Google, which prides itself on building a "better web that is better for the environment", is hosting a fundraiser for the most notorious climate change denier in Congress, it has emerged.

The lunch, at the company's Washington office, will benefit the Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe, who has made a career of dismissing climate change as a "hoax" on the Senate floor.

Proceeds of the 11 July lunch, priced at $250 to $2,500, will also go to the national Republican Senatorial Committee.

It's the second show of support from Google for the anti-climate cause in recent weeks.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that the internet company had donated $50,000 for a fundraising dinner for the ultra-conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute – topping the contributions even of the Koch oil billionaires.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has launched multiple law suits aimed at trying to discredit the science behind climate change – accusing scientists of fraud. None have so far succeeded.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jul/09/google-climate-denier-jim-inhofe

Tony Abbott is the alternative prime minister of Australia, and later this year he will face an election presenting a climate change policy that is frankly insulting and potentially dangerous.

The Coalition's climate change policy amounts to a bullet point in a pamphlet – the "Real Solutions for Australians" plan – number 10 of 12 such bullet points. It reads:

"We will take direct action to reduce carbon emissions inside Australia, not overseas – and also establish a 15,000-strong Green Army to clean up the environment."

Digging down, the direct action "policy" comprises of:

• An "Emissions Reduction Fund" of $3bn to fund projects that would reduce carbon emissions, based on a tender process.
• Support for projects such as "soil carbon technologies and abatement".
• A commitment to reducing carbon emissions by 5% by 2020.

To understand this "voluntary approach" to climate change policy, you need to understand where Abbott and the Coalition are coming from: a position of denial that climate change is real and driven by human activity. In addition to saying "climate change is crap", in a more considered interview with the ABC's Four Corners, Abbott said:

"I have pointed out in the past that there was that high year a few years ago and the warming, if you believe various measuring organisations, hasn't increased … the point is not the science, the point is how should government respond, and we have a credible response."

If you don't believe that global warming is real, then the "direct action" policy could be considered "credible".

An increasing number of Coalition members are climate denialists.

read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/southern-crossroads/2013/jul/08/tony-abbott-climate-policy-australia

It’s no surprise to regular readers I am quite concerned about climate change. My concern on this issue is two-fold: one consists of the actual global consequences of the reality of global warming, and the other is the blatant manipulation of that reality by those who would deny it.

These two issues overlap mightily when it comes to Arctic sea ice. The ice around the North Pole is going away, and it’s doing so with alarming rapidity. I don’t mean the yearly cycle of melt in the summer and freeze in the winter, though that plays into this; I mean the long-term trend of declining amounts of ice. There are two ways to categorize the amount of ice: by measuring the extent (essentially the area of the ocean covered by ice, though in detail it’s a little more complicated) or using volume, which includes the thickness of the ice. Either way, though, the ice is dwindling away. That is a fact.

Of course, facts are malleable things when it comes to the deniosphere. One popular denier claim is that Arctic sea ice extent is higher in recent years than it was in 1989, therefore claims of it melting away are false.

This is so blatantly wrong that it’s hard to believe anyone could make that claim with a straight face. But make it they do, like Lawrence Soloman did in (surprise!) an OpEd in the Financial Post (which, like the Wall Street Journal, is a refuge for denialist claims). Soloman’s silliness is taken apart easily by Tamino on his blog. Harrison Schmitt has made this claim as well. It’s simple cherry picking your data, and a huge no-no when it comes to real science.

When you look at the average, the trend in the ice, it goes down, down, down. Over time, there’s less.

How much less? I was curious about this recently, because most of the graphs I see deal with what scientists call “anomalies”, that is, departures from average. If people average 180 centimeters tall, and you are 182 cm in height, your “height anomaly” is +2 cm. If you were 173 cm tall your height anomaly is -7 cm. Simple, and useful when dealing with some physical effects, but sometimes the emotional impact is lost. If you hear someone has a height anomaly of +15 cm you’d think that was interesting, but if you met them in person you’d see that means they’re really tall.

The same with sea ice. Graphs show us that sea ice is declining over time, but it’s shown as a percentage, or a deviation from some past period. That’s good to give you a grasp of the situation, but doesn’t tell you how much actual ice is left.

So what’s the real loss of ice we’re experience every year?

The answer is: a lot. A whole lot. Even after seeing the numbers, I was taken aback by this graph which shows sea ice extent plotted over time.

The solid black line is the amount of sea ice over the year averaged from 1979 – 2000. The dashed line is the amount in 2012, and the brownish solid line is this year, up to late May. As you can see, we’re right on track to match last year—which was way below average. This plot is from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, and they have an interactive version where you can add or subtract various years. You can see we are headed for serious trouble, and soon. The ten lowest maxima for extent in the satellite record all occurred in the last ten years.

Obviously, Arctic ice grows every winter and melts every summer. In March 2013, the Arctic ice reached its maximum extent, which was the sixth lowest on record (it naturally fluctuates a bit year to year, but the trend is definitely downward). It drops to its minimum extent in September, but on top of that, over time, the minimum amount itself is shrinking.

Look again at the graph, at the bottom of the y-axis. That line is 0, meaning zero ice, essentially nothing but liquid water at the Earth’s north polar regions; that means this graph gives you an absolute scale. Then note that the past year’s minimum was only half the amount of ice we had on average from 1979 – 2000. If you click on previous years to add them to the graph, you’ll see that the past ten years or so have had very low ice minima; these correspond to most of the warmest years on record.

And it gets yet worse. If you look at the volume of sea ice, that drops even faster than the extent. This terrifying video uses a clever graphic to demonstrate just how much sea ice we lose every year.

So the volume of ice is decreasing even faster every year as well; the ice is getting thinner and thinner. This is a very bad sign, as thinner ice melts more easily. No one knows when we’ll have the first ice-free Arctic summer—extrapolating into the future can be difficult—but one thing we can bet on is that it’ll be a lot sooner than the year 2100 as originally predicted just a few years ago. It could be in as little as 30 years. Although some deniers claim this Arctic loss is offset by growth in Antarctic ice, this claim as usual, is simply false.

Of course, oil companies are already planning on exploiting an ice-free Arctic to drill for more oil. The irony is obvious, but there’s also the added point that while oil money is behind a lot of the denial, they themselves are ready to jump on the positive—for them—effects of global warming.

And, no doubt, the deniers will make lots of noise about this, calling me an alarmist and pointing to ever more cherry-picked data and misleadingly plotted numbers. But the fact is the Earth is warming up. That’s melting the ice at both poles, increasing sea levels. We’re still dumping gigatons of carbon dioxide in the air every year, and the amount increases at a steady and measurable level. That CO2 is warming us up.

Stopping the deniers may be as hard as stopping the warming itself. Perhaps once we have satellite images of an ice-free north pole we’ll see a change in public sentiment. It’s a shame that may be what it’ll take. My concern is that by the time that happens, it’ll be too late.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/05/28/arctic_sea_ice_

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The positives of global warming, by Gus:

Canada winters won't be so severe.

Russian winters won't be so severe.

Australian winters won't be so severe (hum?)

Storms will give the insurance industry something to do.

Summers in Australia will be extended by three months and go from hot to bloody hot

Rising sea levels will drown the poor delta people of the earth, leaving only the rich to inherit the planet

The rich now living on the glorious foreshore have enough money to buy the middle class out of living on the hills.

The oil trade route will open in the Arctic all year round

We won't have to burn so much coal to stay warm (though we'll burn more to stay cool)

Viewpoint: Air-Conditioning Will Be the End of Us

Trying to engineer hot weather out of existence in an age of man-made global warming is indefensible

Earlier this week, as the temperature in New York City hit the upper 90s and the heat index topped 100, my utility provider issued a heat alert and advised customers to use air-conditioning “wisely.” It was a nice, polite gesture but also an utterly ineffectual one. After all, despite our other green tendencies, most Americans still believe that the wise way to use air conditioners is to crank them up, cooling down every room in the house — or even better, relax in the cold blasts of a movie theater or shopping mall, where someone else pays the bills. Today Americans use twice as much energy for air-conditioning as we did 20 years ago, and more than the rest of the world’s nations combined. As a climate-change adaptation strategy, this is as dumb as it gets.

I’m hardly against air-conditioning. During heat waves, artificial cooling can save the lives of old, sick and frail people, and epidemiologists have shown that owning an AC unit is one of the strongest predictors of who survives during dangerously hot summer weeks. I’ve long advocated public-health programs that help truly vulnerable people, whether isolated elders in broiling urban apartments or farm workers who toil in sunbaked fields, by giving them easy access to air-conditioning.

read more: http://ideas.time.com/2013/07/17/viewpoint-air-conditioning-will-be-the-end-of-us/?iid=tsmodule

The heatwave currently sending temperatures soaring around Britain could last as long as two months, with experts predicting it may well end up beating the scorching summer of 1976 for maximum temperatures and longevity.

The Met Office today extended its level two health alert, warning that dangerously high temperatures could last until the end of July.

On Saturday - the hottest day of the year so far with temperatures of 31.4C - the Met Office raised the alert to level three; the final point before the situation is declared an emergency and special measures taken to save lives.

There is no immediate end in sight to the sizzling summer weather however, with forecasters predicting the heatwave is likely to continue well past the current health alert expiry point, leading to a blisteringly hot August.

If that happens and temperatures stay at similar levels to what they are now, the heatwave of 2013 will beat that of 1976 – currently the hottest summer average temperature since records began.

Jonathan Powell, a forecaster at Vantage Weather Services, told the Express newspaper: “There is not a shred of evidence it is going to end any time soon… The rest of July is showing a similar picture and now August looks like following suit, so we could be looking at another six weeks or more of this.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-weather-heatwave-could-last-two-months-beating-records-set-by-sizzling-summer-of-1976-8708770.html

A former Forbes journalist has claimed that Google pressured her employer into unpublishing a 2011 piece she wrote that was critical of the tech titan - and then scrubbed the cached version from search engine results.

Kashmir Hill, now a senior reporter for Gizmodo, wrote that she was working for Forbes in 2011 during the roll-out of Google's ill-fated social network, Google Plus, (six years later, less than one percent of Google's users have a Plus account and only a fraction of that minority actually use the network with any regularity, according to Forbes).

But in 2011, Google Plus was generating significant buzz, with outlets like the IB Times saying it was "poised to overshadow Facebook." The key consideration for this was that the integration of Plus with Google's many other successful features, such as the eponymous search engine, would extend Alphabet's dominance to the world of social networks as well.

Hill wrote that Google intended to tie search engine results to Plus, encouraging Forbes and other outlets to add Plus' "+1" social button to articles because Plus recommendations would improve an article's search results on Google.

Or, to put it another way, according to Hill: "if a publisher didn't put a +1 button on the page, [then their] search results would suffer." She asked Google's representatives if this was correct, and they told her yes.

She adds that she followed up by approaching Google's public relations team, who she claims told her that the Plus button "influences the ranking." They didn't deny that excluding the +1 button would damage an article's Google search results.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/science/201709011057009844-google-negative-story-search-suppression/

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Australian authorities are aiming to create the world's first media code that will require Big Tech companies to pay news outlets to host their content on their sites, namely Google and Facebook. The two tech giants have criticized the legislation, threatening to withdraw their services from the nation should it come into effect.

The US-based internet giant Google has struck a multimillion deal with Seven West Media, a news company in Australia, to pay for its news to be displayed in Google’s News Showcase, the Guardian reported Monday.

According to the report, the chairman of the Australian media company, Kerry Stokes, said the agreement gives the company "fair payment" for its content. However, the agreement has another 30 days before it is sealed.

The exact amount of the agreement was not disclosed.

According to the report, Showcase licensing agreements are a way for Google to pay news outlets without paying for the news shown in search results. Google is currently in talks about the feature with other Australian media outlets.

Google News Showcase - which just launched in Australia - is a new product which benefits both publishers and readers. Participating publishers increase their revenue through monthly payments from Google. Find out more → https://t.co/B5g30yqJ8Fpic.twitter.com/cz8IhVxeuF

A similar function called Facebook News has been created by Facebook and the company is reportedly in negotiations with unnamed media outlets in Australia. 

According to the Associated Press, Google has signed agreements with more than 450 publications worldwide. The company is already reportedly paying smaller Australian media, with Seven West being the first major company on board.

The code drafted by the Australian government is stemming from a 2018 Treasury department order to Australia’s competition and consumer agency to investigate the effect of the tech giants on the struggling news media environment. Some critics claim that the new rules were drafted at the behest of Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Google and Facebook campaigned against the rule, finding it unworkable and saying it addresses deceptive sources of the struggles of news media outlets. Last year, Facebook threatened to ban Australians from sharing news if the code was passed, while Google said in January it would have "no choice" but to shut down its search engine in Australia. 

As policymakers around the world move to counter the outsized power of US-based tech giants, the rule could prove to be a pacesetter for other nations.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/business/202102151082086266-google-to-pay-millions-to-australian-media-company-for-news-content---report/

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