Links tagged “emergency”

Donna Laframboise: "RCP8.5, I think of it as Ridiculous Climate Prophecy" - "Fairy tales to describe how humans might impact the climate by the year 2100." 

It can’t become reality, they point out, unless humanity burns five times more coal than we currently do, “an amount larger than some estimates of recoverable coal reserves.” Whenever RCP8.5 gets mentioned, they say, it should be clearly labelled as an “unlikely worst case.”

Incredibly, that ‘major scientific report’ (National Climate Assessment) takes RCP8.5 seriously. Calling it a “core scenario,” page 6 of the report presents it as a realistic possibility rather than a farfetched hallucination:

"RCP8.5 is generally associated with higher population growth, less technological innovation, and higher carbon intensity of the global energy mix."

This means the report is junk. No matter how many federal agencies were involved in its creation. But the New York Times didn’t tell readers that.

The Bad: If next president is climate activist:

"Don’t wait on Congress. Don’t wait to see if one type of policy solution works best; just do them all." - Brett Hartl, chief political strategist, Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund.

If climate activist president wins in 2020: "Rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement is easy but is only the start. Among numerous other options in circulation: Declare a climate emergency and reallocate resources. Block pipeline construction and restrict pipeline use. Halt drilling on federal lands and use of fracking technology across the nation. Ban all fossil fuel imports and exports. Place a carbon adjustment fee on imported goods produced through carbon-intensive processes. And on. Presto-chango through unilateral executive power that ignores the legislative branch."

The Good: The "Trump administration has largely eviscerated all of the major Obama climate policy efforts via executive orders, regulatory revisions, and administrative stalling, designed to make it as difficult as possible for any successor to shift gears again.”

Junk Science Week: "The purpose of global climate policy is to get us from the dangerous upper end of the forecast range down to the safe bottom end. But what users of climate projections need to understand is that we are already there. In fact, we never left it. We don’t need to kill the global economy to get onto an emissions path we’ve always been on. If we want to avoid the RCP8.5 future scenario all we have to do is stop feeding it into climate models, because that’s the only place it exists."

Paul Ehrlich: "It’s insane to have so many people alive at the same time." ... It turns out, if you want to have a maximum number of people live, the way to do it isn’t to see how many can cram on the planet at one time. The way to do it is to have a sustainable society, millions, but not many billions, for thousands, or millions, of years." ...

"The problem is not so much making automobiles more efficient, it’s getting rid of most of the automobiles."

"The health threat from the COVID-19 virus is trivial, compared to the health threat from climate disruption."

"Trump’s got a lot of blood on his hands already, but that’s nothing, we could lose everybody to climate disruption."

"When you ask what we should be doing, the answer is: we’ve got to change the entire system."

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Also see: Paul Ehrlich on COVID: ‘We desperately need a national shutdown, and ordered from the top’ – Also admits it was ‘mistake’ to put in ‘scenarios’ (predictions) in his ‘Population Bomb’ book

& Reality Check: Accurate Tribute to Paul Ehrlich: ‘Mad…Kook…Lunatic…Disgraced…Worse than Hitler…fear-monger…parasite on Academic system…Bernie Madoff of science’