Tag: climate change

(CNN)Five Winter Olympians have traded in the slopes for briefing rooms to urge Congress to take action on climate change. The Sochi Olympics was "one of the worst events I've ever had. It's unlikely that city will ever be able to host the Winter Olympics again," Gold said. The Sochi Games were in 2014, but Gold's injury has continued to be a problem, and she had surgery earlier this year. And that likely rings true for the Olympic athletes here today," Bennet said. The same thought came from gold medalist Wise, who said he believes winter sports and outdoor recreations are responsible for many jobs and economic activity. A recent report from Protect Our Winters found that in the winter season of 2015-2016, more than 20 million people participated in some sort of outdoor activity, bringing an estimated value of $20.3 billion to the US economy. We see [climate change] happening all over the world, and it affects everyone at every level. I see man-made snow everywhere we go — nobody can count on natural snow anymore. Climate change is taking away a very healthy, incredibly fun, family-oriented sport that I love," gold medalist Diggins said.

Jerry Taylor believes he can change the minds of conservative climate skeptics. Taylor and others believe it’s conversations like these—with political elites, and focused on policies they can justify in conservative terms—that could eventually lead to real action on climate change. Lesson one: Pick the right targets Political scientists consistently find that mass opinion doesn’t drive the policy debate so much as the other way around. A Gallup poll in late March found that nearly 70 percent of Republicans believe global warming is “generally exaggerated,” while 67 percent of Democrats believe it will pose a “serious threat” in their lifetimes. Instead, the goal should be to change the minds of the elites. The good news is this means you don’t have to change as many minds. Carbon pollution costs real people real money. Republicans generally oppose new taxes, of course. In fact, there are signs of growing bipartisan support for clean energy, at least partially driven by the fact that deeply red states have become big generators of jobs in wind and solar power. That, given today’s intense culture wars over climate change, is at least a start.

The head of the United Nations body charged with addressing global warming wants to work with the Trump administration to bring the U.S. back into the Paris Agreement on climate change, she told TIME last week at an energy conference in Houston. Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said that she remains “hopeful” that Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement can be reversed before it becomes official in 2020. “We are more than happy to engage with the U.S. administration in order to address their concerns,” Espinosa told TIME on the sidelines of the CERAWeek energy conference hosted by IHS Markit. George David Banks, a former Trump energy advisor, told TIME last month that Trump has been telling foreign leaders that the U.S. might rejoin the Paris Agreement. Banks suggested the Trump might want to use re-engaging on the Paris Agreement as a talking point ahead of the 2020 election. Trump’s position on climate change is far from the only issue on Espinosa’s plate. The former Mexican foreign minister acknowledged to TIME that countries’ current commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions remain behind the target set in the Paris Agreement but said that the “path is there” to achieve the goals. The deal calls for countries to limit temperatures from rising more than 2°C (3.6°F) by 2100 with an ideal target of keeping temperature rise below 1.5°C (2.7°F). “We are far from the 1.5 degrees if we look at the commitments that have been put on the table,” she said. “Without participation of the energy sector in the transformation that we need to have to address climate change we will not be able to get to the goals set in the Paris Agreement,” she said.

EPA chief Scott Pruitt sought "to stage public debates challenging climate change science," reports the New York Times, and President Trump "expressed enthusiasm" for the idea. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc About: MSNBC is the premier destination for in-depth analysis…

California’s exposure to climate change has been laid bare with warnings that San Francisco faces a far worse threat from rising seas than previously thought, while the agricultural heart of the state will increasingly struggle to support crops such as peaches, walnuts and apricots as temperatures climb. The findings, from two new scientific studies, come as California’s neighboring west coast states Oregon and Washington have both faltered in their legislative attempts to address climate change and deliver a rebuke to Donald Trump’s dismissal of the issue. “In Washington, we are holding a very good policy hostage because it’s not perfect. San Francisco can lay claim to being one of the greenest cities in the US, through its embrace of clean energy, mandated recycling and banning of single-use plastic bags, yet it faces a steep challenge to avoid the ravages of sea level rise. Researchers using satellite-based radar and GPS have discovered large areas of land beside the San Francisco bay is sinking, exacerbating the threat from sea level rise and storms. This scenario would worsen if melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica trigger a far faster rate of ocean expansion. “A huge number of people along the west coast are in low-lying areas, in Los Angeles and San Francisco all the way up to Seattle. And California’s neighbors to the north are struggling to demonstrate that states can compensate for the lack of federal action on climate change, even those where Democrats have a firm grip on power. Meanwhile, in Oregon, another state dominated by elected Democrats, lawmakers failed to agree on a cap on greenhouse gases and will instead revisit the issue in 2019. “Rather than getting bogged down in how money from a carbon tax would be spent, we need to make climate change a bipartisan issue again,” said Aseem Prakash, the director of the center for environmental politics at the University of Washington.

What’s more, media headlines have warned about sea level rise daily during the past week. Can the young couple just not see the evidence in front of them? When we’re confronted by visually crowded settings, we tend to notice emotional words and tune out others. For example, if you were presented a series of words appearing one after another in quick succession — 10 words per second — you would struggle to name all of them. Previous research has shown that if the second target is emotionally arousing, then people are better able to see it than if it is neutral — compare the words murder and keyboard, for example. When we modified the test to measure people’s attention to climate change, we found people who are concerned about climate change are better at seeing climate-related words, such as carbon, right after the first target than those who are less concerned. In short, conservatives showed climate change blindness. Targeted communication Now that we know people’s political orientation affects their visual attention to climate change, this raises a possible feedback loop, where concerned liberals readily tune their attention to news headlines about climate change and become even more concerned. The visual blindness can further deepen the denial of the real risks of climate change such as flooding, hurricanes, drought and heatwaves, and consequently a lack of action to mitigate climate change. If we’re to be successful communicating the risks of climate change to conservatives, we may need to go about it in a different way.

Oil has occupied a central place in the American economy for the past century — powering houses, automobiles, factories and everything in between. But for the first time oil and gas companies are openly grappling with a less-than-certain future where climate change and related advances in other energy sources make them less dominant. In its annual energy outlook released last week, BP said that it expected oil demand to peak in the next two decades as renewable energy grows and consumers purchase hundreds of millions of electric vehicles. In an outlook released in February, Exxon Mobil projected a peak in demand for gasoline in the coming decades and acknowledged that some of its assets “may not be attractive investments” as a result of the shifting energy market. Exxon Mobil projects 400% growth in wind and solar power by 2040 while BP says renewable energy will make up 40% of growth in energy production in the same period. In some cases, oil companies will shift some of their refineries from making gasoline to making other petroleum products. That posture has changed as the science of climate change has become increasingly undeniable and countries across the globe push the energy sector away from fossil fuels. Despite a burst of environmental deregulation and climate change skepticism from President Donald Trump, most large oil and gas companies today acknowledge climate change and try to push for policy solutions that will still leave them a signifiant role in the energy future. “The global trend is happening no matter what the regulator would do.” But the growing acknowledgment of climate change and the coming evolution of the energy sector is a business decision. More than 20 of the country’s biggest utilities and oil and gas companies lack measured consideration of the risks of climate change, according to the report.

She was invited to join high profile names including Ellie Goulding, Helen Hunt and Shawn Mendes for the 24 Hours of Reality campaign, aimed at uniting the globe to find solutions to the climate crisis. Mr Gore was full of praise for the Prime Minister, and gave her a glowing introduction over the satellite link. "I gotta say at the outset, I'm really excited to meet you by means of this video hook-up cause I watched your election and I was cheering for you," he told her. US President Donald Trump has removed America from the Paris Agreement, but Mr Gore is part of a wide movement to keep climate change on the agenda. In the live interview, Ms Ardern said climate change is about more than politics and it's already hurting New Zealand. "We're seeing a decrease in our glaciers, we're seeing increased dryness in our soil. This is an issue that affects our wildlife, it affects our crops, it affects our lives." Unusually warm conditions in Fiordland were cited as a contributing factor to the recent death of a Kakapo named Blake, the first heat stress death of the species in 20 years. Other native birds, such as the Yellow-eyed penguin, are also suffering as sea temperatures affect their feeding patterns Chile President Michelle Bachelet will also be speaking at 24 Hours of Reality about her country's bold policies to ditch fossils fuels and use wind, solar and geothermal energy. Newshub.

Cupp accuses Maher of ‘emboldening irresponsible blowhards like Rush Limbaugh’. Conservative commentator S.E. Cupp warned Bill Maher to not use the term climate change "denier," saying it could embolden figures like talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who earlier this week called Hurricane Irma a climate change ploy. "I feel like the word 'denier' is a bit loaded. I think you have to be allowed to ask questions, the basis of scientific inquiry, asking questions about stuff," Cupp, a host on HLN, said on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" on Friday. “And so to say that ‘I don’t know if hurricanes are caused by climate change’- every scientist I read this week said they don’t cause them but they’re probably making them more intense. I think it’s OK to say that," she continued. I think that it a question that is unanswered by scientists. "I don't live my life by what I might make Rush Limbaugh get mad at," Maher responded. Over five million people have been evacuated from Florida in preparation for the storm.