Scientists Discover First Earth-Like Planet With An Atmosphere
A major breakthrough in the search for habitable worlds
Source: Scientists Discover First Earth-Like Planet With An Atmosphere…
Al Gore Has Made Another Science Fiction Movie About ‘Global Warming’
COMMENTARY
Al Gore Has Made Another Science Fiction Movie About Global Warming
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore addresses participants during a three-day climate change training and workshop on how best to address the effects of global climate change in the Philippines. Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, has a new movie out on the climate change issue called “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power.” (AP)
A decade ago, Al Gore’s 2006 faux-umentary about climate change called “An Inconvenient Truth” won two Oscars. No, it wasn’t in the propaganda or fantasy category, though it should have been. It was filled with so many falsehoods that a British judge said it could not be shown to students unless it included a notice pointing out the errors.
A quick Google search shows there is no shortage of articles outlining the movie’s flaws and identifying Gore as the carnival huckster that he is.
Despite the problems with “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore is back with “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” scheduled to open this summer. No doubt the politically correct voters at the Academy will adore this one, too. Gore speaks the language of the self-righteous, self-appointed moral superiors, so they will be happy to again celebrate one of their own while welling up inside with a sense of pride.
It gives them yet another reason to tell themselves that, yes, we are heroic people. The more rational among us call this virtue-signaling.
Some would justifiably wonder why Gore would make a sequel. Does he think that another round of junk science and Gore-ish hectoring will protect the world from the scourge he’s been nagging the public about for decades? Because he’s the man who said at his first movie’s premiere that “unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” Isn’t it simply too late now to do anything?
No doubt Gore’s next fabulous fable will show “evidence” that man is dangerously warming his planet by pointing out some things that are different than they were in 2006 and fit the warming alarmists’ claims that human-driven climate change is going to make things hotter, colder, wetter, drier, windier, less windy, snowier and less snowy.
But what hasn’t changed is the global temperature. It simply won’t budge no
Pope Francis urges Trump to reconsider ‘global warming’ position
By Philip Pullella
ROME (Reuters) – The Vatican urged U.S. President Donald Trump to listen to “dissenting voices” and reconsider his position on climate change on Thursday, saying the United States risked being supplanted by China as leader in environmental protection.
Pope Francis has made defense of the environment a key plank of his papacy, strongly backing scientific opinion that global warming is caused mostly by human activity.
“This is a challenge for us,” said Cardinal Peter Turkson, the pope’s point man for the environmental, immigration and development, when asked about Trump’s executive order dismantling Obama-era climate change regulations and his immigration policies.
“Fortunately, in the United States, there are dissenting voices, people who are against Trump’s positions,” said Turkson, who is from Ghana and was one of the driving forces behind the pope’s 2015 encyclical letter on environmental protection.
“This, for us, is a sign that little by little, other positions and political voices will emerge and so we hope that Trump himself will reconsider some of his decisions,” Turkson told reporters at a breakfast meeting.
The pope and the Vatican, which has diplomatic relations with more than 180 countries and a permanent observer status at the United Nations, have strongly backed the international Paris Agreement in 2015 to curb world temperatures.
“We as a Church, are full of hope that (Trump’s positions) will change,” Turkson said.…
Russia President Putin: Climate skeptics may not be so ‘silly’
Russia President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that climate change doubters “may not be at all silly.”
In an interview by CNBC at the International Arctic Forum in Arkhangelsk, Russia, Putin was asked about the rollback of environmental regulations from U.S. President Donald Trump‘s administration.
“Those people who are not in agreement with opponents (of climate change) may not be at all silly,” Putin replied via an interpreter.
Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to reverse regulations imposed by the Obama administration that had been designed to curb the devastating impact of climate change.
Trump’s Energy Independence Executive Order effectively suspends over six measures ratified by his predecessor, and though businesses have welcomed the move, environmental campaigners and many world leaders have condemned the action.
While Putin reaffirmed Russia’s commitment to the Paris climate agreement, he also agreed with Finnish President Sauli Niinistö’s comments regarding the inevitability of global warming. It would “continue anyway and anyhow,” Putin said of climate change.
As a compromise to Washington’s environmental position, Moscow would attempt to meet the U.S. halfway to find a solution.
Trump Dropping Climate Change Impact From Government Reviews
President Trump plans to drop climate change as a factor in making government decisions, Bloomberg reported Tuesday . The move, which would reportedly cover environmental reviews of appliance standards, industry regulations and pipeline projects, would largely reverse how the Obama administration addressed climate change.
Source: Trump Dropping Climate Change Impact From Government Reviews…
Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry on EPA chief Pruitt’s CO2 comments: ‘I think these two statements made by Pruitt are absolutely correct’
What Scott Pruitt actually said
Listen to what Scott Pruitt actually said on CNBC and then compare it to the portrayal in the media. Here is the key text:
I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.
Can you square what Pruitt actually said with the distorted quotes and headlines about this? I can’t.
I think that these two statements made by Pruitt are absolutely correct:
I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact
We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.
The other two statements give slightly conflicting messages:
I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet.
The main statement of controversy is:
I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.
You can interpret this in two ways:
1.Pruitt is denying that CO2 is a primary contributor to recent global warming
OR
2.Pruitt is saying that he does not accept as a ‘fact’ that CO2 is a primary contributor because we simply don’t know.
Since his subsequent statement is “But we don’t know that yet”, #2 is obviously the correct interpretation.
I think he is saying that he is not convinced that we know with certainty that humans have caused 100% of the recent warming (which is what some climate modelers are saying, see recent tweets from Gavin Schmidt), or that humans have caused ‘more than half’ of the recent warming (which was the conclusion from the IPCC AR5.
JC reflections
If I am interpreting Pruitt’s statements correctly, I do not find anything to disagree with in what he said: we don’t know how much of recent warming can be attributed to humans. In my opinion, this is correct and is a healthy position for both the science and policy debates.
Exactly what the Trump administration intends to do regarding funding climate science, energy policy and the Paris climate …
Bills to fix EPA science introduced in House
Both inspired by the work of JunkScience.com (as told in “Scare Pollution“). The media release is below. For the the full background story, read “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA.” ### SST Committee Members Introduce the Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017, EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act … Continue reading Bills to fix EPA science introduce in House
Trump’s Blitzkrieg against the rogue and fake U.S. government ‘scientific’ tweeters
…UN IPCC ‘altered’ climate reports violate U.S. science policy guidelines
U.S. Scientific Integrity Rules Repudiate the UN Climate Process
By Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise, author of the book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert.
Mere days before he left office, Barack Obama’s Department of Energy (DOE) introduced a sweeping new scientific integrity policy. This matters because the DOE is the largest funder of physical sciences in America, and because climate change is one of its core concerns.
Elsewhere, I’ve explained that the new policy is a startling departure from the one that prevailed while Obama was in charge. It seems designed to unleash mayhem. In both instances, however, the DOE was adamant concerning one issue: Politicians should not tamper with scientific findings.
The 2014 DOE policy declares:
Political officials will not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings. [italics added]
The 2017 DOE policy says:
Under no circumstance may anyone, including a public affairs officer, ask or direct any researcher to alter the record of scientific findings or conclusions. [italics added]
…personnel will not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings, or intimidate or coerce…others to alter or censor scientific or technological findings or conclusions.
There’s nothing equivocal about these statements. When scientists produce a document that says one thing, but their findings get massaged and manipulated by the people upstairs, scientific integrity has been violated. That is the clear position of the US government.
I am therefore happy to report that this same government has, in no uncertain terms, repudiated the process by which UN climate reports are produced.
In recent years, I’ve written two entire books about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Tasked with producing authoritative climate change assessments, the IPCC recruits scientists to write these documents.
The last major scientific assessment, released in 2013-2014, runs to 7,000 pages. No one has time to read such an opus, so the IPCC also released a Summary for Policymakers approximately 30 pages long for each of the report’s three sections.
These summaries were authored by a subset of the scientists who worked on the main report. But the IPCC considers scientists’ own, unadorned words to be a mere draft. Before each summary became an official IPCC document it was extensively altered. By political officials.
IPCC summary-rewriting meeting. Click to enlarge. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ipccphoto/14108451053/ Image used here in a fair use context. More info here.This …
Trump appointees on climate change: Not fake, not a big deal either
It started with Rex Tillerson’s hearing Wednesday. The former Exxon Mobil chief knows the subject of climate change very well, and as secretary of state, he would head up U.S. international negotiations on the matter under the Paris climate agreement (assuming this country continues to participate in that accord, something that Tillerson left pretty ambiguous).
Yet Tillerson stated that while humans are changing the climate, “our ability to predict that effect is very limited” — a dubious assertion, when it is clear that more emissions equal more warming, and when scientists can now directly connect the volume of emissions with particular temperature ranges for the planet.
But for Tillerson, it was really more about the minimization of the problem than its rejection. Later in his testimony, Tillerson went on to say of the changing climate that “I don’t see it as the imminent national security threat that perhaps others do.”
The pattern continued Thursday when Rep. Michael Pompeo, Trump’s pick to head the CIA, also got asked about climate change by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) — and seemed to suggest he didn’t think the subject very relevant to the job.
Pompeo is on record as raising doubts about the very fundamental climate trend itself. Speaking on C-SPAN in 2013, he said that “there are scientists that think lots of different things about climate change. There’s some who think we’re warming, there’s some who think we’re cooling, there’s some who think that the last 16 years have shown a pretty stable climate environment.” Actually it’s clear that the planet is warming and scientists have in fact said that is “unequivocal.
In this context, Harris asked Pompeo about what role the issue plays in national security, noting that John Brennan, the current CIA director, has flagged climatic changes as a potentially destabilizing force:
Extreme weather, along with public policies affecting food and water supplies, can worsen or create humanitarian crises. Of most immediate concern, sharply reduced crop yields in multiple places simultaneously could trigger a shock in food prices with devastating effect, especially in already fragile regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Compromised access to food and water greatly increases the