Friday 26th of April 2024
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zuck2

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg flew to Glacier National Park on Saturday to tour the melting ice fields that have become the poster child for climate change’s effects on Montana’s northern Rockies.

But days before the tech tycoon’s visit, the Trump administration abruptly removed two of the park’s top climate experts from a delegation scheduled to show him around, telling a research ecologist and the park superintendent that they were no longer going to participate in the tour.

The decision to micromanage Zuckerberg’s stop in Montana from 2,232 miles east in Washington, made by top officials at the Interior Department, the National Park Service’s parent agency, was highly unusual — even for a celebrity visit.

It capped days of internal discussions — including conference calls and multiple emails — among top Interior Department and Park Service officials about how much the park should roll out the welcome mat for Zuckerberg, who with the broader tech community in Silicon Valley has positioned himself as a vocal critic of President Trump, particularly of his withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/07/20/climate-expe...

 

meanwhile on the old incontinent...

A new lobby group has appeared in Europe claiming to represent ‘consumers’. But a closer look reveals it is actually backed by some familiar groups known for their efforts to weaken climate and environmental regulations.

The Consumer Choice Centre (CCC) was set up in March 2017 and was promoted as “a grassroots-led movement” that “empowers consumers across the globe”.

But an investigation by Brussels think tank Corporate Europe Observatory suggests the CCC is actually working as a lobby group for a network pushing deregulation, while working closely with high-profile organisations including London-based think tank the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) and US oil billionaire Charles Koch.

The IEA’s head of lifestyle economics, Christopher Snowdon, helped launch the group at an event just around the corner from the European Parliament in April 2017, Corporate Europe Observatory said. At the event, theCCC said it collaborated with libertarian think tank EPICENTER, which the IEA was involved in creating.

EPICENTER promotes the work of six free-market think tanks, including reports that criticise renewable energy subsidies and praising fracking.

As DeSmog UK previously revealed, the IEA has close ties to a UK network of climate science denial organisations that pushed for Brexit. Former IEA chairman, Neil Record, now sits on the board of climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Forum.

The think tank was awarded zero stars for transparency by watchdog Transparify as it refuses to disclose its funders.

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/07/20/new-lobby-group-tied-brexit-climat...

we're seeing extreme weather phenomenon...

DIMITRI LASCARIS: This is Dimitri Lascaris for The Real News. This is part two of our interview with esteemed climate scientist, Michael Mann. Professor Mann talked with us in part one about a recent article in New York Magazine, which offered a very dire assessment of humanity's future as a result of climate change. In this part, I'd like to discuss with Professor Mann some of the current weather phenomena that we're seeing extreme weather phenomenon.

 

Professor Mann is a distinguished research professor and a director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. He's the author of the book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, and his latest book co-authored with Tom Toles is titled The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy. Welcome again, Michael.

 

MICHAEL MANN: Thanks, good to be with you.

 

DIMITRI LASCARIS: So this week, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the first half of 2017 was the second hottest on record and that last month, June, was the third hottest June on record. An NOAA scientist, Ahira Sanchez-Lugo, remarked that these high temperature are "extremely remarkable because temperatures had been expected to drop after the end of the strong El Niño in 2016, which contributed to record temperatures in that year."

 

Do you agree with Ms. Sanchez-Lugo that temperatures thus far this year are extremely remarkable, and if so, why?

 

MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, I would say that it's somewhat remarkable. They're more or less on the trend line. It's not like these temperatures are coming in so far above our model projections that we can't make sense of them. They're more or less on the trend line or a little bit above the trend line, and that's after a decade where some of the numbers were coming in a little bit below the trend line. When they were coming in below the trend line, you had the all too predictable chorus of climate change deniers insisting that climate change had stopped. That warming had stopped. That there was a pause in warming, and that was all nonsense. Temperatures tend to fluctuate from year to year due to various influences, including natural influences.

 

Now, we are seeing some of those influences sort of push us in the other direction. We had a several year-long El Niño event, which boosted global temperatures quite a bit. 2016, the warmest year on record, benefited from that warm. It is a little surprising that 2017 hasn't fallen off as much as we might have expected, given that the El Niño event, which is a global temperature boosting event, has subsided, and we've instead at least gone into a little bit of a La Nina, which is the opposite sort of cooling side of that phenomenon.

 

One of the things that is going on here is that much of the warmth in recent years hasn't just been related to El Niño. It's been related to a very warm Arctic. The Arctic has been remarkably warm, and that's consistent with what the models predict. We expect this so called Arctic amplification of warming, in part because of the melting of ice, which allows more of the sunlight to be absorbed, further warming the Arctic.

read more:

http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19616:First-Six-Months-of-2017-Marked-By...