Trump keeping 'open mind' on pulling out of climate accord

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Donald J. Trump on Tuesday with Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, right. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times


President-elect Donald J. Trump met with journalists from the newsroom and opinion staff at The New York Times on Tuesday. Here are some of the issues discussed at the meeting. By YARA BISHARA and NICOLE FINEMAN on Publish Date November 22, 2016. Photo by Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »

Politics | Wed Nov 23, 2016 | 5:47am EST
Trump keeping 'open mind' on pulling out of climate accord
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-idUSKBN13H1DZ

   [Video : Trump departs after meeting at New York Times]
   
   By Roberta Rampton | NEW YORK
   
   U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was keeping an
   open mind on whether to pull out of a landmark international accord to
   fight climate change, in a softening of his stance toward global
   warming.
   
   Trump told the New York Times in an interview that he thinks there is
   "some connectivity" between human activity and global warming, despite
   previously describing climate change as a hoax.
   
   A source on Trump's transition team told Reuters earlier this month
   that the New York businessman was seeking quick ways to withdraw the
   United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement to combat climate change.
   
   But asked on Tuesday whether the United States would withdraw from the
   accord, the Republican said: "I'm looking at it very closely. I have an
   open mind to it."
   
   A U.S. withdrawal from the pact, agreed to by almost 200 countries,
   would set back international efforts to limit rising temperatures that
   have been linked to the extinctions of animals and plants, heat waves,
   floods and rising sea levels. .
   
   Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, also said he was thinking about
   climate change and American competitiveness and "how much it will cost
   our companies," he said, according to a tweet by a Times reporter in
   the interview.
   
   Two people advising Trump's transition team on energy and environment
   issues said they were caught off guard by his remarks.
   
   A shift on global warming is the latest sign Trump might be backing
   away from some of his campaign rhetoric as life in the Oval Office
   approaches.
   
   Trump has said he might have to build a fence, rather than a wall, in
   some areas of the U.S.-Mexican border to stop illegal immigration,
   tweaking one of his signature campaign promises.
   
   Also in Tuesday's interview, he showed little appetite for pressing
   investigations of his Democratic rival in the presidential campaign,
   Hillary Clinton.
   
   "I don't want to hurt the Clintons, I really don't. She went through a
   lot and suffered greatly in many different ways," he told reporters,
   editors and other newspaper officials at the Times headquarters in
   Manhattan.


President-elect Donald Trump reacts to a crowd gathered in the lobby of the New York Times building. Trump, who has never previously held public office, was quick to bristle at unflattering news coverage during the campaign, even as he remained accessible to certain reporters, including several from the Times. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
         
   But Trump said "no" when asked if he would rule out investigating
   Clinton over her family's charitable foundation or her use of a private
   email server while she was U.S. secretary of state during President
   Barack Obama's first term.
   
   If Trump does abandon his campaign vow to appoint a special prosecutor
   for Clinton, it will be a reversal of a position he mentioned almost
   daily on the campaign trail, when he dubbed his rival "Crooked
   Hillary," and crowds at his rallies often chanted: "Lock her up."
   
   His comments to the Times about Clinton angered some of his strongest
   conservative supporters.
   
   Breitbart News, the outlet once led by Trump's chief strategist, Steve
   Bannon, published a story on Tuesday under the headline, "Broken
   Promise: Trump 'Doesn't Wish to Pursue' Clinton email charges."
   
   The FBI investigated Clinton's email practices, concluding in July that
   her actions were careless but that there were no grounds for bringing
   charges.
   
   The Clinton Foundation charity has also been scrutinized for donations
   it received, but there has been no evidence that foreign donors
   obtained favors from the State Department while Clinton headed it.
   
   BUSINESSMAN AND PRESIDENT
   
   Trump, a real estate developer who has never held public office,
   brushed off fears over conflicts of interest between his job as
   president and his family's businesses.
   
   "The law's totally on my side, the president can't have a conflict of
   interest," he told the New York Times. My company's so unimportant to
   me relative to what I'm doing," Trump said.
   
   Conflict-of-interest rules for executive branch employees do not apply
   to the president, but Trump will be bound by bribery laws, disclosure
   requirements and a section of the U.S. Constitution that prohibits
   elected officials from taking gifts from foreign governments, according
   to Republican and Democratic ethics lawyers.
   
   "There may be specific laws that don't apply to the president, but the
   president is not above the law," said Richard Painter of the University
   of Minnesota, a former associate counsel to Republican President George
   W. Bush.
   
   "Do we really want to run our government where you have the president,
   the leader of the United States and the free world, saying: 'I'm going
   to do the bare minimum to squeak by?'" asked Norman Eisen, a former top
   ethics lawyer in Obama's White House.
   
   Trump's businesswoman daughter Ivanka joined her father's telephone
   call with Argentine President Mauricio Macri earlier this month and
   attended a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, raising
   questions of possible conflicts of interest.
   
   When asked whether House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan and other
   Republicans in Congress would consider his trillion-dollar
   infrastructure plan, Trump boasted he was popular with the party's
   leaders on Capitol Hill.
   
   "Right now, they're in love with me," he said.
   
   Since his Nov. 8 election victory, Trump has been meeting with
   prospective candidates for top positions in his administration.
   
   Ben Carson, a former Republican presidential hopeful who dropped out of
   the 2016 race and backed Trump, has been offered the post of secretary
   of housing and urban development, Carson spokesman Armstrong Williams
   said.
   
   Carson, a retired surgeon who met with Trump on Tuesday, will think
   about it over the Thanksgiving holiday, Williams said.
   
   Trump arrived in Florida on Tuesday evening to spend Thursday's holiday
   at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach.
   
   (Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus and Amy Tennery in New York;
   Doina Chiacu, Susan Heavey, Steve Holland, Emily Stephenson and Valerie
   Volcovici in Washington; and Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Writing
   by Alistair Bell and Eric Beech; Editing by Frances Kerry and Peter
   Cooney) "

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George Frey/Getty
TRUMP AT NASA: HASTA LA VISTA CLIMATE FRAUD AND MUSLIM OUTREACH...
by JAMES DELINGPOLE | 23 Nov 2016 | 347
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/23/trump-nasa-hasta-la-vista-climate-fraud-muslim-outreach/

  "NASA's top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt has warned President-Elect
   Donald Trump that the planet just won't stand for having a
   fully-fledged climate denier in the White House.
   
   Good luck with that one, Gavin. Or "Toast" as we'll shortly be calling
   you...
   
   Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS),
   told the Independent:
   
      "The point is simple: the climate is changing and you can try to
       deny it, you can appoint people who don't care about it into
       positions of power, but regardless nature has the last vote on
       this."
   
   Unfortunately, Schmidt doesn't feel so strongly on the issue that he is
   prepared to offer his resignation:
   
      Asked if he would resign if the Trump administration adopted the
      most extreme form of climate change denial, Dr Schmidt said this
      was "an interesting question". It would not cause him to quit "in
      and of itself", he said.
     
      "Government science and things generally go on regardless of the
       political views of the people at the top," Dr Schmidt said. "The
       issue would be if you were being asked to skew your results in any
       way or asked not to talk about your results. Those would be much
       more serious issues."
   
   Schmidt's principled position on skewing results is somewhat ironic
   given that skewing results is what he does best.
   
   Last year a German professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert – a retired
   geologist and data computation expert – accused NASA GISS of having
   tampered with the raw data so extensively that it had effectively
   "invented" global warming.
   
   As I reported at Breitbart:
   
      He has painstakingly examined and tabulated all NASA GISS's
      temperature data series, taken from 1153 stations and going back to
      1881. His conclusion: that if you look at the raw data, as opposed
      to NASA's revisions, you'll find that since 1940 the planet has
      been cooling, not warming.
   
   Ewert listed some of the trickery employed by Schmidt and his egregious
   predecessor James "Death Trains" Hansen to exaggerate the appearance of
   "global warming".
   
    • Reducing the annual mean in the early phase.
    • Reducing the high values in the first warming phase.
    • Increasing individual values during the second warming phase.
    • Suppression of the second cooling phase starting in 1995.
    • Shortening the early decades of the datasets.
    • With the long-term datasets, even the first century was shortened.
   
   This chart, comparing the satellite temperature records with Schmidt's
   adjusted version, gives you an idea of the scale of the climate fraud
   being committed by NASA GISS.
   
   
   
   Among Schmidt's many outrageous adjustments are the ones he made to
   Iceland's temperature data sets.
   
   You can see – courtesy of Paul Homewood – what he did to the one at
   Reykjavik:
   
   
   
   So long and slippery are Gavin's tentacles that, it would appear, he has
   somehow persuaded the Iceland Met Office to accept these adjustments,
   where previously it had rebutted them. You can read the full story at
   Real Climate Science.
   
   This is not science. This is political activism of a kind unlikely to
   receive much support from the incoming presidential administration.
   
   Firstly, as we know, Donald Trump has declared himself a sceptic of
   man-made climate change theory.
   
   Secondly, President-Elect Trump holds the old-fashioned view that the
   job of an organisation called National Aeronautics and Space
   Administration really ought to involve stuff like space exploration –
   not, as it became under President Obama, an official promoter of
   climate alarmism and a vehicle for Muslim outreach.
   
   Just to remind you what an emasculated husk Obama made of NASA, here is
   an actual quotation from 2010, in which NASA administrator Charles
   Bolden spoke about his new priorities:
   
      "When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me
       with three things. One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to
       want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our
       international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he
       wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage
       much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good
       about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."
   
   This now looks likely to come to a very welcome end.
   
      According to Bob Walker, who has advised Mr Trump on space policy,
      Nasa has been reduced to "a logistics agency concentrating on space
      station resupply and politically correct environmental monitoring".
     
      Mr Walker, a former congressman who chaired President George W.
      Bush's Commission on the Future of the US Aerospace Industry, told
      The Telegraph: "We would start by having a stretch goal of
      exploring the entire solar system by the end of the century.
   
      "You stretch your technology experts and create technologies that
       wouldn't otherwise be needed. I think aspirational goals are a good
       thing. Fifty years ago it was the ability to go to the moon."
   
   I guess that's bye bye Gavin Schmidt then. He's beginning to sound very
   much like a luxury the U.S. taxpayer cannot afford.
   
   READ MORE STORIES ABOUT:
   Big Government, Breitbart London, Environment, Bob Walker, Charles
   Bolden, Climate Change, Donald Trump, Fraud, Friedrich Karl Ewert,
   Gavin Schmidt, GISS, Global Warming, Muslim outreach, NASA, Obama, Paul
   Homewood, Tony Heller "

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Climate change: It's "game over" for planet earth
[ Most certain when the Climate Change Vampires suck all CO2
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