Making Climate Change Go Away By Not Saying "Climate Change"
Energy Department climate office bans use of phrase ‘climate change’ https://t.co/jqOuUWV59h pic.twitter.com/UEUNLSb65b
— EarthToday (@earthtoday) April 3, 2017
Keith’s note: Let’s see how long it takes for NASA, NOAA, NSF etc. to be told to do the same thing by the White House.
Wow.
A “visceral” reaction? What, are they going to start screaming if they come across a memo with climate change in it? I’m grateful they were at least embarrassed enough to deny that anything as such was taking place.
If the Trump Administration doesn’t think climate change is a problem, they need to just say, “We don’t think climate change is a big problem at this time”. Not this.
Apparently the mere mention of “climate change” to a Republican politician is enough to cause them to become “triggered”.
I hate how climate science has been politicized by the petroleum industry and the politicians who receive large campaign donations from them.
Especially when no individuals or corporations are attempting to make a penny of profit from renewable energy. /sarc/
Thank you.
Fine, say “global warming.” http://Www.robert-w-jones.com
The term is rather ambiguous. The climate is always changing and humans will be unable to stop that.
Your words are, of course, right. Yes, climate has always changed. But it is changing much faster today, and that is largely due to humans. More importantly it is likely that the change is faster than life on this earth can accommodate without major impacts. That is especially true for humans, whose footprint on the panel is much bigger than it used to be last time there was significant climate change.
Things have changed very fast in the past no?
The Sahara for instance was lush and green and
rapidly became a desert. Some think because of an orbital/axis shift. How are we supposed to stop that? So it happened and will happen, with or without us, no? I think adaption the answer even if we managed to zero ourselves out of the equation. it’s going to happen again.
Many think an ice age is next, given that is more the “normal” state of things, what if we are postponing that with AGW? So complex I still think to panic humans into action that may likely not really matter isn’t wise.
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/…
“The time span of the past few million years has been punctuated by many rapid climate transitions, most of them on timescales of centuries to decades. The most detailed information is available for the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene stepwise change around 11 500 years ago, which seems to have occurred over a few decades.”
Adams, Maslin and Thomas discuss the chronology and causation of climate fluxuations in detail. It isn’t just that “climate changes”.
http://ruby.fgcu.edu/course… Each of the many ancient changes in climate has been analyzed, and for the majority a dramatic change in geology, ocean currents, vulcanism etc. has been identified that would have been obvious had humans been present, including sudden increases in greenhouse gasses due to vulcanism or other causes.
If you want to know whether a scienific theory is accurate, you have to consider all the evidence. One cannot say that climate warmed (in the Northern Hemisphere) 11,500 years ago therefore the change we are experiencing today is “natural”. A change in climate is the result of a dramatic change in solar heating, atmospheric composition, ocean currents, or other specific and dramatic events. The most dramatic climate change driving factor today is the unprecidented increase in atmospheric CO2 due to the burning of fossil fuels.
Meanwhile the Trump administration wants to end research on climate change. Without research to produce facts, those pesky scientists will not be able to prove a thing.
oh, puh-leeze.
Here we are drawing a line in the sand again. Your either for US or against us. Instead of drawing a line in the sand, suppose we draw a circle in the sand. Wouldn’t that be a work of art?
Didn’t we try that bit with the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” thing that eventually morphed into “I’m telling you right here, right now”?
The Great con of the 2016 megadonors continues as Red continues to support carbon profit at the expense of the environment as companies are being investigated spinning climate change risk. *DOE* will not use the phrases “climate change,” “emissions reduction” or “Paris Agreement” because **companies** do not want liability?!
Examine the cost of carbon: 100B barrels of oil from Keystone which will add ~ 200ppm to the world at an environmental cost of 4T (likely low) is $40 to $80/barrel. Industry is not going to set aside nor support a carbon tax at least doubles the price of an barrel of oil. Oh, denying cc exists best for companies, not future generations. Catching on?
The US is a member of the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which “is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. It was established in 1988 to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts. In the same year, the UN General Assembly endorsed the action by WMO and UNEP in jointly establishing the IPCC.
The IPCC reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. It does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters.”
Meanwhile, Royal Dutch Shell agreed to sell most of its Canadian oil sands, the latest international oil major to withdraw from the costly carbon-heavy projects and will be used to pay off debt.
Au contraire, I believe this is most certainly a White House directive, just one or two steps removed. Or at the very least it is a duplicitous directive emanating from one of the few nodes where the Trumpers and the GOP actually concur, and feel ( wrongly) they have a mandate from the people to start the deconstruction of government in earnest. Follow the slime trail.
I think Lynn has a good point, and that’s as disturbing. Above a certain management level, information gets communicated through presentations which are about the “big picture” and designed not to get into the technical details more than absolutely necessary. That ends up meaning that convincing people of something depends more on how you present the information than on the information itself. In that environment, it’s critical to use words and phrases with positive connotations (to your audience) and avoid words and phrases with negative connotations. It doesn’t actually matter if the White House said or did anything; the dynamics of the system promote self-censorship of terminology people _believe_ the White House wouldn’t be sympathetic to.
I find that very disturbing, because of what it says about senior management decisions. In a technical field, they are made based on impressions and how material is presented. Not on the information itself (in no little part because the information has been watered down to the point where there isn’t much technical content left.) I think that’s extremely disturbing.
Politicos telling civil servants to not use accurate terms when communicating with the citizenry- who, after all, own the work we do- is not only wrong, it probably truly is illegal; particularly when the future health and safety of those same people can be impacted. NASA in particular has a legal mandate for the ‘widest possible dissemination’ of information. Of course the question then arises: Will civil service managers do their duty to the public and not do or enforce anything that would violate the public trust by politically-mandated mis-speak? Or will they simply go along to protect their SESs, including punishing any employee who continues to do their job?
“Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon-not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words-which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:
times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported Africa rectify
times 10.12.83 forcasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doublespeakplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.
With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be deal
with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures.”
1984, George Orwell
Why would you think that? Have you ever looked at the Answers In Genesis website? Or the “museum” they built in Kentucky? Complete with a replica of the so-called “ark”?
It’s a formidable opponent that is gaining strength; the leaders are educated; they are excellent presenters who depend on what I call the “seem like” hypothesis: “seems like the climate is always changing, amirite?” Or “seems like an eyeball ‘evolving’ from nothing is impossible”. Or pointing out the apparent absurdity of common ancestors between humans and certain apes. Etc.
And that particular group, ably led, is far from peculiar.