ANS -- Climate denial and the Antarctic

This is about what's going on with climate change, the antarctic, and the climate deniers.  I'm mostly just sending it because I hadn't heard about it on the news.  Had you?

--Kim

The Other 98% 

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The United States walked into a meeting about saving Antarctica and asked everyone to please stop saying the words "climate change." France refused.

In May, delegates from 44 countries gathered in Hiroshima to work through the treaty that has governed Antarctica since 1959. The job was simple: tell the truth about what is happening to the ice.

Instead, American negotiators pushed to drop broad language like "climate change" and swap in vague references to "specific" environmental changes, as if the continent were melting by coincidence.

The French delegation drew a line. They warned that the steady disappearance of climate references was a real concern, and that climate change is a reality affecting every country regardless of borders. Refusing to even name it, France argued, would set a dangerous precedent.

Here is what those words describe.

Antarctica is now shedding around 135 billion tons of ice every year. Emperor penguins, who need stable sea ice just to raise their chicks, were recently listed as endangered, and at this very meeting the parties failed to grant them the protected status scientists called for.

The melt the US wants left unnamed is the same melt that raises the seas lapping at Miami, Norfolk, and every coastal town in America.

None of this is a scientific argument. Claire Christian of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition put it flatly: the evidence is clear, the region is changing fast, and the effects are already hitting planetary systems. There is no honest disagreement here, only an administration that would rather edit the thermometer than read it.

This is not a one-off edit in a single report. The administration pulled the US out of the Paris climate agreement for the second time, and in February the EPA repealed the 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health, the legal foundation under nearly every federal rule limiting carbon pollution.

Trump, who has called climate change a "con job," cheered the rollback as the biggest deregulation in American history and canceled roughly $8 billion in clean energy funding. Striking the words out of an Antarctic report is just the same project in miniature: if you never measure the fire, you never have to admit the house is burning.

Evan Bloom, a former American diplomat who spent years inside these negotiations, named it plainly: the move shows how far out of step the US has drifted from the rest of the world, and it fits a White House that fights any focus on climate at the tables it sits at.

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