Lethal Heating: 02/03/17

03/02/2017

World-Leading Climate Change Scientist Calls For 'Rebellion' Against Donald Trump

The Independent - Ian Johnston

Professor Michael Mann says the US is ‘firmly back in the madhouse’ as new president launches ‘dizzying, ongoing assault on science’

Professor Michael Mann says the US is ‘back in the madhouse’ over climate science denial AP

One of the world’s leading climatologists is calling for a “rebellion” by scientists against Donald Trump.
Professor Michael Mann, whose work was key in demonstrating that global temperatures had risen dramatically because of human activity, said academics and researchers were usually reluctant to take to the streets in protests.
But Mr Trump’s “assault on science” meant the US was “firmly back in the madhouse” of climate science denial, he said, and required a response from the community.
The new US President dismissed climate change as a Chinese hoax before the US election and since then has appointed a string of people with links to the fossil fuel industry and a track record of global warming scepticism to senior positions in his administration.
And, as Professor Mann, of Pennsylvania State University, wrote in an article for The Hill website, Mr Trump has also “barred the Environmental Protection Agency from publishing studies or data prior to review by political appointees and has told them to remove mention of climate change from their website”.
“The White House’s own climate webpage has been disappeared for good measure,” he added.
“It is difficult to keep up with this dizzying ongoing assault on science.”
Following the anti-Trump Women’s Marches around the world, there are now plans for a March for Science in Washington and other places next month.
“We scientists are, in general, a reticent lot who would much rather spend our time in the lab, out in the field, teaching and doing research,” Professor Mann wrote.
“It is only the most unusual of circumstances that gets us marching in the streets.
“Trump’s assault on science is just such a circumstance. And we are seeing a rebellion continue to mount.”
Professor Mann recently published a book called The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy.
He said at the time he was criticised by other “well-meaning fellow climate scientists” for dignifying denial by writing about it.
But he said the book “couldn’t seem any more prophetic” following Mr Trump’s election.
It meant that someone with views largely dismissed by politicians and scientists all over the world is now one of the most powerful people on the planet.
“The era of climate change denial is over. Rejection of the unequivocal scientific evidence that carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are warming the planet and changing our climate is no longer socially acceptable,” Professor Mann said.
“Only the most fringe of politicians now disputes the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and human-caused, and they are largely ignored.”

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EU Looks To China On Climate Change As US Signals Retreat

Voice of America - Reuters

Myron Ebell, who leads U.S. President Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency's transition team, holds a speech at the Solvay library in Brussels, Belgium. Feb. 1, 2017.

BRUSSELS — Faced with a U.S. retreat from international efforts to tackle climate change, European Union officials are looking to China, fearing a leadership vacuum will embolden those within the bloc seeking to slow the fight against global warming. While U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to act on campaign pledges to pull out of the 2015 Paris accord to cut greenhouse gas emissions, his swift action in other areas has sparked sharp words from usually measured EU bureaucrats.
When Trump's former environment adviser, until the president's inauguration this month, took to a stage in Brussels on Wednesday and called climate experts "urban imperialists," a rebuke from Britain's former energy minister drew applause from the crowd packed with EU officials.

Brexit
But with fault lines over Brexit, dependence on Russian energy and protecting industry threatening the bloc's own common policy, some EU diplomats worry Europe is too weak to lead on its own in tackling climate change.
Instead, they are pinning their hopes on China, concerned that without the backing of the world's second-biggest economy support for the global pact to avert droughts, rising seas and other affects of climate change will flounder.

An environmental activist holds a banner reading "resist" while attending a speech by Myron Ebell, left, who leads U.S. President Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency's transition team, in Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 1, 2017.

"Can we just fill the gap? No because we will be too fragmented and too inward looking," one EU official, involved in climate talks, told Reuters. "Europe will now be looking to China to make sure that it is not alone."
The EU's top climate diplomat Miguel Arias Canete will travel to Beijing at the end of March, EU sources said. Offering EU expertise on its plans to build a "cap-and-trade" system is one area officials see for expanded cooperation.
Enticed by huge investments in solar and wind power in economies such as China and India, Germany, Britain and France are seeking closer ties to gain a share of the business.
But hurdles stand in the way of an EU clean energy alliance with China after the two sides narrowly averted a trade war in 2013 over EU allegations of solar panel dumping by China. "We need to embrace the fact that China has invested very heavily in clean energy," Gregory Barker, climate change minister to former British Prime Minister David Cameron, told Reuters on the sidelines the environment conference in Brussels organized by conservative politicians.
"If America won't lead then it's clear that China will."

Climate change pact
China's partnership with former U.S. President Barack Obama's administration helped get nearly 200 countries to support the Paris climate change pact in 2015.
That agreement, which looks to limit the rise in average global temperature to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels, entered into force late last year, binding nations that ratified to draft national plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But despite Beijing's green policy drive, propelled by domestic anger over smog and the environmental devastation wrought by rapid economic growth, some EU officials are skeptical it can pull as much weight as the United States on climate issues.
"We will make a lot of noises [about allying with China], but let's be honest we lost an ally - a major one," a senior EU energy diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "China's biggest issues are domestic. ... It's clean water, air and food."

Environmental activists protest Myron Ebell, who leads U.S. President Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency's transition team, at the Solvay library in Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 1, 2017.

When the United States last took a step back on climate diplomacy, giving up on the 1997 Kyoto protocol on CO2 emissions under former U.S. President George W. Bush, Europe assumed leadership of global negotiations to cap planet warming.
It is among the first now to legislate on how to spread the burden among its member nations of its promise to cut emissions by 40 percent by 2030.
Talks are tough, though, particularly for coal-dependent nations such as Poland, and EU officials fear climate skepticism in the Trump administration may slow efforts.
"This may give the perfect excuse to a number of countries like Poland," another EU official said. "The deal has always been that we move when the big players [the United States and China] move."

Dent, not destroy
Others are more sanguine, saying a U.S. retreat would dent, but not destroy, the current global momentum in tackling climate change - not least because cities, businesses and civil society are driving for change as much as governments.
"If the U.S. doesn't play the game, that's a problem. But it's a trade problem," an EU diplomat said. "Maybe European business will win out."
To date, there has been no sign that any other country is preparing to pull out of the Paris agreement. Days after Trump's election, almost 200 nations at the Marrakesh annual U.N. talks agreed a declaration saying that tackling climate change was an "urgent duty."

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Scientists Investigate Cookstoves as Source of Global Pollution

Climate Change Could Increase Oceanic Mercury

Study: Restoring Wetlands Could Help Fix Climate Change

Scientists Blast Lack Of NHMRC Funding On Climate

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Australia's premier medical research funder provides almost no research into climate change impacts on health despite the issue providing "a huge challenge for the health sector", a group of leading scientists say in a new paper.
The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) pioneered studies on the urgent need for research into global warming's health impacts with a 1991 report. Despite that Australia had spent less than one dollar in every $1000 on health funding to the issue since, the researchers including Nobel laureate Peter Doherty said.

Heatwaves are becoming more intense, more frequent and lasting longer in Australia, researchers say. Photo: Getty

It took until 2003 for the NHMRC to award its first project grant on the issue. "In 2016, none of the 516 funded project grants, totalling $420 million, included a climate change or heatwave focus", according to the paper published this week in Nature Climate Change.
The near total lack of medical research into climate change and health comes despite heatwaves already killing more Australians than any other natural hazard. For instance, severe heat in the days prior to the 2009 Black Saturday fires killed more than twice the 173 bushfire fatalities, said Andy Pitman, one of the authors.
"Climate change and health is an issue that's fallen through a crack", said Professor Pitman, who also heads the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science based at the University of NSW. "It's a failure of design that wasn't as apparent in the past but it's becoming more apparent as we're seeing more extremes affecting health."
On the one hand, funding under the Australian Research Council explicitly bars research into medical areas. On the other, scientists are deterred from applying to NHMRC grant panels for broad-ranging matters such as climate and health, which takes in physics, human physiology, sociology and economics, he said.

Mosquito study
The NHMRC told Fairfax Media it had provided $16.6 million in climate change research from 2000-2016, or about $1 million year.
It said it supported one project related to climate change in 2016 worth $529,896 – to begin in 2017 – for a study on the risk of chikungunya transmission – a disease spread by mosquitoes.
"The NHMRC does not generally determine the subject of research grant applications," its media unit said. "Applications are investigator-initiated and therefore based on the expertise and research interests of those applying for funding."
Professor Doherty, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Medicine, said the NHMRC's funding structure needed an overhaul.
"The perception of excellence depends a bit on who's on the review committee," Professor Doherty said. "With an area that goes across a number of sub disciplines, it's often very hard to get that review in a way that makes it seem exciting."
A national centre "with modest funding" may be the only way forward, he said.
The Nature paper noted Europe and the US had found ways to pursue research into climate and health.
A US government study in 2016 identified research priorities including: temperature-related death and illness; air quality impacts; impacts of extreme events on human health; vector-borne diseases; impacts on water-related illness; food safety, nutrition, and distribution; and mental health and wellbeing.

'Acting like invertebrates'
Fairfax Media sought comment from Greg Hunt, the new federal health minister who had overseen climate policy in one of his previous roles as environment minister.
Greens leader Richard Di Natale said the government's approach had been to save money now rather than address "one of the major health issues of this century".
"Not planning to mitigate the health impacts of a warming planet is recklessly dangerous and a failure to look after people's wellbeing," Dr Di Natale, who is also the party's health spokesman, said.
"This is a complex challenge that crosses a number of scientific fields, we need to be smarter by actively creating ways for researchers and policymakers to work together," he said.
Simon Chapman, a professor emeritus of public health at Sydney University, contrasted the near-absence of climate research with the $3.3 million allocated by the NHMRC into studying the effects of wind farms on health despite its own year-long study finding no "consistent evidence" of a problem.
"In the current climate it is hard to believe that the absence of any Targeted Call for Research on climate change and health does not reflect the NHMRC executive and board reading the political tea-leaves, and acting like invertebrates," Professor Chapman said.
"Their shameful acquiescence in indulging the crossbench-dominated Senate wind farm committee's ludicrous conclusions that harm from wind turbines needed priority research did little to inspire confidence."
Catherine King, Labor's health spokeswoman, told the Climate and Health Alliance roundtable in Canberra last year that climate and health would be a priority of the party.
"The first step is to accept the science of climate change, as well as its impact on health – unequivocally," Ms King told the gathering. "I do think it's worth noting that only one of the major parties can say that it accepts the evidence of climate change without complaint."

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