The city is suing BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell, according to The Associated Press.
New York alleges the five major oil companies have played a role in global warming, the AP reported and is seeking to recoup billions of dollars spent preparing for climate change.
The city previously said it was going to divest its five pension funds from fossil fuel companies, according to the AP.
In a statement about plans to divest, de Blasio said New York City is “standing up for future generations by becoming the first major US city to divest our pension funds from fossil fuels.”
“At the same time, we’re bringing the fight against climate change straight to the fossil fuel companies that knew about its effects and intentionally misled the public to protect their profits,” he said.
Yes Climate Change is really real.
“As climate change continues to worsen, it’s up to the fossil fuel companies whose greed put us in this position to shoulder the cost of making New York safer and more resilient.”
“ExxonMobil welcomes any well-meaning and good faith attempt to address the risks of climate change. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a global issue and requires global participation and actions,” the company said in a statement. “Lawsuits of this kind — filed by trial attorneys against an industry that provides products we all rely upon to power the economy and enable our domestic life – simply do not do that,” they added.
Hypocrites Mayor Bill de Blasio and Deputy Mayor Richard Buery getting off Helicopter.
A spokesman for Shell said the issue of global warming is not one that should be handled in the courts. A spokesman for BP declined to comment to the AP.
Last year, San Francisco and Oakland sued the five major oil companies, blaming them for the effects of climate change. The cities in September each filed a lawsuit in their respective county courts against the oil companies.
Alarmist scientists have been caught red-handed tampering with raw data in order to exaggerate sea level rise.
The raw (unadjusted) data from three Indian Ocean gauges – Aden, Karachi and Mumbai – showed that local sea level trends in the last 140 years had been very gently rising, neutral or negative (ie sea levels had fallen).
But after the evidence had been adjusted by tidal records gatekeepers at the global databank Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) it suddenly showed a sharp and dramatic rise.
The whistle was blown by two Australian scientists Dr. Albert Parker and Dr. Clifford Ollier in a paper for Earth Systems and Environment.
The paper – Is the Sea Level Stable at Aden, Yemen? – examines the discrepancies between raw and adjusted sea level data in Aden, Karachi and Mumbai.
Kenneth Richard at No Tricks Zone reports:
The authors expose how PSMSL data-adjusters make it appear that stable sea levels can be rendered to look like they are nonetheless rising at an accelerated pace.
The data-adjusters take misaligned and incomplete sea level data from tide gauges that show no sea level rise (or even a falling trend). Then, they subjectively and arbitrarily cobble them together, or realign them. In each case assessed, PSMSL data-adjusters lower the earlier misaligned rates and raise the more recent measurements. By doing so, they concoct a new linearly-rising trend.
Here is a before/after from Karachi:
The authors do not mince their words. They refer to these adjustments as “highly questionable” and “suspicious.”
That’s because they can find no plausible scientific explanation for the adjustments.
As they explain at the beginning of their paper, it is hard to put together consistent sea level records covering a long time period. This is because tide gauges are often the result of multiple sets of data, taken over different time periods using different instruments, which are then spliced together.
What is proposed as a single record in databases such as the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) (PSMSL 2017a) is often the composition of data collected by different instruments, sometimes in different locations or over different time windows, with significant gaps in between one measurement and the others. This is the case of the Aden, Yemen tide gauge that is the only tidal location of the Arabian Peninsula spanning a time window long enough to infer a trend and acceleration of the relative sea level (assuming there was continuous measurement and no quality issue). In Aden, similar to Karachi and Mumbai and other tide gauges of the area, a single-tide gauge record is the result of multiple sets of data subjectively coupled together. While a new tide gauge is recording since about 2007, the alignment of the previous data is continuously changing.
So there is nothing per se wrong with PSMSL making adjustments in order to make the different datasets align.
What is wrong is the way that the scientists at PSMSL have adjusted them. In every case, they have revised them in order to make them produce a sharp upward trend in sea level rise – despite the fact that global records do not support this.
The truth, Parker and Ollier conclude in their paper, is that sea level has changed very little in the three sites examined:
The reconstructed tide gauge records of Aden, Mumbai and Karachi are perfectly consistent with multiple lines of evidence from other key sites of the Indian Ocean including Qatar, Maldives, Bangladesh and Visakhapatnam. The sea levels have been stable since the start of the twentieth century in Aden similar to Karachi and Mumbai.
But the official PSMSL data – as used by other global data-keeping bodies such as NOAA – claims that there has been a sharp increase.
In Aden, for example, the alarmists have turned a modest 1.21 mm/year rise into a 3.02 mm/year rise.
In Aden, with data 1880–1969, the trend was + 1.21 mm/year.
Per the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Centre for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (NOAA 2017a), with data from an intermediate version of a single-tide gauge record by PSMSL we may call (n-1), the sea-level trend in Aden is + 3.02 mm/year based on the monthly average mean sea-level (MSL) results 1879–2011, Fig. 6a (image from NOAA(2017b) downloaded on September 13, 2017).
Using the online analysis tool of Burton’s sealevel.info (Sealevel.info 2017a), with data from the latest update of the PSMSL database that we may call version n, with 2 more years of data, but also with some other corrections, see the data before the year 1900 shifted up, the sea-level trend in Aden is + 1.35 mm/year based on the MSL results 1879–2013, Fig. 6b (image from Sealevel.info (2017b) downloaded on September 13, 2017). Worthy of note, the acceleration is now large and positive.
Again, there is no plausible scientific explanation for these adjustments.
As the authors put it:
“It is always highly questionable to shift data collected in the far past without any proven new supporting material.”
Indeed, but it is perfectly consistent with the behavior of alarmist scientists in other fields, notably those concerning surface temperature data records. As we have reported here before, there is copious evidence to suggest that the gatekeepers of global warming have consistently and shamelessly cooked the books and rigged the data in order to give the impression that “climate change” is a major and unprecedented phenomenon.
A major part of the global warming scare narrative is that melting ice caps will cause sea levels to rise at a dangerous and unprecedented rate, enveloping low-lying Pacific islands, flooding vulnerable countries like Bangladesh and perhaps one day drowning even places like Manhattan.
There is little if any scientific evidence that this is actually happening.
What’s extraordinary is the desperation of scientists at what ought to be impeccably neutral and trustworthy institutions such as NASA, NOAA and PSMSL to pretend that it is.
When alarmists in charge of surface temperature datasets make dishonest adjustments to exaggerate the appearance of global warming, it looks like corruption.
When alarmists in the entirely separate field of sea level measurement make precisely the same sort of dishonest adjustments in order to accord with the same global warming narrative, it starts to look like a conspiracy.
If you can’t argue politics with your relatives, then just trash their Thanksgiving dinner for spite, says a politics column in GQ magazine, titled “It’s Your Civic Duty to Ruin Thanksgiving by Bringing Up Trump.”
The writer gets straight to the point:
It’s late-November 2017, and you know what that means: Every man you’ve ever seen on TV for any reason has just been unmasked as a woman-hating sewer ghoul. Also, it’s time to ruin your Trump-supporting family’s Thanksgiving—for America!
Then column then offer suggests different ways for adult-children to customise their own Thanksgiving tantrums:
Don’t show up. For some parents, your absence will speak louder than any sodden arguments over the density of pumpkin pie. If you can’t even look them in the eye, they’ll know you mean business. Besides, Friendsgiving rules.
Show up and be kind of an asshole. No hugs; only stiff, formal handshakes. During the football game, talk about police brutality nonstop. Take any opportunity to emphasize just how much Bruce Springsteen and the entire E Street band loathes Trump. Come out as an aspiring professional DJ.
Scorched Earth. Not even a handshake; just stare, disgustedly, at their outstretched arms. Build a wall out of mashed potatoes…
This Turkey Day, consider making life HELL for a few of your relatives.
It’s late-November 2017, and you know what that means: Every man you’ve ever seen on TV for any reason has just been unmasked as a woman-hating sewer ghoul. Also, it’s time to ruin your Trump-supporting family’s Thanksgiving—for America!
Thanksgiving is a celebration of community and gratitude, where we reconvene in our nostalgia-drenched hometowns and perform time-honored traditions such as almost sleeping with your high school crush and going around the table to say what you’re most thankful for and where you were on 9/11. Last year’s Thanksgiving was a difficult time for most Americans—roughly 65.8 million of us. The election was still a fresh wound. Trump had begun assembling his Dr. Caligari cabinet of White House monsters, each one a direct fuck-you to some beloved ideal. There was the EPA chief who doesn’t believe in climate change, the labor secretary who opposed minimum wage increases, the flagrantly Islamophobic National Security Adviser who might just be a foreign agent, and at the helm of it all, a man who speaks almost exclusively in racist dog whistles and “locker room talk.” Thanksgiving was a cathartic vent sesh for liberals with like-minded families, and a painful twist of the knife for those without.
I was lucky, kind of. Both my family and my wife’s family were Hillary supporters. But we spent Thanksgiving 2016 at my parents’ house in Asheville, North Carolina—a city which, despite its Portlandia-esque sensibilities, was nestled in deep red territory. Walking around downtown, I saw more sentient MAGA hats in a few hours than I had in three long post-election weeks in New York. Right away, my dad informed me that some Trump supporter friends would be joining our Thanksgiving dinner. He assured me he’d politely asked them not to talk politics, and encouraged me to follow suit. I spent Thanksgiving dinner trying to guess which guests were the ones who voted for Trump, like the most embarrassing Agatha Christie mystery of all time. This armistice dinner went surprisingly smoothly, thanks to the politics ban and enough whiskey to ride out a prohibition crisis. It helped that these people were not my family. Whatever qualms I had with them outside of this holodeck simulation of a normal dinner would never come to a head, since we had no reason to be in regular contact. Also, Trump had not actually taken office yet.
Last year, Trump supporters could still make a case for impending change. Perhaps Donald would go through a molting phase, shedding his most intolerant and unstable parts like clumps of dead lizard skin. Instead, if anything, his reptilian hide got doused in nuclear waste and he has since Godzilla’d all over America’s purple mountain majesties. Anyone hoping for peace last Thanksgiving was rewarded with constant chaos, “very fine” Nazis marching in the streets, and a flame war with North Korea unfolding entirely over Twitter, which may or may not end in Armageddon.
This year, if you’re headed home to a household that still thinks a sex-offending game show host in rapid cognitive decline was the best choice for a president, it is your civic duty to filibuster Thanksgiving.
” It might be different when it’s their own child—who probably isn’t an Antifa supersoldier and who definitely doesn’t have loser genes—weighing in with cold hard facts.”
Trump has spent the entire year performing one long, clumsy touchdown dance atop the wreckage of America’s former norms and values. He turned the presidency into a haberdashery. He made nepotism a core hiring strategy. He attacked a civil rights leader during Martin Luther King Day. He politicized a Boy Scout jamboree. Any parents still riding the Trump Train at this point have thereby signaled that nothing is sacred. It is time to follow their example. They can’t stand idly by while President Deals tramples every other American tradition and yet somehow expect that Thanksgiving will be normal too. If every other moment of this year is going to be drastically out of whack, nobody should get to pretend that everything is normal for one meal just because that’s what the pilgrims would have done.
Don’t show up. For some parents, your absence will speak louder than any sodden arguments over the density of pumpkin pie. If you can’t even look them in the eye, they’ll know you mean business. Besides, Friendsgiving rules.
Show up and be kind of an asshole. No hugs; only stiff, formal handshakes. During the football game, talk about police brutality nonstop. Take any opportunity to emphasize just how much Bruce Springsteen and the entire E Street band loathes Trump. Come out as an aspiring professional DJ.
Scorched Earth. Not even a handshake; just stare, disgustedly, at their outstretched arms. Build a wall out of mashed potatoes. During the football game, order 10 Papa John’s pizzas—the official foodstuff of the alt right—and use them as pie charts to demonstrate who benefits most from the GOP tax plan. Refuse to be alone in a room with your mom, citing the Mike Pence rule. Call your parents by a Donald Trump nickname of your choosing—perhaps Little Rocket Mom or Liddle’ Dad. Insist on setting a place for Robert Mueller, the way Jews do for Elijah on Passover. Wear a coal miner hat for solidarity. Punch a cornucopia right in the mouth.
Of course, this is about more than just spite—as satisfying as spite can be in these trying times. This is about potentially chipping away at the ~35 percent of un-budging Trump supporters. Sure, some of them are fully on board with every inexplicable decision, but others may be swayable. They are Fox News devotees who have simply internalized the message that all negative news about Trump is fake news. They know the president is unpopular, but they think his unpopularity is the strict province of haters and losers. It might be different when it’s their own child—who probablyisn’t an Antifa supersoldier and who definitely doesn’t have loser genes—weighing in with cold hard facts. Having a son or daughter loathe everything you’ve become is easier long distance; it’s another thing when that kid is staring turkey-carving daggers at you from across the table.
If your family is unmoved after a ruined Thanksgiving, though, that’s fine too. After all, next year’s Thanksgiving falls just after the 2018 midterms, and if your true believer parents still feel the way they do now, you might ruin their holiday in another way.
Delingpole: And So It Begins, Trump’s Great Climate Purge…
Finally the Trump administration is starting to get serious about taking on the Green Blob.
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt – perhaps stung by criticisms that he was turning into a squish – today reaffirmed, in an interview with CNBC, that he is not a believer in catastrophic man-made global warming.
“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet…”
This new boldness coincides with a purge of warmist scientific advisers at both the EPA and the Interior Department.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has chosen to replace half of the members on one of its key scientific review boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is “reviewing the charter and charge” of more than 200 advisory boards, committees, and other entities both within and outside of his department. EPA and Interior officials began informing outside advisers of the move on Friday, and notifications continued over the weekend.
Pruitt’s move could significantly change the makeup of the 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors, which advises EPA’s key scientific arm on whether the research it does has sufficient rigor and integrity. All of the members being dismissed were at the end of serving at least one three-year term, although these terms are often renewed instead of terminated.
Among the tragic victims is Robert Richardson, a Michigan professor and “ecological economist”, who tweeted movingly about his martyrdom.
A closer look at the man’s biog gives a few clues as to why his contract was not renewed:
His research, teaching, and outreach program focuses primarily on sustainable development, and he uses a variety of methods from the behavioral and social sciences to study decision-making about the use of natural resources and the values of ecosystem services.
Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.
But the biggest sign of Trump’s commitment to slaying the Green Blob is expected tomorrow when we’ll finally hear whether or not the president means to keep his election promise to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement.
If this happens it will be a disaster for the U.S., with the only beneficiary being White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. At least that’s what environmental journalist David Roberts claims in Vox.
Given that Roberts is the guy who once called for Nuremberg-style trials for climate skeptics perhaps his views should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Nonetheless, he is quite right when he argues that whether the U.S. stays in or out of Paris it will make little difference on the policy front.
[The agreement] asks participants only to state what they are willing to do and to account for what they’ve done. It is, in a word, voluntary.
Roberts suspects, as I do, that the legalistic reasons being advanced for pulling out of Paris have probably been overdone.
But whatever works is fine by me. The important thing is for the U.S. to pull out of Paris not in order to facilitate exit from Obama’s Clean Power Plan or to avert legal action from politicized litigators like the Sierra Club but purely as an upward extension of the presidential middle finger to the bloated, corrupt and overmighty Climate Industrial Complex.
If and when Trump pulls the U.S. out of Paris it won’t be the end for the Green Blob, nor even the beginning of the end. But it might, perhaps, be the end of the beginning. It will be arguably the first big signal by any major leader of the Western world that the tide on the Great Global Warming Scam is about to turn and that the Alarmists are about to be crushed by fortune’s wheel.
Burnett: White House Faction Pushing Trump to Stay in Paris Climate Deal Despite Campaign Promise
Environment and Energy Policy research fellow at the Heartland Institute, H. Sterling Burnett, spoke with Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday regarding President Trump’s position on the Paris Climate Agreement. The Heartland Institute has called for the United States to withdraw.
The press release reads in part:
The Paris Climate Treaty puts America last, the exact opposite of what candidate Trump and now President Trump has promised. The treaty would require the United States to make massive reductions in emissions and pay billions of dollars in ‘climate reparations’ to Third World dictators, while requiring no emission cuts from developing countries including India and China. Why should the United States pay hundreds of billions of dollars to developing countries at a time when the U.S. government is running massive debts, when economic growth is slower for a longer period of time than at any time since the Great Depression, and when American workers are losing out to lower-paid workers in China and India?
Burnett said Wednesday, “Trump rightly said he was going to withdraw from this, but … there are two factions in the White House. There are those like Scott Pruitt, head of the EPA, like Steve Bannon, his adviser, that say keep your campaign promise. Withdraw from the Paris Climate agreement. Let America grow.”
“But then there’s the other faction,” he continued, “that’s led by Rex Tillerson, who has a lot of influence … as secretary of state, who said we should stay in the agreement. It’s led by his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. … She wants to make climate change her signature issue. So he’s got powerful interests trying to keep him in the agreement, saying not [to] leave it as it is, but renegotiate it. Cut a better deal.”
“Problem is, there are no terms within the treaty to cut a better deal. You’re not allowed within the treaty to cut a better deal. And the worst problem is, is there’s no better deal to be had, in the sense that if you’re forcing America to cut its emissions, you’re having big government intervene in the economy,” he concluded.
Bit by Bit, Trump Methodically Undoing Obama Policies
WASHINGTON (AP) — Amid the turmoil over staff shake-ups, blocked travel bans and the Russia cloud hanging overhead, President Donald Trump is steadily plugging away at a major piece of his agenda: Undoing Obama.
From abortion to energy to climate change and personal investments, Trump is keeping his promises in methodically overturning regulations and policies adopted when Barack Obama was president.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing.
Trump recently failed to fulfill his pledge to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which continues to stand as Obama’s most recognizable domestic policy achievement. Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan couldn’t persuade enough fellow Republicans to back new health care legislation last month. Ryan pulled the measure just before a scheduled House vote.
Trump has had better outcomes in other areas.
CLIMATE CHANGE
Trump signed an executive order last week to deliver on his pledge to unravel Obama’s efforts to curb global warming. The order launched a review of the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s chief effort to curb carbon emissions by restricting greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants. Trump also lifted a 14-month-old halt on new coal leases on federal lands. The Obama administration had imposed a three-year freeze on such leases in January of last year.
The executive order covers a range of other Obama-era rules, including requirements to factor the “social cost” of carbon emissions into all regulatory actions and to crack down on methane emissions at oil and gas wells. Business groups had complained to Trump, himself a businessman, that the rules were intrusive and expensive.
INTERNET PRIVACY
Trump is expected to sign a measure soon to block online privacy regulations the Federal Communications Commission issued during Obama’s final months in office. It’s a first step toward allowing internet providers to sell information about their customers’ browsing habits. The FCC rule was designed to give consumers more control over how companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon share information. Critics complained that the rule would have increased costs, stifled innovation and picked winners and losers among internet companies.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer says the rule represents the type of “federal overreach” that Trump pledged as a candidate to reverse.
ABORTION/FAMILY PLANNING
Trump is expected to sign legislation erasing another Obama rule, one that barred states from withholding federal family planning funds from Planned Parenthood affiliates and other clinics that provide abortions. The rule was finalized shortly before Obama left office in January.
The measure cleared the Senate last week with Vice President Mike Pence, who is also president of the Senate, casting the tie-breaking 51st vote in the 100-member chamber.
KEYSTONE XL OIL PIPELINE
Trump greenlighted the long-delayed project on March 24, reversing Obama’s decision less than 18 months earlier. After Trump invited TransCanada, the Canadian company building the $8 billion pipeline, to resubmit its application, the State Department approved the project, saying it would advance U.S. national interests. Obama had said the project would not.
Approval came nearly a decade after TransCanada applied to complete the 1,700-mile (2,735 kilometers) pipeline to carry oil from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast.
Trump says the project will reduce costs and reliance on foreign oil, and create thousands of jobs. Obama had said it would undercut U.S. credibility in international efforts to tackle climate change.
DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE
Under Obama, the Army Corps of Engineers had declined in December to allow pipeline construction under South Dakota’s Lake Oahe on grounds that alternate routes needed to be considered. Native American tribes had sued to block construction, arguing that the pipeline threatened their water supply and cultural sites.
The project has moved forward again under Trump, who acted shortly after taking office. In February, the Army Corps of Engineers abandoned further study and granted an easement that was needed to complete the pipeline. Energy Transfer Partners immediately began drilling under the lake.
FUEL EFFICIENCY STANDARDS
The Trump administration is re-examining federal requirements governing the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks. In 2012, the Obama administration set fuel economy regulations for model years 2017-2025 and agreed to complete a midterm evaluation by next year. Then, days before Obama left office, the Environmental Protection Agency decided to keep stringent requirements it had set in place for model years 2022-2025.
The auto industry balked. Trump announced in Michigan that he’s putting the midterm review back on track. His decision has no immediate effect but requires the EPA to determine no later than April 2018 whether the 2022-2025 standards are appropriate.
TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP
Obama was his administration’s biggest cheerleader for the sweeping agreement involving the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim nations. But the Senate needed to ratify it, and bipartisan opposition basically doomed it before he left office.
As a candidate, Trump railed against this agreement and pledged to withdraw from it, saying he was a better negotiator and could strike better deals. Shortly after taking office, he directed the U.S. trade representative to withdraw and said he would pursue individual deals with the other countries.
ABORTION/MEXICO CITY POLICY
Trump reinstated a ban on providing federal money to international groups that perform abortions or provide information about them. Obama had lifted the ban when he took office in 2009.
Known as the “Mexico City Policy” or, by critics, as the “global gag rule,” the regulation has been a political volleyball, instituted by Republican administrations and rescinded by Democratic ones since 1984. Trump signed it one day after the 44th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the United States. The policy also prohibits taxpayer funding for groups that lobby to legalize abortion or promote it as a family planning method.
PERSONAL FINANCE
Trump has instructed the Department of Labor to delay an Obama-era rule that would require financial professionals who charge commissions to put their clients’ best interests first when advising them on retirement investments. The “fiduciary rule” was aimed at blocking consultants from steering clients toward investments with higher commissions and fees that can eat away at retirement savings. The rule was to take effect this month. The financial services industry argued that the rule would limit retirees’ investment choices by forcing asset managers to steer them to low-risk options.
Undoing the rule was part of a promised assault by Trump on banking rules enacted after the Great Recession. He has directed the Treasury secretary to review the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial oversight law, which he has said is a disaster. The law’s aim was to keep banks from repeating practices that many blamed for the financial meltdown.
