wish list he presented last year to the Trump administration. He is one of several coal barons who lobbied the administration to revisit the cost-benefit rules to set a precedent for future regulations.

Near the top of Mr. Murray's to-do list, higher even than mercury, was the repeal and replacement of the Clean Power Plan, a cornerstone of President Barack Obama's strategy to fight global warming. Here, too, Mr. Wheeler has faithfully delivered, and here, too, he and his agency have given short shrift to human health.

The Clean Power Plan was aimed mainly at reducing carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, from coal-fired power plants. But like the mercury rule, it would also, as a collateral benefit, have reduced other dangerous pollutants like smog and soot. In so doing, the Obama administration calculated, it would prevent 1,500 to 3,600 premature deaths per year by 2030 and would provide other beneficial health effects. By contrast, as Lisa Friedman of The New York Times discovered, the Trump administration's laughably weak replacement plan would cause (by the Trump E.P.A.'s own calculations) as many as 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030, as well as 15,000 new cases of upper respiratory disease and billions of dollars in new health care costs, mainly from an increase in fine particulate matter linked to heart and lung disease.

At the time, Mr. Wheeler's lieutenants told everyone not to worry, that the agency had other rules to control these and other life-threatening pollutants. Among the optimists was William Wehrum, the agency's chief air pollution officer, who is glad to have another chance to undermine the nation's clean air laws after failing to do so during his previous stint in the George W. Bush administration. “We have abundant legal authority to deal with those other pollutants directly,” he declared.

As it happens, however, these other legal authorities are also at risk. As The N.Y. Times's Eric Lipton reported, the Trump replacement plan would also have greatly weakened another E.P.A. program known as the New Source Review, a plan that has had an enormously beneficial effect on air quality in this country and whose demise would allow many of the nation's dirtiest power plants to keep running without installing new pollution controls.

What we are dealing with here, in other words, is a bit of a shell game — hard to follow, costly to the public, satisfying to those who are running it. We are also dealing with people who won't let inconvenient forecasts about death and disease deter them from their appointed goal of satisfying Mr. Trump's pro-coal agenda, and who also seem eager to keep such forecasts hidden. Late last month we learned that the E.P.A. planned to dissolve its Office of the Science Advisor, the latest of several steps beginning under Mr. Pruitt to diminish the role of scientific research in policymaking.

Nobody really expected a new policy direction from Mr. Wheeler, who was once consigliere to Senator James Inhofe, Congress's most outspoken climate change denier. But in Mr. Wheeler's insistence on a narrow, even cramped, reading of the nation's landmark environmental laws, he is ignoring science and threatening the public health and welfare.


__________________________________________________________________________

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

• A version of this editorial appears in The New York Times on Tuesday, October 09, 2018, on Page A24 of the New York print edition with the headline: “Coal Is Killing the Planet. Trump Loves It.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/opinion/epa-climate-environment-trump.html
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« Reply #1183 on: October 10, 2018, 11:19:21 am »


from The Washington Post…

Our planet is in crisis. We don't have time for Trump's foolishness.

We are living in a climate horror movie.

By EUGENE ROBINSON | 6:58PM EDT — Monday, October 08, 2018

Firefighters monitor a backfire near Ladoga, California, in August. — Photograph: Noah Berger/Associated Press.
Firefighters monitor a backfire near Ladoga, California, in August. — Photograph: Noah Berger/Associated Press.

HERE IS how to interpret the alarming new United Nations-sponsored report on global warming: We are living in a horror movie. The world needs statesmen to lead the way to safety. Instead, we have President Trump, who essentially says, “Hey, let's all head to the dark, creepy basement where the chain saws and razor-sharp axes are kept. What could go wrong?”

The answer is almost everything, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The impact of human-induced warming is worse than previously feared, the report released on Monday says, and only drastic, coordinated action will keep the damage short of catastrophe.

To this point, climate change has been a slow-motion calamity whose impacts, month to month and year to year, have been hard to perceive. Unfortunately, according to the report, that is about to change.

The burning of fossil fuels on an industrial scale has raised global temperatures by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That may not sound like much, but look at the consequences we're already seeing: Stronger, slower, wetter tropical storms. Unprecedented heat waves. Devastating floods. Dying coral reefs. A never-before-seen summer shipping lane across the Arctic Ocean.

Meanwhile, humankind continues to pump heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a tragically self-destructive rate. The IPCC calculates that a further temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius — almost inevitable, given our dependence on coal, oil and gas — would be challenging but manageable. An increase of about 2 degrees, however, would be disastrous.

What's the difference? With a 1.5-degree rise, about 14 percent of the world's population would be vulnerable to severe and deadly heat waves every five years; with a 2-degree rise, that figure jumps to 37 percent. With a 1.5-degree rise, an additional 350 million city dwellers worldwide will face water shortages; with a 2-degree rise, 411 million people will suffer such drought. With a 1.5-degree rise, coral reefs will experience “very frequent mass mortalities”; with a 2-degree rise, coral reefs will “mostly disappear.”

Small differences can have huge impacts. Under the 1.5-degree scenario, up to 69 million people will be newly exposed to flooding. Under the 2-degree scenario — which the report estimates would boost sea-level rise by as much as 36 inches — the number rises to 80 million.

Please don't dismiss all of this as just another boring compendium of carefully hedged facts and figures. I have followed the IPCC's research since covering the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The new report strikes a different tone that combines weary fatalism with hair-on-fire alarm. In dry, just-the-facts language, it predicts declining fisheries, failing crops, more widespread risk from tropical diseases such as malaria, economic dislocation in the most-affected countries — and, by logical extension, greater political instability.

All of these impacts are bad with 1.5 more degrees of temperature rise. With 2 degrees they are much, much worse.

The obvious solution is to dramatically reduce carbon emissions. The IPCC says emissions need to decline by at least 40 percent by 2030 and to reach net zero by 2050, if we are to hold warming to 1.5 degrees. Yet last year, according to the International Energy Agency, global emissions hit an all-time high.

Since 2016, representatives of 195 nations — including all the big emitters — signed on to the landmark Paris agreement calling for systematic emissions reductions beginning in 2020. But Trump, who has ignorantly called climate change a “hoax”, decided to withdraw the United States from the pact. Even worse, Trump is aggressively trying to increase reliance on coal, which contributes a disproportionate amount of carbon dioxide emissions compared with other fossil fuels.

U.S. carbon emissions actually fell slightly in 2017, because of the expansion of the renewable energy sector. But Trump administration policies are designed to reverse that trend; and if they fail to do so, it will be because the rest of the world is already moving toward clean energy — a huge economic shift that threatens to leave the United States behind.

When you read the IPCC report, you see that what the world really needs is visionary leadership. As the world's greatest economic power and its second-largest carbon emitter, the United States is uniquely capable of shepherding a global transition to renewable energy. Instead, the Trump administration rejects the science of climate change and actively favors dirty energy sources over clean ones.

Humanity has no time for such foolishness. “I'm the president of the United States. I'm not the president of the globe,” Trump thundered at a recent rally. On what planet does he think this nation resides?


__________________________________________________________________________

Eugene Robinson writes a twice-a-week column on politics and culture for The Washington Post and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper's Style section. He started writing a column for the Op-Ed page in 2005. In 2009, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for “his eloquent columns on the 2008 presidential campaign that focus on the election of the first African-American president, showcasing graceful writing and grasp of the larger historic picture.” Robinson is the author of Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (2010), Last Dance in Havana (2004), and Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (1999). He lives with his wife and two sons in Arlington.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Tom Toles: Fighting climate change is too expensive because destroying the planet is cost-free

 • Eugene Robinson: Climate change is real. Welcome to the new normal.

 • Brian Klaas: You can't put America first if you put climate change last

 • Eric Holthaus: Climate change wrought this freak of nature

 • The Washington Post's View: We won't stop California's wildfires if we don't talk about climate change


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-planet-is-in-crisis-we-dont-have-time-for-trumps-foolishness/2018/10/08/5531ceea-cb37-11e8-a360-85875bac0b1f_story.html
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« Reply #1184 on: October 10, 2018, 10:31:28 pm »

so we get a few beaches washing away thats normal best to build on rock not sand

California fires not enough rain was maybe a guy with matches but most of all bad forest management by moonbats


Bad forest management to blame for forest fires

California is suffering, yet again, through a horrendous summer of wildfires that are destroying forests, homes — and lives. Many in the media seem to blame the size of the fires on climate change.

President Donald Trump had a different take in a recent tweet: “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws ... Must also tree clear to stop fire spreading!”

Trump is correct that human-caused policies may be playing a bigger role than human-caused climate change in the increasingly destructive wildfires.

For decades the U.S. Forest Service allowed logging companies to enter forests and clear out dead, stressed and diseased trees and underbrush — all of which are kindling for wildfires.

Between 1960 and 1990 roughly 10 billion to 12 billion board feet of timber was removed annually from national forests, according to the Forest Service. But a steady decline led to only about 2.5 billion board feet harvested in 2013, leaving forests filled with dead and diseased trees.

As the Forest Service reported last December, in California “the total number of trees that have died due to drought and bark beetles” reached an historic 129 million on 8.9 million acres. The dead trees continue to pose a hazard to people and critical infrastructure ...”

You can say that again! But it doesn’t have to be that way — and it wasn’t in the past.

California Rep. Tom McClintock, the Republican chairman of the Subcommittee on Federal Lands, said at a committee hearing last year: “The sale of excess timber ... provided a steady stream of revenue to the treasury and thousands of jobs to support local families. We could match and maintain tree density to the ability of the land to support it.”

But, he continued, “Forty-five years ago, we began imposing laws that have made the management of our forests all but impossible.”

The result of those changes has been a rapid expansion, not so much in the number but the size of wildfires.

The Government Accountability Office has published a chart showing the total number of national forest acreage burned between 1910 and 1997 — national forests, as opposed to state and private forests, are mostly in western states. Wildfires took between 300,000 and 400,000 acres annually between 1940 and 1985. There has been a steady increase ever since. The current California wildfires have consumed more than 1 million acres, according to the Forest Service.

Why the decades of smaller fires? Better-managed forests, especially when management focused on “select cutting.”

But one of the purposes of the National Forest Management Act of 1976 was to protect national forests from excessive logging. And it required forest planning based on a consensus of groups, including environmental organizations that tended to oppose the logging.

In addition, the Engendered Species Act tied the hands of effective management if specific actions would have a perceived negative impact on threatened species.

Such changes ultimately made forest management, in McClintock’s words, “all but impossible.”

The irony is that California Gov. Jerry Brown is dedicated to reducing carbon emissions — using more renewable energy sources, imposing higher mileage standards on cars and trucks, etc. But the wildfires that have grown so extensive on his watch undermine those efforts.

The earth has been on a gradual warming trend since the last ice age; there is very little humans can do about that. And many climate scientists concede that most carbon-reducing proposals would have minimal impact on rising temperatures.

But there is a lot we can do about reducing the size and intensity of wildfires, which would also reduce carbon emissions. And it starts with embracing policies that were standard practice decades ago. Well-managed forests are much safer and less-costly forests.

https://www.hollandsentinel.com/news/20180831/con-bad-forest-management-to-blame-for-forest-fires
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« Reply #1185 on: October 11, 2018, 10:40:37 am »


Yes, we KNOW you're stupid.

But do you have to keep on displaying it and digging an ever-deeper hole for yourself?

People in Woodville must consider you to be their village idiot.
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« Reply #1186 on: October 11, 2018, 10:40:54 am »



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« Reply #1187 on: October 11, 2018, 10:48:16 am »



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« Reply #1188 on: October 11, 2018, 09:40:10 pm »

your a stupid dumb cunt
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« Reply #1189 on: October 12, 2018, 03:26:25 am »

your a stupid dumb cunt


Hahaha ... an “intelligent” statement from Woodville's village idiot.

How many hours did it take you to compose that reply?

It must have really taxed your Trump-addled brain, eh?
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« Reply #1190 on: October 12, 2018, 04:14:56 am »


you're copy & past fake news moronic commie clown troll thats too stupid to have a life
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« Reply #1191 on: October 12, 2018, 04:23:17 am »


I guess you're too dumb & blind to notice the ever-increasingly-extreme weather.

Not to worry, your insurance company is soon going to ramp up your premiums through the roof to cover the losses they are being forced to pay out on due to global warming and climate change. No doubt you'll whinge & squeal like a stuck pig when that happens, while remaining too thick to work out why that is happening.

Oh well ... ignorance is bliss for dumbfucks, eh?
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« Reply #1192 on: October 12, 2018, 08:29:19 am »

our weather is ok
its more about money a big con

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« Reply #1193 on: October 12, 2018, 11:33:29 am »


Go tell that to the people in Florida who have lost everything.

Mind you, they're most likely stupid Trump supporters, so it probably serves them right their houses have been destroyed.

I guess they can just keep on sticking their fingers in their ears and shutting their eyes and proclaiming, “it isn't happening ... it's fake news that my house got destroyed by the weather.”

Haw haw haw!!!
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« Reply #1194 on: October 12, 2018, 03:05:08 pm »

yes thats right its called the weather you silly bunny
funny thing its been happening for 1000s of years
why dont we call it climate change hahaha Grin

« Last Edit: October 15, 2018, 04:02:44 pm by Im2Sexy4MyPants » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #1195 on: October 16, 2018, 11:05:36 am »


Yes, we KNOW you're stupid.
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« Reply #1196 on: October 16, 2018, 12:30:10 pm »


from The Seattle Times....

Political and corporate leaders ignore climate peril

President Trump and other political and corporate leaders ignore climate peril.

By DAVID HORSEY | 3:27PM EDT— Monday, October 15, 2018



THE United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued a new report that says, without swift action by the world's governments, the dire effects of climate change will be coming much sooner than expected — perhaps within two decades. As he has in the past with other warnings about how the United States and the world will suffer severe consequences if no action is taken in response to rising global temperatures, President Donald Trump shrugged it off, accusing scientists of having a “political agenda”.

__________________________________________________________________________

• See more of David Horsey's cartoons at The Seattle Times HERE.

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/political-and-corporate-leaders-ignore-climate-peril
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« Reply #1197 on: October 17, 2018, 01:08:14 pm »

oh yeah thats it a cartoon instead of real facts
you really should find out who is making all the money from this carbon scam,follow the money...
give scientist enough funding and they will say anything to make the al gore richer

man made warming only in china
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« Reply #1198 on: October 17, 2018, 02:21:57 pm »


You wouldn't know FACTS even if you shit them out of your arsehole.
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« Reply #1199 on: October 17, 2018, 02:47:13 pm »

oh thats right your the mega mind hahaha
what you doing today
taken over the world yet? Cheesy
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