Leonardo DiCaprio To Jet Off to Vineyard in St. Tropez, France For His Foundation’s Annual Gala to Fund Climate Projects
http://ecowatch.com/2016/06/27/ldf-gala/
The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation announced today its third annual gala at the Domaine Bertaud Belieu vineyard in St. Tropez, France on July 20. The major charity event raises funds to protect Earth’s last wild place, implement solutions that restore balance to threatened ecosystems and ensure the long-term health and wellbeing of all its inhabitants.
attends a Dinner and Auction during The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation 2nd Annual Saint-Tropez Gala at Domaine Bertaud Belieu on July 22, 2015 in Saint-Tropez, France.
Last year’s gala at Domaine Bertaud Belieu on July 22, 2015 in Saint-Tropez, France raised $40 million for environmental causes. Photo credit: The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation
This year’s occasion will be co-hosted by the Oscar-winning actor and noted environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio, the foundation’s global chair Milutin Gatsby and chief executive officer Terry Tamminen.
Event chairs…
Guardian: Old People Voting Against Climate or Brexit is ‘Intergenerational Theft’
Oil industry consultant Dana Nuccitelli, writing for the Guardian, has launched yet another green attack on democracy, by suggesting that older people who voted for Brexit, or who vote against green policies, are committing “intergenerational theft”.
The inter-generational theft of Brexit and climate change
Youth will bear the brunt of the poor decisions being made by today’s older generations
In last week’s Brexit vote results, there was a tremendous divide between age groups. 73% of voters under the age of 25 voted to remain in the EU, while about 58% over the age of 45 voted to leave.
This generational gap is among the many parallels between Brexit and climate change. A 2014 poll found that 74% of Americans under the age of 30 support government policies to cut carbon pollution, as compared to just 58% of respondents over the age of 40, and 52% over the age of 65.
Inter-generational theft
The problem is of course that younger generations will have to live with the consequences of the decisions we make today for much longer than older generations. Older generations in developed countries prospered as a result of the burning of fossil fuels for seemingly cheap energy.
However, we’ve already reached the point where even contrarian economists agree, any further global warming we experience will be detrimental for the global economy. For poorer countries, we passed that point decades ago. A new paper examining climate costs and fossil fuel industry profits for the years 2008–2012 found:
“For all companies and all years, the economic cost to society of their CO2 emissions was greater than their after‐tax profit, with the single exception of Exxon Mobil in 2008”
…
It now falls to the US to do better than the UK. Risk management and the well-being of future generations must trump ideology and fear in the November elections. We simply can’t afford two of the world’s superpowers being dictated by populism and xenophobia at the expense of our youth’s future.…
Michael Mann, scientist: Data ‘increasingly unnecessary’ because ‘we can see climate change’
Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate-change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious.
“Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change,” Mr. Mann toldthe Democratic Platform Drafting Committee at a hearing.
“What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle,” he said.
Mr. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, spoke before the committee June 17 in Phoenix, Arizona.
His comment drew hoots from climate skeptics, including the website Greenie Watch, which posted his comment under the headline, “‘Scientist’ Michael Mann says there is no need for statistics: You can just SEE global warming.”
“Unsurprising. The statistics are pretty doleful for Warmism,” said the site in a Monday post.
Dem Party Platform Calls For Prosecuting Global Warming Skeptics
Democratic operatives responsible for creating their party’s platform this year have unanimously adopted a provision calling for the Department of Justice to investigate companies who disagree with Democrats on global warming science.
A panel of Democrats voted Friday to approve a final draft of the party’s platform to promote “Progressive Democratic Values,” which apparently includes investigating energy companies who “misled” shareholders about global warming.
The drafting committee, led by DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, has decided to back ongoing investigations by mostly Democratic state attorneys general into ExxonMobil’s stance on global warming.
…DNC Platform Calls for ‘Fossil Fuel Investigations’, 100% Renewable Energy
DNC Platform Calls for Fossil Fuel Investigations, 100% Renewable Energy
http://ecowatch.com/2016/06/27/dnc-platform-investigate-exxon/
The committee drafting the Democratic Party platform unanimously voted to…
— gReader Pro…
Warmist Michael Mann says there is no need for statistics: ‘We can see climate change…now, playing on our TV screens’
The Democratic Platform Drafting Committee held a series of hearings to solicit input on what issues should be front-and-center during the general election. Michael Mann spoke as follows:
“What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle. Regardless of how you measure the impacts of climate change — be it food, water, health, national security, our economy — climate change is already taking a great toll… The stakes could not be greater in this next election — the future of our children and grandchildren literally hangs in the balance — nor could the contrast be any more stark. We have on the one hand a Republican Party whose standard bearer, Donald Trump, and a great majority of its congressional representatives deny that climate change even exists. We have on the other hand a Democratic Party that understands full well that while we can debate the policy specifics for dealing with this crisis, we cannot bury our heads in the sand and avoid dealing with the growing threat.”…
India delays ratification of Paris climate treaty indefinitely
http://junkscience.com/2016/06/india-delays-ratification-of-paris-climate-treaty-indefinitely/
More bad news for Obama.
From the Times of India:…
Investigate the authors? Debunked 97‰ climate ‘consensus’ paper garners over 500K downloads
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/27963/
Five hundred thousand. That’s the number of downloads which has graced the University of Queensland’s John Cook’s paper which claims 97% of scientists believe humans are “largely responsible” for global war– er, climate change.
The average number of downloadsfor an academic paper is … 700.
The 97% figure has widely been touted by activists and politicians since the report was published. President Obama had said “Ninety-seven percent of scientists, including, by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that [global warming debate] to rest.” (The president has since has upped the figure to 99.5%.)
The problem with Cook’s work,according to The Daily Caller, is that that 97% has been met with a lotof skepticism and outright denunciation:
Cook and his team got to 97 percent by running a keyword search for “global warming” and “global climate change” between 1991 and 2011, which yielded more than 12,000 papers. They then agreed upon definitions of possible categories the papers could fit into — “explicit or implicit endorsement of human-caused global warming, no position, and implicit or explicit rejection” — and used the paper abstracts and attempted to decipher the position of each paper.
Earth System Dynamics noted in a September, 2013, press release that there were errors in the math used to get the 97 percent number. “Only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate papers Cook examined explicitly stated that Man caused most of the warming since 1950. Cook himself had flagged just 64 papers as explicitly supporting that consensus, but 23 of the 64 had not in fact supported it.”
A paper by five climatologists in 2013 pointed out that Cook’s research “misrepresented the views of most consensus scientists.”
Also in 2013, Dr. Craig Idso, whose work was lumped in with the 97%,said that the Cook paper was “not an accurate representation of [his team’s] paper.”
MORE: GOP AGs will prosecute climate alarmists if probes of skeptics continue
“It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming,” he said.
The University of Sussex’s Richard Tol responded to the Cook team by saying “Consensus has no place in science,” and characterized the (Cook) data as “a load of crap.”
Now, if Cook and company had put out a paper trivializing global war– er, um, climate change, they’d be in the sights of alarmist academics …
Tax viruses!? Ocean viruses may have impact on Earth’s climate – ‘Could be responsible for billions of metric tons of extra CO2 every year’
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/ocean-viruses-may-have-impact-earth-s-climate
By Jessica McDonaldJun. 17, 2016 , 9:45 AM
Viruses—already the bane of human existence—may also be having an impact on Earth’s climate. A new study reveals that the pathogens steal energy from ocean bacteria, preventing them from sucking up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. As a result, viruses could be responsible for billions of metric tons of extra carbon dioxide every year, though the impact on the environment is unclear.
“I think it’s a great study,” says Adam Martiny, a microbial ecologist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the work. “It adds to this growing notion that to understand the global carbon [cycle], there’s just a lot of different biological interactions.”
The ocean is full of microbes that breathe in carbon dioxide and get their energy from the sun. In fact, by converting this carbon into the building blocks of bodies, so-called cyanobacteria and other ocean microbes sequester—or “fix”—about half of the carbon dioxide on Earth.
But viruses can impact this process. When they attack cyanobacteria, they inject their genetic material, turning the microbes into virtual virus factories. The injected DNA includes photosynthetic genes, suggesting that the viruses—known as cyanophages—might be changing how the bacteria process carbon.…