Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s VP Pick: ‘Humans have a responsibility to do something” about climate change

What You Need To Know About Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s Vice President Pick

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2016/07/22/3801047/tim-kaine-hillary-vp/

Clinton announced Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) as her running mate on Friday night in a text message to her supporters. The post What You Need To Know About Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s Vice President Pick appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Kaine has spoken out strongly about the need to address global climate change. In 2012, he said “humans have a responsibility to do something” about climate change. He has a lifetime score of 91 percent from the League of Conservation Voters, opposed the Keystone XL pipeline and protected 400,000 acres of land from being developed when he was governor of Virginia.

However, Kaine’s climate record does come with a couple caveats. He has supported offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean and also supported a measure that fast-tracked the building of natural gas terminals.…

Kerry: Regulating refrigerator chemicals are ‘of equal importance’ to battling ISIS

Via: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/kerry-air-conditioners-worse-than-isis/article/2597416

John Kerry made the remarks as part of a pep talk for negotiators working through the weekend to amend a 1987 treaty called the Montreal Protocol to deal with the chemicals. (AP Photo)

John Kerry made the remarks as part of a pep talk for negotiators working through the weekend to amend a 1987 treaty called the Montreal Protocol to deal with the chemicals. (AP Photo)

By JOHN SICILIANO 7/22/16 2:49 PM

Air conditioners and refrigerators pose as big a threat to “life on the planet” as the threat of terrorism, Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday.

Kerry was in Vienna negotiating a global climate deal to phase out chemicals used as refrigerants in basic household and commercial appliances such as air conditioning and refrigerators, called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. The chemicals are a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions that many scientists blame for contributing to global warming.

Kerry made the remarks as part of a pep talk for negotiators working through the weekend to amend a 1987 treaty called the Montreal Protocol to deal with the chemicals.

“Yesterday, I met in Washington with 45 nations — defense ministers and foreign ministers — as we were working together on the challenge of [the Islamic State], and terrorism,” he said. “It’s hard for some people to grasp it, but what we — you — are doing here right now is of equal importance because it has the ability to literally save life on the planet itself.”

The global deal would match new EPA regulations to ban HFCs in the United States and promote alternative chemicals for use in appliances.

The EPA’s rules, together with the negotiations in Vienna, are part of the president’s climate agenda for his final year in office.

Full Examiner article here: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/kerry-air-conditioners-worse-than-isis/article/2597416

Poll: 77% Of Voters Agree With Trump’s Energy Position

The majority of Americans agrees with Republican nominee Donald Trump’s pro-energy position, according to a recent poll conducted by the American Petroleum Institute (API).

“We are going to lift the restrictions on the production of American energy. This will produce more than 20 trillion dollars in job creating economic activity over the next four decades,” Trump said Thursday night when accepting the Republican nomination for president. “My opponent on the other hand wants to put the great miners and the great steelworkers of our country, out of work and out of business. That will never happen with Donald J. Trump as president. Our steel workers and our miners are going back to work again.”

The poll found 77 percent of voters want to see America increase production of oil and gas resources located in the U.S, including 94 percent of Republicans, 73 percent of independents, and 64 percent of Democrats.

The poll also found 69 percent of voters would support a political candidate who promised to increase production of American oil and natural gas, gaining approval from 86 percent of Republicans, 69 percent of independents, and 57 percent of Democrats. Roughly 71 percent of voters would oppose legislation that could potentially raise energy costs on the American consumer.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/22/poll-77-percent-of-voters-agree-with-trumps-energy-position/#ixzz4FACLwBuI

University of Deleware Penguin Panic Paper Exposed As Flawed… Used ‘Tricks’

Antarctic climate models fail to handle natural variability: Adélie penguins continue to appear

By Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
(German text translated/edited by P. Gosselin)

On June 29, 2016 the University of Delaware (UD) unleashed a climate penguin panic with its press release:

Penguins and climate change:
UD scientists report projected response of Adélie penguins to Antarctic climate change

It’s a big question: how is climate change in Antarctica affecting Adélie penguins? Climate has influenced the distribution patterns of Adélie penguins across Antarctica for millions of years. The geologic record tells us that as glaciers expanded and covered Adélie breeding habitats with ice, penguin colonies were abandoned. When the glaciers melted during warming periods, this warming positively affected the Adélie penguins, allowing them to return to their rocky breeding grounds. But now, University of Delaware scientists and colleagues report that this beneficial warming may have reached its tipping point. In a paper published today in Scientific Reports, the researchers project that approximately 30 percent of current Adélie colonies may be in decline by 2060 and approximately 60 percent may be in decline by 2099.”

That’s absolutely bitter. More than half of the penguins will be dead by 2099. In earlier times they benefitted from climate warming, but today heat is threatening to wipe them out. How has this come to be? The press release continues:

It is only in recent decades that we know Adélie penguins population declines are associated with warming, which suggests that many regions of Antarctica have warmed too much and that further warming is no longer positive for the species,” said the paper’s lead author Megan Cimino, who earned her doctoral degree at UD in May.”

Antarctica has warmed unusually over the past decades?

Unfortunately that is completely wrong, see here. Precisely on this subject a new paper by Jones et al. 2016 in Nature Climate Change tells us:

Assessing recent trends in high-latitude Southern Hemisphere surface climate
Understanding the causes of recent climatic trends and variability in the high-latitude Southern Hemisphere is hampered by a short instrumental record. Here, we analyse recent atmosphere, surface ocean and sea-ice observations in this region and assess their trends in the context of palaeoclimate records and climate model simulations. Over the 36-year satellite era, significant linear trends in annual mean sea-ice extent, surface temperature and

Democratic Platform Calls For WWII-Scale Mobilization To Solve Climate Crisis

This month, the full Democratic Platform Committee approved the strongest statement about the urgent need for climate action ever issued by a major party in this country.

The platform makes for the starkest possible contrast with a party that just nominated Donald Trump — a man who has called climate change a hoax invented by and for the Chinese, who hasdenied basic reality such as the drought in California, and who has vowed to (try to) scuttle the unanimous agreement by the world’s nations in Paris to take whatever measures are necessary to avert catastrophic warming and keep total warming “well below 2°C.”

In contrast, one party in this country has finally embraced the blunt — and scientifically accurate — language of climate hawks as to what those measures actually entail:

We believe the United States must lead in forging a robust global solution to the climate crisis. We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II. In the first 100 days of the next administration, the President will convene a summit of the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis.

James Hansen, America’s leading climatologist, and his colleagues have been make such a call for a while. In 2008, in The Open Atmospheric Science Journal, they explain why the effort needed is “herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II.” So have activists like 350.org founder, Bill McKibben. McKibben is on the 15-member Platform Drafting Committee — as is Neera Tanden, who is President and CEO of the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the CAP Action Fund (where I have worked for 10 years), and as is Carol Browner, who is a former EPA Administrator and on the CAP Board.…

CBS Uses Heat Wave to Play Up ‘Bigger Problems’ From Climate Change

Wednesday’s CBS Evening News used the recent heat wave in the United States to hype climate change. Mireya Villarreal featured a meteorologist who contended that “this is such a massive problem — and even if we were to completely stop all carbon emissions right now, we would still have a very serious situation. We’ve passed the tipping point.” Villarreal underlined that “2016 is the hottest year ever recorded,” and that “this season, fires are more intense; drought conditions are growing; and the arctic sea ice is melting sooner.” [video below]

The correspondent first noted that “from Minnesota to California, record-high heat is expected to linger for days.” She continued by playing her first clip from Mark Jackson of the National Weather Service, who used a greenhouse comparison to explain the heat wave. After giving her “hottest year ever recorded” line, she also reported the hot weather in other parts of the Northern Hemisphere.…

Senate Dems Get Irrational During ‘Web of Denial’ Climate Change Event

The best answer to many of the claims by Senate Democrats during their three-day “Web of Denial” climate change campaign in Congress this week is also the simplest: “So what?”

“Climate change is real,” asserted Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Jean Shaheen (D-NH), and Martin Heinrich (D-NM). So what? Gravity and sunrise are also real. That doesn’t imply we cause them or that we would be better off without them. Climate has been changing since the origin of the atmosphere. The onlyconstant about climate is change.

Furthermore, the world has mostly cooled for the last 3000 years.

Merkley and Feinstein continued: “Manmade climate change is a fact.”

So what? It is obviously warmer in urban areas than in the countryside because of manmade impacts. But the only place where carbon dioxide (CO2) increase causes a temperature increase is in computer models programmed to show exactly that.

Every record from every time period shows that temperature increase precedes CO2 increase, not the other way around.

‘Gripping work of fiction’ – Media slammed for claiming Earth warming ‘faster’ than expected — ‘Um, no, it isn’t’

Special to Climate Depot

Is the Reuters “news” agency committing fraud?

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Yet another screaming Reuters headline, this time Earth on track for hottest year ever as warming speeds up, precedes yet another screaming, inaccurate, prejudiced Reuters “news” article about the totalitarians’ current hot topic.

http://sustainability.thomsonreuters.com/2016/07/21/earth-on-track-for-hottest-year-ever-as-warming-speeds-up/, written from Geneva, cites the World Meteorological Disorganization as saying the Earth is warming at “a faster rate than expected”.

Um, no, it isn’t.

monckton july 2016

The Global Warming Speedometer for January 2001 to June 2016 shows observed warming on the HadCRUT4 and NCEI surface tamperature datasets as below IPCC’s least prediction in 1990 and somewhat on the low side of its 1995 and 2001 predictions, while the satellite datasets show less warming than all IPCC predictions from 1990 to 2001. Later IPCC predictions are too recent to be reliably testable.

All of the observations have been much affected by the recent el Niño spike, which may yet be followed by a correcting la Niña, in which event it is possible that the Pause may resume, though don’t bet on it yet. Theory would lead us to expect some warming over the medium to long term, though on balance not very much.

Now, was it really too much work for Reuters, which prides itself on its numerical data, to check IPCC predictions against observations, rather than rebarbatively regurgitating a handout that any of its customers could have downloaded from WMD all by their little selves?

“June,” says Reuters’ gripping work of fiction, “marked the 14th straight month of record heat.” Now, let me see, when Ted Cruz displayed WUWT’s Pause graph in the Senate last November, at which time there had been no global warming for 18 years 19 months, was there not a great deal of whining about how a mere 19 years was too short a period to draw any conclusions?

Yet Reuters, the supposedly bankable financial/statistical news agency, unquestioningly recycles self-serving WMD propaganda to the effect that 14 months is enough to confirm what Private Fraser in Dad’s Army had long told us: that “We’re a’ doomed!”

monckton 2 2016

“We’re a’ DOOMED!”

Next, Reuters unquestioningly reports a WMD spokesman as saying: “What we’ve seen so far for the first six months of 2016 is really quite alarming. This year suggests that the planet can warm up faster than we expected in a much shorter time … We don’t have …