Acting with a breathtaking level of corruption Republicans are doing everything in their power to undercut President Obama’s ability to negotiate urgently needed greenhouse gas reductions with other countries as the Paris Climate Conference approaches. No doubt Republicans are trying to placate their Party’s new owners the Koch Brothers.
Republicans vow to deny Obama climate funds to derail Paris talks
By Devin Henry
Republicans are taking aim at a new “Green Climate Fund,” as they look to weaken President Obama’s hand in global climate talks later this month.
The pot of money, a $3 billion climate change pledge the president’s administration made last year, is something officials hope to bring to the negotiating table at United Nations summit in Paris.
But Republicans — hostile to the climate talks and bent on doing whatever they can to derail a deal in Paris next month — say they’re going to deny Obama the first tranche of money he hopes to inject into the fund.
“We pledge that Congress will not allow U.S. taxpayer dollars to go to the Green Climate Fund until the forthcoming international climate agreement is submitted to the Senate for its constitutional advice and consent,” 37 Republican senators wrote in a letter to Obama on Thursday.
The fund, a pool of public and private money, is meant to help poorer nations prepare for climate change.
A Senate appropriations bill cleared the way for the first portion of American funding earlier this year, but Republicans committed this week to blocking it in a final budget deal.
That’s not the only thing these corrupt Republicans are doing.
GOP chairman ratchets up fight against global warming study
By Timothy Cama
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is ratcheting up his fight against federal climate change scientists, saying he has whistleblowers telling him that a widely publicized study on global warming was not conducted properly.
Smith, chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, is threatening to subpoena Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker in his probe of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) global warming study.
In a Wednesday letter, Smith said whistleblowers contacted the committee with concerns that align with some of the allegations he’s made about NOAA’s study published this summer that was said to refute the idea of a more than 15-year “pause” in global warming.
Some Democrats aren’t taking this nonsense from the craven Republicans sitting down.
Dem accuses GOP chairman of ‘witch hunt’ in climate probe
By Timothy Cama
The top Democrat on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee is fighting back against what she calls a “witch hunt” and “harassment” over climate change science by the committee’s chairman.
In a blistering public letter, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) accused Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) of an illegitimate, politically driven probe that makes a mockery of Congress’s investigative powers.
The probe into a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) study of Earth temperatures is also light on actual allegations of substantial wrongdoing, Johnson wrote late Thursday.
Johnson said that in Smith’s four-month investigation, he has accused top NOAA scientists of scientific misconduct, accused the staff of the journal Science of participating, and accused the White House and NOAA of conspiring against it.
“And all of these indictments are conjured out of thin air, without you presenting any factual basis for these sweeping accusations — exposing this so-called ‘investigation’ for what it truly is: a witch hunt designed to smear the reputations of eminent scientists for partisan gain,” Johnson wrote in her letter.
How urgent is Climate Change?
Why a Climate Deal Is the Best Hope for Peace
BY JASON BOX AND NAOMI KLEIN
If we acknowledge that the instability emanating from the Middle East has these roots, it makes little sense to allow the Paris attacks to minimize our already inadequate climate commitments. Rather, this tragedy should inspire the opposite reaction: an urgent push to lower emissions as rapidly and deeply as possible, including strong support for developing countries to leapfrog to renewable energy, creating much-needed jobs and economic opportunities in the process. That kind of bold climate transition is our only hope of preventing a future in which, as a recent paper in the journal Nature Climate Change put it, large areas of the Middle East will, by the end of the century, “experience temperature levels that are intolerable to humans.”
But even this is not enough. The deepest emission reductions can only prevent climate change from getting far worse. They can’t stop the warming that has already arrived, nor the warming that is locked in as a result of the fossil fuels we have already burned. So there is a critical piece missing from our climate conversation: the need to quickly lower atmospheric CO2 levels from the current four hundred parts per million to the upper limit of what is not considered dangerous: three hundred and fifty parts per million.
The implications of a failure to bring carbon down to safer levels go well beyond amplifying catastrophes like Syria’s historic drought. The last time atmospheric CO2 was this high, global sea levels were at least six metres higher. We find ourselves confronted with ice-sheet disintegration that, in some susceptible areas, already appears unstoppable. In the currently overloaded CO2climate, it’s just a matter of time until hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from coastal regions, their agricultural lands and groundwater destroyed by saltwater intrusion from sea rise. Among the most vulnerable areas are broad swaths of South and Southeast Asia—which include some of the world’s biggest cities, from Shanghai to Jakarta—along with a number of coastal African and Latin American countries, such as Nigeria, Brazil, and Egypt.
Study: Changing Climate will shrink World Economy by 23% by 2100 by 75% in poorest 40% of countries
THIS IS VERY LIKELY TO BECOME THE MOST TUMULTUOUS CENTURY IN HUMAN HISTORY AS CLIMATE CAUSED ECONOMIC DISRUPTIONS AND THE RESULTING MASS MIGRATIONS BECOME THE NORM
Republicans are putting the delusional preferences of the Koch Brothers ahead of the well being of future generations of not only Americans, of of all the peoples of the world. The Republican Party no longer has any scruples or integrity. The GOP has become a herd of Judas Goats.