Prince Charles Warns Climate Change Deniers Will 'Test World To Destruction' By 'Sticking Their Head In The Sand'

Evening Standard - Chloe Chaplain

Climate change: Prince Charles delivering a speech on Forests in 2015 AFP/Getty Images

Prince Charles has warned climate change deniers will "test our world to destruction" unless action is taken to cut pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
The Prince of Wales said evidence of change to the global climate is inescapable and the situation "so serious that we cannot look away or stick our heads into the sand".
Shrinking ice caps, the migrant crisis and conflicts are just some of the disasters being fuelled by man-made climate change, he said.
The passionate campaigner issued the appeal as environmentalists raised concerns over the United States' commitment to cutting emissions under Donald Trump's administration.

Donald Trump: The President has previously said that he believes climate change is a hoax (AP)

The new president, who once said climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese to undermine the American economy, is expected to swiftly rewrite US energy policy and undo regulations including restrictions on oil drilling and coal mining.
In contrast Charles praised China, home to some of the most polluted cities in the world, for providing "strong leadership" in showing how quickly technology can be adopted to tackle the problem.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Charles said the world can no longer afford to dispute the hard facts or treat climate change as a "matter of opinion".

Climate change: Prince Charles wrote the book with Emily Shuckburgh, a Cambridge University climate scientist, left, and Tony Juniper, a former Friends of the Earth director (AP)

"We can take the scientific evidence and act accordingly, or we can find ways to remain unconvinced that robust and immediate action is necessary," he wrote.
"The problem with the latter choice is that we will continue to test our world to destruction until we finally have the 'evidence' to show that its viability and habitability have been destroyed.
"And by the time we come to our senses, it is likely be too late to do anything about it."
A 20-fold increase in the use of energy since the industrial revolution has led to a dramatic rise in carbon emissions that are causing "alarming" changes in the natural world, Charles said.
Evidence from satellites and other observations demonstrates the retreat of glaciers around the world, diminishing water supplies in South Asia, the demise of sea ice in the Arctic and the death of coral reefs, the Prince explained.
Charles also cited the "numerous" records that are being broken by extreme weather around the world, describing flooding in particular as "one of the most terrible events".
"It is leading to a decline in some wildlife species, threatens food and water supplies and can be a contributing factor for the migration of people.
"These effects can in turn exacerbate political tensions and help fuel conflict," he wrote.
The Prince dismissed suggestions by some scientists that there has been a "pause" in global warming, referring instead to data that showed 2016, 2015 and 2014, were the warmest on record.
He also rejected the criticism made by some sceptics that environmental regulations stifle development and employment, noting: "Acting now is far cheaper than picking up the pieces later."
Charles has co-authored a peer-reviewed Ladybird Expert book on the issue with a leading environmentalist and a climate scientist.
His proposals for taking on climate change range in scale from featuring global warming on weather forecasts to overhauling the economy.

Links

• Prince Charles: We must act on climate change to avoid 'potentially devastating consequences'
• Prince Charles calls for action on climate change
• Prince Charles Co-Authors Ladybird Climate Change Book
• Prince Charles pens Ladybird book on climate change
• Ladybird Books
• What Prince Charles gets wrong – and right – about climate change and conflict in Syria
• ‘Unprecedented level of cooperation’ needed to tackle climate change, says Prince Charles

Trump's 'Control-Alt-Delete' On Climate Change Policy

BBC - Matt McGrath

Amid concerns over his attitude to climate change, the new President has signed orders to push forward with two major oil pipelines. Getty Images

Are the recent actions taken by the Trump team on the issues of climate and energy the opening shots in a war on knowledge?

Or are they simply what you'd expect from a new administration of a different political hue?
Let's examine what we know.
Just after Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president, a range of information on the White House website related to climate change was moved to an Obama online archive.
The only references to rising temperatures on the new Trump White House site are a commitment to eliminate "harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan". This was President Obama's broad-based strategy to cut carbon emissions.
The brief White House document now contains a further indication of the green priorities of the new administration. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), should focus on its "essential mission of protecting our air and water".

The Twitter account of Badlands National Park has seen a number of tweets relating to climate change deleted. Getty Images

While the administration figures out how to achieve that re-focus, staff at the EPA have been told to freeze all grant making, and to be quiet about it. This means that no external press releases will be issued and no social media posts will be permitted. It is unclear when these restrictions will be lifted.
Reports from news agencies indicate that the roll-back will not stop there, with climate information pages hosted by the EPA expected to be shut down.
"My guess is the web pages will be taken down, but the links and information will be available," the prominent climate sceptic and adviser to the Trump transition team, Myron Ebell, told Reuters.
"If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear," said an anonymous EPA staff member, according to reports.
The Trump team has also taken immediate steps to push forward with two controversial oil pipelines.
So are all these moves evidence of a malevolent mindset, determined to crush all this snowflake climate change chatter?
Definitely, according to Alden Meyer, a veteran climate campaigner with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"President Trump and his team are pursuing what I call a 'control-alt-delete' strategy: control the scientists in the federal agencies, alter science-based policies to fit their narrow ideological agenda, and delete scientific information from government websites," told BBC News.
"This is an across-the-board strategy that we are seeing at multiple federal agencies on a range of issues, though climate denialism is clearly the point of the spear."
Not according to White House spokesman Sean Spicer.
"I don't think it's any surprise that when there's an administration turnover, that we're going to review the policy," he said.
However the disappearance of tweets of basic climate change information from the Badlands National Park Twitter account has raised serious concerns that the Trump team is not just seeking to roll back regulation, but is also taking an ideological stand against what they might see as "warmist" propaganda

Protesters have maintained a long-term presence to stall progress on the Dakota Access Pipeline. Getty Images

Back in 2009, President Obama enacted rules that federal agencies should have scientific integrity policies, that guaranteed the rights of free speech of employees, following on from the gagging of some researchers and the altering of reports under the Bush administration.
While the current steps being taken by the Trump team may turn out to be less restrictive than feared, on this side of the pond there's a great deal of concern.
Scientists see the forthcoming visit of UK prime minister Theresa May to Washington as an opportunity to press the President to rein in his approach.
"We are beginning to see our fears realised less than a week after President Trump has taken office," said Bob Ward, from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
"I hope that the Prime Minister will challenge President Trump about this censorship and political interference in the process of gaining and sharing knowledge about climate change during their meeting on Friday."
Climate scientists in the US are also rallying to fight back.
A march on Washington by scientists is being proposed, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts have been created based on the the idea that "an American government that ignores science to pursue ideological agendas endangers the world".
Meanwhile, another national park - Golden Gate NPS - has started tweeting climate facts.

Links

• National Park Service climate change Twitter campaign spreads to other parks
• Trump Administration Orders EPA to Remove Its Climate Change Web Page
• Trump orders EPA to remove web page on climate change, says report
• President Trump Can Attack Agency Science, But Can't Delete Climate Change

This Anxiety-Inducing Video Shows More Than 100 Years Of Climate Change In 20 Seconds

Science Alert - Fiona Macdonald

NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed this week that 2016 really was the hottest year on record... again.
That might not seem so alarming - after all, climate and weather trends come and go. But the reality is that, regardless of how much the planet's temperature has changed over its 4.5 billion years of existence, it's nothing compared to what we've seen in the past century.
XKCD made that abundantly clear with this incredible infographic that takes a big-picture view of climate change throughout human history.
But a timeline is one thing - it's another thing entirely to see that average temperature creep up and creep up, year-on-year, in this stress-inducing 20-second time-lapse, released by NASA last week:


The data in the video above goes back to 1880, when NASA began collecting temperature records from its 6,300 weather stations, ship- and buoy-based observations, and Antarctic research stations.
Until around the 1970s, you can see that the temperature fluctuates much like you'd expect, with the oranges and reds reflecting warmer temperatures, and the blues showing cooler years.
But from the 1980s onwards, there's very little blue left on the globe, and it's slowly covered in orange, yellow, and red, taking us right through to 2016.
The reference thermometer you can see in the top left-hand corner reflects the temperature difference (in degrees Celsius) between each year, and the mid-20th century mean - the '0' on the scale.
By the end of last year, the average temperatures around the planet were creeping up to almost 1 degrees Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than that reference point.
"2016 is remarkably the third record year in a row in this series," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies. "We don’t expect record years every year, but the ongoing long-term warming trend is clear."
As you can see in the visualisation, not all of that warming happens across the planet at the same time, thanks to weather phenomena such as El Niño or La Niña.
For example, 48 states in the US experienced 2016 as only the second hottest year on record, but the Arctic experienced its warmest year ever, with record low sea ice coverage to match.
If a video isn't really your thing, NASA also released this gif showing the year-on-year increases. If it's not moving, you can see it in action here:

Either way you look at it, we're in a period of unprecedented global warming. So we'd better learn how to cope with rising temperatures, fast.

Links

• Last time the ocean was this hot, sea levels got up to 9 metres higher
• This again? NASA just confirmed that 2016 was the hottest year on record
• The end of coal is near: China just scrapped 103 power plants
• Parts of the Northeastern US are heating up faster than the planet as a whole
• Here are all the risks of climate change in a single graph