NYT Quietly Deletes Section Of Pruitt E-Mail Story That Contradicted Sierra Club, NRDC Talking Points
BY SIMON LOMAX FEBRUARY 24, 2017
A New York Times story that contradicted claims of wrongdoing against U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt was quietly edited after publication to remove lines that challenged the talking points of environmental activist groups.
The Feb. 22 story was about thousands of newly released e-mails from Pruitt’s time as Oklahoma attorney general, showing communications between his office and the state’s energy industry. Environmental activists claim those discussions about how to challenge environmental regulations issued by the Obama administration should disqualify Pruitt from leading the EPA.
The Sierra Club, for example, claims Pruitt is “unfit to serve” and the e-mails released this week “are as bad as we thought,” according to the group’s executive director Michael Brune. The Natural Resources Defense Council, another group that strongly opposed Pruitt’s nomination, said the e-mails “confirm his critics’ worst fears.”
But when it was first published, the Times story reached a very different conclusion. “Despite the large volume of correspondence between Mr. Pruitt’s office and the industry players, the emails are unlikely to cause Mr. Pruitt significant new problems,” the newspaper reported. “They do expand on email exchanges or topics that previously had been disclosed.”
Conservative and libertarian news outlets RedState and Reason picked up on the Times’ reporting almost immediately. The Indiana Law Blog also quoted the same two sentences from the newspaper’s report.
The e-mails “turned up nothing that is particularly surprising or corrupt,” wrote Ronald Bailey, the science correspondent for Reason. “It turns out that an elected Republican politician was in frequent contact with constituent companies who wanted to make known their concerns about the impact of federal regulations on their businesses,” Bailey said.
Using the e-mails to attack Pruitt is “another tiresome example of selective political outrage” by activist groups that had very close ties to senior EPA officials during the Obama administration, Bailey concluded.…
Big-gov-brain wants “half a trillion” to add ice to the Arctic
Sometimes an idea comes along that adds another chapter to the Book of Stupid. You might think windmills on land are an indulgent, pointless fantasy, but take that idea and make it worse: (CNN) A team of scientists has a surprisingly simple solution to saving the Arctic: We need to make more ice.
Source: Big-gov-brain wants “half a trillion” to add ice to the Arctic…
Environmental hypocrites protesting against oil pipeline, burned oil to keep themselves warm!
Environmental hypocrites who were protesting against the Dakota Access oil pipeline, burned oil to keep themselves warm! They also left enough litter to fill more than 250 garbage trucks! Environmental hypocrites who were protesting against the Dakota Access oil pipeline, burned oil to keep themselves warm!They also left enough litter to fill more than 250 garbage trucks!Fox News writes of this: (the bolding is mine)What was once a bustling makeshift city is now a largely abandoned garbage pit.
Source: Environmental hypocrites protesting against oil pipeline, burned oil to keep themselves warm!…
‘I’m Not Ashamed’: GOP Lawmaker Defends His Bill To Abolish EPA In Front Of Angry Voters
‘I will fight for the environment’
Source: ‘I’m Not Ashamed’: GOP Lawmaker Defends His Bill To Abolish EPA In Front Of Angry Voters…
Hundreds of scientists urge Trump to withdraw from U.N. climate-change agency
By Valerie Richardson – The Washington Times – Thursday, February 23, 2017
More than 300 scientists have urged President Trump to withdraw from the U.N.’s climate change agency, warning that its push to curtail carbon dioxide threatens to exacerbate poverty without improving the environment.
In a Thursday letter to the president, MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen called on the United States and other nations to “change course on an outdated international agreement that targets minor greenhouse gases,” starting with carbon dioxide.
“Since 2009, the US and other governments have undertaken actions with respect to global climate that are not scientifically justified and that already have, and will continue to cause serious social and economic harm — with no environmental benefits,” said Mr. Lindzen, a prominent atmospheric physicist.
Signers of the attached petition include the U.S. and international atmospheric scientists, meteorologists, physicists, professors and others taking issue with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC], which was formed in 1992 to combat “dangerous” climate change.
The 2016 Paris climate accord, which sets nonbinding emissions goals for nations, was drawn up under the auspices of the UNFCCC.
“Observations since the UNFCCC was written 25 years ago show that warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign — much less than initial model predictions,” says the petition.
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Mr. Trump said during the campaign he would “cancel” U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement, which was ratified in September by former President Barack Obama over the objections of Senate Republicans, who argued that the accord requires Senate ratification under the U.S. Constitution.
Myron Ebell, a Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar who led the Trump transition team on the Environmental Protection Agency, told reporters last month in London that the president would pull out of the Paris Agreement.…
POTENTIAL TRUMP SCIENCE ADVISER SAYS CLIMATE CHANGE IS GREAT
The rumored frontrunner for the same position for the Trump administration is William Happer, a physicist from Princeton. Happer’s academic science credentials are solid, but he’s earned a reputation as a climate-change skeptic, with good reason. He recently told the Guardian, “There’s a whole area of climate so-called science that is really more like a cult. It’s like Hare Krishna or something like that. They’re glassy-eyed and they chant. It will potentially harm the image of all science.”
The Benefits of Carbon Dioxide
Broadly, Happer isn’t a climate denialist per se, rather he’s a climate change enthusiast, firmly believing that further elevated CO2 levels would be beneficial for humanity. He also professes to care deeply about the scientific method. So, in this spirit, I’ll challenge these assumptions with a mind open to his viewpoint.
Happer told ProPublica earlier this month that historical predictions had overestimated the climate change that we observe today: “What’s not only shaky but almost certainly wrong is the predicted warming,” he said. “In 1988, you could look at the predictions of warming that we would have today and we’re way below anything Hansen predicted at that time.”…
A new culprit for ‘climate change’ is found, but it’s not of this Earth — it’s Mars!
Since the media is all aflutter over proposed changes to the EPA and various climate-based regulations, we may as well visit (or revisit) the debate on climate change. Is it the result of activities of man or simply the normal patterns of changes in the Earth’s complicated biosphere? Some claim that it’s a combination of the two. But now, a team of astrophysicists has released new data which seems to support a decades-old theory which places the blame, shall we say, a bit further away. Since a picture is worth 1000 words, here’s a hint:
That’s right. The actual culprit for the repeated rise and fall of global temperatures might actually be Mars. That sort of thing is rather hard to square with our current debates but it all has to do with the “chaos” inherent in the orbits of the planets and how they interact with each other. The journal Nature broke the story this week and the details are contained in this release from the University of Wisconsin.
Using evidence from alternating layers of limestone and shale laid down over millions of years in a shallow North American seaway at the time dinosaurs held sway on Earth, the team led by UW–Madison Professor of Geoscience Stephen Meyers and Northwestern University Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Brad Sageman discovered the 87 million-year-old signature of a “resonance transition” between Mars and Earth. A resonance transition is the consequence of the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory. It plays on the idea that small changes in the initial conditions of a nonlinear system can have large effects over time.
In the context of the solar system, the phenomenon occurs when two orbiting bodies periodically tug at one another, as occurs when a planet in its track around the sun passes in relative proximity to another planet in its own orbit. These small but regular ticks in a planet’s orbit can exert big changes on the location and orientation of a planet on its axis relative to the sun and, accordingly, change the amount of solar radiation a planet receives over a given area. Where and how much solar radiation a planet gets is a key driver of climate.
This all seems to be based on the phenomena generally known as the “butterfly effect.” But in this case, it’s taken to a whole new, interplanetary level. The “chaos” of the …
Scientists: We Know What Really Causes Climate Change (And It Has Nothing To Do With Human Beings)
BY:
A new study produced by a University of Wisconsin-Madison geoscientist and Northwestern astrophysicist presents an explanation of the fluctuations of the earth’s temperatures that global warming alarmists are going to make sure to bury: The cycle of changes in the climate over the millennia is a result of changes in the amount of solar radiation, in part caused by small changes in the orbits of Earth and Mars.
While the theory that solar radiation is the most significant factor determining global temperatures is anything but new, the team of scientists have reportedly tied the phenomenon to planetary orbits in a more concrete manner than previous studies.
In an article summarizing the scientists’ findings, which were originally published this week in the journal Nature, the University of Wisconsin-Madison notes that the study “provides the first hard proof for what scientists call the ‘chaotic solar system,’ a theory proposed in 1989 to account for small variations in the present conditions of the solar system.” Those variations over millions of years “produce big changes in our planet’s climate.”
Not only does the new discovery promise to provide a better understanding of “the mechanics of the solar system,” but also “a better understanding of the link between orbital variations and climate change over geologic time scales.”
UW-M provides some more details on the groundbreaking study:
Using evidence from alternating layers of limestone and shale laid down over millions of years in a shallow North American seaway at the time dinosaurs held sway on Earth, the team led by UW–Madison Professor of Geoscience Stephen Meyers and Northwestern University Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Brad Sageman discovered the 87 million-year-old signature of a “resonance transition” between Mars and Earth. A resonance transition is the consequence of the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory. It plays on the idea that small changes in the initial conditions of a nonlinear system can have large effects over time.
In the context of the solar system, the phenomenon occurs when two orbiting bodies periodically tug at one another, as occurs when a planet in its track around the sun passes in relative proximity to another planet in its own orbit. These small but regular ticks in a planet’s orbit can exert big changes on the location and orientation of a planet on its axis relative to the sun and, accordingly, change the amount
EU Sees Almost No Fossil Fuel Consumption Progress Despite Hundreds Of Billions Of Euros Invested!
…Global polar bear population sees ‘significant increase’ – almost 30,000 bears – Up 27% since 2005
By Polar Bear Expert Dr. Susan J. Crockford:
The results of three recently-released studies that were not included in the last IUCN Red List assessment add more than 2,050 bears (on average)1 to the official 2015 global polar bear estimate, a point you won’t likely hear next Monday (27 February) from most polar bear specialists, conservation organizations, their cheerleaders and corporate sponsors on International Polar Bear Day.
This means the adjusted 2015 global estimate for polar bears should be about 28,500 (average), a significant increase over the official estimate of 26,500 (average) for 2015 — and an even larger increase over the 2005 estimate of about 22,500 (average)2, despite the dramatic loss of summer sea ice since 2007 that we hear about endlessly.
It is increasingly obvious that polar bears are thriving despite having lived through summer sea ice levels not predicted to occur until 2050 – levels of sea ice that experts said would wipe out 2/3 of the world’s polar bears (Amstrup et al. 2007; Crockford 2017a, b).
So when you hear, “Save the polar bears, their future is grim” next week, remember that polar bears are thriving right now because those future predictions were flawed: summer sea ice is not critical habitat for polar bears. Instead of a vacuous “vanishing species” polar bear T-shirt from WWF, buy Polar Bear Facts and Myths for the kids in your life – and Polar Bears: Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change for your home or community library. You’ll be glad you did.
Footnotes:
1. Total for all three estimate increases is 2054, or about 2050.
Barents Sea (BS) estimated at 3749 for entire region, up 42% (1109) since 2004 estimate of 2640, based on 42% Svalbard increase determined in 2015 (Norwegian Polar Institute 2015; Crockford 2017b) applied across the region. This is consistent with observations in 2004 that researchers found about three times (2.87) as many bears in the Russian sector than in Svalbard (Aars et al. 2009), and the stated expectation by Norwegian biologists that the population size would continue to increase despite declines in sea ice (Fauchald et al. 2014).
Baffin Bay (BB) estimate 2,826 (95% CI = 2,059-3,593) at 2013 (SWG 2016), up 752.
Kane Basin (KB) estimate 357 (95% CI: 221 – 493) at 2013 (SWG 2016), up 193.
2. USGS polar bear biologists (Amstrup …