Actor Mark Ruffalo calls Obama ‘immoral’ at climate rally for allowing fracking
Hollywood star Mark Ruffalo accused US President Barack Obama on Sunday of hypocrisy for allowing fracking and other fossil fuel extraction while presenting himself as a green president.
The Oscar-nominated “Spotlight” and “Avengers” actor spoke out at a rally in Los Angeles protesting against man-made climate change and, in particular, the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, the site of escalating protests in recent weeks.
“President Obama, it is immoral for you to keep drilling in our state lands, in our federal lands, off our federal waters, while at the same time calling yourself a climate change leader,” he said.
Ruffalo, 48, recently narrated and produced “Dear President Obama: The Clean Energy Revolution Is Now,” a critical documentary on the outgoing head-of-state’s environmental legacy.…
UN Climate-Change Censor Performs as Singing Space Pixie on YouTube
By P.J. Gladnick
Remember the haughtily officious spokesperson for the United Nations Climate Change Conference chronicled here in Newsbusters yesterday who wants to ban skeptical journalists from attending their meeting in Morocco next month? His name is Nick Nuttall and it appears he has a very bizarre side gig.
You can see him performing in the following video but a word of warning… You need to put your coffee cups down now or risk coating your computer screens with the caffeinated liquid. Are you ready? Okay, I now present to you UN spokesperson/censor and singing space pixie Nuttall entertaining you as he floats gently around in the extraterrestrial ether:
Now all of you! Join the singing space pixie! And it is important to do good job because only you can save the world with this incredibly lame melody.…
CLIMATE TRUTH FILE: 2016: Skeptical Talking Points from A-Z on Global Warming – Point-By-Point
https://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/CFACT-Climate-Truth-File-2016.pdf
Global temperatures have been virtually flat for about 18 years according to satellite data, and peer-reviewed literature is now scaling back predictions of future warming
The U.S. has had no Category 3 or larger hurricane make landfall since 2005 – the longest spell since the Civil War.
Strong F3 or larger tornadoes have been in decline since the 1970s.
Despite claims of snow being ‘a thing of the past,’ cold season snowfall has been rising.
Sea level rise rates have been steady for over a century, with recent deceleration.
Droughts and floods are neither historically unusual nor caused by mankind, and there is no evidence we are currently having any unusual weather.
So-called hottest year claims are based on year-to-year temperature data that differs by only a few HUNDREDTHS of a degree to tenths of a degree Fahrenheit – differences that are within the margin of error in the data. In other words, global temperatures have essentially held very steady with no sign of acceleration.
A 2015 NASA study found Antarctica was NOT losing ice mass and ‘not currently contributing to sea level rise.’
2016 Arctic sea ice was 22% greater than the recent low point of 2012. The Arctic sea ice is now in a 10-year ‘pause’ with ‘no significant change in the past decade’
Deaths due to extreme weather have declined dramatically.
Polar bears are doing fine, with their numbers way up since the 1960s.
Full report here: https://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/CFACT-Climate-Truth-File-2016.pdf
…
‘Climate change’ may spark next financial crisis, fmr. Bank of England regulator says as he pushes carbon tax
“It is potentially a systemic risk.”
Climate change could cause the next financial crisis, the former deputy head of the Bank of England’s regulatory department said Monday.
Climate change “is potentially a systemic risk,” Paul Fisher, who recently retired as deputy head of the Prudential Regulation Authority, told Bloomberg. “It could be the trigger for the next financial crisis,” he said, noting that climate change can force a sudden change in prices in a similar way that the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union damaged the sterling’s value.
Fisher, an expert on monetary policy and financial markets, explained the effects of climate change — storms, drought, and other environmental instability — can move financial markets as there is a risk of “system-wide repricing of assets happening quite suddenly.” He also said that policy changes, such as implementing a carbon tax, could have a market effect.
Some elected officials argue that environmental policies to reduce the emissions that cause climate change are too costly, and Fisher’s comments come in line with years of economic research that underscore the importance of predictable regulatory regime over market instability. Not acting on climate change could be much worse, economically.…
John Kerry: ‘It Pisses Me Off’ That Climate Change Got Left Out of Presidential Debates
By Bridget Johnson
The secretary of State lamented that “not one single question was asked of any candidate on the subject of climate change” during the three presidential debates and vice presidential debate.
“Didn’t that piss you off while you were watching?” DiCaprio asked.
“Yeah. Totally. Totally. It pisses me off tonight, too,” Kerry replied.
…
Secretary of State John Kerry admitted “it pisses me off” that climate change wasn’t brought up in the presidential debates.
On a panel with Leonardo DiCaprio after a Thursday screening at UN headquarters in New York of the actor’s documentary “Before the Flood,” Kerry said that “maybe November 8th will produce a capacity for the entire Republican caucus” to see the global-warming film.
“It should be required for every single one of them,” he added, to applause from the audience.
Kerry emphasized that “we’re not sitting here chasing some pie-in-the-sky set of possible solutions somewhere down the road.”
“The solutions are here now. Every single one of them is staring us in the face. We know what we have to do. The solution to climate change is energy policy. And if we will make the right choices and everybody here exponentially grown around the planet starts to push the politicians, as the film said, then they won’t dare be against it as the populations begin to demand different sources of electricity, different sources of — of transportation, and so forth,” he said.
Kerry argued that climate-change activists “will be able to win the battle of sending a message to people about how we account for the true costs, about what our opportunities are for a new energy base for our nation, how we will be able to do transportation and meet all of our obligations.”
He recalled trying to get cap-and-trade passed during his time in the Senate and “big coal — which now, by the way, is bankrupt — spent enormous sums of money against other colleagues, scaring them and making it clear to them that they were going to have a very difficult re-election because of the funding mechanisms we have in America for our elections, and that’s why people backed off.”…
Shocked Scientists Say Climate Change Isn’t Causing a Sea Algae Crisis
According to the National Science Foundation, an analysis of how global warming and rising sea temperatures affects tiny oceanic organisms showed alleged man-made gloabl warming isn’t creating the crisis some scientists feared it would.
Observe. Researchers with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that rising ocean temperatures did cause an early reproductive boom in certain types of phytoplankton, tiny microscopic algae organisms that form the base of the food chain for a lot of marine ecosystems. These little guys only bloom at certain times of the year, an annual pattern that scientists feared would be affected by global warming. (After all, phytoplankton has been known to cause problems when it blooms out of control, a phenomenon that the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science admitscan be caused by a host of factors.)
“As ocean temperatures increased during the study period, annual blooms ofSynechococcus occurred up to four weeks earlier, researchers found, because cells divide faster in warmer waters,” the 13-year study found.
Scientists were concerned that “Such shifts could have major effects on marine ecosystems worldwide.”
“If ocean temperatures continue warming over the next century, some ecosystems could become dominated by small phytoplankton, eventually leading to changes that could affect larger species like fish, whales and birds,” researchers hypothesized.
However, the study itself admits, “That growth in smaller phytoplankton isn’t a sure thing, however.” Why?
Because as it turns out, when there’s an early boom in this type of phytoplankton growth, the things that eat said phytoplankton simply eat them faster.
As the bacteria grew more quickly, tiny protozoa, viruses and other single-celled organisms that prey on Synechococcus consumed them more quickly.
“That was a surprise to us,” says Sosik. “We didn’t expect such a tight lockstep among Synechococcus and its consumers as the spring bloom changed. It shows that the consumers are able to keep up.”
This balance of bacteria and consumers leads to a similar bloom cycle year after year, but with a shift in timing earlier or later as the water temperature changes, Sosik says.
Basically, scientists spent 13 years tracking algae to study the devastation wrought by climate change, only to find out everything was A-OK — possibly because the Earth isn’t primed to fall apart at the drop of a hat.…
NOAA: U.S. has gone 11 years without a major (Cat 3+) hurricane strike
…Oops. NYT: ‘New Climate-Friendlier Coolant Has a Catch: It’s Flammable’
…CLIMATE CHANGE HITS COFFEE YIELD? IT’S A LOAD OF FROTH, SAY SCIENTISTS
Climate change has been wrongly blamed for devastating coffee plantations, a study has found.
Coffee leaf rust (CLR) caused coffee production in Colombia to fall by 40 per cent between 2008 and 2011. The decline was linked to the worst epidemic for several decades. A number of other coffee-producing countries in Central America and the Caribbean were also affected and hundreds of thousands of people lost their livelihoods.
The fungus appears as powdery orange spores that cause the leaves to fall off. It also reduces bean quality and makes the bushes vulnerable to other diseases. In badly affected areas, new bushes must be planted.
Some scientists linked the spread of the fungus to climate change because it thrives in higher temperatures and the moisture caused by increased rainfall.
The International Coffee Organisation, an intergovernmental body of coffee exporting and importing countries, said in 2014: “Due to changing climatic patterns, the fungus is expanding to higher altitudes where coffee is grown.”
Scientists at the University of Exeter took a different view. Their paper, published in the Royal Society journal Philosophical Transactions B, concluded: “We find no evidence for an overall trend in disease risk in coffee-growing regions of Colombia from 1990 to 2015, therefore, while weather conditions were more conducive to disease outbreaks from 2008 to 2011, we reject the climate change hypothesis.”
Full story
see also: GWPF Climate Briefing: Roasting the Coffee Apocalypse
…John Kerry Says DiCaprio’s New Global Warming Doc Will Turn GOP Into Believers
Secretary of State John Kerry is convinced actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary about climate change will transform Republicans into climate change warriors.
DiCaprio’s global warming-themed documentary, “Before The Flood,” will almost certainly persuade climate change skeptics in Congress to soften their hearts on the environment, Kerry told a United Nations panel Thursday night.
The documentary shows the Oscar winner jet-setting around the world, watching glaciers from helicopters, and convening with President Barack Obama and electric vehicle automaker Elon Musk, who sees himself as an anti-oil crusader.
“As a 28-year veteran of the Senate who knows Jim Inhofe well and many of the other people depicted in the film, maybe Nov. 8 will produce a capacity for the entire Republican caucus to go to the Goddard Space Center, NASA, see that map and to see this film,” Kerry said, referring to Republican Sen. Jim Inhoffe of Oklahoma.
“It should be required for every single one of them,” he added.
DiCaprio, who attended the panel in New York alongside Kerry, mirrored the former Massachusetts senator’s sentiments, telling those in attendance that he was “incredibly moved” by the climate scientists in the film.