Trump dooms planet, women and minorities hit hardest
Posted by Richard on June 1, 2017
I spent way more time than I should have on Twitter today, marveling at the collective freak-out over the President’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. And thoroughly enjoying the rejoinders to the Chicken Littles from some of the folks I follow.
Leonardo DiCaprio was an obvious and easy target.
I’ll start caring what celebrities think about the Paris Accord when they start making the sacrifices they’re asking others to make. pic.twitter.com/VIazScmt0H
— Thomas C. (@Thomas_Conerty) June 1, 2017
Justin Trudeau got a good smack-down.
Just curious… would you like us to keep buying all your bitumen sands oil products? https://t.co/yyyG4HNXQ7
— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) June 1, 2017
Yes, Mitt Romney wrung his hands over the decision, and Steve Kruiser made the obvious comment.
With Republicans like these… https://t.co/w4dOxJXErw
— SFK (@stephenkruiser) June 1, 2017
A tenured chair at Harvard spewed forth an interesting take on history that elicited countless reactions like David Burge’s.
Huh, and here I mistakenly thought it was pissed off anti-monarchy libertarians with guns. Thanks, Harvard U!https://t.co/oGXKRbT3ah
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 2, 2017
I could go on and on. There was “conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin, who hated the Paris Accord until Trump dumped it; now she loves it and is dismayed. There was the ACLU denouncing it as “an assault on communities of color” because more blacks live near coal plants. Doubling down on that, some senile California attorney declared that Trump did it “just because it was signed by our first black POTUS – yes, he is that racist.!!!!”
There are a bunch more, including a funny rejoinder to Michael Moore, in my timeline. Both the Federalist and Ricochet have compilations of some of the most panicky, over-the-top reactions to the President’s decision. And Twitchy is just full of related stuff.
But one of the things that really struck me was this: many of the same people who insisted that withdrawing from the Paris Accord would flood coastal cities, kill children, destroy the planet, etc., also insisted that withdrawing was stupid because the accord didn’t obligate us to do anything. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
Rick Shultz said
I may be practically the only person I know who is not unhappy about Trump’s decision to get us out of the Paris Accord. Even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then. I just feel that the truth is more important by far than politics. “Greenhouse” gasses have been in our atmosphere over the history of this planet as has been shown in ice core samples. And the figures we get from these that approximate temperature before direct measurement began don’t correlate with the amounts of these gasses at any particular time. If you look at astrophysics, you find that Newton’s work doesn’t quite cover the motions of the sun or the planets as observed. The reason is that the center of the sun is NOT the center of mass of the solar system. A point known as the “barycenter” is the actual point that all the planets and moons orbit. The barycenter is the point between two objects where they balance each other. It is the center of mass where a moon orbits a planet or a planet orbits a star. Both bodies actually orbit around a point that lies outside the center of the larger body. The moon doesn’t orbit the exact center of the Earth. It actually orbits a point on a line between the center of the Earth and the Moon that’s about 1,710 km below Earth’s surface. The solar system also has a barycenter and, depending on the current locations and masses of all the planets, the barycenter of the solar system is either below the surface of the sun or more than twice the sun’s diameter outside it. So the sun does a wobble around it. If you’d like to see it, go to:
http://astro.unl.edu/classaction/animations/extrasolarplanets/ca_extrasolarplanets_starwobble.html
This results in cycles of changing irradiance of all the planets, including Earth, which has several cycles one of which is a 30 year cycle in which the heat the side facing the sun gets is changing by about 3% which doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize that’s about 40 watts per square meter. That comes out to a total of 1.0305 x 10 to the 10th power MEGAWATTS of heat; an amount which could not be added to the atmosphere by any human activity including what the Gaia worshippers add in hot air. If this bump in temperature was anything more than all the other little bumps that we see in core samples, then I would be worried, but since it’s way more than likely that this is all it is, I am not.