Thursday February 28th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing post will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials)😉
Trump’s New Climate Change Panel
Perhaps, (and we hope) considering all of the climate change news I’ve presented in just the past week, the Trump Administration’s putting together a last ditch panel to deny that CO2 is warming the planet will flat out be ignored. What’s hilarious in my scientific view is that the person chosen to lead the panel, William Happer, has denied that CO2 is a pollutant, suggesting that CO2 is beneficial like Jews being maligned frim Hitler during WWII in 2014. That comparison is ludicrous. Today I’m just making my readers aware that some bad science is about to muddy the proverbial watered once again with the public should this panel come to fruition.
Here is a reposted VOX article on today’s main topic:
https://www.vox.com/2019/2/20/18233378/william-happer-trump-climate-change-panel
Trump’s pick to chair new climate panel once said CO2 has been maligned like “Jews under Hitler”
William Happer has bizarre, backward views about climate science.
By Aaron Rupar@atrupar Feb 20, 2019, 5:10pm EST
The Pentagon and several federal agencies have repeatedly warned over the years that climate change is a threat to national security. Yet the White House is reportedly convening a panel to question it anew.
The Washington Post, citing a National Security Council (NSC) discussion paper it obtained, reports that White House staff are preparing an executive order for President Donald Trump’s signature that would establish a Presidential Committee on Climate Security to be chaired by a notorious climate change denier.
That man, NSC senior director William Happer, argued on CNBC in 2014 that “the demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”
John Whitehouse of Media Matters dredged up the video:
Happer’s views have gotten no less extreme since then. When he was under consideration for the role of Trump’s science adviser in early 2017, Happer sent an email to a Jezebel reader asserting that the “demonization of CO2” “really differs little from the Nazi persecution of the Jews, the Soviet extermination of class enemies or ISIL slaughter of infidels.”
Media Matters has previously detailed how Happer, a retired Princeton professor who is not trained as a climate scientist, has tried — unsuccessfully — to conceal the fact that oil interests have directly funded his “research.” And as a recent paper in Nature Climate Change noted, the fossil fuel industry has long been involved in campaigns in US politics “aiming to refute, confuse and obstruct acceptance of the reality of climate change,” using scientists just like Happer to spread misinformation.
The Trump administration keeps trying to muddy the waters about climate science
The Post’s report about the White House’s new panel is the latest indication that the Trump administration is trying to actively mislead the public on the well-established science of climate change.
As Vox’s Umair Irfan and Alex Ward have reported, many agencies in the executive branch of Trump’s own government have been warning the president and the American people of the severe threats of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
“The impacts and costs of climate change are already being felt in the United States, and changes in the likelihood or severity of some recent extreme weather events can now be attributed with increasingly higher confidence to human-caused warming,” according to the National Climate Assessment, released in November.
Asked about the National Climate Assessment by a reporter in November, Trump flatly said, “I don’t believe it.”
Last month, the Pentagon released a report detailing the national security threat posed by climate change. Weeks later, the intelligence community released its annual consensus World Threat Assessment. The document echoes the Pentagon’s finding that climate change is a major threat:
Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security. Irreversible damage to ecosystems and habitats will undermine the economic benefits they provide, worsened by air, soil, water, and marine pollution.
The NSC discussion paper obtained by the Post about the new panel suggests it would be created with an eye toward muddying the waters about the Pentagon and intelligence community’s findings. Though the paper acknowledges that a number of federal government reports have concluded climate change is a major threat, it goes on to claim “these scientific and national security judgments have not undergone a rigorous independent and adversarial scientific peer review to examine the certainties and uncertainties of climate science, as well as implications for national security.”
Given Happer’s views, there’s little doubt that he’ll indulge Trump if he wants to use the panel to deny the well-established science of climate change. In doing so, the consequences are grave: He’d further imperil the United States and future generations everywhere.
My thoughts here are that any “science” presented by this panel will be very paper thin, and hopefully the public will easily be able to see through deception. It still saddens me, though, that any leader, let alone that of the United States, would attempt to deceive the public on the climate in light of overwhelming scientific evidence, Sigh.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Here is some more climate and weather news from Thursday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)
And more ETs from Europe:
(If you like these posts and my work please contribute via the PayPal widget, which has recently been added to this site. Thanks in advance for any support.)
The Climate Guy