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Friday Cat Blogging – 17 June 2016

Mother Jones

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Hilbert and Hopper get along fine, but they don’t cuddle up together much anymore. Yesterday they did, however, when Hilbert decided to barge into the pod that Hopper had already staked out. Usually she gives up pretty quickly when this happens (you can almost feel Hopper mentally rolling her eyes and then heading off to some Hilbert-free spot), but this time she held her ground. Aren’t they adorable?

And speaking of adorable, yesterday I wrote a post wondering what the hell Donald Trump meant by this: “Every time you turn on one of those aircraft carriers it costs you probably a million bucks. I’d say, don’t turn it on. The captain would say, we want to show you how great these engines are working. No, I don’t want to hear it, just stop.”

Well, a reader from Denmark emails to suggest that this was—wait for it—a Reaganesque reimagining by Donald, who told this story years ago about his own yacht. As soon as he started talking about things that float on the water—i.e., aircraft carriers—his mind apparently drifted back to his own personal experience with things that float on the water—i.e., the ill-fated Trump Princess megayacht. And if my reader is right, a captain of the Trump Princess once wanted to show off his ship’s engines to the boss, who was horrified at the potential expense of firing them up.

This totally makes sense, since Trump is so self-involved that everything always relates back to himself in one way or another. And it also makes sense that he might not have wanted to fire up the engines in his yacht—especially since he was in the process of going bankrupt at the time—whereas it makes no sense at all to worry about “turning on” the engine of a nuclear-powered Nimitz-class supercarrier. So: can anyone verify this? Did Trump originally tell this story about his own yacht, and somehow drifted back in time when he was talking about aircraft carriers yesterday?

And now, since you’ve all been so patient about me sneaking a Trump story into a catblogging post, on to the cats.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 17 June 2016

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Ted Cruz Used A Line From The Aaron Sorkin Film "The American President"

Mother Jones

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It seems clear that this wasn’t plagiarism so much as an homage but it’s still weird.

It would be funny if he had said, “I’m gonna get the guns.”

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Ted Cruz Used A Line From The Aaron Sorkin Film "The American President"

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What if Al Gore ran for president, again?

What if Al Gore ran for president, again?

By on 18 Mar 2015commentsShare

Al Gore’s an important guy to the climate movement. Back in 2006, he helped focus America’s attention (briefly) on the threat of climate change, and he’s been fighting the good fight ever since without attracting the same amount of attention (or ire). Until, maybe, now. The media is paying attention again — and some are even suggesting he run in the Democratic primary against Clinton in 2016.

Ezra Klein argues that a Gore candidacy would put climate change at the top of the agenda, where it should be. While income inequality, which many Democrats are currently focused on, is a “serious problem,” Klein writes, “climate change is an existential threat.” Also, a president can do more on his or her own to fight climate change than to fight inequality.

When it comes to climate change, there’s no one in the Democratic Party — or any other political party — with Gore’s combination of credibility and commitment. Bill McKibben, founder of the climate action group 350.org, calls Gore’s work on the issue “the most successful second act of any political life in U.S. history.” Perhaps that’s hyperbole, but it speaks to the regard in which Gore is held by climate activists. Though he’s been out of office for 15 years, he’s never left the climate fight. Gore has proven himself the opposite of those politicians who love the game more than they care about the issues.

Moreover, in an era in which very little moves through Congress, climate change is an issue where the president has real unilateral authority. The Environmental Protection Agency has the power to aggressively regulate greenhouse gas emissions — a process the Obama administration has begun, but that the next president will need to continue. Much of the crucial work on climate change requires coming to agreements with India and China — and that, too, is an arena where the president can act even if Congress is paralyzed.

Klein notes that running on climate change alone probably wouldn’t work. Unfortunately, Americans just don’t care that much about an issue they think of as a future threat (though by the end of the next president’s term, the American public might come to see that the threat has moved firmly into the present). But Klein points out that Gore, historically, has been more in line with the Democratic base than Clinton on other issues as well. “He opposed the Iraq War and endorsed single-payer health care, for instance. His Reinventing Government initiatives, mixed with his Silicon Valley contacts and experience, look pretty good for a post-Healthcare.gov era.”

So, according to Klein, a Gore presidency should sound pretty good to climate hawks. But some argue that Gore’s high-profile involvement with the climate movement keeps climate change a partisan issue, hurting the movement. From a New York Times profile on Gore this week:

Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, says Mr. Gore has become a symbol of climate change, which is both good and bad. He energized Democrats on climate issues, but alienated many conservatives, with the eager help of groups like the Heartland Institute and its allies like [Sen. James] Inhofe, who demonize Mr. Gore as part of their campaign to undercut the scientific consensus on the human role in global warming.

“Al Gore cannot ever reinvent himself from the fact that he became one of the country’s most polarizing political leaders,” Dr. Leiserowitz says. “Even as he is trying to explain climate change, he is reminding people, amplifying the conservative response around him.”

Maybe Gore did contribute to making climate change a partisan issue way back in 2006. But unfortunately, that ship has sailed. No matter what action Obama, Clinton, or any other Democrat might propose to take on climate change, conservative politicians won’t be on board. The Republican Party has moved further and further to the right, and become more and more unwilling to work with Democrats on solutions to anything. Gore’s degree of visibility — whether he decides to run for president repeatedly or become a hermit in Mongolia for the rest of his days — won’t change that.

Another problem with a Gore candidacy could be the money he’s made while championing climate science, and the supposed hypocrisy involved in the lifestyle he’s lived with that money. As Luke Brinker writes at Salon, deniers tend to see Gore’s wealth as tantamount to proof that climate change is a hoax — a hoax intended to enrich Al Gore and those sniggering scientists at the IPCC:

You may remember that during the rollout of his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and for years thereafter, climate skeptics have proven all too keen to pounce on Gore’s hypocrisies — his sky-high utility bills, his fondness for private air travel, and so on — as if his own bad habits somehow debunked climate science; Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) even cited Gore’s marital troubles in explaining his about-face on the issue. It’s all patently ridiculous, but even the patently ridiculous helps shape our political discourse. So those of us who acknowledge climate change as an existential threat must also own up to the fact that the anti-science crowd relishes the idea of Gore as their foil. Laudable as Gore’s climate work has been, his political reemergence would risk debasing the climate debate at least as much as it would offer hope for moving that debate forward.

This whole debate is moot, for now, because Gore hasn’t publicly expressed any interest in running another campaign. But it does seem that, by merely continuing to exist and talk about climate, Gore has prompted at least a small discussion about how global warming will figure into the 2016 campaign. And that can’t hurt.

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What if Al Gore ran for president, again?

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Climate Change Deniers Take Yet Another Hit

Mother Jones

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Climate change deniers don’t have a lot of credible scientists who support their view. But they have a few, and one of the busiest and most prolific is Wei-Hock Soon, who insists that global warming is caused by variations in the sun’s output, not by anything humans are doing. Soon’s doctorate is in aerospace engineering, not atmospheric science or geophysics or some more relevant discipline, but he’s nonetheless an actual scientist and a reliable ally for the climate deniers.

Unfortunately, the New York Times reports a wee problem with Soon’s work:

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.

Oops. But a friend of mine suggests that the real news is the way climate change was treated by the Times reporters who wrote the story. Here are a few snippets:

The documents shed light on the role of scientists like Dr. Soon in fostering public debate over whether human activity is causing global warming. The vast majority of experts have concluded that it is and that greenhouse emissions pose long-term risks to civilization.

….Many experts in the field say that Dr. Soon uses out-of-date data, publishes spurious correlations between solar output and climate indicators, and does not take account of the evidence implicating emissions from human behavior in climate change….“The science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, whose scientists focus largely on understanding distant stars and galaxies, routinely distances itself from Dr. Soon’s findings. The Smithsonian has also published a statement accepting the scientific consensus on climate change.

Etc.

There’s no he-said-she-said in this piece. No critics are quoted suggesting that there’s an honest controversy about human contributions to climate change. There’s no weaseling. It’s simply assumed that climate change is real and humans are a primary cause—the same way a similar article might assume that evolution or general relativity are true.

I haven’t followed the Times’ coverage of climate change in close enough detail to know if this represents an editorial change of direction or not. But whether it’s new or not, it’s nice to see. More please.

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Climate Change Deniers Take Yet Another Hit

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