deputy press secretary Raj Shah focused on the report’s disclaimer about
“remaining uncertainty in the sensitivity of Earth’s climate to
[greenhouse gas] emissions.”
Meaning nobody read it before they signed off on it.
Declines in CO2 emissions are not the same as declines in the total amount in the atmosphere and oceans. Any reduction in U.S. CO2 emissions happened in spite of the Effen Moron Administration’s attempts to revive fossil fuel dependency. All the green economy developed because it is more efficient and cheaper and has rather more of a future potential than the fossil industries. A cleaner healthier future is bigger than trump’s BS.
Here’s the actual report, in case anyone is interested. Not sure why it wasn’t linked to in the article.
I’m pleasantly surprised that the report wasn’t shelved, or butchered with politically motivated edits at the end of the process.
Extremely likely? I thought they were sure.
more than 90 percent of it has been caused by humans
Well, since we’ll never eliminate 100% of GHGs, why try at all?
Scientists always are cautious in stating that something is definite…I have gone to numerous talks where the speaker says something like “this is what we see, but we want/need more data to really say it’s real”, and I have made that statement myself. It’s part of being a scientist, we are always looking for better ways to measure and analyze data to determine what’s going on, and we realize that there will always be improvements in both in the future that may render what we see as incorrect, not because we did something wrong, but because our instruments or techniques were lacking compared to new ones. After all Newton was definitely right about gravity, but it turned out he was wrong once Einstein showed us more about how the universe works.
And, “extremely likely” is scientist speak for “this is a slam dunk”. There is a slight possibility every scientist doing this has it wrong, but the odds of that are, well, extremely unlikely. Humans are the root cause of the warming we are seeing, regardless of what a certain political party wants to believe.
It’s good to see that this wasn’t quashed or revised…though, odds are there would have been major lawsuits if the administration had tried. Remember, this was leaked in an effort to keep the Trump administration from changing the conclusions, and if it was not released or rewritten it would have been a major embarrassment, and possibly illegal.
It won’t matter to the Trump administration, as the spokesperson showed they will ignore it and cherry pick the bits that agree with their politics. Eventually, the small mindedness of these people will be obvious to history, though that may be small comfort.
99.9999% sure = “not sure”.
You know, there’s a chance (very very small) that one of those 6 bullets will be a dud.
Does that make Russian Roulette safe to participate in?
I’ll pass, thanks.
Asked by TPM Friday why the White House signed off on the report — given its record of making policy around a skepticism of climate science — deputy press secretary Raj Shah focused on the report’s disclaimer about “remaining uncertainty in the sensitivity of Earth’s climate to [greenhouse gas] emissions.”
“We’ll just look back in the rear view mirror and admit our culpability then.”
Agreed, but we’re still alone in bed with Syria.
Fire kills. Plant trees.
This about smoke taint must be fake news, the reports from California’s wine country.
Thanks, I have wondered about that.
Might be worth marketing to barbecue joints …
Then say it. This is a fact. Don’t hedge.
In the never-ending struggle between malevolence and incompetence in this administration, score another one for incompetence. It may cause them to start WWIII (deity of your choice forbid), but domestically, their incompetence is our protection.
(@professorpoopypants, I think this is the answer to your surprise…)
It’s not a hedge, it’s being accurate. Absolutely nothing in science is 100% completely proven true—only that ‘this is what we’ve observed, and this is what the data indicates’. If, after 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 repetitions, something appears to be true, it appears to be true. The complete set of data will not be final until the end of time, and it only takes one time for it to suddenly not be true.
This is why gravity is a theory.
Uh-oh, we can’t just accept this as one more paper on the mountain of other papers that say the same thing.
No, I think we need to red team/blue team this because mumble mumble mumble. And I have just the man for the job - celebrated climate scientist rick “the ocean has knobs and the environment is warming because of the environment” perry!
You do understand that in this report “extremely likely” isn’t just English words, but rather, a precisely defined measure that is an ISO standard, right?
And you also do realize that in science a prediction of the future cannot, by definition, be a fact?
Edit: A correction. They are not using an ISO standard. They describe their standard in the figures at the bottom of the following page.
Extremely likely is defined as a probability of 95-100%.
“The ocean has knobs”? Is that related to Perry’s fossil-fuels-can-stop-sexual-harassment theory?