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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.
There is a difference between "misrepresented" and "misunderstood."
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
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.
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.)
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
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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