Climate Watch – Dataset Platform

Launching in November 2017, Climate Watch brings together dozens of datasets for the first time to let users analyze and compare national climate pledges under the Paris Agreement, access historical GHG emissions data, discover how climate objectives can help achieve sustainable development goals, understand vulnerabilities and readiness to climate impacts, and use models to map new pathways to a lower-carbon future.

The online platform is designed to empower policymakers, researchers, media and other stakeholders with the climate data, visualizations and resources they need to gather insights on national and global progress on climate change.

Climate Watch is designed to empower policymakers, researchers and other stakeholders with the climate data, visualizations and resources they need to gather insights on national and global progress on climate change. Climate Watch is a free, user-friendly platform to create and share custom data visualizations, comparisons of national commitments and new analysis based on open data.

Climate Watch is implemented by World Resources Institute in collaboration with partners: Climate Action Tracker, Climate Analytics, German Institute for International Cooperation (GIZ), NDC Partnership, The World Bank, Google, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

We encourage you to use the platform and share it with your networks.

If you have any questions, feedback or would like to speak to someone, please email: ClimateWatch@WRI.org

Newsroom | UNFCCC – COP23 – Bonn, Germany

UN Climate Change is very happy to introduce to you our new COP23 website just in time for 2017 UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn. We would like to thank the German Government for their voluntary funding and support for this dynamic site featuring both a newsroom and COP23 information plus a better calendar of events that pulls in dates from various UN Climate Change databases.

The launch is part of a much wider upgrade of the UN Climate Change secretariat’s web presence. Over the coming months, after COP23, we plan to retire our current website on the UNFCCC process and move to a new, 21st century system with modern features and enhanced user-friendliness.

We would like to thank especially the Government of Norway and the European Union for their voluntary support for the wider initiative.

We hope you like our new COP23 site as a teaser for even bigger and better enhancements to come.

Visit the new website here cop23.unfccc.int. Like the old Newsroom, the new UN Climate Change News and COP23 website is also available in French and Spanish.

Help us promote the new website on your social media channels. You can find many digital assets on the UN Climate Change Trello board.

What the JFK Conspiracy Theories Say About Us – On The Media – WNYC

Oct 27, 2017

Thousands of previously classified documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released this week, while President Trump ordered a review of a few hundred files that were withheld for national security concerns.

The document release has been anticipated by conspiracy theorists who still question whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in November 1963, and why. Brooke speaks with journalist Ron Rosenbaum about his long-time interest in the case and how 50 years of searching for answers has changed the “landscape of the American mind.”

Rosenbaum is the author of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. His excellent essay, “Oswald’s Ghost,” about following JFK conspiracy buffs, can be found in The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms.

Anti-Science Climate Deniers Taking Over EPA Science Advisory Board | Alternet

A third of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board, an influential panel that reviews the science the agency uses in formulating safeguards, could be succeeded by climate science-denying, polluter-friendly replacements when their terms expire at the end of this month.

The board, which has been in existence for nearly 40 years, is traditionally populated by bona fide scientists from academia, government and industry who volunteer to serve three-year terms. This time around, as first reported by E&E News, at least a dozen of the 132 candidates vying for one of the 15 open seats reject mainstream climate science. But that’s not all. There are at least 10 other equally inappropriate candidates on the list, and not all of them are scientists, despite the fact that it’s supposed to be a panel of scienceadvisers.

…(read more).

We Are Being Held Hostage to Unpopular Conservative Thinking: 7 Reasons Our Democracy Fails | Alternet

Of all the myths the Republicans have perpetrated, and there are a lot of them, perhaps none is more powerful or insidious than the foundational one that this is an overwhelmingly conservative country and that progressives are outliers in it, along with its pernicious corollary that conservatives are “real” Americans while liberals (and the minorities who support liberal policies) are somehow counterfeits.

It is a brilliant bit of propaganda. The only problem is that it isn’t factually true, at least for those who still believe in facts. While there are more self-described conservatives than liberals, in large part, I think, because of the conservatives’ success at conflating their brand with Americanism itself, the gap has been narrowing. And in any case, party identification is just about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. What is more important: Most Americans reject conservative policy positions. Again and again, on issue after issue, the majority of Americans seem to tilt to the left: on immigration, including Trump’s border wall; on Obamacare repeal; on leaving the Paris climate accord; and on gay marriage.

So why then do conservatives control all three branches of government? More to the point, why do they control Congress and the presidency when Democrats got more votes? You might conclude that America is being held hostage by a minority group of conservative zealots. And you would be right.

Of all the myths the Republicans have perpetrated, and there are a lot of them, perhaps none is more powerful or insidious than the foundational one that this is an overwhelmingly conservative country and that progressives are outliers in it, along with its pernicious corollary that conservatives are “real” Americans while liberals (and the minorities who support liberal policies) are somehow counterfeits.

It is a brilliant bit of propaganda. The only problem is that it isn’t factually true, at least for those who still believe in facts. While there are more self-described conservatives than liberals, in large part, I think, because of the conservatives’ success at conflating their brand with Americanism itself, the gap has been narrowing. And in any case, party identification is just about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. What is more important: Most Americans reject conservative policy positions. Again and again, on issue after issue, the majority of Americans seem to tilt to the left: on immigration, including Trump’s border wall; on Obamacare repeal; on leaving the Paris climate accord; and on gay marriage.

So why then do conservatives control all three branches of government? More to the point, why do they control Congress and the presidency when Democrats got more votes? You might conclude that America is being held hostage by a minority group of conservative zealots. And you would be right.

...(read more).

Congressmen push Jeff Sessions to call environmentalists terrorists – ThinkProgres s

Non-violent resistance tactics used to stymie pipeline construction at Standing Rock last year could be in new legal jeopardy if lawmakers get their way. CREDIT: AP Photo/John L. Mone

Four Democrats join 80 Republicans on letter asking the Attorney General to treat pipeline sabotage as domestic terrorism.

Alan Pyke Oct 24, 2017, 2:12 pm

Environmental activists who sabotage oil and gas pipelines to protect land, water, and the climate should be treated like out-and-out terrorists, according to 84 members of Congress who sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday.

The letter asks Sessions if he currently has enough power to treat pipeline sabotage as not only criminal but terrorist activity, encourages him to treat interference with pipeline systems as an assault on the United States’ national security, and seeks to define pipeline “terrorism” as any act that knowingly damages oil and gas infrastructure.

…(read more).

In Targeting Truth and Facts, Trump Earns Scientists’ Ire on Vimeo

GUEST: Gretchen Goldman, Research Director for the Center for Science and Democracy at Union of Concerned Scientists.

BACKGROUND: With a climate denier in the White House and a de facto gag order on federal agencies in place, scientists around the country, many of whom rely on federal funding, are finding themselves increasingly politicized.

Rogue tweets from employees of the National Parks Service and NASA have revealed a deep frustration among those who advocate for truth and facts.

Now, across the country there is a move afoot to organize a March for Science in Washington DC and many other other cities. As of this recording the newly formed March for Science Facebook page has garnered nearly a quarter of a million “likes” in just days.