scholarly journals White House Science Adviser Blasts Congress at NSF Meeting

Eos ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 096 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randy Showstack

John Holdren, science adviser to President Obama, critiqued geoscience budget cuts passed by the House of Representatives and Congress members equating geosciences with climate change research.

Eos ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randy Showstack

Holdren said that investing in climate change science and policy measures is good for the economy, national security, and the environment.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Marlow ◽  
Sean Miller ◽  
J. Timmons Roberts

This study explores the role of Twitter bots (automated users) in online discourse on climate change. We examined 6.5 million tweets posted during the days leading up to and the month following President Donald Trump’s June 1, 2017 announcement of the United States’ withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. Of a 10% sample of users, we used the machine learning algorithm “Botometer” to identify likely mechanized “bots.” Botometer identified 17,509 suspected bot accounts, representing about 9% of users and 17% of all tweets. Query limits on Botometer and the capacity of STM modeling reduced our final sample size to 167,259 tweets. We then used the ‘stm’ package in the R statistical programming language to implement structural topic models to cluster tweet content into topics. We identified 34 topics. Topics broadly fell into categories related to news of the withdrawal and the responses from various media and government personnel, posts about climate change research, discussions of the denial of climate change, and finally activist topics with campaign goals. Within these topics, bots were often common, representing as much as 38% of tweets. Additionally, among the most common 15 topics, we found evidence that after adjusting for topic size, timing of tweets, and whether a user was suspended, tweets produced by bots were more likely relative to non-bot users to fall into four topics. These topics included tweets sharing news links on the announcement, links related to climate research, links sharing denialist research, and links about White House aids and their views of fossil fuels. These findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support for Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 1962
Author(s):  
Zhilong Zhao ◽  
Yue Zhang ◽  
Zengzeng Hu ◽  
Xuanhua Nie

The alpine lakes on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) are indicators of climate change. The assessment of lake dynamics on the TP is an important component of global climate change research. With a focus on lakes in the 33° N zone of the central TP, this study investigates the temporal evolution patterns of the lake areas of different types of lakes, i.e., non-glacier-fed endorheic lakes and non-glacier-fed exorheic lakes, during 1988–2017, and examines their relationship with changes in climatic factors. From 1988 to 2017, two endorheic lakes (Lake Yagenco and Lake Zhamcomaqiong) in the study area expanded significantly, i.e., by more than 50%. Over the same period, two exorheic lakes within the study area also exhibited spatio-temporal variability: Lake Gaeencuonama increased by 5.48%, and the change in Lake Zhamuco was not significant. The 2000s was a period of rapid expansion of both the closed lakes (endorheic lakes) and open lakes (exorheic lakes) in the study area. However, the endorheic lakes maintained the increase in lake area after the period of rapid expansion, while the exorheic lakes decreased after significant expansion. During 1988–2017, the annual mean temperature significantly increased at a rate of 0.04 °C/a, while the annual precipitation slightly increased at a rate of 2.23 mm/a. Furthermore, the annual precipitation significantly increased at a rate of 14.28 mm/a during 1995–2008. The results of this study demonstrate that the change in precipitation was responsible for the observed changes in the lake areas of the two exorheic lakes within the study area, while the changes in the lake areas of the two endorheic lakes were more sensitive to the annual mean temperature between 1988 and 2017. Given the importance of lakes to the TP, these are not trivial issues, and we now need accelerated research based on long-term and continuous remote sensing data.


2021 ◽  
pp. 004728162110078
Author(s):  
Shanna Cameron ◽  
Alexandra Russell ◽  
Luke Brake ◽  
Katherine Fredlund ◽  
Angela Morris

This article engages with recent discussions in the field of technical communication that call for climate change research that moves beyond the believer/denier dichotomy. For this study, our research team coded 900 tweets about climate change and global warming for different emotions in order to understand how Twitter users rely on affect rhetorically. Our findings use quantitative content analysis to challenge current assumptions about writing and affect on social media, and our results indicate a number of arenas for future research on affect, global warming, and rhetoric.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heikki S. Lehtonen ◽  
Jyrki Aakkula ◽  
Stefan Fronzek ◽  
Janne Helin ◽  
Mikael Hildén ◽  
...  

AbstractShared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), developed at global scale, comprise narrative descriptions and quantifications of future world developments that are intended for climate change scenario analysis. However, their extension to national and regional scales can be challenging. Here, we present SSP narratives co-developed with stakeholders for the agriculture and food sector in Finland. These are derived from intensive discussions at a workshop attended by approximately 39 participants offering a range of sectoral perspectives. Using general background descriptions of the SSPs for Europe, facilitated discussions were held in parallel for each of four SSPs reflecting very different contexts for the development of the sector up to 2050 and beyond. Discussions focused on five themes from the perspectives of consumers, producers and policy-makers, included a joint final session and allowed for post-workshop feedback. Results reflect careful sector-based, national-level interpretations of the global SSPs from which we have constructed consensus narratives. Our results also show important critical remarks and minority viewpoints. Interesting features of the Finnish narratives compared to the global SSP narratives include greater emphasis on environmental quality; significant land abandonment in SSPs with reduced livestock production and increased plant-based diets; continued need for some farm subsidies across all SSPs and opportunities for diversifying domestic production under scenarios of restricted trade. Our results can contribute to the development of more detailed national long-term scenarios for food and agriculture that are both relevant for local stakeholders and researchers as well as being consistent with global scenarios being applied internationally.


2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 364
Author(s):  
Amanda S. Gallinat ◽  
Richard B. Primack ◽  
David L. Wagner

2014 ◽  
Vol 122 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elmar Kriegler ◽  
Jae Edmonds ◽  
Stéphane Hallegatte ◽  
Kristie L. Ebi ◽  
Tom Kram ◽  
...  

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