18/03/2019

Donald Trump’s Climate Denial Gets More Ridiculous By The Day

Newsweek - Michael E. Mann



Michael E. Mann
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.)
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.

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Malcolm Farr: ‘The Public Debate On The Existence Of Climate Change Is Over And We Are Owed An Apology’

NEWS.com.au - Malcolm Farr


School Strike for Climate Change: Thousands of students skip school for protests

The public debate on the existence of climate change is over and we are owed an apology from those who prolonged it for self-serving political purposes.
They might acknowledge their disrespect for science, or for driving rejection as a vehicle for “brutal retail politics”.
Voices as varied as the schoolchildren who marched on Friday, the top ranks of Australia’s central bank, and federal department chiefs are warning of the consequences of those changes.
The debate continues, but it now is centred on measuring the urgency of a response to increasing climate instability, and the detail of that response.
Emergency services, diplomats and farmers are all seeking the best answers to climate change effects — effects which some of their flecked representatives for the better part of a decade said didn’t exist.
Military and intelligence agency leaders have warned climate change is a national security threat to Australia.
There still are holdouts, including a few reactionary MPs who continue to embrace Tony Abbott’s belief just over nine years ago that the science was “absolute crap”.
And there is a fringe which make cases which can only be resolved by outlandish conspiracy theories, often along the dubious lines of the United Nations and One World Government.
And there are credible sources moving in the other direction.
Deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia Guy Debelle last week made clear climate change is now a factor in tracking and guiding the economy; he gave no hint it was a UN plot.
But he did stress the need for an orderly transition to clean energy; a need for greater backing of renewable energy projects; preparing for new ways we work and the jobs available to us; and the broader task of readying the entire economy for change.
“Financial stability will be better served by an orderly transition rather than an abrupt disorderly one,” he said.
Last week, secretary of the Department of Home Affairs Mike Pezzullo mentioned climate change in a speech — Seven Gathering Storms — to a think tank.
Mr Pezzullo warned of states which might become ungovernable and a possibility of “mass displacement of people”.
Contributions to this displacement could be “poverty, hunger, water and resource scarcity, and a changing climate, which will have to be thought of as a systemic risk factor”.
These are just a few elements of government which have appreciated the existence and impact of climate change in ways some elected politicians have been too frightened or deliberately manipulative to acknowledge.
These are the folk who might consider an apology.
Tony Abbott is not the only denier in parliament but over a decade he has been the pacesetter if not the leader of that block of ignorance.
“The argument is absolute crap. However, the politics of this are tough for us,” he told a regional audience in December 2009.
“Eighty per cent of people believe climate change is a real and present danger.”
Just as Mr Abbott scorned majority views on same sex marriage, he early on resolved to ignore voters on climate change.
He used that rejection of evidence and local opinion to wreck the carbon price policy of Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard, his offensive from Opposition against the so-called “carbon tax”.
His chief adviser in Opposition and when he became prime minister, Peta Credlin, in 2017 put that campaign into context.
“That was brutal retail politics, and it took Abbott six months to cut through and when he did cut through Gillard was gone,” she told Sky News.
And, Ms Credlin said, “It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know.”
However, Mr Abbott was “hugely unconvinced” in 2009 and continued to harness his rejection of climate change science in 2017 in a speech he made in along on.
“Primitive people once killed goats to appease the volcano gods. We are more sophisticated now but are still sacrificing our industries and our living standards to the climate gods to little more effect,” he said.
But something happened 10 days ago.
Mr Abbott abruptly endorsed the UN backed Paris agreement on emission reduction, a process aimed at limiting climate change.
A sudden convert, he has yet to say sorry for his past rejection.


We're not pleased with ScoMo's climate plan: striking students

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The RBA Has Sounded The Climate Change Alarm. Time To Sit Up And Take Notice

The Guardian - 

Students are striking, the central bank is warning of ‘damaging outcomes’ and denialism has to be met with scorn
RBA deputy governor Guy Debelle: ‘both the physical impact of climate change and the transition are likely to have first-order economic effects.’ Photograph: David Moir/AAP 
On Friday tens of thousands of school students around the country took to the streets to voice their anger over inaction on climate change. It came three days after the assistant governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia warned about the impact of climate change on our economy. This week really should mark the end of the line for anyone within politics or the media being able to spout climate-change denialism without being met with scorn and jeers. It also should mark the time when boldness and verve becomes the norm for any climate-change policy.
For most people with common sense, our current climate-change policy debate remains utterly frustrating. The problem is there are some in the conservative media and politics who, either due to gross stupidity or a willing desire to fake stupidity, are determined to continue that frustration.
Now one might wonder why someone would actively choose to peddle lies merely to get a gig in the Liberal party or on some unwatched show on Sky News, or to be paid to write poorly some column or blog for News Corp papers.
But at this point, who cares?
Those people have tied themselves to the rotting carcass of climate-change denialism for reasons of profit. We should not now pretend that their views are not redolent with the putrid stench of obtuse irrelevance – an irrelevance made abundantly clear when on Tuesday the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, Guy Debelle, delivered a speech titled “Climate Change and the Economy”.
It was a landmark speech that sets a precise point from which you can say you are with reality or you have thrown in your lot with idiocy and avarice.
The RBA is not an institution given to radicalism, and so when one of its most senior members states that “both the physical impact of climate change and the transition are likely to have first-order economic effects” it’s a big deal.
Central bankers don’t talk about impacts on the economy lightly or just to please protesting school kids. They only address climate change because they have assessed it has and will continue to have real impacts on the economy.
What Debelle had to say was quite sobering.
He stated that “we need to reassess the frequency of climate events ... and our assumptions about the severity and longevity of the climatic events”.
This, he noted, is not news to the insurance industry. Those companies whose entire profit is based around risk have long been factoring in climate change, because unlike the denialist crew who get paid to be ignorant, insurers actually have to factor in reality when assessing risk.
The Reserve Bank also has to factor in risk and Debelle noted that there are many forces affecting our economy and financial stability, but “few of these forces have the scale, persistence and systemic risk of climate change”.
Debelle also noted the difficulties we face are not small.
He acknowledged the difficulties with the transition to a lower-carbon-intensity world will clearly depend upon “whether it is managed as a gradual process or is abrupt”. But he suggested “the trend changes aren’t likely to be smooth.
“There is likely to be volatility around the trend, with the potential for damaging outcomes from spikes above the trend,” he said.
Central bankers prefer to say 10 words of fudge than two of bluntness. So when a central banker starts talking about “damaging outcomes” that’s the time to sit up and take notice.
He also noted that, just in case you were thinking we only need to worry about more droughts and extreme heat events, there is also the problem “where two (or more) climatic events combine to produce an outcome that is worse than the effect of one of them occurring individually”.
And that is bad because “combined with the increased volatility, this increases the likelihood of non-linear impacts on the economy”.
That is, we can’t just say climate change could have a linear impact on our economy – where it reduces growth by a set percentage each year. Rather, the impact could get progressively worse over time.
Debelle acknowledged that we have always had to deal with droughts and cyclones. He noted that “the current drought has already reduced farm output by around 6% and total GDP by about 0.15%” and that even if we return to average rainfall it will continue to weigh on the economy through this year.
So we know weather affects the economy. But Debelle noted that climate change is a trend, not a cycle like weather, where you experience good and bad times.
“What if,” Debelle asked, “droughts are more frequent, or cyclones happen more often?” The shock to the economy “is no longer temporary but close to permanent”.
Permanent shocks to the economy, damaging outcomes, first-order economic events.
At this point anyone still spouting denialist bile in newspaper columns or on the campaign trail needs to be treated like an anti-vaccer at a healthcare expo.
It also means our major political parties need to step up. The Liberal party will most likely need a major defeat (or two) before facing reality, but the ALP also needs to realise that now is not the time for timidity – which Shorten displayed with his rather weak support of the student’s strike on Thursday.
Leadership requires boldness – a boldness now supported by very clear warnings from our most sober economic institution.
The RBA cannot do anything to limit climate change; it can only assess the risks and act appropriately. It is up to governments to take action and it is time to leave the lies and vindictive ignorance of climate change deniers, in the media and in politics, behind us.
Our central bank has warned of inaction. Our children this week took to the streets to demand action. It is time for our governments to deliver.

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