Miami’s mayor on Hurricane Irma: “If this isn’t climate change, I don’t know what is”

By David Smiley 8 September 2017 (Miami Herald) – Miami’s Republican mayor called on President Donald Trump and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency Friday to acknowledge that climate change is playing a role in the extreme weather that has slammed his city and the continental U.S. this summer. Speaking from Miami’s Emergency Operations […]

Trump stacks administration with climate change denialists – “It’s much more naked and right-wing than what we’ve seen before”

By Devin Henry 9 September 2017 (The Hill) – President Trump has stacked his administration with officials who doubt the scientific consensus behind man-made climate change, underscoring a growing divide within the Republican party. Even as leading scientists, environmentalists and most Democrats accept research that shows climate change accelerating — and as some see it […]

Trump wanted to kill the Obama flood rule. Then came the hurricanes.

By Rebecca Leber 8 September 2017 (Mother Jones) – Three weeks ago, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that reversed an Obama-era requirement that future construction in areas likely to flood need to be built at a higher elevation [cf. Trump signs order to end Obama-era flood risk building standards]. But after the devastation […]

Those three percent of scientific papers that deny climate change? A review found them all flawed

By Katherine Ellen Foley 5 September 2017 (Quartz) – It’s often said that of all the published scientific research on climate change, 97% of the papers conclude that global warming is real, problematic for the planet, and has been exacerbated by human activity.But what about those 3% of papers that reach contrary conclusions? Some skeptics […]

Now we have a moral duty to talk about climate change

By Mark Lynas 31 August 2017 (CNN) – This is what climate change looks like. Entire metropolitan areas — Houston in the United States and Mumbai in India — submerged in catastrophic floods.Record-breaking rainfall: Harvey’s 50-plus inches of torrential deluge set a new national tropical cyclone rain record for the continental United States.They used to […]

Hurricane Harvey and the storms to come – In the leadup to the historic flood, Texas Republicans abetted Trump’s climate-change delusions

By Elizabeth Kolbert 4 September 2017 (The New Yorker) – On 29 August 2005, at six-ten in the morning, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana, just east of New Orleans. Katrina had spent days wobbling over the Gulf of Mexico, and by the time it reached the coast it was […]

Denying Hurricane Harvey’s climate links only worsens future suffering – “Three options remain for dealing with the crisis: mitigate, adapt, and suffer”

By Dana Nuccitelli 5 September 2017 (The Guardian) – Human-caused climate change amplified the damages and suffering associated with Hurricane Harvey in several different ways. First, sea level rise caused by global warming increased the storm surge and therefore the coastal inundation and flooding from the storm. Second, the warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, […]

A two-decade crusade by conservative charities fueled Trump’s exit from Paris climate accord

By Robert O’Harrow Jr. 5 September 2017 (The Washington Post) – Myron Ebell stood in bright sunlight as President Trump stepped into the Rose Garden and spoke. “In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens,” Trump said to rowdy applause, “the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord.” […]

Katharine Hayhoe: I was an Exxon-funded climate scientist

By Katharine Hayhoe 24 August 2017 (The Conversation) – ExxonMobil’s deliberate attempts to sow doubt on the reality and urgency of climate change and their donations to front groups to disseminate false information about climate change have been public knowledge for a long time, now.Investigative reports in 2015 revealed that Exxon had its own scientists […]

Yes, ExxonMobil misled the public about global warming

By Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran 1 September 2017 (The Los Angeles Times) – In late August, we published the first academic analysis of ExxonMobil’s 40-year history of communications on climate change. We published our findings in an open-access, peer-reviewed journal and made our method and evidence transparent and auditable by publishing 121 pages of […]

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