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Trump Administration Sees a 7-Degree Rise in Global Temperatures By 2100 (washingtonpost.com)
Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century. From a report: A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 4 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe. But the administration did not offer this dire forecast as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet's fate is already sealed. The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump's decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.
Big claims. Where's your sources?
This is an NHTSA study to weigh the costs and benefits of automobile fuel efficiency standards.
A more fuel efficient car may be trading passenger lives for higher miles per gallon. It makes sense to determine what the benefits are.
In this case the preliminary study is saying the beneficial impact on warming may be insignificant. You can argue about those conclusions, but arguing about climate change as a whole is irrelevant to the point of the study.
Oh, come on Kendall, it's all down to how you fit the curve to the data points (oblig. XKCD) and you know it. Depending on the approach you use, you can make any one of the lines in that graph other than India's have the best overall downward trend over the next few years. It's lies, damn lies, and statistics, pure and simple, so unless the person making the claim that A is doing better than B is caveating it with their methodology they're just as credible/full of it as someone claiming that B is doing better than A.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
That doesn't support the conclusion that "it doesn't matter what the USA does". We're still a huge emitter, we still have massive influence on what the rest of the world does, and (incidentally) a lot of that stuff being made in China is being made for U.S. consumption (and shipped across an ocean at tremendous environmental expense).
The fact is, if we want to avoid global catastrophe, we must all attack the problem.
We in the US ranked second in the world for totally carbon emissions, and third in the world on a per capita basis. China is the largest emitter on a net basis, but emits less than half of what we do on a per capita basis.
Now we green tards may be bad at math, but it's not really about math: The US emits 4x the CO2 that Japan does, but we have 2.5x the population of Japan, spread of 26x the area. It's apples to oranges.
Geographically large countries like Australia emit more carbon per capita than comparable but more compact countries like Austria, which has almost the same per capita GDP. Rich countries like Japan emit more carbon than poor ones like Zimbabwe, which has almost the same land area.
What this means is that there are endless arguments you can make about who is the most carbon-virtuous country on the planet, because every country is a special case.
This isn't about winning brownie points in a contest to see who can make his neurotic self-image concerns the center of attention. A 4C temperature increase by 2100 would be catastrophic for everyone. Well, most people, specifically non-rich people.
So we shouldn't judge countries by how much carbon they emit, but by the steps they could be taking to reduce their carbon footprint.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It means the days of trying to force agreements that exempt the worst emitters while saddling the US with huge economic burdens are over. If you think we must "Do Something!!" you can no longer pretend that China doesn't exist and isn't an enormous contributor while dreaming up schemes to downsize the US to 1700's emission levels. None of that is politically feasible any longer — if it ever was — so you need to get your mind right and start imagining solutions that also burden China and whatever other economies emerge to replace China as well. The simple minded and foolish la-la land climate politics of the last 20-30 years have failed. Catch up, son.
The People are on to you. They understand that the wealthy establishment, its well-employed professional class and the coddled tech bros of the Valley with their Internet amplified voices won't suffer one iota of pain under the energy poverty schemes they've been threatening to inflict on the hoi polloi, and the hoi polloi gets it. So you must change. Either figure out some way to supply clean, low cost, abundant energy or get to work on a GULAG system to dispose of the folk, because they are no longer sleep walking into energy poverty on behalf of your anxieties.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Here's the official data: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/...
EU CO2 emissions have been falling for a long time. There has been a bit of a stall recently due to a bit of a transition, but we are still on track for some very aggressive targets. The IEA is predicting wind to be the dominant source of electricity in 2027, with coal down to just 10%.
https://arstechnica.com/scienc...
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nobody is pure evil. Not everything Trump does is wrong or harmful, in the same way that even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then. But I do honestly believe he will go down in the history books as the worst US president of all time, and that record will likely outlive the country.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The environment doesn't care about countries. It cares about total pollution. Countries is a completely arbitrary delineation that has no bearing on anything. People is a concrete delineation -- to support people, some pollution must be produced. To support countries, in theory, nothing has to be produced because you can draw a line on a map and have a country of 0.
If the world had two countries, and one had only one person in it and did 49% of the pollution, and the other had the other 7 billion people, everybody else and did 51% of the pollution, which country has the most opportunity to reduce pollution? Unless you have a damn good rationale, it's the country of one person. Because the environment doesn't care about countries. But the country of 7 billion people is strong evidence that the other country is polluting almost 7 billion times as much as it needs to.
Especially since it's conceivable that the country of 7 billion is using the absolute minimum possible pollution to support 7 billion people at an acceptable level. But it's not possible for the country of 1 to be doing so.
None of that is to say that China is perfect. Eg. if you dug up evidence that 1/10th of China's population is responsible for almost all the polluting and the other 9/10ths are in abject poverty and should really be brought up to a higher standard even at the expense of polluting *more*, then you could make the argument that China is the bigger problem.