I have been holding off (aside from one pre-election outburst) talking about potential Trump appointees, because they've all been speculative (and because the idea of cackling Rudy Giuliani becoming AG makes my skin crawl).
But here's something concrete to start kvetching about: Myron Bell, who's declared global warming a hoax (or, more recently, a good thing because "people prefer less severe winters"), who has headed Exxon's anti-climate change policy project, who in the Bush White House watered down a climate change report from the EPA, and who then tried to get the head of the EPA fired so as to discredit the agency in the eyes of the president.
This is the man that Donald Trump has picked to head his EPA "transition team."
What colorful thing will Trump do next?
Originally shared by +John Baez:
This man must be stopped
Trump has said on Twitter that:
the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.
While he later denied saying this, he is now threatening to put Myron Ebell in charge of his Environmental Protection Agency "transition team". Transition team? Yes, apparently Trump wants to weaken or destroy this agency. And if you don't know Myron Ebell, you'd better learn about him now!
Myron Ebell has said:
I don’t want to say it’s a disaster, but I think it is potentially a disaster for humankind and not necessarily any good for the planet.
What's he talking about? Global warming? No, he's talking about the Paris agreement to fight global warming. He claims global warming is, on the whole, a good thing. Why?
In fact, there is no question that most people prefer less severe winters.
After running an organization devoted to eliminating protection for endangered species, he switched to heading the Global Warming and International Environmental Policy project at an institute funded by Exxon. His job was to sow doubt and create confusion about climate change.
But he burst into fame in 2002. That's when he helped Bush's White House "council on environmental policy" water down a key report on global warming. He was caught by Greenpeace, and a scandal erupted.
He also tried to get the head of the Environmental Protection Agency fired. Back then it was Christine Todd Whitman. In a secret memo to Philip Cooney, head of Bush's anti-environmental council, Ebell wrote:
It seems to me that the folks at the EPA are the obvious fall guys, and we would only hope that the fall guy (or gal) should be as high up as possible. I have done several interviews and have stressed that the president needs to get everyone rowing in the same direction. Perhaps tomorrow we will call for [Christine Todd Whitman] to be fired. I know that that doesn't sound like much help, but it seems to me that our only leverage to push you in the right direction is to drive a wedge between the President and those in the Administration who think they are serving the president's best interests by publishing this rubbish.
"This rubbish" was a report put out by the EPA warning people of the dangers of climate change.
So, get ready: this guy will be working full-time to cause trouble!
Here's a good Scientific American article to get you up to speed:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-picks-top-climate-skeptic-to-lead-epa-transition/
Here's Myron Ebell on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myron_Ebell
Here's Myron Ebell rewriting scientific reports:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/jun/09/science.environment
Myron Ebell saying global warming is, on the whole, a good thing:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1225/038.html
Here's Trump's claim that climate change is a notion invented by the Chinese:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/26/13067918/donald-trump-presidential-debate-2016-climate-change-hoax
He's so wacky and unconventional!
In two years we’ll have the first opportunity to vote out politicians who are going along with the crap we expect from Trump and the GOP. Boot enough out and some of the rest will start reexamining their positions.
If enough Americans can be bothered to vote at all, or for anything but legalizing pot.*
My guess is that things will have to get very bad indeed to get voter percentages up to, say, 60%.
*I’ve had a Californian told me that pot may help them get through the next four years, so yay for that.
PRESS RELEASE- 2016, 11th november
A French scientist’s research attributes most of the global warming to solar activity
The Dutch-British publishing company Elsevier B.V. has put online on October 25, 2016, a paper entitled “Earth Climate Identification vs. Detection and Attribution”. This publication, referenced on the ScienceDirect website, was revised in the due rules by a peer committee in Annual Reviews in Control (ARC), one of the seven scientific journals of IFAC, federating thousands of international experts in automatic control and modelisation of complex systems.
The author, Professor Philippe de Larminat, is a recognized expert in these disciplines. He applied the proven techniques of dynamical systems identification to the Earth climate, using paleoclimatic databases available from the major institutes and international organizations. It follows that “with a 90% probability level, one cannot reject the hypothesis of a zero anthropogenic contribution”. While “the hypothesis of a low sensitivity to solar activity must be rejected with a probability level greater than 90%.”
Conversely, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) considers that “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the middle of the 20th century”, this on the basis of the “Detection and Attribution”, a theory explicitly dedicated to anthropogenic attribution of recent climate change.
The paper presents and clarifies the causes of this contradiction.
• The main one is due to the durations used for climate observations: a thousand years for Identification, at most one hundred and fifty years for the Detection-Attribution, thereby eliminating the millennia events of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, notoriously correlated to solar activity. « It has the effect of minimizing the contribution of solar activity » says the author.
• The second contradiction is due to a confusion between cause and effect, about the El Niño events. The author examines the reasons for this “heavy methodological error, which is obvious to any expert in systems science”.
Could the Philippe de Larminat publication challenge the prevailing consensus on anthropogenic climate change, consensus which is turning the world economic issues (COP 21, 22) as far as the moral issues (Laudato si)? Questioned on the eventuality that a new consensus can emerge, that of a preponderant influence of solar activity on the climate, the author only recalls: “Neither the consensus nor the votes have any place in science; only the evidences matter. To the argument of authority, French philosopher Descartes opposed the authority of the argument. But the consensus is only a submission to the argument of authority, the lowest ever”.
This publication, whose part is accessible even to the non-experts, confirms the conclusions already advanced by the author in his previous work “Climate change – identification and projections” (ISTE/Wiley, 2014). It is expected to reopen the debate on a new basis.
Philippe de LARMINAT,
Contact: philippe.delarminat@orange.fr
Press Contact: +33 (0) 6 78 43 95 78
Open access journal link : http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1367578816300931