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President Donald Trump plans to make good on his campaign vow to withdraw the United States from a global pact to fight climate change, a source briefed on the decision said on Wednesday, a move that promises to deepen a rift with U.S. allies.
White House officials cautioned that details were still being hammered out and that, although close, the decision on withdrawing from the 195-nation accord - agreed to in Paris in 2015 - was not finalized.
[...] The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Trump was working out the terms of the planned withdrawal with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, an oil industry ally and climate change doubter.
[...] The CEOs of Dow Chemical Co, ExxonMobil Corp, Unilever NV and Tesla Inc all urged Trump to remain in the agreement, with Tesla's Elon Musk threatening to quit White House advisory councils of which he is a member if the president pulls out.
Source: Reuters
On Twitter, Trump indicated that an announcement was coming soon.
"I will be announcing my decision on the Paris Accord over the next few days," he wrote. "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"
[...] Opponents of the climate deal were concerned after White House economic advisor Gary Cohn told reporters that the president was "evolving on the issue" during his trip overseas.
His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly channelled support for the deal behind the scenes at the White House, encouraging climate change activists that Trump might change his mind. Trump's Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon CEO, also supported remaining in the treaty.
Source: Brietbart
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday June 01 2017, @04:58AM (45 children)
Love the Cognitive Dissonance going on here.
So the OIL MAN supports staying in and the "oil industry puppet" wants out. Or maybe people have opinions and aren't slaves to big oil? Nah, that would make heads explode to even consider. I support pulling out because it is stupid and anti-science. AGW breaks every principle of the Scientific Method, period. Worse, because it does it so obviously it is degrading public confidence in science itself. It is a myth pushed to enrich the Globalists and redistribute wealth.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mykl on Thursday June 01 2017, @05:13AM (41 children)
I'm not exactly sure how you came up with the claim that AGW "breaks every principle of the Scientific Method, period.". Scientists have formed a theory, designed experiments to test that theory, and have analysed the results to confirm and/or adjust their theory. That's exactly what is happening in climate science today.
The world has been through this all before, back in the 70s/80s with the banning of CFCs when it was determined that they harmed the ozone layer. We had the same lobbyists claiming that the science was 'fake' or that there were other causes. Thank goodness the governments of the day paid more attention to the science than to the shrill voices of self-interested parties, or we may have lost even more of the ozone layer. As it is, we have just recently turned the corner where the hole over Antarctica has started to close again (CFCs had about a 20-30 year delay as they made their way up to the ozone layer, so there was always going to be a long tail in the fix). Skin cancers across Australia, which have been rising over the last couple of decades, may finally start to fall again.
Unfortunately, the governments of today haven't acted quickly enough, and it looks like it's already too late for the Great Barrier Reef, for one:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/07/the-great-barrier-reef-a-catastrophe-laid-bare [theguardian.com]
Screw you, climate change denier.
(Score: 0, Troll) by jmorris on Thursday June 01 2017, @05:39AM (23 children)
Nope. They had a theory, designed some computer models to attempt to test the theory, they were all outside the error bars so they ignored them and then started rewriting the historical record in attempts to salvage their gravy train. The only way to 'test' AGW theory is computer modeling, all models old enough to have predictive power have come up outside their error bars predicting far higher than what actually happened. Newer models may or may not be better but we won't know for twenty years.
But then it got worse. As the Earth simply refused to warm on demand they morphed the scam to Climate Change. Well of COURSE the goddamned climate has continually changed since the Earth cooled enough to have a climate. What they did was nothing less than double down and make a claim that literally was not falsifiable since absolutely any result would 'confirm' it. Tell me what could possibly happen to falsify "Climate Change?" Do you know what you call a belief, unsupported by quantifiable evidence, that isn't falsifiable by any evidence or argument? I will tell you, we normally call such a belief a religious belief. And that is the optimistic view, that they are simply deluded. The more likely explanation for why trained scientists would abandon the Scientific Method is politics and money. Remember that there are literally trillions of dollars at stake in this latest International boondoggle and every other one. Plus the almost unlimited political power, enough to make their Marxist dreams come true. Might powerful temptations to be resisted, pretty easy to see why they succumbed.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Soylentbob on Thursday June 01 2017, @05:53AM (16 children)
Global warming as a graph [xkcd.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @06:20AM
"That graph looks fake. It must be made up." -AGW denier
The above statement seems to be the only basis for climate change denial.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @06:56AM (14 children)
XKCD's cartoon looks like the hockey stick. For example, the little ice age is smoothed over so much that XKCD guy has to put an arrow there to remind himself where a historic weather event should be.
Activists hate the more accurate one drawn by Josh.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/20/josh-takes-on-xkcds-climate-timeline/comment-page-1/ [wattsupwiththat.com]
There was a reason the Romans and Greeks wore togas 2000 years ago!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @07:59AM (5 children)
FTFY
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Thursday June 01 2017, @12:40PM (4 children)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @12:50PM (2 children)
Ad hominem, but not necessarily a fallacy. Depends on who does the critising.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Thursday June 01 2017, @06:49PM (1 child)
Duh. But since it's not me committing the fallacy, then it's a fallacy.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday June 01 2017, @10:27PM
Not so typical, more of a trifecta of a non-fallacy. Climate change denial? Check! Brietbarf News? Check!! khallow coming to the defense with a badly thought out accusation of ad hominem? Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner! Not a fallacy. Fake news.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday June 03 2017, @08:28PM
Not so much the "inaccuracy", my dear khallow, more the mendacity. Hanlon's razor applies in most cases (do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence), but in the case of these sources it does not because it has become fairly obvious to anyone arguing from good faith that these sources have been intentionally inaccurate, on purpose, with malice aforethought, and therefore calling them out is not an instance of an argumentum ad hominem. They are lying. Yes, scientists may occasionally be inaccurate, but for the most part, and by common consensus, they are not doing so intentionally, except in the tiny minds of twisted climate deniers, like some people who post here on SoylentNews. Allow me the privilege of not having to name names.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @12:42PM (7 children)
So you say that smoothing removed extremes from the curve? Well, that makes the fact that the current warming survives that smoothing just more significant, doesn't it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @02:08PM (6 children)
The original hockey stick models were producing hockey stick graphs regardless of the data fed in, so... not necessarily
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @02:19PM (5 children)
You make that sound like inputting random data produced the same result. That's basically a lie.
The truth is that using different, internally consistent, data sets of actual temperature measurements produce basically the same result.
That's confirmation of correctness, not disqualification.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 01 2017, @07:41PM (4 children)
From this summary [technologyreview.com] of the research in question:
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @08:03PM (3 children)
Do you know who you are citing in that article from 2004?
Richard Muller: former climate change denier who now says that humans are almost entire responsible for climate change. [scientificamerican.com]
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday June 01 2017, @10:53PM (2 children)
We should consider this warning sign. High profile researchers came up with a model of the past climate which was eventually shown to be heavily biased via its statistical processes to generate a hockey stick shape - a relatively flat model of climate change for a thousand years prior to the human industrial age and a sharp turn upwards afterward. Then when that research was discredited, suddenly several more studies with the same hockey stick curve show up to back the first bit of research. While that's not unheard of in science that some deeply erroneous work turns out to be on the right track, it is a curious coincidence that so much research backing that particular curve just suddenly shows up right when climate mitigation advocates needed a propaganda rebuttal to the Medieval Warm Period, which was prior to 1999 thought by many climate researchers to be a time when the Earth was roughly as warm as it is now (and implying as a result an inconveniently strong solar effect on climate).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @11:25PM (1 child)
> That doesn't cancel out Muller's comments and thus is a red herring.
No, what cancels them out is all the further research since 2004 that has verified the hockey stick graph.
Muller himself contributed to it.
> We should consider this warning sign.
You are a warning sign.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 01 2017, @11:49PM
Which isn't of much use, if the hockey stick isn't an accurate representation of the world's climate through the past thousand years. A key warning sign here is modern climate variations on the multi-decadal scale which disappear when one goes from the instrument record to paleoclimate data.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Weasley on Thursday June 01 2017, @06:03AM (3 children)
So climate change is a leftist conspiracy to seize power and then hand it over to the proletariat?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 01 2017, @12:41PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Weasley on Thursday June 01 2017, @03:26PM (1 child)
Are there any national implementations of Marxism?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 01 2017, @06:46PM
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @06:05AM
"their Marxist dreams come true"
Hahaha. This guy is just a troll. Ignore him.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @03:01PM
The truth is that the term "climate change" was deliberately popularized by republican pollster Frank Luntz for Bush in 2002 [theguardian.com] in order to minimize the danger of the problem. But, by 2006 even Luntz was publicly saying that global warming is real and serious:
Furthermore the whole belief that the earth stopped warming is nothing more than statistical innumeracy. In 1998 there was a local maximum in warming [wikipedia.org] - a peak that was substantially higher than before. It took about 10 years to hit that same level again, but since then we've zoomed past it. 2014 [nasa.gov], 2015 [nasa.gov], and 2016 [nasa.gov] were each the hottest year on record at the time.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 01 2017, @05:45AM (15 children)
The skin cancers in Australia are dependent on the CFC pollution? if so, cause of death over decades should hint to this.
People tend to get the nasty malign melanoma there.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Soylentbob on Thursday June 01 2017, @07:11AM (14 children)
Skin cancer is correlated to UV-radiation, which is correlated to ozone-depletion in higher atmosphere, which lags behind CFC polution by 20 years as parent poster already suggested. So, according to the expectation voiced by the scientist, with the ban of CFC in the '80s we should see an ongoing incline of melanoma cases until ~2000, after that a stagnation, and with some luck a decline once the ozone layer rebuilds.
Here are some actual statistics [canceraustralia.gov.au] (and here [canceraustralia.gov.au] is a deep-link to the graph proving the former hypothesis voiced in the '80s).
There are some logical connections that can be assumed true even if not proven by experiment. If you know that people need to breath to survive, and you know by experience they drown after some time under water, you don't have to repeat the experiment with alcohol, oil and other liquids to prove that they will drown there as well. If it is known by experiment that uv-radiation increases the risk of skin cancer, it is known that ozone filters uv-radiation, it is known that CFC destroys ozone, it is known that it takes 20 years to go up through the atmosphere, then you don't need to wait for statistics to prove that CFC pollution will increase the risk of skin-cancer.
Same with global warming: Some of the mechanisms are known. There are some mitigating effects (e.g. the sea dissolving some of the CO2), and probably not all of them were considered in the previous model. Some might delay the warming, other effects might speed it up (e.g. the methane released from the thawing former perma-frost areas in Siberia), some of them might cause additional problems (e.g. the CO2-levels in the seas can kill the corals, could bring the fish-population out of balance). AFAIK, no one claims to understand all interconnections to the last detail, and the models are adjusted when new influences are found. But the tendency is clear.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday June 01 2017, @08:09AM (9 children)
Actually, yes you do. Because there happens to be substances mammals CAN breath in, I'm sure you too have seen the video of lab rats swimming fully enclosed in a vat of liquid, which just happens to be a CFC if I recall. So yes Science requires you to actually test everything because every time we actually do the science right that way we end up discovering new stuff.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Soylentbob on Thursday June 01 2017, @08:57AM (8 children)
Nice niche-example, but wrong conclusion. They didn't emerge rats in random liquids to see if they will always drown, instead they analysed the effect of drowning, analysed the build-up of the lung, devised a liquid which might work as well, and tested that hypothesis.
I was suspecting someone would come up with it, but dismissed the thought because anyone informed enough to know about this effect could be expected to be intelligent enough to see how bad an argument it is. But if you insist on testing everything before taking it as fact, maybe you can submerge yourself in your filled bathtub for half an hour. I expect, no-one ever drowned in that one, so maybe it is safe :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @01:56PM
He knew this. Just thought he could put it in and none would catch it. Same with Hannity. Leave out key aspects add in leftist .... faux news.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @03:08PM (1 child)
Dude, you got red-herringed.
Who the fuck cares if rats can breath a CFC?
That's got zero to do with UV exposure and skin-cancer rates.
Jmorris can't refute the facts, so he zeroes in on a completely irrelevant side-issue to steer the conversation away from him being wrong.
(Score: 2) by Soylentbob on Thursday June 01 2017, @06:10PM
I found it amusing enough to answer for once :-)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 01 2017, @07:51PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by Soylentbob on Thursday June 01 2017, @08:50PM (3 children)
Actually you just have to look at the sea, ships coming into view tip of the sail first, to conclude earth is round. Humans did that more than 2000 years ago.
Your analogy is even less fitting because it contains no element of conclusion, just first appearances. The equivalent to the flat-earthers would therefore be the agw-denier: Go by what they feel right, without any attempt to understand the reasoning behind the other side.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 01 2017, @10:40PM (2 children)
Why would we do that empirical nonsense when we can logically conclude the Earth is flat instead? So much less work, you know.
Even if that were true, that would be irrelevant.
You keep feeling that way. My point is that we have the same false certainty presented just as you presented in your first post. Now, I get you don't think you're an AGW-denier, because you don't believe the general theory is false. But accepting a theory on completely unscientific grounds is no different than rejecting it on completely unscientific grounds. Reality isn't going to be any different. Let's examine your assertions in more detail:
You made a very specific assertion about the effects of CFC pollution. Where's the evidence to support that assertion? And notice that this ignores human behavior. It's very easy for humans to change their behavior in ways that increase or decrease not only the incident of melanoma (by staying inside or outside, for an obvious example), but even its detection. So right away, we have a huge factor that by itself can confound the prediction. But moving on, we also have a huge disconnect between the production of CFCs and the destruction of ozone in the stratosphere. The problem is that you don't have a handle on how ozone is created and destroyed (which is a huge problem with greenhouse gases as well). For example, if the primary mode of destruction of ozone is upper atmosphere water ice, then things like ozone holes might be natural phenomena going back to when oxygen first appeared in the atmosphere a billion or so years ago. But it's not as sexy a story to sell to say that humans panicked on a global scale when they first measured ongoing billion year old phenomena, is it?
I don't have a horse in this particular race, but it's interesting how confident these decisions were on the basis of a small period of time of measurement. I find that same overconfidence showing up once again with climate mitigation advocacy. There is a peculiar blinkered outlook such as you stating that one doesn't actually need to resort to evidence to make highly speculative claims:
Let us note here your implication that the models are good enough to base policy on. But what is that based on? You made a point of stating that "logical connections can be assumed". But we see here that you don't know enough about the system in question to make that claim (and it's not looking good for climate modelers either - we need models that can predict, not models that can fit well to past data that might not be correct).
(Score: 2) by Soylentbob on Friday June 02 2017, @06:45AM (1 child)
I could now write some equally verbose explanation, but it boils down to this:
We don't have a labratory-earth to experiment. But we don't have one to waste, either. That leaves two options: Either we don't bother at all and ignore any very likely risk, or we accept that science builds a model and tries to improve its accuracy incrementally by checking it against reality, and give it our best effort. Note that I still avoid any premise about the actual correctness of current prevalent models.
It should be a no-brainer that the second postition is the only viable one. If you can't agree that far, we need to open a moral discussion, not one about facts.
Assuming we agree on 2nd, you could still try to deny agw or ozone depletion due to CFC, but not just by pointing out how the current models lack accuracy or skew in one direction. In that case as a doubter you would have to propose a better model, which needs to be consistent with state-of-the-art physics (behaviour of infrared- and other radiation in CO2 and methane, liquid flow dynamics, etc.) and match past measurements. You could earn millions by that, given that large industries would profit from it. The fact that no-one came up with such model and agw is still focused on pointing out inaccuracies, although capitalism generates a strong incentive to oppose global warming, shows how unlikely such a model would be.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 02 2017, @12:15PM
Well, if we're going to base our decisions on such models, then let us note that a) the models don't predict consequences at present that are particularly severe, and b) such model building has a history of bias and exaggeration, meaning the consequences are probably less dire (particularly in the distant future where no one faces consequences for being deliberately wrong) than predicted. In the meantime, humanity has other, bigger problems that it needs to deal with. While a coherent, measured approach to climate change mitigation can help these bigger problems, I can't help but notice that just like the bias of the climate models, there is a consistent bias in favor of radical and unproductive climate change mitigation even to the point of making the bigger problems worse (such as a recent story where someone advocates that we need global food rationing because climate change).
And that sums up why I'm not on board. There is this myopic obsession with climate change as if it were the only problem that the world faces; there is this consistent bias in favor of exaggerating the problems of global warming and other climate change (which to make clear, I do agree exist, just not to the degree that it is the most important problem that humanity faces); and there are a variety of really poor solutions being proposed as a result which don't take into account the actual problems that humanity faces or the actual costs of the solutions.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 01 2017, @09:40AM (3 children)
I need statistics to figure out when the lowered CFC pollution will cause less skin cancers. Australia is almost like a gigantic no-go-zone. At last on daytime.
Is the skin cancer rate the same for Aborigines?
For them the individuals that could not handle it should been dead since thousands of years ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @09:41PM
If the earth is flat then you need only pen and paper.
Start at any point on the paper and draw east.
You will run to the edge. And need a portal to get 'home'.
If you home is (0,0) (which is easiest) this will work with any maintained angle.
All needing a portal to get back home.
On a sphere you don't need a portal.
Having traveled around the world I have yet to enter a portal.
Portals exist in magic. Thought magic was evil.
Also see Foucault's pendulum for a simple to build proof.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Friday June 02 2017, @12:20AM (1 child)
Skin cancer rates for Aborigines are much lower because they have much darker skin/more melanin than European-Australians, and are thus much less susceptible to skin cancer. This, of course, varies depending on heritage (e.g. someone who only has 1 aboriginal grandparent will generally have lighter skin and may be more susceptible)
Even if Aborigines were susceptible to skin cancer, they wouldn't have been affected by CFC pollution thousands of years ago, because we only invented CFCs in the 20th Century.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 02 2017, @01:00AM
My thought on Aborigines were that they maybe have such good protection naturally that they aren't affected at all even by the modern CFC ozone depletion issue.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 01 2017, @10:06PM
He came up with the claim because he wants it to be true. Read some of his post history; this is a Leninist, in the sense that he has said on at least one occasion i can remember here he wants to burn the entire system down.
Presumably this includes the entire culture, everything from the news media to the scientific method itself. It all stands condemned in his sight. Therefore, he makes this sort of claim to hasten the destruction of these things. Remember that "actor-based vs reality-based community" thing from the Bush era? This is the same thing. And what that little quotable sound bite actually means is closer to "We are the doers, and you are the passive, reactive observers."
Make sense now? This isn't even a lie; it's bullshit. Meaning J-Mo does not know, or care, how true his words are, so long as they work toward his aims. If the liar is Truth's rapist, the bullshitter is Truth's slovenly, impotent, gluttonous pimp.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Touché) by shrewdsheep on Thursday June 01 2017, @08:41AM
In an argument about science or the "scientific method", I suggest you learn to avoid saying "period.".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @05:17PM (1 child)
[begin supper-encoded secret communication] Special Elite Crack Social Justice Squad of Warriors, jmorriswatch unit, update. jmorris seems to be at a cross-roads with regard to AGW. Trump administration vacillations and conflicts of interest have put him into a noncoherent thought pattern. Not that this is new, but it is a different pattern, less coherent. Will advise if situation offers opportunities for intervention.[end super-encoded sucret communism]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 01 2017, @10:09PM
Roger that, Captain. Deploying flares for increased visual range. Subject's motivations and movements have been illuminated; spread information to all observers as per standard cognitohazard vaccination protocol.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...