From Al Jazeera America, "House votes to defund reality"
"On Thursday, 227 Republicans and four Democrats voted for an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) proposed by Rep. David McKinley, R-W.Va., that would prevent the Pentagon from spending money to carry out the policy recommendations from the National Climate Assessment or several United Nations reports on climate change and sustainability.
It’s unclear if the amendment will make it into the final version of the NDAA — the annual spending bill for the Department of Defense, which is worked out mutually between the Senate and the House. But the overwhelming support in the House highlights the increasingly obvious gap between elected Republicans (and a few Democrats) and pretty much every government agency.
The military has long been aware that climate change is a real and growing threat to the United States. Most recently, in a report published by a government-funded nonprofit earlier in May, retired military officers warned that climate change has already stretched defense budgets and could cause disruptions in military operations."The Department of Defense has historically led federal innovations in science and technology. It would be a shame to see funding cut for development of common sense technologies that the DOD has identified as important for national security. It seems to me unlikely that this amendment will pass negotiations in the Senate.
Lack of broad science skill makes one gullible to mob-think.
ReplyDeleteNATURAL phenomena drove all of the reported average global temperature changes since before 1900. The temperature trend is calculated by a simple equation. The correlation is 95% and uses only two drivers.
CO2 change is not one of them.
Search using key words AGW unveiled to see the simple analysis and discover the drivers.
Thanks for the unrelated tangent. But since you're interested in global temperature change, here's some more information for you:
Deletehttp://web2.msue.msu.edu/bulletins2/media/pdf/CANR%20fact%20sheet%20E3151%20final.pdf
At issue is whether or not money should be spent studying climate change. It shouldn't.
DeleteThe 95% correlation occurred irrespective of whether CO2 was considered.
Many still cling to the mistaken belief that human activity has a significant effect on climate. Some of the mistakes that lead to this belief are discussed at http://consensusmistakes.blogspot.com/
A key factor in understanding why CO2 change doesn't matter is that a ghg in pure ghg acts very differently from a trace ghg in a non-ghg atmosphere. The fact that there are EMR absorbing ghgs in an atmosphere consisting of primarily non-ghgs means that thermalization takes place and the EMR flux declines logarithmically with altitude. The absorbed energy rises in convective thermals. Warm humid evenings in the mid-west and cool dry evenings in the desert reinforce the concept of thermalization.
The issue is not whether to study climate science. The issue is whether federal agencies should have the ability to carry out common sense preparations for operating under a changing climate.
DeleteAnyway, the amendment isn't going to make it to the final bill. And there are some problems with the article I quoted-- the National Climate Assessment doesn't make policy recommendations.