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And another one gets nominated where they should not have any business..
Quote:President Donald Trump’s choice to run the Department of Homeland Security — which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to disasters — refuses to acknowledge the basic climate science needed for her to protect the nation from future disasters during her Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday. Ignoring the fact that the White House just approved and released a massive report from 13 federal agencies declaring that humans are responsible for all recent global warming, DHS nominee Kirstjen Nielsen still repeated the same tired science-denying talking point that has become a common refrain in the Trump administration: namely, that the climate is always changing and humans play some role, but darned if you know what it is. Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), one of Congress’ top proponents of climate action, was able to utterly dismantle Nielsen’s denial.
Sen. Carper eviscerates Trump’s Homeland Security pick for her climate science denial – ThinkProgress
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With what will they come up next
Quote:A Republican lawmaker on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee said Thursday that rocks from the White Cliffs of Dover and the California coastline, as well as silt from rivers tumbling into the ocean, are contributing to high sea levels globally. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) made the comment during a hearing on technology and the changing climate, which largely turned into a Q&A on the basics of climate research. Climate scientist Philip Duffy testified before the panel, addressing lawmakers’ questions about climate change, according to E&E News.
"The rate of global sea-level rise has accelerated and is now four times faster than it was 100 years ago," Duffy told the panel. Brooks said that erosion played a factor in that. "Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up," Brooks said at the hearing. "I'm pretty sure that on human time scales, those are minuscule effects,” responded Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and a former senior adviser to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, responded. The committee, led by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), in recent years subpoenaed climate scientists in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for documents related to climate research, accusing the agency of pushing a “political study” that concluded there has not been a 15-year pause in global warming.
And GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.) told Duffy that it was “disturbing” to constantly be told not to question whether humans are the main cause of climate change, and that the committee “should all be open to different points of view.”
GOP lawmaker says rocks falling into ocean to blame for rising sea levels
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While EPA Chair Scott Pruitt is on his next scandal (we lost count, to be honest), the real scandal is what he's done to the EPA (a wholesale sellout to corporate interests, mostly fossil fuels). But here is a judge that could bring some sanity back:
Quote:A U.S. district judge has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to release any documents used by Administrator Scott Pruitt to make his public statement that human behavior is not a “primary contributor” to climate change. The chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Beryl Howell, said in a ruling issued last Friday but first widely reported this week that the EPA had to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed last year by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). PEER requested any documents Pruitt used to inform a statement he made on climate change last year.
Judge rules EPA must provide evidence used for Pruitt's climate change claims | TheHill
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It's not impossible..
Quote:NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine says he changed his mind on the existence of man-made climate change because he “read a lot.” “I heard a lot of experts, and I read a lot,” Bridenstine told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “I came to the conclusion myself that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that we've put a lot of it into the atmosphere and therefore we have contributed to the global warming that we've seen. And we've done it in really significant ways.” The former congressman from Oklahoma had long denied the scientific consensus on climate change and said in a 2013 speech on the House floor that "global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago." In May, Bridenstine first announced publicly that he now believes human activity is the main cause of climate change.
NASA chief says he changed mind about climate change because he 'read a lot’ | TheHill
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07-02-2018, 06:17 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-02-2018, 06:19 PM by stpioc.)
Can you believe these people..
Quote:Over twenty national and state conservative groups are urging the Trump administration to reject an international agreement that aims to fix climate change by limiting the use of a chemical commonly found in refrigerators. In a letter sent Monday to President Trump, 21 groups including the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Heritage Action asked Trump to pull the U.S. out of an Obama-era agreement known as the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which aims to reduce emissions of global warming-causing hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) used as a refrigerant.
Big businesses, including the U.S. refrigerator industry, are also supportive of the agreement, urging the Trump administration to stay committed to the deal because of the business potential of new regulations. The industry hopes to convince the administration that staying in will create U.S. jobs due to the fact that the country is a leader in refrigerant products and the pact will likely drive new demand for their expertise globally. However, conservatives view the treaty, which was signed in Kigali, Rwanda, as a leftover from the Obama administration that should be done away with. The letter states that the "Kigali Amendment would do far more economic harm than environmental good."
Top conservative groups urge Trump to reject climate change agreement | TheHill
More harm than good?? Perhaps with the help of EPA Pruitt's new cost benefit analysis, LOL.
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The five stages of climate denial..
Quote:Stage 1: Deny the Problem Exists
Stage 2: Deny We're the Cause
Stage 3: Deny It's a Problem
Stage 4: Deny We can Solve It
Stage 5: It's too Late
To date, the Trump administration has pinballed between Stages 1, 2, and 3, calling climate change a Chinese hoax, disputing the degree of human causation (100% since 1950), and claiming it’s not a threat. But the purpose of climate science denial is to obstruct climate policies, and science denial doesn’t hold up in court. Unlike in the political realm, judicial decisions are generally based on evidence.
The Trump administration wants to roll back the Obama administration’s increased vehicle fuel efficiency standards. But under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), “if a proposed major federal action is determined to significantly affect the quality of the human environment,” the agency has to publish an environmental impact statement (EIS). And so, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was required to publish an EIS detailing how the proposed fuel efficiency rollbacks would impact the environment, including via climate change. Here, the Trump administration shifted to Stage 4 and 5 climate denial.
The tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual actors using a shared-resource system act in their own seeming self-interest and deplete the resource as a result. For example, consider a small fishery with a dozen fisherman each catching as many fish as he can. Soon the resource becomes overfished and every fisherman suffers the consequences. Only if they all agree to limit their catches to sustainable levels can the fishery remain a long-term stable resource for all of the fishermen.
We’re in the same situation with climate change. Every country can act in its own short-term self-interest and continue burning lots of seemingly cheap fossil fuels; the long-term result in that scenario would be a catastrophic destabilization of the global climate on which we all rely. Or every country can agree to take steps like increasing vehicle fuel efficiency standards that cumulatively will slow global warming and avoid the worst climate change impacts.
Of course, being a short-sighted nationalist, Donald Trump is the only world leader to reject the Paris climate agreement. His administration is similarly making short-sighted arguments that coincidentally serve the best interests of the fossil fuel industry, while in this case producing the equivalent carbon emissions of adding 9 million more cars on the road.
The Trump administration has entered Stage 5 climate denial | Dana Nuccitelli | Environment | The Guardian
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Climate denier in chief
Quote:President Donald Trump sought to cast doubt on a UN report on climate change that had dire warnings about how little time we have to stop a global catastrophe. Trump suggested that the state of the world's climate may actually be "fabulous," and that he's seen reports expressing that position. The report outlines the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Trump has previously called climate change a "hoax" and pulled the US from the Paris Climate Accord.
Trump: Climate change may be 'fabulous' after UN climate change report - Business Insider
Amazing stuff..
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Quote:Legislation to address climate change has repeatedly died in Congress. But a major new study says the policy deaths were not from natural causes — they were caused by humans, just like climate change itself is.
Climate action has been repeatedly drowned by a devastating surge and flood of money from the fossil fuel industry — nearly $2 billion in lobbying since 2000 alone.
This is according to stunning new analysis in the journal Climatic Change on “The climate lobby” by Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert J. Brulle. The most important conclusion of Brulle’s is that spending by those in favor of climate action was dramatically overwhelmed by the big fossil fuel suppliers and users: “Environmental organizations and the renewable energy sector lobbying expenditures were dwarfed by a ratio of 10:1 by the spending of the sectors engaged in the supply and use of fossil fuels.”
Fossil fuel industry spent nearly $2 billion to kill U.S. climate action, new study finds – ThinkProgress
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Obstructing science with the likes of Russia and Saudi Arabia (just a coincidence that these are the biggest fossil fuel producers and chummy murderous regime friends of the Trumps?)
Quote:Attempts to incorporate a key scientific study into global climate talks in Poland have failed. The IPCC report on the impacts of a temperature rise of 1.5C, had a significant impact when it was launched last October. Scientists and many delegates in Poland were shocked as the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait objected to this meeting "welcoming" the report. It was the 2015 climate conference that had commissioned the landmark study.
Climate change: COP24 fails to adopt key scientific report - BBC News
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Quote:Brazil’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, will meet a rightwing US advocacy group that denies climate change, just four days before the United Nations Climate Action Summit. Salles will meet representatives from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) at the headquarters of the US Environmental Protection Agency on 19 September, Brazil’s Folha de S Paulo newspaper revealed. The meeting was immediately condemned by environmentalists, who said it showed that the government of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, had no commitment to fighting the climate crisis. News of the meeting emerged a day after Brazil’s foreign minister questioned the scientific proof for global warming in a convoluted speech in Washington. Addressing the Heritage Foundation, Ernesto Araújo said “there is no climate catastrophe” and described efforts to fight climate change as a plot to destroy national sovereignty.
Brazil environment minister to meet US climate denier group before UN summit | World news | The Guardian
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