NYT Oped by Warmist: A Scientists’ March on DC ‘is a terrible idea’ – Will ‘reinforce narrative that scientists are an interest group & politicize their data’
Climate Depot comment: “This warmist professor is spot on with many of his observations about the proposed DC climate march. Kudos to New York Times for publishing it. Michael Mann must be having fits over this.”
By Robert S. Young, a professor of coastal geology and the director of the program for the study of developed shorelines at Western Carolina University.
Excepts:
A March will serve only to reinforce the narrative from skeptical conservatives that scientists are an interest group and politicize their data, research and findings for their own ends.
There is no question that the proposed March for Science will make my job more difficult and increase polarization.
A march by scientists, while well intentioned, will serve only to trivialize and politicize the science we care so much about, turn scientists into another group caught up in the culture wars and further drive the wedge between scientists and a certain segment of the American electorate.
…
Al Gore, bless his heart (as we say in the South), was well intentioned when he made “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. But he did us no favors. So many of the conservative Southerners whom I speak to about climate change see it as a partisan issue largely because of that high-profile salvo fired by the former vice president.
Scientists marching in opposition to a newly elected Republican president will only cement the divide. The solution here is not mass spectacle, but an increased effort to communicate directly with those who do not understand the degree to which the changing climate is already affecting their lives. We need storytellers, not marchers.…
‘Arctic Justice’ Animated ‘Global Warming’ Kids Film with Alec Baldwin coming soon – Try ‘to save the arctic’
Jeremy Renner, Alec Baldwin, Heidi Klum, John Cleese, James Franco, Anjelica Huston and Omar Sy are part of voice cast of the family film, hitting theaters in 2018.
Open Road is teaming with the Arctic Justice: Thunder Squad, acquiring the starry and topical CGI-animated film for a 2018 release.
Jeremy Renner, Alec Baldwin, Heidi Klum, John Cleese, James Franco, Anjelica Huston and Omar Sy are among the voice cast of the family film, directed by Aaron Woodley. It is produced and fully financed by AMBI and its principals, Andrea Iervolino and Monika Bacardi. Animation work is currently being done out of AMBI’s Toronto-based AIC Studios.
Arctic Justice: Thunder Squad tells the story of a rag-tag group of inexperienced heroes (voiced by Renner, Franco, Baldwin, Huston, Klum and Sy) who come together to save the arctic and foil the evil plans of a sinister Doc Walrus (voiced by John Cleese), who hatches a secret plot to accelerate global warming and melt the arctic circle.
“The family film audience is hungry for quality product and we are very happy to serve up something fresh and topical with Arctic Justice,” stated Tom Ortenberg, CEO of Open Road.…
Climate Billionaire Gives Up!? Tom Steyer Is Moving ‘Beyond’ Global Warming Activism
By Michael Bastasch
The single largest donor of the last two election cycles says he’s moving his activism beyond rallying young people against global warming to lead the “resistance” against President Donald Trump.
The move comes after San Francisco hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer personally spent about $163 million in the last two election cycles supporting Democratic candidates and liberal causes, like fighting global warming.
Steyer saw his political stock rise after throwing millions behind efforts to oppose the Keystone XL oil pipeline, eventually creating his own activist group, NextGen Climate Action, to “bring climate change to the forefront of American politics.” NextGen intended to mobilize young people and support candidates whose top priority was fighting global warming.…
Former Obama Official Mocks ‘Hottest Year on Record’ – Temps Within Margin of Error
Claims that 2016 was “the hottest year on record” are drawing sharp criticism from scientists who say it reflects how global warming has become more social crusade than evidence-based science.
“The Obama administration relentlessly politicized science and it aggressively pushed a campaign about that politicized science,” said Steven E. Koonin, who served as under secretary for science in Obama’s Department of Energy from 2009 to 2011.
Koonin, a theoretical physicist at New York University who once worked for energy giant BP, also blamed a “happily complicit” media for trumpeting the now-departed Obama administration’s dubious claim.
The controversy began in mid-January when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a report declaring that “the globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for 2016 was the highest among all years since record-keeping began in 1880.”
NOAA fixed the 2016 increase at 0.04 degrees Celsius. The British Met Office reported an even lower rise, of 0.01C. Both increases are well within the margin of error for such calculations, approximately 0.1 degrees, and therefore are dismissed by many scientists as meaningless.
The reports, however, set the global warming bell towers ringing. Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was quoted at Climate Central referring to the past temperature record and saying “2016 has really blown that out of the water.”
Following the lead of the Schmidt and government press releases, USA Today wrote that “the planet sizzled to its third straight record warm year in 2016.” The New York Times’ front-page headline said, “Earth Sets Temperature Record for Third Straight Year.” The article declared that the latest readings were “trouncing” earlier numbers and the planet had thus “blown past” the previous records.
Such characterizations are absurd, according to Richard Lindzen, a meteorology professor at MIT and one of the world’s foremost skeptics that global warming represents an existential threat.
“It’s typical misleading nonsense,” Lindzen said in an e-mail. “We’re talking about less than a tenth of degree with an uncertainty of about a quarter of a degree. Moreover, such small fluctuations – even if real – don’t change the fact that the trend for the past 20 years has been much less than models have predicted.”
Koonin suggested the White House and the media could consider an alternative presentation of what’s happening.
“I think simply by having the government press releases on
Pelosi: Gorsuch Is Terrible For You If You ‘Breathe Air, Drink Water’
Tuesday night, appearing at a CNN townhall moderated by Jake Tapper, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi attacked Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, with typical leftist hyperbolic rhetoric, snapping, “Clean air, clean water, food safety, safety in medicine, and the rest, if you care about that for your children, he’s not your guy.”
Pelosi pontificated as follows:
…Elections have ramifications, and here is a living, breathing example of it. The president and his first appointment to the court, and hopefully his only appointment to the court, has appointed someone who has come down on the side of corporate America versus class action suits on securities fraud. He’s come down against employer’s — employee’s rights. Clean air, clean water, food safety, safety in medicine, and the rest, if you care about that for your children, he’s not your guy. Gabby Giffords’ group, the group for responsible solutions related to gun safety, said that he comes down on the side of felons, over gun safety. Hostile to women’s reproductive rights, Hobby Lobby case, for example.
DELINGPOLE: Trump’s Climate Plans Just Made the Media’s Heads Explode Like Watermelons
It was great – a bit like that No Pressure video that the enviro-loons made a few years ago, only better because this time the victims weren’t blameless schoolchildren but grisly, puffed-up, righteously eco, Trump-and-Brexit-hating TV and newspaper Environment Correspondents, all of whom hate my guts. (They hate yours too, so don’t get smug.)
The occasion was a press conference hosted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation for Myron Ebell, head of the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team. Satan’s Emissary, as liberals prefer to think of him.
Ebell had come to tell them about Trump’s plans for the environment and energy, which I won’t repeat here because you know them already. (It’s going to be beautiful, that’s all you need to remember.)
No, the reason I went wasn’t to hear what Ebell had to say but to watch how his audience reacted.
You know that scene in The Omen when Damien’s parents try to take him into a church? It was a bit like that. Or maybe the one in The Exorcist, where Regan’s head does a 360 degree spin.
They hated it. (Especially the bit where Ebell told them that Trump would definitely be pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate treaty) They couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They curled their lips. They laced their questions with the bitterest scorn. But they didn’t really tune into Ebell’s measured, silken, soft-spoken answers because, hell, they knew what he was saying just had to be wrong and they didn’t really understand what he meant anyway.
The reporter who set the tone – and if nothing else, you’ve got to admire his honesty – was the one from Channel 4 News who told Ebell: “It will occur to you that this room is full of people like myself who consider that nothing you say has any basis in fact. So what you’ve been telling us is essentially meaningless.”
Ebell replied with some painful home truths. “Elections are surprising things…” he began and went on to explain to the mystified audience why
Trump moves hands on Doomsday clock for the EPA and the Paris Climate Agreement
…Trump’s Cut To Regulations Puts EPA On Notice
…‘The Environmentalist War On Science’: ‘EPA threw out 5 years of fracking safety research to appease green extremists’
By JEFF STIER
The EPA just threw out five years of fracking safety research to appease green extremists. Although early drafts found no evidence that fracking has had a “widespread, systemic” impact on drinking water, the final report claims that there isn’t “enough information to make a broad conclusion.”
How absurd. An honest look at the science should have environmentalists waving the white flag in their fight against fracking. It’s time for both the EPA and green crusaders to quit this political charade and recognize that fracking technology has boosted the economy, helped wean America off imported oil and gas, and dramatically reduced CO2 emissions.
In 2015, a draft of the EPA’s report found that fracking operations have not “led to widespread, systemic impact on drinking water.” Since then, the underlying science in the report hasn’t changed. But the EPA, under pressure, adjusted its conclusion to suit critics to the left even of the administration, who would have been left without a leg to stand on in their efforts to sow doubt about fracking safety.…
Environmentalists’ Worst Fears About Trump Are Coming True
President Donald Trump on Tuesday morning declared himself an “environmentalist” in public remarks before meeting with automobile manufacturers, but as the day wore on, he and his new administration seemed intent on realizing the worst fears of the broader conservation movement.
In the same breath in which he characterized himself as an environmentalist, Trump said that he believes that the movement is “out of control” and promised a “very big push” to have more cars built in the United States. He also promised for the second day in a row to roll back regulations that he said are stifling the productivity of U.S. businesses. On Monday, he told a different group of business leaders that he believes he could do away with 75 percent of federal regulations or more.