By Josh Fischman15 December 2016 SAN FRANCISCO (Scientific American) – Anxiety among Earth and climate scientists has been mounting for weeks. The election of Donald J. Trump as U.S. president, a candidate who called human-driven climate change a hoax, was followed by Trump naming more and more climate-change doubters to run the government’s environment and […]
[Longtime Desdemona readers will recall the ”libricide” against Canadian fisheries science by the Harper government in 2013. –Des] By Brady Dennis 13 December 2016 (Washington Post) – Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent […]
By Sarah Kaplan 15 December 2016 SAN FRANCISCO (Washington Post) – Activism wasn’t originally on the agenda for Stephen Mullens, a meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma. He’d come to the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union — the first major gathering of the world’s earth and climate scientists since the election of Donald […]
By William M. Arkin, Ken Dilanian, and Cynthia McFadden14 December 2016 (NBC News) – U.S. intelligence officials now believe with “a high level of confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News. Two senior officials […]
13 December 2016 (Desdemona Despair) – Here are Desdemona’s remarks at today’s climate activism meeting held concurrently with the 2016 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco: When Mike invited me to this event back in June, what I would have said then was very different from what needs to be said today. Since the […]
By Daniel Berehulak 7 December 2016 (The New York Times) – You hear a murder scene before you see it: The desperate cries of a new widow. The piercing sirens of approaching police cars. The thud, thud, thud of the rain drumming on the pavement of a Manila alleyway — and on the back of […]
By Valerie Volcovici and Timothy Gardner7 December 2016 (WASHINGTON) – Donald Trump will pick an ardent opponent of President Barack Obama’s measures to curb climate change as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, a Trump transition team source said on Wednesday, a choice that enraged green activists and cheered the oil industry. Trump’s choice, Oklahoma […]
[cf. Australia’s One Nation party vs. science] By Jessica Shankleman21 November 2016 (Bloomberg) – Populism is drawing momentum from environmentalism in the U.S. and Europe, threatening the world’s effort to rein in climate change. Donald Trump’s election in the U.S., the U.K. Independence Party and Marine Le Pen’s ascent in France all represent a break […]
By Jordan Fermanis1 December 2016 (Crikey) – When One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts delivered his maiden speech to the Senate on September 13 of this year, he used the occasion to attack the science of climate change. In his speech, Roberts labelled climate change a “scam”, said it was prone to “hyperbolic predictions” and accused […]
9 January 2011 (Desdemona Despair) – In April 2010, actor Lance Baxter, known to many as the voice of the GEICO Gecko, left a voice mail for the “tea party” organization Freedom Works that asked how Freedom Works will “spin it when one of your members does actually kill somebody, wondering if you’ve got a […]