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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.

2 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not "misunderstood" by gtall · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re: Not "misunderstood" by slew · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...