The Paris agreement repeal:
More CO2 please, a good deal.
It’s the feed-stock of life
not the cause of all strife.
Yet apocalypsians squeal.
The greening of the earth thanks to increasing CO2, feed more people, less hunger. What’s wrong with that? With more CO2, plants use less water to perform photo-synthesis, especially in warm climates.
CO2, the best fertilizer existing, given freely to the developing countries.
The march against science has passed
It rained, they did not have a blast.
Still they blamed CO2
for the Climate boo-hoo.
Real scientists still were harassed.
A message from embassy trolls.
From Russia with love, as it rolls.
AP checked: Is it true?
April fool! We fooled you!
They fooled AP’s “fake news” controls!
The automated switchboard at the Russian embassy had yesterday this recorded message:
“You have reached the Russian Embassy. Your call is very important to us.”
“To arrange a call from a Russian diplomat to your political opponent, press 1.”
” To use the services of Russian hackers, press 2.”
” To request election interference, press 3, and wait until the next election campaign”
The Associated Press reports—because, apparently, AP felt the need to check—it was able to confirm the recording was meant as a “joke.”
Yes, AP has fact checkers. They used at least nine to fact check Sarah Palin’s book, “Going rouge”, but no one was the slightest interested in fact checking first candidate, then president Obama, his words were not to be fact checked, at least not by AP.
And they do not understand what is a joke.
What Chelsea the Clinton did twit
just proves that she is a nitwit.
It’s a photoshop make
like the famed Long Form fake.
It’s time for the Clintons to quit.
This is what Chelsea Clinton twitted: (Yes, I know it’s spelled tweet, but for Chelsea Clinton it’s a twit)
Yes Chelsea, it is photoshopped. A Lighthearted, humorous picture montage. It is surprisingly easy to do.
To help to educate you, here is another photoshopped image:
amaIt was photoshopped using at least 11 layers of information.
The difference between this and the previous picture is nobody except maybe Chelsea Clinton is fooled by a picture of Abraham Lincoln with a “Make America Great Again” cap. Nearly every Democrat got fooled by Barack Obama’s ” Long Form Birth Certificate. Yet both are obvious fakes.
NOV. 28, 2015 gave his answers to 16 questions in the N.Y. Times regarding Climate Change. This Climate realist added his answer.
Answers to Question 1: How much is the planet heating up?
Answers to Question 2. How much trouble are we in?
Answers to Question 3. Is there anything I can do?
Answers to Question 4. What’s the optimistic scenario?
Answers to Question 5. Will reducing meat in my diet help the climate?
Answers to Question 6. What’s the worst-case scenario?
Answers to Question 7. Will a tech breakthrough help us?
Answers to Question 8. How much will the seas rise?
Answers to Question 9. Are the predictions reliable?
Answers to Question 10. Why do people question climate change?
Answers to Question 11. Is crazy weather tied to climate change?
Answers to Question 12. Will anyone benefit from global warming?
Justin Gillis answer to Question 14. How does agriculture affect climate change?
It’s a big contributor, but there are signs of progress.
The environmental pressures from global agriculture are indeed enormous.
The demand for food is rising, in large part because of population growth and rising incomes that give millions of once-low income people the means to eat richer diets. Global demand for beef and for animal feed, for instance, has led farmers to cut down huge chunks of the Amazon rain forest.
Efforts are being made to tackle the problems. The biggest success has arguably been in Brazil, which adopted tough oversight and managed to cut deforestation in the Amazon by 80 percent in a decade. But the gains there are fragile, and severe problems continue in other parts of the world, such as aggressive forest clearing in Indonesia.
Scores of companies and organizations, including major manufacturers of consumer products, signed a declaration in New York in 2014 pledging to cut deforestation in half by 2020, and to cut it out completely by 2030. The companies that signed the pact are now struggling to figure out how to deliver on that promise.
Many forest experts at the Paris climate talks in late 2015 considered the pledge as ambitious, but possible. And they said it was crucial that consumers keep up the pressure on companies from whom they buy products, from soap to ice cream.
My answer to Question 14. How does agriculture affect climate change?
Whenever a forest is cut down and the earth gets tilled the local microclimate changes, and not for the better. The earth warms about 0.8 degrees C, the evapotranspiration is drastically reduced, the ground dries up having lost its protective shade. That is why it is an insane idea to cut down the rainforests of Borneo to produce biofuel.
Thanks to increasing CO2 levels agriculture is in much better shape than before.
CO2, the life-giving gas, not “Carbon Pollution”. A Limerick – and explanation.
What then is this “Carbon Pollution”?
A sinister, evil collusion?
CO2, it is clean,
Makes for growth, makes it green,
A transfer of wealth, a solution.
CO2 concentration has increased from about 280 ppm in pre-industrial times to 405 ppm today, and is increasing at a rate of 2 ppm per year. We are way past the point of no return, 350 ppm which would lead to a temperature catastrophe. (1) But instead, something rather interesting is occurring. The earth is getting greener! (2) This 40 % increase in CO2 the last 250 years has led to a more than 30 % increase in agricultural production all by itself without adding fertilizer or using higher yielding seeds. (3) Thanks to this we can now feed an additional two billion people on earth without starvation. The news are so good, that the per capita food production is increasing, even as the population is increasing. (4)
Look at it this way. The value of basic agricultural products is more than 1.5 trillion dollars worldwide. 30% of that is due to increased CO2. That means that the CO2 emitted is worth 450 billion dollars, spread out over all farmers and ranchers worldwide. This wealth transfer is occurring right now, and knows no national boundary. It is a gift from the developed countries to the rest of the world. Who could be against that?
It turns out that this wealth transfer occurs without global governance. The leaders of the world will not have their say in who gets the wealth transfer, the U.N. bureaucrats will not get their cut, and politicians cannot get a campaign issue since it occurs without their involvement.
So to recapture the initiative they renamed this life-giving gas “Carbon pollution” and managed somehow to get the Supreme Court to agree with the notion that CO2 is a pollutant.
How can that be? They argued that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which is true. It is second only to water vapor. It is responsible for about 9 degree Celsius rise in global temperature, and if CO2 increases, so does the greenhouse effect and the temperature increases. This in turn leads to more water vapor in the air, and water vapor is the strongest greenhouse gas, so there is a risk of reaching a “tipping point” when we could experience a thermal runaway of the planet. All of this is true, so U.N. and many governments around the world have sponsored studies to model climate change, over a hundred models have been constructed, and they all come up with rather gloomy forecasts. The research is so intense that over 3 billion dollars of government monies are spent yearly on climate change research.
All models show a similar pattern, a fairly steep and more or less linear rise in temperature as CO2 increases. There is only one major thing wrong with them. They do not agree with what is happening to the global temperature. We have now had 224 months (Sep 2015) without any global warming, in fact, the trend is down. (5)
What is wrong with the models? They all assume a passive earth, where there is no negative feedback to the changing environment. It turns out, the earth has a “governor”, and it can be expressed in one word, albedo, which means “whiteness” or how much of the incoming sunlight that gets reflected back into space.
The major albedo changers are the amount of ice around the poles and clouds, but even land use changes such as forests cut down and replaced by agriculture and urbanization.
When there is snow or ice on the ground, more sunlight gets reflected and it gets colder still. Urban heat islands are warmer than the surroundings, airports are warmer than its surroundings. Interestingly, that is where we are placing our new weather stations. (This is great for pilots that have to evaluate take-off and landing conditions, but is less than ideal for climate research. But then again, climate research has moved from the realm of physical science to political science, where different rules do apply.)
The most important albedo changers of the earth are clouds. Without them no land based life would be possible since clouds serve both as rainmakers and temperature stabilizers. If there were no clouds the equilibrium temperature at the equator would be around 140 degrees F.
Over the oceans, in the so called “doldrums” where there are no trade winds, the mornings start with a warm-up, and when the conditions are right a shower or thunderstorm occurs. The ambient temperature is usually between 84 and 88 degrees when this happens. As CO2 concentrations increase thunderstorms occur a few minutes earlier and last a little bit longer, but they are no more severe and as a result the average temperature stays the same. (5)
In desert areas of the world this temperature regulator doesn’t work well, so deserts will receive the full force of temperature increase which is 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit per doubling of CO2 levels.
In the temperate region the temperature increase will be somewhere in between. Dry days will be warmer, cloudy and rainy days will have the same temperature as before, since the regulator starts to function.
The polar region is a special case. None of the models have done a good job at modeling the clouds at the poles, especially the South Pole. (6) They will warm up more than 2 degrees F, how much is a question. In the South average temperatures will rise from – 70 degrees F in the interior all the way to maybe – 63 degrees F, and come closer to freezing in the summer at the northern edges. There may be added snowfall that will expand the ice sheet. The Antarctic ice sheet has set new records since record keeping began, and is at the moment bottoming out at 30% more ice than the 30 year average. (7)
The North Pole region is even more complicated since it is partially land, partially ocean. The oceanic ice cap has been shrinking at a fairly constant rate the last 30 years, but last year it broke the trend and grew back to break the trend line. The winter snow cap has remained at about the same level year to year with a slightly positive trend line, this year being no exception. So, why is the snow cover growing slightly, but ice cover shrinking? The common explanation has been global warming, but the ice cover kept shrinking even as the temperature increase leveled off. There are two possible explanations: Warming oceans and changes in pollution. The North Atlantic Oscillation has been mostly positive (warmer) since 1970 and has only recently turned negative, so that is certainly part of the cause of the shrinking of the icecap, but another candidate is even more likely: Carbon Pollution. With that I do not mean CO2, but good old soot, spewing out from the smokestacks of power plants in China. 45% of all coal burned is burned in China, often low grade lignite with no scrubbers. The air in Beijing is toxic to humans more days than not. Some of that soot finds its way to the arctic and settles on the ice, changing its albedo, and the sun has a chance to melt the ice more efficiently. This occurs mostly in the months of August and September when the Sun is at a low angle anyway, so the changing of the albedo has very little effect on temperature. The net result of all this is that the temperature in the North Pole region will rise about 3 degrees Fahrenheit for a doubling of the CO2. This will have a very minor effect on the Greenland ice cap since they are nearly always way below freezing anyway (-28 degree C average). The largest effect will happen in August and September in the years when all new snow has melted and the soot from years past is exposed. This happened two years ago with a sudden drop in albedo for the Greenland ice. It will also lead to an increase in the precipitation in the form of snow, so the net result is the glaciers may start growing again if the amount of soot can be reduced.
The conclusion is: The temperature regulator of the earth is working quite well, and the increase in temperature at the poles is welcome as it lessens the temperature gradient between the tropics and the polar regions, which in turn reduces the severity of storms, since they are mostly generated by temperature differences and the different density of warm, humid and dry, cold air. (8) The Polar Bears will do quite well, their numbers have more than doubled in the last 50 years.
(1). This is a message from 1010global.org. Their aim was to reduce carbon emissions by 10% in 2010.
https://lenbilen.com/2014/02/22/a-religious-message-from-1010global-org-and-a-limerick/
(2). The earth is getting greener! https://lenbilen.com/2013/03/19/co2-the-solution-to-climate-change/
(3).
(4).
(5). Reality versus climate models.
(6) Projected cloud cover for various climate models versus reality.
(7)
(8).
Th
ere is a new book out:
About Face! Why the World Needs More Carbon Dioxide is easy reading from two scientists and an economist. About Face! is the product of two scientists and an economist. The scientists are Madhav Khandekar in Canada and Cliff Ollier in Australia, plus economist Arthur Middleton Hughes in the USA.
It will change your understanding of climate science and explain how we can save millions of lives and billions of dollars per year.
Available on Amazon here
NOV. 28, 2015 gave his answers to 16 questions in the N.Y. Times regarding Climate Change. This Climate realist added his answer.
Answers to Question 1: How much is the planet heating up?
Answers to Question 2. How much trouble are we in?
Answers to Question 3. Is there anything I can do?
Answers to Question 4. What’s the optimistic scenario?
Answers to Question 5. Will reducing meat in my diet help the climate?
Answers to Question 6. What’s the worst-case scenario?
Answers to Question 7. Will a tech breakthrough help us?
Answers to Question 8. How much will the seas rise?
Answers to Question 9. Are the predictions reliable?
Answers to Question 10. Why do people question climate change?
Answers to Question 11. Is crazy weather tied to climate change?
Justin Gillis answers to Question 12. Will anyone benefit from global warming?
In certain ways, yes.
Countries with huge, frozen hinterlands, including Canada and Russia, could see some economic benefits as global warming makes agriculture, mining and the like more possible in those places. It is perhaps no accident that the Russians have always been reluctant to make ambitious climate commitments, and President Vladimir V. Putin has publicly questioned the science of climate change.
However, both of those countries could suffer enormous damage to their natural resources; escalating fires in Russia are already killing millions of acres of forests per year. These countries may think differently, once they are swamped by millions of refugees from less fortunate lands.
My answers to Question 12. Will anyone benefit from global warming?
Most people benefit from global warming. Temperature in the tropics increase only marginally, the closer to the poles you go, the greater the benefits. Snowfall will increase, winter temperatures will moderate, leading to less temperature tension between regions, less hurricanes, less tornadoes, less severe rainstorms but more rain, less droughts, in short, good all around. There are some areas that will suffer, such as the hot deserts. But the desert fringes will benefit, check the agricultural aspect of the questions.
There has sprung up a large bureaucracy supported by the concept of climate change. Billions of dollars has been spent, mostly by governments, but some corporations have also been shamed to go along to get along. However, they are chasing the wrong target. CO2 is not a pollutant, it is our friend. There is plenty of real pollution in this world. The obsession with CO2 have prevented us from tackling real problems, such as air and water pollution, not to mention the mounting need for recycling and harvesting recycled products, not putting them in landfills, energy harvesting methane, more environment friendly packaging and so on. Hopefully this is what the universities will specialize in from now on, not fighting CO2. Here is a blurb from LYNDONVILLE, VT (PRWEB)March 21, 2017
A new Bachelor of Science degree in Climate Change Science at Lyndon State College, to be launched this fall, will give students skills to confront the pervasive problems caused by global climate issues.
As the impacts of global warming grow and intensify, LSC is addressing a crucial need for trained professionals to find solutions to climate change challenges. One of few such degree programs in the country and the only one in Vermont, the innovative major is part of LSC’s nationally known Atmospheric Sciences department. Students will be prepared for a wide range of career opportunities in a rapidly evolving field.
The cutting-edge program will train students to apply their skills in a variety of areas affected by climate change, including renewable energy, public policy, climate risk management, and urban and natural resource planning. Students will do research with faculty on externally funded projects that will influence government and business initiatives.
The interdisciplinary curriculum includes general science courses and meteorology and climatology courses. Students will gain hands-on experience with data collection, learn technological skills for climate data analysis and environmental assessment, and develop communication skills to help bridge the gap between scientists and non-scientists.
“Climate change may be the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. We are altering our atmosphere in a way that is changing our climate and impacting all life on our planet,” says Janel Hanrahan, assistant professor in the Atmospheric Sciences department. “These impacts are expected to escalate, and our atmosphere will likely be altered for thousands of years into the future.”
A new LSC website, the Climate Consensus, features faculty blogs, student content, articles, social media pages and a way for the public to give input. Visit http://www.theclimateconsensus.com/.
For more information about the Climate Change Science program, visit LyndonState.edu/ClimateChange.
Having said all that, it takes a lot of energy to clean up the environment.
Answers to Question 15. Will the seas rise evenly across the planet?
NOV. 28, 2015 gave his answers to 16 questions in the N.Y. Times regarding Climate Change. This Climate realist added his answer.
Answers to Question 1: How much is the planet heating up?
Answers to Question 2. How much trouble are we in?
Answers to Question 3. Is there anything I can do?
Answers to Question 4. What’s the optimistic scenario?
Answers to Question 5. Will reducing meat in my diet help the climate?
Answers to Question 6. What’s the worst-case scenario?
Answers to Question 7. Will a tech breakthrough help us?
Answers to Question 8. How much will the seas rise?
Answers to Question 9. Are the predictions reliable?
Answers to Question 10. Why do people question climate change?
Justin Gillis answer to Question 11. Is crazy weather tied to climate change?
In some cases, yes.
Scientists have published strong evidence that the warming climate is making heat waves more frequent and intense. It is also causing heavier rainstorms, and coastal flooding is getting worse as the oceans rise because of human emissions. Global warming has intensified droughts in regions like the Middle East, and it may have strengthened the drought in California.
In many other cases, though, the linkage to global warming for particular trends is uncertain or disputed. That is partly from a lack of good historical weather data, but it is also scientifically unclear how certain types of events may be influenced by the changing climate.
Another factor: While the climate is changing, people’s perceptions may be changing faster. The Internet has made us all more aware of weather disasters in distant places. On social media, people have a tendency to attribute virtually any disaster to climate change, but in many cases there is no scientific support for doing so.
My answer to Question 11. Is crazy weather tied to climate change?
The tornadoes are declining. More CO2 means less temperature gradients causing fewer tornadoes.
The Polar Bears will do quite well, their numbers have more than doubled in the last 50 years.
The temperature regulator of the earth is working quite well, and the increase in temperature at the poles is welcome as it lessens the temperature gradient between the tropics and the polar regions, which in turn reduces the severity of storms, and tornadoes, since they are mostly generated by temperature differences and the different density of warm, humid and dry, cold air.
Will droughts increase? The data does not indicate so:
What about ocean acidification? As CO2 increases, a lot of it will be absorbed in the oceans, thereby making the oceans more acid. This is true, but CO2 is a very mild acid and has a minor acidic influence. Of much more importance is acid rain. At one time in the 70’s some lakes in Norway had a Ph. of about 4.5, enough to kill most trout fishes. In Sweden it was said they fertilized their rivers and lakes four times as much as tilled soil, leading to significant acidification of both the Baltic and the North Sea. The Baltic Sea is still in danger of total oxygen depletion. By comparison to these dangers CO2 in the ocean is only a very minor disturbance. Clean the rivers and lakes first!
Oh, and one more thing. The sea level rise is a natural phenomenon of tectonic plate movements, the Atlantic Ridge is rising and the Eastern Seaboard is sinking. These movements will continue to occur regardless of the climate.
John Kerry said in Indonesia the other day: “The science is unequivocal, and those who refuse to believe it are simply burying their heads in the sand. We don’t have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society. And in a sense, climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction. “
The opposite is true, increased levels of CO2 is a major vehicle of wealth distribution. (Green is increased plant growth, red is decreased, 1982 – 2010)
The increase in temperature is manageable and even desirable in most regions of the world, desert areas and areas prone to flooding being the exception.
In conclusion:
CO2 is a clean gas, necessary for life, and an increase in the amount of CO2 is highly desirable.
The very minor increase in temperature is on balance beneficial, since it leads to a less violent climate, with fewer storms, hurricanes and tornadoes.
The increase in CO2 makes us able to feed another 2 billion people on earth, not to mention additional wildlife.
Ocean acidification is a problem, not so much from CO2, but from sulfuric acid, nitrates and other pollutants. The major offender: China.
The increase in precipitation is beneficial, except in areas already prone to flooding. It is especially welcome in arid areas. The chart below show no increase in heavy rains as CO2 increases.
On the other hand the great conservationist SARAH PALIN once said: “We’ve got to remind Americans that the effort has got to be even greater today toward conservation because these finite resources that we’re dealing with obviously – once oil is gone it’s gone, once gas is gone, it’s gone. And I think our nation has really become kind of spoiled in that arena.”[Fox News, Hannity’s America, 10/12/08]
Coal, oil, peat, wood and natural gas are our best raw material to sustain life as we know it, and are far to valuable to waste on electricity production, so let us switch electricity production to thorium based nuclear energy
. https://lenbilen.com/2012/02/15/nuclear-power-and-earthquakes-how-to-make-it-safer-and-better/
https://lenbilen.com/2012/02/15/eleven-reasons-to-switch-to-thorium-based-nuclear-power-generation/
https://lenbilen.com/2012/02/15/eleven-more-reasons-to-switch-to-thorium-as-nuclear-fuel/
https://lenbilen.com/2012/01/31/energy-from-thorium-save-500-million-from-the-budget-now/
Coal can be converted to jet fuel and gasoline, air planes have no alternative fuels.
Answers to Question 12. Will anyone benefit from global warming?
Answers to Question 13. Is there any reason for hope?
Answers to Question 14. How does agriculture affect climate change?
Answers to Question 15. Will the seas rise evenly across the planet?
NOV. 28, 2015 gave his answers to 16 questions in the N.Y. Times regarding Climate Change. This Climate realist added his answer.
Answers to Question 1: How much is the planet heating up?
Answers to Question 2. How much trouble are we in?
Answers to Question 3. Is there anything I can do?
Answers to Question 4. What’s the optimistic scenario?
Answers to Question 5. Will reducing meat in my diet help the climate?
Answers to Question 6. What’s the worst-case scenario?
Answers to Question 7. Will a tech breakthrough help us?
Justin Gillis answer to Question 10. Why do people question climate change?
“Hint: ideology.
Most of the attacks on climate science are coming from libertarians and other political conservatives who do not like the policies that have been proposed to fight global warming. Instead of negotiating over those policies and trying to make them more subject to free-market principles, they have taken the approach of blocking them by trying to undermine the science.
This ideological position has been propped up by money from fossil-fuel interests, which have paid to create organizations, fund conferences and the like. The scientific arguments made by these groups usually involve cherry-picking data, such as focusing on short-term blips in the temperature record or in sea ice, while ignoring the long-term trends.
The most extreme version of climate denialism is to claim that scientists are engaged in a worldwide hoax to fool the public so that the government can gain greater control over people’s lives. As the arguments have become more strained, many oil and coal companies have begun to distance themselves publicly from climate denialism, but some are still helping to finance the campaigns of politicians who espouse such views.”
My answer to Question 10. Why do people question climate change?
Nobody except total ignoramuses deny climate change. We can learn from history that the Swedish army crossed the Great belt on ice during the little ice age, Greenland had a cheese farm “Gaarden under sanden” during the Medieval warming period, tree stumps emerging from the melting Mendenhall Glacier, shows there was a forest there 1000 to 3000 years ago, the wine making in England during the Roman warm period, the cooldown during the Dark ages causing massive deaths, the emerging of a man preserved in ice for 5000 years, even before the Minoan warming period. We can see marks from multiple ice ages, such as the finger lakes, “giant kettles” in Sweden from the river that emptied the Baltic Ice lake, and so on. All this happened during stable CO2 levels.
The recent sharp rise of CO2 levels is unprecedented and it should be studied if that is good or bad for the climate since it is a greenhouse gas. We had a little ice age and are still coming out of it, but worldwide temperatures are still lower than during the Medieval warming period. So the question is: how much of the recent warming trend can be attributed to the rise of CO2 and will we ever get back to the Minoan optimum at any level of CO2? On the other hand, what can we do to stave off, or at least delay the onset of the next ice age? These are questions that should be made, but unless you take the “politically correct” position it is very hard to get funding. On the other hand, the “ideological position” taken by the IPCC, has convinced numerous countries, which have spent in the hundreds of billions of dollars, to prop up the “research” on the evils of increasing CO2.
The main cherrypicker of data and climate denialism can be can be represented by Michael Mann and his famous “hockey stick” denying both the little ice age and 
the Medieval Warming period. Another example is how homogenization of temperature data to make the data fit when the environment around the temperature stations change. The temperature adjustments form a near perfect straight line, the less CO2, the more old temperatures are adjusted downward to conceal previous warm periods. This is not science. It may be political science where perception is reality, but science demands the models are checked versus reality. To adjust temperatures as a function of CO2 levels to prove rising temperatures as a function of CO2 levels is scientific fraud.
G20 to meet in Black Forest
Sweet unity no longer chorused
The encouraging word
in the Paris accord
Mnuchin to farce metamorphosed.
(Bloomberg) — Finance ministers for the U.S., China, Germany and other members of the Group of 20 economies may scale back a robust pledge for their governments to combat climate change, ceding efforts to the private sector.
Citing “scarce public resources,” the ministers said they would encourage multilateral development banks to raise private funds to accomplish goals set under the 2015 Paris climate accord, according to a preliminary statement drafted for a meeting that will be held in Germany next week.
The statement, obtained by Bloomberg News, is a significant departure from a communique issued in July, when finance ministers urged governments to quickly implement the Paris Agreement, including a call for wealthy nations to make good on commitments to mobilize $100 billion annually to cut greenhouse gases around the globe.
“It basically says governments are irrelevant. It’s complete faith in the magic of the marketplace,” John Kirton, director of the University of Toronto’s G-20 Research Group, said in an interview. “That is very different from the existing commitments they have repeatedly made.”
The shift in tone comes as U.S. President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, prepares for his first G-20 meeting, scheduled for March 17 to 18 in the spa town of Baden-Baden. While European nations including Germany have been at the forefront of combating global warming, Trump has called climate change a hoax.
The Republican president vowed during his campaign to “cancel” the Paris agreement but has said little about the deal since taking office. His cabinet members, meanwhile, have sent mixed signals. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. should keep a seat at the table for international climate talks. Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, on Thursday expressed doubt that humans were to blame for global warming and called the Paris agreement a “bad deal” for the U.S.
The most notable element of the draft is what’s missing. The statement issued after the G-20 finance ministers and central bank governors meeting in July dedicated 163 words to the Paris Agreement, pushing nations to bring the deal into force, meet emissions targets and fulfill financial pledges. This current draft dedicates just 47 words to the agreement, focusing exclusively on development banks raising private funds, without mentioning government financial support.
Germany, as the meeting’s host, leads the process of writing the statement, which will eventually be adopted via consensus by all 19 nations plus the European Union. The German finance ministry declined to comment on the draft.
“The most charitable thing to say is they’re waiting to see where Donald Trump actually lands by the time they get in Hamburg and thus, doing nothing to annoy the incoming American Treasury Secretary,” Kirton said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who holds the rotating presidency of the G-20, has signaled that she would use the forum to push Trump on climate issues. The two leaders are scheduled to meet in Washington March 14.
“The takeaway is it clearly puts less emphasis on climate finance as a priority than last year’s did,” Alden Meyer, director of policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in an interview. “It doesn’t talk about government action. That is a significant step back from what countries agreed to in Paris.”
Full statement: https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/2017/03/09/g-20-document-shows-governments-retreating-from-climate-funding
A tweet can contain up to 140 characters, a limit that is now relaxed, but if each character takes up 8 bits of information (one byte), the it can be said, a tweet is 140 bytes.
The Authorized version of the King James Bible contains 3,116,480 characters, or about 22,260 tweets. Some people have tweeted that much!
But all the information in the KJV pales compared to the information in every cell of the human body. The numbers will get large, so let us learn about large numbers
One kilobyte is 1000 bytes, Megabyte is 1000 Kb or 1000,000 bytes, Gigabyte is 1000 Mb or 1,000,000,000 bytes, Terabyte is 1000 Gigabytes or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, Petabyte is 1000 Terabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, Exabyte is 1000 Terabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, Zettabyte is 1000 Exabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, Yottabyte is 1000 Zettabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
Back to how much data is in our body. We have about 3,2 billion DNA genome pairs in every cell in our body. there are 4 types, so each pair can be packed into 2 bits, which means every cell in our body contains 800 Megabytes of data, the information equivalent of 250 King James Bibles. Giving there are about 37 trillion cells in our body plus about one quadrillion bacteria in our gut the total amount of information in our body is about 30 Exabytes, most of it duplicated, but yet. In addition, all plants and animals contain DNA, so the total information in the world is staggering, far exceeding the term Yottabyte.
If you are an atheist or true believer in evolution that all this came about by chance plus time plus nothing, especially no sign of intelligent design, the math doesn’t add up.
In 2001 the New York City twin towers were destroyed through a terror attack, and the U.S. response was to collect data to capture terrorists before they could attack. The NSA started to monitor all electronic communication through a program called Prism, starting in earnest in 2007, see fig:
This is in part taking place in a large data center in Utah, housing, it is rumored up to one Yottabyte of collected data. 
What type of data do they collect? Check this figure:
The question is this: How much of this is linked to terror?
Then, today I found out via Wikileaks that NSA is not alone is spying on us.
CIA malware targets iPhone, Android, smart TVs
CIA malware and hacking tools are built by EDG (Engineering Development Group), a software development group within CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence), a department belonging to the CIA’s DDI (Directorate for Digital Innovation). The DDI is one of the five major directorates of the CIA (see this organizational chart of the CIA for more details).
The EDG is responsible for the development, testing and operational support of all backdoors, exploits, malicious payloads, trojans, viruses and any other kind of malware used by the CIA in its covert operations world-wide.
The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell’s 1984, but “Weeping Angel”, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.
The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom’s MI5/BTSS. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In ‘Fake-Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.
As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.
The CIA’s Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones. Infected phones can be instructed to send the CIA the user’s geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone’s camera and microphone.
Despite iPhone’s minority share (14.5%) of the global smart phone market in 2016, a specialized unit in the CIA’s Mobile Development Branch produces malware to infest, control and exfiltrate data from iPhones and other Apple products running iOS, such as iPads. CIA’s arsenal includes numerous local and remote “zero days” developed by CIA or obtained from GCHQ, NSA, FBI or purchased from cyber arms contractors such as Baitshop. The disproportionate focus on iOS may be explained by the popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites.
A similar unit targets Google’s Android which is used to run the majority of the world’s smart phones (~85%) including Samsung, HTC and Sony. 1.15 billion Android powered phones were sold last year. “Year Zero” shows that as of 2016 the CIA had 24 “weaponized” Android “zero days” which it has developed itself and obtained from GCHQ, NSA and cyber arms contractors.
These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking the “smart” phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.
The CIA also runs a very substantial effort to infect and control Microsoft Windows users with its malware. This includes multiple local and remote weaponized “zero days”, air gap jumping viruses such as “Hammer Drill” which infects software distributed on CD/DVDs, infectors for removable media such as USBs, systems to hide data in images or in covert disk areas ( “Brutal Kangaroo”) and to keep its malware infestations going.
Many of these infection efforts are pulled together by the CIA’s Automated Implant Branch (AIB), which has developed several attack systems for automated infestation and control of CIA malware, such as “Assassin” and “Medusa”.
Attacks against Internet infrastructure and webservers are developed by the CIA’s Network Devices Branch (NDB).
The CIA has developed automated multi-platform malware attack and control systems covering Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux and more, such as EDB’s “HIVE” and the related “Cutthroat” and “Swindle” tools, which are described in the examples section below.
In the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks about the NSA, the U.S. technology industry secured a commitment from the Obama administration that the executive would disclose on an ongoing basis — rather than hoard — serious vulnerabilities, exploits, bugs or “zero days” to Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other US-based manufacturers.
Serious vulnerabilities not disclosed to the manufacturers places huge swathes of the population and critical infrastructure at risk to foreign intelligence or cyber criminals who independently discover or hear rumors of the vulnerability. If the CIA can discover such vulnerabilities so can others.
The U.S. government’s commitment to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process came after significant lobbying by US technology companies, who risk losing their share of the global market over real and perceived hidden vulnerabilities. The government stated that it would disclose all pervasive vulnerabilities discovered after 2010 on an ongoing basis.
“Year Zero” documents show that the CIA breached the Obama administration’s commitments. Many of the vulnerabilities used in the CIA’s cyber arsenal are pervasive and some may already have been found by rival intelligence agencies or cyber criminals.
As an example, specific CIA malware revealed in “Year Zero” is able to penetrate, infest and control both the Android phone and iPhone software that runs or has run presidential Twitter accounts. The CIA attacks this software by using undisclosed security vulnerabilities (“zero days”) possessed by the CIA but if the CIA can hack these phones then so can everyone else who has obtained or discovered the vulnerability. As long as the CIA keeps these vulnerabilities concealed from Apple and Google (who make the phones) they will not be fixed, and the phones will remain hackable.
The same vulnerabilities exist for the population at large, including the U.S. Cabinet, Congress, top CEOs, system administrators, security officers and engineers. By hiding these security flaws from manufacturers like Apple and Google the CIA ensures that it can hack everyone at the expense of leaving everyone hackable.
Cyber ‘weapons’ are not possible to keep under effective control.
While nuclear proliferation has been restrained by the enormous costs and visible infrastructure involved in assembling enough fissile material to produce a critical nuclear mass, cyber ‘weapons’, once developed, are very hard to retain.
Cyber ‘weapons’ are in fact just computer programs which can be pirated like any other. Since they are entirely comprised of information they can be copied quickly with no marginal cost.
Securing such ‘weapons’ is particularly difficult since the same people who develop and use them have the skills to exfiltrate copies without leaving traces — sometimes by using the very same ‘weapons’ against the organizations that contain them. There are substantial price incentives for government hackers and consultants to obtain copies since there is a global “vulnerability market” that will pay hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for copies of such ‘weapons’. Similarly, contractors and companies who obtain such ‘weapons’ sometimes use them for their own purposes, obtaining advantage over their competitors in selling ‘hacking’ services.
Over the last three years the United States intelligence sector, which consists of government agencies such as the CIA and NSA and their contractors, such as Booz Allan Hamilton, has been subject to unprecedented series of data exfiltrations by its own workers.
A number of intelligence community members not yet publicly named have been arrested or subject to federal criminal investigations in separate incidents.
Most visibly, on February 8, 2017 a U.S. federal grand jury indicted Harold T. Martin III with 20 counts of mishandling classified information. The Department of Justice alleged that it seized some 50,000 gigabytes of information from Harold T. Martin III that he had obtained from classified programs at NSA and CIA, including the source code for numerous hacking tools.
Once a single cyber ‘weapon’ is ‘loose’ it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by peer states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.
This is where we are today. On Saturday, President Trump found out that he had been spied upon in Trump Tower during the election. The Wikileaks revelation lends credibility to this accusation. And of course, CIA can make it appear that the hacking came from, say Russia and then put in some false software, framing the victim.
Yet, all this spyware, hacking and data gathering is simple compared to the wonder of life.
Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment. 
