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Massive Government Report Says Climate Is Warming and Humans Are the Cause (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: It is "extremely likely" that human activities are the "dominant cause" of global warming, according to the the most comprehensive study ever of climate science by U.S. government researchers. The climate report, obtained by NPR, notes that the past 115 years are "the warmest in the history of modern civilization." The global average temperature has increased by about 1.8 degree Fahrenheit over that period. Greenhouse gases from industry and agriculture are by far the biggest contributor to warming. The findings contradict statements by President Trump and many of his Cabinet members, who have openly questioned the role humans play in changing the climate. The report states that the global climate will continue to warm. How much, it says, "will depend primarily on the amount of greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) emitted globally." Without major reductions in emissions, it says, the increase in annual average global temperature could reach 9 degrees Fahrenheit relative to pre-industrial times. Efforts to reduce emissions, it says, would slow the rate of warming.
"The assessments are required by an act of Congress; the last one was published in 2014. "
So we have these laws requiring the government workers to model climate change and make assessments of it, those models are used by military and civil planners to anticipate flooding, food shortages, etc. Driven by the best models the scientists can build from all the data.
And we have Scott Pruit, head of the EPA, climate change denier, essentially driven by Hannity of Fox News, who in turn is simply sponsored propaganda of a dying coal industry. Pruit repeats basic flawed logic and misdirections to pretend its not happening.
Notice the split? Scott isn't working from the science or the data from under him, he's working from the sponsored commentary on Fox News. But then that's just paid for propaganda, it's not science. So you have one group working from real data and models that bypass his agency, and his agency working from PR puff pieces written by industries looking for favors.
That's not healthy.
What if the head of the Defense Department did that? Suppose US was at war with Russia and Russia hired Hannity to push its propaganda. Instead of making choices based on all the data and science the government could muster, you'd have a military undermined from the top by its own boss. You can see that now with the Russian cyber attacks against USA, Fox is doing a full on deflection. Not a denial, a deflection. They know Russia is doing that, yet trying to get their viewers to ignore it as a non-story.
Double my expenses? Sure. I've lived in a country where most of my expenses were up to 5x what I'm currently paying in the USA. Medicine? Don't take any. Insurance? that's already 4x the norm for the rest of the world here. How far would I be willing to go? Whatever it takes. You short term thinkers have no place in the world. Most of the things you take for granted, and complain that they are already too expensive, like gasoline and electricity, are downright dirt cheap by the rest of the world's standards. I say remove the government subsidies in the USA and let you people discover what it's like in the rest of the civilized world.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
We burn carbon in order to do useful things. We measure the usefulness of things with money. "Waste" means burning carbon without doing something useful.
So the relevant metric isn't a country's total CO2 emissions, or CO2 emission per capita, but CO2 emission per dollar of GDP. If one country emits more CO2 per GDP than another one, you can decrease CO2 emissions by moving production from the former to the latter, while maintaining the same total production.
And on that score, the US is around the middle of the pack, producing value of $2,291 per ton of CO2 emitted. China is one of the worst, at $435/ton. European countries (Germany, Netherlands, UK, etc.) are around $4000/ton.
Here is the ironic thing, when I see a report about remarking about climage change: It must be something very notable and significant, because it is definitely in the financial interest of the powers that be to play it down.
So, if scientists that will have Hell to pay for climate change are stepping forward with these results, the actual damage being done may be far, far worse than what we see now. Especially areas like the Sahel in Africa where when resources dry up, conflicts start, mainly because it turns to fighting or starving.
Right now, the view in a lot of places may be "who cares about Africa?", but that view only makes groups like Daesh stronger. The world's problems cannot all be solved by bullets (Iraq and Afghanistan have shown the US and USSR that), so it might be in the interest of civilization to at least find ways to mitigate desertification, work on desalination and effective irrigation, and find ways to reclaim arable land from the sea.