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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.
Misunderstood? Or willfully misconstrued to fit an agenda?
Silence is a state of mime.
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!
...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...
Holding the president accountable for decisions that his brand, and whoever is associated with it, makes?
Is there any president who we give a pass for making retarded world-scope decisions because of "jargon, confusing verbiage, and passive voice"? Maybe if the president of the united states and his advisors can't reason with jargon, confusing verbiage, and passive voice, they should look into alternate career paths.
Maybe Obama just misunderstood the TPP.
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.
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.)
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.
Was it Trump who misunderstood the study, or government advisers?
Seems kind of irrelevant. I mean, I don't think that anyone imagines Trump is actually reading scientific studies. Obviously someone is telling him these things. It could be advisors, but it seems just as likely it's something someone said on Fox and Friends. Regardless, his statements about the research were inaccurate.
Was it Trump who misunderstood the study, or did the study not communicate clearly?
Not sure if English is your second language or something, but in English, if you fail to understand something because it was not communicated properly, it's still proper to say that you misunderstood.
Did the study use a lot of jargon, confusing verbiage, and passive voice?
I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make here. There's bound to be some scientific jargon in a scientific paper. And what does "passive voice" have to do with anything?
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"?
Did someone claim that the paper was vague? It seems like Trump was also under the impression that the paper gave specific projections, enough that he claims the environmental impact is negligible. It's just that those claims don't accurately characterize the results of the research.
Is the news article cited above just completely and totally wrong, or has it been vetted for accuracy?
Do you have any reason to think that it's totally wrong or inaccurate? Or are you just taking an absurd cynical position? For any statement, you could say, "What if that's just totally wrong?":
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth-- or maybe he wasn't! Maybe Lincoln is still alive today. Have those stories been vetted for accuracy?
Water molecules are made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Or maybe that's just totally wrong! Has anyone researched this?
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...
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.
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.
Not to put too fine a point on the issue but...
Was it Trump who misunderstood the study, or government advisers?
Many Trump advisors such as Musk and Iger, along with the CEOs of massive businesses including Exxon and Chevron (oil companies!), Microsoft, Apple, Goldman Sachs, GE, etc told Trump leaving the Paris Accords was a bad idea. Several, specifically Musk and Iger, have already stepped down from advisory councils. The only advisor Trump trusts is Trump. He has explicitly said so.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Fuck you. The "passive voice" is the best "voice".
It is perfect for writing which needs to be neutral, factual, and unencumbered by shitty spin or hyperbole. The fucking Word grammar check always harasses me about using a "passive voice" whenever I have to fire it up to write an evaluation or a technical document. If I knew how the fuck to disable that rule I would, but I'm not about to dig through the ever-changing options menus to find it for how infrequently I use Word.
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.
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I looked into Lindzen's arguments ten years ago when he was the darling of the denialist movement. I stopped bothering when he made a statistical argument that was completely invalid for any data sample that has serial correlation. Any MIT student who'd passed 18.05 would be able to spot that.
He's a crackpot, like Andrew Wakefield is on vaccinations. Wakefield too had impressive academic associations; he got his medical degree from the Imperial College School of Medicine, which is harder to get into than Harvard Medical School, and was a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was also a crackpot.
The only difference between Wakefield and Lindzen is that science is a lot more tolerant of crackpots than medicine is.
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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.