Month: September 2017

Daily News 18 Sep 2017

Trump Adviser Tells Foreign Ministers U.S. Will Leave Paris Climate Accord

UNITED NATIONS — Gary D. Cohn, the top White House economic adviser, told ministers from several major allies on Monday that the Trump administration was “unambiguous” about its plans to withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate change unless new terms were met.

Ministers emerging from the 90-minute breakfast in a back room of The Smith, a brasserie near the United Nations, described the meeting as genial and productive. But, they said, they learned no specifics from Mr. Cohn about the likelihood of the United States’ remaining in the global accord or what changes would be needed to make it acceptable to the White House.

“I made the president’s position unambiguous, to where the president stands and where the administration stands on Paris,” Mr. Cohn told reporters after the meeting. “We reaffirmed the president’s statement that he made in the Rose Garden, and we continue to reinforce what the president is saying.”

President Trump announced in a Rose Garden speech in June that the Paris agreement — under which nearly 200 nations pledged voluntary targets to cut planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions and to support poor countries grappling with rising global temperatures — was bad for America’s economy. He said the United States would withdraw from the agreement, but left open the possibility that he might try to “renegotiate” the accord.

Full story

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

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September 18, 2017 at 10:43AM

Daily News 18 Sep 2017

Two Weeks After Harvey, Cheniere Runs More Gas Than Ever

Two weeks after Hurricane Harvey flooded the U.S. Gulf Coast, brought shipping to a halt and knocked out power to millions, the only company sending U.S. shale gas overseas is back in business. In fact, Cheniere Energy Inc.’s flagship Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana is liquefying more natural gas for export than ever.

Cheniere fully restored operations at the complex this past weekend. And a few days after that, the company brought in and liquefied a record 3.1 billion cubic feet of gas, said Doug Shanda, senior vice president of operations. With another expansion nearing completion, the Houston-based company expects to extend that record this winter, he said in a phone interview Thursday.

As Harvey drenched the region, Cheniere was acutely aware of its status as the first shale gas export terminal built along the U.S. Gulf Coast. About three dozen like it have been proposed, but for now, it’s alone. So all eyes were on Cheniere during the storm. Citigroup Inc. warned of possible disruptions at the terminal while Genscape Inc. speculated on how long it would remain open. It became a litmus test of sorts — for how resilient America’s gas supplies could be in a global market.

“We are the poster child of the way this is supposed to work out,” said Corey Grindal, Cheniere’s senior vice president of supply.

If it’s any indication of how the terminal fared, it never shut. Sabine Pass kept liquefying gas throughout the storm, even as a major Kinder Morgan Inc. supply line went down, dangerous storm surges halted vessel traffic and tanks began filling up.

The way Grindal sees it, Cheniere had no choice but to keep running. As the country’s largest gas buyer, the company has contracts to bring in massive shipments of gas by pipeline — and contracts to turn the fuel into a liquid for loading onto tankers.

As long as the plant is operating, “I don’t have the right to call up a producer or a supplier and say, ‘I’m not taking your gas,”’ he said.

Full story

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

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September 18, 2017 at 10:43AM

Daily News 18 Sep 2017

Guardian: Climate Scientists are Not Just In it for the Money

The Cray ecoplex NOAA GAEA supercomputer used for modeling. Gaea was funded by a $73 million American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 investment through a collaborative partnership between NOAA and the Department of Energy.

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

The Guardian has posted an article defending climate scientists against accusations they’re just grant money grubbing liars.

The idea that climate scientists are in it for the cash has deep ideological roots

Graham Readfearn

Author and academic Nancy MacLean says cynicism about the motives of public servants, including government-backed climate scientists, can be traced to a group of neoliberals and their ‘toxic’ ideas

You’ll have heard that line of argument about cancer scientists, right?

The one where they’re just in it for the government grant money and that they don’t really want to find a cure, because if they did they’d be out of a job?

No, of course you haven’t. That’s because it’s ridiculous and a bit, well, vomit-inducing.

To make such an argument, you would need to be deeply cynical about people’s motives for consistently putting their own pay packets above the welfare of millions of people.

You would have to think that scientists were not motivated to help their fellow human beings, but instead were driven only by self-interest.

…

Suggesting that climate scientists are pushing a line about global warming because their salaries depend on it is a popular talking point that deniers love to throw around.

But why do so many “sceptics”, particularly those who form part of the organised machinery of climate science denial, feel comfortable in accusing climate scientists of only being in it for the money?

Duke University history professor Nancy MacLean suggests some answers in her new book Democracy in Chains: the Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.

The book documents how wealthy conservatives, in particular petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch, teamed up with neoliberal academics with the objective, MacLean says, of undermining the functions of government in the United States.

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Read more: http://ift.tt/2x6rV9m

There are some intriguing examples of rapid enrichment through climate grants, such as the Shukla’s gold story, in which Shukla and his wife made hundreds of thousands of dollars every year working part time for their climate foundation. But the overall impression I received from reading the Climategate emails is one of out of control groupthink – a frenzied effort to shut down opposing points of view, tone down adverse findings, to keep the narrative “tidy”.

For example, Climate Scientist Keith Briffa’s infamous 1999 letter to Micheal Mann and others;

Climategate Email 0938018124.txt;

… I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter.

For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago. …

Source: Wikileaks

The medical analogy chosen by The Guardian author is interesting. Medical research is riddled with scandalous cases of scientific misconduct. D.G Altman’s famous study of medical research failures is still as applicable today as it was when Altman wrote his critique in 1994.

The following from the British Medical Journal;

Richard Smith: Medical research—still a scandal

January 31, 2014

Twenty years ago this week the statistician Doug Altman published an editorial in the BMJ arguing that much medical research was of poor quality and misleading. In his editorial entitled, “The Scandal of Poor Medical Research,” Altman wrote that much research was “seriously flawed through the use of inappropriate designs, unrepresentative samples, small samples, incorrect methods of analysis, and faulty interpretation.” Twenty years later I fear that things are not better but worse.

Most editorials like most of everything, including people, disappear into obscurity very fast, but Altman’s editorial is one that has lasted. I was the editor of the BMJ when we published the editorial, and I have cited Altman’s editorial many times, including recently. The editorial was published in the dawn of evidence based medicine as an increasing number of people realised how much of medical practice lacked evidence of effectiveness and how much research was poor. Altman’s editorial with its concise argument and blunt, provocative title crystallised the scandal.

Why, asked Altman, is so much research poor? Because “researchers feel compelled for career reasons to carry out research that they are ill equipped to perform, and nobody stops them.” In other words, too much medical research was conducted by amateurs who were required to do some research in order to progress in their medical careers.

Ethics committees, who had to approve research, were ill equipped to detect scientific flaws, and the flaws were eventually detected by statisticians, like Altman, working as firefighters. Quality assurance should be built in at the beginning of research not the end, particularly as many journals lacked statistical skills and simply went ahead and published misleading research.

“The poor quality of much medical research is widely acknowledged,” wrote Altman, “yet disturbingly the leaders of the medical profession seem only minimally concerned about the problem and make no apparent efforts to find a solution.”

…

Climate Thought Control

Being “framed” is slang when someone is blamed for something they did not do, i.e. being set up by means of false evidence and witnesses.

Jennifer Good is a communications professor explaining how the media is expected to mold public opinion in favor of climate activism. Her article in the Toronto Star Putting hurricanes and climate change into the same frame is revealing, especially the subtitle A study shows network Hurricane coverage this month did not link an increase in extreme weather to global warming.

The prof is disappointed that climate change was not more frequently mentioned in stories about the recent hurricanes. She considers it an opportunity missed. Some excerpts below with my bolds.

I have analyzed two weeks of broadcast news stories that appeared on America’s seven largest TV networks as well as Canada’s CTV network. In just over 1,500 stories about hurricanes, “Trump” was discussed in 907 of those stories (or about 60 per cent), while “business” was discussed in 572 of those stories (or about 38 per cent).

“Climate change” was discussed in just 79 of the hurricane stories — or about five per cent.

What’s Wrong with Professional, Objective Reporting?

The fundamental answer is that climate change and extreme weather (i.e., hurricanes) need to be framed together more often. As scientists have pointed out, while climate change is not causing the weather, it is definitely exacerbating the weather. But increasingly adding climate change to the extreme weather frame is only the tip of the (yes, melting) iceberg. Alternatives to “business as usual” need to be part of the media’s, and our, extreme weather frames.

Of those 1,500 broadcast news stories involving hurricanes, only four also mentioned “fossil fuels,” and not a single news broadcast discussed “alternative energy.”

Similarly, while “economy” is discussed in 187 of the hurricane news stories, only 18 stories discussed hurricanes, the economy and climate change together; and not one story explored the links between an economic model based on endless growth, and the implications of this endless growth for the planet and climate change.

The Purpose of Media is to Manipulate Public Opinion

In his seminal 2010 paper “Why It Matters How We Frame the Environment,” published in the journal Environmental Communication, the American linguist and philosopher George Lakoff offered that the world is made up of frames. “Framing” is how our neural system defines a concept by grouping together what goes with — or gets framed with — that concept. Our brains are wired this way.

For example, when you read “climate change,” your brain immediately frames the concept of climate change with certain words and concepts. Everyone cognitively frames “climate change” somewhat differently, but there might also be large overlaps. Terms like “fossil fuels” and “human activity” might be in many people’s climate change frames, although frames can differ widely. (Think, for example, of climate change skeptics.)

Not surprisingly, the news media plays a significant role in how our brains frame concepts. The more the media frames a story by associating it with certain words and concepts, the more likely we are to use those same words and concepts in our own framing.

And conversely, if the news media never framed a story using certain concepts, there is “hypocognition,” or as Lakoff proposed, a “lack of ideas we need.”

In times of crisis, there are many immediate and urgent stories that need to be told about lives and loss, bravery and struggle. But crisis also provides an opportunity for change — an opportunity to shift our frames and include the ideas we desperately need.

So far, that opportunity seems to have been missed. Meanwhile, the oceans get warmer.

The Other Side of the Story

While the prof is totally convinced she knows what the public needs to know about weather and climate, actual weather scientists disagree with her. In fact, the efforts to link storms and fossil fuels were present way too often and hindered the public from understanding these events.

For instance, Hurricane scientist Dr. Ryan Maue ripped climate ‘hype’ on Irma & Harvey in his WSJ article Climate Change Hype Doesn’t Help.

As soon as Hurricanes Harvey and Irma made landfall in the U.S., scientists, politicians and journalists began to discuss the role of climate change in natural disasters. Although a clear scientific consensus has emerged over the past decade that climate change influences hurricanes in the long run, its effect upon any individual storm is unclear. Anyone trying to score political points after a natural disaster should take a deep breath and review the science first.

As a meteorologist with access to the best weather-forecast model data available, I watched each hurricane’s landfall with particular interest. Harvey and Irma broke the record 12-year major hurricane landfall drought on the U.S. coastline. Since Wilma in October 2005, 31 major hurricanes had swirled in the North Atlantic but all failed to reach the U.S. with a Category 3 or higher intensity.

Even as we worked to divine exactly where the hurricanes would land, a media narrative began to form linking the devastating storms to climate change. Some found it ironic that states represented by “climate deniers” were being pummeled by hurricanes. Alarmists reveled in the irony that Houston, home to petrochemical plants, was flooded by Harvey, while others gleefully reported that President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago might be inundated by Irma.

By focusing on whether climate change caused a hurricane, journalists fail to appreciate the complexity of extreme weather events. While most details are still hazy with the best climate modeling tools, the bigger issue than global warming is that more people are choosing to live in coastal areas, where hurricanes certainly will be most destructive.

Summary

Actual scientists are calling for less, not more manipulative journalism.

And as for the oceans getting warmer, Prof. Good, that is due to the oceans storing and releasing solar energy, nothing to do with burning fossil fuels. The oceans heat the atmosphere, and not the other way around. See Empirical Evidence: Oceans Make Climate

via Science Matters

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September 18, 2017 at 09:40AM