‘Climate Denier’: Imprecise, Fallacious, and Hateful
Compare that to the New York Times. CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL read the print edition subtitle. The web headline: “Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead E.P.A.” The Times article does not quote any supporters of the pick but does usefully quote Pruitt himself.
“Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” he wrote in National Review earlier this year. “That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.”
This tale of two newspaper headlines indicates the highly polarized, emotional debate over the physical science, economics, politics, and diplomacy of climate change. But words and terms are powerful things. Precision and civility are needed in light of the confirmation debate set for EPA administrator-designate Pruitt.
More precise, descriptive, and noninflammatory terms need to come to the top in a new policy era. The term skeptic can be joined by critic to designate those wary of what passes for mainstream climate science.
As the climate “consensus” continues to weaken (climate warming is well below model predictions), and natural warming in the post-Little Ice Age era is better understood and appreciated, non-alarmist rather than “skeptic” or “critic” should come to be used more for the Pruitt position.
Days before Trump takes office, Obama gives another $500 million to UN Green Climate Fund
Via: https://thinkprogress.org/500-million-to-gcf-306414ccc909#.nhpgh0on4
Days before Trump takes office, State Department gives $500 million to UN Green Climate Fund
The announcement is expected to prompt a backlash.
The State Department announced Tuesday it would transfer $500 million to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund (GCF), likely irking Republican lawmakers while keeping what commitments it can to the international community before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Friday.
“The Green Climate Fund is a critical tool that helps catalyze billions of dollars in public and private investment, in countries dealing not only with the challenges of climate change, but the immense economic opportunities that are embedded in the transition to a lower-carbon economy,” a spokesman said.
Under President Obama, the United States pledged $3 billion to the fund, which supports low-carbon and resilience projects in developing nations. Environmental groups and a network of faith-based groups applauded the decision, which brings the total U.S. contributions so far to $1 billion.
But it’s not clear if the other $2 billion will ever appear.
Trump has pledged to cut all spending to international climate projects, including payments to the UN fund. His transition team has also questioned how much money the State Department spends on environmental issues abroad.
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With 3 Days Left, Obama Gives Another $500 Million To The UN’s Green Fund
The Department of State sent another $500 million to the United Nations “Green Climate Fund” Tuesday, marking yet another last-minute move to cement President Barack Obama’s legacy before he leaves office in three days.
Obama pledged $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) in 2014, but has only sent $1 billion to the program. The administration sent its first $500 million payment to the GCF in March.
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Related Links:
UN Green Climate Fund has more money than projects
State Dept’s $500 Million Transfer to the UN’s ‘Green Climate Fund’
Last week, the Obama administration transferred $500 million in U.S. funds to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. Congress never authorized the Green Climate Fund or any appropriations to it. The State Department must fully account for how it decided to give taxpayer dollars to a U.N. fund that Congress never authorized.
GOP environment chairman plans ‘wholesale change’ at EPA
The top senator overseeing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is planning a “wholesale change” at the agency under President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican Congress.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the new chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, wrote in a Fox News opinion piece Tuesday that he and Trump EPA nominee Scott Pruitt will implement a major policy turnaround at the agency.
Barrasso outlined the EPA’s failures under Obama, including the Gold King Mine disaster in Colorado and the Flint water crisis in Michigan. Barrasso also blamed the agency for instituting expensive regulations.
“Disregard for the consequences of its actions has become the trademark of the EPA for the last eight years. Policy goals and talking points have consistently taken priority over American families. This cannot be the case any longer,” Barrasso wrote.
“I look forward to ushering in wholesale change at the EPA,” he continued. “I will be doing it alongside a committed and capable administrator.”
Barrasso’s panel will meet Wednesday to consider confirming Pruitt, who has been a frequent litigator against Obama’s EPA as the attorney general of Oklahoma.
Barrasso applauded Pruitt’s work against Obama’s EPA, saying he “stood up for Oklahomans against the EPA’s extreme regulations on greenhouse gasses, methane emissions, and cross state air pollution,” as well as challenging “unworkable” water rules and fighting Obama’s interpretations of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.…
Pruitt will put EPA back on track
…Statistician: UN climate treaty will cost $100 trillion – To Have No Impact – Postpone warming by less than four years by 2100
Danish statistician Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, the President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, has come out denouncing the UN climate Paris agreement as a massive waste of money that will do nothing to impact climate change. In a January 16, 2017 Prager U video titled, “The Paris Climate Agreement Won’t Change the Climate,” Lomborg explains that “the agreement will cost a fortune, but do little to reduce global warming.” (Full transcript here)
Lomborg ridiculed the UN Paris agreement supporters as making “grand pronouncements and vague specifics.”
Lomborg first took his analytical skills to take apart President Obama’s EPA climate regulations done through executive order.
“Using the same prediction model that the UN uses, I found that [Obama’s] power plan will accomplish almost nothing. Even if its cuts to carbon dioxide emissions are fully implemented – not just for the 14 years that the Paris agreement lasts, but for the rest of the century — the EPA’s Clean Power Plan would reduce the temperature increase in 2100 by just -.023 degrees Fahrenheit,” Lomborg explained.
“In the unlikely event that all of these extra cuts also happen, and are adhered to throughout the rest of the century, the combined reduction in temperatures would be 0.057 degrees. To put it another way, if the U.S. delivers for the whole century on the President Obama’s very ambitious rhetoric, it would postpone global warming by about eight months at the end of the century,” Lomborg said.
Lomborg continued, aiming his analysis at the much touted UN paris climate agreement.
“Now, let’s add in the rest of the world’s Paris promises. If we generously assume that the promised carbon cuts for 2030 are not only met — which itself would be a UN first — but sustained throughout the rest of the century, temperatures in 2100 would drop 0.3 degrees — the equivalent of postponing warming by less than four years. Again, that is using the UN’s own climate prediction model,” Lomborg said.
He continued: “But here is the biggest problem: These miniscule benefits do not come free — quite the contrary. The cost of the UN Paris climate pact is likely to run 1 to 2 trillion dollars every year, based on estimates produced by the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum and …
Geologist: ‘The delusional war on warmth’
For decades, global warming scaremongers have been stealing energy from the environment using windmills, solar collectors, and biofuels, force-fed by carbon taxes and emission trading schemes. Their delusional dream is to cool the globe.
However, there has been no global warming for nearly 20 years. Right now, the great ice sheets are growing thicker, and record snow is blanketing much of the climate change leader, the Northern Hemisphere landmass. Solar panels are blinded by snow, and turbines don’t turn in the cold still air, or else they have to be shut down because of icing or high winds. Like all green things, wind and solar power often hibernate in winter.
Meanwhile, the unloved all-weather energy producers (coal, gas, and nuclear) are straining at their limits, as families huddle around heaters fearing the first flickers of failure from overloaded power grids.
No food is produced from land smothered in snow – farmers fear late frosts and welcome early spring rains and warmth.
For the last million years, Earth has experienced long cycles of ice separated by short warm inter-glacials. Today’s warm era is already a mature twelve thousand years old, and Earth’s climate is fluctuating naturally toward the next glacial cycle in which many animals and plants will perish. Only fools would assist the return of the ice.
Warmists are making a massive mistake by assuming that global cooling is better than global warming. They are ignoring their precious “Precautionary Principle.”
A frigid ice house is far more dangerous and destructive than a warm greenhouse.
Disclosure: Viv Forbes is a geologist who has studied geological and climate history; and a farmer who watches the pastures die in the dry cold winters as the livestock and wildlife wait for the warmer weather and spring storms.
Enviros Occupy W. VA Dem Sen. Joe Manchin’s Office, Demand He Vote Against Trump Nominees
…Earth Hour in 3D: Dim, Dark and Dopey
World Wide Fund for Nature (Australia) is gearing up for its tenth idiotic Earth Hour at 8.30pm on Saturday, March 25. Once again it will be urging people to turn off lights (but not fridges, freezers, TVs, dishwashers, computers, aircons and smart-phones). If WWF is aware that satellite data shows no atmospheric warming for the past 18 years, that information figures nowhere in its literature.
Of course, any large-scale lights-off actually increases CO2emissions because generators have to do inefficient ramping-up of power when the lights go on again. Such quibbles have never worried WWF.
Earth Hour is run by national manager Anna Rose. She is co-founder and former head of the Youth Climate Coalition, and spouse of Simon Sheik, former national director of GetUp, failed Greens candidate and, most recently, promoter of a fossil-fuel-free superfund.[1] Rose claims, on the basis of sample surveys from consultancy AMR, that a quarter (nearly 6m) of the Australian population took part in Earth Hour 2016.[2] That’s a big call. In 2015, she was claiming one in three Australians (7.7m) took part in 2014.
The media-savvy WWF has been theming its annual Earth Hours. Last year’s theme was “Protect the Aussie places we love” with sub-texts about global warming destroying the Barrier Reef by 2050 and other alarmist mantras (the Reef made it safely through previous eras of strong warming). The 2017 Earth Hour theme is “the voice of the future generation”, taking into overdrive WWF’s propaganda assault in schools.
WWF’s partner in the schools’ Earth Hour exercise is Cool Australia, a green/left outfit founded and run by Jason Kimberley of the wealthy Just Jeans clan. Cool Australia claims more than 52,000 educators whose lessons reached more than 1,050,000 students in 2016. (It is a national scandal that schools have become such hotbeds of green/left indoctrination).…
Trump’s mission: ‘Bolster America’s energy sector to unleash the U.S. economy’
As Trump takes on that goal, he should keep four main tenets in mind: respect for private property rights, reliance on voluntary exchange, tax neutrality, and consumer welfare.
The Trump administration will have to undo eight years of obstruction under President Barack Obama’s relentless public policy war against fossil fuels. After a good many executive orders to cancel out the previous administration’s overreach, it will be time to play offense.
Breakthrough technology has opened up vast reserves of previously inaccessible oil and gas. But rather than welcoming this bounty (although he took credit for it at the wellhead and at the pump), Obama has been more interested in restricting access and blocking infrastructure development.
Trump’s new energy-policy era can find inspiration in Ronald Reagan’s swift closure of the Richard Nixon-to-Jimmy Carter energy-crisis era. A week after taking the oath of office in 1981, Reagan removed price and allocation controls from crude oil and petroleum products.…