Thursday, August 10, 2017

Anyone Think Señor Trumpanzee Has What It Takes To Protect America From The Impact Of Climate Change?

>


Which is the bigger story-- a report by scientists from 13 federal agencies that the average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years or that scientists fear Trump will suppress the report?

The report itself, which concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now, is devastating to the arguments of Climate Change Deniers who dominate the Republican Party and the Trump Regime. "Evidence for a changing climate abounds," the scientists assert, "from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans."
The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change,” they wrote.

The report was completed this year and is a special science section of the National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four years. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft report, and the authors are awaiting permission from the Trump administration to release it.

One government scientist who worked on the report, Katharine Hayhoe, a professor of political science at Texas Tech University, called the conclusions among “the most comprehensive climate science reports” to be published. Another scientist involved in the process, who spoke to the New York Times on the condition of anonymity, said he and others were concerned that it would be suppressed.

The report concludes that even if humans immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world would still feel at least an additional 0.50 degrees Fahrenheit (0.30 degrees Celsius) of warming over this century compared with today. The projected actual rise, scientists say, will be as much as 2 degrees Celsius.

A small difference in global temperatures can make a big difference in the climate: The difference between a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and one of 2 degrees Celsius, for example, could mean longer heat waves, more intense rainstorms and the faster disintegration of coral reefs.

Among the more significant of the study’s findings is that it is possible to attribute some extreme weather to climate change. The field known as “attribution science” has advanced rapidly in response to increasing risks from climate change.
So will Scott Pruitt's EPA in particular and the Trump Regime in general change or suppress the report? UN Ambassador Nikki Haley insists the Regime will "accept" the report's findings. "Just because we pulled out of the Paris accord doesn't mean we don't believe in climate protection," she said. "I think we're very aware that we need to do that. What we're saying is we're not going to sell out American businesses to do that." Margaret Hartmann, writing for New York Magazine, wasn't quite so optimistic-- and for good reason.




For those who believe the scientific consensus that human-caused global warming is real, President Trump has already made many nightmares a reality. In his first six months, Trump picked a climate-change denier to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, rolled back around two dozen environmental regulations, and announced that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

So far “climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese” isn’t the official policy of the U.S. government, but many worry that in addition to implementing policies that undo America’s progress on global warming, the Trump administration will take steps to prevent others from accessing facts about the problem. During the transition, the Trump team sent a questionnaire to the Department of Energy that aimed to root out “climate empiricists” (they later distanced themselves from the document). Then, during Trump’s first 100 days in office, the new administration gradually excised mentioned of climate change from government websites.

On Monday, The Guardian published emails between staffers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which show that they were told to use terms like “weather extremes” in their work in place of “climate change.” Think Progress notes that previous administrations have used less politicized terms to open up a dialogue with farmers, but the emails attribute the change to a “shift in perspective within the executive branch.”

...“The current situation will provide an acid test of whether the Trump administration is open to hearing the scientific truth about climate change or is so much in the thrall of fossil fuel interests that they are fixated on hiding the reality from the public,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.

Earlier this week, the State Department offered a glimmer of hope regarding the administration’s environmental policy when it said the U.S. will participate in upcoming international climate-change negotiations, and remains open to “re-engaging” in the Paris accord. There’s nothing to prevent Trump from renegotiating the country’s carbon-emissions targets and remaining in the agreement, or from releasing the Climate Science Special Report-- but it’s hard to see why he would. In recent days, he’s seemed particularly interested in showing his base he’s up for a challenge, and this presents yet another opportunity to attack the “failing” New York Times.

Labels:

7 Comments:

At 10:21 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

That picture is so awesome. Especially the Donald as a pinhead. But each one is awesome in their own way. In general I enjoy the illustrations.

 
At 4:52 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Let's start at the beginning: Money Talks. Loudly.

Being forced to spend ten million dollars of money originally budgeted for that new yacht only angers the frustrated yacht owner. He might then spend a million to buy enough politicians to screw over the entire world just so he can go back to buying a bigger toy.

Then he starts looking into what else he wants that will harm the planet and everyone who loves on it. After all, if you are so important, where is your fortune?

So to address the title question: it depends on who "America" means. We already know it doesn't mean We the People. So it must mean Big Money. Thus Trump is already doing what Big Money wants to defend itself from having to be responsible human beings and end the ridiculousness that is their lives.

They DO think that Trumpanzee what it takes to protect THEM from ANY impact of climate change that involves having to surrender money or ANY part of the Good Life.

 
At 6:52 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

4:52 has a salient comment.

But note that inconvenient climate data has been suppressed by all admins since the '80s. NASA is the agency that had been tasked with suborning, collating and reporting climate data and all admins since Reagan have put politicians at the head partly, if not wholly, to temper or totally suppress all the bad news that science would have given us.

This is nothing new. Welcome to the fools' America, where big oil buys the same fake science that big tobacco bought for a half century.

 
At 8:37 AM, Blogger Ten Bears said...

Our changing atmosphere doesn't give a flying rat's ass about mice and the best laid plans of men.

When you take a step back and look at it on a geological scale, it's all really rather humorous. They played the long game, perhaps a thousand years, and then just as their machinations are coming to fruition out of nowhere the unaccounted for scatters them like Humpty Dumpty's shell.

With all the extreme weather insanity forefront today I can't help but smile at the old Chiffon margarine commercial where upon discovering it's not butter, it's margarine, is plastic, Mother Nature goes from all sweetness and light, flowers and flutes to wham: Bambi meets Godzilla, thunder, lightening, hurricanes.

It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

It didn't have to be this way.

The 1916 Rauch & Lang Electric car had an 50-mile range at 20 mph on a single charge and cost $2,800. Adjusted for inflation, about $61,000 today.

https://youtu.be/LLrTPrp-fW8

 
At 2:03 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Speaking of old commercials, I just came across this bit of fluff from Pepsi, circa 1967, urging the younger generation to just stay asleep--oh so sleepy--and don't wake up until the people who sold you this bill of goods are long gone and pouf, Donald Trump is the President, kids. Good luck! Awakeness at this point seems very difficult.
At 7:34:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mLRhsxJ8_GE

ekstase

 
At 2:50 PM, Blogger Ten Bears said...

Gather 'round kiddies, the man with the goodies is here.

 
At 6:10 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

TTB, your comment is salient.

But the atmosphere would still be shit if we'd all been driving electric cars like that one for the past century. We'd have burned megatons more coal to produce the electricity to recharge them.

Mankind has been befouling the earth for 100,000 years. We've deforested to build and burn, mined coal and oil to burn for heat and power and built an entire human transportation infrastructure based on plentiful oil (asphalt roads to jet fuel) which also includes digging huge holes to get metals... all because it's just so easy to do.

And every step of the way we leave huge scars on/in the earth and a layer of shit above ground that we must breathe and which rain brings back down to earth to kill our flora and, indirectly, fauna.

All just because we can.

And when finally we notice what we've been doing because of real consequences... we deny and await the second cumming or rapture or whateverthefuck the Christian imbeciles are calling it.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home