Women Get it. They Just Do.
September 19, 2019

People worried about global warming often want their leaders to enact ambitious climate policies. A recent study suggests that electing female politicians can help make that happen.
Astghik Mavisakalyan is an economics professor at Australia’s Curtin University. She and a colleague examined the legislatures of 91 countries. They compared the percentage of seats held by women to the rigor of each country’s climate policies.
“We found that female representation in national parliaments does lead countries to adopt more stringent climate change policies,” she says.
The researchers say it’s not just because countries that elect more women also happen to support more environmental protection.
In their analysis, they considered all kinds of factors, including the country’s GDP per capita, education levels, and overall political orientation. They found that none of these other factors could fully explain the link between female leadership and climate policies.
More research is needed to better understand the connection. But based on the data, Mavisakalyan says it seems possible “that climate change campaigns may actually succeed more in places where there are more females in political power.”

September 19, 2019 at 1:38 am
Nah. I have no problem looking at cutaway drawings of any anatomy of any living thing, but this one is just gratuitous and distracts from the story.
You can do better than this.
September 19, 2019 at 9:12 am
Agree, I don’t want to share the otherwise great article because of that!
September 19, 2019 at 2:38 am
Definitely more girls leading the school strikes. Speak better too.
September 19, 2019 at 7:19 am
As presented here all it shows is that women (but anybody really) who believes that humans can change the climate are completely insane. We are told that the atmosphere keeps us warm and the greenhouse gases add to the warming. This is utter nonsense and the moon is proof. The moon without any atmosphere reaches 127C on the sun side and -173C on the dark side. The earth without an atmosphere would have these temperatures. Any fool can see that the atmosphere keeps the earth COOL in the day time, but to do that it needs the main greenhouse gas – water vapour. The greenhouse gases keep us COOL. The desert regions are proof of this, where there is no water vapour the day temperatures is up to almost 60C and night temperatures are below freezing. The Romans used to make ice in the deserts at night. Carbon dioxide is an insignificant gas that has no effect in desert.
One look at temperatures across the earth at the same latitude show that humid regions are cooler than the dry desert regions. More evidence that water vapour cools the earth.
This shows the drivers of our climate. The sun provides the energy we need to keep warm, but it is the oceans that really create our climate. They have a huge thermal capacity compared to the atmosphere, which effectively has none in relation to water. The oceans move the heat about keeping the dark side warm at night. Evaporation of the oceans provides cooling and rain which also evaporates and cools inland regions. This is the important cycle deciding our climate.
September 19, 2019 at 8:31 am
What a bizarre concoction of scientific knowledge and misapprehension you have spewed out here, morpheus. Perhaps you really ARE on acid.
September 19, 2019 at 11:24 am
Quite typical and expected. I took care to select a name that would provoke insults because it is all you have to respond with. You know nothing about science and even less about the scientific method. There is a YouTube video of the great Richard Feynman which you might be able to find. He describes the scientific method as starting with a theory, the theory is then tested by direct observation or experiment and the results compared to the theory. If they don’t match the theory then it is wrong. Science deals with such setbacks, and there are many, by discussion.
A good example of how this worked is the discovery that the earth is not the centre of the solar system or the universe. Galileo almost lost his life for putting forward his ideas. You are just as ignorant as the church at the time. Galileo only observed that the earth rotates around the sun. He did not know why and real scientists never stop asking questions and discussing ideas. Newton eventually explained that gravity held the earth in orbit but he did not know what gravity was. It took Einstein to explain this, but real scientists will still not stop trying to find more understanding of gravity.
It is significant that Einstein was very confident about his theories but he recognised that they were only theories until there was evidence to support them. It is 100 years this year since a famous observation, defined by Einstein, was carried out. This was to prove that gravity bends light. Importantly there were two independent teams making the observations during a solar eclipse. Science also requires repeatability. The same applied to the recent discovery of the Higgs-Bosun particle. Two independent teams using different instruments works at the Large Hadron Collider. This is how real scientists work. Not the cLIEmate science liars which you believe.
Rise to the challenge. Explain why Knoxville with a high humidity and therefore greenhouse gases to keep it warmer has lower temperatures than Las Vegas on approximately the same latitude but with low humidity and a higher temperature. You cannot admit that you believe in nonsense so you hide behind insults.
September 19, 2019 at 12:16 pm
I don’t know why I’m bothering, as you clearly believe what you want to believe. Have at it.
But, desert climates are warmer because the lack of water moisture allows more sunlight to strike the ground. This is amplified by less plant life – fewer plants equals less moisture in the area and more sunlight warming the ground. Additionally, more moisture equals more rain equals cooler temperatures.
https://theweatherprediction.com/habyhints2/553/
Knoxville is not a desert climate. Yearly rainfall there is 50 inches. Yearly rainfall in Las Vegas is just over 4 inches.
Greenhouse gases, like water vapor, do reflect sunlight away from the Earth, as you say. But, they also absorb and re-radiate heat rising from the Earth from sunlight. They do both things.
For instance, a cloudy day will see cooler daytime temperatures. But, it will also have warmer night temperatures. That’s the radiant heat being trapped. Additionally, Las Vegas evenings will be cooler in general than Knoxville evenings by the same principle.
Some areas under climate change will see more effects from climate change than others. Las Vegas, due to its desert climate, is likely one such place:
https://news3lv.com/news/local/report-las-vegas-climate-is-warming-faster-than-any-other-city-in-the-nation
(continued)
September 19, 2019 at 12:17 pm
The theory of global warming/climate change has been around a long time. It has been vigorously tested by thousands of scientists for many decades. Here is an article from 1959:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-dioxide-and-climate/
You might consider that the people who study this issue perhaps know about it than you do.
Here’s one other link:
http://ase.tufts.edu/cosmos/view_chapter.asp?id=21&page=1
The last line there says:
“The level of water in a pond similarly remains much the same even though water is running in one end and out the other.”
CO2 is different than water, though, in that we are releasing a lot of stored carbon in the form of fossil fuels and deforestation. It had been fixed in the ground and the surface and out of the atmosphere. It’s now being added to the atmosphere.
September 20, 2019 at 9:39 am
Pretty sure you’ve gone away, morpheus – no reply in over a day. But, if you are actually interested instead of just a troll, this article from a few days ago explains your question well:
Inverse: A sliver of the atmosphere is about to cause big problems on Earth.
https://www.inverse.com/article/59351-earth-atmosphere-carbon-dioxide-global-warming
September 19, 2019 at 12:24 pm
” He describes the scientific method as starting with a theory, the theory is then tested by direct observation or experiment and the results compared to the theory. “
LOL. And *I* am the one who doesn’t know anything about science?!? Hooo-Boy!
Love the way you equate yourself with Galileo, Einstein,Feynman. You forgot Abraham Lincoln and Da Vinci but I expect we will hear about them soon? I so very much hope so!
September 19, 2019 at 9:04 pm
=> https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/galileo-syndrome-and-the-principle-of-exclusion/
September 19, 2019 at 8:42 am
Tell it to NASA and every national scientific body on the planet.
Or are you an agent provocateur who is happy to appear idiotic.
September 19, 2019 at 9:04 am
Morphy is tripping on his acid yet again! Safe trip, Morphy!
September 19, 2019 at 2:30 pm
I have an experiment for you. Go running in the desert when it’s 48° C (take some water), and try the same thing when it’s 36° C after the monsoon when the relative humidity is about 95%. See where you fall over first.
The humidity will kill you because your sweat won’t evaporate, as in the desert. The place with the 95% humidity is cooler in terms of the thermometer because of clouds and evaporation.
The reason the earth is not like the moon is not because of the atmosphere, but because of the water vapor, which is the most important green house gas. Warmer nights are invariably more humid nights, so water vapor warms and cools — the north and south pole are deserts and very cold. As you have already observed, the Romans got their ice from the desert (which isn’t being cooled by water vapor, but by lack of it).
September 19, 2019 at 9:06 pm
https://skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm
September 19, 2019 at 9:11 am
Going to attend a school strike tomorrow in Winchester, VA. Will wear my CLIMATE JUSTICE NOW tee from LCV and my WARREN FOR PRESIDENT 2020 cap. Will report back on how it goes—-Winchester is redder than the DC Suburbs—-it will be interesting..
And YES, “Women Get It. They Just Do.” That’s why I’m voting for Warren—-she gets it and has plans to fix it all. Time to take the testosterone out of the White House.
September 19, 2019 at 9:19 am
PS Warren is surging! She is tops on my “magic wand” list—-too bad there is no such thing (except in the mind of the stable genius—-he uses it to wipe out his lies and mistakes).
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/9/18/1886374/-In-new-poll-Warren-leads-in-first-choice-second-choice-and-induction-by-magic-wand?detail=emaildkre
September 19, 2019 at 9:07 pm
How is Sanders doing?
September 19, 2019 at 9:16 pm
Losing ground to Warren.
September 20, 2019 at 11:10 am
Recent polls have Bernie Sanders winning in NH, Nevada, tied for first in CA, and in close second in Iowa. His campaign just passed 1 million individual donors faster than any campaign in history.
CNN:
–“it’s a 2 person race” b/w
@JoeBiden
+
@ewarren
September 20, 2019 at 5:26 am
School strike today, shed loads of kids, people and me, Leaders today and tomorrow, (youth that is), excellent stuff.