Google Goes Off the Climate Change Deep End – Paul Driessen

Editor’s note: This article was co-authored by Chris Skates.

In a recent interview with National Public Radio host Diane Rehm, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said his company “has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on facts. And the facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. We should not be aligned with such people. They’re just literally lying.”

While he didn’t vilify us by name, Mr. Schmidt was certainly targeting us, the climate scientists who collect and summarize thousands of articles for the NIPCC’s Climate Change Reconsidered reports, the hundreds who participate in Heartland Institute climate conferences, and the 31,487 US scientists who have signed the Oregon Petition, attesting that there is no convincing scientific evidence that humans are causing catastrophic warming or climate disruption.

All of us are firm skeptics of claims that humans are causing catastrophic global warming and climate change. We are not climate change “deniers.” We know Earth’s climate and weather are constantly in flux, undergoing recurrent fluctuations that range from flood and drought cycles to periods of low or intense hurricane and tornado activity, to the Medieval Warm Period (950-1250 AD) and Little Ice Age (1350-1850) – and even to Pleistocene glaciers that repeatedly buried continents under a mile of ice.

What we deny is the notion that humans can prevent these fluctuations, by ending fossil fuel use and emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide, which plays only an insignificant role in climate change.

E120, e130,

Nicaragua Canal: 200 year old dream finally comes true

RT

Published on Dec 26, 2014

Nicaragua has started work on one of the most-ambitious construction projects in Latin America – a waterway linking the Pacific and Caribbean to dwarf the Panama Canal.

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice

Climate Change 2014: What Do We Do Now?

As we move into 2015, the latest climate science continues to diverge from policy. New science tells us that, because of short-lived climate pollutants, current policies dealing with carbon dioxide pollution alone will likely produce more warming than doing nothing at all.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now also said that we must begin to effect a large removal of the accumulated climate pollution already in our atmosphere – that emissions reductions alone are no longer sufficient. But all is not discouraging, when it comes to new climate discoveries. Atmospheric removal of carbon dioxide now appears to be no more expensive than many things our civilization does every day.

This is a paradigm change from current policy. All policy to date basically relies only on reducing carbon dioxide emissions that we put in the sky every year. Nowhere does policy or proposed policy suggest taking more out than we put in. Two decades ago, proposed climate policy was suggesting carbon dioxide emissions reductions of 80 percent or more by 2100. A decade ago, the suggestions were for reductions of 80 percent or more by 2050. Today in some cities, current policy is reaching for what is being called net zero, or 100 percent reductions of carbon dioxide emissions by mid-century.

Looked at a different way, the Kyoto Protocol called for the United States to reduce emissions to 1987 levels by 2012. Currently proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations reduce US emissions to 1970 levels by 2030. This may seem substantial, but in reality it’s less than a 13 percent reduction in almost 20 years.

Since 1987, we have emitted as much carbon dioxide as was emitted in the prior 236 years. The relatively inconsequential increase in emissions reduction in currently proposed EPA rules – that will hopefully be adopted in July 2015 – are literally 20 years behind, and short-lived climate pollutants and the short-term time frame are not addressed at all.

…(read more).

Global Climate Change
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More than 1000 migrants rescues off Italian coast on Christmas Day

euronews (in English)

Published on Dec 26, 2014
At least 1250 refugees and migrants were rescued by the Italian navy in four different operations on Christmas Day.

They were taken onto the Navy ship ‘Etna’ where they received medical check-ups before being transferred to the Sicilian port of Pozzallo.

While onboard Etna, a Nigerian mother gave birth to her baby, with the help of Italian medical staff.

On another boat, Italian emergency services discovered the body of a man who had died during the journey.

Global Climate Change
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Drone footage exposes US factory farm reality incl football-pitch sized ‘cesspool’

RT

Published on Dec 22, 2014
Drones are often the first choice for official surveillance or military operations. One American film-maker, though, has used the unmanned aircraft to expose shady practices at US farm corporations which, he claims, are putting people’s health at risk.

Food-Matters
Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice

E.O. Wilson Reflects on His Career and Stresses the Importance of Biodiversity

Big Think

Published on Dec 22, 2014

Legendary biologist Edward O. Wilson claims that the biosphere is incredibly delicate. Without a change in behavior, he says, we will irreversibly harm Earth’s biodiversity.

Read more at BigThink.com: http://goo.gl/q993x0

Global Climate Change
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Anders Fogh Rasmussen on the Geopolitical Challenges of Climate Change

Big Think

Published on Dec 26, 2014
Former Prime Minister of Denmark Anders Fogh Rasmussen discusses the coming political ramifications of climate change.

Read more at BigThink.com: http://goo.gl/O8uR

Global Climate Change
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The International Monetary Fund and the Ebola outbreak – The Lancet Global Health

Alexander Kentikelenis, Lawrence King, Martin McKee, David Stuckler

Open Access DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(14)70377-8

• Summary
• Full Text
• References

In recent months, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has announced US$430 million of funding to fight Ebola in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia.1 By making these funds available, the IMF aims to become part of the solution to the crisis, even if this involves a departure from its usual approach. As IMF Director Christine Lagarde said at a meeting on the outbreak, “It is good to increase the fiscal deficit when it’s a matter of curing the people, of taking the precautions to actually try to contain the disease. The IMF doesn’t say that very often.”2

Yet, could it be that the IMF had contributed to the circumstances that enabled the crisis to arise in the first place? A major reason why the outbreak spread so rapidly was the weakness of health systems in the region. There were many reasons for this, including the legacy of conflict and state failure. Since 1990, the IMF has provided support to Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, for 21, 7, and 19 years, respectively, and at the time that Ebola emerged, all three countries were under IMF programmes. However, IMF lending comes with strings attached—so-called “conditionalities”—that require recipient governments to adopt policies that have been criticised for prioritising short-term economic objectives over investment in health and education.3 Indeed, it is not even clear that they have strengthened economic performance.3

Here we review the policies advocated by the IMF before the outbreak, and examine their effect on the three health systems. The information was extracted from the IMF archives of lending agreements covering the years 1990–2014.

…(read more).

And see:

• IMF policies blamed for aggravating spread of Ebola December 26, 2014

 

Global Climate Change
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Worldwide Coal Production Continue Grow

TheRealNews

Published on Dec 25, 2014

There is no war on coal, the International Energy Agency ( IEA) nor the Obama Administration has any plans to reduce coal production in-spite of commitments made to reduce green house gas emissions, says analyst Jeff Biggers

Global Climate Change
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Crude harvest: selling Mexico’s oil

Al Jazeera English

Published on Dec 26, 2014

Mexico may be hitting the perfect storm when it opens its energy resources to foreign investors.

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice