A daughter can make a man do almost anything. I know: I’ve got one and I am putty in her hands.
If she wants a pony and bats her eyelashes at me, I’ll be off in a trice to buy her a herd. Baby unicorn ponies, if that’s what she prefers. With jewels inlaid in their spiral horns and maybe some magical attachment that plays the collected works of Taylor Swift while she rides.
So I totally get where President Trump is coming from when I read reports that, under the influence of Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, he has toned the phrasing of an Executive Order so that it no longer includes derogatory comments about the utterly useless and pointless climate deal signed in Paris in 2015 by Barack Obama.
Kushner and Ivanka “intervened to strike language about the climate deal from an earlier draft of the executive order,” sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.
Ivanka and her husband “have been considered a moderating influence on the White House’s position on climate change and environmental issues,” WSJ reports. Now, the executive order will have no mention of the so-called Paris agreement.
If it’s just a case of casual daughter-pleasing, fine. But if he actually means it than we should all start to worry.
I’ve said it before but it’s worth saying again: if President Trump proves to be as radical on energy and climate as he promised to be on the campaign trail, then this, even if he achieves nothing else, will more than qualify him for a place next to the greats on Mt Rushmore.…
Testifying before Congress, former UN climate scientist Dr Patrick Michaels says the Paris climate commitments from China “are nothing but business as usual” and “the Indian commitment is less than nothing.” Michaels: “They’re not doing anything.”
Hearing: At what cost? Examining the Social Cost of Carbon
Subcommittee on Environment
US House Science Committee
February 28, 2017…
WASHINGTON — The White House is fiercely divided over President Trump’s campaign promise to “cancel” the Paris agreement, the 2015 accord that binds nearly every country to curb global warming, with more moderate voices maintaining that he should stick with the agreement despite his campaign pledge.
Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser, is pressing the president to officially pull the United States from the landmark accord, but he is clashing with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who fear the move could have broad and damaging diplomatic ramifications.
Mr. Trump vowed on the campaign trail to tear up President Barack Obama’s global warming policies, and on the home front he is moving aggressively to meet those pledges with deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and a new E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, who is a skeptic of climate science.
Next week, Mr. Trump plans to sign an executive order directing Mr. Pruitt to start the lengthy legal process of unwinding Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations for cutting greenhouse pollution from coal-fired power plants. Those regulations are the linchpin of the last administration’s program to meet the nation’s obligations to reduce climate emissions under the Paris agreement.
While the president cannot, as Mr. Trump suggested, unilaterally undo a 194-nation accord that has already been legally ratified, he could initiate the four-year process to withdraw the world’s largest economy and second-largest climate polluter from the first worldwide deal to tackle global warming. Such a move would rend a global deal that has been hailed as historic, throwing into question the fate of global climate policy and, diplomats say, the credibility of the United States.
But it would also demonstrate to his supporters that Mr. Trump is a man of his word, putting American coal interests ahead of a global deal forged by Mr. Obama.
…
“The two greatest obstacles to a Clexit (climate exit from U.N. Paris agreement) are probably Ivanka and Tillerson,” wrote Marc Morano, a former Republican Senate staff member who now runs Climate Depot, a fossil-fuel-industry-funded website that promotes the denial of climate science, in an email. “Tillerson with his ‘seat at the table’ views could be biggest proponent of not withdrawing the U.S. from the agreement.”
Mr. Tillerson is a former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, which, like many major global
Testifying before Congress, former UN climate scientist Dr. Patrick Michaels says increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are causing a ‘remarkable greening of planet Earth’. Michaels says previous government calculations of the “Social Cost of Carbon” erroneously ignore the substantial benefits of increased CO2.
DR MICHAELS: “There is another systematic error in the previous calculations of the SCC [Social Cost of Carbon]. We live on a planet that is becoming greener because of the direct physiological effects of increasing carbon dioxide on plant photosynthesis. A massive survey of the scientific literature by Dr. Craig Idso shows this caused a $3.2 trillion increment in agricultural output from 1961 to 2011.”
Hearing: At what cost? Examining the Social Cost of Carbon
Subcommittee on Environment
US House Science Committee
February 28, 2017
With barely a month as Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson is coming under fire for not having met with the UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa. Espinosa sent a request to Tillerson for a face-to-face meeting but the newly minted secretary has been traversing the globe and meeting with other diplomats. That’s not sitting well with worried environmentalists and the impecunious #United Nations.
Espinosa made her comments after a meeting this week in Chicago where she discussed making businesses less carbon intensive. She told reporters she’s not surprised given it was the beginnings of a new administration. She also recognized the importance of having the U.S. as a partner. Before leaving office, President Obama sent the U.N. climate green fund $1 billion.
Tillerson has been a proponent of a carbon tax and said at his confirmation hearings the United States should have a “seat at the table” when asked about the Paris Climate Accord. Espinosa admitted the U.S. was an important ally and she looked forward to meeting with the administration once everything has settled down.
She also fretted the U.S. could voluntarily withdraw from the Paris agreement, which calls for keeping warming from rising over 1.5°C by reducing CO2 emissions. Espinosa said she was worried the U.S. would change its position on the accord, which is why she was looking forward to working with Tillerson. Given previous comments by Trump, she has good reason.
And if President Trump did ignore the non-binding agreement there’s really not much the U.N. can do; Espinosa believes there are enough companies on the road to reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions so it won’t matter. She noted a number of cities, largely in California, have set aggressive agendas for meeting “sustainability” goals.…
It has been known for some time that in addition to fossil fuels, food production and consumption significantly contributes to anthropogenic climate change. For instance, it has been estimated that switching to vegetarianism could possibly cut emissions by nearly 63 percent and adopting a vegan diet could reduce emissions by up to 70 percent. However, the new study by researchers from the University of Sheffield calculates the exact environmental impact of a loaf of bread and isolates the associated production process that releases the most greenhouse gases.
“We found in every loaf there is embodied global warming resulting from the fertilizer applied to farmers’ fields to increase their wheat harvest. This arises from the large amount of energy needed to make the fertilizer and from nitrous oxide gas released when it is degraded in the soil,” Liam Goucher, lead author of the study, said in a statement.
The study found the single biggest culprit was the ammonium nitrate fertilizer used in wheat cultivation, which accounts for nearly 43 percent of greenhouse gas emissions released in the production of a loaf of bread. Use of this fertilizer causes the release of nitrous oxide, which is a greenhouse gas that is reportedly 300 times worse than carbon dioxide. The study estimated that 60 percent of global agricultural crops are grown with the use of fertilizers which amounts to more than 100 million tons of fertilizers a year.
In order to reach their conclusions, the researchers analyzed the entire production cycle of bread, which includes growing and harvesting the wheat, milling the grain, producing the flour, baking the bread and finally, packaging the loaf. One loaf of bread weighing 1.8 pounds would have added 0.4 pounds of CO2 from baking, .06 pounds from milling and a whopping 0.56 pounds from the fertilizer used to harvest the wheat.
Although the report notes that cutting down on fertilizers may be helpful, it warns that doing so may cause less food production which can be detrimental in fighting world hunger and malnutrition.
“The findings raise a very important issue – whose responsibility is it to bring about the implementation of these interventions: …
In a new paper (Stein et al., 2017), scientists find that Arctic sea ice retreat and advance is modulated by variations in solar activity.
In addition, the sea ice cover during the last century has only slightly retreated from the extent reached during coldest centuries of the Little Ice Age (1600s to 1800s AD), which had the highest sea ice cover of the last 10,000 years and flirted with excursions into year-round sea ice.
The Medieval Warm Period sea ice record (~900 to 1200 AD) had the lowest coverage since the Roman era ~2,000 years ago.
Of note, the paper makes no reference to carbon dioxide or anthropogenic forcing as factors modulating Arctic sea ice.
The causes that are controlling the decrease in sea ice are still under discussion. In several studies changes in extent, thickness and drift of Arctic sea ice are related to changes in the overall atmospheric circulation patterns as reflected in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Arctic Oscillation (AO). The NAO and AO are influencing changes of the relative position and strength of the two major surface-current systems of the Arctic Ocean.
The increase in sea ice extent during the late Holocene seems to be a circum-Arctic phenomenon, coinciding with major glacier advances on Franz Josef Land, Spitsbergen and Scandinavia. The increase in sea ice may have resulted from the continuing cooling trend due to decreased solar insolation and reduced heat flow from the Pacific.
The increase in sea ice extent during the late Holocene seems to be a circum-Arctic phenomenon as PIP25-based sea ice records from the Fram Strait, Laptev Sea, East Siberian Sea and Chukchi Sea display a generally quite similar evolution, all coinciding with the decrease in solar radiation.
The main factors controlling the millennial variability in sea ice and surface-water productivity are probably changes in surface water and heat flow from the Pacific into the Arctic Ocean as well as the long-term decrease in summer insolation, whereas short-term centennial variability observed in the high-resolution middle Holocene record was possibly triggered by solar forcing.
Robust substantiation for the trends documented in this new Arctic sea ice record comes from a 2005 paper by Lassen and Thejll entitled “Multi-decadal variation of the East Greenland Sea- Ice Extent: AD 1500-2000.” Shown below is an annotated graph from the paper
The supposed record comes from Esperanza. As Jim Steele at WUWT points out, Esperanza is at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, at a latitude of 63.4S, just about as far outside the Antarctic Circle as you could get.
And as WUWT also points out, the temperature was purely the product of a fohn wind.
The temperature of 63.5F was actually set in March 2015, but has only just been officially confirmed by the WMO. As the Capital Weather Gang at the Washington Post noted at the time, the previous record of 62.8F was also set at Esperanza as far back as 1961.
The implication now is that “balmy” temperatures of 63F are unheard of Antarctica, which is clearly nonsense.
And as we can see, monthly average temperatures in March 2015 were not in the least unusual. Indeed, the hottest March was in 1965.
None of this information is mentioned by either Greenpeace, or media outlets such as MSN, who also carry the story.
But the really dishonest part is that photo of two poor penguins stranded at the top of a melting lump of snow.
As Joe has discovered, exactly the same photo appeared in December 2013, in an article by the International Science Times, which was about record cold temperatures in Antarctica. The picture is actually on Cape Denison, as the report makes clear:
When it’s late February and you’re complaining about the winter dragging endlessly on, take comfort in the fact that you’re not on the East Antarctic Plateau, where scientists have measured the coldest temperature on earth. At negative 135.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the August 10, 2010, temperature was “tens of degrees colder than anything ever seen in Alaska, Siberia or Greenland,” said Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., the group that made the discovery.
