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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.
It's important to note that the contemporary strategy for pushing through the globalist / corporatist agenda is to attach "pork" to treaties that sound like they provide a greater social benefit.
The TPP was one such example. It was anything but a "free trade agreement". It was filled with trade legislation which created impediments to free trade and granted historically unprecedented advantages to corporations.
The Paris Climate Agreement contained language regarding gender equality. Why? What was that language doing in a climate change agreement. The gender equality issue is just one small point of many pieces of pork.
The point is *not* "but don't you support gender equality"?
The point *is* "why are our agreements becoming clouded with special interests"?
That would only make him happy because then he'd be the greatest martyr that ever lived. If you really want to cause him pain, then it would be better if he were ignored and the rest of the country moved on without him and his alleged administration.
I don't think Trump "misunderstood" the science; he didn't have any understanding of the science in the first place.
Trump has been consistently wrong on every issue. I keep waiting for him to make a mistake and accidentally get something right, or perhaps just try it once just to see what it feels like, yet incredibly it hasn't happened yet. It's really extraordinary when you think about it.
I'd say that Dr. Lindzen should put more effort into demonstrating the validity of his claims in the scientific literature, but frankly he's just not that good at it.
We've been trying for about 120 years to disprove the idea that CO2 can cause changes in climate, or longer if you want to start counting from Tyndall. And it was indeed considered to be proven false through much of the 20th Century. But the things that we thought would prevent this from happening turned out to be untrue, and the consensus gradually changed over the period 1950-1980 or so.
At this point speculating about some phenomenon that would make AGW not a problem is like speculating about the properties of the luminiferous ether: it would have to be both very large to cancel out the H2O feedbacks, and very small to have not been noticed to date, and not only would this have to be compatible with all prior temperature records, but it must also account for observations of extraterrestrial atmospheres. Yes, our radiative transfer equations explain temperature profiles in the atmosphere of Venus and the atmosphere of the Sun, so if we're missing something big about atmospheric physics you need to say why we haven't seen it on Earth and elsewhere, because otherwise the numbers all add up.
Lindzen actually deserves recognition as having put forth the most plausible alternative theory concerning AGW. Unfortunately, to date he has not been able to provide convincing evidence for his theories. His belief that there is some negative feedback is far closer to believing in magic at this point, at least until someone figures out more than one way to transfer energy to space.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Why are you using per-capita output? The atmosphere doesn't care about per-capita output.
And China and India are INCREASING their emissions and will continue to do so as they develop and each capita demands a higher standard of living. Their options are to increase pollution or kill a bunch of people. (Or, considering their governments and social structures, why not both?)
What else than a per capita output?
Would you give Luxembourg the same CO2 allowance as india?
Kepping less developed countries down by restricting their CO2 output to a fraction of those in the US won't fly this day and age.
How about per-industrial-GDP? India has about 1/2 the CO2 emissions of the US, but only 1/9 the industrial-GDP** and 1/5 the exports...
By simply using per capita measures, you ignore that some countries have more export and more industrial GDP per capita. By simply assigning CO2 emission targets per capita for a country, you are essentially transferring the equilibrium industrial and export-related jobs from one country to another country. Depending on your politics this is either the only fair thing to do, not fair at all, inevitable, or unfortunate.
**the total GDP of the US is about 9x that of India and both India and the US have about 20% of their GDP as industrial GDP, so by extrapolation the industrial-GDP of the US also about 9x that of India...