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LEFT WING LOONS Title: Scientists tell Donald Trump: Climate change is real Scientists tell Donald Trump: Climate change is real By Lisa M. Krieger, Bay Area News Group Scientists to Trump: Human-caused climate change is real — and don’t mess with the hard-won Paris Agreement. That’s the message of a new letter co-drafted by a prominent Bay Area climate scientist and signed by 375 members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, including famed physicist Stephen Hawking, biologist E.O. Wilson and 30 Nobel Prize winners. Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who helped to organize the effort, said he felt it was important to speak out. “The United States has to be a leader in international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and solve this global problem,” said Santer, in a Tuesday morning press briefing. While asserting that the “open letter” is addressed to the public, not Trump, he said “if you have expertise in climate science, it would be an epic failure to remain silent when that scientific understanding is dismissed as a hoax or conspiracy.” Kerry Emanuel, professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another letter organizer, said “We all reacted with some shock to statements from the Republican platform that would have reversed decades of progress. We felt we had to say something.” The letter warns that a withdrawal from the agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would diminish America’s international credibility, hobble our economic competitiveness in green energy technologies and undermine the world’s ability to cope with climate change. “If you know the road ahead is washed out, you don’t keep driving down it,” said Santer, who in 1998 was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” for his statistical analyses that first linked humans to global warming. “We have a responsibility to point out that the science is credible….this letter is an attempt to affirm the reality of human-caused warming — and the serious consequences of doing nothing.” Even as the evidence has become unmistakable, the Republican nominee for president has advocated withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. In contrast, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has promised to accelerate President Obama’s efforts on climate change and says the U.S. could produce a third of the nation’s electricity from renewable energy sources by 2027. But she has not yet embraced the one policy that many see as the best way to stop global warming: a carbon tax. Her campaign faces the tough challenge of appealing to both younger voters — who supported Bernie Sanders for his opposition to the Keystone pipeline and Arctic drilling — and older pro-oil voters in swing states like Pennsylvania. Advertisement In his first major speech on energy policy last May, Trump called the climate change deal “bad for U.S. business” and said the pact allows “foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use.” In August, the Trump campaign’s press release on economic policy vowed to rescind “all the job-destroying Obama executive actions, including the Climate Action Plan” and “save the save the coal industry and other industries threatened by Hillary Clinton’s extremist agenda.” Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax.” “Perhaps there’s a minor effect,” Trump told The Washington Post’s editorial board, “but I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change.” Trump also has failed to understand that local weather is irrelevant to global climate. While visiting California on a cold day, he tweeted: “I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!” In an interview with Reuters, Trump said he didn’t like the Paris climate agreement, recently signed by 195 countries, including the United States, and would seek to renegotiate it. “I will be looking at that very, very seriously, and at a minimum I will be renegotiating those agreements, at a minimum. And at a maximum I may do something else,” Trump told Reuters. “But those agreements are one-sided agreements and they are bad for the United States.” The 2016 Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was the result of a multi-year process — and lengthy negotiations — under the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is unclear whether the next President could actually change the Paris accord, which will have legal force once it is ratified in January by 55 countries that contribute 55 percent of global emissions. If ratified, the U.S. would have to wait four years to withdraw from the deal. This climate debate between mainstream scientists and politicians isn’t new. But as Election Day draws nearer, the scientists sought to be influential on this important policy issue. “For lawmakers to not heed the advice of esteemed scientists on matters of science, in this the 21st century, signals the beginning of the end of an informed democracy,” Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, said in a prepared statement. Stanford professor Lawrence H. Goulder, director of the Stanford Center for Environmental and Energy Policy Analysis, said “the letter correctly indicates the importance of our political leaders’ recognizing these scientific findings. Success in combating this global problem requires broad, international participation, and U.S. leadership is crucial to achieving such participation.” The National Academy of Sciences is an honorific society whose members are distinguished scholars in science and engineering. It provides independent advice to the United States government on scientific and technological issues. “There is an urgent need for NAS members to enter this arena,” said Santer. MIT’s Emanuel and Ray Weymann, a climate scientist at Carnegie Institution for Science in Cambridge, joined him in the four-month letter-writing effort. In 1995, Santer was the lead author of a key chapter in a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That chapter reached the historic conclusion that ”the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” His findings have unleashed a firestorm around Santer, who has gained respect in the scientific community for his ability to coordinate group efforts to address this important issue. Some critics denounced his science; others called for his dismissal. Dismayed by climate change deniers, Santer has repeatedly tried to set the record straight. For example, when critics claimed that global warming has stopped and that computer models cannot simulate decade-long periods with little or no warming, Santer and colleagues showed that simulations can indeed produce such hiatus periods. “This is an issue which will define us,” he said. “How we respond to climate change will be the legacy of our generation Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
#2. To: tpaine (#0)
Am I alone in the opinion that Stephen Hawking is a fake? How can we possibly know what he is thinking and saying? For all we know it is someone else and their words and thoughts transmitted through him and his equipment to make them so they can't be challenged.
#4. To: jeremiad (#2)
I'll admit that this same idea has crossed my mind, -- but I doubt it, seeing that he does have fairly radical ideas, -- ideas that not many of his peers have made objections about.. But then, --- look at his peers and the 'human caused warming' bullshit.. Odds are that all of them are batshit crazy.
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