The video captures Trump’s skill for covering every subject possible in his public speeches, and we’re dying to know the origins of the footage with Trump dancing amid laser lights.
Eclectic Method is Jonny Wilson, best known for his danceable audio-visual remixes that gained acclaim in “Copyright Criminals,” a 2009 documentary about the creativity of music sampling.
Tough enough to crank out these videos on a tight schedule, but the ground keeps shifting as I’m working. That sound of grinding metal you hear is the wheels coming off the climate denial monster truck.
Anyhow, even as I’m working with video of Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth predicting more adjustments to the satellite record – news breaks, of course, of new adjustments to the satellite record. Of course, they show more warming in the very record that Ted Cruz likes to wave around at hearings and elsewhere.
As I noted at the time, RSS had the only data that could remotely support Senator Cruz’s argument. Surface and ocean temperatures have warmed, ice has melted, sea levels have risen, species have been forced to migrate, spring has begun earlier, and so on.
Even other estimates of the atmospheric temperature, of the same satellite data by scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH), and by weather balloons, indicate that the atmosphere is warming. Ted Cruz cherry picked RSS because it was the lone outlier that seemed to support his preferred argument against the need to take action to mitigate the risks posed by human-caused global warming.
That’s no longer the case. In their new paper, Mears and Wentz detail the revised RSS method to account for drift in the time of day at which satellites measure the same location on Earth (known as “diurnal drift”, discussed by Mears at the 0:47 mark in the above video). They applied a method suggested by Stephen Po-Chedley and colleagues at the University of Washington in an important paper covered by John Abraham last year. As a result, the new version of RSS (v4.0) shows about 60% more warming than the previous version (v3.3) since the record began in 1979.
The U.S. Justice Department has forwarded a request from two congressmen seeking a federal probe of ExxonMobil to the FBI’s criminal division.
U.S. Representatives Ted Lieu and Mark DeSaulnier sought the probe last year to determine whether the oil giant violated federal laws by “failing to disclose truthful information” about climate change.
In response, the Justice Department deferred to the FBI, saying it is that agency’s responsibility to conduct an initial assessment of facts that prompted the congressmen’s request. Such action is considered standard procedure, according to former federal prosecutors who say the response appears ambiguous as to what action may be taken by the FBI.
“As a courtesy, we have forwarded your correspondence to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),” said a letter to the congressmen from Peter J. Kadzik, an assistant U.S. attorney general.
“The FBI is the investigative arm of the Department, upon which we rely to conduct the initial fact finding in federal cases. The FBI will determine whether an investigation is warranted.”
The Justice Department’s referral letter to the FBI, however, has not been released, so it is not known if it contained any specific instructions.
The referral was made to the assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division.
The FBI and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Below, interview with one of the Congressmen who made the original request, Ted Lieu, (D – California)
You’ve obviously been very active in trying to push the federal government to investigate major fossil fuel companies like Exxon Mobil Corp. and Shell Oil Co. over alleged denial of climate change. How do you see that playing out in this administration?
Lieu:
I’m very pleased that after Congressman DeSaulnier (D-Calif.) and I sent letters to the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission, we now have the New York attorney general saying he’s launching an investigation into Exxon. There are reports the California attorney general is doing same, and then recently it appears the Maryland attorney general is going to do that as well.
If you are still wondering how someone like Donald Trump can get traction in an election – or the role of science denial in degrading public discourse, or the link between climate deniers and racist conspiracy theories, here’s more food for thought.
Above, video from the Heartland Climate denial conference in 2012 shows how climate deniers have made common cause with young earth creationists to destroy the teaching of science and critical thought in American schools.
Below, the fresh new face of climate denial in Texas.
A woman who believes in the New World Order conspiracy theory and that President Obama worked as a gay prostitute could soon win a seat on the Texas state Board of Education, the Houston Chronicle reports.
Mary Lou Bruner fell just 2 points short of gaining the 50 percent needed to avoid a run-off. Bruner, who claims to be a retired teacher who holds a Masters in special education, believes sex education materials “stimulate” children to experiment with sex and that the United Nations has a plan to wipe out two-thirds of the world population.
According to the Chronicle, Bruner has deleted most of her Facebook posts with questionable content — but not before Gawker and others could collect screen shots of them. Many can be viewed via a simple image search in Google.
“Obama has a soft spot for homosexuals because of the years he spent as a male prostitute in his twenties,” Bruner wrote in October. “That is how he paid for his drugs.”
Bruner also believes climate change is a conspiratorial hoax.
Drawing one of the strongest links yet between global warming and human conflict, researchers said Monday that an extreme drought in Syria between 2006 and 2009 was most likely due to climate change, and that the drought was a factor in the violent uprising that began there in 2011.
The drought was the worst in the country in modern times, and in a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists laid the blame for it on a century-long trend toward warmer and drier conditions in the Eastern Mediterranean, rather than on natural climate variability.
The researchers said this trend matched computer simulations of how the region responds to increases in greenhouse-gas emissions, and appeared to be due to two factors: a weakening of winds that bring moisture-laden air from the Mediterranean and hotter temperatures that cause more evaporation.
Colin P. Kelley, the lead author of the study, said he and his colleagues found that while Syria and the rest of the region known as the Fertile Crescent were normally subject to periodic dry periods, “a drought this severe was two to three times more likely” because of the increasing aridity in the region.
Dr. Kelley, who did the research while at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and is now at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said there was no apparent natural cause for the warming and drying trend, which developed over the last 100 years, when humans’ effect on climate has been greatest.
Martin P. Hoerling, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration whose earlier work showed a link between climate change and aridity in the Eastern Mediterranean, said the researchers’ study was “quite compelling.”
As I’ve reported – the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation helped support last summer’s Dark Snow Project efforts in Greenland. Although my schedule did not mesh – Leo’s plans tend to be rather fluid – Jason Box was there to take Leo to some key locations on the ice, and sketch out the problem.
But that was last year.
This summer, for the first time in 3 years, I won’t be heading to Greenland – but there is another project in the works that expands on Dark Snow’s mission – and I’ll need your help.
Announcement coming soon.
If you’re ready to jump in now, click on the image below, and earmark your donation to Peter Sinclair 2016.
The speech came as no surprise to Jason Box, a glaciology professor at the Geologic Survey of Denmark and Greenland.Box is one of the scientists who was already personally familiar with the world-famous actor, thanks to DiCaprio’s support for his research in 2015.
Through his foundation, DiCaprio helped fund Box’s “Dark Snow” field campaign, which the prominent ice researcher is using to find out how much the darkening of the ice sheet from pollution in northern midlatitudes is speeding up its melting.
The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. – George Orwell
“I’ve always cautioned fellow skeptics that it’s dangerous to claim no warming,” Spencer said in a phone conversation. “There has been warming. The question is how much warming there’s been and how does that compare to what’s expected and what’s predicted.” – Roy Spencer in the Washington Post
Above, excerpted remarks from well known “climate skeptic” Pat Michaels, PhD, of the Cato Institute – from his talk at the Heartland Institute’s 2008 climate denial conference.
Heartland is, of course, a well known fossil fuel funded “think” tank. (full remarks here)
In light of recent developments, Michaels remarks have resonance. Worth your minute and a half.
Our planet’s preliminary February temperature data are in, and it’s now abundantly clear: Global warming is going into overdrive.
There are dozens of global temperature datasets, and usually I (and my climate journalist colleagues) wait until the official ones are released about the middle of the following month to announce a record-warm month at the global level. But this month’s data is so extraordinary that there’s no need to wait: February obliterated the all-time global temperature record set just last month.
Using unofficial data and adjusting for different base-line temperatures, it appears that February 2016 was likely somewhere between 1.15 and 1.4 degrees warmer than the long-term average, and about 0.2 degrees above last month—good enough for the most above-average month ever measured. (Since the globe had already warmed by about +0.45 degrees above pre-industrial levels during the 1981-2010 base-line meteorologists commonly use, that amount has been added to the data released today.)
Keep in mind that it took from the dawn of the industrial age until last October to reach the first 1.0 degree Celsius, and we’ve come as much as an extra 0.4 degrees further in just the last five months. Even accounting for the margin of error associated with these preliminary datasets, that means it’s virtually certain that February handily beat the record set just last month for the most anomalously warm month ever recorded. That’s stunning.
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The data for February is so overwhelming that even prominent climate change skeptics have already embraced the new record. Writing on his blog, former NASA scientist Roy Spencer said that according to satellite records—the dataset of choice by climate skeptics for a variety of reasons—February 2016 featured “whopping” temperature anomalies especially in the Arctic. Spurred by disbelief, Spencer also checked his data with others released today and said the overlap is “about as good as it gets.” Speaking with the Washington Post, Spencer said the February data proves “there has been warming. The question is how much warming there’s been.” Continue reading “2016 – Tough Year Shaping up for Deniers”
Recent Nature Climate Change paper reopens the theological discussion about whether there was a “pause” or “hiatus” (really meaning just continued warming but slower) in global surface temperatures during the last decade or 2. Significant authors include Mike Mann and Gerald Meehl.
Deniers, as usual, are freaking out.
Kind of moot in that even denialdom’s favorite graph, (above) from John Christie/Roy Spencer’s University of Alabama Huntsville shop is showing a bodacious spike that kind of makes the “no warming since…” meme a bit dated.
Just to show how over the top this has gotten, here’s just a sampling of James Delingpole’s latest spittle flecked rant.
In my last column I promised I’d name the guilty names: all those morally bankrupt, intellectually tainted, mendacious, ignorant useful idiot shills who for the last several years have assumed the mantle of scientific expertise and loftily declared that the “Pause” in global warming wasn’t a thing, only a fantasy cooked up by evil deniers.
You may say that I’m using a sledgehammer to crack a nest of cockroaches; that rather than crow in victory one should be magnanimous in order to prove oneself a better man than they are, Gunga Din.
Distrust of media has hit an all-time high, with many Americans turning over TV newscasts and cancelling subscriptions to newspapers, according to reasech(sic) by the Pew Research Center.
The centre found that many are switching to fringe websites to feed their hunger for news.
The group’s research concluded 65 per cent of Americans believe the “national news media have a negative effect on our country”.
A separate recent Gallup poll said six in 10 of the US public now have “little or no confidence in the national media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly”.
The main bugbear appears to be that they see news as opinion columns in disguise, particularly when it comes to the climate change debate.
Rep Lamar Smith is a Republican who has represented Texas’s 21st district since 1987.
Recent Nature Climate Change paper reopens the theological discussion about whether there was a “pause” or “hiatus” (really meaning just continued warming but slower) in global surface temperatures during the last decade or 2. Significant authors include Mike Mann and Gerald Meehl.
