The US senate votes to continue wars

In spite of the uncertainties and turnarounds of Donald Trump’s policies and decisions it appears that the US senate is the true warmonger among United States political landscape.

The news come from Al Jazeera.

US Senate rebukes Trump over Syria, Afghanistan withdrawal plans

Senators resoundingly back text saying pullouts could allow ISIL and al-Qaeda to re-group, destabilise both countries.

Senators from across party lines in the United States have backed an amendment opposing Donald Trump's plan to pull troops out of Syria and Afghanistan, in a strong rebuke of the Republican president's decision.

The text, which was passed on Monday by a majority of 70 to 26, says the troop withdrawal could allow the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group and ak –Qaeda  to re-group and destabilise both countries.

The measure was sponsored by Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate who said last week it "would acknowledge the plain fact that al-Qaeda, ISIS and their affiliates in Syria and Afghanistan continue to pose a serious threat to our nation".

Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna, reporting from Washington, DC, said the result of the vote constituted "a sharp, bipartisan rebuke from the Senate of Trump".

The amendment, opposed by only three of the 53 Senate Republicans, will eventually be incorporated into a broader security bill on the Middle East which will be voted on later this week.

"Importantly, too, it's then got to go to the House of Representatives, where other aspects of the wider bill are likely to receive stern opposition from the Democrat-controlled body," Hanna said.

In a surprise move in December, Trump tweeted plans to remove the US's 2,000 troops out of Syria, arguing that ISIL had been defeated, even though his intelligence chiefs testified last week that the group's fighters remain a potent threat and are seeking a comeback.

Trump's declaration shocked allies and prompted the resignations of Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Brett McGurk, who was the envoy to the US-led global coalition against ISIL. Last month, McGurk said: "There is no plan for what's coming next" in Syria in Trump's plan to pull troops out of the country.

His comments came days after a suicide bomber in mid-January killed four US military personnel and 15 others in the northern Syrian town of Manbij, the deadliest attack on US troops since their deployment in the country in 2014.

The president has also vowed to pull half of the 14,000-strong US force from Afghanistan, where Washington has had a military presence since its 2001 invasion, citing the high cost in "blood and treasure".

In December, senators, including prominent Republicans, inflicted another resounding rebuke on the president, holding Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman responsible for the October 2 murder of Jamal Khashoggi after the Trump administration had been largely supportive of the kingdom's de facto ruler.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/02/senate-rebukes-trump-syria-afghanistan-withdrawal-plans-190205022114987.html

Climate change
Scientific uncertainties manipulated to create political certainties
Danilo Antón

At the international level, multilateral agencies have agreed on a series of measures, supposedly to combat climate change, through the reduction of carbon emissions. They also include other measures to limit the type of activities contributing to climate change produced by the CO2 increase in the air.

It is noteworthy that climate change is a phrase without real content because "climate change" has always existed and will continue to exist. Those of us who work in geology know this very well. You can not imagine the Earth's atmosphere without climate change.
More complex is to confirm the type of climate change that there is or will be ..
The strategies developed in the context of the Paris agreement assume that we know what is going to happen in climate, and this belief is at least risky. The data (raw unfiltered data) on which these promised strategies are based do not have definitive confirmation.
In any case, it would be worthwhile to implement them as a precautionary principle.
Of course there is always some risk, global warming, which is spoken with total certainty, is not proven by the information available.There are possibilities that, in the medium and long term, the tendency mightbe, not to increase the global temperature, but to decrease it. In that case we could be helping "global cooling".

I think that the emission of carbon dioxide, which is considered an element of risk (because it is a greenhouse gas), does not really seem to pose any danger to humans, because carbon dioxide is the "gas of life". It is the gas that allows plants to grow, and indirectly sustains animal life, and, of course, our own life.
However, reducing carbon dioxide-producing activities also reduces emissions of other harmful substances, such as sulfur gases, nitrogen oxides, or aerosol particles (soot). That is why I believe that these agreements can have positive effects on air pollution, although it is not so clear what kind of consequences they will have in relation to "climate change"
Unfortunately. US President Donald Trump has generated a lot of media noise in deciding that the US will withdraw from the Paris agreement because, he said, he is an enemy of the measures taken to combat climate change which, according to him, also affect The economy and the sources of labor in the United States.
Obviously he does not care if there is climate change or global warming or whatever, what matters is that it will not prevent a series of corporate billions projects that for various environmental reasons are locked.
But to me personally, I do not care what Donald Trump thinks or says,
Until we prove it to the contrary we will have to continue investigating a few things that arouse many uncertainties:
1) What role do the variations of solar radiation play in climate changes (heating, cooling, rain, storms, etc.)?
2) What role does CO2 play, and in particular anthropogenic CO2 emissions in atmospheric dynamics?
3) What role does water vapor play in thermal balance and atmospheric dynamics?
3) What role do aerosols play in thermal balances and in atmospheric dynamics?
4) What is the long-term trend of ocean levels?
5) What is the long-term trend of ocean temperature (and concomitantly, tropospheric and stratospheric temperatures)?
These questions have not been settled. At the official level it is insisted on holding that everything is resolved and that there is scientific unanimity. But it's not like that. Neither everything is resolved nor is there scientific unanimity.
Therefore it is not appropriate to approach the issue with militant dogmatism. Especially because we can be wrong ..
Finally, I'm not interested in what President Trump thinks or says about it. It can be intuited that this gentleman will last little at the front of the system of corporate megacapitalism and will stop being a protagonist in the environmental pseudo-politics of the elites ..
But we can not freely transform scientific uncertainties into political certainties. The future may end up passing the bill ...