Mother Jones - Feb 10, 2016:
The Supreme Court Just Did Serious Damage to the Fight Against Climate Change ~~~President Obama's climate legacy is in trouble.~~~
".....the ruling could throw a wrench in the delicate diplomacy surrounding the global climate agreement reached in Paris in December. One defining feature of the Paris summit that made it the most successful round of climate talks in two decades was the leadership of Secretary of State John Kerry and other US officials. It was the Clean Power Plan that gave other countries confidence that the US was finally willing to do something about its own massive carbon footprint. In other words, the plan was supposed to be Obama's proof that the US would follow through on its Paris promises. Now, the trust of other big polluter - China, India, the European Union - could be shaken. That could have a chilling effect on climate action around the globe.
"I think the stay raises doubts in other countries' minds," said Jake Schmidt, international program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "I'm already getting a lot of questions and confusion [from policy analysts abroad]. There will be a lot of outreach to explain what this really means."
Their concerns may well be justified - even if the Supreme Court ultimately does rule in favor of the administration. That's because, regardless of the case's final outcome, yesterday's stay will make the Clean Power Plan more vulnerable if a Republican wins the presidential election in November. All of the leading GOP candidates have vowed to roll back Obama's climate agenda. (Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have both promised to carry it forward.)....."
Mother Jones - Jan 19, 2016:
Scientists Explain Why Ted Cruz Is Wrong About the Climate ~~~ Humans are heating up the planet, no matter what the GOP front-runners say~~~
"This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
"In December, GOP senator, presidential hopeful, and outrageous science denier Ted Cruz held a Senate panel about climate change that could charitably be called a farce. He impaneled a series of people who ranged from lukewarmers (believing the Earth is warming, but it's not dangerous, or not rapid enough to worry about now) to out-and-out head-in-the-sand deniers.
During the hearing, Cruz said a lot of completely false things, but two things he hammered over and again were the reliability of satellite data, and how those data don't show any warming over the past 18 years - the so-called pause.
As I've written many times, that "pause" doesn't exist; we're still getting warmer and have been for decades. He cherry-picked the data, looking only as far back as 1998, when a huge spike in temperature due to an El Niño event made it look like temperatures are flat since then (when you start high, it makes the rest of the graph look flatter). That's hugely misleading, of course........."