Satellite data indicates a large fall in the temperature of the lower Troposphere back to pre-El Nino levels. This decrease has reinstated the so-called “pause” in lower atmosphere temperature. The decrease is seen in the land only data. Data from the sea shows a decline but not as much. This is expected given the ocean’s thermal lag. Data from the RSS group that provides satellite temperature services show that late-2016 temperatures have returned to the level it was at post-1998. This clearly shows the recent El Nino for what it is ‚Äì a short term weather event. Now that it is over it can easily be seen that the lower Tropospheric temperature displays no long-tern trend between 1999 ‚Äì 2016. –Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor, 21 November 2016
US President-elect Donald Trump is set to slash Nasa’s budget for monitoring climate change and instead set a goal of sending humans to the edge of the solar system by the end of the century, and possibly back to the moon. According to Bob Walker, who has advised Mr Trump on space policy, Nasa has been reduced to “a logistics agency concentrating on space station resupply and politically correct environmental monitoring”. This year Nasa’s Earth Science Division received $1.92 billion in funding, up nearly 30 per cent from the previous year. Its funding has gone up 50 per cent under President Barack Obama. At the same time Mr Obama proposed cutting support for deep space exploration by $840 million next year. –Nick Allen, The Sunday Telegraph, 20 November 2016
US president-elect Donald Trump has confirmed that among his first actions as president will be to “free up” and “fire up” the shale gas and “clean coal”, promising “millions” of jobs by beginning his assault on Barack Obama Clean Power Plan. In a video update on the Presidential Transition, Trump outlined some policy plans for his first 100 days in office, and his day one executive actions when he takes over the reins on January 20 2017. On energy, he said he would “cancel job-killing restrictions” on the production of American fossil fuel resources, including unconventional shale energy and the yet-to-move-beyond-conceptual clean coal. He said this would create “many millions” of jobs. —Renew Economy, 22 November 2016
The election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States signals the beginning of the end of international climate alarmism. Trump’s victory has shaken the green movement to its core and will almost certainly lead to the Paris climate agreement’s unravelling. –Benny Peiser, Financial Post, 21 November 2016
But if Trump does pull the US out of the futile UN programme to prevent manmade climate change — it’s an impossible objective with the developing world continuing rapidly to increase its exploitation and consumption of coal — perhaps a British cabinet might dare to question Westminster’s religious faith in the Climate Change Act. If Mrs May ever wanted to demonstrate real substance in her stated desire to represent the interests of “the just-managing ordinary workers” over the concerns of the “Westminster elite”, scrapping the Climate Change Act would hit the bullseye. Ask the Donald. –Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times, 20 November 2016
My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science? My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties? Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? –John Tierney, City Journal, Autumn 2016
