Guys I've had to deal with snow twice in the last week and I live in the South. Pretty sure that means global warming is bullshit but idk
What bison in South Dakota can teach us about fighting climate change One rancher is deploying a controversial holistic grazing strategy to restore the land and capture carbon dioxide. By Umair Irfan Feb 2, 2018, 10:30am ESTSHARE The Weather Channel recently launched a fantastic package on the impacts of climate change across the United States, with 50 stories about how rising temperatures will affect all 50 states. One that really stood out was about South Dakota — a part of the country often overlooked for its climate vulnerability — tying together bison herds and a clever tactic for pulling carbon dioxide out of the air. The piece, by Pam Wright, emphasizes two key points about climate change in the United States that I think often get lost in discussions: 1) While we often tend to focus on dramatic impacts of climate change — higher seas and more intense hurricanes on the coasts — regions like the Great Plains are facing dire economic threats too. And 2) Not all of the solutions for climate change have to do with technology. Rising temperatures may shrink cattle herds in South Dakota, threatening the state’s economy Average temperatures in South Dakota have already shot up by 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900, and the number of triple-digit temperature days is poised to double by 2050, Wright reports. The concern is that these rising temperatures will lead to more severe droughts, which in turn will harm the livestock this state relies on heavily for its economy. South Dakota has about five beef cattle for every one of its 865,000 residents, and they’re worth almost $2.8 billion to the state’s economy. The value of livestock in South Dakota. South Dakota Department of Agriculture And using bison as a proxy for cattle, one study found that every degree Celsius of average temperature rise would cost the livestock industry an additional $1 billion as the market weight of cattle declines. Projections show that under a business as usual trajectory for greenhouse gas emissions, the region will see average temperature rise by 4.65 degrees Fahrenheit by 2065, which will take a big bite out of the state’s cattle industry. Bison are being harnessed as carbon engineers While greenhouse gases from transportation and power plants (rightfully) dominate the discussions about the causes of climate change, agriculture, and, more fundamentally, the way we use land, also produces a lot of emissions. Take a look at this chart from the Environmental Protection Agency on the sources of greenhouse gases in the United States: Environmental Protection Agency Conspicuously absent from this chart is land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF, in environmental policy jargon). Cutting down forests and paving over grasslands destroys organisms that naturally breathe in and hold onto greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. But the United States has managed land in a way that has made it a net carbon sink, soaking up more carbon dioxide than it releases. Trees, shrubs, and grasses drink in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen as they stretch their branches and spread their leaves. And as a result, LULUCF offset 11.8 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions in 2015. An overview of the carbon cycle in forests. S. Luyssaert Et Al./Global Change Biology - 16, 1429–1450 (2010) That means putting more thought into how we cultivate pastures, grasslands, and forests could help bring down the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. (The United Nations also counts LULUCF as an important tactic for fighting climate change.) Wright profiles 777 Bison Ranch, which is deploying a holistic grazing method that proprietor Mimi Hillenbrand says will help restore topsoil, cultivate grasses, and draw carbon dioxide out of the air. The approach was pioneered by biologist Allan Savory, who argued that rather than reducing the amount of livestock to curb problems like climate change and desertification, animal herds should be cultivated in a way that mimics their ancestral habits. Conventional pasture grazing, with animals pent up in one area, can denude the soil of vital grasses, reducing its carbon dioxide uptake and leading to soil erosion. However, the 777 Bison Ranch is home to just under 2,000 bison that graze, trample, and defecate as they travel through 35 pastures in search of fodder, enriching and aerating the soil while allowing native grasses to regenerate. Some scientists have criticized Savory’s ideas, finding flaws in his foundational research in Africa, like the fact that that livestock in his initial experiment received supplemental feeddue to weight loss, and that grass cover didn’t improve much despite unusually high rainfall in the region. And other researchers have found that Savory’s short-duration grazing tactics yielded disappointing results when tried in the United States, which is why it hasn’t caught on more. Regardless of whether or not bison can go hoof-to-hoof with carbon dioxide scrubbers on power plants as a climate change mitigation strategy, it’s worth remembering that fighting climate change is more than a matter of hardware. And while holistic grazing remains a fringe practice in US agriculture, farms are increasingly deploying technologies to limit emissions, like trapping methane from livestock waste and using anaerobic digesters to produce electricity, thereby reducing their total greenhouse gas emissions. We’re going to need all of these tactics and more to decarbonize as fast as we possibly can.
.S. Intelligence Agencies Break With Trump Over Climate Threats By Eric Roston February 13, 2018 8:30 AM CST From Threat assessment references work of global climate scientists Report warns extinctions will ‘jeopardize vital ecosystems’ The U.S. intelligence community is at odds with the White House about threats America faces from climate change. The nation’s intelligence agencies are warning, in the annual Worldwide Threat Assessment, of global instability if climate change continues unabated, according to a report submitted for a hearing Tuesday before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “The impacts of the long-term trends toward a warming climate, more air pollution, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity are likely to fuel economic and social discontent -- and possibly upheaval -- through 2018,” the report states. The intelligence report describes how warming temperatures will exacerbate disasters, war, shortages, economic volatility and migration. Citing research showing that human activities have accelerated extinctions worldwide 100 to 1000 times normal rates, the analysts write that losses “will jeopardize vital ecosystems that support critical human systems.” Two recent policy papers from the Department of Defense carried no such alarms about the warming world, placing the military nominally in line with the president’s actions and reversing a position adopted by President George W. Bush’s Pentagon in 2008. The world has warmed nearly a degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) in the last century, driven by industrial greenhouse gas emissions, according to the 2017 U.S. National Climate Assessment. President Donald Trump has called global warming a “Chinese hoax” and rejected the otherwise unanimous Paris Agreement to cut carbon pollution. In his 2019 budget released Monday, he proposed to eliminate scientific, energy-related and diplomatic efforts meant to study or address the causes or consequences of global change.
Environmentalists Say They’re Averting Climate Disaster. Conservatives Say It’s Terrorism. The post-9/11 rhetoric vilifying environmentalists is making a comeback. Spoiler By Alexander C. Kaufman Ji Sub Jeong/HuffPost Republicans are once again warning people about the threat of eco-terrorism. Michael Foster, 53, is a mild-mannered mental health counselor and father of two from Seattle, with short-cropped silver hair and soft features. But in a North Dakota court last October, prosecutors painted Foster as a ruthless killer and agent of chaos. The prosecution team compared him to the 9/11 hijackers who killed 2,996 people in the worst terror attack in history, and warned that he envisioned an anarchic future under Islamic religious law. Prosecutors even put him in a league with Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber whose 17-year bombing spree left three dead and injured 23. Foster hadn’t killed anyone. He didn’t even injure anyone when, on Oct. 11, 2016, he put on a white hard hat and neon-yellow safety vest, grabbed some bolt cutters, and clipped the chain locking a fenced section of the Keystone Pipeline in Walhalla, North Dakota. Once inside the fence, Foster cranked a giant wheel-like valve until it closed, temporarily stopping the flow of tar sands oil. “In order to preserve life as we know it, and civilization, and give us a fair chance and our kids a fair chance, I’m taking action as a citizen,” Foster told another activist, Sam Jessup, who live-streamed the action. “I am duty-bound.” Foster’s action was part of a protest in solidarity with the indigenous activists fighting to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which runs through a sacred water source at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on the other side of the state. Foster and Jessup did so in coordination with “valve turners” in four other states, timing their break-ins across the country to temporarily halt 15 percent of U.S. oil consumption. Sam Jessup A screenshot of Michael Foster turning the valve on the Keystone Pipeline. Then came the legal crackdown. In October, a judge convicted Foster and Jessup of felonies ― including criminal mischief and conspiracy to commit criminal mischief ― carrying maximum sentences of 11 to 26 years in prison. Earlier this month, the judge sentenced Foster to three years in prison; Jessup received two years of probation. (Other valve turners have faced up to 10 years in prison and $20,000 in fines.) “They hit the trifecta: 9/11, the Unabomber, and that somehow our action was going to lead to Sharia law,” said Emily Johnston, 51, who is set to stand trial in May for turning a pipeline valve in Minnesota. “The theory being that if everyone just acted on what they believed in, it would be anarchy.” That theory is now gaining some traction in Washington. In October, 84 members of Congress, including four Democrats, sent Attorney General Jeff Sessions a letter urging him to find out whether the Department of Justice could prosecute pipeline saboteurs as terrorists. The Justice Department has yet to announce a decision, but said in November that it was “committed to vigorously prosecuting those who damage this critical energy infrastructure in violation of federal law.” Doing so would be a break from the Obama administration’s decision to let states handle such cases, rather than treating them as federal crimes. The purpose of this law isn’t to wrap everybody up and send them to federal prison. It’s to scare people, to create fear. Will Potter, author of ‘Green Is The New Red’ Download But policymakers are sharpening their knives on the state level, too. Late last year, the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council drafted model legislation calling for severe punishments for anyone caught trespassing on or tampering with an oil, gas or chemical factory. The Critical Infrastructure Protection Act even includes a clause that any “conspirator” organization would be fined 10 times more than a trespasser, opening the door to crippling penalties for environmental groups. Lawmakers in Ohio and Iowa are now considering bills based on the proposal. The Iowa bill is backed by Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. In all, 31 states have considered 58 bills to crack down on protesters since November 2016, according to a database maintained by the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. Eight have been enacted, and 28 are pending. At a moment when the Trump administration is waging all-out war on environmentalism, macheting away regulations and gearing up for a massive pipeline construction spree, “eco-terrorism” is re-emerging as a boogeyman in a way it hasn’t since right after 9/11. There are already laws in place to send environmentalists who tamper with fossil fuel infrastructure to jail, as Foster’s case demonstrates. But if conservative lawmakers get their way, new laws could undermine the environmental movement ― just as scientists say the humans are running out of time to make the changes needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change. [paste:font size="3"]Protesting After The Patriot Act Targeting environmentalists as domestic security threats goes back nearly two decades. Radical environmental groups experienced their heydays in the 1990s, but became victims of their own success as concerns over pollution and animal cruelty went mainstream. But even as the influence of these groups waned, a scorched-earth crackdown loomed. President George W. Bush signed the USA Patriot Act in October 2001, just over a month after the 9/11 attacks. The law expanded the government’s view of domestic terror suspects and granted law enforcement sweeping new powers to investigate organizations and individuals, including by seizing assets without any prior hearing or criminal charges. “It’s about installing fear so they don’t go out and protest in the first place,” said Will Potter, author of the book Green Is The New Red, while comparing ALEC’s recent bill to the actions taken after 9/11. “The purpose of this law isn’t to wrap everybody up and send them to federal prison. It’s to scare people, to create fear.” Potter would know. In 2002, when he was a reporter working on the Chicago Tribune’s metro desk, two FBI agents arrived at his home to question him about an animal rights protest he and his girlfriend had participated in months earlier. Both had been arrested and charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct after leaving flyers in a neighborhood where an insurance executive whose company covered animal laboratory testing lived. He says FBI agents, armed with new powers under the Patriot Act, threatened to add him to a domestic terror list if he didn’t become an informant on the group with which he protested. The officers threatened him, telling him they could “make your life very difficult for you,” having secured “more authority now to get things done and get down to business” after 9/11, Mother Jones reported in 2011. Is this about just protecting some businesses? Or is this about this larger idea that the radical left is threatening America? Cas Mudde, Dutch political scientist In 2005, John Lewis, then the FBI official in charge of domestic terrorism, ranked “eco-terrorism and animal-rights movement” activists ahead of radical Islamic extremists as the nation’s top domestic terror threat. The agency began investigating Eric McDavid, a self-declared green anarchist, that same year. In a now-infamous case, the FBI recruited a mole to get close to McDavid and coax him into plotting a C4 bomb attack. He was arrested in January 2006, and spent a decade in prison. Congress also quietly passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act in 2005, a sweeping law that classified many forms of animal rights protest as terrorism. It was used to prosecute Lauren Gazzola, the U.S. coordinator for a campaign against an animal product testing, on six felony charges that included conspiracy to violate an earlier law meant to protect businesses from protestors. The crackdown was at odds with any realistic threat these environmentalists might have posed. Less than 10 percent of all radical environmental and animal rights actions from 2003 to 2010 even included criminal activity, according to a study published in 2014 in the journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. Of those acts, 66 percent were vandalism, less than 15 percent were house visits, and just over 12 percent involved freeing animals from cages. About 4 percent were arsons, and 1.4 percent involved explosives. There were no assassinations. Protesting Post-Trump Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist who co-authored the study on criminal activity amongst activists, points out that the attacks on environmentalists came at a time when many political protesters were speaking out against the Iraq War ― meaning environmentalists served as a sort of proxy for other left-leaning protest movements. This is not unlike what we’re seeing now, Mudde said, noting that overlap between leftist activists and radical environmentalists makes it easy for conservatives to demonize both equally. For example, Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity spent months inveighing against the so-called “antifa” and “alt left” movements, terms they use to refer to certain anti-fascist protester groups that rose up in response to increasingly vocal white nationalists in the U.S. Researchers who study extremists say “alt left” does not describe a real phenomenon. Mudde said it could be especially telling to see how Republicans frame the laws to criminalize fossil fuel protest. “Is this about just protecting some businesses?” he said. “Or is this about this larger idea that the radical left is threatening America?” The surprise election of President Donald Trump in 2016 dashed any hopes that the so-called green scare was a thing of the past. Trump, who dismisses climate change and installed an EPA administrator who shares his ideological antagonism toward science, reversed regulations and announced plans to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. The conditions primed the rise of a more militant environmental movement ― and for an even more militant crackdown. In a provocative essay published in September in Foreign Policy, think tank scholar Jamie Bartlett argued that “formal, peaceful political activism — that all-important route to redress — isn’t working” to address pollution and that “the signs of growing radicalism in green circles are already there, if you know where to look.” He noted that hard-line environmental organizations are seeing a membership surge, and that local anti-fracking groups are growing faster than ever before. Yuri Gripas / Reuters Attorney General Jeff Sessions has yet to make a final decision on whether his Justice Department will prosecute pipeline saboteurs as terrorists. In April, the Department of Homeland Security warned of attacks by eco-terrorists who “believe violence is justified” to stop the planned Diamond Pipeline from Oklahoma to Tennessee. But the report admitted that no current intelligence suggested any attack had actually been planned. The oil and gas industry is fueling fears of impending eco-terrorist attacks. In October, the American Petroleum Institute disclosed that it was “working with the Trump administration on this issue, including the DOJ, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration,” according to the trade publication Natural Gas Intelligence. API indicated that its lobbyists met with the FBI and other agencies to discuss “efforts related to pipeline security,” according to its final-quarter disclosure report from 2017. The ALEC model bill is perhaps the clearest indication that “eco-terrorism” is back as a boogeyman on the right. When ALEC began shopping the bill around to state legislatures, it included a letter signed by a consortium of fossil fuel corporations and chemical manufacturers urging lawmakers to introduce bills based on the legislation to curtail the “growing and disturbing trend” of environmentalists attacking infrastructure. The letter, which HuffPost obtained, listed five examples to back up the trend. One was the valve turners case. The others did not actually involve environmentalists. Instead, they were loosely bound by common threads of mental illness or workplace grievance: In August 2011, Daniel Wells Herriman heard voices in his head, which convinced him to plant a crude bomb near a gas pipeline in Oklahoma. He turned himself in, pleaded insanity, and was sentenced the next year to more than five years in prison. In June 2012 ― after spending months writing fawning prison letters to the Unabomber and posting enraged videos about having to pay taxes ― Anson Chi decided to live out his fantasies by blowing up a homemade explosive near a natural gas pipeline in Plano, Texas. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Just after midnight on April 16, 2013, a sniper fired more than 100 rounds of .30-caliber rifle ammunition into the radiators of 17 electricity transformers in Metcalf, California. The attacker, believed to “an insider” who worked at the utility PG&E, was never found. In October 2017, vandals believed to be recently furloughed employees ransacked a wastewater plant in Crow Agency, Montana, igniting a fire and firing off guns. RELATED COVERAGE[/paste:font] Anti-Pipeline Activist Found Guilty After Being Barred From Mentioning Climate Change Natural Gas Industry Brings A Fake Grassroots Group To Eastern Pipeline Fights Leaked PowerPoint Reveals The Gas Industry’s Playbook For Waging Pipeline Fights Marathon Petroleum Corporation, the only individual company to sign the letter, declined to comment. The Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for utilities, said, “It is important for law enforcement agencies to have the ability to hold individuals and organizations accountable for any attempts to damage or sabotage critical infrastructure.” In a bizarre response, a spokesman for the Energy Policy Network denied that the a coal-industry advocate signed the letter. He did not respond when sent screenshots and asked to comment on why the group’s name appeared in the signature of the letter. The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a trade group, did not respond to questions about the examples listed in the letter, but defended its support for the ALEC legislation. “Our highest priority is the welfare of our employees, surrounding communities and the environment, and sabotage against critical infrastructure can put this safety at risk,” Chet Thompson, the association’s president and chief executive, told HuffPost by email. “While AFPM defends peaceful protest, violence is never justified and cannot be condoned.” The American Chemistry Council and the American Gas Association ― trade associations for chemical manufacturers and gas-burning utilities ― did not respond to requests for comment. ALEC did not reply to an email requesting an interview. While industry groups quietly work to lay sharper legal snares for environmentalists, people like Johnston, the woman who turned a pipeline valve in Minnesota, are fighting to reshape the narrative over fossil fuel sabotage in court. In October, a district court judge in Minnesota ruled that Johnston and her two co-defendants would be allowed to argue that the “necessity” of confronting climate change justified temporarily shutting down the pipeline. Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, called the defense “extremely unusual,” according to InsideClimate News. But, if successful, it could set a legal precedent used in the past by political activists on issues including the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons and abortion. Either way, Johnston said she is prepared to make an example of herself. “I’m not afraid to go to jail,” she said. “I’m afraid of climate change.” The full letter ALEC attached to its bill: ALEC letter by Alexander Kaufman on Scribd
probably discussed in another thread but... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...r-stunning-scientists/?utm_term=.d4f93f4d7057
China dunking on the rest of the world. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-china-pollution/ China’s War on Pollution Will Change the World
Always good to see another way in which the current USA administration is leading us down the path of being taken over by China as the greatest world power.
20,000 Scientists Have Now Signed 'Warning to Humanity' A chilling research paper warning about the fate of humanity has received 4,500 additional signatures and endorsements from scientists since it was first released last year. The paper—"World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice"—was published in November 2017 in the journal Bioscience and quickly received the largest-ever formal support by scientists for a journal article with roughly 15,000 signatories from 184 countries. Today, the article has collected 20,000 expert endorsements and/or co-signatories, and more are encouraged to add their names. Spoiler The "Warning" became one of the most widely discussed research papers in the world. It currently ranks 6th out of 9 million papers on the Altmetric scale, which tracks attention to research. It has also inspired pleas from political leaders from Israel to Canada. "Our scientists' warning to humanity has clearly struck a chord with both the global scientific community and the public," said lead author ecology professor William Ripple at Oregon State University in a statement. The 2017 paper is actually an update to the original version published 25 years ago by the Union of Concerned Scientists. It was signed by 1,700 scientists then, including the majority of living Nobel laureates in the sciences. The first notice started with this statement: "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course." It described trends such as the growing hole in the ozone layer, pollution and depletion of freshwater sources, overfishing, deforestation, plummeting wildlife populations, as well as unsustainable rises in greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures and human population levels. Unfortunately, the authors of the updated paper said that humanity failed to progress on most of the measures and ominously warned, "time is running out." "Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change" from the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, the paper stated. The authors concluded that urgent measures are necessary to avoid disaster. They called upon everyday citizens to urge their leaders to "take immediate action as a moral imperative to current and future generations of human and other life." This week, three letters in comment and a response companion piece by the "Warning" authors was published in BioScience. The response piece, "Role of Scientists' Warning in shifting policy from growth to conservation economy," includes two key areas for action in policy and science, from introducing a Nobel Prize in Economics for incorporating the limits of the biosphere to introducing a global price on carbon. Watch below for an interview about the "Warning" paper with co-author Thomas Newsome of the University of Sydney's School of Life and Environmental Sciences: science Mike Pompeo Would Be the First Secretary of State to Deny That Climate Change Is Real This is an alarming position for anyone, but it’s specifically problematic for this Cabinet position. Spoiler By Alexander C. Kaufman March 13, 20182:32 PM Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 13. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters This story was originally published by HuffPost and has been republished here with permission from Climate Desk. Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump’s pick to replace sacked Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, threatens to bring a hard-line brand of climate change denialism to Foggy Bottom for the first time. The current CIA director, named early Tuesday as the nominee to be the nation’s top diplomat, has long rejected the widely accepted science behind man-made global warming, dashing hopes that the United States might reverse its decision to leave from the Paris climate accord before November 2020, when the deal allows the country to formally withdraw. In a twist, Tillerson, the former chief executive of ExxonMobil Corp., turned out to be one of the most moderate voices on climate change in the Trump administration, despite his previous employer’s role as an early and generous financier of the climate change denial movement. Tillerson urged Trump against pulling out of the Paris Agreement last June and suggested last September that the U.S. could remain in the deal. Still, the State Department rewrote its webpage on climate change last March, abolished its climate change envoy position in August, and left teams working on global warming issues in limbo, seemingly encouraging staff to leave. Coincidentally, a major environmental nonprofit sued the State Department on Tuesday for refusing to release a U.N. report on U.S. climate action that was due on Jan. 1. If confirmed by the Senate, Pompeo seems poised to do more damage to efforts to combat climate change. “It’s good news for us,” said Myron Ebell, a leading proponent of climate change denial and a director at the right-wing Competitive Enterprise Institute. “I expect very good things from him at the State Department.” Ebell, who led Trump’s transition at the Environmental Protection Agency, said he hopes Pompeo will convince the president to withdraw the U.S. from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, completely ending all U.S. participation in climate talks. He also wants Pompeo to “bury” an international deal to phase out refrigerants, coolants, and aerosols called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, that contribute to climate change. The deal, signed by 197 countries in October 2016, is called the Kigali Amendment. Last November, the State Department quietly indicated its support for the agreement. In his six years as a Republican congressman from Kansas, Pompeo voted so routinely against environmental policies that he received a 4 percent lifetime score on the League of Conservation Voters’ ranking. In 2011, he unsuccessfully pushed to end energy subsidies in a move Ebell said was meant to target tax credits for wind turbines. Throughout his tenure in Congress, Pompeo received over $1 million in donations from the billionaire Koch brothers’ network, making him their top recipient in the Trump administration. He collected $71,100 from Koch Industries, the Republican megadonors’ fossil fuel conglomerate, catapulting Pompeo to the top of the company’s recipients in Congress in 2016 alone, according to data collated by the Center for Responsive Politics. In January 2017, Pompeo skirted questions about his view on climate science during his Senate confirmation hearing to become CIA director. “Frankly, as the director of CIA, I would prefer today not to get into the details of the climate debate and science,” he said. “It seems — my role is going to be so different and unique from that.” In December 2015, Pompeo railed against the Obama administration for brokering the Paris climate agreement, the global deal to cut planet-warming emissions that virtually every nation on Earth has now signed. “For President Obama to suggest that climate change is a bigger threat to the world than terrorism is ignorant, dangerous, and absolutely unbelievable,” he said at the time. Pompeo called the accord part of a “radical climate change agenda.” He even used the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, that killed 14 people to inveigh against Obama, claiming he “continues this pursuit of misguided policies, including his radical climate change agenda,” according to a since-deleted statement cited by Climate Central. In December 2013, Pompeo rejected the consensus among 97 percent of peer-reviewed climate researchers that the planet is warming and burning fossil fuels, industrial farms, and deforestation are the main causes. “Look, I think the science needs to continue to develop,” he said during a segment on C-SPAN. “I’m happy to continue to look at it. There are scientists who think lots of different things about climate change. There’s some who think we’re warming, there’s some who think we’re cooling, there’s some who think that the last 16 years have shown a pretty stable climate environment.” Environmental groups swiftly condemned Trump’s decision to name Pompeo as secretary of state. “Donald Trump has now somehow picked someone even worse than Rex Tillerson to run the State Department,” Naomi Ages, Greenpeace USA’s climate director, said in a statement. “In addition to being a climate denier, like his predecessor, Pompeo is a Koch brothers’ shill who will denigrate the United States’ reputation abroad and make us vulnerable to threats at home.”
I DIDN’T DO IT Oil Companies Admit Climate Change Is Real, Say Don’t Blame Us In a California lawsuit, fossil fuel companies admit the truth—but deny responsibility. Spoiler Jay Michaelson Spoiler 03.23.18 4:30 AM ET Big Oil now says that climate change is real, but it’s not their fault. Yes, after nearly thirty years of denying that “global warming” was happening; then admitting it’s happening but denying that it’ll be that bad; then admitting it’ll be bad but denying human beings have anything to do with it, the oil companies have again changed their tune. Now, they say, it is happening, it is bad, it is human beings’ fault… but don’t blame us. What caused this change of heart? A lawsuit. San Francisco, Oakland, four other California cities, and several counties have sued half a dozen oil companies for damages they are suffering, and will suffer more in the future, from rising sea levels. Sea level rise is caused by the melting of polar ice caps and the expansion of water when it is warmed, both triggered by global warming. The cities say that the oil companies have known about the risks of anthropogenic climate change, but that rather than disclose what they know, the companies engaged in a decades-long campaign to deceive the public that the science is uncertain. “These companies knew their products were causing sea-level rise, and they deceived people about it,” San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement. “Now, that bill has come due.” In a highly unusual move, Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California invited the parties to present a “tutorial” on climate change, answering eight idiosyncratic questions regarding climate science. That took place Wednesday. Chevron, which took the lead in the tutorial, surprisingly chose to “anchor its presentation” on the 2014 report UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For years, industry-sponsored puppets have decried the IPCC as unreliable, uncertain, or, if you prefer, a giant global conspiracy meant to destroy American capitalism. Now, however, the IPCC is right: Human-caused climate change is real, and dangerous. Someone tell President Trump! But there’s a footnote. According to Chevron, there are so many contributors to climate change that “anyone in the world could be brought in in the case, including the plaintiffs themselves.” Sure, fossil fuel companies do their part, but so do a lot of other people. So, they say, you can’t pin this on us. Chevron’s about-face is part of the fossil fuel industry’s recent strategy to co-opt, rather than deny, the reality of climate change. That strategy is part triangulation, part greenwashing. For example, an ExxonMobil webpage entitled “Our position on climate change” states that “the risk of climate change is clear and the risk warrants action. Increasing carbon emissions in the atmosphere are having a warming effect. There is a broad scientific and policy consensus that action must be taken to further quantify and assess the risks.” That sounds pretty progressive, and is certainly greener than the position of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who has explicitly denied the “broad scientific and policy consensus” on climate change. Only, the devil’s in the details. First, Exxon and Mobil were the leading funders of climate denial for over 30 years. Internally, it has known about the causes and effects of climate change since the 1970s. Externally, it has not only denied the truth but created multiple initiatives to lie to the public. In 1989, Exxon co-founded the Global Climate Coalition, whose mission was to claim that climate science was uncertain, even as its own internal memos warned that it “cannot be denied.” In 1998, it joined the American Petroleum Institute’s plan to challenge climate science by creating new “experts” to counter the scientific consensus. And it funded puppet “think tanks” such as the Heartland Institute, George C. Marshall Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy. All of these publish bogus disputes of climate science, written by people on the fossil fuel industry payroll. People like Willie Soon, who hid the fact that ExxonMobil was funding him, lied about his credentials, called his scientific papers “deliverables” to Exxon, and is still at it, weighing into the case over which Judge Alsup is presiding. To his credit, Judge Alsup required all scientists filing their opinions to reveal who’s paying them. Finally, ExxonMobil’s green-sounding statements turn brown when exposed to sunlight. When it comes to specific climate “actions,” the company continues to oppose hard emissions reduction targets, investments in alternative energy, and the “clean power plan” that Trump’s EPA has now shelved. And in the California lawsuit particularly, ExxonMobil has taken an extremely aggressive response: the company has counter-claimed, arguing that the California cities are restricting its “First Amendment right to participate in the national dialogue about climate change” and are failing to warn their own municipal bond investors of the risks of climate change. The fact that the cities don’t include those risks in their bond offerings, Exxon says, proves that they don’t really believe them. Instead, Exxon has said in court pleadings that the whole lawsuit is a “conspiracy” hatched at a June, 2012, meeting of climate activists in La Jolla, California (“the La Jolla Playbook”). It is filing its own suit in Texas “to investigate potential claims of abuse of process, civil conspiracy, and constitutional violations” and is seeking to depose a number of environmental activists who took part in that meeting. Of course, the sheer cost of doing so is enormous for the activists, trivial for ExxonMobil, whose annual revenue was $237 billion last year. In some ways, it’s encouraging that oil companies now admit what their own scientists have known for several decades. But really, it’s just a change in tactics. They’ve denied the inevitable for decades, and now, under oath and under the cloud of climate reality, they’ve switched to denying responsibility. That strategy makes sense in the context of a court case, which Big Oil will probably win. But as a political strategy, it is perhaps a preview of more evasions to come.
My boss went to Antarctica around Christmas and he said the ice on the South Pole is growing while north pole is shrinking because of earths tilt. Too lazy to google if he was lying to me.
It's super variable these days. In 2014 it was at record highs, in 2017 it was the lowest it's been since they began tracking in 1979.
His takes on climate change are as bad as thechatch and neither have the balls to defend them anymore.
Only 100 years after Exxon first realized realized the effects burning fossil fuels has on the environment
I wish more conservatives would admit it’s real so we can actually have debates regarding things like this. If you want to say that the actual measures we would have to take to stop global warming would basically shut down the entire economy, then we can have that discussion rationally. You can’t have a discussion with someone denying reality though.
I too wish they weren't disingenuous liars who are dependent on liberal rubes thinking they're making good faith arguments.
Energy Source: Boris Ryaposov/Shutterstock NY Mag: Global Warming Death Toll Will Be ‘On The Scale Of 25 Holocausts’ New York Magazine writer David Wallace-Wells is out with another alarmist warning about what a warmer future might hold for humanity — death from air pollution on the scale of 25 Holocausts. Wallace-Wells’ article has made the rounds on the web for its pessimism about the Paris climate accord. The author said “Paris is very quickly starting to look like Kyoto,” a previous climate treaty he called “completely ineffective.” Indeed, Wallace-Wells says the Paris accord looks “more and more like fantasy.” The International Energy Agency (IEA) just reported carbon dioxide emissions increased more than one percent in 2017, despite the Paris accord being in effect for more than on year. But Wallace-Wells also warned that global warming of 2 degrees Celsius will exacerbate air pollution problems, killing 150 million more people than if warming were limited to 1.5 degrees. “Numbers that large can be hard to grasp, but 150 million is the equivalent of 25 Holocausts,” Wallace-Wells wrote, referring to the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews and other groups. “It is five times the size of the death toll of the Great Leap Forward — the largest non-military death toll humanity has ever produced,” Wallace-Wells added. “It is three times the greatest death toll of any kind: World War II.” NOW WATCH WHY GLOBAL WARMING IS OVERBLOWN: Wallace-Wells derived his figures from a paper recently published in the journal Nature Climate Change to “quantify the suffering that would be avoided if the planet were kept below 1.5 degrees of warming, rather than two degrees,” he wrote. While admitting the paper’s figures were “speculative,” Wallace-Wells argued “it is a virtual certainty that we will inflict, thanks to climate change, the equivalent of 25 Holocausts on the world” — due to the effects of global warming outside of just worse pollution. “So 25 Holocausts is our absolute best-case outcome; the likely suffering will be considerably higher still,” Wallace-Wells wrote. Lots of studies have claimed catastrophic results from future global warming, often by using a “worst case” scenario of warming that’s being increasingly panned by experts as increasingly unlikely. The research Wallace-Wells cites, however, focuses on the costs of worse air pollution, but the epidemiological data underlying links between premature death and fine particulate matter and ozone is mixed. Toxicologists have found that while surveys suggest a correlation between fine particulates and ozone in some parts of the country, there’s no correlation in many others. It only adds to the uncertainty surrounding air pollution and public health. Follow Michael on Facebook and Twitter Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected]. http://dailycaller.com/2018/03/26/ny-mag-global-warming-death-toll/
Shell Knew Fossil Fuels Created Climate Change Risks Back in 1980s, Internal Documents Show A trove of documents shows the oil company’s scientists urged its leaders to heed the warnings. That could now play into lawsuits over global warming. John H. Cushman Jr. By John H. Cushman Jr. Follow @jackcushmanjr Apr 5, 2018 Scientists working for Shell warned the oil giant decades ago about the climate change risks posed by fossil fuels, new documents show. Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Internal company documents uncovered by a Dutch news organization show that the oil giant Shell had a deep understanding, dating at least to the 1980s, of the science and risks of global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions. Spoiler They show that as the company pondered its responsibility to act, Shell's scientists urged it to heed the early warnings, even if, as they said, it might take until the 2000s for the mounting evidence to prove greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were causing unnatural climate change. "With the very long time scales involved, it would be tempting for society to wait until then before doing anything," company researchers wrote in a 1988 report based on studies completed in 1986. "The potential implications for the world are, however, so large that policy options need to be considered much earlier. And the energy industry needs to consider how it should play its part." Otherwise, a team of Shell experts said, "it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation." For the next decade—as the emerging science was becoming increasingly robust, and as international efforts to curb heat-trapping emissions gained steam and calls for action grew more urgent—the company persisted in emphasizing the lingering uncertainties of climate science and the costs of ambitious policies, the documents show. Shell's own "review of the scientific uncertainty and the evolution of energy systems indicates that policies to curb greenhouse gases beyond 'no regrets' measures could be premature, divert economic resources from more pressing needs and further distort markets," a February 1995 management brief advised. The documents were unearthed by the journalist Jelmer Mommers [1] of De Correspondent [2], whose investigative article was published on Thursday in Dutch. Many of the documents, along with explanatory notes, were released on the Climate Files website [3], where researcher and climate advocate Kert Davies maintains extensive archives. To get their work before a broader audience, they shared embargoed copies of the documents. What Shell Knew & What It Means for Lawsuits Just like researchers at other oil and gas companies, notably Exxon [4], Shell's scientists and managers understood, before the general public, that uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions could eventually put its core businesses at risk—and alter ecosystems and put much of the world's population in peril. The accretion of evidence complicates the industry's position as Big Oil defends itself in a broadening array of climate-related litigation [5]. On Wednesday, Dutch environmentalists said they plan to sue [6] Royal Dutch Shell to force it to cut its oil and gas investments and production. Donald Pols, director of Friends of the Earth Netherlands/Milieudefensie, said the company "should take its responsibility to stop wrecking the climate." Responding to the litigation, Shell said that it has long embraced climate change science and strongly supports the Paris climate agreement [7] aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less. But it said that meeting that target is a complex social challenge, that energy is important to the global quality of life, and that the issues should not be tackled in court. Rather, it called for sound government policy and a cultural shift toward green energy. Shell is already a defendant in other court cases. The key legal question in much of the litigation is whether the companies understood risks of global warming well enough, and early enough, to be held accountable for damages that are already occurring and are likely to grow. 'Major Social, Economic, Political Consequences' The Shell documents released so far don't address in significant detail questions of liability or whether Shell was properly disclosing risks to shareholders. Litigators are sure to note a brief, but telling, remark in the 1988 document: The fossil fuels Shell consumed and sold at the time "account for the production of 4 percent of the CO2 emitted worldwide from combustion." Two tables broke the data down. "In the light of the possible effects of an increase in greenhouse gases, it is important to examine the likely political responses to expressions of environmental concern," Shell's report said. The emerging problem "could have major social, economic and political consequences," it said—a powerful enough upheaval to be "the greatest in human history." By then, Shell had to be acutely aware of the growing political repercussions of its contribution to the climate problem. After all, the 1988 document was circulated just as NASA scientist James Hansen testified in Congress that global warming had already arrived and had to be dealt with urgently. Shell's What-If Scenario: East Coast Hurricanes Over the decades, Shell spent considerable effort generating what-if scenarios to help it grope its way forward. In one, a 1998 planning document carrying the acronym TINA (for "there is no alternative"), the company even imagined events in the year 2010 after violent and damaging storms wreaked havoc on the East Coast of the U.S. "Although it is not clear whether the storms are caused by climate change, people are not willing to take further chances," the document speculates. "After all, two successive IPCC reports since 1995 have reinforced the human connection to climate change." "Following the storms, a coalition of environmental NGO's brings a class-action sit against the U.S. government and fossil-fuel companies on the grounds of neglecting what scientists (including their own) have been saying for years: that something must be done," the scenario states. How Shell's Thinking on Climate Changed Shell's documents of the era, like papers from Exxon at the time [8] that were published in 2015 by InsideClimate News [4], are full of passages about the uncertainties that surrounded the emerging science. A nuanced reading suggests that Shell, then as now, gave more attention to the need for global action on climate, and did so earlier, than Exxon. To this day, the company opens the door a bit wider [9] to a more responsive approach to the climate crisis. But its current thinking continues to generate debate over whether its vision is ambitious enough [10]. The Dutch archives trace the evolution of the company's thinking over years of considerable climate policy turmoil. For example, Shell participated in the work of the Global Climate Coalition, founded in 1989 to fight the Kyoto Protocol, only to leave it 10 years later over irreconcilable differences [11] over the protocol's emissions targets, which Shell embraced. All the while, concentrations of carbon dioxide moved inexorably upward [12]. Children born since that time have never lived through a year [13] in which the world's climate was cooler than the previous average. One passage from 1988, even though written in a dry corporate style, reads now like an evocation of this perspective across the generations. "The changes in climate, being considered here, are at an unaccustomed distance in time for future planning, even beyond the lifetime of most of the present decision makers but not beyond intimate (family) association," it said. In other words, it said you might not see the results of your decisions, but your children and grandchildren might. In the Mid-1990s, Straddling the Line In a 1995 "management brief" on climate change that stressed its "major business implications for the fossil fuel industry," Shell conceded the "general consensus" of its human causes while making a nod to what it called "well-grounded scepticism." It said "a definitive, unequivocal position on the science of global warming ... quite simply is beyond current capabilities." Still, it suggested that "over the next decades, renewable forms of energy can gradually become competitive," and it projected that "CO2 emissions could peak at about 10 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC) a year before the middle of the next century and decline." (The figure Shell predicted for the eventual emissions peak is equivalent to 36.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e). Global emissions from energy and cement reached 32.5 GtCO2 last year [14].) The next year, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was publishing its second major assessment of climate science, Shell found itself in a delicate balancing act between accepting the scientific consensus and arguing that there was still too much uncertainty to dictate aggressive action. "Although climate change is a long term issue, today's responses do not have to be long term," Shell argued. "'Irreversible' actions need to be avoided." 'An Evolutionary, Not a Revolutionary Process' In hindsight, it's possible to say that this ambivalence would prove costly. And the litigation over who should pay these costs will hinge on how jurists today read this kind of document from the past—along with any more evidence yet to emerge from these lawsuits. It's not so much that any one document contains a smoking gun. It's rather that the steady accumulation of documents, which is bound to continue, will build up the weight of the evidence. In that way, the legal question resembles the scientific question Shell addressed in a 1995 document called "Is Climate Change Occurring Already?" "Detection of a human induced change in the earth's climate will be an evolutionary and not a revolutionary process," it said. "It is likely that a slow accumulation of evidence, rather than a 'smoking gun,' will indicate man-made emissions as the cause of some part of the observed climate change." Editor's note: This story has been changed to convert Shell's 1995 forecast of eventual peak greenhouse gas emissions from gigatonnes of carbon (GtC) to gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e), a standard conversion, for purposes of comparison to the International Energy Agency's current data. Published Under: Business and Accountability [15] Climate Denial [16] Exxon Climate [17] Climate Change [18] © InsideClimate News https://insideclimatenews.org/print/52309
Dangerous climate tipping point is ‘about a century ahead of schedule’ warns scientist A slowing Gulf Stream system means catastrophic East Coast flooding will get much worse. Joe Romm Apr 12, 2018, 2:48 pm Spoiler New research provides strong evidence that one of the long-predicted worst-case impacts of climate change — a severe slow-down of the Gulf Stream system — has already started. The system, also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), brings warmer water northward while pumping cooler water southward. “I think we’re close to a tipping point,” climatologist Michael Mann told ThinkProgress in an email. The AMOC slow down “is without precedent” in more than a millennium he said, adding, “It’s happening about a century ahead of schedule relative to what the models predict.” The impacts of such a slowdown include much faster sea level rise — and much warmer sea surface temperatures — for much of the U.S. East Coast. Both of those effects are already being observed and together they make devastating storm surges of the kind we saw with Superstorm Sandy far more likely. The findings come in two new studies published this week. One study published in the journal Nature, titled “Observed fingerprint of a weakening Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation,” was led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. It finds that the AMOC has weakened “around 15 per cent” since the mid-twentieth century, bringing it to “a new record low.” Another new study in the same issue of Nature “supports this finding and places it in a longer climate history context,” as Potsdam’s Stefan Rahmstorf notes at RealClimate. A video from Potsdam Institute explains how we know the slowdown is being driven by human-caused climate change: The observed fingerprint of temperature changes in the Atlantic are precisely what the models predicted would happen when the slowdown began in earnest. The impacts are serious. A slow-down in deepwater ocean circulation “would accelerate sea level rise off the northeastern United States, while a full collapse could result in as much as approximately 1.6 feet of regional sea level rise,” as the authors of the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) explained in November. This extra rise in East Coast sea levels would be on top of whatever multi-foot sea level rise the entire world sees. An AMOC slowdown would reduce regional warming a bit, especially in Europe, but “would also lead to a reduction of ocean carbon dioxide uptake, and thus an acceleration of global-scale warming.” And the slowdown also means a rise in water temperatures off the U.S. mid-Atlantic and Northeast coasts, which has already begun (see map). The AMOC slowdown has begun warming up the waters off the mid-Atlantic and NE coast. CREDIT: Potsdam Institute. So this new research on the AMOC slowdown provides evidence that human-caused global warming is responsible for a much larger fraction of the higher East Coast SSTs (and sea level rise) that fueled the super-charged storm surge of Sandy than previously thought. As Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences explained back in 2013: “Abnormally high sea-surface temperatures all along the eastern seaboard at the time, which must have some component associated with globally warming oceans, likely helped Sandy maintain tropical characteristics longer and allowed the storm to travel farther northward than would be expected in late October. Warmer ocean waters would also increase evaporation rates, adding to the moisture and latent heat available to the storm.” The key question has always been what fraction of the recent rise in eastern seaboard SSTs (and sea level rise) can be attributed to global warming. Increasingly, it seems that a very large fraction can.. So it appears likely that catastrophic East Coast flooding will get much worse, much faster than anyone had expected. https://thinkprogress.org/climate-t...ead-of-schedule-warns-scientist-06d633f968fc/
“Holy Shit. This is Dangerous”: Nixon, a Soviet Bomb Test, and a Top-Secret Climate Study The ’70s were amazing. Sharon WeinbergerApr. 29, 2018 6:00 AM dzika_mrowka/iStock/Getty On March 23, 1971, the Soviet Union set off three Hiroshima-scale nuclear blasts deep underground in a remote region some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, ripping a massive crater in the Earth. The goal was to demonstrate that nuclear explosions could be used to dig a canal connecting two rivers, altering their direction and bringing water to dry areas for agriculture. Spoiler The nuclear bombs, it turned out, weren’t that effective for building canals, though they did create an “atomic lake” in the crater formed by the blast. But the tests had another lasting consequence, all but forgotten until now: They set in motion the first US government research on climate change—a far-reaching project that has continued into this decade. On the surface, the reaction to the Soviet tests was somewhat muted. Western countries, including the United States, detected the explosions and lodged a protest alleging a violation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Moscow wouldn’t publicly acknowledge the tests for several years. But in the national security community in Washington, the blasts sparked panic. When intelligence officials briefed Stephen Lukasik, the director of the Pentagon’s secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he had an immediate reaction: “Holy shit. This is dangerous.” The Soviet Union, it turns out, had for more than a decade been studying ways to use nuclear weapons to create massive canals to reroute water for irrigation, and the plan involved hundreds of nuclear detonations. “The Soviets wanted to change the direction of some rivers in Russia,” Lukasik, now 87 years old, told me recently in an interview. “They flow north where they didn’t do any good for them and they wanted to turn them around so they would flow south.” The Pentagon didn’t particularly care which way rivers ran in the Soviet Union, but it cared about how this ambitious act of geoengineering, which would affect waters flowing into the Arctic Ocean, could potentially alter the world’s climate. Lukasik decided that DARPA needed to start a climate research program that could come up with ways to model the effects. The name of this climate program, highly classified at the time, was Nile Blue. At first glance, DARPA might have seemed like an odd place to study climate change. The agency was created in 1958 as a response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, to help the United States get into space. But in those years, DARPA was also deeply involved in nuclear issues. It had created an extensive monitoring system precisely to tip off the Pentagon to secret tests like the Soviet effort in 1971. That same year, John Perry, a young Air Force officer, got an unexpected question from an official at DARPA (at the time called just ARPA; the D for “defense” was added in 1972). “We need a program manager for this program we have. Would you like to come to Washington?” the DARPA official asked Perry. “Washington was the not the Midwest or Vietnam, so I said, ‘Sure,’” Perry recalled answering. “I’ll discover later what the hell this thing is.” For Perry, a meteorologist by training, it wasn’t a hard decision, even if he didn’t know exactly what the job entailed. He soon found himself at DARPA’s headquarters in northern Virginia, where he was put in charge of the mysteriously named Nile Blue. One of the first things he decided to do was get rid of the secrecy. Even if the concerns about Soviet nuclear tests needed to be kept quiet, research on climate modeling could be done in the open. Keeping the program classified, particularly during the Vietnam War, would only hurt DARPA’s ability to work with academic scientists, he argued. The secrecy “did throw sort of a miasma over the program,” Perry recalled, noting there were rumors that DARPA was involved in weather-altering research. “In fact, I had a visit from a guy from the arms control office in the State Department who came over, armed with top-secret clearances and what-have-you, to find out what nefarious things we were doing. He was very disappointed to find out that there weren’t any.” Once the program was declassified, the next step was finding scientists to do the necessary studies. Perry found himself in charge of $3 million in funding, a sizable sum in the early 1970s, and his mandate was about to expand. Soon after starting the research program, he was summoned to the director’s office to meet with Lukasik and Eric Willis, who directed DARPA’s nuclear monitoring program. Willis, who had been a student of Willard Libby, the inventor of radiocarbon dating, was interested in taking a historical look at climate. Willis “took the position that the climate research program really didn’t make any sense unless you had good information on past climates to be able to do the verification models,” Perry recalled. “He thought there should be an element of past climate research in there.” Perry knew nothing about this topic, so he nodded and smiled before walking out of the director’s office with a new charge to spend $400,000 on paleoclimate research. “Essentially, I called up a few people and said, ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but I want to give you a lot of money,’” he said. The heart of the Nile Blue program was computational modeling. DARPA may not have had experience with meteorology, but it did have plenty of experience with computers. Just two years earlier, the agency’s computer science office had established the first nodes of ARPANET, the network that would later become the internet. DARPA was also in charge of the Illiac IV, one of the world’s first supercomputers. DARPA’s climate work helped justify the continuation of Illiac IV, whose costs were attracting scrutiny. “They needed to say that its capability was being developed for some customers who could pay for it,” Perry said. “Climate modeling is a very good customer for computer science.” (Critically, DARPA’s funding for modeling rescued the RAND Corporation’s work on climate simulation, which the National Science Foundation was on the verge of canceling.) “Modeling is just like masturbation,” he recalled Reck telling some of the DARPA-funded scientists at a conference. “If you do it too much, you start thinking it’s the real thing.” The modeling work had its critics. Perry recalled that Ruth Reck, an atmospheric scientist at General Motors, expressed early skepticism of DARPA-funded climate models. “Modeling is just like masturbation,” he recalled Reck telling some of the DARPA-funded scientists at a conference. “If you do it too much, you start thinking it’s the real thing.” Reck, who confirmed the anecdote in a recent interview with me, said her point was that scientists were confusing their models with reality. “They had a right to feel glad that they were doing it, they were contributing a lot, but it didn’t mean it was the real thing. It just wasn’t,” she said. “That is very much like masturbation: If they do it enough, it becomes the focus of what they want.” Yet DARPA’s work was critical to sparking those debates. The research program for the first time was drawing together modelers, paleoclimatologists, radiation experts, and meteorologists. The program created an interdisciplinary field, according to Warren Wiscombe, who credits the agency for transforming him from an applied mathematician into a climate scientist in the 1970s. “All of the sciences then that later contributed to climate science were very separate and they had brick walls between them,” he said. “They were what we call stovepiped now.” As DARPA was building up its Nile Blue program, another government effort that would alter the course of climate research was taking place behind the scenes. In December 1972, George J. Kukla, of Columbia University, and R.K. Matthews, of Brown University, wrote to President Richard Nixon expressing their concerns about “a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experience by civilized mankind.” Their concern was not global warming but cooling, which they feared could lower food production and increase extreme weather. It was a preliminary result (and one that would later be used by critics of climate change in a simplistic fashion to argue that climate predictions were wrong). The letter caught the attention of Nixon, who ordered an interagency panel to look at the issue. The recommendation, according to William Sprigg, who helped set up the national climate program, was “that the government should have some kind of a program, a plan that would set goals and determine who should be doing what.” In the end, the Soviets abandoned their grand plan to alter the course of rivers, but by the time DARPA finished its research in 1976, the foundation of climate research was firmly in place: a community of scientists dedicated to the issue, and a political atmosphere conducive to continuing the research. DARPA, whose mandate is for fixed-term research, ended its climate program, but the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration picked up the work, eventually leading to the establishment of the national climate program. Even scientists like Reck, who were critical of some of the early modeling work, said the research has showed clearly that climate change is real. “I stand with what I told John [Perry] years ago: ‘I really don’t think we know, I think we are far from understanding the climate,’” she told me. “That does not mean we should not curtail everything that we can to slow down the rate of change. I think we have to do that. I think it’s absolutely frivolous not to do that.” While the debates go on about the accuracy of climate models, the scientific consensus is that climate change is real, and much of the credit for establishing that consensus goes to DARPA—whose role has been largely forgotten, except by the scientists funded by the program and who went on to take leading positions in climate research. More than 40 years after the end of Nile Blue, former DARPA officials like Perry and Lukasik still get together for a monthly lunch, where they reminisce about their days at the pioneering agency. Lukasik recalls Perry telling him: “You know, Steve, the work started in DARPA and continued by me in the National Science Foundation became the foundation for all of the understanding of global warming.”