NYT: Our Readers Are Too Dumb To Understand Global Warming Numbers – Hide Fact that Claimed ‘Hottest Year’ was within margin of error
I recently wrote about the wretched reporting on the claim that 2016 was the “hottest year on record,” using as my main example a New York Times article by Justin Gillis that gave his readers none of the relevant numbers they could use to evaluate that claim. None of them. If you search for the actual numbers, you will eventually find that the effect they are claiming, the actual amount by which this year was hotter than previous years, is smaller than the margin of error in the data.
Shortly afterward, I got a revealing response from Gillis. I’ll fill in all the details for you, because the whole thing is an important case study in why you can’t trust mainstream reporting on global warming. But let’s just cut to the chase. When I asked him why he didn’t include the basic numbers we need to understand his story, he gave me this reply:
So if I understand this correctly, a reporter from the New York Times is telling me that his readers are too dumb to understand numbers.
…
Pushed a little on this, Gillis conceded that “there is no one number” for last year’s average global temperature, because it “depends on which of the five datasets you care to inspect,” and he went on to point to other complications.
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This is, pretty obviously, a dodge. His original article did not tell us that the numbers are complicated and that they vary depending on who is collecting the measurements. His original article simply hyperventilated about how amazingly hot it is. All the complications are just his fallback position when challenged.…
Malia Obama Joins Dakota Access Pipeline Protest
Malia Obama joins Dakota Access pipeline protest at Sundance http://bayareane.ws/2jnnTPG
Malia Obama joined a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday.…
The Urgency of Revoking the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding
Alan Carlin | January 27, 2017
The Trump Administration has been rolling out Executive orders on a daily basis to implement many of President Trump’s campaign promises. These include a number of orders related to environmental and energy policy. But possibly because Trump never made any promises related to revoking the USEPA Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Endangerment Finding (EF), there has been no public announcement of any proposed EPA action on this, the most critical step needed to bring sanity back to climate policy. Even if all of the climate-related EPA regulations promulgated by Obama are revoked or otherwise changed, more such regulations can be promulgated in the future as long as the GHG Endangerment Finding remains in effect.
So the thing to watch is whether EPA makes any move to revoke the Finding. Although the revocation of a number of the EPA climate regulations is a gook first step, only if and when EF revocation occurs can the profound risks posed by climate alarmism be said to have passed in the US. As discussed previously, the risks arise not from the alleged climate change fears raised by the climate alarmists but rather from their ill-founded, useless, and horrendously expensive measures to reduce human carbon dioxide (CO2emissions. This has always been the only serious risk and what must be avoided if the US and the developed world is to have a prosperous future that will allow humans to have access to the fossil fuel-generated energy needed for continued economic progress and improved human welfare and if plants are to not to lose partial access to one of their basic nutrients.
I have previously described one possible route to encouraging USEPA to undertake such an EF revocation that I have been involved in. But there are many others depending on the arguments used to invalidate the current EF. Although my name is included as one of the authors of the TSD for the present EF, apparently for historical reasons (explained here), there are many reasons why I believe it should be revoked as soon as possible. The reasons I used are explained in the letter I co-signed last fall, but many others can be found in my book, Environmentalism Gone Mad, as well as numerous previous posts on this blog.
EPA’s Three Lines of Evidence
The basis for the EPA’s GHG Endangerment Finding is their three
Russian icebreakers stuck in ‘very heavy severe ice conditions’ in Arctic
Date: 27/01/17
By Ron Clutz, Science Matters
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/arctic-ice-takes-revenge/
The saga shows that despite all the talk of climate change and warming in the Arctic, thick ice can prevent convoys from crossing the Northern Sea Route in deep winter.
Vessels Kapitan Dranitsyn and Admiral Makarov ‘marooned’ in east for the rest of winter after getting trapped off Chukotka.
Russian Convoy Takes Advantage of Reduced Arctic Ice Extent
In the first such crossing since Soviet times, the convoy had earlier delivered supplies for the world’s first floating heat and power plant to be assembled in Chukotka, Russia’s most easternmost region, after a successful journey from Arkhangelsk to Pevek lasting from 14 December to 7 January.
The ease of the sailing was seen as a sign that climate warming in the Arctic can open up shipping lanes even in midwinter. From the Siberian Times, Blow to Northern Sea Route as voyages of two icebreakers are… broken by ice
Reports of Arctic Ice Demise Prove Premature
But, despite significant temperature rises across the northern latitudes in recent years, the vessels became quickly stuck in thick, compressed ice on their return journey.
Initially there were hopes that the icebreakers could force their way out and continue their voyage within a week, and aerial reconnaissance was deployed in a search routes from the ice clog.
They are currently trapped by sudden thick ice around Chukotka’s northernmost cape Shelagsky, some 24 nautical miles from Pevek, in some of Russia’s most exposed waters.
Ruslan Nazarov, chief of Chukotka’s emergencies service, said: ‘The ice around Cape Shelagsky is at 10 points. The ice fields are more than one metre thick. The ice compression is strong and hummocks are higher than 2.5 metres.
Embarrassing But Not Life-threatening
The situation is not critical, Nazarov said, stressing that the regional ministry of emergencies and Chukotka government keep a close eye on it. ‘All the ships have enough fuel, food and all other necessities.’
A spokesman for Rosmorport has announced the icebreakers will delay a return until probably May or early June. ‘The vessels will remain for the winter because of the very heavy severe ice conditions,’ he said.
All the vessel got out of the ice, and three of them – Captain Dranitsyn and the two cargo ships – returned to Pevek. The Admiral Makarov moved further east to continue working for Rosmorport in clearing sea routes.
Officials said the icebreakers could …
Privatization! Gore To Host ‘Climate Change Summit’ After CDC Cancels It
Now this is what I like to see. Privatization! If you really care about an issue, such as global change climate warming, you should have the right to spend as much of your own money as you want on it. Just stop robbing the rest of us at gunpoint.
Brooke Seipel, The Hill:
Climate activist and former vice president Al Gore is teaming up with the American Public Health Association and other organizations to hold a summit on climate change and health that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention canceled earlier this week.
The CDC quietly called off the summit after President Trump’s inauguration, telling reporters it was “exploring options to reschedule the meeting.” The scientific community has accused CDC officials of canceling the event out of fear of the Trump administration…
“They tried to cancel this conference but it is going forward anyway,” Gore said in a statement on the event.…
Trump Official: We’re Gonna Cut The EPA In Half
The former leader of President Donald Trump’s EPA transition team said Thursday he expects the president to slash the agency’s budget and staff.
Myron Ebell, the director of the Center for Energy at free market group Competitive Enterprise Institute, told reporters that Trump is considering reducing by magnitudes the agency’s workforce. It currently stands at 15,000 employees nationwide.
“Let’s aim for half and see how it works out, and then maybe we’ll want to go further,” Ebell said, referring to his wish to see the EPA slashed by at least half. He left Trump’s transition team last week, but was at one time on the president’s short list to head the agency.
Half of the EPA’s budget is transferred to state and local areas to update infrastructure projects and environmental cleanup efforts. Ebell, who is a long-time EPA critic and climate skeptic, said the cuts would likely fall on the remaining half of the agency’s budget, which supports a portion of federal employees.…
Trump to sack climate scientists and slash EPA: Unskeptical scientists are terrified
No elected representative has done more to speed climate research up:
Donald Trump to sack climate change scientists
Myron Ebell, who led Mr Trump’s transition team at the agency, said that he expects the new President to sack at least half of the staff there. He also hopes that the organisation will have its budget cut significantly, he said.
Trump will save the state based EPA roles, but chop the federal monster which has 15,000 employees:
Ebell suggested it was reasonable to expect the president to seek a cut of about $1 billion from the EPA’s roughly $8 billion annual budget.
About half the EPA’s budget passes through to state and local governments for infrastructure projects and environmental cleanup efforts that Ebell said Trump supports.
We live in hope:
“President Trump said during the campaign that he would like to abolish the EPA, or ‘leave a little bit,”‘ Ebell said.
Not surprisingly, climate scientists are reacting with their usual calm demeanor:
GOVERNMENT SCIENTISTS AT U.S. CLIMATE CONFERENCE TERRIFIED TO SPEAK WITH THE PRESS
The mood was understandably gloomy at the National Conference and Global Forum on Science, Policy, and the Environment.
“It’s strange,” the woman said. “People keep walking up to me and giving me hugs.” Like several others I spoke to for this story, she declined to tell me her name out of fear that she might suffer retaliation, including being fired.
Imagine not being able to speak freely? Welcome to the world of skeptical scientists.
…Bloomberg News: Scientists Warn Trump’s Border Wall Will Be Bad for the Planet – Cause ‘Global Warming’
President Donald Trump’s plan for a southern border wall will cost billions of dollars and has already sparked a diplomatic rift with Mexico. It’s also going to be bad for the planet.
Concrete is a potent source of greenhouses gas, and Trump’s “great wall” will need a lot of it — more than double the amount in Hoover Dam, according to engineers at New York University and University College London.
A 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) wall would require an estimated 275 million cubic feet of concrete. It would release as much as 1.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to Christoph Meinrenken, an associate research scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. That’s more than the annual emissions from every home in Pittsburgh.
“The carbon footprint of a wall that size would be huge,” Dan Millis, borderlands program coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Arizona chapter, said in an interview.
Trump’s executive order to build the wall comes as nations around the globe push to reduce greenhouse gases and meet goals set under the Paris Climate accord. Last year was the hottest on the record, with temperatures inching ever loser to the level scientists say would be catastrophic, according to the United Nations.
‘Not Building Walls’
The U.S. needs to invest in infrastructure and many worthwhile projects will require concrete, said Rachel Cleetus, lead economist and climate policy manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists. But those projects should be in line with the broader goal of fighting global warming.
“Let’s talk about modernizing electric grids — not building walls,’’ Cleetus said in an interview.…