KIMMEL SLAMS PALIN

Sarah Palin has a new gig peddling a new climate-denial film called Climate Hustle. This is a perfect project for the former half-term governor of Alaska and failed vice-presidential candidate, because it combines her expertise in absolutely nothing with losing jobs. This was simply too much for late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to handle, crushing her so perfectly it’s impossible to think she could ever respond.

Kimmel ran two clips of incoherent Palin ramblings using the “think of the children” angle about science she isn't educated enough to understand. The problem is that her word-salad perpetuates the questioning of something 97 percent of all scientists believe. If she, and other dangerous climate deniers, continue to ramble on the proverbial street corner with a sign, it generates more and more doubt and we destroy the Earth.

“I have a theory,” Kimmel proposed. “I think maybe Sarah Palin wants global warming. It’s cold in Alaska. It would be welcome up there. But, the idea that she knows more than 97 percent of scientists is offensive and dangerous. No matter what Sarah Palin and these geniuses she surrounds herself with try to tell you, climate change is not a liberal-versus-conservative thing.”

“We’ve had 15 of the 16 hottest years ever since 2001. That’s not an opinion. It’s a fact,” Kimmel continued as the audience applauded. “For some reason whether or not humans are contributing to this has become a left versus right issue. The politicians debate it. Our scientists don’t. A huge majority of climate scientists say climate change is happening. They say we’re causing it and we need to do something about it before it has a terrible effect on all of us. There’s no debate about the greenhouse effect, just like there’s no debate about gravity. It someone throws a piano off the roof, I don’t care what Sarah Palin tells you — get out of the way. It’s coming down on your head.”

VIDEO COURTESY OF ABC

Kimmel continued, blaming Republicans in Congress for standing with Sarah Palin by perpetuating the idea that climate change is a “left-wing conspiracy.” Republicans “apparently know more about science than our scientists, or they pretend to because they get money to make sure they can keep doing the destructive things that they do.”

“Either you believe in science or you don’t,” Kimmel concluded. He also said that he expects to hear from the right for his defense of logic on the show. So, instead of passing himself off as some sort of scientific expert, he brought on actual scientists. One after the other, the experts, not Palin-experts, but actual experts, promised that they are not “fucking with you” when it comes to catastrophic climate change.

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STAFF WRITER

CLIMATE CHANGE AND TRUMP, GOP DENIES THEM BOTH

Trevor Noah explained on Wednesday that he came to two realizations while watching primary results come in a night earlier.

“People are batshit crazy,” Noah said. “And also, a lot of Republicans are treating Donald Trump’s takeover the way they treat climate change — in other words, they deny it.”

VIDEO COURTESY OF COMEDY CENTRAL

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
Get More: The Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,The Daily Show Video Archive

To substantiate his position, Noah showed Sen. Marco Rubio’s attempt to somehow spin Trump’s seven wins on Super Tuesday into a positive for himself. Noah went on to say:

“Like antibiotic-resistant bacteria, Donald Trump is an uncomfortable reality,” 

Noah also laughed at Sen. Ted Cruz for insisting that winning four out of 15 contests thus far made him the party’s only viable challenger against the real estate magnate.

“You’re not co-winners, Ted Cruz,” Noah said. “Just the way he says it: ‘Every one of those states has been won by Donald Trump or myself … And if you look at myself and Jay-Z combined, we have both slept with Beyoncé on numerous occasions, and that is why I will stop Obama.'”

The saddest part of the whole affair, he said, was that political climate change and its environmental counterpart shared one characteristic.

“Regardless of whose fault it is, Republican denial is going to end up hurting all of us,” Noah said.

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Blogger-In-Chief

Roger West

HEY BEN, IF YOU'RE SO SMART....

Ben Carson is not a fan of the uneducated.

At his town hall meeting in Iowa City on Friday, the Republican presidential candidate insulted people with low IQs and lamented that they were allowed to vote. He said it was “disturbing” that many people are unable to pass the written test to get into the military. He urged the audience to “read up” on the history of Islam, and said progressives are “dumbing down our society” with calls for political correctness.

All of this intrigued Daniel Schnall, 29, a graduate student at the University of Iowa and registered independent. Schnall asked Carson: If you’re so passionate about being educated, then why don’t you accept the science of human-caused climate change?

Can you explain… why you’re not willing to listen to the experts?

“You’ve spoken a lot about using common sense and using your brain, and I really appreciate that,” Schnall said. “And in some of the questions in the debates, you responded that you really seek the input of experts.”

He continued: “The experts in the scientific community overwhelmingly agree that climate change is a problem. Can you explain that discrepancy, and why you’re not willing to listen to the experts?”

For the entirety of his presidential campaign, Carson has been unwilling to say he accepts the mainstream scientific opinion that carbon emissions from human activity cause climate change, and that climate change will have catastrophic effects if left unchecked. “There’s always going to be either cooling or warming going on,” Carson has said, implying that humans have nothing to do with how hot the Earth is becoming.

On Friday, he responded to Schnall’s question by saying that the climate science is “politicized.”

“I don’t subscribe to the politicization of the environment, because that’s what leads to things like the Clean Power Plan,” Carson said, referring to Obama’s regulations to limit carbon emissions from coal power plants. “The EPA has said that if we implement every aspect of the Clean Power Plan, it will lower the temperature of the Earth by 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit… that’s the benefit. The cost is billions of dollars and millions of jobs. That doesn’t make any sense, because that is ideologically driven.”

There’s a lot to unpack about Carson’s comments on the Clean Power Plan. For one, he said that regulations would be useless because they would only make a small dent in global temperatures. But that’s scientifically misleading — no one regulation in any one country can be significant enough to make a big dent in global temperatures. However, considering the United States is currently the world’s second-largest carbon emitter and by far its largest historically, the idea is that the U.S. must act first to motivate other countries to do the same.

If he’s going to stand up there and say we need to listen to the experts, and we need to use our brains — 97 percent of the scientific community agrees on this one.

And his claim that putting carbon regulations on the already-dying coal industry would cost “billions of dollars and millions of jobs” is also dubious — according to multiple studies, the regulations would actually create jobs in renewable energy and energy efficiency sectors, since both will have to be increased to meet the regulations’ requirements.

But the most notable portion of Carson’s response was what he didn't say — and that’s anything about the actual science of human-caused climate change. Carson said the EPA had become politicized and that the Clean Power Plan wouldn't work, but he didn't say anything surrounding the actual question, which was why, scientifically, he doesn't accept that climate change is a problem.

Schnall recognized this, saying that he was “not really” happy with the candidate’s answer. Schnall said that while he’s “not the biggest climate change advocate,” he asked the question because he was frustrated with the polarization of climate change in politics. And for Carson in particular, he just didn't understand how someone could preach the importance of education while denying mainstream science.

“If he’s going to stand up there and say we need to listen to the experts, and we need to use our brains — 97 percent of the scientific community agrees on this one,” he said. “It’s not just politicizing the issue. It’s a little more than that.”

[Cross-Posted from thinkprogress]







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STAFF WRITER

IF PRESIDENT, NUTTER CRUZ WILL NOT HONOR GLOGAL CLIMATE

The United States will break its recent promise to approximately 200 countries to join in the fight against climate change if nutter Ted Cruz is elected president.

That’s according to Cruz himself, who on Tuesday said he would withdraw the U.S. from the historic climate agreement reached in Paris earlier this month. That non-binding agreement saw nearly 200 leading nations unanimously embrace a plan that would leave most of the world’s fossil fuels unburned, thereby limiting global warming “to well below 2°C [3.6°F] above preindustrial levels.”

According to the Washington Post, Cruz said the international agreement was disingenuous — not really to fight climate change, but to gain “more and more government power.”

“Barack Obama seems to think the SUV parked in your driveway is a bigger threat to national security than radical Islamic terrorists who want to kill us. That’s just nutty,” Cruz said. “These are ideologues, they don’t focus on the facts, they won’t address the facts, and what they’re interested [in] instead is more and more government power.”

Though the Department of Defense and other security agencies do consider climate change a security threat, the Paris climate deal was intended to fight other harmful impacts of global warming, including catastrophic food shortages, sharply increased extinction rates, and irreversible sea-level rise, among other things.

Cruz, however, fervently denies that those impacts exist. Earlier this month, Cruz held an entire hearing to discuss what he believes to be inaccuracies in scientific data surrounding climate change. Unfortunately, Cruz seemed to willfully misinterpret data — he conflated the Antarctic with the Arctic to make it seem like ice melt predictions were incorrect; he cited the work of a scientist who has publicly insulted Cruz for misusing his research; and he even discredited the scientific method by comparing climate scientists to flat-Earthers.

Though Cruz’s denial of mainstream climate science is in line with many members of the Republican party, his desire to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement is not. A Reuters poll released Wednesday showed that a majority — 58 percent — of U.S. Republicans support working with other countries to solve the problem of global warming.

And here is why nutter Cruz won't be President. 

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Blogger-In-Chief

Roger West

STOP WORRYING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AND CONCETRATE ON CRIMES AGAINST CHRISTIANS

A Republican Climate Denier expressed anger at Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials on Wednesday for putting what he claimed was a misplaced priority on climate change.

Instead of studying the security risks posed by climate change — which include threats to infrastructure, disease spread, and increased refugees — Wing nut Rep. Jeff Duncan said DHS should worry about other things, including “illegal aliens murdering beautiful innocent lives” and “folks who want to do great harm to Christians.”

“Your priorities are wrong at the Department of Homeland Security,” he said at a House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing:

I think that we’ve got threats of ISIS; we’ve got cartels shooting at helicopters on the border; we’ve got unaccompanied children coming into this country; we’ve got illegal aliens murdering beautiful innocent lives in San Francisco; we’ve got a woman who had her head blown off in Los Angeles by someone.

There are events after events going on around the world that are true threats to the United states, folks who want to do great harm to Christians, want to do great harm to others.

They want to come to this country and end the American way of life, and for whatever reason, we’re now spending out hard-earned dollars on climate science and the belief that this is one of the biggest threats to national security.

Duncan’s comments can be found here, at around the 48 minute mark of the archived webcast.

Duncan’s outrage over DHS studying climate risks may have to do with the fact that he doesn’t think climate change is real. He stated as much on Wednesday at the hearing, asking three high-level DHS officials to explain “why the earth was warmer during the medieval times” (a oft-used claim that is false). He also stated that “this notion that man-made climate change is happening is wrong.”

More than 56 percent of congressional Republicans deny or question the science behind human-caused climate change. By contrast, 97 percent of climate scientist’s actively publishing research on the subject say climate change is real and humans cause it.

When assessing national security risks, the Department of Defense sides with the scientists. It doesn’t consider climate change a direct threat, but considers it a “threat multiplier” that can worsen direct threats such as terrorism and infectious disease spread.

At the subcommittee hearing, called to examine the DHS’ “misplaced” focus on climate change, one official said that only two to four of its employees worked on the climate components of the agency’s latest Quadrennial Homeland Security Review. In that review, the DHS said natural hazards driven by climate change could pose threats to infrastructure, thereby risking national security in some parts of the country.

[h/t thinkprogress]

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STAFF WRITER

MARCH 2015 EASILY SMASHES RECORD FOR HOTTEST MARCH EVER

This was easily the hottest March — and hottest January-to-March — on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA’s latest monthly report makes clear Mother Nature is just getting warmed up:

· March 2015 was not only the hottest March in their 135-year of keeping records, it beat “the previous record of 2010 by 0.09°F (0.05°C).” 

· January-to-March was not only the hottest start to any year on record, it also beat “the previous record of 2002 by 0.09°F.” 

· March was so warm that only two other months ever had a higher “departure from average” (i.e. temperature above the norm), February 1998 and January 2007, and they only beat March by “just 0.01°C (0.02°F).” 

· Arctic sea ice hit its smallest March extent since records began in 1979.

The human-caused global warming trend that made 2014 the hottest year on record is continuing. We may even be witnessing the start of the long-awaited jump in global temperatures.

Last week, NASA also reported this was the hottest three-month start of any year on record. In NASA’s database, though, this was the third warmest March on record. It was the warmest in the dataset of the Japan Meteorological Agency. These three agencies use slightly different methods for tracking global temperature, so their monthly and yearly rankings differ slightly, even as they all show the same long-term trend driven by carbon pollution.

It is increasingly likely that 2015 will be the hottest year on record. El Niños typically lead to global temperature records, as the short-term El Niño warming adds to the underlying long-term global warming trend. NOAA has predicted there’s a 60 percent chance the El Niño it declared last month will continue all year. If it does, 2015 may well top the 2014 record by a significant margin.

[h/t thinkprogress]

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STAFF WRITER

Climate Warming Is Just GOD Farting

Bill Maher ended his show tonight by going after Republican “zombie lies” on the environment and basically calling them “prostitutes” for denying climate change just to satisfy donors.

He ripped into candidates like Rick Perry, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz for raising serious questions about established science on climate change, before saying the whole thing was “never about facts to begin with.”

Maher said the donors are “making their money killing the planet” and as long as people like the Kochs.

VIDEO COURTESY OF HBO

Blogger-In-Chief

Roger West

JAMES INHOFE IS A SPECIAL KIND OF STUPID

Wednesday was a big day for conservative for flat earth society member and wing nut Sen. James Inhofe . In the morning, he officially took the gavel as chairman of the Senate’s Environment Committee. In the afternoon, he took the Senate floor for a long speech about how human-caused climate change is fake.



In sum, the speech has everything. References to the oft-debunked “ClimateGate” stolen e-mail “scandal”, a poster of a Time Magazine cover from 1974 claiming an ice age is coming, and multiple references to former Vice President Al Gore. It has a mention of a survey of weather-casters who think global warming is caused by natural variation, but does not mention that weather-casters are not climate scientists. It even includes the claim that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “started” the whole idea that climate change is happening, even though the idea was conceived about 200 years ago.

The video above actually begins a couple minutes in to Inhofe’s speech, with a quote from Richard Lindzen, a former MIT professor and one of the most-cited voices of scientists who think global warming is fake. Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist, has often been characterized as having contrarian scientific opinions. He has also said that the evidence that cigarettes cause lung cancer is not “so strong that one should rule that any questions were out of order.”

Behind Inhofe in the beginning of the video is a list of climate scientists — Lindzen included — who don’t agree with the vast majority of climate scientists who say human-caused carbon emissions are contributing to climate change. Inhofe says he has compiled a list of 4,000 “renowned scientists” scientists who disagree (“this is all in my website,” he said). Inhofe’s list actually has 650 people, some of whom are television meteorologists, geologists, anthropologists, and even a man with no college degree.

Conversely, one of the most recent peer-reviewed studies on the state of climate science showed that out of 4000 abstracts from peer-reviewed papers published in the past 21 years that stated a position on the cause of global warming — 97 percent of these endorsed the point that it was human-caused. In the video, Inhofe says this is “just not true.”

Inhofe also criticizes climatologist Michael Mann’s famous hockey stick graph, which displayed temperatures going back half a millennium, and cites the controversy it received as a reason to believe climate change is fake. He does not mention that the National Academy of Sciences vindicated the hockey stick graph in 2006 as good science, as have multiple other peer-reviewed studies since.

It’s also worthwhile to point out that even if the hockey stick was wrong, even if it didn’t exist, we would still have enough scientific evidence to prove climate change is real and caused by humans. “Climate deniers like to make it seem like the entire weight of evidence for climate change rests on the hockey stick,” Mann told the Atlantic in 2013. “And that’s not the case. We could get rid of all these reconstructions, and we could still know that climate change is a threat, and that we’re causing it.”

Don’t expect this speech to be the end of climate denial in the Senate. Indeed, Inhofe ended his speech by promising more of it, citing his new position as head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

“Now I’m back in that position so we’ll have a chance to have hearings, and Mr. President, we’re going to have hearings with prominent scientists to come in and talk about this thing,” he said. “We’ll be there to be the truth-squad.”

James Inhofe, you are this week's worst person of the week. Congrats numbnutz!

[h/t thinkprogress]



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Blogger-In-Chief
Roger West

"LIKE PUSHING A MILLION POUNDS OF IDIOTS UP A MOUNTAIN"

CLIMATE DENIER, TIN FOIL HAT SOCIETY MEMBER PAUL "LYING" RYAN"

Jon Stewart last night blasted three "Republican" congressmen on Monday for being climate change deniers sitting on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Kind of like an oxymoron this is - conservatives on science and intelligence committees.

Stewart showed footage of three Tin Foil Hat Society Members - Larry Buschon (R-IN), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Steve Stockman (R-TX) each thinking they could counter White House scientific advisor John Holdren’s evidence during a hearing last week, only to get shut down.

Holdren, Stewart said, had the Sisyphean task of “pushing a million pounds of idiot up a mountain,” including one exchange where Holdren told Buschon to “look at the scientific literature” regarding climate change.

In response, Buschon scoffed at reading findings from “climatologists whose career depends on the climate changing,” saying, “I could read that, but I don’t believe it.”

Instead of reading the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, Stewart said, Buschon was relying on the opinions of YouTube commenter's like “Obummerlies1776″ for his opinions on climate change, and scoffing at people who study the phenomenon for a living.







To all the Tin Foil Hat Society Members - NEWSFLASH: In the future, our descendants will not be as mad at us about the National Debt nearly as much as Global Warming and Fukushima.

Science and Climate Change deniers, you are all today's asshat of the day! 

NFTOS

Editor-In-Chief

Roger West

'The Endarkenment'

Rep. Alan Grayson has always spoken out against the crazy, anti-intellectual side of the GOP party.





Grayson explains that politicians like Cruz understand what their actions will cost the American government and the taxpayers, but don't care. This past Sunday, Senator Marco Rubio joined the ranks of Ted Cruz , Louis Gohmert and many others as a disbeliever in truth and facts when he denied that climate change was influenced by mankind and said scientists were all wrong when asked if climate change was threatening cities in Florida.

To some Christian conservatives, climate change is nothing more than a sign of the approaching "end of times", but for Rubio, it's just outlandish nonsense - but to people who objectively consider the calculus of the evidence, it's a threat to our planet's entire existence.

NFTOS

Editor-In-Chief

Roger West

POLAR VORTEX

COMPUTER MODEL OF POLAR VORTEX

On Sunday night, a reporter for The Weather Channel stood in a Minnesota snowstorm, talking about local efforts to move homeless children into heated shelters. “How cold is it supposed to get?” the anchor, back in the studio, asked. The reporter replied: “Colder than Mars.”

Indeed, recent temperatures across the U.S. have been Mars-like. Forecasts in the midwest call for temperatures to drop to 32 below zero in Fargo, N.D.; minus 21 in Madison, Wis.; and 15 below zero in Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Chicago. Wind chills have been predicted to fall to negative 60 degrees — a dangerous cold that could break decades-old records.

All of which begs the question — if climate change is real, then how did it get so cold?

The question is based on common misconceptions of how cold weather moves across the planet, said Greg Laden, a bioanthroplogist who writes for National Geographic’s Scienceblog. According to Laden, the recent record-cold temperatures indicate to many that the Arctic’s cold air is expanding, engulfing other countries. If true, this would be a perfect argument for a “global cooling” theory. The Arctic’s coldness is growing. Laden asks, “How can such a thing happen with global warming?”

1989 POLAR VORTEX

The answer, he writes, is that the Arctic air that usually sits on top of our planet is “taking an excursion” south for a couple of days, leaving the North Pole “relatively warm” and our temperate region not-so-temperate. “Go Home Arctic, You’re Drunk,” he titled the explanation.

“The Polar Vortex, a huge system of moving swirling air that normally contains the polar cold air, has shifted so it is not sitting right on the pole as it usually does,” Laden writes. “We are not seeing an expansion of cold, an ice age, or an anti-global warming phenomenon. We are seeing the usual cold polar air taking an excursion. So, this cold weather we are having does not disprove global warming.”

In fact, some scientists have theorized that the influx of extreme cold is actually fueled by effects of climate change. Jennifer Francis, a research professor at Rutgers University’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Science said today that it’s not the Arctic who is drunk. It’s the jet stream.

Arctic warming, she said, is causing less drastic changes in temperatures between northern and southern climates, leading to weakened west-to-east winds, and ultimately, a wavier jet stream. The stream’s recent “waviness” has been taking coldness down to the temperate United States and leaving Alaska and the Arctic relatively warm, Francis said. The same thing has been happening in other countries as well. Winter storms have been pounding the U.K., she noted, while Scandinavia is having a very warm winter.

“This kind of pattern is going to be more likely, and has been more likely,” she said. “Extremes on both ends are a symptom. Wild, unusual temperatures of both sides, both warmer and colder.”

Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth, a distinguished senior climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research said: "The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question, All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be."

So sorry GOP science deniers, this influx of cold weather is not your debunking trump card to the reality of climate change. 

NFTOS
Editor-In-Chief
Roger West