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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.
I don't think Trump "misunderstood" the science; he didn't have any understanding of the science in the first place.
After all, it's mass inst of *technology*, not mass inst of *science*.
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"?
Is there anything he DOESN'T misunderstand (aside from repaying favors perhaps...)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Misunderstood? Or willfully misconstrued to fit an agenda?
Silence is a state of mime.
Not to put too fine a point on the issue but...
Was it Trump who misunderstood the study, or government advisers?
Was it Trump who misunderstood the study, or did the study not communicate clearly?
Did the study use a lot of jargon, confusing verbiage, and passive voice?
Did it make clear and specific projections, or was everything couched in "if this scenario and those people do that then something might change here to cause this effect"?
Is the news article cited above just completely and totally wrong, or has it been vetted for accuracy?
Any reason to bash Trump, I suppose.
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.
Their study accurately found that the Paris treaty was not solving the problem.
Now they are hiding from the truth because they don't want to get blamed for reporting it.
They are afraid of the modern day church of climate change inquisition
There is a difference between "misrepresented" and "misunderstood."
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
... climate fools.
Trump is capitalistic.
MIT paying lip service to externalities won't actually change the fact that short-termist technocracy, led by institutions such as MIT, are the problem, not the solution.
That is a ridiculously and uselessly tiny amount of reduction. We'd be better off keeping industrial output the same as it is now and redirect a portion of it to climate engineering efforts like spraying silver dust into Earth orbit. The Paris agreement is equivalent to reducing industrial output by about half for what is likely to be less than 1 degree C of a net result, IF every nation on the planet adheres to it, that's insanity. 1% of our single nation's industrial output redirected toward climate engineering could get into the tens of degrees C within a decade, easily.
Oh noes! The world is going to end if the US doesn't transfer a bunch of money to other countries.
See that "Preview" button?
...Did the study use a lot of jargon, confusing verbiage, and passive voice? Did it make clear and specific projections, or was everything couched in "if this scenario and those people do that then something might change here to cause this effect"?
The study summary is here: http://meetingorganizer.copern...
The MIT press release summarizing results is here: http://energy.mit.edu/news/how...
I think it would be easier to simply list the things he *does* understand. That should be an incredibly short list.
I'm assuming "tying my own shoes" probably aren't on that list.
... Trump wanted to put one of his campaign promises in the "win" column.
America has spoken and that's precisely what America wants.
It is what it is.
Until America votes otherwise, we will continue to masturbate to thoughts of isolationism.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
And neither do most of his handlers. It was a line they put in to pad out a speech, and they could not care less if it was accurate or meaningful.
I think the correct statement would be whoever read the research to told trump that deliberately mislead him. Trump doesn't read anything pass 140 characters.
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.)
MIT study says accord would yield a benefit of 0.6 degree and 1.1 degrees Celsius change by 2100. President weighs cost of implementing vs. MIT's expected benefit and says "too much work for too little effort."
So...what part of MIT's work did the prez misunderstand here? (It seems he got his cost info elsewhere, but what part of the benefit did he miss, exactly?)
CO2 has the properties it has regardless of your views on international agreements or your favorite international conspiracy. The universe well and truly doesn't fucking care about your fantasies. CO2 absorbs and re-emits solar radiation as it does, irrespective of whether you think some evil conspiracy is involved.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
https://youtu.be/TJNJ_k8SUkA
Open your eyes.
MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: Believing CO2 controls the climate ‘is pretty close to believing in magic’ http://www.climatedepot.com/20...
I think the problem is that the issue was not reduced to 9 bullet points or less on a single sided sheet using only one and two sylable words.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"Let me be perfectly clear. The killing of the ambassador in Libya was the result of a backlash against a Youtube video"
So we shouldn't care if a president lies and Americans die, but we should care if Trump misquotes an MIT study? Perhaps you could tell me why one is ok and the other is not.
When you shit on people on the country for 8 years calling them racist every time they bring up something like the above, why would any of them care when you bring anything up ever again? I think you are reaping what you asked for.
It might be different if every single prediction made by the "climate scientists" over the past 50 years hadn't been completely wrong.
It would be only news if Trump understood it. Or anything more complex than how to con people with simple tricks, really.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because if you list the science he gets wrong, you will be here long after he is dead and buried.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
and has a working bullshit detector
why do the DNC prioritize transgender toilet rights over global warming? both are bullshit pseudoscience, but they think the threat posed by the first is greater
The problem is that the briefing paper was not rendered in Comic Sans 14 point as a bullet point list with no more than two syllable words. Diagrams are important to, but must distill the concept as much as possible, Mr. Trump gets confused easily. A golf analogy is always helpful.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
fuck mit admins. they should stfu before someone shoots them in the faces. they, who like to rat out nerds to the fbi, like little bitches. stupid fucking socialists should be rounded up and shot on tv. At the very least beat down in the parking lot.
It is what it is.
Please stop using this phrase. I find it objectionably, redundantly useless. Also, "...at the end of the day..." please.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Trump knows talk show hosts are the real experts on climate science: https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2017/06/01/withdrawing-paris-climate-agreement-trump-called-fox-news-host-advice/216748
He didn't misunderstand, he misrepresented the facts to fit his narrative. I don't know if he knew what he was saying was not true or if he was simply regurgitating what his staff fed him, but the end result is the same.
The saying goes "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence". But they forgot the important second part: "except when it comes to government".
Did you hear the people applauding him as he made the announcement? The smarmy waves of satisfaction coming off the man? That's what this whole thing is about. The science doesn't matter at all. Him understanding it or not doesn't matter at all.
This whole thing was about looking good in front of his base and gathering their applause. Nothing else. If he did understand the science or not, it would have been irrelevant to him. That wasn't the point at all.
This whole exercise was about standing on a stage and having people applaud him.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Trump chooses to believe what and who he wants to believe. In this case, it was Kimberly Guilfoyle of "The Five" on Fox News. This is no joke. When it comes to big decisions, Boss-T, the President of the United States, is picking up the phone to TV celebrities on deliberately-biased cable news shows, rather than the leading tech executives in the country, international diplomats, and god knows who else, including, apparently, MIT Scientists.
If Putin invades Poland, I wonder who he'll call to ask whether he should push the button on Russia?
Big win for Kimberly, though... she's got her eye on replacing Sean Spicer in his thankless job as Trump's mouthpiece, this making her the ONLY winner from this announcement.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Since Mr. Trump seems to "UNDERSTAND" almost nothing, no big surprise! I would guess he would have to read a lot longer than his attention span will allow, to even come close to even a superficial understanding.
It was never ratified through congress because Obama knew even democrats wouldn't vote for it. So bravo Trump! Keep up the good work of ripping up Obamas failed agenda!
I read on slashdot that this treaty would have no affect on climate, that i was far too weak. This is now the cause of the death of all life on Earth. What happened?
Don't tell us what this Jabberwokky looks like, show us one of them.
Is the beginning of an infinite sequence.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Then if it's so important, why not do without the gender bullshit?
And if we're all going to die now, well, Trump offered to renegotiate the accord in a way that's more fair to the US. And who knows, would maybe even get approved by Congress, and therefore be binding! And the Europeans told him to pound sand.
Why do the Europeans hate the world and want us all to die?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Maybe the scientists should have included more colorful charts, and mentioned Trump more:
National security officials put Trump's name in their briefings as much as possible so he will keep reading
What did Putin tell Trump to do?!? Isn't that the real question from the Democrats? RUSSIA! TRUMP BAD! STOLE ELECTION! He can't pull us out of the treaty because he's illegitimate!
Sorry.
http://skepticalscience.com/comparing-global-temperature-predictions.html
Turns out your claim is a load of crap.
Unless you were talking about denier predictions and models....
It's not a question of conspiracies; just read the damn thing.
Here's the part he was referencing:
Parties acknowledge that adaptation action should follow a âoecountry-driven, gender-responsive, participatory and fully transparent approach, taking into consideration vulnerable groups, communities and ecosystems, and should be based on and guided by the best available science and, as appropriate, traditional knowledge, knowledge of indigenous peoples and local knowledge systems, with a view to integrating adaptation into relevant socioeconomic and environmental policies and actions.â
That paragraph alone should be enough to make any sane human being laugh in disgust and refuse to sign. And the rest of the agreement is full of similar nonsense.
Paris is about as strong as they could get without being a real treaty. It's all legal games to avoid having to really fight huge multi-national industries and their unprecedented power to corrupt and sucker millions around the globe.
Like the other lame "agreements" preceding it, Paris was just a step forward as the next agreements will gradually get stronger as the consequences motivate more and more people. Likely ending in global geoengineering efforts and a historic MESS which will be sold as "it could have been worse" and history condemning all our collective stupidity and selfishness.
Every denier needs to put their names on record so we can shame them for all of history; because they will be completely proven wrong and should go down badly in history. I don't think most have the courage; it's easy for them to not think beyond their lifespan, they lack the maturity.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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.
Only the U.S. has withdrawn. All others remain,
The U.S. has already been reducing carbon emissions over time, and that will accelerate with a large uptake in solar power over the next decade or so.
Thus even if MIT's assertion that "ALL" nations complying would reduce waring by 1.1f is true, the U.S. alone withdrawing is perhaps 1% of that amount, because the real polluters (India and China and other smaller nations) are all still in the "agreement".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But pollution has CO2. CO2 is what plants crave! Crap, or maybe it's Brawndo? Brawdo has electrolytes. It's what plants crave! Environmental science is so confusing. Go away now, I'm 'batin'!
The U.S. is still reducing carbon emissions, greatly due to the increased use of natural gas from fracking, but also a large uptake in solar power.
What the U.S. did is prevent OTHERS from dragging us off the other cliff to the side labeled "economic ruin", the one the EU is busy jumping off of.
At least there will be one nation able to maintain civilization during the upcoming 500 year decline.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Scream'N Cheeto didn't misunderstand anything, the Scream'n Cheeto doesn't fucking care.
Follow the links, read what it says. It matches what Trump said in his speech announcing the withdrawal, watch it on YouTube. Besides, he said clearly that he is willing to re-join the agreement if other bad polluters (China, India) agree to participate on equal terms. Makes sense to me.
So let me get this straight: it's the scientists that are super-greedy liars, and it's the Corporate Execs (i.e. Billionaires and millionaires) that are on the side of reason and are looking out for humanity and the planet?
Are these are the same billionaires that told us lead in gas was safe and tobacco didn't cause cancer.
What the subject says.
So you'll be accepting him the same way you did here, by citing his status in the scientific community on the subject, right?
Clearly someone who cannot spell "Massachusetts" or "Institute" and just gives up halfway through is a certified expert on this subject.
It gets worse than that actually. But yeah...it's full of social justice pork.
They overreached and in typical sociopathic form, they refuse to acknowledge their own mistakes.
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.
So who do I believe? My lying eyes or the words of someone else who clearly didn't read the words?
Why do the Europeans hate the world and want us all to die?
The idea of the Paris accord is to help the world and stop us dying. CO2 has the properties that it does regardless of how Europe or anybody else feels about it.
It's unlikely that humanity will die out from climate change but some people have already died from it. The US pulling out of the Paris accord will mean more people die from it but does not mean that everyone will die from it.
MIT misunderstood glow ball wamming all along.
As a result, climate change now accelerated to 1 degree per HOUR!!!!
As the sun cums up, the earth's temperature goes up
average 1 degree per hour. And when then sun goes
down, the globe cools 1 degree per hour.
Climate is changing every hour!
Awe noooo!
Environmentalists can't tolerate anything that dares breach their narrative, even science.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I don't believe that statement about climate change affecting females disproportionately for one second. Men the world over give their lives to help women and children. The oppressive patriarchy is generally a false narrative. Note the following:
Males are more likely to be homeless than females
Male life expectancy is lower than female life expectancy
More men die at work than women
More men die in war than women
More men are injured/maimed/paralyzed than women
More men commit suicide than women
The list goes on. Men aren't the evil victimizers the media and government wants us to believe they are, and women are often living in better conditions than men.
(I will apologize to anyone who happens to have the Trump last name, though.)
Well, they have the same option everyone in Germany with the last name 'Hitler' had: change it.
Not that Trump is Hitler ... he's more Mussolini to Putin's Hitler. Trump is, always has been, and always will be nothing more than a sidekick to Putin at most. Really, even calling him Mussolini overstates his stature ... he's more like the Vichy regime in France: a puppet put in place by a hostile power to destroy a country from within.
Either way though, you don't see people embracing the last name Hitler, Mussolini, or Vichy, and I suspect Trump will soon fall into the same category. Even his toxic children may one day grow weary of the title.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/28/paris-climate-agreement-should-be-nixed/
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.
I find both of those points very hard to believe, why would something as universal as climate impact women more? Women being the majority of the poor would be weird, almost all the homeless I see are men.
Here is the report:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-5899.12295/full
He'll join Paris back in a bit when there's a lot of pressure on him. This way, when shit's coming, it'll all be blamed on Paris and Trump will be the visionary America needs.
"Trump Misunderstood___________________________________"....
A wide range of answers can be used. Something scientific that is opposed by the owned GOP pawns is obvious to the casual observer.
Do you want us all to be doomed? Why do you hate us so much? And there's the counterargument in a nutshell...which I was trotting out for comedic effect only.
I've rarely seen a more cogent and witty analysis. What an apt refutation! This is clearly the pinnacle of your distinguished career as an internet commentator.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
When you asked "Why would the other country care if it's been ratified by a congress that isn't theirs?" you were missing a critical point: The United States Consitiution is a publicly available document whose treaty text has been unchanged for 200+ years. Anybody on planet Earth who cared enough to spend the necessary 2 minutes would have seen that because the USA is NOT a dictatorship, the American president has no authority to make treaties without the Senate. The US Constitution clearly states that an American treaty signature is only valid if 2/3 of the US Senate votes affirmatively to ratify it. Any foreign leader or diplomat who pretends this is a surprise is supremely ignorant and lazy, or dishonest, or cares very little about the subject at hand.
All those Euro leaders in full freakout mode knew full-well that Obama's signature on their treaty was meaningless without a Senate ratification - the whole damn treaty was really just composed of two things: meaningless symbolic pledges, and demands that the US hand over billions of dollars to other countries and export its induastries to China which was free to go on polluting. They did not really care that it was symbolic, they wanted the symbolism - the thing is devoid of any fixed anything which is why Jim Hansen attacked it back when Obama was president. What these Eurocrats wanted was the symbolism, the framework for future actions, an American president willing to further cripple American manufacturing, and Billions of American dollars flowing into every feel-good cause on Earth.
Globalist politicians are classic examples of treasonous traitors - they sell-out their own people while advancing their own personal financial states and posturing as morally superior. Every single one of them who denounces nationalism is a traitor (you cannot be faithful to your nation and be opposed to the existence of nations).
He got the point that there MIGHT be a fraction of a degree in temperaturre change a century from now in exchange for more and more economic damage to the American middle class and an acceleration of American budgetary nightmares from horrible economic growth rates and increased dependence on government in place of middle class manufacturing jobs.
These MIT jerks are just upset that the "social science" professors in the faculty lounge will be mad at them for providing Trump ammunition to abandon an Obamessaih policy. Time to put on the big boy pants at MIT and admit that the Paris accord was a crap sandwich for anybody in America not living in a college town either directly or indirectly on nearly unlimited college loans SOMEBODY will need to repay someday.
Just WHAT, substantively, did Trump supposedly get wrong? Let's face it, 0.6 degrees and 0.2 degrees are not far apart when predicting the future a hundred years out, particularly in a field where predicting temperatures within a full degree only three weeks out is nearly impossible.
No point "pussyfooting" around by suggesting he misunderstood, Trump will just grab you by that.
Say it how it is.
He lied.
Trump repeatedly emphasized that we would build "clean coal". He said the phrase over and over, emphasizing the word "clean" most.
Then he withdrew from the Paris agreement to (I quote) "benefit the coal industry".
Why would he need to withdraw from the agreement if the coal is "clean"? This is a political stunt to make him look like he's got the average American workers' backs.
In May 2015, there were 69,460 jobs in coal mining itself — only 15,900 of which were extraction workers or helpers, mining machine operators or earth drillers. Meanwhile the U.S. Department of Energy said in 2016 that solar power employed 43 percent of the Electric Power Generation sector's workforce.
It's really all just PR gestures - taking as blatant a mainline Republican position as he can to keep his voting base behind him 100%.
Economies can be repaired, Ecosystems can't.
You are a serious retard if you do not know ecosystems DO IN FACT heal themselves, they don't even need repairing. Have you ever seen an area decades after a bad fire? You don't need to repair ecosystems, fixing and adapting them is what nature does you blithering baboon!
Learn about nature man! Get outside! Holy crap you are being stupid.
Also if you think it is so easy to repair an economy once broken, why don't you go fix Venezuela... But fuck millions of people suffering and dying right? I can see you cackling with glee as society descends into the long night. Go move to Germany or France and watch it happen up close and personal, you'll derive maximum enjoyment.
In 50 years when planet is thriving, as it tends to do when warmers instead of cooler, and Europe is in deep decay and war and strife roil the land, I hope you think back to this very moment and feel the appropriate amount of raw shame at your words today.
I'll let you have the last response because there's no way I'm reading anything further from someone who knows as little as you about, well, anything. Time will issue the rebuttal to whatever nonsense you respond with, and that too shall remain etched in your brain to haunt you later.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Sierra Club disagrees with you.
But even the article you linked to admits natural gas lowers CO2 emissions vs. coal (which is obvious to anyone who has the most basic understanding of chemistry and science - which I guess does not include Warming Alarmists). It just thinks the majority of reduction is from drop is overall usage - which still is not saying that natural gas does not lower CO2 emissions. Learn to read what you link to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
American's need to stop buying useless shit from walmart and amazon. Stop buying shit! Factories in china would close down. Problem solved.
Trump never questioned the science of global warming, he withdrew the United States from a treaty that was never properly approved by the Senate and, in his opinion, was a "bad deal" for America.
Now, let's look at this:
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.
In order:
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
Let's call this the "best-case scenario"
"If we don't do anything, we might shoot over 5 degrees or more and that would be catastrophic,"
Let's call this the "worst-case scenario"
Let's also note that if we all follow "the pledges in the deal" the outcome will be the "worst-case scenario" less the "best-case scenario", or a 5 degree increase, reduced by between 0.6 and 1.1 degrees by 2100, in other words, the best outcome we can predict is a temperature increase of 3.9 degrees.
MIT's scientists had had no contact with the White House and were not offered a chance to explain their work.
No, MIT scientists were offered a chance to explain their work - their opportunity was in their written report that the White House staff cited.
Ken
Seems to be becoming a pattern - got a funny feeling we'll be hearing a lot more of:
"Trump misunderstood X, say [people who clearly know what they're talking about]"
It's not "in every way up for debate". Only our response to the clear and evident problem is up for debate.
So here's a way to cut through the crap: If it's said by the right, it's garbage. If it's said by the left, it has a chance of being correct or hyperbole. If it's said by a climate scientist, then pay attention, because it's the planet at stake and these people know their stuff.
The real problem here is that if a climate scientist says "Business as usual will cost us uncountable trillions of dollars, destroy people's lives, and risk civilisation itself" you'll have some dumbarse right winger saying "well, that's just your opinion". Well, it's not just an opinion, it's the best evidence based information we have.
Trump, in his infinite ignorance, may have gone past the point where the world will give him the benefit of the doubt now. From here on, expect anti-USA sanctions and tariffs against products based on their CO2 intensity during manufacture.
The MIT research he cites literally says the Paris agreement will not meet its goals. MIT is butthurt that he used their research to pull out of this meaningless agreement
What about the people who actually carried out the study? What did -they- have to say?
NO! Impossible! He has a very good brain, and knows all the best words! How could he possibly not understand... any thing at all? He's like a smart person! We're going to Make America Grate Again... (grate on people's nerves! LOL)
Any words after "Trump doesn't understand" are superfluous. Here're a few of the things I believe he does know.
His daughter is red-hawt.
If you keep tricking morons into working for you and not paying them, word does eventually get around.
If you keep tricking morons into lending you money and never paying it back, they eventually learn and you have to borrow from Russian-Government-Connected loan sharks.
Trump heard that you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool ALL of the people some of the time, and stopped listening there, realizing that if he can fool enough of the people enough of the time, you can manage to be "president."
He BIGLY Doesn't Care.
It is virtually impossible for Trump to LIE, because he actually has NO grounding in Reality, and LIKES IT THAT WAY.