Current Events > Trump administration hardens its attack on climate science

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/trump-climate-science.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term global warming into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trumps hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqu to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

And, in what could be Mr. Trumps most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

Mr. Trump is less an ideologue than an armchair naysayer about climate change, according to people who know him. He came into office viewing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency as bastions of what he calls the deep state, and his contempt for their past work on the issue is an animating factor in trying to force them to abandon key aspects of the methodology they use to try to understand the causes and consequences of a dangerously warming planet.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

The attack on science is underway throughout the government. In the most recent example, the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.

Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.

The administrations prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earths atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.

Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.

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Continued:

...the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessments methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide sometimes to an awkward degree.

The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler, the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the presidents deputy assistant for emerging technologies, said in 2014 in an interview with CNBC.

Mr. Happers proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the presidents national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition.

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials including Larry Kudlow, the presidents chief economic adviser have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happers proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.

Even Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist who views Mr. Happer as the climate hustlers worst nightmare a world-class physicist from the nations leading institution of advanced learning, who does not suffer fools gladly, is apprehensive about what Mr. Happer is trying to do.

The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020, he said. Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.

But at a White House meeting on May 1, at which the skeptical advisers made their case, Mr. Trump appeared unpersuaded, people familiar with the meeting said. Mr. Happer, they said, is optimistic that the panel will go forward.

The concept is not new. Mr. Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of a series of military-style exercises, known as red team, blue team debates, on the validity of climate science first promoted by Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator who was forced to resign last year amid multiple scandals.

At the time, the idea was shot down by John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff. But since Mr. Kellys departure, Mr. Trump has talked about using Mr. Happers proposed panel as a forum for it.

For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. Wouldnt be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now! he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.

His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.

Mr. Trumps daughter Ivanka made a well-publicized effort to talk him out of leaving the Paris accord in 2017. But after being vanquished by officials including Mr. Bannon, Mr. Pruitt, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II, there is little evidence she has resisted his approach since then.

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I'm shocked
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I guess censorship is only bad when its banning white supremecists from twitter but not when we omit stuff about climate change from official reports
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Trump is actually killing the planet.

Fuck this man and everything he stands for.
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Bump
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Facts and logic
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Sigh.

Man
Bear
Pig
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The Era of Stupid is well and truly upon us.
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"Science."
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Old people will be dead when we are dying on a dying planet fuck old people making the laws
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Meh...the human race is long due for an epic ass whooping by mother nature anyways. I feel sorry for the children of today, they're the ones who are going to deal with this somehow.
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CADE FOSTER posted...

Old people will be dead when we are dying on a dying planet fuck old people making the laws

The shitty thing is we won't even be able to say "told you so". We can go yell at Trump's gravestone I guess, while the world is ending

The people making these laws will be dead in like 20 years and we are left to deal with it

I hate that some fields of science are now seen as political issues. There are some things that should never be politcal.
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Evangelicals are pulling the strings on this they believe god will save us
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I'm okay with this. Climate science is too often used as a political bludgeon.
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friendbuddypal posted...

I'm okay with this. Climate science is too often used as a political bludgeon.

Uh that is exactly what's being done here by the Trump administration. No field of science should be used as a political or religious tool or held back by it.
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Zikten posted...

CADE FOSTER posted...

Old people will be dead when we are dying on a dying planet fuck old people making the laws

The shitty thing is we won't even be able to say "told you so". We can go yell at Trump's gravestone I guess, while the world is ending

The people making these laws will be dead in like 20 years and we are left to deal with it

Explain why the rest of the world can't make up for America's mistake?
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Bat178 posted...

Zikten posted...

CADE FOSTER posted...

Old people will be dead when we are dying on a dying planet fuck old people making the laws

The shitty thing is we won't even be able to say "told you so". We can go yell at Trump's gravestone I guess, while the world is ending

The people making these laws will be dead in like 20 years and we are left to deal with it

Explain why the rest of the world can't make up for America's mistake?

Razor-thin margins.
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Blightzkrieg posted...

I'm shocked

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Crono99 posted...

Antifar posted...

The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler, the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the presidents deputy assistant for emerging technologies, said in 2014 in an interview with CNBC.

Seriously?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Happer

William Happer (born July 27, 1939[1]) is an American physicist who has specialized in the study of atomic physics, optics and spectroscopy.[2] He is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett[3] Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Princeton University,[2] and a long-term member of the JASON advisory group,[1] where he pioneered the development of adaptive optics.

How can someone so well educated make that kind of statement?

What's wrong with his statement?
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TendoDRM posted...

Crono99 posted...

Antifar posted...

The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler, the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the presidents deputy assistant for emerging technologies, said in 2014 in an interview with CNBC.

Seriously?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Happer

William Happer (born July 27, 1939[1]) is an American physicist who has specialized in the study of atomic physics, optics and spectroscopy.[2] He is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett[3] Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Princeton University,[2] and a long-term member of the JASON advisory group,[1] where he pioneered the development of adaptive optics.

How can someone so well educated make that kind of statement?

What's wrong with his statement?

Comparing a molecule to living beings as though it can suffer the way they did, for one.
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I wish someone close to Trump could convince him to do away with his "anti-climate protection" stance and spin it somehow into "we don't need to do anything about the environment, it's all China's fault" because that would be a mostly true statement at least.