Donald Trump’s reported top pick for energy secretary, oil and fracking billionaire Harold Hamm, declared on the Republican National Convention stage on Wednesday night, “Every time we can’t drill a well in America, terrorism is being funded.”
One day earlier, NASA had announced that this June was the hottest June on record, and that the same could be said for every month in 2016 — part of a long-term climate trend that has exacerbated geopolitical conflicts.
The convention adopted a platform that rejected the Paris climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Meanwhile, researchers published a study indicating that climate change worsened a 2003 heat wave enough to kill 570 more people in Paris and London than would have died in an unchanged world.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee, who will take the convention stage Thursday, told a Cleveland panel on Tuesday that “the earth is no longer warming and has not. For about the past 13 years, it has begun to cool.”
Meanwhile, another group of scientists estimated that temperature rises had helped cause 1 trillion tons of Greenland glacial ice to melt between 2011 and 2014.
Most of the congressional Republicans that believe in addressing climate change stayed home from the convention.
Meanwhile, scientists noted that the earth’s clouds had changed shape, growing taller and moving away from the tropics toward the poles, encouraging drier weather in the subtropics.
Donald Trump, who has called climate change “bullshit,” prepared to accept the Republican presidential nomination.
In Bolivia, the Uru-Murato people, whose lake dried up in December, have adjusted to working in mines instead of on fishing boats.
Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, who has said he “doesn’t know” if climate change is a “resolved issue in science,” promised the RNC audience Wednesday night that “Donald Trump digs coal.”
Meanwhile, Greenland snow turned watermelon pink as Arctic ice melted more than ever before, covering about 40 percent less of the sea than it did 30 years ago.
The party agreed to open more public lands to drilling, abolish the Clean Power Plan, build the canceled Keystone XL pipeline, export more fossil fuels, prevent a carbon tax, “forbid” the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide, and transfer the agency’s regulatory duties to the states. The platform stated that coal is “an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource” and that “year by year, the environment is improving.”
Meanwhile, in Florida, toxic algae, created by agricultural chemicals and heat, drained from Lake Okeechobee and into the Atlantic Ocean, causing coastal communities to request that the federal government declare a state of emergency. Not far away, rising tides inched closer to sprawling Trump properties.
Top photo: Red algae blooms on melting snow in Greenland. A study in Nature Communications showed the light-absorbing affect of the color will hasten glacial melt.
You folks at the intercept are tough man. Instant banning of what you have to say because you used a cuss word, oh my. The Intercept sucks if it will not let me speak my mind. I offended noone but the intercept, obviously. Has Roger Ailes started running your rag?
There is a word my U.S. history professor can’t use without possibly getting fired. People don’t value freedom of speech… they never did, really..
I have more faith that Dr. Who will come to the Earth’s rescue than I do that either the DNC or the RNC will ever come to their senses…if they ever had any. Pence is sickening and as atrocious a Goebbels!! What a fucking monster he is!
Fossil fuel externalities?? Try this thought experiment – image you are going on a trip in your car. Before you start, run a hose from the exhaust pipe into the passenger compartment. Then, start driving. Now ask yourself, does burning fossil fuel have any externalities?
The changes in cloud shape, altitude, density, behaviour, etc., along with aerosol spraying of toxic chemicals, are due to climate geo-engineering. This is hastening ecocide (human and other life be damned) and creating wars over resources. Please gather the evidence and expose this. Thank you.
There s NEVER resolved issues in Science! Still using a rotary dial phone? Cranking your car to start it?
To think that the Dems are just as bad is disturbing. Obama’s energy policy only worsened the situation – the thought you can fight fossil fuel driven climate change with more fossil fuels is ridiculous. So much for our Mr. Climate president – all talk, no action. I knew we were screwed the moment he stepped off the plane in Copenhagen. His face told it all.
Jon Stewart, Where are you?
Every time you don’t allow fracking, give me free beer, shove thousand dollar bills in my pockets, send me free hookers, let me holiday endlessly on my own island and never charge me for things I buy, terrorism is being funded. Are we clear?
I’m sure you saw this from the Late Show just last night, but for others that haven’t:
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/jon_stewart_to_trump_and_his_media_supporters_you_dont_own_americs_20160722
I’m hoping for a similar surprise performance next week.
“Arby’s: For when you’re wondering what it tastes like when a cow dies.”
Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
(Sorry, had to.)
I am pretty skeptical about what I read. And even when I went to the source of many science papers on climate change I didn’t find definitive examples of uncontested evidence of human caused global warming.
I figured I could do that my self. You just have to figure out the volume of the atmosphere and add up all the sources of greenhouse gasses produced by humans and subtract the part that is absorbed. I did CO2 first which is the easiest. The level of CO2 now in the atmosphere is about 400 parts per million. I found the human race produced enough CO2 that would change the level of CO2 in the atmosphere 200 more ppm per year. The trickier thing is to calculate accurately the absorption rate of CO2 into the oceans and on land. But if the level was 400 ppm and the rise each year was know then you can figure how much is being absorbed. but I stopped when I saw the amount released was enough to raise the atmospheric level of CO2 200 ppm. That is a staggering amount of CO2. For me there was no need to know how much methane or nitrous oxide was being released because just the CO2 was bad enough.
So there is no doubt in my mind that we are altering the climate. But I also saw how complicated the problem was. Because there are so many millions of variables the algorithms used to calculate even the most comprehensive model were not going to be accurate. The huge weather models that now give us our daily forecasts are only accurate 2-3 days out because the degree of variability after day 2 reaches such a high level the models lose accuracy. They can’t correctly predict one hurricane even with a huge effort to collect data from in and around the storm. So given the same abilities to create a model and the computers to calculate them what is going to be the accuracy 50 year out in predicting the state of the atmosphere?
This comes around to this article which is not realistic. I have seen no proof of correlation between the present warming events and the larger trend of climate change. There has been a steady rise in temperature and a rise in ocean level for the last 15,000 years. But this article talks about the hottest June on record. What is the length of that record? It is just over 150 years. that’s just 1 percent of the short time from the end of the last ice age. During that period the desert southwest has had 3 mega droughts that lasted over 200 years could any of those 600 plus years been hotter? We know the drier the ground the higher the temperature rises. But we don’t have accurate data to say one way or another. If you go back 150 years how many meteorological data collection sites where there around the globe? the world is 2/3 water so how many ships where out taking accurate weather data. Even today with literally million of ships at sea they stay in shipping lanes. the same 150 years ago. If you wanted to catch the winds east to Europe you followed the same route as other ships so most of the oceans were not covered by ships collecting data. Huge areas around the poles had no weather data just like huge areas like Siberia, the Amazon jungle the Australian outback. We haven’t had good coverage of weather data until we launched weather satellites in the mid 1960’s so of that 150 years maybe 100 are suspect by the fact that the number of data point was small and not evenly spaced around the planet. In the last 2 years there have been 3 times it has rained more than 10 inches at my house. The areas around me has had 2, 500 year floods. Now there might be a slight elevated risk of high rain due to climate change but there is no way those event happen just because climate change. But then in the eastern pacific they have had droughts. which is is caused by global warming drought in the east pacific or floods in the western pacific?
Anyone with a scientific bent of mind would not try to so closely attribute any one set of events to a larger pattern like global climate change. If you dig down closely to what most climate scientist say the majority won’t do that either. It’s just the media and the public that try to force that connection.
Your post is just recycled garbage from the ExxonMobil/Koch Brothers funded climate-denialism program. This is in spite of the fact that ExxonMobil scientists in the late 1970s uniformly agreed that continuing to burn fossil fuels would warm the planet and have major effects on climate stability:
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092015/Exxons-own-research-confirmed-fossil-fuels-role-in-global-warming
The whole tobacco lobby denial approach was then cooked up by Exxon and other fossil fuel interests in the 1980s, but it’s been completely exposed as BS; denying that fossil fuel combustion leads to global warming and climate change, that’s like claiming tobacco doesn’t cause lung cancer, or that the HIV virus doesn’t cause AIDS, or that the moon landing was faked.
Ah yes….1977: the zenith of our scientific understanding.
“[…] **general** scientific agreement that the **most likely** manner in which mankind is **influencing** (not causing) […]”
A fart “influences” your indoor climate…but that really means nothing.
Anyone purporting to understand and distill the extraordinarily complex weather system of this planet into a ‘settled’ notion of human causality is nothing more than a pseudoscientific snake-oil salesman.
Bernie People:
Hillary stole your voice and your votes.
You know it- she did it in-your-face.
Her media Press-titutes think they can con you,
but you know who and what they are.
Don’t enable this despicable behavior with your vote.
Don’t let her steal from you again.
1 trillion tons of glacial melt is about 200 cubic miles. Is that possible?
Easily possible. Just look at Greenland alone – the retreating ice sheet has also revealed mines and settlements from the medieval period. Greenland used to be green folks – indicating that it was once much warmer than it is now, and long before anyone was using fossil fuels.
Why do we have or need PBS? Who on here does not pay for cable or satellite TV /Radio and then we have to pay for PBS?? Who’s money is it anyway? If you want PBS, donate to it and take government and taxpayer $$$ out of it. Make it true Public Radio instead of Liberal Government Radio!!!
Green Gold – Documentary by John D. Liu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBLZmwlPa8A
Healing the Earth | John D. Liu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsXP5dhLQRU
PBS Nature – Leave It To Beavers – S32E07
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS6CAHqzwVE
http://www.whatifwechange.org/magazine/
Visions On Ecosystem Restoration John D. Liu
But there is something for us to smile about. It is when we dream at night about the future our children and grandchildren could have had.
Regardless of what rape-publicans or dumbocrats do, nature bats last. The universe is billions of years old and will continue to unfold with or without us. Our existence as a species is proving to be a failure and we soon will return to little more than stardust once again.
Happy voting – paper or plastic that’s your choice????
What Lebensluge says.
(a) I = P * A * T (Important to learn this one, or it would be if there were any meaningful hope left.)
(b) The universe will certainly continue, and our galaxy and even the solar system are probably beyond our ability to damage significantly. The Earth? Well, we’ve done enormous damage to the biosphere already, but it will probably be able to recover, once we’re either gone or (once again) entirely insignificant — unless, of course, too many of the nukes are launched in the ultimate resource wars. In that case all bets for the planet are off.
(c) Tide or Ivory Snow? The awful truth and fine writing can be comforting, even in the face of the ugly inevitable.
As a TV character once put it, nature created something outside of itself when it created humans, and that experiment was a failure. The best thing we can do is to admit that and end the experiment by ceasing to breed.
It’s too bad, because if humans had focused on expanding their consciousness instead of base crap like attaining ever more material goods and domination of the natural world, humans could have been something really positive and might have been able to legitimately claim that they’re the pinnacle of evolution on Earth. Instead, we’re just the opposite.
For the anti-fracking crowd, one benefit of natural gas is this:
Yes, 99.9% decline in value for Peabody, Walter, Arch, Alpha.
We will probably always need metallurgical grade coal for steel but steam coal is history.
Natural gas releases even more heat-trapping gases than burning coal.
Solar is a no brainer. Just ask the Chinese who are leaving the US in the dust.
Literally in some states.
“Natural gas releases even more heat-trapping gases than burning coal.”
Yes, but it doesn’t leave coal ash ponds behind.
Try just using less energy – Americans use double the per capita energy of Europe.
I don’t know what the 99.9% drop means, but if I had to take a wild guess, I think it means that they’re going to be leaving behind a lot of open strip mines they promised they were going to cover up nicely when they started them.
Tax negative externalities or your grandchildren will spit on your graves.
Our grandkids won’t be happy unless we tax them more???
I just read yesterday that a research ship from Vladivostok that was going to document the open water at the North Pole was turned back by unseasonably thick sea ice
That’s very interesting! Why I myself just received a message via the fillings in my teeth, that the ice in my whiskey is not melting, but in fact is larger than it was when I… oh forget it!
That might be the funniest thing I’ve read on this site. Good one!
And it snows in July in the Southern Hemisphere. It snows in the Southern Hemisphere and they’re talking about Global Warming. Can you believe that crap? I mean, what movie have you ever seen where it snowed in the Southern Hemisphere? But right now, in July, it’s snowing down there, and they think the Globe is warming.
Also, there is an unusual amount of ice in my freezer. Global Warming Shmobal Farming.
Wow, the stupid is strong in this one.
It snows in the mountainous areas like the Andes. There are mountains in the southern hemisphere.
If anybody did not click on the link, Pink snow in the arctic means the wrong kind of algae in arctic snow, the kind that is supposed to quicken the melt, which is not included in the current melt rate stats.
The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and nobody gives a hoot.
This is the first time that I have read about Pink Snow. Interesting!
But I always knew that, I should not eat he yellow snow….
Climate change makes a very convenient scapegoat, because it’s something that nobody can do anything about. Go ask the UN, go ask China, and after you realize that’s going nowhere, just accept what’s happening. But according to http://borneobulletin.com.bn/lake-poopo-just-vanishes-and-bolivians-think-it-may-never-return/ mines and farmers have diverted the water, and there’s no regulation of removals, and silt from the mines is building up in it. They are having a very dry spell and climate change could be involved in that, sure … but the lake doesn’t disappear forever by a spell of dry weather. But it’s more convenient politically to blame a global pattern than to find a way to protect the water source from diversions.
Your article reads like you are trying to convince us that you are right and Trump supporters are wrong.
Were you aware that there are not many climate deniers here? I am trying to figure out why you wrote this. It’s not newsworthy to say team Trump and the RNC is generally denying the science.
She wrote this article, specifically for me. I didn’t know that Arctic Snow had turned pink. But as usual, you’re only interested in news from Pluto.
What are you complaining about? Energy and climate stories are great, unless you have big investments in fossil fuels or are a PR monkey for those interests. . . like most of the corporate press is. And how about NPR taking all that money from the natural gas industry, huh?
I did not realize asking a question = complaining.
Yeah….there’s no corporate boon in green energy….
In 100 years, we have screwed up our planet so bad we face extinction. In 2016 we have a choice. Give Hillary Clinton and wallstreet TPP ownership and rulership of the planet’s economy with thieving profiteering predatory ways or, allow Donald Trump and crew to risk irreversible climate consequences that will cut off the food chain.
give me an effing break.
There is also a choice of Jill Stein and Gary Johnson.
I am figuring that DT’s children wont let him go climate change crazy. Definitely a very hot potato election.
Just out of curiosity, how would voting for Stein solve the problem?
If enough people do it, we could transition to 100% clean renewable energy sources by 2030.
my replies containing links are being rejected. or is it all replies? or is it all comments?
links are being rejected.
Try one link, this site is on a restricted diet and 2 or more links gets you tossed out on your ear. (Honestly, try 1 link)
We’re facing a mass extinction that will eventually start to catastrophically impact civilization, including its corporations and financial institutions. I suggest that it would be intelligent for leftists liberal idealists to get very practical, starting immediately. We can keep pushing HIllary and congress in the direction we hope they’ll go, but we’re not going to get everything we want right now. Vote for Hillary. Even though corporate profiteers are perpetuating the problem of global warming and other environmental disasters, they’re gradually switching over to the “pro earth” position, because you can’t make any profit in a global desert where a couple billion people are climate refugees. So Hillary’s corrupt. Trump is a diabolical narcissistic sociopath. No election has ever mattered this much, please don’t advocate for people to help Trump win by wasting their votes. Please?
“We’re facing a mass extinction” -No, we’re absolutely not. Why should you possibly think this??
A vote for a lying, criminal, war-mongering, corrupt, corporatist, diabolical narcissistic psychopath (Hillary), simply because she used the right ‘feel-good-words’ is intellectually reprehensible. In deed, she represents everything you’re against. There’s nothing “pro-Earth” about anyone on the right or left. They are nothing but a bunch of ignorant manipulable sycophants. Just as there’s been no difference between Obama and Bush, there’s no difference between Hillary and Trump. Open your eyes.
the previous comment makes most of the good points needed and i’d only add a short summation: the republicans deny climate change while the democrats acknowledge it but do absolutely nothing about it other than attending some conferences every year or so and promising the tiniest piecemeal reform possible (then failing to deliver on even that). given that hillary is the queen of meaningless incrementalism i don’t expect any vast improvement should she be elected.
after all, charles koch said he could support hillary if “her actions would be quite different than her rhetoric” and we all know they are very, very, very different. she suddenly “opposes” TPP and she’d totally love to follow elizabeth warren’s lead on wall street – just not enough to offer her the VP slot or any other useful position. at least trump is open about his awful nature and doesn’t try to hide it behind whatever opinion is polling well that day. the “devil you know” and all that.
spot on
Even so-called climate activists are not proposing any real solutions except replacing coal with solar, which would result in a substantial reduction of greenhouse gas emissions but would still allow emissions large enough to be harmful to continue. Agriculture, especially animal agriculture, is the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and transportation is not far behind. And of course human overpopulation plays a big part in multiple ways, not just the fact that fewer people doing the same things pollute less; with substantially fewer people, some of the harmful activities wouldn’t be possible in the first place.
So real solutions must include giving up driving, changing international and other long-distance trade to local trade, eating a lot less meat, eliminating chemical and industrial agriculture, etc. These solutions require major lifestyle changes, and the activists I’ve heard are afraid to alienate the public about their cause, so they keep saying that we can solve the problem without changing how we live. Yeah, and the Tooth Fairy and Santa Clause too.
The Repubican Energy Policy: Unchanged since the Cheney Energy Task Force of March 2001
The Democratic Energy Policy: Unchanged since the Cheney Energy Task Force of March 2001
On one hand, you’ve got Koch and Exxon, major Republican backers directly involved in fossil fuels, bent on keeping America addicted to fossil fuels. They’ve run an effective propaganda campaign targeting Republicans, particularly the evangelicals and the businesspeople, based on either denying that fossil fuels are warming the planet, or that the warming is no big deal.
On the other hand, you’ve got people like BerkshireHathaway’s Warren Buffet and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, major Democratic donors with huge investments in fossil fuels and related companies. Buffet’s huge tar sand investments (he also backed Sarah Palin) explain Clinton’s reluctance to block Keystone; his BNSF train business hauls most of the coal, as well as Dakota oil trains (the ones that are always exploding), and his huge network of utility companies runs power plants that burn all his coal and oil and gas – and of course Goldman Sachs is perhaps the world’s biggest fossil fuel trader, as seen after the 2008 economic collapse.
Democratic voters, unlike Republicans, have not been propagandized into climate denialism; so this is why Democratic leaders like Obama and Clinton give lip service to ‘clean energy’ and ‘fighting climate change’ while behind the scenes, they boost fracking. The only real difference is a more negative attitude towards coal; Hillary Clinton is in the pocket of oil and gas, particularly when it comes to international military interventions in the world’s oil zones.
This, by the way, is why Obama never formed a new Energy Task Force to change directions from the Cheney one. It’s also why he took no action on climate and energy in his first two years, when Democrats controlled Congress. He was a coal-state Senator in Buffet’s pocket, is why.
Hence, the only political party that isn’t lying through its teeth in one way or the other about this issue is the Green Party and its candidate, Jill Steain.
There is the Keystone pipeline system and
there is the Keystone XL branch of that system.
The majority of the Keystone pipeline was completed
within the faking U$A during the Obama administration
and the Obama administration allowed all of it to prepare
for the Keystone XL, which is probably going to be approved
and built by pretending
that they will let the individual states through which it will run
decide the matter.
It could have been cancelled by the Obama administration,
but they decided to simply not endorse it and pass it off
to be built during the next administration.
Most of the dim-witted liberal “environmentalists” ASSUME
that it was cancelled or denied because it was not given a green light
by Obama, but that is a misinterpretation of reality.
Obama’s non-approval is not a cancellation.
It is merely a pause.
The democrats can now use their own devious drivel in contrast
to the blatant idiotic drivel of the republicans to pretend
that they don’t share the same corrupt, degrading, polluting
agenda. They both want the same monetary profits, no matter
how they use words to appeal to their desperately delusional
supporters.
either the candidates (esp johnson) are running their site on an 8086 or..