Trump's Big CON: "Making Ignorance Great Again"

"Donald Trump just took us out of the Paris climate accord for no good reason. I don’t mean that his decision was wrong. I mean, literally, that he didn’t offer any substantive justification for that decision. Oh, he threw around a few numbers about supposed job losses, but nobody believes that he knows or cares where those numbers came from. It was just what he felt like doing.

And here’s the thing: What just happened on climate isn’t an unusual case — and Trump isn’t especially unusual for a modern Republican. For today’s G.O.P. doesn’t do substance; it doesn’t assemble evidence, or do analysis to formulate or even to justify its policy positions. Facts and hard thinking aren’t wanted, and anyone who tries to bring such things into the discussion is the enemy.

Consider another huge policy area, health care. . .

[Republicans] don’t study issues, they just decide, and attack the motives of anyone who questions their decisions. . .

On climate change, influential conservatives have for years clung to what is basically a crazy conspiracy theory — that the overwhelming scientific consensus that the earth is warming due to greenhouse-gas emissions is a hoax, somehow coordinated by thousands of researchers around the world. And at this point this is effectively the mainstream Republican position.

Do G.O.P. leaders really think this conspiracy theory is true? The answer, surely, is that they don’t care. Truth, as something that exists apart from and in possible opposition to political convenience, is no longer part of their philosophical universe. . .

And as health care and climate go, so goes everything else. Can you think of any major policy area where the G.O.P. hasn’t gone post-truth? Take budgeting, . . .

The president, backed by his party, is talking nonsense, destroying American credibility day by day. But hey, stocks are up, so what’s the problem?

Well, bear in mind that so far Trump hasn’t faced a single crisis not of his own making. As George Orwell noted many years ago in his essay 'In Front of Your Nose,' people can indeed talk nonsense for a very long time, without paying an obvious price. But 'sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.' Now there’s a happy thought."

Read The New York Times, Making Ignorance Great Again.

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Climate Change Edition

UPDATE III: Trump's decision "was partly driven by selfish political motives. . . Trump seems to realize how much trouble he is in from the metastasizing Russia story. So he sought to appeal to his political base, shrunken though it is, by re-embracing his 'nationalist' side. He said he’d pull out of the Paris agreement and, by God, he did it! Doesn’t that make him look strong?"

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s diplomacy of narcissism only makes him look weak.

UPDATE II:  "There was no need for President Trump to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement to achieve his goal of overturning the Obama administration’s global warming policy. This had already occurred through court rulings and executive orders, which effectively halted higher vehicle fuel economy standards (up to 54.5 miles per gallon) and ended the Clean Power Plan program, which pushed electric utilities to shift away from coal. Moreover, national commitments to slash emissions made in Paris are voluntary. Countries can modify or ignore them. There is no enforcement or penalty for missing targets. . .

There was little, if any, loss of national sovereignty. The Trump administration could have accepted what it liked (presumably, cheap natural gas with lower CO2?emissions) and rejected what it didn’t (say, the tougher vehicle fuel mileage standards). To make the same point slightly differently: Trump’s actions were mostly symbolic and political. They were grandstanding, intended to impress his core supporters."

Read the Washington Post, Trump ignores the messy reality of global warming — and makes it all about him.

UPDATE:  Did you enjoy the show?

The bill comes due in a generation or two.

Of course it was a quintessential Donald show, "frequently relied on dubious facts and unbalanced claims to make his case that the agreement would hurt the U.S. economy. Notably, he only looked at one side of the scale — claiming the agreement left the United States at a competitive disadvantage, harming U.S. industries. But he often ignored the benefits that could come from tackling climate change, including potential green jobs.

Trump also suggested that the United States was treated unfairly under the agreement. But each of the nations signing the agreement agreed to help lower emissions, based on plans they submitted. So the U.S. target was set by the Obama administration.

The plans are not legally binding, but developing and developed countries are treated differently because developed countries, on a per capita basis, often produce more greenhouse gases than developing countries."

Read the Washington Post, Fact-checking President Trump’s claims on the Paris climate change deal.

Read also the Washington Post, Trump's Paris speech needs a serious fact check.

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump

I will be announcing my decision on Paris Accord, Thursday at 3:00 P.M.  The White House Rose Garden.  MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

6:05 PM - 31 May 2017

The Republi-CON 'Mini Ice Age" Myth

Sunspot activity  have been observed and recorded for at least 400 year.

"Yes, numbers of sunspots can vary by that much [60%] or even more on an 11-year cycle, but the sun’s output—the total amount of energy we get—is extremely stable and only changes by about 0.1 percent, even in extreme sunspot cycles like the one [recently predicted in 2030] . . .

Past research suggests that an extreme decline in solar activity would lead to a shift of just 0.16 degrees Celsius globally—and even that is erased once a more typical solar cycle resumes in a few decades. . .

No matter what the sun does over the next century, we are not heading in to a new ice age. Why am I so sure about that? It may have something to do with the 110 million tons of carbon dioxide humanity is pumping into the atmosphere every single day. The resulting change to our global climate system is so huge, it overwhelms all natural atmospheric forces, including the sun. There is no other plausible explanation for global warming except us."

Read Slate, No, the Earth Is Not Heading for a "Mini Ice Age".

Read also, the Washington Post, News about an imminent 'mini ice age' is trending — but it’s not true.

Luther For President in 2016

"The White House Correspondents' Dinner has become a strange event. It is, ostensibly, an evening when the president and the press can come together to share a few lighthearted laughs. But it's evolved into a recital of brutal truths — albeit one neither side ever really admits happened.

The joke of President Obama's performance on Saturday was that he wasn't joking. Everyone just had to pretend he was. Take this section, from the official White House transcript:

After the midterm elections, my advisors asked me, "Mr. President, do you have a bucket list?" And I said, "Well, I have something that rhymes with bucket list.’" (Laughter and applause.)

Take executive action on immigration? Bucket. (Laughter.) New climate regulations? Bucket. It’s the right thing to do. (Laughter and applause.)

The tip-off there is, "It's the right thing to do." That's not a joke. That's Obama's actual justification for the aggressive executive actions of his second term — "fuck it, it's the right thing to do." But the norms of politics are such that he typically has to frame his actions as routine, dull, even necessary. He has to search for precedent and downplay the consequences.

It's only on the evening of the White House Correspondents' Dinner when he can say what everyone already knows: his actions are huge, they are controversial, they push the norms of American politics, but fuck it, at a moment when American politics seems increasingly broken, Obama has decided to just go ahead and do what he thinks is right.

Then there was this line:

A few weeks ago, Dick Cheney says he thinks I’m the worst President of his lifetime. Which is interesting, because I think Dick Cheney is the worst President of my lifetime. (Laughter and applause.) It’s quite a coincidence.

It's funny, sure. But he's not kidding. It's just the thing Obama can't usually say. The humor is in the shock of him actually saying it.

But the place where Obama stopped being polite and started getting real was when he brought out Luther, his personal anger translator. This was, itself, a way of giving up the game. The Luther joke comes from the Comedy Central sketch show Key and Peele, and the point of it is that Obama, as the first black president, is not allowed to express his anger, as America is terrified of angry black men. And so he's got Luther — the angry black man who can say what he can't. . .

There are no jokes there. There's just Obama saying what he has to say and Luther saying what Obama actually believes.

And what Obama believes is that the press is often sensational, trivial, and fearmongering. He thinks they hype negative stories for weeks on end and then refuse to admit their mistake when the horror fizzles. He thinks he gets the blame for catastrophes but little credit for solutions. He thinks the media has a deep bias toward negative stories (which, of course, we do).

But if Obama is annoyed at the press, he is appalled at Republicans who deny climate change — and are trying to block him from taking action to stop climate change. Obama believes global warming a generational threat, and so when he sees James Inhofe, the chair of the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works, throwing snowballs on the chamber's floor, well, his thoughts on that would likely be seen as unpresidential if he gave them voice."

Read Vox, The joke was that Obama wasn’t joking. 

The 2016 Republi-CON Primaries -- Time to Pledge Allegiance to Charlatans and Cranks

UPDATE II:  "The 2016 Republican candidates can already be sorted into roles that tell us a lot about their chances of winning the nomination."

Read The New York Times, The G.O.P Presidential Field Looks Chaotic. Its Not., which reviews the 'invisible primary leaders, mainstream alternatives, and factional favorites.'

UPDATE:  The Republi-con's first candidate is "a guy with a big mouth and no results . . . [h]e oversimplifies, he exaggerates ... he doesn't provide leadership and he has no real experience," and that according to his party comrade.

Let the circus begin!

Read CNN, GOP Rep. Peter King dismisses Ted Cruz as 'carnival barker'.  

And who will be next, possibly a deadbeat "publicity-hound billionaire and reality TV host"?  We can only hope.

"[W]hat does it say about the current state of the G.O.P. that discussion of economic policy is now monopolized by people who have been wrong about everything, have learned nothing from the experience, and can’t even get their numbers straight?

The answer, I’d suggest, runs deeper than economic doctrine. Across the board, the modern American right seems to have abandoned the idea that there is an objective reality out there, even if it’s not what your prejudices say should be happening. What are you going to believe, right-wing doctrine or your own lying eyes? These days, the doctrine wins.

Look at another issue, health reform. Before the Affordable Care Act went into effect, conservatives predicted disaster: health costs would soar, the deficit would explode, more people would lose insurance than gain it. They were wrong on all counts. But, in their rhetoric, even in the alleged facts (none of them true) people like Mr. Moore put in their articles, they simply ignore this reality. Reading them, you’d think that the dismal failure they wrongly predicted had actually happened.

Then there’s foreign policy. This week Jeb Bush tried to demonstrate his chops in that area, unveiling his team of expert advisers — who are, sure enough, the very people who insisted that the Iraqis would welcome us as liberators.

And don’t get me started on climate change.

Along with this denial of reality comes an absence of personal accountability. If anything, alleged experts seem to get points by showing that they’re willing to keep saying the same things no matter how embarrassingly wrong they’ve been in the past.

But let’s go back to those economic charlatans and cranks: Clearly, failure has only made them stronger, and now they are political kingmakers. Be very, very afraid."

Read The New York Times, Cranking Up for 2016.

As noted before, Republi-cons never let reality spoil a good delusion.

The Republi-CON 'January 2014 Disproves Global Warming' Myth

UPDATE III:  So, because it is cold outside, global warming is a hoax.

"As Stephen Colbert wrote, brilliantly mocking this kind of ridiculosity, "Global warming isn't real because I was cold today! Also great news: World hunger is over because I just ate.'

Read Slate, Ted Cruz Goes Full Orwell.

UPDATE II:  Read USA Today, Earth had warmest winter on record.

Read also, So You Don't Believe in Global Warming, Then Explain What Happens to 35 Gigatons of CO2 Each Year.  

UPDATE:  "The climate numbers are in from January and, on a global perspective, it actually wasn’t that cold at all.

In fact, for the 347th month in a row, planet Earth was downright toasty.

Yep, the last month in which Earth’s average temperature was below the 20th-century average was during the Reagan administration. February 1985, to be exact: 'I Want to Know What Love Is' by Foreigner was the No. 1 song in the country. Sally Field had just been nominated for best actress for Places in the Heart. The author of this piece celebrated his fourth birthday party. That’s a long time for a planet to run a fever.

Since that moment 29 years ago, there’s been an unbroken stretch of planetary warmth. Almost as if the entire globe was warming. Hey, maybe we can call it 'global warming'".

Read Slate, Don't Let the Snow Fool You. January Wasn't Cold at All.  

In the continental U.S, the "average temperature of the U.S. was just 0.07°F below the 1981-2010 average according to NCDC. . .

[In fact Alaska] had its 3rd-warmest January, with temperatures 14.8°F above average. During a late January warm spell, the daily high reached 62°F in Port Alsworth, tying the highest January temperature recorded in the state."

Read Climate Central, Never-Ending Winter? Nah, January in U.S. Was Average.  

So You Don't Believe in Global Warming, Then Explain What Happens to 35 Gigatons of CO2 Each Year

UPDATE X:  "[Guess] what the more accurate, current number for the human-made CO2 pollution put into the air every year is?

40 billion tons."

Read Slate, Did I Say 30 Billion Tons of CO2 a Year? I Meant 40.

UPDATE IX:  "In 2012, National Science Board member James Lawrence Powell investigated peer-reviewed literature published about climate change and found that out of 13,950 articles, 13,926 supported the reality of global warming. Despite a lot of sound and fury from the denial machine, deniers have not really been able to come up with a coherent argument against a consensus. The same is true for a somewhat different study that showed a 97 percent consensus among climate scientists supporting both the reality of global warming and the fact that human emissions are behind it.

Powell recently finished another such investigation, this time looking at peer-reviewed articles published between November 2012 and December 2013. Out of 2,258 articles (with 9,136 authors), how many do you think explicitly rejected human-driven global warming? Go on, guess!

One. Yes, one. . .

If you listen to Fox News, or right-wing radio, or read the denier blogs, you’d have to think climate scientists were complete idiots to miss how fake global warming is. Yet despite this incredibly obvious hoax, no one ever publishes evidence exposing it. Mind you, scientists are a contrary lot. If there were solid evidence that global warming didn’t exist, or that CO2 emissions weren’t the culprit, there would be papers in the journals about it. Lots of them."

Read Slate, The Very, Very Thin Wedge of Denial.  

UPDATE VIII:  That's 35 gigatons of CO2 each year "[f]or the roughly 7.2 billion people who live on Earth today. . . 

A recent United Nations analysis of world population trends indicates global population growth shows no signs of slowing, with current projections estimating a staggering 11 billion people could inhabit the planet by the year 2100, faster growth than previously anticipated. The majority of this surge in population is likely to occur in sub-Saharan Africa, with the population of Nigeria expected to surpass that of theUnited States before 2050, according to the statistical analysis."

Read Discovery News, What 11 Billion People Mean for Climate Change.

And overpopulation is not the only problem, it is also over-consumption.

What happens as those 'other' people start "eating imported Argentinian beef. Drinking wine from Australia. Playing Wii on flat-screen televisions. Driving 4,000-pound sport utility vehicles. Driving 1,400-pound compact cars. Driving at all. Using toasters. Shopping for new jeans. Leaving the lights on in more than one room at a time (not an option). Turning on a heater. Turning on an air conditioner. Taking a bath. Urinating into drinking water. Eating corn. Eating beef at all, Argentinian or otherwise. Deciding which pair of shoes to wear. Flying on airplanes. Using toothpicks. . .

On a carbon scale, one American equals about 20 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, and 250 Ethiopians."

Read Slate, Is Overpopulation Really the Problem?

UPDATE VII:  "Here’s a finding that shouldn’t be all that surprising: Since 1991, roughly 97 percent of all published scientific papers that take a position on the question agree that humans are warming the planet."

Read the Washington Post, Scientists agree on climate change. So why doesn’t everyone else?

UPDATE VI:  "The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea. . .

From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages, to about 280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked.

For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future."

Read The New York Times, Carbon Dioxide Level Passes Long-Feared Milestone. 

UPDATE V:  "For decades now, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have higher than at any point in the last 800,000 years — a fact scientists discovered by analyzing ancient air bubbles trapped in ice cores:

In fact, even that’s probably an understatement. Recent studies have estimated that current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are at their highest levels since the Pliocene, the geologic era between five million and three million years ago. "

Read the Washington Post, Carbon-dioxide levels are at their highest point in at least 800,000 years.  

UPDATE IV:  'Droughts, wildfires, and unprecedented heat waves,' might be one explanation for 35 gigatons of CO2 each year.  Read the Washington Post, Odds of record U.S. heat being a random event: 1 in 1.6 million. 

UPDATE III: "Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. Remember, this was not long after the Climategate affair had erupted, at a time when skeptics were griping that climatologists had based their claims on faulty temperature data.

Muller’s stated aims were simple. He and his team would scour and re-analyze the climate data, putting all their calculations and methods online. Skeptics cheered the effort. . . The Charles G. Koch Foundation even gave Muller’s project $150,000 — and the Koch brothers, recall, are hardly fans of mainstream climate science.

So what are the end results? Muller’s team appears to have confirmed the basic tenets of climate science. Back in March, Muller told the House Science and Technology Committee that, contrary to what he expected, the existing temperature data was “excellent.” He went on: “We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.” And, today, the BEST team has released a flurry of new papers that confirm that the planet is getting hotter. As the team’s two-page summary flatly concludes, “Global warming is real.”Here’s a chart comparing their findings with existing data:"



Read the Washington Post, A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data.


UPDATE II: Wonder what the deniers have to say about this? Read the Chicago Tribune, Stifling heat grips half U.S., some records set.

And take a look at the drought map, "the United States looks as if it has been set on fire and scorched at the bottom edge. Scorched is how much of the Southeast and Southwest feel, in the midst of a drought that is the most extreme since the 1950s and possibly since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The government has classified much of this drought as D4, which means exceptional. The outlook through late September shows possible improvement in some places, but in most of Texas, Oklahoma, southern Arkansas, and northern Louisiana and Mississippi the drought is expected to worsen."

I guess someone should ask Pastor Truthiness (who likes to attribute horrible events to God's wrath over any idea, person, or group he hates) why God is punishing the Bible Belt. Could it be a sign of his displeasure with Pastor Truthiness' sermon's of hate and his support of Middle East dictators?


UPDATE: Maybe that 35 gigatons of CO2 is causing global warming after all. Prof. Richard Muller, a UC Berkeley physicist who has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation . . . [aimed at showing] researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data. . . [and] hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth were surprised when "Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend 'very similar to that reported by the prior groups.'" Read the Los Angeles Times, Critics' review unexpectedly supports scientific consensus on global warming.

"Every year, human activity emits about 35 gigatons of CO2 (the most important greenhouse gas). Of that, 85% comes from fossil fuel burning. To a lot of people, that doesn't mean much -- who goes to the store and buys a gigaton of carrots? For a sense of perspective, a gigaton is about twice the mass of all people on earth, so 35 gigatons is about 70 times the weight of humanity. Every year, humans put that in the atmosphere, and 85% of that is power. Large actions, across whole nations and whole economies, are required to move the needle." Read The Atlantic, Why It's Hard to Talk About Energy.

A Republican Meteorologist on Republi-CON Truthiness About Global Warming

"Climate science shows that over a long period of time, the statistics have changed. Things that used to happen a lot, like consistent winter snow cover, are happening less reliably. Things that happened every now and then, like droughts and wildfires, are happening more reliably. And things that almost never happened -- such as the 15,000 new U.S. temperature records in March -- sometimes now do occur. And they can’t be explained with purely meteorological reasoning.

The changes we’re seeing, far more than I can list here, seem like an accumulation of coincidences. Pieced together, reveal the full puzzle: There’s more heat and moisture in the atmosphere, and our emissions are largely responsible for keeping it there.

The millennium’s first decade was the warmest on record and included nine of the 10 hottest years. Greenhouse gas levels are at their highest in 800,000 years. Less heat is escaping the top of the atmosphere in the wavelengths of greenhouse gases. For the first time, scientists have recorded both hemispheres are warming – and the global temperature spike can’t be linked to an astronomical trigger, such as solar variability. Great Lakes peak ice has seen a 71 percent drop since 1973. Winters are shorter. Lakes melt earlier. Plants are moving north.

Worldwide, 95% of land-based glaciers are losing mass. September Arctic sea ice has lost 10 percent of its area every decade. Sea levels are rising. Oceans are 30 percent more acidic. Flooding and extreme storms are spiking in frequency and intensity. Last winter was the 4th warmest on record, despite the cooling influence of a La Nina phase in the Pacific.

Extremes are becoming more extreme. And none of it has anything to do with Al Gore. . .

How did so much of the Republican Party enter perpetual denial? We’ve turned climate science into a bizarre litmus test for conservatism. To pretend that heat-trapping gases can be waved away with a nod and a smirk is political fairytale. No harm. No foul. Keep drilling.

I’m a Christian and ultimately come to Christ through faith. With climate change no faith is required. There is a large and growing body of evidence. The way nature works applies the same to Republican and Democrat, Christian and Muslim, animal, tree and stone. Why do people who profess to love and follow God roll their eyes? Luke 16:2 says "Man has been appointed as a steward for the management of God’s property, and ultimately he will give account for his stewardship."

Read Bloomberg Businessweek, Climate Change Has Nothing to Do With Al Gore.

And then explain what happens to 35 gigatons of CO2 each year.  

Cap and Trade and Save

"Criticism of cap-and-trade programs often centers on the costs they impose on electric power companies and their consumers. But as I report in Friday’s Times, New York and other Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states that are trying out such a system have found that those costs can be offset by energy efficiency measures paid for by the cap-and-trade program itself."

Read The New York Times, Reaping a Bonus From Cap-and-Trade.

And if you don't believe in global warming, then explain what happens to 35 gigatons of CO2 each year.