Donald Trump's Climate Denial Gets More Ridiculous by the Day

Discussion in 'Politics' started by futurecurrents, Mar 14, 2019.

  1. Once upon a time, Donald Trump accepted the scientific reality that human activity, primarily burning fossil fuels, causes climate change. He signed on to an ad calling on President Obama to take action on climate change. That was 2009. In the decade since, Trump’s Fox News fixation has led him down a steep path of dangerous denial, culminating in his quoting of an industry PR flack who appeared on Fox and Friends to make some profoundly ridiculous claims.

    Patrick Moore, who falsely claims to be a co-founder of Greenpeace, claimed that the “climate crisis” is “Fake Science” and that “carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.”

    First off, the people who call Puerto Rico home, or Paradise, California, or any number of cities and towns across the country and indeed the planet who have felt the already devastating impacts of climate change would beg to differ. Climate change is already making the heat waves that cause heat strokes worse. It’s already raised sea levels, making coastal flooding more common and problematic. It’s already doubled the area burned by wildfires in the past few decades. My own research, in fact, shows that state-of-the-art climate models, if anything, are underestimating the impact climate change is having on extreme weather events.

    Unlike Moore, I’m actually a climate scientist. But even if I weren’t, these findings are readily apparent in even a cursory reading of the National Climate Assessment. That’s the major climate report Trump’s own administration released last year, and it goes into detail about how climate change is already hurting American communities from coast to coast.

    Those details aren’t even necessary to point out how ludicrous Moore’s other suggestion is, that carbon dioxide is “the main building block of all life.” While we are certainly carbon-based lifeforms, it is proteins and nucleic acid, not carbon dioxide, that are the building blocks. In fact, it is classified as a deadly toxin at high concentrations. I’d challenge Moore to prove he believes what he’s saying by trying to survive on carbon dioxide.

    It wouldn’t be the first time someone challenged Moore to prove he means what he says. Back in 2015 Moore told an interviewer that one of Monsanto’s pesticides (Roundup) is not only not cancer-causing, but in fact that “you could drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you.” When the interviewer offered some to Moore to drink, and prove his point, Moore of course became agitated and angry and stormed out in a huff.

    This is the sort of person Trump is apparently turning to for advice. A man who has spent decades doing the industry’s dirty work while trading off a youthful involvement in Greenpeace. A man who, in response to Trump, tweeted to indicate that he, too was in DC, attending a meeting of William Happer’s CO2 coalition, a fossil-fuel funded pro-pollution advocacy organization.

    William Happer is also the man chosen by Trump to potentially lead a panel to conduct an “adversarial” review of climate science. Happer is a former physics professor who was caught in a sting in 2015 agreeing to take money from unknown oil and gas interests in exchange for writing a report full of climate denial. As to the quality of Happer’s climate science, well that’s hard to speak to because he doesn’t actually do any climate science, and never has. What he has done, though, is say insane (and offensive) things, like comparing the treatment of carbon dioxide to the “demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”

    That’s the quality of advice Trump is seeking.

    It’s one thing for Fox’s primary audience, with their failing faculties and dulled critical thinking skills, to be suckered in by their constant barrage of alternative facts and persuasive fictions. It’s quite another for the supposed leader of the free world, who has a thousand scientists at his disposal, to embrace such obviously unscientific claims with such conviction.

    Fortunately, some in his party appear to now recognize that outright denial of human-caused climate change has no place in honest political discourse and they seem to be embracing a pivot to the more worthy debate over what we do to address it. Let us encourage this shift and allow climate change deniers to become increasingly isolated as the fringe, irrelevant relic that they are.

    Michael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent book, with Tom Toles, is The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (Columbia University Press, 2016.)
     
  2. Tsing Tao

    Tsing Tao


    But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick (in Michael Mann's model). In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

    But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

    Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
    This was a funny read. To be fair, the article supports climate change but not the reasons driving it.
     
    traderob and Scataphagos like this.
  3. [​IMG]

    Umm, no, not even close. LOL This is old and disproven by it's own author. Richard Muller admits he was wrong and has actually confirmed the hockey stick.

    Where do you read this shit? This is why the right is so ignorant and deluded about AGW. Fake news-climate disinformation like this.




    In October 2011, Muller wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, concerning his work with the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project:

    When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

    Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.[18]
     
    Last edited: Mar 14, 2019
  4. Tsing Tao

    Tsing Tao

    Where in that text does Muller correct his previous statement about the hockey stick in Mann's model? I only ask because it isn't in any of the text you posted. And you didn't provide any link to the original OP ed. Just a link to (and this is funny) a Wiki article telling us what the Wall Street Journal is and what the Berkeley project is. Thanks for that, by the way. Informative.

    I had been wondering for some time now what this Wall Street Journal really was and finally - FINALLY - someone posted a wiki article on it.
     

  5. Like I said, you believe fake news, refuse to find the real truth and continue to stay ignorant and deluded. Typical righty. Muller agrees that the hockey stick which Man originally proposed is correct. He says as much as I posted above. Try reading.

    "Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work,"

    those prior groups produced the data below which resulted in the hockey stick graph , which Muller has confirmed is correct.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Mar 14, 2019
  6. Tsing Tao

    Tsing Tao

    Where does he say it? In the video you posted after my reply was posted? Because it isn't in the text and I'd rather not waste time watching some 5 minute video you drudged up to make a point that is never made.
     
  7. Tsing Tao

    Tsing Tao

    You know, conversations are a bit harder to have when you keep editing and adding comments and stuff after someone has already replied. Just sayin'.

    The one quote you posted:

    "Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work,"

    Which has no link for context (other than Wikipedia's footnote) and in no way references Mull in anything, anywhere, that you posted does not mean he is contradicting what he specifically said about Mull's post in my commentary provided (and link).

    Would you like to go for the consolation round?
     
  8. I'm done. Look it up. Mann did the hockey stick. Muller confirmed the numbers of the hockey stick.
     
  9. Tsing Tao

    Tsing Tao

    So no source. Just your claim.

    Got it.
     
  10. Cuddles

    Cuddles

    https://theweek.com/speedreads/888638/trump-now-says-climate-change-serious-not-hoax

    Trump now says climate change is 'serious' and not 'a hoax'

    Trump has long been a climate change denier, calling global warming "a hoax" created "by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." When asked by reporters on Thursday if he still believes climate change isn't real, Trump said, "No, no. Not all all. Nothing's a hoax. ... It's a very serious subject. The environment is very important to me. I'm a big believer in that word, the environment. ... I want clean air, I want clean water. I also want jobs, though."
     
    #10     Jan 10, 2020