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Fears that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will pull out of the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming pushed almost 200 nations at climate talks in Morocco on Thursday to declare action an "urgent duty".
Trump has called man-made global warming a hoax and has said he will withdraw from the Paris Agreement, which seeks to wean the global economy off fossil fuels this century with a shift to renewable energies such as wind and solar power.
In a statement, the ministers at the meeting said momentum for cutting greenhouse gases was "irreversible" and reaffirmed their commitment to "full implementation" of the Paris accord.
"We call for the highest political commitment to combat climate change, as a matter of urgent priority," they said in the Marrakesh Action Proclamation.
"Our climate is warming at an alarming and unprecedented rate and we have an urgent duty to respond," it said. Delegates applauded and joined hands above their heads in a standing ovation after the proclamation was read out.
"We call for the highest political commitment to combat climate change, as a matter of urgent priority" by Alister Doyle and Nina Chestney, Reuters, Nov 17, 2016
For more reporting on what transpired at Cop 22 in Marrakesh, see:
To access the official COP 22 website of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), click here.
According to the latest forecasts, 2016/17 should be stamped in history as an official La Niña season. And although its relative weakness has somewhat downplayed its existence, La Niña is already halfway through its run.
La Niña is the cool phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which is very closely monitored by commodity markets as ENSO is one of the most reliable long-term indicators of weather patterns on the global scale.
In its monthly ENSO discussion last week, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center issued a "La Niña Advisory," its first official recognition of the phenomenon’s presence. The agency left the probability for weak La Niña to persist through the Northern Hemispheric winter months unchanged at 55 percent.
La Niña cycle halfway complete - what's next? by Karen Braun, Reuters, Nov 16, 2016
Now we know that many other industries have learned from Big Tobacco’s playbook. Physicians hired by the National Football League have questioned the evidence that concussions can cause brain disease, and soda sellers have financed research to deny that sugar causes obesity. And climate deniers have conducted a kind of scavenger hunt for oddities that appear to challenge the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists.
Climate Change in Trump’s Age of Ignorance, Opinion by Robert Proctor, Sunday Review, New York Times, Oct 19, 2016
America’s TV meteorologists: Symptoms of climate change are rampant, undeniable, Opinion by Paul Douglas, Capital Weather Gang, Washington Post, Nov 18, 2016
The PRISM Climate Group gathers climate observations from a wide range of monitoring networks, applies sophisticated quality control measures, and develops spatial climate datasets to reveal short- and long-term climate patterns. The resulting datasets incorporate a variety of modeling techniques and are available at multiple spatial/temporal resolutions, covering the period from 1895 to the present. Whenever possible, we offer these datasets to the public, either free of charge or for a fee (depending on dataset size/complexity and funding available for the activity).
The COP stands for the “Conference of the Parties.” It is the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), opened for signature in 1992 during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and later entered into force in 1994.
The ZME Science team was at the event for two weeks and shared loads of news and impressions about the discussions and activities that took place at the summit.
For full articles and more information visit: www.zmescience.com
Quote derived with permission from author from:
"So here's the thing. It sounds like a simple question. Is CO2 produced by man's activities causing the planet to warm up? But to answer that question, to make a clear attribution to carbon dioxide, you have to know something about all of these other agents of change. But the fact is we do know a lot about all of those things. You know, thousands of scientists have been working on understanding all of these man-made causes and the natural causes. And we've got it worked out, and we can say, "Yes, CO2 is causing the planet to warm up now."
High resolution JPEG (1024 pixels wide)
Posted by John Hartz on Sunday, 20 November, 2016
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