Saturday, April 14, 2018

More impactful climate change news Walker, WI will ignore

To Wisconsin's hard-right GOP Gov. Scott Walker, political integrity is much like an environmental ethic; who needs it?

With environmental outlier Wisconsin scrubbing climate change science off its webpages, and repetitive, extreme storms also getting the Walker shoulder shrug
  
expect no official reaction in our agricultural and forest products state to this finding.
A major climate boundary in the central U.S. has shifted 140 miles due to global warming
Scientists say it will almost certainly continue shifting in coming decades, expanding the arid climate of the western Plains into what we think of as the Midwest. The implications for farming could be huge. 
Six years ago I used an Internet climate predicting tool and found that Madison's weather is heading for what's normal in Wichita, Kansas.

To be fair to Walker, however, he once took a direct question about what he'd do about climate change and said he learned as a Boy Scout to always leave your campsite cleaner than you found it.


The record here and here indicate that he has not applied that cleaner-than-he'd-found-it principle very widely.


For example, here:

Walker's legacy? Ignoring, unwinding predecessors' environmental records.
Lake Michigan defines Wisconsin's eastern border, but Gov. Scott Walker is leaving on that lakeshore an environmental legacy of shame.
His calculated, donor-driven degradation of the Wisconsin DNR - - and, mind you this began in his first few days in office with an attack for a donor on a Brown County wetland - - an exceptional disdain for Wisconsin's conservation heritage and for the integrity of the Great Lakes also makes him an outlier compared to his predecessors in both parties who can claim legacy environmental achievements which Walker is undermining and showing no interest in bequeathing anything similar.
And similarly,  here
Scott Walker signs bills dismantling GAB, overhauling campaign finance law
Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group founded by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, was one of two entities registered with the state to lobby in favor of the bill...
The campaign finance measure removes various limits on campaign contributions, some of which recently have not been in effect after being struck down in court. It lifts the ban on corporate contributions to political parties and legislative campaign committees and doubles individual contribution limits to candidates.
It makes clear that candidates may coordinate with issue advocacy groups, the type of activity that was at the center of the investigation into Walker’s campaign. Such groups seek to influence elections but don’t expressly call for the election or defeat of a particular candidate.
Shakespeare in "The Tempest" told us "what's past is prologue." Walker's more in Henry Ford's camp: "History is bunk." Science, too, so whose Department of Natural Resources needs a science bureau, Bucky?
CLIMATE CHANGE | 15 RESEARCHERS TRANSFERRED TO NEW PROGRAMS 
Lawmakers say GOP reining in DNR scientists who rebelled on climate change
And let's close that loop: 
Sen. Tom Tiffany says he asked governor for DNR job cuts
Because tor Tiffany, like Walker, science, and what's past, is bunk:
State Sen. Tom Tiffany has owned up to asking for job cuts to DNR scientists, who he has said focus too much on climate change...
DNR scientists have studied the effects of rising temperatures on issues like trout management, tree cover and pest infiltration. Scientists maintain that management of such resources has to take climate change into account.
But Tiffany said there’s no scientific reason to set policy based on climate changes.
“It happens,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that man is causing global warming, and it doesn’t mean that we should have these significant shifts in public policy without having proof that we are causing this.”

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