ROTLMAO! BIG TRUMP BACKFIRE! Coal Emissions Are Killing Climate Change Deniers and Anti Environmentalists - Your Days Are Numbered, Prepare To Die Slowly!

[Heinz Heinrich Spanknobe]

Power Plant Air Pollution Kills 13,000 People Per Year,
Coal-Fired Are Most Hazardous: ALA Report

The American Lung Association (ALA) recently released a new
report on the dramatic health hazards surrounding coal-fired
power plants.

The report, “Toxic Air: The Case For Cleaning Up Coal-Fired
Power Plants,” reveals the dangers of air pollution emitted by
coal plants.

One of the starkest findings in the report claims, “Particle
pollution from power plants is estimated to kill approximately
13,000 people a year.”

So what’s the biggest culprit?

“Coal-fired power plants that sell electricity to the grid
produce more hazardous air pollution in the U.S. than any other
industrial pollution sources.” According to the report details,
over 386,000 tons of air pollutants are emitted from over 400
plants in the U.S. per year. Interestingly, while most of the
power plants are located in the Midwest and Southeast, the
entire nation is threatened by their toxic emissions.

An ALA graph shows that while pollutants such as acid gases
stay in the local area, metals such as lead and arsenic travel
beyond state lines, and fine particulate matter has a global
impact. In other words, while for some workers the pollution
may be a tradeoff for employment at a plant, other regions
don’t reap the same benefits, but still pay for the costs to
their health.

The report connected specific pollutants with their health
effects. According to the ALA, 76% of U.S. acid gas emissions,
which are known to irritate breathing passages, come from
coal-fired power plants. Out of all industrial sources, these
plants are also the biggest emitter of airborne mercury, which
can become part of the human food chain through fish and
wildlife — high mercury levels are linked to brain damage,
birth defects, and damage to the nervous system. Overall, air
pollutants from coal plants can cause hearth attacks, strokes,
lung cancer, birth defects, and premature death.

The American Lung Association isn’t the only group to connect
coal plants with death and illness. A recent study released in
the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences found that, due
in large part to health problems, coal costs the U.S. $500
billion per year. Specifically, the study found that the health
costs of cancer, lung disease, and respiratory illnesses
connected to pollutant emissions totaled over $185 billion per
year.

What does the American Lung Association want to come out of
releasing their report? According to Charles D. Connor,
president and CEO of the American Lung Association, “It’s time
that we end the ‘toxic loophole’ that has allowed coal-burning
power plants to operate without any federal limits on emissions
of [dangerous pollutants].”

On March 16th, the EPA is required to issue a proposal on how
to clean up these air pollutants. The proposal suggests that
large production coal-fired plants install controls that have
been shown to decrease air pollutants. The newly proposed
controls are already currently used in some plants. Control
technologies include scrubbers, currently used by 46% of
plants, to control acid gases. Another control technology is
activated carbon injection, used to control mercury, which
involves blowing powder activated carbon into a flue gas to
absorb pollutants — this technology is currently used by just
13% of plants.

The EPA is finally taking steps to cut down on toxic emissions
form coal-fired power plants. Yet, many people believe that
there’s no such thing as clean coal.

[DNC Peederfiles]

On Sun, 12 Nov 2017 23:57:25 +0000 (UTC), Heinz Heinrich Spanknobe
<HeinzSp...@hoo.com> wrote:

Last year, the New York Times called climate change “the most
important story in the world.” So the Trump administration raised some
eyebrows at a recent White House briefing when it turned to the
newspaper of record for support in its effort to defend the
president’s deeply unpopular decision to withdraw from the Paris
climate agreement.

At the briefing, EPA chief Scott Pruitt was asked whether Trump thinks
humans are warming the planet. After refusing to comment on the
president’s views, Pruitt said that the “degree of human contribution”
to global warming remains uncertain. That uncertainty, Pruitt
suggested, makes it difficult to decide how policymakers should
respond.

And then he read aloud from the now-infamous Times column written in
April by conservative never-Trumper Bret Stephens. The piece, which
sparked a weeks-long media firestorm, made a convoluted case for more
skepticism of climate change models — which Stephens equated to
Hillary Clinton’s campaign polling. “Much … that passes as accepted
fact is really a matter of probabilities,” he wrote. “That’s
especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and
simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate
future.” Last week, NBC announced that it was hiring Stephens as a
contributor.

Stephens, like Pruitt, insists he isn’t a climate change denier, but
the columnist’s argument was nonetheless widely rejected by
scientists; a few dozen of them signed an open letter arguing that
Stephens “mischaracterizes both the certainties and uncertainties
regarding climate change, and misrepresents how science reports
uncertainties.”

It’s hardly surprising that a misleading New York Times column would
be promoted by the administration of a president who sees global
warming as a Chinese hoax. Skeptics have long sought to validate their
views by injecting them into respectable media outlets. And they’ve
frequently been successful. Here’s a short history of climate
misinformation infiltrating the mainstream news media:

1990s and 2000s: Oil companies push climate denial in the news media

In 1997, countries around the world signed the the Kyoto Protocol, the
world’s first serious attempt to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Months
later, the New York Times reported on documents showing that the oil
industry — including representatives from Exxon, Chevron, and Southern
— were planning a campaign to “maximize the impact of scientific views
consistent with ours on Congress, the media, and other key audiences.”
The campaign, the Times reported, would include an effort to track
“the percentage of news articles that raise questions about climate
science and the number of radio talk show appearances by scientists
questioning the prevailing views.” It would also develop a so-called
“sound scientific alternative” to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of scientists that
evaluates climate change research.

Industry representatives told the Times that the plan was “tentative”
and had not yet been approved. Nevertheless, the next decade-plus
featured plenty of false-equivalency and he said/she said arguments in
news stories about climate science. In many cases, the statements of
scientists and other experts were “balanced” by those of deniers. In
2008, Maxwell Boykoff, who is now a University of Colorado professor,
published a study in the journal Climatic Change that looked at news
programs on ABC, CNN, NBC, and CBS from 1995 through 2004. He found
that 70 percent of the networks’ global warming stories “perpetuated
an informational bias” by including the unscientific views of climate
skeptics. In another study published in 2004, Boykoff looked at
coverage in major newspapers from 1988 through 2002 and found that
half of the 636 randomly selected articles gave roughly the same
attention to skeptics’ arguments about the supposedly natural causes
of climate change as they did to the scientific consensus that humans
are warming the planet.

The Washington Post, for example, published a 2004 story about a study
that used climate modeling to demonstrate that climate change was
leading to a greater risk of heatwaves. The story quoted the
Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell as saying, “Modeling is
not science. This is a very small-potatoes paper based on modeling
that can’t be proved or disproved” for the next 50 years. CEI is a
conservative think tank that is closely associated with climate change
denial and has also received funds from Koch-backed groups and other
fossil fuel groups over the years. (Ebell would go on to lead the EPA
transition team for the Trump administration.)

2006: CNN’s contrarian meteorologist

After a 2006 segment on global warming, CNN meteorologist Chad Myers
appeared on air to deliver the day’s weather report. Anchor Miles
O’Brien said to Myers: “You’re a little bit of a skeptic on global
warming, I know.” Myers rejected that characterization and assured
O’Brien that “CO2 is heating the atmosphere.” But he nonetheless went
on to suggest that climate research may be exaggerated because of the
heat island effect, in which heat retained by urban infrastructure
causes cities to be artificially warmer. “Metro areas are getting
warmer,” he said. “If you put the same thermometer out in the middle
of a cornfield in Nebraska, maybe it wouldn’t be too much different.
We’ll have to see. You know, I know this is happening; it’s just a
matter of how much it is, that’s all.” (Actually, urban heat islands
have a negligible effect on global temperatures, and Nebraska is
indeed getting hotter).

Years later, Myers went on to publicly recant his climate
contrarianism. He noted the theories he once thought were credible
enough to broadcast are “now called ‘zombie theories,’ long since
debunked myths about climate change that skeptics will continually
bring up to counter the facts of man-made climate change.”

March 2007: NPR airs a debate on whether climate change is real

Intelligence Squared, an Oxford-style debate program that airs on NPR,
hosted a debate on whether humans are the primary driver of global
warming and how we should deal with it. On the side representing the
overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are responsible for
dangerous amounts of warming were two climate scientists and a NASA
climate modeler. On the other side were two skeptical scientists:
Richard Lindzen, an MIT professor who said the earth “is always
warming or cooling,” and Philip Stott, a retired academic who made a
similar point. Joining Lindzen and Stott was science fiction writer
Michael Crichton, who claimed that scientists hadn’t shown “whether or
not carbon dioxide is the contemporary driver for the warming we’re
seeing.”

The introductory remarks by Robert Rosenkranz, chair of Intelligence
Squared, featured more false equivalence, including a jab at climate
science: “Maybe a side that feels like there is nothing to debate
might feel that there are perhaps some inconvenient truths on the
other side that they would prefer not to deal with. I’m old enough to
remember when there was a scientific consensus on global cooling, and
this was in the 1970s with all kinds of alarmist data on that
subject.”

February 2009: George Will vs. sea ice

George Will, whose Washington Post column appears in hundreds of
papers and reaches millions of readers, is one of media’s most
consistent voices of climate science denial. In 2009, he sparked a
particularly intense backlash when he suggested that the case for
human-made climate change was undermined by sea ice measurements. “As
global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this
was evidence of man-made global warming,” he wrote. “Since September,
however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either
up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According
to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global
sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

But Will was wrong. The very source that he reportedly relied on for
this argument — a statement issued by the University of Illinois
researchers he cited — made clear that sea ice observations were, in
fact, consistent with the scientific consensus surrounding global
warming. Several Post journalists took the unusual step of criticizing
their colleague’s column; one called out Will for providing readers
“with misleading climate science information that conflicts with what
scientists know.”

Fall 2009: Climategate

On Nov. 17, 2009 — just three weeks before the start of high-profile
climate negotiations in Copenhagen — roughly 1,000 emails belonging to
climate scientists were published on the internet. Climate change
deniers quickly declared that the apparently hacked emails revealed
evidence of massive scientific fraud and labeled the episode
“Climategate.” In particular, they seized on a 1999 email sent by
British scientist Phil Jones, which famously referred to an effort to
“hide the decline.” The context of the email made it clear that Jones
was not referring to a deceptive effort to conceal a (nonexistent)
decline in global temperatures, but to a method for dealing with
complications in tree-ring data.

As the controversy wore on, the Media Research Center — a conservative
media watchdog organization — began demanding that the major broadcast
networks cover the story. The networks complied. On Dec. 4, NBC
reported that “those who doubt that manmade greenhouse gases are
changing the climate say these e-mails … show climate scientists
massaging data” and aired footage of Patrick Michaels, a climate
skeptic at the libertarian Cato Institute, calling for an
investigation. On Dec. 9, ABC reported — inaccurately — that “one of
the most damning email exchanges credits [climate scientist Michael]
Mann with a trick to hide the decline in temperatures.” Mann had done
nothing of the sort. That same day, the Washington Post published an
op-ed by Sarah Palin falsely claiming that the emails revealed that
scientists had “manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global
temperatures.”

Months later, multiple investigations would conclude that the
researchers had not committed scientific misconduct and that the
science behind climate change remained as strong as ever.

2011: False balance across the pond

It’s not just U.S. media. An independent body, the now-defunct BBC
Trust, issued a July 2011 report on the BBC’s “over-rigid application
of editorial guidelines on impartiality” that gave “undue attention to
marginal opinion” on climate change. BBC Trust commissioned Steve
Jones, an emeritus geneticist at University College London, who wrote
in his independent review:

For at least three years, the climate change deniers have been
marginal to the scientific debate but somehow they continued to find a
place on the airwaves. Their ability so to do suggests that an
over-diligent search for due impartiality — or for a controversy —
continue to hinder the objective reporting of a scientific story even
when the internal statements of the BBC suggest that no controversy
exists. There is a contrast between the clear demands for due
impartiality in the BBC’s written guidelines and what sometimes
emerges on air.

The BBC faced added pressure in 2014, when a House of Commons
committee issued a report calling out the network for false
equivalency.

2012: Avoiding controversy

In 2012, the Discovery Channel aired the documentary titled Frozen
Planet, coproduced by the BBC, which discussed how life and nature
were changing in the warming Arctic and Antarctic. The program made
scant mention of the human causes of that warming. The series producer
said at the time the the filmmakers didn’t want to emphasize the
science on climate change because it “would have undermined the
strength of an objective documentary, and would then have become
utilized by people with political agendas,” according to the New York
Times. Climate activists targeted the channel with a campaign asking
for more of a focus on climate change.

2013: The pause

In recent years, a favorite argument of climate change deniers has
been that global warming stopped or slowed dramatically after the
1990s, which, they claim, calls into question the scientific consensus
that humans are dangerously warming the planet. It’s a deeply
misleading argument that relies on the fact that 1998 was an unusually
hot year and ignores the reality that 16 of the 17 warmest years on
record have occurred since 2001. But in the fall of 2013, just as the
IPCC was rolling out a landmark report on global warming, the
mainstream media took the bait. A Media Matters study found that news
outlets mentioned the so-called “pause” in 41 percent of their stories
about the IPCC. Former Mother Jones reporter Chris Mooney highlighted
one particularly problematic CBS News report from the time:

At the outset of the segment, CBS’s Mark Phillips intoned: “Another
inconvenient truth has emerged on the way to the apocalypse. The new
U.N. report on climate change is expected to blame man-made greenhouse
gases more than ever for global warming. But there’s a problem. The
global atmosphere hasn’t been warming lately.”

Then followed an animation, seeming to show that since the year 1998,
rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere haven’t been matched by
rising temperatures. Soon, CBS cut to a scientist trying to explain
this apparent global warming “pause” by saying that the missing heat
has gone into the oceans. Then, presumably for balance, came an
interview with a climate skeptic who, when asked whether the “pause”
blunts the urgency of doing something about global warming, replied
that “it has already.”

This pause, it turns out, likely never existed. The National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration published a paper in 2015 that
readjusted its dataset to account for a “cooling bias” in how
scientists measured global temperatures. The results suggested that
atmospheric warming hadn’t actually slowed down, let alone stopped.

2013: False balance on the opinion pages

USA Today pairs its editorials on “controversial” topics with pieces
expressing opposing views. In October 2013, this convention led to the
widely read paper running an editorial on climate change alongside a
fact-challenged op-ed by Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland
Institute, which has received funding from fossil fuel companies. In
this op-ed, Bast falsely claimed that no warming had occurred in 15
years and that it was now time to listen to “other voices in the
debate” rather than the IPCC.

2017: Bret Stephens

In late April, the New York Times hired Bret Stephens, a former Wall
Street Journal columnist with a history of characterizing climate
change as an “imaginary enemy” and claiming that temperatures would be
“about the same” in a century. When Stephens’ debut Times column cast
doubt on climate models that predict significant future warming, the
backlash was immediate. “No subject since the election has come close
to producing this kind of anger toward The Times,” wrote Liz Spayd,
the paper’s public editor at the time. Days later, NBC hopped on the
bandwagon, hiring frequent climate misinformer (see above) George Will
as a contributor. Last week, the network squared the circle when it
hired Stephens, too. His views contradict NBC’s own reporting that the
world’s top scientists agree that “unless the world changes course
quickly and dramatically, the fundamental systems that support human
civilization are at risk.”

http://grist.org/article/a-brief-history-of-fake-climate-news-in-the-mainstream-media/

Yep. Global warming is horse shit.

[Ultra Magnus]

RNC Peederfiles wrote

> a

www.grist.org

#FAKENEWS from the usual conspiracy kook websites aimed at gullible
subintelligent uneducated right wing peons who are usually Trump loving
traitors.


Rightists are always afraid of the truth and they hate science.


Enjoy your propaganda. It won't save you from death.

[Ultra Magnus]

[Rightwing Breitbart Scientist]

[Rightwing Breitbart Scientist]

[Rightwing Breitbart Scientist]