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Trump Picks Top Climate Skeptic To Lead EPA Transition (cbsnews.com)
Billly Gates writes: Trump's transition team is steamrolling ahead to transition the government. Trump chose Myron Ebell to oversee environmental policies. Myron Ebell is chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of climate change denialists and alarmists. Scientific American provides some background information about Ebell in a report from earlier this year: "In a biography submitted when he testified before Congress, he listed among his recognitions that he had been featured in a Greenpeace 'Field Guide to Climate Criminals,' dubbed a 'misleader' on global warming by Rolling Stone and was the subject of a motion to censure in the British House of Commons after Ebell criticized the United Kingdom's chief scientific adviser for his views on global warming. More recently, Ebell has called the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan for greenhouse gases illegal and said that Obama joining the Paris climate treaty 'is clearly an unconstitutional usurpation of the Senate's authority.' He told Vanity Fair in 2007, 'There has been a little bit of warming ... but it's been very modest and well within the range for natural variability, and whether it's caused by human beings or not, it's nothing to worry about.' Ebell's views appear to square with Trump's when it comes to EPA's agenda. Trump has called global warming 'bullshit' and he has said he would 'cancel' the Paris global warming accord and roll back President Obama's executive actions on climate change."
When temperatures go up, it's global warming.
When temperatures go down, it's global climate change.
When temperatures stay the same, it's a "pause" in (choose one) global warming or global climate change.
When there's drought, it's due to global climate change.
When there are floods and torrential rain, it's due to global climate change.
Ditto for the presence and/or absence of hurricanes, Pacific storms, etc.
What's really going on? There is so much nonsense being spewed (including, I'll say it for you, my own) that who can sort it out? The nonsense is coming from both sides of the question, by the way.
This is a religious war worse than Emacs vs. VIM. Fortunately, there's less at stake :)
(In case of whoooosh, well, that's a joke, son.)
Flame away ..... three, two, one ....
Pure speculation!
So you get to decide which countries around the world have improper leaders, eh? What other countries should we invade on your suggestion?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
What actually happened was that the very Establishment you nutters rage on about went on a massive campaign to politicise science. Die Welt steht kopf...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
What you don't understand: weather forecasts and how costs reduce over time.
Wind could be free, it will never be base load. Or at least, not in my lifetime.
What's the real cost of extracting that coal, when all the effects on the landscape and the environment are taken into account?
That doesn't matter because I don't pay it.
Now you could debate if you like if I SHOULD pay it, but I don't, so that is a moot point.
Can wind power replace coal today? No. But how much electricity is generated by natural gas today? Wind power is potentially cheaper than natural gas today.
Natural gas is even less expensive than coal, at about 2.2 cents per KWh, coal is having trouble because of natural gas at the moment. Wind is about double the cost of natural gas, give or take.
In any case, natural gas is "cleaner" than coal, but not by enough to change the outcome.
The issue is not what should be used today, but where should our investments be? You can invest in technologies that will make life much more difficult and expensive in the future, or technologies that will reduce global climate change and reduce global tensions.
Did I say I was against wind and solar? I'm not, they are fine for producing perhaps 25% in the near term and up to 50% in the long term of our total power needs. Where do we get the rest from?
The primary problem is point 1 above, Math... people simply suck at it, unable to understand how much energy is used, consumed, and what it would REALLY take to stop the rise in CO2 levels.
It will take more than we're willing to do, full stop. Everything else is just fantasy and expensive.
The point of no-return probably passed 30 years ago, we are way, way beyond that point, adaption to the new world is where we should be putting our money, not trying to keep the Titanic from sinking after it has already hit the iceberg.
Models.
Same types of models that predicted a Trump loss.
Huh.
"I am an economist."
Not trying to be insulting, but... the odds of you being right are about the same as a coin flip...
https://www.scientificamerican...
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/21...
http://www.governing.com/topic...
Just another day in Paradise
> Temperatures are going up
(I've removed your insult, because real scientists do not use insults.)
We can't make that claim. We only have about 20 years of quality data to work with. Before then, temperature measurement devices were not precise and not accurate enough to collect high-quality temperature data on a global scale. So any temperature data from before the mid 1990s is suspect at best, and likely completely wrong, especially as we go back decades or even a century or two. When we're talking about a temperature variance of 0.5% to 1.5% over centuries, we can't be dealing with measurements that have an error range of +/- 8% or more.
Estimating historical temperatures based on ice core samples, tree rings, or other methods is even more unreliable, and not even worthy of consideration. We need to work with facts here, not speculation based on extremely questionable data.
There just isn't enough data to properly study this subject in a scientific manner. Any studies that are done, and any claims that are made, aren't much better than religious dogma. We need to work with facts, and we currently do not have enough of them to work with.