Month: November 2016

Mary Robinson served as president of Ireland from 1990 to 1997, and U.N. high commissioner for human rights from 1997 to 2002.

I’m happy to see congruence between Robinson’s observations on the UN COP 22 conference, and what I heard from Glaciologist Jason Box and Environmental Scientist Cara Augustenborg in my newest Yale Climate Connections video.

Main take away?
America will hurt primarily itself, and sacrifice not only our leadership in the exploding clean energy revolution, but what may be left of our leadership of the world community.

Box and Augustenborg agreed that China seems more than happy to assume not only technological and economic, but Moral, leadership of the planet.  Republicans, the party of Science denial,  are willing to see the country fail in service of their fossil fueled clients.

Your call, science deniers.

Mother Jones:

Conservative TV host Bill O’Reilly is urging Donald Trump to stick to the Paris climate agreement, the global pact to reduce emissions that the president-elect has railed against for months. “It doesn’t really amount to much anyway,” O’Reilly told his Fox News audience Wednesday evening. “Let it go.”

O’Reilly is no fan of climate action. He said in 2011 that “nobody can control the climate but God.” But on Wednesday, O’Reilly said staying in the Paris agreement would “buy some goodwill overseas” for the incoming president. At least one prominent politician—Nicolas Sarkozy, the former leader of France who is running again for the presidency—has proposed tariffs on US imports should Trump pull out of the deal, which was signed in December 2015 and came into force just before the election.

On Thursday, Britain announced it had ratified the deal, while hundreds of major companies co-signed a letter urging Trump to uphold America’s climate pledges. The 360 companies included Nike, General Mills, and Hewlett Packard.

Trump has said that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese and has pledged to slash funding to United Nations climate programs. He put a prominent climate change denier, Myron Ebell, in charge of his Environmental Protection Agency transition team.

Jimmy Fallon Show.
Fiddler in the back is my nephew, John William Sinclair, who, like Macklemore, is Seattle based.

I’ve been saying it for years, there is some toxic neurological loop that is common to racists and climate deniers.

Steve Bannon, soon to be perhaps the most powerful man in the White House, given Mr. Trump’s hands off, checked out management style, is the entire package rolled up into one fat, ugly, Neo-Nazi ball.

But all I know is one of the worst people on God’s green earth was just instituted as the chairman and CEO of the Trump campaign.
– Dana Loesch – former co-worker with Steve Bannon

Inside Climate News:

President-elect Donald Trump has famously called climate change a hoax invented by the Chinese, but the man he has chosen as his chief White House strategist advances a far more elaborate conspiracy.

Stephen Bannon has called government support of alternative energy “madness.” His conservative website, Breitbart News, relentlessly pursues the idea that global warming is an invention of activists, university researchers and renewable energy industry profiteers determined to assert global governance for their own gain.

“Pure scum” is how Breitbart News describes the alleged schemers, and the site suggested that the Vatican had been taken over by Marxists after Pope Francis urged the world to protect the environment and slow climate change. Bannon has cited a faked TIME magazine cover, purportedly from the 1970s, as evidence that scientists once thought the world was cooling.

Global warming hoax theories are among a wide range of extremist views that were circulated on the pages of Breitbart News under its executive chairman, Bannon.

The site’s at times overtly racist, anti-Semitic and sexist content has prompted many to protest Trump’s selection of him for a key post, and one that does not require Senate confirmation. The outcry has come from civil rights advocates, top Democrats and even some Republicans. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate group activity, reported in Aprilthat there had been a noticeable shift at Breitbart to more overt anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and racist rhetoric, making it, in effect, “the media arm of the alt-right.”

“Steve Bannon’s appointment should make us very nervous,” Sen. Bernie Sanders posted on Twitter. “We’re going to tell him and Trump that we will stand together and not be divided up.”

There’s been less attention to Bannon’s denial of climate change science, and the conspiratorial views on clean energy he has promoted via Breitbart. Advocacy against climate change action has been a key aim of a major financial backer of Breitbart, the reclusive hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. He reportedly played a key role in installing Bannon at the top of the Trump’s campaign in an August shake-up. Mercer, a major donor to the Heartland Institute, Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative organizations that deny climate change, was among the top campaign contributors of the 2016 election. He spent $23.5 million to help elect Trump and other Republican candidates. Continue reading “New Face of Republican Party. Bannon is Racism+Climate Denial Personified.”

No PollyAnna, but 2 scientists who attended the COP22 Meeting in Marrakech say there is still a way forward.

Yale Climate Connections:

Two scientists who participated in a recent global climate-change meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, come across in a new Yale Climate Connections video as hopeful, bordering on optimistic, about continued international efforts to address the problem. (See related posts here, here, and here.)

Glaciologist Jason Box, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, and Cara Augustenborg, an environmental scientist with University College in Dublin, point to a spirit of resolution and perseverance in Marrakech in the days immediately following the U.S. election of Donald J. Trump.

“I thought before the election that, if Trump wins, we’ll all just go home,” Augustenborg told a meeting at Trinity College in Dublin on November 15, a week after Trump’s election. “But I was really surprised that the attitude in Marrakech was really quite positive. Negotiating team members and civil society representatives took the approach of: ‘Look, this is going to make it harder for the U.S., definitely, but it’s only one country out of 196, and the rest of us are still on track, we’re still going to act.’”

“Everyone’s got more resolve to make the Paris agreement a success,” Box said in a November 16 Skype interview with independent videographer Peter Sinclair. “That’s what everyone’s talking about.”

He said “the ‘T’ word” was not a principal focus of international participants. “This disruption, optimistically, will stir things up,” he said in the monthly “This is not cool” video.

China with ‘new role’ … ‘a big winner’?

Augustenborg pointed to China as a possible “big winner” if the Trump administration pulls back on climate: “For China, this is really seen as an opportunity. They said, ‘Hey, the U.S. has always been leading this, but we want to lead.’”

That view appeared to be reinforced in reporting by New York Times reporter Coral Davenport. She quoted Liu Zhenmin, China’s lead negotiator in Marrakech and China’s deputy minister of foreign affairs. Liu said China rejects a 2012 Trump assertion that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

“Whatever position the U.S. puts forth, China will continue to support the Paris agreement,” Davenport reports Liu as saying in Marrakech.

“They seem pretty upbeat about the role they play,” Box says of China. “They’ve become the largest producers of solar …. They’re taking it seriously, and there doesn’t seem to be so [many] obstacles in the way for them.”

“The attitude was very much, ‘We’re going to keep going, and if the U.S. doesn’t act, they’re just going to be left behind technologically, and that’s their loss,” Augustenborg said.

“Clean energy just makes good economic sense,” Box said. “It really doesn’t make economic sense to not participate in the clean energy revolution.” He pointed to what he sees as a big role for free-market initiatives in that revolution.

“I’m getting a more positive feeling from being at this meeting than I was expecting,” said Box, who from 2002 to 2012 was a scholaar at Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar Research Center.

This is all a dream, right?

Buzzfeed:

In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.

During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.

Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. (This analysis focused on the top performing link posts for both groups of publishers, and not on total site engagement on Facebook. For details on how we identified and analyzed the content, see the bottom of this post. View our data here.)

Washington Post:

Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off viral news hoaxes for several years. He has twice convinced the Internet that he’s British graffiti artist Banksy; he also published the very viral, very fake news of a Yelp vs. “South Park” lawsuit last year.

But in recent months, Horner has found the fake-news ecosystem growing more crowded, more political and vastly more influential: In March, Donald Trump’s son Eric and his then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, even tweeted links to one of Horner’s faux-articles. His stories have also appeared as news on Google.

In light of concerns that stories like Horner’s may have affected the presidential election, and in the wake of announcements that both Google and Facebook would take action against deceptive outlets, Intersect called Horner to discuss his perspective on fake news. This transcript has been edited for clarity, length and — ahem — bad language.

You’ve been writing fake news for a while now — you’re kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer. Well, I’d call it hoaxing or fake news. You’d call it parody or satire. How is that scene different now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

You mentioned Trump, and you’ve probably heard the argument, or the concern, that fake news somehow helped him get elected. What do you make of that?

Continue reading “Did Fake News put Trump in the White House?”

I miss the old days when we thought Exxon and the Koch Brothers were all we had to contend with.

Normally I would not post something from the Daily Mail as worth a read, but the writer here is former Moscow Bureau Chief for The Economist, and his analysis, while terrifying, is sound.

Edward Lucas in The Daily Mail:

The restoration of the Soviet empire is under way — and America is not going to stop it.

That is the chilling conclusion we must draw from Donald Trump’s first few days as President-elect, in which he received what he termed a ‘beautiful’ letter from Vladimir Putin, followed by an amicable phone call in which the two pledged to restore friendly relations between Washington and Moscow.

Then, yesterday, Syria’s President Assad said that Mr Trump would be a ‘natural ally’ alongside Russia in the bloodsoaked Syrian civil war if he fulfils his pledge to fight terrorism.

Assad and Putin are, of course, at the forefront of the aerial bombardment that began on Tuesday against rebel-held areas of the city of Aleppo after several weeks of relative calm.
–

That is why I believe it’s no exaggeration to say Putin, not Trump, is the biggest winner of the American presidential election.

The irony is that at home, President Trump will be constrained by his inexperience, and by America’s solid political institutions.

The real damage will be done abroad — to us and to others who depend on strong defence and intelligence ties with America. Intelligence experts fear Putin will offer President Trump a ‘Grand Bargain’ some time in 2017.

The outline would be simple. The West drops sanctions, stops pestering the Putin regime about its appalling human rights record, accepts that the Kremlin has a sphere of military and political influence in Eastern Europe, and treats Russia as a serious global player.

In return, Putin would offer counter-terrorism co-operation against the constant threat of Islamist attacks around the world, a brokered peace in Syria (meaning an end to the floods of refugees to Europe), and an easing of military tensions around Russia’s western borders.

He would promise — no doubt oozing sincerity — a future of peace and friendship. The deal-loving tycoon, still settling into the Oval Office, would jump at this ‘Grand Bargain’, regarding it as a piece of international statesmanship.

He would boast about saving billions of dollars by being able to pull American troops out of Europe.

In truth, this deal would be as shameful as the Yalta summit of 1945 at which Stalin outmanoeuvred Britain and America, consigning Eastern Europe to misery and captivity within the Soviet Empire.

US media furiously normalizing a Neo-Nazi champion in the White House.

Raw Story:

NPR apparently felt the need to invite on a Breitbart mouthpiece to put in a good word for Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s newly announced senior policy adviser. Bannon previously led Breitbart, a publication beloved by the so-called alt-right, a loose coalition of white nationalists, “identitarians,” neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, racists, and misogynists who were ecstatic over Bannon’s appointment. Pollak’s segment was a master class in obfuscation and a primer on how to flip the script and turn totally justified accusations of bigotry, misogyny and anti-Semitism into “reverse racism.”

Continue reading “#NotNormal. If Your Hair is on Fire, Good, you Have Grasped the Situation”

Remember: “White Nationalist”is PC speak for Nazi.

Graph here is from Gavin Schmidt of NASA, showing current average global temperatures, including October, with a prediction for how 2016 will end up.
2014 and 2015 were records, 2015 by a long way – which was more or less expected due to the very large super El Nino event in 2015-16.

But scientists have generally been expecting a deceleration as we move into more of a La Nina phase, where we expect more heat to get sucked into oceans, and atmospheric temps to level off.  Instead what we are seeing is another record that may be as much hotter in 2016 as 2015 was above ’14.

Guardian:

Residents of the Alaskan city of Barrow (due to change its name to Utqiaġvik on 1 December) would normally be looking out across a frozen harbour by now, but this year the sea is reluctant to freeze.

Barrow’s average temperature for October 2016 was a balmy -1C, significantly warmer than the long-term average of around -8C. And over the North Pole the air has been a full 10C warmer than average of late.

Much of the reason for these warm temperatures and the sluggish rate of sea-ice formation is the exceptional summer sea-ice melt that occurred this year. By 10 September the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that Arctic sea-ice had shrunk to an area of just 4.14m square kilometres – tying with 2007 for second lowest sea-ice extent on record, and some 740,000 square kilometres short of the record set in 2012. Continue reading “Chinese Plot Continues. As 2016 Wraps, Another Record Looms”

We are in the Pearl Harbor-like aftermath of a successful attack on the world’s oldest Democracy, aided and abetted by a media so corrupt, they still refuse to accept responsibility.

Media Matters:

It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. … The money’s rolling in and this is fun.” —CBS CEO Les Moonves discussing Donald Trump, February 2016. 

While reporters and pundits sift through their harassing and sometimes anti-Semitic letters and emails from Trump supporters — and contemplate what the future holds if radio show host Laura Ingraham becomes the next White House press secretary — few seem to be in the mood to reflect on their just-concluded campaign effort. And even fewer scribes seem willing to accept that the media made serious missteps in their election coverage — and that those mistakes helped elect Donald Trump president.

Any implications drawn from the media’s broken performance in 2016, a year when Trump’s former campaign manager was hired by CNNwhile still cashing Trump campaign paychecks, have been largely waved off. Much of the media’s message today is that the press simply played no significant role in tipping the election to Trump.

Detailing “The Democratic Coalition’s Epic Fail,” The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall cataloged what he saw as the many shortcomings of the Hillary Clinton campaign. What was notably absent from the list of hurdles that Clinton and Democrats failed to clear? The press. It’s not even worth discussing, apparently.

There seems to be little interest in acknowledging that the press virtually extinguished policy and issue coverage this campaign cycle. That journalists were bullied by Trump yet often held him to a lower, softer standard than Clinton (see Clinton Foundation vs. Trump Foundation coverage). That the press somehow managed to help normalize a bigoted Republican nominee who openly embraces white nationalism, while showering him with nonstop attention. Or that the press’s relentlessly caustic Clinton coveragebecame a hallmark of the campaign.

Immediately following the election, New YorkTimes Editor Dean Baquet and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. assured readers that “We believe we reported on both candidates fairly during the presidential campaign.” So no, journalists don’t seem interested in self-examination, and they certainly don’t seem open to admitting that their occasionally colossal blunders helped tip the scales in Trump’s favor.

In fact, quite the contrary. “The press succeeded in exposing Trump for what he was. Voters just decided they didn’t care,” Politico announced.

Question: How well did the press succeed in getting Trump to release his tax returns? In getting him to release relevant health information about himself? In getting him to hold a press conference during the final months of the campaign?

Answer: The press failed, categorically, in all those routine pursuits. But many journalists today remain certain everything was fine in 2016.

From CNN reporter Maeve Reston:

Reston claims it’s just “lazy” for people to blame the press in the wake of Trump’s victory, but there is solid data to back up a lot of complaints about lopsided election coverage.

As Media Matters pointed out, in the week after FBI Director James Comey announced that the bureau would be assessing newly discovered emails to find out if they were relevant to its investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server, five of the country’s top newspaper published a total of 100 (100!) stories about or mentioning the emails, 46 of them on the front page. Additionally, the three network evening newscasts devoted a total of 25 minutes to the FBI email story during two crucial weeks late in the campaign, compared to just three minutes of policy coverage.

Meanwhile, NBC’s Katy Tur also seemed to dismiss post-campaign press criticism:

Continue reading “Media an Accessory in One of History’s Greatest Crimes”

Washington Post:

Today, Trump is president-elect. And Bannon, a top executive at the hard-right Breitbart News who helped guide Trump’s victorious campaign and has been named a senior White House strategist, is set to be one of the new president’s most influential advisers.

The clearest public sense of how the two plan to work together — and what policies Bannon will probably try to push — came over the course of nine one-on-one interviews on Bannon’s radio show between November 2015 and June of this year.

In those exchanges, a dynamic emerged, with Bannon often coaxing Trump to agree to his viewpoint, whether on climate change, foreign policy or the need to take on Republican leaders in Congress.

At times, Bannon seemed to coach Trump to soften the harder edges of his message, to make it more palatable to a broader audience, while in other cases he pushed Trump to take tougher positions. He flattered Trump, praising his negotiating skills and the size of his campaign crowds.

–

In the December interview, Bannon presented the problems of climate change and the Islamic State as a binary option — offering Trump, in effect, the choice of fighting one or the other.

“Do you agree with the pope and President Obama that [climate change] is absolutely a path to global suicide, if specific deals are not cut in Paris, versus focusing on radical Islam?” Bannon asked, referring to the negotiations that eventually led to a global climate agreement in Paris last year.

Trump said that what other people considered to be climate change was probably just weather. Radical Islam should be the focus.

“We are fools,” Trump said, meaning the Obama administration.