Climate Change Report in Balance Whilst Hope the Whale Hangs in NHM

There is a draft Climate Change report sitting on President Trump's desk, written by scientists from 13 federal agencies. It points out that the most recent decades have been the hottest for the past 1,500 years. You can read the draft 600 plus page report here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/climate/document-Draft-of-the-Climate-Science-Special-Report.html

It confirms that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change.”

The extreme weather events since 1980 have cost the US $1.1 trillion so far.

With a climate skeptic President, there is currently unease that the final report may not actually make it into the public domain.

The fear is not helped by recently published letters from the early days of the administration, to the United States Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). They apparently instruct staff to avoid the use of the phrase Climate Change and replace it with phrases such as “weather extremes”. However Kaveh Sadeghzadeh, NRCS’s communications director, told The Huffington Post, “these emails, sent in the first days of the new Administration, did not reflect the direction of senior agency leadership.” The NRCS “has not received direction from USDA or the Administration to modify its communications on climate change or any other topic.”

With North Korea remaining strident about it's nuclear deterrent with threats to the US, President Trump broke from his holiday to deliver a similar hard response: make more threats and North Korea would "face fire and fury like the world has never seen".

The possible resultant nuclear winter would be a drastic solution to global warming.

I saw 'Hope' the whale hanging in the main hall in the Natural History Museum in London for the first time today. The impact of a whale descending towards you was ruined for me by the placement of a museum stand right at the point where the public should be standing.

In fact, the more impressive view was from the higher galleries. That said, it was a more than adequate replacement of Dippy the Diplodocus who has gone on a national tour. I tried taking some stereo pictures. It will be interesting to see if they work.

I was there for the Quekett Microscopical Club Gossip meeting, a show and tell, today on botanical slides. I stayed on afterwards for a curry at a nearby restaurant before setting off back home.