Even Fox News can’t believe that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, doesn’t accept the basic scientific finding that carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to recent global warming.
To promote President Trump’s disastrous plan to gut the EPA and U.S. climate action, Pruitt has been pushing his dangerous beliefs on all the major networks.
Pruitt may have thought the Murdoch-owned network that has led the way on attacking climate science for two decades would be a friendly audience. He was wrong.
Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace thoroughly debunked Pruitt for defending his absurd claim that CO2 is not “a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”
Wallace will have none of it: “Mr. Pruitt, there are all kinds of studies that contradict you.” He quotes the conclusion of the world’s leading climate scientists in the U.N.’s 2013 assessment of the scientific literature that there’s a 95 to 100 percent chance “human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
Month: April 2017
Bill Maher: “In the old Cold War, at Least we had the White House on Our Side”
“If you think Hillary’s a bitch, try Karma.”
The Long Trail from ClimateGate to RussiaGate
Senator Mark Warner’s intro to this week’s hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee is a good primer on the twisting trail of RussiaGate, the penetration by a foreign power of the United State’s highest office.
That’s not where it began. Disinformation is as old as human civilization, but the targeting of science and the scientific method began in earnest with initiatives in the US to undermine the use of scientific information in regulating powerful corporations and their behavior. The lead industry, the tobacco industry, the chemical and energy industries, have all funded and participated in the long-term erosion of public trust in scientific knowledge – or even the notion that there can be scientific knowledge, that citizens only option is to choose from among “alternative facts”.
Senator Warner:
Russia continually sought to diminish and undermine our trust in the American media, like blurring our faith in what is true and what is not. Russian propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik successfully produced and peddled disinformation to American audiences in pursuit of Moscow’s preferred outcome. This Russian propaganda on steroids was designed to poison the national conversation in America. The Russians employed thousands of paid internet trolls and botnets to push out disinformation and fake news at a high volume, focusing this material on to your twitter and Facebook feeds and flooding our social media with misinformation. This fake news and disinformation was then hyped by the American media echo chamber and our own social media networks to reach and potentially influence millions.
Former FBI Agent Clint Watts discussed Russian activities in the election here -significant at 5:25 – he notes (this is a) “duplicate of what they do to their own population, to sow disinformation so that their own population is confused.”
The innovation of the last decade has been in using the tools of social media to widen and more precisely target these efforts, and those techniques were road-tested and perfected in the attacks on climate science that took place in 2009-10, now known as “climate gate”. Continue reading “The Long Trail from ClimateGate to RussiaGate”
Trump Budget Cuts NASA Climate Satellites, Renewable Research
While Obama was in the White House, Republicans couldn’t realize their dream of defunding science.
Now?
In his most recent weekly address, President Trump praised NASA’s “mission of exploration and discovery” and its ability to allow mankind to “look to the heavens with wonder and curiosity.” But left out of his statements was the work NASA does to peer back at our home planet and unravel its many remaining mysteries—a mission targeted for cuts in his administration’s budget outline released earlier this month.
In a budget otherwise scant on specifics, four climate-related NASA satellite missions were proposed for termination, including one already in orbit.
Those missions are aimed not only at helping scientists learn more about key parts of the climate system and how global warming is changing them, but also at practical matters such as monitoring the health of the nation’s coastal waters and providing earlier warnings of drought stress in crops.
The proposed cancellations mesh with statements made by Trump, administration officials and some members of Congress who have argued that NASA should be focused on outer space and leave the job of observing Earth to other agencies. But NASA’s unparalleled experience and expertise in developing new observational technologies and launching satellites makes it a crucial part of the Earth science enterprise, many experts say.
“I don’t see anybody else who could fill that gap,” Adam Sobel, a Columbia University climate scientist, said.
While the budget outline is not the final say, as Congress ultimately controls the purse strings, the proposed cuts are indicative of an “undeclared war on climate,” as David Titley, director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at Penn State and a retired rear admiral in the Navy, put it. Eliminating the proposed missions and other climate science funding to save even a few hundred million dollars is short-sighted, given the long tails of climate change’s expected impacts in the U.S. and around the world, several scientists said.
“I think that those are very, very short-term gains that ignore a coming threat” that will endanger American lives and the economy “and not in 20 years, but now,” Kim Cobb, a coral expert at Georgia Tech, said.
“It is shortsighted and not what made our nation great,” Gabe Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton University, said. “It is only through targeted research and sustained monitoring that we can expect to be leaders in weather and climate prediction and understanding.”
THE MISSIONS
While NASA’s overall budget of about $19 billion was cut by less than 1 percent, Earth sciences research was targeted for a larger share of the proposed cuts, losing about 5 percent of its roughly $2 billion budget. The proposed budget, the outline says, “focuses the Nation’s efforts on deep-space exploration rather than Earth-centric research.”
Continue reading “Trump Budget Cuts NASA Climate Satellites, Renewable Research”