"... he hasn't been as bad as I feared..." Give him a bit more time...he seems to be gearing up to start a war based on appointments of folks like Bolton. On the other hand, if he really does make peace with North Korea, diffuse tensions with Russia, get us out of Syria...they make take the O man's Peace Prize away and give it to the T man!
Meanwhile, back on topic-ish...
The linked SkS article concludes that as extant measurements of climate change are uncertain, fighting climate change simply comes down to cutting carbon pollution as fast as possible. Unfortunately, the business world believes that if something is not worth measuring then it is not worth doing.
Title: "Climate scientists debate a flaw in the Paris climate agreement"
https://www.skepticalscience.com/flaw-p ... hurer.htmlExtract: "The debate lies in exactly how the Paris climate target is defined and measured, which has not been precisely established. Millar’s team used the UK Met Office and Hadley Centre global surface temperature dataset called HadCRUT4, which begins in 1850 and estimates global surface temperatures have warmed about 0.9°C since that time. The team thus calculated the remaining carbon budget that will lead to an additional 0.6°C warming.
But HadCRUT4 has some significant flaws. First, it only covers 84% of Earth’s surface. There are large gaps in its coverage, mainly in the Arctic, Antarctica, and Africa, where temperature monitoring stations are relatively scarce. And the Arctic is the fastest-warming part of the planet, which means that HadCRUT4 somewhat underestimates global warming.
A second issue is that over the oceans, HadCRUT4 uses sea surface temperatures, which haven’t warmed quite as fast as air temperatures directly above the ocean surface. There’s also a third issue – what’s the start date from which we want to stay below 1.5 or 2°C warming? The starting point in HadCRUT4 is 1850, but another recent study led by Schurer found that starting even earlier would add up to 0.2°C to the warming we’ve already caused, and thus shrink the remaining carbon budget.
Taken all together, these three issues could mean that we’ve already warmed 0.2–0.3°C more than estimated in the Millar study, which would mean a significantly smaller carbon budget. Each additional 0.1°C warming shrinks the remaining 2°C carbon budget by about 20%, so in that sense even one-tenth of a degree is important in answering this question about our chances of meeting the Paris targets.
…
It’s simple: cut carbon pollution as much and as fast as possible"
(Thanks to aslr at asif for link and text)