In 2012, I attended the Heartland Institute’s annual Climate Denial shindig, which was in Chicago not far away.
I thought of it in light of recent news that Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, a climate denier, has again doubled down on his belief that President Obama was not born in the US.
This is not peculiar to Trump – like racism, birtherism is endemic to the climate denial movement.
The former House Speaker, who smokes so much that his office had to be fumigated to get rid of the scent of stale cigarette smoke, just landed a fitting post-retirement gig as a director at Reynolds American (RAI), the tobacco company that makes Camel and Newport. (Boehner was known to smoke Camel Ultra Lights.)
Boehner is likely hoping it’ll be easier to oversee Reynolds American’s management than it was to corral rowdy Republican lawmakers.
The jump to Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Reynolds American comes nearly a year after Boehner suddenly stepped down as House Speaker, a day after an emotional meeting with Pope Francis.
Reynolds American revealed the high-profile addition to its board in a statement on Thursday. The No. 2 U.S. tobacco company said Boehner will join the board immediately and serve on its corporate governance, nominating and sustainability committee.
In addition to not worrying about reeking of smoke at his next big meeting, Boehner’s new gig should carry a sweet raise, too.
No specific salary information was released by Reynolds, but directors at the company made at least $300,000 in fees and stock awards last year. One of directors hauled in nearly $1 million.
More on the sordid history, below. Continue reading “Kissing Butts: Climate Denier Joins Tobacco Board”
Donald Trump has been vocal about his belief that climate science is a chinese plot. He has reinforced the point that I’ve made here often, that racism and conspiracist thinking go hand in hand with climate denial.
He also has been at the lead of spreading conspiracy theories that President Obama not an American, and is somehow part of a massive plot, (begun apparently, more than 50 years ago with fake birth announcements in Honolulu newspapers) to place a foreign agent in the presidency. According to polls, upwards of half of Republican primary voters believe this.
It’s easier to understand how Republican voters have been so quick to believe climate deniers, when you understand the fundamental split from reality that the “birther” argument represents.
Mr Trump has said, among other things, that if he were to “shoot someone on 5th Avenue” his supporters would still back him, and that appears to be true.
Indeed, the media has set the bar so low for Mr Trump, that if in the upcoming debate he defacates on the stage, we’ll hear from Fox and Friends, how Presidential he is, able to make a poopy like a big boy.
More on Trump’s climate denial below. Continue reading “Trump: Doubling Down on Racism, Birtherism, and Climate Denial”
Arctic sea ice appeared to reach its annual minimum extent on September 10, 2016, NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reported today. An analysis of satellite data showed that sea ice around the North Pole shrank to 4.14 million square kilometers (1.60 million square miles).
The 2016 sea ice minimum is effectively tied with 2007 for the second lowest in the satellite record. Since satellites began monitoring sea ice in 1979, researchers have observed a decline in the average extent of Arctic sea ice in every month of the year.
The map above shows the extent of Arctic sea ice on September 10, 2016. Extent is defined as the total area in which the ice concentration is at least 15 percent. The map was compiled from observations by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR-2) sensor on the Global Change Observation Mission 1st–Water satellite operated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The yellow outline shows the median sea ice extent observed in September from 1981 through 2010.
The sea ice cover on the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas regulates the planet’s temperature, influences the circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, and affects life in Arctic communities and ecosystems. The ice cap shrinks every year during the spring and summer until it reaches its minimum extent in September. Sea ice grows during the late autumn and winter months, when the Sun is below the horizon in the Arctic Circle.
Continue reading “Sea Ice Reaches Official Minimum, Tied for Second Lowest”
Last year had a record number of strong storms like Typhoon Meranti, currently raking over China.
Above, MIT’s Kerry Emanuel tells why.
Below, new research underscores a trend, especially in Asia.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography:
Typhoon intensity in the northwest Pacific Ocean has increased markedly over the last four decades, according to an analysis by a pair of researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the University of North Carolina.
Wei Mei, a former Scripps postdoctoral scholar, and Shang-Ping Xie, the Roger Revelle Chair in Environmental Science at Scripps, said the most significant aspect of their National Science Foundation-supported analysis is that the strongest intensification has occurred in typhoons that make landfall, which is about half of all typhoons. It is a consequence of strong ocean warming near the coasts of East and Southeast Asia.
“The intensification of landfalling typhoons coincided with rapid economic development in coastal China,” said Mei. “The effects were strongly felt there.”
As an example, Mei noted that Typhoon Nepartak, the first typhoon of the 2016 season, caused the deaths of more than 80 people and nearly 10 billion Chinese yuan (more than US $1.5 billion) in damage in China.
The paper, “Intensification of landfalling typhoons over the northwest Pacific since the late 1970s,” appeared in the Sept. 5 advance online publication of the journal Nature Geoscience. Continue reading “Stronger Cyclones like Meranti a Trend in Asia”
Master’s student Karina Hansen appeared at the door to my office at GEUS: “something looks strange” at Spalte Glacier connected to the 79 Glacier far northwestern Greenland.
The ~9 km wide Spalte Glacier is a tributary of the 79 Glacier which today has the Arctic’s largest ice shelf. The ice shelf forms the end of the North East Greenland Ice Stream, the only Greenland ice stream clearly reaching the highest elevations.
We observed that between 14 Aug., 2015 and 3 September 2016, a marine-terminating tributary of the 79 fjord glacier, the Spalte Glacier flowing into Dijmphna Sound has detached and area (more than 95 km2) roughly the area of Manhattan Is.
The detachment of the ice shelf fragment appears to be nearly 100% complete.
The floating ice shelf fragment appears to have split into more than one piece already. But the main fragment have not floated away yet. I expect that will happen this year or next.
Continue reading “As Temps Break Records, Greenland Calving Continues”
A scaled-down gale blows over a flat plate set inside the tabletop wind tunnel. Despite the low lighting and hazy Plexiglas view portals, we can clearly see the frenzied fluttering of streamer ribbons, called telltales, in the field of little wind vanes that carpets the exposed test surface inside.
At first, each unruly telltale flies every which way, clear evidence of unsteady air flows gusting within. “OK, that’s off,” the researcher says.
“Here’s on…” Almost like a sorcerer’s spell, an otherworldly, blue-violet halo emerges at the front of the plate and hovers corona-like, casting peculiar purple shadows onto the walls. The telltales meanwhile become suddenly and strangely obedient, instantly swinging round in near unison, aligned by an insistent new wind.
“Off,” she says. The ribbons flap arbitrarily as the eerie electric flame fades. “On.” More purple haze and parallel ribbons.
“Off, off…and on.” The odd glow, curious order, and incessant roar of the fan drop away. By the time the lights come on, a whiff of ozone hangs in the air and everyone in the room is grinning uncontrollably.
And for good reason. We just watched moving air being controlled by plasma, the lesser-known, fourth state of matter which also exists in the blistering core of our sun. And while such lab demonstrations are both uncanny and awe-inspiring, these so-called plasma actuators could produce far more impressive benefits in the real world, especially for the aviation and wind power industries, and maybe even the trucking business.
On airplane wings, for example, tiny plasma actuators could help planes fly more safely, more efficiently, and with greater stability and control. They can speed, slow or divert air flows in ways that can cut drag, fuel use, and CO2 emissions by as much as 25%, researchers estimate. Some experts even think that these devices might someday replace conventional flight control surfaces such as flaps and ailerons. Imagine witnessing the ghoulish purple glow of the lab demo from the window seat of a transcontinental flight.
More immediately, aerodynamicists are looking to place the same technology on the huge, vulnerable, and costly blades of wind turbines to improve their efficiency, extend their lifetimes, and even help them more effectively cope with gusting winds.
Technology advancements are expected to continue to drive down the cost of wind energy, according to a survey of the world’s foremost wind power experts led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Experts anticipate cost reductions of 24%-30% by 2030 and 35%-41% by 2050, under a median or ‘best guess’ scenario, driven by bigger and more efficient turbines, lower capital and operating costs, and other advancements
Continue reading “Wind Energy to Benefit from High Tech, Higher Turbines”
I’ve been bombarded with requests to repost or at least mention a new web-comic from the popular XKCD series depicting earth’s climate timeline over 20,000 years or so.
The original graphic is a bit ponderous to repost in the confines of this WordPress-powered blog, but Aaron Huertas has posted a nice, wonky walk-through.
New revelations, if you needed any.
Similar techniques have been used to sell tobacco, fossil fuels, and, it turns out, the ridiculously sugar-heavy standard American diet.
As nutrition debates raged in the 1960s, prominent Harvard nutritionists published two reviews in a top medical journal downplaying the role of sugar in coronary heart disease. Newly unearthed documents reveal what they didn’t say: A sugar industry trade group initiated and paid for the studies, examined drafts, and laid out a clear objective to protect sugar’s reputation in the public eye.
That revelation, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, comes from Dr. Cristin Kearns at the University of California, San Francisco, a dentist-turned-researcher who found the sugar industry’s fingerprints while digging through boxes of letters in the basement of a Harvard library.
Her paper recounts how two famous Harvard nutritionists, Dr. Fredrick Stare and Mark Hegsted, who are now deceased, worked closely with a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, which was trying to influence public understanding of sugar’s role in disease.
The trade group solicited Hegsted, a professor of nutrition at Harvard’s public health school, to write a literature review aimed at countering early research linking sucrose to coronary heart disease. The group paid the equivalent of $48,000 in 2016 dollars to Hegsted and colleague Dr. Robert McGandy, though the researchers never publicly disclosed that funding source, Kearns found.
Hegsted and Stare tore apart studies that implicated sugar and concluded that there was only one dietary modification — changing fat and cholesterol intake — that could prevent coronary heart disease. Their reviews were published in 1967 in the New England Journal of Medicine, which back then did not require researchers to disclose conflicts of interest.
That was an era when researchers were battling over which dietary culprit — sugar or fat — was contributing to the deaths of many Americans, especially men, from coronary heart disease, the buildup of plaque in arteries of the heart. Kearns said the papers, which the trade group later cited in pamphlets provided to policymakers, aided the industry’s plan to increase sugar’s market share by convincing Americans to eat a low-fat diet.
“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA paper.
Continue reading “How Big Sugar Followed the Tobacco/Fossil Fuel Playbook”
Mind control is a thing. It’s actually a business model.
It’s not the “They Live” model of invisible rays from the television controlling the populace, at least not yet. The reality is much more low tech, has been known to tyrants for thousands of years, but has been amplified by mass media and internet vectors in the current version.
One of the key components is that you split people away from objective reality with some kind of a Big Lie, doesn’t really matter what, but, “my God is the best God”, “Barack Obama was born in Kenya”, or “Climate Change is a Chinese Plot” will all do just fine. Then you build your alternative reality edifice on that, creating a parallel world that looks very much like the objective one, with a few critical differences inserted.
Once you’ve got that, then you’re off and running – and if you’ve entrained a number of followers, you can fleece them, direct them, and if necessary, send them to war.
Reality check below.
Continue reading “Denial Paranoia: Louisiana Flood due to “Weather Weapon””
