Slashdot Mirror
Trump Misunderstood MIT Climate Research, University Officials Say (reuters.com)
MIT officials said U.S. President Donald Trump badly misunderstood their research when he cited it on Thursday to justify withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. From a report: Trump announced during a speech at the White House Rose Garden that he had decided to pull out of the landmark climate deal, in part because it would not reduce global temperatures fast enough to have a significant impact. "Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100," Trump said. "Tiny, tiny amount." That claim was attributed to research conducted by MIT, according to White House documents seen by Reuters. The Cambridge, Massaschusetts-based research university published a study in April 2016 titled "How much of a difference will the Paris Agreement make?" showing that if countries abided by their pledges in the deal, global warming would slow by between 0.6 degree and 1.1 degrees Celsius by 2100. "We certainly do not support the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris agreement," said Erwan Monier, a lead researcher at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and one of the study's authors. "If we don't do anything, we might shoot over 5 degrees or more and that would be catastrophic," said John Reilly, the co-director of the program, adding that MIT's scientists had had no contact with the White House and were not offered a chance to explain their work.
Will Trump ever be called to account for these lies and distorted half-truths? His behaviour is going to cost many lives, and not just in the US. That amounts to something worse than criminal behaviour to my mind, and I would like to see him ultimately tried by an international court.
There is a difference between "misrepresented" and "misunderstood."
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Science or not, funneling American wealth to third world countries via a non-binding agreement is enough of a reason to oppose participation in this treaty and to be glad it was never submitted to be potentially ratified.
The amount of "American wealth" that is "funneled to third world countries" is so small a number that you can't even see it in the pie chart of the government budget expenditures. It is absolutely and completely negligible.
If that's your objection, you are focussing on the trivial.
(The one exception here is American aid to Israel, if you want to call Israel a third-world country; totaling $127.4 billion. But most of that it military aid, not energy.)
That would be pretty much any treaty that has properly gone through the senate.
MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: Believing CO2 controls the climate ‘is pretty close to believing in magic’ http://www.climatedepot.com/20...
Which is worse, liar or idiot? Or maybe equal parts of both.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If you want to hit Trump where it hurts, you get him in the one thing that he really values: himself. I don't want to see him assassinated. Beyond that fact that it's a bad idea to call for the death of any US President - no matter the reason - it wouldn't "fix" this problem. Instead, I want to see him kicked out of office, jailed, and for his name to become toxic. When people think "Nixon", they think of a crook. I want his name to represent so much worse to the point that nobody wants anything to do with the name "TRUMP". That would really hurt Donald as his name seems to be the thing he values above all else. (I will apologize to anyone who happens to have the Trump last name, though.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Women commonly face higher risks and greater burdens from the impacts of climate change in situations of poverty, and the majority of the world’s poor are women.
and
Parties to the UNFCCC have recognized the importance of involving women and men equally in UNFCCC processes and in the development and implementation of national climate policies that are gender-responsive by establishing a dedicated agenda item under the Convention addressing issues of gender and climate change and by including overarching text in the Paris Agreement
So...my interpretation of the above is: don't just focus on the issues of a specific group but make sure this is for the common good, because lord knows the history of modern (or past) civilizations doesn't have a bad tendency to focus on certain groups which may be in power and not work for the common good.
yeah, I don't have a problem with what they are saying now that I understand it. They have an effing valid point.
Believe it or not, USA is NOT the only contributor to the Paris Agreement, the USA contribution is only 3% of the total figure. So you want to pollute and let everyone else clear up the mess. We all have responsibilities to this planet.
"Per capita, however, the U.S. pumped out more CO2 than China and India combined in 2015. On average, each individual living in the United States contributed 16.07 tons to the country’s total. But each individual living in China and India contributed 7.73 and 1.87 tons on average, respectively." quote from https://www.usatoday.com/story...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Try reading it.
India specifically gets US dollars to fund it's green industry pretty much forever. China gets to keep uping emissions for 13 years and then the US pays them to use green energy that they are already building. Russia just gets to ignore the entire thing.
Several other 3rd world countries also gets US dollars but not as bad as the above. It was a horrible accord that only an idiot would sign *John Kerry*
Sure, it makes no difference to whether you want to put a sweater on, but that's not the point. The troposphere is vast, and 0.2 C represents an immense amount of kinetic energy, which in turn drives dramatic changes in circulation and precipitation patterns. You can get a sense for this by calculating how much energy an average of 0.2 C represents.
Start with this: how much does a cubic meter of air weigh? Have you ever thought about that? A cubic meter of dry air at sea level weighs about 2.7 pounds. How much energy does it take to raise 2.7 pounds of dry air by 0.2 degrees? It turns out you can look that kind of thing up. It takes about 245 joules.
Now take that 245 joules/m^3 and multiply it by the volume of the troposphere. As you recall from calculus, you can approximate this by taking the surface area of a sphere 6,371,000 meters in radius and multiplying by the troposphere's roughly 11 km height. You should end up with a figure on the order of magnitude of 10^18 joules.
Or you can think of that as being roughly the same as 20,000 Hiroshima sized bombs. Granted the density of air 10 km up is somewhat less, but we haven't factored in the gigatons of water vapor in the atmosphere. Or interactions with the oceans; most of the excess energy goes into the oceans, and that in turn affects climate in countless ways. That's how palm trees grow in Southern Britain, even though Cornwall's further north than Maine.
And yet... You just can't feel a 0.2C change. Then again you can't feel the Coriolis force either, but that can bend a subtle pressure gradient hundreds of miles long into a cyclone, a feat no human agency can resist, much less match.
Scale matters. If there's anything scientific and mathematical literacy should teach, it's that. That's why the future of the planet can't be trusted to a semi-literate ignoramus.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.