NASA Is Defiantly Communicating Climate Change Science Despite Trump’s Doubts

Washington Post - Jason Samenow

Via NASA Climate Change’s Facebook page: “Two of the three top January temperature anomalies have been during the past two years.”

If you peruse NASA’s social media feeds dedicated to climate change, you would have no clue a new administration has taken power that has expressed doubts about the reality or seriousness of the issue.
Every day, NASA has dutifully posted updates on Twitter (@nasaclimate) and Facebook pertaining to climate change science, including some that are in direct contradiction to statements made by President Trump and some of his Cabinet picks.
Steve Cole, a NASA spokesperson, told the Capital Weather Gang the change in the administration has not altered how the agency communicates science. “We’re doing our jobs, it’s business as usual,” Cole said.
Early Thursday afternoon, the @NASAClimate account tweeted, “I want to put images right in front of people that #globalwarming is, in fact, happening,” quoting and displaying the work of aerial photographer Timo Lieber who is documenting climate-change effects in Greenland.

IMAGE

Trump has long been a global warming doubter, at one point calling it a Chinese hoax. In a November interview with the New York Times, he would only concede there may be “some connectivity” between human activity and climate change.
But on Monday, and in direct contradiction to Trump, the @NASAClimate Twitter account retweeted a scientific finding that humans are climate change’s dominant cause. “Humans are changing the climate 170 times faster than natural forces, according to a new study,” the tweet said.

At his confirmation hearing, President-elect Trump's Environmental Protection Agency administrator nominee Scott Pruitt outlined his plan for the agency. (Video: Thomas Johnson/Photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

This finding was not only at odds with Trump’s view of the issue, but also Scott Pruitt’s, his pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency. During his confirmation hearing, Pruitt waffled on the linkages between human activity and climate change, saying: “I believe the ability to measure, with precision, the degree of human activity’s impact on the climate is subject to more debate on whether the climate is changing or whether human activity contributes to it.”
NASA’s climate change website has a far less ambiguous characterization: “The vast majority of actively publishing climate scientists — 97 percent — agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change.”
On Wednesday, NASA’s climate change Facebook page highlighted the specter of “significant” damages from climate change, quoting the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

IMAGE (NASA Climate Chance Facebook page, accessed Feb. 16, 2017)

Trump, of course, has been dismissive of the scale of the problem, telling The Washington Post: “I just think we have much bigger risks.”
The Facebook post touting the risk of climate change damages then linked to NASA’s website on climate change effects. It states scientists have “high confidence” in predictions of future temperature rise. This doesn’t quite square with a statement of Rex Tillerson, now Trump’s secretary of state. Tillerson said the ability to predict the effect of increasing greenhouse gases is “very limited” during his confirmation hearing.
NASA appears unfazed by the political winds swirling around the climate change issue. It has steadfastly shared information, even when out of step with the positions of new leadership.
NASA’s active presence on social media is in stark contrast to the EPA, which hasn’t published a single tweet since Trump was inaugurated. Trump’s officials imposed a media blackout at the agency.
The EPA media blackout and the administration’s stance on climate change have worried some scientists that more drastic efforts to suppress scientific information may follow. Some scientists are even working with computer coders to back up federal online data, including NASA’s, out of fear the administration will remove it.
NASA insists none of its data has been touched.
“Availability of NASA Earth science data has not changed in recent months, nor have any Earth science data sets been taken offline,” the agency said in statement. “Since 1994, NASA has supported a full and open sharing of data from Earth science satellites, field campaigns and research.”
One does wonder whether NASA will be an enduring safe-haven for climate change science information and if it will continue to post information that contradicts the positions of administration officials. But so far, no one has stopped it.

Links

• The EPA’s social-media accounts have been silent since the inauguration
• Trump’s pick to lead Commerce Department says NOAA scientists can freely share their work
• Contrary to reports, climate change doubter Ken Haapala is not guiding NOAA
• Trump adviser proposes dismantling NASA climate research
• NASA smacks down climate change doubters in Facebook discussion

Critical Condition: Health Experts Sound The Climate Alarm

Daily Climate - Peter Dykstra

Experts paint a dire portrait of climate change’s public health impacts, but leave a little room for hope.

Al Gore. Climate Reality

ATLANTA—In a gathering impacted by presidential politics, an all-star cast of public health experts largely stuck to their own bleak script: Climate change is poised to unleash an unprecedented, global public health crisis.

Panel at the event. Climate Reality

Not even former Vice President Al Gore, who served as the day's emcee, waded into the political swamp. He presented a half-hour, health-themed version of his much-lauded slide show.
While Gore summarized the gobsmacking array of climate impacts—heat stress, water supplies, food security, mental health, respiratory and infectious diseases, allergens, and weather disasters—he left room at the end for some more convenient truths: The world, he said, is more than able to shift to a clean energy economy, reduce CO2 emissions, and blunt the worst impacts of climate change.
Harvard internist Ashish Jha discussed the climate-related spread of pathogens, and provided one of the conference’s few direct political jabs: “Walls,” he said, “will not keep these pathogens out.”
Activist and philanthropist Laura Turner Seydel gave an impassioned pitch to participate in the April 22 Scientists’ March in Washington, and to resist the anticipated science and environmental rollbacks of the Trump Administration.
But much of the day focused on overwhelmingly bad news for the world. Harvard’s Sam Myers presented potential impacts on the global food supply that go beyond the links between extreme weather and crop failure. Research shows that increased CO2 actually decreases nutrients in certain food crops, he said.
Rising temperatures, he added, encourage some forms of plant blight, and could also make the backbreaking outdoor work of food production impossible in regions like northern Africa.
Psychologist Lise Van Susteren introduced examples which she said illustrate climate change’s impacts not on the body, but on the mind. “Climate anxiety” and its sharper cousin, “climate trauma,” contribute to depression, substance abuse, violence, and more, she said.
“Destructive impacts from climate change,” she said, “will someday be treated as if they were child abuse.”
Sir Andy Haines of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tried gamely to provide an antidote to the barrage of negative news. ”Motivating people through fear, is often difficult, and can lead to cynicism,” he said. Instead, promoting the health benefits of a low-carbon economy can be a winning strategy.

"Destructive impacts from climate change will someday be treated as if they were child abuse." Lise Van Susteren 

The cost savings from those benefits will more than offset any financial hit occasioned by moving away from fossil fuels. Haines added the semi-obvious: Eschewing the car for a bike or a hike cuts emissions and increases health simultaneously.
Electric cars and bicycles, he said, cut both emissions and noise, while improved building efficiency can both reduce heating and cooling and indoor air pollution. Conversion from a heavily meat-reliant diet would provide twin benefits to health and climate.
Other panelists and speakers discussed the health impacts of adapting to a changing climate; the unique challenges of climate-related health issues in poor and minority communities; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s assistance to state and local governments on climate issues.
Healthcare advocate Gary Cohen tossed out a stat that was clearly intended to drive home the public health community’s role in climate issues: “Our addiction to fossil fuels…. is killing more people than AIDS, malaria and TB combined.”

Sir Andy Haines. Climate Reality

Cohen added “In the 21st Century we can no longer support healthy people on a sick planet.”
The conference closed with a panel on climate communication. It was mostly a primer for solid climate communication by health professionals, but one of the panelists was hardly a “usual suspect” in all things climate. Jerry Taylor is former vice president of the CATO Institute, often booked onto TV talk shows to call climate science into question. For the past few years, he’s burned former political bridges by acknowledging climate change and advocating a carbon tax. “After 20 years of wrestling with the climate bear, I lost,” he said.
Taylor’s prescription for persuading conservatives and Republicans on climate change focused on talking about risk management, and avoiding discussions of the social cost of carbon or the massive restructure of the world’s economy.

To CDC, or not to CDC
The meeting was originally announced in mid-2016 by the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After Donald Trump’s election, the CDC abruptly pulled the plug on the three-day event, citing “uncertainty” in the agency’s direction under Trump.
Several non-government groups, universities and philanthropies teamed up to salvage a one-day conference on short notice. The Carter Center’s Chapel held a capacity crowd of 340, including 40 accredited journalists.
The short notice perhaps explains the adorably generic name for the meeting: “Climate & Health Meeting.” In a surprise appearance, host and former President Jimmy Carter gave the CDC a pass for cancelling its event.
“The CDC has to be a little more careful politically,” he said. “The Carter Center doesn’t.”
Politics loomed large in one other portion of the gathering: A physician scheduled to present in Atlanta ended up doing so remotely. According to American Public Health Association President Georges Benjamin, Dr. Nick Watts had recently visited hospitals in Iran, and was denied a visa to enter the U.S.

Links

• A government website for kids scrubbed its climate warnings.
• Disappearing seagrass protects against pathogens, even climate change, scientists find.
• Mexico City, parched and sinking, faces a water crisis.
• Trump's repeal of stream rule helps coal at the expense of climate and species.
• Climate change doubled the likelihood of the New South Wales heatwave.
• US scientists fear America under Donald Trump will become like a totalitarian regime.

Australia Positioned To Be Renewable Energy Superpower

Fairfax - Ross Gittins

The old joke says the questions in economics exams don't change from year to year, but the answers do. Welcome to the economics of energy and climate change, which has changed a lot without many people noticing - including Malcolm Turnbull and his climate-change denying mates.
They've missed that the economics has shifted decisively in favour of renewable energy, as Professor Ross Garnaut​, of the University of Melbourne, pointed out at an energy summit in Adelaide last October.

Illustration: Glen Le Lievre. 

Garnaut is chairman of Zen Energy, a supplier of solar and battery storage systems. But there aren't many economists who know more about the energy industry and climate change than Garnaut, who's conducted two federal inquiries into the subject.
He says that, since his second review in 2011, there have been four big changes in the cost of renewable energy relative to the cost of energy from coal or gas.

Ross Garnaut says that nowhere in the developed world are solar and wind resources together so abundant as in the west-facing coasts and peninsulas of southern Australia. Photo: Luke Sharrett

First, the cost of renewable energy generation and energy storage equipment has fallen "massively".
The modelling conducted for his inquiry assumed the cost of photovoltaic solar generation would fall by a few per cent a year. In practice, costs have fallen by about five-sixths since that assumption was made.
"Similarly large reductions have occurred in the cost of lithium ion batteries and related systems for storing energy," he says.
There have been less dramatic but substantial reductions in costs of equipment for electricity from wind and other renewables.
The cost reductions come from economies of scale in the hugely increased production by China and others, plus savings through "learning by doing". Advances in technology will keep prices falling after scale economies have been exhausted.
Second, there have been "transformational improvements" in battery storage technology, used at the level of the electricity grid, to ensure balance between supply and demand despite renewables generators' "intermittency​" (inability to operate when the sun's not shining or the wind's not blowing).
Third, there's been a dramatic reduction in the cost of borrowing the money needed to cover the capital cost of generation equipment.
Real interest rates on 10-year bonds are below or near zero in all developed countries, including Australia.
"These exceptionally low costs of capital are driven by fundamental changes in underlying economic conditions and are with us for a long time," Garnaut says.
Low interest rates reduce the cost of producing, storing and transporting renewable energy more than they reduce the cost of fossil-fuel energy because renewable costs are overwhelmingly capital (sun and wind cost nothing), whereas fossil fuel costs are mainly recurrent (digging more coal out of the ground).
Fourth, there's been a dramatic increase in the cost of gas - and thus gas-fired electricity.
Ten years ago Australia had the developed world's cheapest natural gas - about a third of prices in the US. Today, our prices are about three times higher than in the US.
Why? Because the development of a liquid natural gas export industry in Queensland has raised the gas prices paid in eastern Australia to "export parity" level - the much higher price producers could get by selling their gas to Japan or China (less the cost of liquefaction and freight).
It's worse than that. Because foreign investors were allowed to install far too much capacity for LNG exports - meaning none of them is likely to recover their cost of capital - they've been so desperate for throughput they've sometimes bid gas prices well above export parity.
Apart from making gas-fired power more expensive relative to renewables, this has implications for how we handle the transition from "base-load" coal-fired power (once you turn a generator on, it runs continuously) to intermittent solar and wind production.
It had been assumed that gas-fired power would bridge the gap because it was cheap, far less emissions-intensive than coal, and able to be turned on and off quickly and easily to counter the intermittency of renewables.
Now, however, without successive federal governments quite realising what they'd done, gas has been largely priced out of the electricity market, with various not-very-old gas-fired power stations close to being stranded assets.
What now? We thank our lucky stars the cost of energy storage is coming down and we get serious about storage - both local and at grid level - using batteries and such things as "pumped hydro storage" (when electricity production exceeds immediate needs, you use it to pump water up to a dam then, when production is inadequate, you let the water flow down through a hydro turbine to a lower dam).
In other words, the solution is to get innovative and agile. Who was it who said that?
Turnbull's party seem to be pro coal and anti renewables partly because they know we have a comparative advantage in coal.
We can produce it cheaply and we've still got loads in the ground. The rest of the world is turning away from coal and the environmental damage it does, but let's keep opening big new mines and pumping it out, even though this pushes the prices our existing producers get even lower.
If the banks are reluctant to finance new coal mines at this late stage, prop them up with government subsidies. Join the international moratorium on new mines? That would be unAustralian.
But get this: Garnaut says we also have a comparative advantage in the new world of renewables.
"Nowhere in the developed world are solar and wind resources together so abundant as in the west-facing coasts and peninsulas of southern Australia. South Australian resources are particularly rich...
"Play our cards right, and Australia's exceptionally rich endowment per person in renewable energy resources makes us a low-cost location for energy supply in a low-carbon world economy.
"That would make us the economically rational location within the developed world of a high proportion of energy-intensive processing and manufacturing activity.
"Play our cards right, and Australia is a superpower of the low-carbon world economy."

Links

• Mark Butler denies Labor has ditched 2030 renewable energy goal
• It's a goal, it's a target, no, it's ... Labor's energy policy
• Climate change a 'material' risk for the financial system: APRA 
• Oceans are losing oxygen, posing growing threats to marine life, research says