Joe Issa On Frightening AP Fact Check – “Global Warming Real,

A Story by Sally Shiv

Long before the Associated Press (AP) fact check on global warming surfaced, exposing mistaken assertions among recent United States administrators,

Long before the Associated Press (AP) fact check on global warming surfaced, exposing mistaken assertions among recent United States administrators, Jamaican whiz kid Joe Issa was already adding up his findings, and there are striking similarities with AP’s " the planet is definitely heating up, the main cause is carbon dioxide (CO2) and humans are largely to blame.

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Issa, a history-making accounting and economics major, and therefore not into romanticism, found out that if global warming was kept at the 2o C above pre-industrial levels agreed upon by the leaders, this could mean imminent catastrophe in Jamaica by the end of this century.

He also believes, for example, that with warming of just one degree Celsius, global warming is reducing world gross domestic product (GDP) by 1.22 per cent.

According to experts, the impact of hurricanes and other weather systems on the economy of Jamaica as a result of global warming has already been severe, fuelling greater concerns for the future.

Issa’s fears are further supported by an Inter-American Development Bank report on Jamaica’s Catastrophe Risk Profile, which said “the island is at risk of losing US$105 million annually due to hurricanes and other extreme weather events.”

It said that “as far back as 2006, Jamaica recorded a 7.3 per cent loss to GDP as a result of the impacts of climate change.”

Acting in the interest of all low-lying islands like Jamaica Issa, `ahead of the 2016 Paris Conference on Global Warming joined the lobby for countries to increase their carbon-cutting pledges sufficiently to reduce global warming to 1.5o C, down from 2o C.

In supporting a harder, not softer voluntary renewal of individual country pledges to reduce global warming, Issa shares his opinion.

He says: “Global warming does exist and it is mainly caused by the carbon dioxide which we as humans cause to be emitted into the atmosphere; so we must take responsibility for our bad deeds,” stressing that “all countries responsible must contribute proportionately to the amount of CO2 they release.”

“I believe they should up their pledges at the up-coming 2017 conference, especially as the US is reportedly planning to withdraw from the climate-change accord, which I think is unfortunate,” says Issa, who has built a retail conglomerate from just one gas station in 1995.

And despite further warning by experts that “the current rate of global warming is already causing impacts beyond the current adaptive capacity of many countries, particularly Small Island Developing States (SIDS) such as Jamaica,” Issa says unfortunately, many persons in key positions to help protect countries like Jamaica are still ill informed, citing the AP Fact Check.

For example, contrary to Issa’s understanding of the voluntary nature of the Paris agreement, the new Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt, who was nominated by President Donald Trump in December and approved in February by the Senate, is arguing that the U.S. has no alternative but to pull out of the Paris accord because it cannot otherwise change its terms, stating the deal “can only be ratcheted up, not softened.”

Of course, the AP Fact check sys otherwise: The U.S. and all other targets are voluntary, determined by individual nations and can be modified in any direction " stronger or weaker, it quoted people involved in negotiating the deal as saying. It cites as an example, the Obama administration’s pledge to reduce carbon emissions by about a quarter within eight years.

France’s climate ambassador and a key negotiator, Laurence Tubiana, also support what Issa believes to be the case, tweeting: “Of course US government CAN legally downsize its contribution but SHOULD Not.”

The Frenchman is joined by American Nigel Purvis, who was a State Department climate negotiator under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush: He said, “Scott Pruitt is wrong…”

Purvis stated that the Paris agreement called for nations “to make their targets progressively tighter every five years because the agreement doesn’t do enough to prevent dangerous warming levels, but that provision doesn’t prevent a country from submitting a weaker target now.”

Another area of dispute relates to what causes global warming, as Pruitt goes counter to what is commonly believed to be the truth, contending that carbon dioxide is only one of many causes of man-made climate change: “It’s a cause like methane and water vapor and the rest.”

AP’s Fact check once again proves him wrong: The overwhelming majority of climate scientists say carbon dioxide is by far the primary cause of global warming.

It quoted Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has calculated that about 73 percent of the human-caused warming since 1750 is from carbon dioxide. It stressed that water vapor and methane contribute much smaller amounts.

Issa sums up citing an AP fact check which quoted a joint statement from the National Academy of Sciences and Royal Society in Britain as saying that “human-induced increases in CO2 concentrations have been the dominant influence on the long-term global surface temperature increase.”