I actually disagree with the president on this. He should have simply announced, "The Paris Climate agreement is a treaty and before it can be in effect, it must be ratified by a vote of two-thirds of the Senate. So I've submitted it to the Senate for 'advise and consent,' so until this is approved, it has no binding on the United States." I know, a quaint idea, having treaties approved by the Senate, rolling the Constitution.
But I've seen this and I almost lost my coffee. Enjoy.
Opinion
(COMMENT: At least they called it opinion.)
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Trump’s Stupid and Reckless Climate Decision
By BILL McKIBBEN
Read his bio. It's classic!
JUNE 1, 2017
People say, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. We should be so lucky. President Trump has a hammer, but all he’ll use it for is to smash things that others have built, as the world looks on in wonder and in fear. The latest, most troubling example is his decision to obliterate the Paris climate accord: After nearly 200 years of scientific inquiry and over 20 years of patient diplomacy that united every nation save Syria and Nicaragua, we had this afternoon’s big game-show Rose Garden reveal: Count us out.
It’s a stupid and reckless decision — our nation’s dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq....
Yo Billy, where have you been the last decade? Obamacare? The Iran Nuke Deal? B Hussein Obama sticking his nose and ears into Syria, Libya and Egypt? The Iranians taking our boats without consequence?
...But it’s not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science. It undercuts our civilization’s chances of surviving global warming, but it also undercuts our civilization itself, since that civilization rests in large measure on those two forces.
Slight bit of hyperbole there Billy?
Science first. Since the early 1800s we’ve been slowly but surely figuring out the mystery of how our climate operates — why our planet is warmer than it should be, given its distance from the sun. From Fourier to Foote and Tyndall, from Arrhenius to Revelle and Suess and Keeling, researchers have worked out the role that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases play in regulating temperature. By the 1980s, as supercomputers let us model the climate with ever greater power, we came to understand our possible fate. Those big brains, just in time, gave us the warning we required...
OK Billy, one question. What should the temperature be? If you can say without question it's "warmer than it should be," then you know what it should be. Otherwise, how do you know if the current temp is not the "correct" temp? So please Billy,
enthrall me with your acumen.
And now, in this millennium, we’ve watched the warning start to play out. We’ve seen 2014 set a new global temperature record, which was smashed in 2015 and smashed again in 2016. We’ve watched Arctic sea ice vanish at a record pace and measured the early disintegration of Antarctica’s great ice sheets. We’ve been able to record alarming increases in drought and flood and wildfire, and we’ve been able to link them directly to the greenhouse gases we’ve poured into the atmosphere...
I know, a radical few questions. So we never had "drought and flood and wildfire" before we had cars during gas and ships or trains burning coal and diesel? And how were they directly related to "greenhouse gases?" BTY, isn't the largest greenhouse gas in the atmosphere di-hydonated oxide, sometimes know as water?
...This is the largest-scale example in the planet’s history of the scientific method in operation, the continuing dialectic between hypothesis and skepticism that arrived eventually at a strong consensus about the most critical aspects of our planet’s maintenance. Rational people the world around understand. As Bloomberg Businessweek blazoned across its cover the week after Hurricane Sandy smashed into Wall Street, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”
Science is not consensus, it's observations, analysis, testing, proofs, review by non-interesting reviewers. And Bloomturd as a source, spare us.
But now President Trump (and 22 Republican senators who wrote a letter asking him to take the step) is betting that all of that is wrong. Mr. Trump famously called global warming a hoax during the campaign, and with this decision he’s wagering that he was actually right — he’s calling his own bluff. No line of argument in the physical world supports his claim, and no credible authority backs him, not here and not abroad. It’s telling that he simultaneously wants to cut the funding for the satellites and ocean buoys that monitor our degrading climate. Every piece of data they collect makes clear his foolishness. He’s simply insisting that physics isn’t real.
Are you one of the people who say biology is just a social construct? There are no male or females?
Read the rest if you want, but it's great. Billy here sounds like he's about to loose it, I would actually enjoy watching him have his stroke (tongue in cheek).
Have a great weekend!
