Eerily resonant for voters with functioning brainstems.
Month: January 2017
“This is a Serious Risk”: Rex Tillerson on Climate Change
In his own words, from December 2016.
While Mr. Tillerson’s Exxon has stopped funding several groups that loudly denied climate science, it still funds organizations that pursue a broader agenda of fighting measures to address climate change, including carbon taxes.
Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian, said the positions held by the company and Mr. Tillerson still constitute climate denial, but in a “clever and sophisticated” form. “It is, in my view, what makes it more concerning,” she said, “because many people don’t scratch the surface to see what lies beneath.”
Peter C. Frumhoff, the director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, characterized Exxon’s stance as, “We agree with the I.P.C.C. on climate science — except where it’s inconvenient.” The Senate hearings on Mr. Tillerson, he said, should be a public trial on Exxon’s history of studying climate science while spreading doubt about the underlying science and the company’s actions.
Some hard-line deniers of the overwhelming scientific evidence for climate change have said they, too, were uncomfortable with Mr. Tillerson’s positions on climate change, fearing he may be too soft.
Marc Morano, publisher of the site Climate Depot, said that at first he had reservations, but that he was now confident Mr. Tillerson would act in accord with Mr. Trump’s stated views on climate change.
“A deeper examination of Tillerson,” he said, “reveals a man who is not going to be a friend of the climate-change movement.”
Below, Tillerson answers a climate question in 2012. Continue reading ““This is a Serious Risk”: Rex Tillerson on Climate Change”
Coal Country Bought Trump’s Promise, but the 19th Century is Not Coming Back
Above, desperate coal country folk bought Huckster Donald Trump’s promise of a revival of 19th century technology. Now wondering if they were swindled.
And oops, Black Lung benefits tied to Obamacare.
Below, coal Baron Robert Murray agrees that coal jobs won’t come back, but shows perhaps where the coal country delusions come from. Even the Fox News host here has trouble following the crazy, as Mr Murray makes wildly incorrect claims about energy prices.
See most recent energy prices here. Note, Murray above refers to price per Kilowatt hour, prices below are per Megawatt hour, so 20 cents/kwh would be 200 dollars/mwh. Click to expand.
And yet here is Trump, by his promises at least, insisting that coal mining is going to come back with all those glorious jobs. It just isn’t I’m afraid, economics is stronger than politics here. I’ve made this point before, back in May in fact:
The third reason is the killer: economics. Fracking has made natural gas cheaper than coal for power generation. Thus new generations of power plants are going to be gas ones, not coal. And refurbs and life extensions of coal plants aren’t going to happen for the same reason. There’s just not going to be anything like the same market for thermal coal in the future.
We’re not going to use as much coal in the future and the coal that we will use isn’t going to come from the Appalachian mines. Trump simply isn’t going to bring back all those mining jobs. They’re gone, gone forever. Just like those assembly line jobs in electronics. And pining for the lost blue collar jobs isn’t going to help in the slightest. The thing to do now is to work out what other task that same labor can do.
Continue reading “Coal Country Bought Trump’s Promise, but the 19th Century is Not Coming Back”
“..to Make Simple People Change Their Vote..”. Inside the Russian Troll Machine
Above, best coverage of the most significant development in the 2016 election was from the Comedy Channel.
You wonder how it is that any news about climate is immediately swarmed by vicious clouds of trolls?
Below – dated from April 2015. Obviously relevant.
Just after 9pm each day, a long line of workers files out of 55 Savushkina Street, a modern four-storey office complex with a small sign outside that reads “Business centre”. Having spent 12 hours in the building, the workers are replaced by another large group, who will work through the night.
The nondescript building has been identified as the headquarters of Russia’s “troll army”, where hundreds of paid bloggers work round the clock to flood Russian internet forums, social networks and the comments sections of western publications with remarks praising the president, Vladimir Putin, and raging at the depravity and injustice of the west.
The Guardian spoke to two former employees of the troll enterprise, one of whom was in a department running fake blogs on the social network LiveJournal, and one who was part of a team that spammed municipal chat forums around Russia with pro-Kremlin posts. Both said they were employed unofficially and paid cash-in-hand.
They painted a picture of a work environment that was humourless and draconian, with fines for being a few minutes late or not reaching the required number of posts each day. Trolls worked in rooms of about 20 people, each controlled by three editors, who would check posts and impose fines if they found the words had been cut and pasted, or were ideologically deviant.
The LiveJournal blogger, who spent two months working at the centre until mid-March, said she was paid 45,000 roubles (£520, $790) a month, to run a number of accounts on the site. There was no contract – the only document she signed was a non-disclosure form. She was ordered not to tell her friends about the job, nor to add any of them to the social media accounts she would run under pseudonyms.
“We had to write ‘ordinary posts’, about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government is fascist, or that sort of thing,” she said.
Scrolling through one of the LiveJournal accounts she ran, the pattern is clear. There are posts about “Europe’s 20 most beautiful castles” and “signs that show you are dating the wrong girl”, interspersed with political posts about Ukraine or suggesting that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is corrupt.
Continue reading ““..to Make Simple People Change Their Vote..”. Inside the Russian Troll Machine”
Drag Race: Tesla v Ferrari
Any questions?
Making a List. Checking it Twice
This video more current than ever.
If you’re paying attention, you saw this a few weeks ago.
The Department of Energy is refusing the Trump transition team’s request to name those who have worked on climate change within the department, because of concerns about what the incoming administration will do with the names. President-elect Donald Trump has denied climate change is real.
NPR’s Jennifer Ludden tells our Newscast unit the request of such names was included in a 74-question document distributed to the agency’s workforce. Jennifer says, “The Trump team wants the names of career employees and contractors who have attended U.N. climate talks over the past five years. It also wants emails about those meetings.”
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On Tuesday, the department released a statement saying the questionnaire had “unsettled” many in its workforce, that it would “be forthcoming with all [publicly] available information” but it would withhold “any individual names.”
Not the only list Trump wanted.
Ominously.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has asked two Cabinet departments for the names of government officials working on programs to counter violent extremism, according to a document seen by Reuters and U.S. officials.
The requests to the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security involve a set of programs that seek to prevent violence by extremists of any stripe, including recruitment by militant Islamist groups within the United States and abroad.
Reuters could not determine why the Trump team asked for these names. The Trump team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump has frequently criticized President Barack Obama for not doing enough to battle Islamic militants and for his refusal to use the term “radical Islam” to describe Islamic State and other militant groups.
Some career officials said they feared the incoming administration may be looking to undo the work that the Obama administration has done on countering violent extremism.
A Solar Wall: One Way to Make Mexico Pay
PEOTUS unhappy that media is pointing out he is asking Congress/taxpayers to pay for his wall.
Jigar Shah has a modest proposal.
.. lets start with some basics. The average commercial solar panel is 2 meters by 1 meter (actually 77 inches by 39 inches). The border with Mexico is roughly 2,000 miles or about 3,200 kilometers. If you position the solar panels on the wall with one single row with the short side down, you get about 3,200,000 panels or about 1,000 MWs of solar power. According the Washington Post, the wall with Mexico could be 65 feet high (19.8 meters). So you could technically flush mount almost ten (10) solar panels onto the wall, but most likely you would only have five (5) to optimize production per solar panel.
(That) means you could put almost 5,000 MWs of solar panels on the wall. According to PVWatts, the wall would produce over 6,600,000,000 kilowatt-hours. At about six (6) cents per kilowatt-hour (typical cost of electricity from natural gas and coal plants in the USA) the electricity would be worth about $396,000,000 per year. Over the 40 year life of the solar panels, the solar panels would collect over $15,840,000,000 – not counting the tax credits already in place for solar, low cost debt from the North American Development Bank or escalating value of daytime power in Mexico.
That same Washington Post article quoted the President-elect saying that he thought the wall could be built for $12 billion. So if the power were to be sold to the Mexican people – power they desperately need – then the President-elect could actually make good on his promise to say that the Mexican people paid for the wall (as John Carney suggested). Also with 2,000 miles available, the technology sponsorship models would be endless. There is so much good technology coming out of the Department of Energy that needs to be commercialized, what better place then at the wall?
Katharine Hayhoe: Does the Bible Mention Climate Change?
My friend Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist, and an evangelical Christian. She is a great ambassador for climate science to a community that needs a little encouragement.
Dr. Hayhoe and I agree that, contrary to stereotype, one finds a great deal of spiritual and moral conviction in the science community. That spirit of constant search for truth is itself, a fundamentally spiritual quest.
Above, she takes on some fallacious arguments climate deniers use to confuse the religious faithful.
Hayhoe also appears in the video below, one of my favorite “This is Not Cool” pieces, that I presented at the American Geophysical Union in 2015 – on Climate as a Moral Issue.
Below, famous clip of congressional climate denier misusing biblical quotes. Continue reading “Katharine Hayhoe: Does the Bible Mention Climate Change?”
New Study: Atlantic Circulation Less Stable than Thought (“Gulf Stream” slowdown)
New study on behavior of Global warming’s effect on critical circulation in the Atlantic Ocean – what many laypeople think of as “the Gulf Stream”, but scientists more correctly call the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation”, or AMOC.
I produced the video (above) not long ago on a similar study by Stefan Rahmstorf, Mike Mann, and Jason Box – which looked at the possible effect of melting Greenland ice on the same circulation. The current study looks at greenhouse gases and global temps generally, but does not include Greenland melt.
Main point is, while most folks think of global warming as a long, slow process, climate change can have unexpected, paradoxical, and sudden effects, as it can cause relatively rapid changes in ocean and/or atmospheric circulation.
Spewing too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere could shut down the major ocean current that ferries warm water to the North Atlantic, new climate simulations suggest. While not as extreme as the doomsday scenario portrayed in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, such a shutdown could cause wintertime temperatures to plummet by an estimated 7 degrees Celsius or more in northwestern Europe and shift rainfall patterns across the globe.
Many previous climate simulations predicted that the Atlantic circulation would remain largely stable under future climate change. But those simulations failed to accurately portray how relatively freshwater flows between the Atlantic and Southern oceans, an important mechanism as the climate warms. After fixing that inaccuracy, Yale University climate scientist Wei Liu and colleagues set up an extreme climate scenario to test the current’s robustness. Doubling CO2concentrations in the atmosphere shuttered the Atlantic current in 300 years, the researchers’ simulation showed.
While such a rapid CO2 rise is unrealistic, the new simulation demonstrates that the current isn’t stable after all, the researchers conclude January 4 in Science Advances. “The next step is to use a more realistic warming scenario to predict what the future will look like,” Liu says.
Even with a more realistic scenario, the applicability to the real world will be hampered by a lack of direct long-term observations of the Atlantic circulation, says Gerald Meehl, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Observations help improve simulations, but such data for the Atlantic current don’t go back “for more than a decade or two,” he says.
Known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the Atlantic current is a colossal conveyor belt. It carries warm water from the South Atlantic northward along the ocean surface into the North Atlantic. Near Greenland where the current makes a U-turn, cold water sinks and flows southward into the South Atlantic. These two halves of the AMOC form a loop that keeps northwestern Europe warm and drives rainfall across the tropical Atlantic. Continue reading “New Study: Atlantic Circulation Less Stable than Thought (“Gulf Stream” slowdown)”
Fox News (Again) Trying to Shout Down the 98 Percent
For Fox News, Fake News is not a tactic, it’s a Business Model.
Fake News is, of course, not News to Climate Scientists. They’ve been dealing with it for decades.
On Fox News last night Tucker Carlson gave a bit of a seminar on the “La la la I can’t hear you” method of climate denial, as he did not want to accept and deal with the overwhelming consensus on the science of climate change, but rather badger a non-scientist about the exact source of the 98 percent figure.
For future reference, here’s a primer on what we know about the overwhelming, 150 year old science of climate change.
My friend John Cook PhD conducted perhaps the most famous survey on the issue.
John and I also discussed how another climate denier, perennial Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, misused and distorted a study to claim high levels of doubt on climate in the global science community.
Continue reading “Fox News (Again) Trying to Shout Down the 98 Percent”