Cheers! Climate change summit canceled by CDC amid uncertainty of a Trump presidency
Climate change is a public health issue
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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly canceled a climate change summit scheduled for next month in Atlanta, according to E&E News, a trade publication for energy and environment professionals. The news comes a few days after Donald Trump, who wants to roll back Obama’s environmental policies, was sworn in as president.
Those scheduled to speak at the conference received an email saying the summit was canceled, according to E&E News, which obtained a copy of the email. “We are currently exploring options so that the Summit may take place later in the year,” CDC officials wrote. The Verge confirmed that the summit was canceled through the American Public Health Association (APHA), one of the organizations that partnered with the CDC for the conference.
“We were notified just recently,” Mandi Yohn, an APHA communications specialist told The Verge, “in the last week or so.”
In a statement to The Verge, the CDC said that it began notifying participants on December 22nd, 2016. The agency didn’t say the summit was canceled, but only postponed. “We are exploring options to reschedule the meeting while considering budget priorities for fiscal year 2017, including the current continuing resolution, and potential overlap with an APHA conference on the same topic also being held later in 2017,” the statement reads. The CDC didn’t answer a question regarding the reasoning behind rescheduling the summit.
Under Obama, the CDC started looking at climate change as a public health issue, working with states and cities to address health problems related to heat waves and pollution. Health officials see climate change as a threat because warming temperatures help boost outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases like Zika, as mosquitoes expand their range. Heavy rainfalls and flooding can also help spread water-borne diseases like cholera.
The Climate and Health Summit was scheduled for February 14th–16th in Atlanta, where the CDC is headquartered. The event was supposed to “showcase the state of the science on climate and health, adaptation efforts through interagency collaboration, and communication and stakeholder engagement strategies,” according to a flier posted by the National Indian Health Board, another of the CDC’s partners for the event.
Wacky Claim: Forests ‘held their breath’ during global warming ‘pause’
From the UNIVERSITY OF EXETER comes this wacky headline:
Forests ‘held their breath’ during global warming hiatus, research shows
Global forest ecosystems, widely considered to act as the lungs of the planet, ‘held their breath’ during the most recent occurrence of a warming hiatus, new research has shown
Global forest ecosystems, widely considered to act as the lungs of the planet, ‘held their breath’ during the most recent occurrence of a warming hiatus, new research has shown.
The international study examined the full extent to which these vital ecosystems performed as a carbon sink from 1998-2012 – the most recent recorded period of global warming slowdown.
The researchers, including Professor Pierre Friedlingstein from the University of Exeter, demonstrated that the global carbon sink — where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and stored in the natural environment – was particularly robust during this 14 year period.
The study shows that, during extended period of slower warming, worldwide forests ‘breathe in’ carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, but reduced the rate at which they ‘breathe out’ — or release the gas back to the atmosphere.
The team believes the crucial study offers a significant breakthrough for future climate modelling, which is used to predict just how different ecosystems will respond to rising global temperatures.
The pioneering study is published in leading science journal, Nature Climate Change, on Monday, January 23 2017.
‘The Beginning of the End of EPA’
The GOP followed the lead of President Donald Trump, who in a March debate said he would abolish EPA, and in a May speech in North Dakota condemned “the Environmental Protection Agency’s use of totalitarian tactics” that has “denied millions of Americans access to the energy wealth sitting under our feet. This is your treasure, and you – the American People – are entitled to share in the riches.”
Trump and the GOP are saying, finally, what millions of people have been thinking for a long time: EPA has become the cause of, not the so
Trump plans to ban the EPA from funding science, report says
Donald Trump plans to ban the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from funding science, and “overhaul” its use of science from outside groups, according to a Monday report published in Axios.
The EPA is the agency charged with protecting America’s clean air and water, and under former President Barack Obama, it took significant steps to combat climate change.
Axios reporters Jonathan Swan and Mike Allen say they got a “sneaky peek” at the Trump transition team’s action plan for the agency. They did not publish the full plan, but summarized it and included this key excerpt:
“EPA does not use science to guide regulatory policy as much as it uses regulatory policy to steer the science. This is an old problem at EPA. In 1992, a blue-ribbon panel of EPA science advisers that [sic] ‘science should not be adjusted to fit policy.’ But rather than heed this advice, EPA has greatly increased its science manipulation.”…
Warmist review of Gore’s Sequel: ‘Convoluted & diluted’ – Film plays ‘like a social media booster for Mr. Gore’
One of the toughest things about a film like this, is figuring out who its audience actually is. Most people have already decided where they stand on the issue of Global Warming. Change needs to come from both ends of the spectrum, whether that’s left and right, or east and west. The problem with this film however, is that it often pats one side on the back while at the same time vilifying the other. India, one of the film’s few antagonists, is portrayed like a soulless coal-burning entity whose views are void and who only can progress into the 21st century with a helping hand from its western counterpart (think old lady crossing the street).
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The problem is that any important ideas or commentary on this global issue were never really allowed to flourish. Instead, the important issues of Global Warming and climate change were trapped in a shadow cast by Al Gore himself. The film plays less like a social commentary, and more like a social media booster for Mr. Gore and gives the impression that the film may have better relayed its message without the man who helped prop the issue up into the limelight in the first place. The irony is apparent, is it not?
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For those unfamiliar with American politics, we’re talking the reddest of the red. Unfortunately, even these guys were still portrayed as “simple folk” that may not know much about science, but at least know enough to start using renewable energy. It’s almost as if the film is saying “Look! If these podunks can do it, why can’t you?”. Potential greatness again undermined by the need for inserting political commentary.
In the end, An Inconvenient Sequel may only play well to those who are either fans of the original film, or those that are just now coming into the conversation about Global Warming. There aren’t any new ideas presented here, and the ideas that are there, are constantly being convoluted and diluted. It’s obvious that intentions were good, and the issue is indeed important, but the film lacks execution and may not have quite the changing impact as the first one did. …
SOURCE: Career EPA Staffers Will Undermine Trump, Leak To The Press
An unnamed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) source warned that agency employees will leak information about “actions they deem ill-advised or illegal” to environmental groups and the media, Politico reports.
The unnamed career staffer, whose identity Politico keeps anonymous, warned EPA employees “who stay to fight actions they deem ill-advised or illegal by quietly providing information of what is happening inside their agencies to advocacy groups and the media,” Politico reported.
Employees are likely to leak to environmental groups and sympathetic media outlets critical of President Trump’s agenda. Trump plans to repeal EPA regulations aimed at tackling global warming and may cut the agency’s budget.
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Gore Rewrites ‘Inconvenient’ Claim about NYC Flooding in ‘Sequel’
By Julia A. Seymour
Critics gave former Vice President Al Gore grief for predicting in An Inconvenient Truth that major cities including lower Manhattan would be underwater if severe ice melt occurred.
Now Gore is rewriting history to claim his prediction came true in promotion footage of his upcoming film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which debuted at Sundance on Jan. 19.
In this case, context is the difference between honesty and self-interested revisionism.
In his 2006 film, Gore warned, “If Greenland broke up and melted or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida [animation shown with much of the state underwater].”
Immediately, after showing Florida, Gore showed animations of drowning cities and countries: San Francisco, The Netherlands, Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta and then Manhattan.
“But this is what would happen to Manhattan, they can measure this precisely,” Gore warned as he showed his audience much of the city underwater, including the area where the memorial would be built.
Now, he’s twisted his original words to make it appear his prediction about Manhattan came true.
“Ten years ago when the movie An Inconvenient Truth came out, the single most criticized scene was an animated scene showing that the combination of sea level rise and storm surge would put the ocean water into the 9/11 memorial site, which was then under construction. And people said, ‘That’s ridiculous. What a terrible exaggeration,” Gore claimed in a newly released clip from An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. [Emphasis added]
In that clip, Gore then shows “Superstorm Sandy” footage of water flooding lower Manhattan, including the memorial site and a quote from Gov. Andrew Cuomo blaming climate change, to prove true Gore’s claim from 11 years ago.
But his original prediction was not about extenuating circumstances of a storm like Sandy slamming into New York or any “storm surge” at all. It was about the sea level rise that would be generated as (he predicted) ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica escalated dramatically.
The latest maps show that Greenland still has ice 11 years after Gore’s prediction of catastrophic melt due to global warming.
What’s worse than Gore’s rewrite of history is that online media not only aren’t exposing it, they’re perpetuating the distortion. EcoWatch reported on Jan. 23, “Al Gore’s Prediction Came True.” SlashFilm.com …
Arctic Sea Ice Grows Back To 2006 Levels
Sea ice charts for 18 January from NSIDC Masie show exactly as much sea ice in 2017 as there was back in 2006 – 13.4 million km^2.
Masie image below from 2006 (enlarged and cropped from archived version and label re-inserted) shows the distribution of ice was slightly different than this year (less in Baffin Bay/Davis Strait/Labrador Sea, more in the Barents and Bering Seas):
Considering only Canada (where 2/3 of the world’s polar bears live), Canadian Ice Service comparative graphs going back to 1971 show average amounts of ice existed the week of 15 January 2017, but considerably more than the estimates for the 1970s (odd that we never hear about that):
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New Paper: 14 Scientists Affirm Solar Forcing, Not CO2, Is ‘Dominant Control’ For Modern Climate Change
One of the oft-stated “truths” for advocates of the position that humans are predominantly responsible for climate changes is that the Sun could not have played more than a negligible role in the global warming of the last few centuries. Indeed, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) report theorizes that the long-term solar contribution to climate change has been slightly above zero.
IPCC AR5:
And yet today’s scientists have not been deterred in their quest to document a robust Sun-Climate link in the paleoclimate data… as well as in the temperature and climatic changes for recent decades. In 2016 alone, for example, there were over 130 scientific papers documenting a non-negligible solar influence on climate.
Climate scientist Dr. Jianyong Li, who has himself authored over 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications, continues this trend of linking climate changes to solar forcing. He and 13 other scientists just published a new paper in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews in which they have clearly affirmed the dominance of the Sun’s forcing on the climate of China (and for the Northern Hemisphere in general) during the past few thousand years, including the last century. The authors assert that climate changes and solar activity are well correlated throughout the paleoclimate record, and that if there is a role for greenhouse gases to influence climatic trends, that role is merely supplementary, not dominant. They also describe in detail how the Sun’s variance acts to influence atmospheric and oceanic heat oscillations, and how this may affect regional precipitation, weather, and temperature changes.
Li et al., 2017
Summary
“We suggest that solar activity may play a key role in driving the climatic fluctuations in NC [North China] during the last 22 centuries, with its quasi ∼100, 50, 23, or 22-year periodicity clearly identified in our climatic reconstructions. … It has been widely suggested from both climate modeling and observation data that solar activity plays a key role in driving late Holocene climatic fluctuations by triggering global temperature variability and atmospheric dynamical circulation (e.g., Haigh, 1996; Shindell et al., 1999; Bond et al., 2001; Fleitmann et al., 2003; Dykoski et al., 2005).”
Climate Changes/Oscillations And Solar Activity Well Correlated For North China, Northern Hemisphere
“Spectral analyses indicate that the PANN [annual precipitation] record has significant periodicities at 100, 67, 57 and 23 years; and the TANN [annual
MIT climate scientist warns ‘global warming’ fears ‘indoctrinating a generation of young people with foolishness’
WORCESTER – Arctic ice, rising sea levels, and polar bears were the stuff of spirited discussion over bagels and lox Sunday morning at Central Mass. Chabad.
Atmospheric physicist Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor Emeritus of Meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an eminent dissenter from the popular consensus that climate change poses a significant threat to the planet, spoke at a breakfast at the Jewish center at 22 Newton Ave.
Mr. Lindzen’s topic: “Global Warming or Climate Alarmism?” He argued the latter.
While headlines blare “the world is coming to end,” Mr. Lindzen said, that is not happening. A “totally insignificant spike” in temperature of a tenth of a degree last year led to reports that 2016 was the “warmest year on record,” he said. He showed graphs of temperatures over centuries that he said showed fluctuations in temperature are normal.
“The relationship of modest warming to coming catastrophe are blatantly false,” said Mr. Lindzen, who warned against “indoctrinating a generation of young people with foolishness.”
The seas have been rising for 10,000 years, he said. Climate change is cyclical and natural, and the amount of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by human activity from the Industrial Revolution to the the present day is arguable, he maintained. Climate “hysteria” is being fed in the cause of a malicious “war on energy” by propagandists of the environmental Left who “want any source of energy as long as it doesn’t work,” he said.
He quoted H.L. Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety from an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” The time has come to “put the brakes on” climate change alarmism, he said.
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“So what are they saying this for?” asked Rabbi Fishman. “To scare you!” exclaimed Mr. Lindzen.
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