ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 380

Why so many white evangelicals in Trump’s base are deeply skeptical of climate change

By Sarah Pulliam Bailey

President Trump announced Thursday that he is withdrawing the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, alarming religious leaders here and around the globe who decried the decision as a departure from the nation’s leadership role.

Mainline Protestant denominations, including the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, denounced the president’s actions. Major Jewish, Muslim and Hindu organizations also condemned the president’s withdrawal from the agreement.

Several Catholic leaders also denounced the move, which came just a week after Pope Francis at the Vatican personally handed the president his encyclical urging care for the planet. In the 2015 document, Francis called for an “ecological conversion,” saying Christians have misinterpreted Scripture and “must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures.”

But many evangelicals do not hold this view.

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Trump announces U.S. will exit Paris climate deal, sparking criticism at home and abroad

By Philip Rucker and Jenna Johnson

President Trump announced Thursday afternoon that he is withdrawing the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, an extraordinary move that dismayed America’s allies and set back the global effort to address the warming planet.

Trump’s decision set off alarms worldwide, drawing swift and sharp condemnation from foreign leaders as well as top environmentalists and corporate titans, who decried the U.S. exit from the Paris accord as an irresponsible abdication of American leadership in the face of irrefutable scientific evidence.

Trump, who has labeled climate change a “hoax,” made good on a campaign promise to “cancel” the Paris agreement and Obama-era regulations that he said were decimating industries and killing jobs. The president cast his decision as a “reassertion of America’s sovereignty,” arguing that the climate pact as negotiated under President Barack Obama was grossly unfair to the U.S. workers he had vowed to protect with his populist “America First” platform.

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Life Driven Purpose, pg 60

“And, by the way, when Jesus announced that we should cut off body parts, he was telling others to harm themselves. There were entire monastic orders that castrated themselves because Jesus said in Matthew 19:12 that “he that is able to receive it, let him receive it.” Every year in the United States we read about one or two men who mutilate themselves in order to prove their obedience to Christ. In my opinion, that is immoral.”

–Dan Barker, Life Driven Purpose, pg 60

Discuss!

Climate Science Meets a Stubborn Obstacle: Students

By Amy Harmon

To Gwen Beatty, a junior at the high school in this proud, struggling, Trump-supporting town, the new science teacher’s lessons on climate change seemed explicitly designed to provoke her.

So she provoked him back.

When the teacher, James Sutter, ascribed the recent warming of the Earth to heat-trapping gases released by burning fossil fuels like the coal her father had once mined, she asserted that it could be a result of other, natural causes.

When he described the flooding, droughts and fierce storms that scientists predict within the century if such carbon emissions are not sharply reduced, she challenged him to prove it. “Scientists are wrong all the time,” she said with a shrug, echoing those celebrating President Trump’s announcement last week that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

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How Is Worldwide Sea Level Rise Driven by Melting Arctic Ice?

By Annie Sneed

Climate change is warming the Arctic more than twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet. One of the most serious consequences is sea level rise, which threatens nations from Bangladesh to the U.S. But exactly how does melting Arctic ice contribute to sea level rise? Scientific American asked Eric Rignot, professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, and Andrea Dutton, assistant professor of geology at the University of Florida, how changes in this particular northern region are driving the oceans to dangerous heights.

Seas are now rising an average of 3.2 millimeters per year globally, and are predicted to climb a total of 0.2 to 2.0 meters by 2100. Rignot and Dutton say that in the Arctic, the Greenland Ice Sheet poses the greatest risk for ocean levels because melting land ice is the main cause of rising seas—and “most of the Arctic’s land ice is locked up in Greenland,” Rignot explains. That’s 2.96 million cubic kilometers of ice now covering land areas—and it’s melting into the ocean. If the entire Greenland Ice Sheet thawed, Dutton says, it would raise sea levels by an average of seven meters. That would significantly flood coastal megacities such as Mumbai and Hong Kong.

Greenland’s land ice is already thawing fast enough to raise worldwide seas 0.74 millimeter per year. “The melt rate has been increasing,” in large part because the ice sheet’s surface thawing has picked up as global temperatures warm, Dutton says. “This acceleration of surface melt has doubled Greenland’s contribution to sea level rise” compared with the period from 1992 to 2011, Dutton adds.

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Denmark scraps 334-year-old blasphemy law

By The Guardian

Danish lawmakers have repealed a 334-year-old blasphemy law that forbids public insults of a religion, such as the burning of holy books.

Only a handful of blasphemy trials have taken place in the past 80 years, and several high-profile cases have been dropped, including one involving a caricature of the prophet Muhammad published in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005.

Denmark was the only Scandinavian country with a blasphemy law, which called for up to four months in prison upon conviction, although most people were fined instead.

Politicians who wanted to repeal the law introduced in 1683 “do not believe that there should be special rules protecting religions against expressions”, the Danish parliament said on its website.

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Next-generation cancer drugs boost immunotherapy responses

By Heidi Ledford

An approach to unleashing immune responses against cancer is showing promise in early clinical trials, and may boost the effectiveness of existing therapies.

The experimental drugs target a protein called IDO, which starves immune cells by breaking down the crucial amino acid tryptophan. IDO can suppress immune responses and rein in potentially damaging inflammation. But it can also halt the body’s natural immune response to cancer and allow tumours to grow unchecked. Some tumours even express IDO to shield themselves from the immune system.

Researchers will present the latest round of clinical data from IDO-inhibiting drugs at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois, on 2–6 June. The results add to mounting evidence that IDO inhibitors boost the effectiveness of treatments called immunotherapies, which bolster immune responses against cancer. “It’s almost like you’re taking down a tumour force field,” says Michael Postow, a cancer researcher at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

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Trump ditching Paris climate deal isn’t the end of the world

By Catherine Brahic

Yesterday US president Donald Trump declared “we’re getting out” of the Paris climate agreement, swiftly followed by a pledge to begin negotiations to re-enter it on “better” terms.

The decision will unavoidably damage businesses and research in the US, as well as the health of its population and its international reputation. But how much damage will it inflict on global efforts to keep warming below 2°C? In short, has Trump doomed us all?

Current political pledges, including US targets set by the last president, Barack Obama, add up to a global temperature rise of 3.6°C. To bring that down to 2°C, global emissions must peak as soon as possible, ideally within the next three years, and cease entirely by 2070. That’s a tall order, but the energy sector and industry more generally have undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. Best of all, much of it is happening on the international stage, independent of US federal decisions.

First, the dirtiest of fossil fuels – coal – is in decline, most notably in the US and China. As Trump is at pains to point out, the US coal industry is dying; most agree his best efforts are unlikely to reverse that. Coal-fired power stations around the world are being retired at unprecedented rates and in the last few years, the amount of coal mined globally has fallen.

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Fact-checking Trump’s Paris Agreement speech

By Emily Holden, Dylan Brown, Benjamin Storrow and Scott Waldman

President Trump justified his decision yesterday to leave a global climate accord with debunked conservative talking points and studies funded by groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry.

He claimed the Paris Agreement would make America the laughingstock of the world, costing the country 2.7 million jobs. He said China and India could build coal plants with abandon, while the United States would be forced to shutter its own. Factories would close. Energy prices would skyrocket. Brownouts and blackouts could spread across the power grid, forcing families to go without electricity.

“In short, the agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs. It just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States, and ships them to foreign countries,” Trump said. “The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris Agreement. They went wild. They were so happy — for the simple reason that it put our country, the United States of America, which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage.”

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How scientists reacted to the US leaving the Paris climate agreement

By Jeff Tollefson & Quirin Schiermeier

Nature rounds up reaction from researchers around the world to US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

Jane Lubchenco, marine ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis and former administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

Where to start? President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement shows a blatant disregard for the wishes of most Americans and business leaders, an irresponsible and callous dismissal of the health, safety, and economic well-being of Americans, a moral emptiness in ignoring impacts to the poorest people in the US and around the world, and gross ignorance about overwhelming scientific evidence. Far from “protecting America” as the president stated, withdrawing from Paris will make America more vulnerable and diminish its world leadership. It is terrifying that the individual who should be leading the rest of the world is so arrogant and irresponsible.

Our collective future and that of much of the rest of life on Earth depends in part on confronting climate change and ocean acidification. Doing so requires global collective action. It’s hard to imagine anyone consciously choosing to leave a legacy of impoverishment, economic disruption, increasingly bizarre weather, health impacts ranging from heat strokes to spread of diseases, rising sea levels and flooding — but that is just what the president has done. Moreover, the new path and the president’s proposed budget would forego significant economic opportunities.

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