This will make your blood boil:
Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.
Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.
Not only did they know, but they actively worked to bury the evidence and muddy the waters, so now we have a generation of wingnuts who won’t and don’t believe the scientific data. Folks like these guys:
Last Thursday, the nation watched with a mix of amusement and horror as the House Benghazi committee spent 11 hours grilling Hillary Clinton on a bizarre farrago of issues, many of which bore only tangential connection to the Benghazi attack.
Over the past few weeks, the political narrative seems to have shifted from “Clinton in trouble” to “congressional witch hunt seeks to take down Clinton.” Between McCarthy’s accidental truth telling, an ex-staffer confirming the worst reports about the committee, and another House Republican conceding the obvious, it has become clear that the Benghazi committee is a thoroughly partisan political endeavor. Opinion has turned, but Republicans are trapped.
The thing is: The Benghazi committee is not even the worst committee in the House. I’d argue that the House science committee, under the chairmanship of Lamar Smith (R-TX), deserves that superlative for its open-ended, Orwellian attempts to intimidate some of the nation’s leading scientists and scientific institutions.
The science committee’s modus operandi is similar to the Benghazi committee’s — sweeping, catchall investigations, with no specific allegations of wrongdoing or clear rationale, searching through private documents for out-of-context bits and pieces to leak to the press, hoping to gain short-term political advantage — but it stands to do more lasting long-term damage.
The current Republican party and their cronies in the business world are an aggressive and malignant cancer.
Baud
You’re up early.
HeartlandLiberal
Well, as the German’s would have said: Short Term Profits Ueber Alles!!
HeartlandLiberal
@Baud: Cole probably wanted to see this morning’s close up triangle in the east of Mars, Jupiter, and Venus. We did do, but it is clouded over and raining here in south central Indiana. Can’t complain, we have not had much rain for two months, only infrequent episodes of showers. Today and tonight forecast if 100%. I sure hope so.
Baud
Libertarians hate this sort of abuse of power. I’m sure they will speak out against it.
Baud
@HeartlandLiberal:
First the blood moon and now this.
What does it all mean?
BillinGlendaleCA
@HeartlandLiberal: I saw that the other night, pretty cool.
HeartlandLiberal
Reminds me of the ads promoting cigarettes, with the helpful doctors advising you on the best brand to buy. Like Lucky Strike. Or Camels. Both of which I smoked in my callow youth, until I kept coughing up blood every couple months in my early twenties, and kicked the cigarette habit. Boy, did I love those unfiltered Pall Malls.
Here is a nice Time magazine photogallery of the propaganda ads. Reminisce.
“Your Doctor Wants You To Smoke”
http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1848212,00.html
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: It’s not good, probably another Clinton Presidency.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
We can’t say we weren’t warned.
Tokyokie
Please keep in mind that these are the proponents of small government and it saddens them deeply to use the power of Congress to harass individuals in order to preserve the enoromous wealth of their donors.
Cermet
How can anyone be surprised that any energy corporation only cares about profits and not lives? That is why the banks and energy companies (read the 0.001% and above, who own all the carbon still in the ground) bought the thug party to prevent laws/regulation to stop anyone from acting on AGW
Baud
Speaking of assholes
NorthLeft12
I am surprised that people are surprised that large multinational corporations knew/know all about climate change and then invested money and effort in denying and discrediting this information.
They needed to know about it as climate change will have medium and long term impacts on product design and facility location and management. They would also be interested in evaluating future opportunities that could cash in on climate change.
They then would fight the good fight to delay any potential government action about it as this would be seen as additional cost that may reduce profits. Another pesky regulation to follow like labour laws, health and safety, tax code, and finally environmental guidelines and targets. Yeah, those things that they move plants to other countries to avoid.
OzarkHillbilly
The sun rises in the east and water is still wet. What were you expecting John?
Gindy51
@HeartlandLiberal: SE IN here, wishing the rain had held off a few days. The cistern cleaning guys are going to be here this week and it was nearly empty. Now it’s filling up making it harder (and more costly) for them to clean it. I also wanted to see the alignment but have been watching Venus and Jupiter dance for about 2 weeks already. Nice clean AM skies for weeks and rain the one day I REALLY wanted it to be clear. Oh well.
Another Holocene Human
Whatever, people are dumb. Climate change was openly talked about in the late 1980s before the PR people shut that all down. But peeps are so dumb they’d dismiss it because some crank thought a blizzard or two in the 70s meant the ice age is coming. Academics knew about excess CO2 for years, but proving it caused temp increase was a huge academic battle for some time.
Look, if you were told the truth, why do you then doubt because some talking heads on TV told you to doubt it? The truth made the most sense with the bare facts available whereas their spinning … was something else.
NorthLeft12
@Baud: I found the last line of the article particularly amusing;
Yes, the potential fine will be a proverbial drop in the ocean to these billionaires, but to think that their shining reputation will be damaged in any way by this is really quite a joke.
First, virtually no one will ever hear of this, or among their supporters will understand it as a negative. Most likely, any prosecution will be passed off as persecution by those librul Obummers because Hobby Lobby dared to assert their rights and defied the great Tyrant.
Second, the Hobby Lobby spin meisters will convince people that they were trying to save these artifacts from the criminals and savages who inhabit the Middle East.
And yes, they are hypocritical assholes.
debbie
Doubtless this evidence can easily be found in Prudhoe Bay.
OzarkHillbilly
@NorthLeft12:
I can’t wait for the demands for gov’t subsidies to defray the costs of moving their refineries. They’ll justify the requests by explaining that the gov’t should have done a better job of regulating the environmental impacts of global warming. And I literally can’t wait as I will fortunately be dead by the time that happens.
donnah
Money money money money.
Really, it’s always about money and the bottom line. Lives don’t matter, whether they’re the lives of oil drill platform workers, coal miners, or ocean wildlife. No life has value, which is strangely at odds with their anti choice belief that every single fetal life is precious.
The Republicans are the biggest hypocrites, and always will be. They will stand behind Big Business because they want to continue their privileged lives without acknowledging that our world is in dire straits and the planet is crumbling beneath our feet. And when the icecaps have liquified and the floods come, they will be able to flee to higher ground and ignore the drownings below them. It’s how they are. And they’ll say it’s God’s will.
Baud
@NorthLeft12:
Yep. They are firmly ensconced within their bubble.
Ryan
@Baud: Oh, I’m sure they’ll interpret this as Christian persecution for suing the Obama Administration over PPACA. Not over breaking laws regarding raiding antiquities.
OzarkHillbilly
Speaking of global warming: Extreme heatwaves could push Gulf climate beyond human endurance, study shows
The extreme heatwaves will affect Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha and coastal cities in Iran as well as posing a deadly threat to millions of Hajj pilgrims in Saudi Arabia, when the religious festival falls in the summer. The study shows the extreme heatwaves, more intense than anything ever experienced on Earth, would kick in after 2070 and that the hottest days of today would by then be a near-daily occurrence.
…
They said the future climate for many locations in the Gulf would be like today’s extreme climate in the desert of Northern Afar, on the African side of the Red Sea, where there are no permanent human settlements at all. But the research also showed that cutting greenhouse gas emissions now could avoid this fate.
Oil and gas rich nations in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia, have frequently tried to frustrate international climate change negotiations. The Gulf, where populations are rising quickly, was hit in 2015 by one of its worst-ever heatwaves, where temperatures topped 50C (122F) and led to a significant number of deaths.
Karma. It’s a bitch.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Idi Amin: I want you to tell me what to do.
Nicholas Garrigan: You want ME to tell YOU what to do?
Idi Amin: Yes, you are my advisor. You are the only one I can trust in here. You should have told me not to throw the Asians out, in the first place.
Nicholas Garrigan: I DID!
Idi Amin: But you did not persuade me, Nicholas. You did not persuade me!
Satby
Some days it feels like my blood boiled away years ago, leaving me with bile and dust clogging up my veins. I’m sure people aren’t really more venal now, but it sure seems like it. Destroy the planet for profit? No problem. Too bad about the kids and all the future kids and animals.
Tokyokie
@Ryan: Of course, it took W.’s pretty little war to get a lot of these antiquities onto the black market.
C.V. Danes
With a big chuvk of his state currently under water, Smith may want to rein in his attitude. But then again, we’re talking about Texas.
Matt McIrvin
This has all been obvious for many years.
Warming from carbon dioxide was a well-known phenomenon in the 1970s; the basic mechanism was understood by 1896. I learned about it in elementary school. What wasn’t fully understood then was whether CO2 warming, or cooling from increased aerosols in the atmosphere, would be the dominant human climate effect. But even then, most papers on the subject in the scientific press favored warming. And that conclusion has been close to universal among scientists in the relevant fields ever since the 1980s.
I still know intelligent, technical people (often, computer science or mathematics) who insist that the consensus on climate change is a delusion enforced by unscientific groupthink, because they’re American conservatives and they get this message hammered into them every day.
The current version of this is a sort of fallback position constructed to be as plausible as it can get, by taking every possible source of uncertainty and leaning as far as it can in the appropriate direction, only occasionally dropping into outright conspiracy theory. Yes, CO2 causes warming, but because of a negative water-vapor feedback that is much stronger than every mainstream climate scientist says it is, the climate sensitivity is some distance off the low end of the politically-tainted IPCC consensus, Michael Mann is a crank so you can’t trust the hockey stick graph (I’ve been told that his own colleagues have all rejected it, which as far as I can tell is completely false), and the obvious warming that keeps happening every year is from vaguely specified “natural cycles”. Nothing is ever going to change their minds, even though it’s all so transparently an industry propaganda effort.
OzarkHillbilly
@C.V. Danes: It’s all the homos in Houston. God is pissed and he’s going to drown them right out.
C.V. Danes
@Baud: Moral relativism.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Not all of them. Just Keith G.
Napoleon
@Matt McIrvin:
I actually thought it was understood before the Civil War.
bemused
@Baud:
I automatically assume that as a religious fundamentalist’s beliefs become more rigid and extremist there is a corresponding increase in probability that “Christian” is very dirty in one or multiple ways. Getting caught is just a matter of time.
Baud
@C.V. Danes:
More like immoral relativism.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Oh, it’s all of them alright. Especially that lesbian mayor they have who is pushing laws for equal rights for LGBT people. But also all the people who voted for her. They need to be punished too.
Betty
So what about the scientists employed by Exxon in the 70’s? They didn’t feel any ethical responsibility to speak out? Sad.
Matt McIrvin
@Napoleon: 1896 was Arrhenius’s paper. He actually tried to estimate the size of the effect and he was in the ballpark, though that was partly luck.
scav
@bemused: There’s certainly a solid support-base / demand for Christianity as an “all sins forgiven so all behaviors should be expected” bible-banging creed that furthermore can be used a weapon against others.
The Pale Scot
@Baud:
Because nothing says Yahweh like Sumerian tablets denoting grain sales.
Tinare
But the market is benevolent and we don’t need an Environmental Protection Agency because companies wouldn’t do anything to ruin the environment because that would be bad for business. Isn’t that the party line? I never understand how, when faced with a preponderance of evidence to the contrary how anyone will sell/buy that with a straight face. But yes, government always bad, business always good. Arseholes.
Cervantes
Decades ago, it did.
She’s right.
People who said the same thing decades ago were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, Luddites, flat-earthers, tree-huggers, anti-American, and worse.
Cervantes
@The Pale Scot:
!
SFAW
Jim Inhofe will say that Exxon/Mobil was lying about AGW. Telling the truth about everything else, of course, such as when they said AGW is GOOD for you.
Kind of like smoking (as mentioned above), and asbestos before that.
I’m waiting for Inhofe (and Lamar Smith, and the rest of those motherfuckers who should be convicted of crimes against humanity) to explain that if we only used leeches, poultices, and various incantations to rid ourselves of bad humours, everything would be A-OK.
If only there were a neutron bomb for stupid/evil.
sharl
The current majority party in Congress is fine with science, as long as its practitioners don’t get all uppity and think they deserve some say in public policy.
I was surprised and irked a couple months ago to hear Elizabeth Warren introduce Newt Gingrich at a forum on the importance of scientific research. Yeah, the same guy who killed the Office of Technology Assessment back in the mid-90s.
So, science dudes and dudettes, stay in your lane! Stick to churning out gee-whiz!, sizzling hot-hot-hot results that play well in our clickbait-oriented media. Just don’t go putting on airs by thinking your work should make a difference to the general public; leave that to the Dogma Lords.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone :)
SFAW
@Cervantes:
But that was only figuratively, you amateur.
In a few decades, it might be literal. THEN we’ll “separate the men from the boys.” Not that any of us will be here to observe the phenomenon.
rikyrah
hmmmmmmmm….
Poll Watch: Ben Carson Edges Ahead Nationally in Times/CBS News Poll
Ben Carson has taken a narrow lead nationally in the Republican presidential campaign, dislodging Donald J. Trump from the top spot for the first time in months, according to a New York Times/CBS News survey released on Tuesday.
Mr. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, is the choice of 26 percent of Republican primary voters, the poll found, while Mr. Trump now wins support from 22 percent, although the difference lies within the margin of sampling error.
The survey is the first time that Mr. Trump has not led all candidates since The Times and CBS News began measuring presidential preferences at the end of July.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/poll-watch-ben-carson-edges-ahead-nationally-in-times-cbs-news-poll/ar-BBmtmoS?li=AAa0dzB&ocid=HPCDHP
Matt McIrvin
The other thing to stress about the “scientists were predicting global cooling in the 70s” story is that the people who did think there was going to be cooling had a specific mechanism in mind: the increase in the Earth’s albedo from aerosols, that is, smog, reflecting radiation back into space. They knew about the conventional warming mechanism, they just weren’t sure that this other thing wouldn’t outweigh it. And if you look at global temperatures through the 20th century, you can see that there was this flattish period of slight cooling from about 1940 to 1970 that was probably at least partly because of aerosols.
As far as I know, nobody today thinks aerosols are increasing quickly enough to outweigh the warming effect of carbon dioxide. And if they were, we would be in big trouble from that. It’d be a cure worse than the disease.
Some of the contrarians are still pinning their hopes on something I alluded to above, that the effect of water vapor under current conditions is actually a negative rather than a positive feedback, because of increased clouds. Nobody in the mainstream of the field actually believes this (water vapor is a pretty powerful greenhouse gas, which after all is responsible for most of the atmosphere’s current warmth, so that’s hard for the cloud effect to overcome). The main advocate is a scientist named Fred Singer, a professor emeritus at UVa who, as far as I can tell, used to be respectable but kept doubling down as his theory fell out of favor, and now is basically a wingnut celebrity. It’s a sad, familiar story.
rikyrah
Alycee
@jazziz2
Sheriff contacts federal agencies to investigate Spring Valley incident http://on.wltx.com/1N35vYD via @WLTX
MomSense
My blood is boiling about this. It feels like the house is on fire and the kids are inside. The oil companies pursued the exact same strategy as big tobacco only this time there will be more death and destruction.
bemused
@scav:
“Sin no more” doesn’t apply to them because they got a permanent free pass from God.
Cervantes
@OzarkHillbilly:
Except that, as usual, those who did the dying were the powerless, not the powerful.
Germy Shoemangler
You’ve seen this from 1958? The Unchained Goddess? With footage of melting glaciers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg
Baud
@rikyrah:
Oh my. Now things get interesting.
The Pale Scot
@SFAW:
If only reservations could be set up so people that rely on magical thinking could remain safe from from the predations of reality.
But this the place for you Cleatus. What? I didn’t mention there’s no electricity or modern medicine?
Electric lights and vaccines aren’t mentioned in the bible guy, we wouldn’t want to corrupt your children with all that sciency stuff.
Aren’t statistics the tool of the Devil?
RSA
@Satby:
In fact, you will be mocked without mercy even for bringing up the topic of children or animals, as if strong and decisive people shouldn’t care about them.
Dork
@Baud: It’s their religious right to sell illicit shit. SCOTUS said so, or something. Also, Christian persecution.
Lee
Exxon’s PR Guy is on twitter working on damage control.
From some of his tweets it would appear that Exxon is now backing anthropomorphic global warming.
“Decades of widely available #climate science research is not a “cover up.” #GetTheFacts on what #ExxonKnew”
rikyrah
OF COURSE THEY KNEW!!!
Why would anyone be surprised by this?
I certainly am not.
Punchy
@Betty: Hard to pay the mortgage while standing in a soup line.
SRW1
Somebody has to keep the proud tradition of Joe McCarthy alive, though Joe made kind of specific allegations.
Well, nobody’s perfect all of the time!
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: These stories about individual polls drive me nuts because the ones that get attention are the startling man-bites-dog stories, and most of the time they’re just statistical outliers. If you look at HuffPo’s averages, Trump is still 8 or 9 points ahead of Carson.
But Carson’s numbers are rising faster than Trump’s, and he’s close to taking the lead in more states than just Iowa. I think he’s sealing up the religious-conservative vote and his ceiling may be higher than Trump’s. His main competition for those voters would be Ted Cruz, and Cruz seems to be dropping.
OzarkHillbilly
@Cervantes: Except that, as usual, those who will do the dying will be the powerless, not the powerful. The House of Saud will by then be well ensconced in their beachfront property in Greenland.
JPL
@NorthLeft12: Let’s remember that IOKIYR.
SFAW
@The Pale Scot:
Nor in the Constitution. No doubt the Tenthers and the Twofers prefer to remain In The Dark.
SFAW
@Lee:
Anthropogenic.
scav
@Lee: Oh deary, is the endearing little ‘Mercan public now acting all shocked and stunned that a corporate entity — a crucial element in the free-market moral universe! — might have lied to its economic gain?!? to them!?! O the sweet dears. What shall we tell them about Father Christmas
Paul in KY
@rikyrah: I’m waiting for The Donald to unload on him.
Just One More Canuck
@rikyrah: So The Donald was only a blowhard who just said whatever he thought they wanted to hear? Now they want someone like Carson, who truly is crazy
Lee
@SFAW:ooops. It’s early and very little caffeine yet.,
SFAW
@Matt McIrvin:
WTF is your problem? Why aren’t you talking about Jeb!’s surge from an RCP aggregate of 7.2, all the way up to 7.0. He’s kicking butt and taking
‘Ludesnames!SFAW
@Lee:
Yeah, I’ve found that low caffeine levels are a tool of Satan.
NorthLeft12
I will be interested to see if Exxon [as part of its penance/damage control] uses any of its considerable lobbying muscle to promote some action on climate change issues…….besides financial subsidies/tax breaks for them to upgrade their facilities to withstand the impact of climate change related events.
They will probably not do anything positive and protest that they don’t want to get involved in “political” issues. Primarily because they know a flip on this issue will embarrass and enrage a large number of right wingnuts. Elected and not elected.
Cervantes
@SFAW:
Who knows? Exxon might be backing the anthropomorphic version. Could even be a marketing ploy — and the best part is, I can see it working on some people.
SFAW
@NorthLeft12:
Can we assume you mean that it’s not the “flip,” so much as the new, non-hippie-punching position, that will cause the rage?
OzarkHillbilly
So… speaking of corporations that do bad things, I give you the Violation Tracker:
Discover Which Corporations are the Biggest Violators of Environmental, Health and Safety Laws Throughout the United States
Violation Tracker is the first national search engine on corporate misconduct. Version 1.0 covers environmental, health and safety cases initiated by 13 federal regulatory agencies since 2010, including those referred to the Justice Department. Other violations (banking, antitrust, wage & hour, etc.) will be added later. Violation Tracker is produced by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First.
Should be fun. Until the GOP makes all such info classified under the 2017 Good Governance Act.
SFAW
@Cervantes:
See, now you’re just being silly. It’s almost as if I said “up,” you’d say “well, it COULD be down. Or sideways.” Glad I could help, however.
Amir Khalid
@SFAW:
I admire your generosity in filling in for RtR during his enforced absence from these threads.
SFAW
@Amir Khalid:
It’s probably a role away from which I should step. Especially considering his significant personality flaws. (Disclaimer: Not that I don’t have a number of my own, but [I hope] they’re nothing like his.)
But thanks(?) for the “compliment.”
Cervantes
@SFAW:
Er … what?
The joke, such as it was, was on Exxon. If you’d rather make it about you, feel free. I’ll step right out of your way.
But speaking of jokes, here’s a better one: A man came home early one day only to find his wife in flagrante delicto with his best friend. Glaring at him over the best friend’s shoulder, she says: “Damn it! Here’s Mr. Big Mouth. Now the whole neighborhood will know!”
boatboy_srq
@Lee: I vote for “anthropomorphic global warming” to be added to the rotating tags.
boatboy_srq
Seems to me that the fact that ExxonMobil knew, and did significant research, will only harden the anti-science crowd’s disbelief: “you can’t trust scientists because they’re all liberal squishes, and you can’t trust bidness because it says no and yes at the same time.” I see more belief among the adherents to the Global Warming is a Myth sect rather than less.
SFAW
@Cervantes:
For someone as (presumably) well-educated and certainly well-read as you, the “whahappen?” seems out of character.
“Anthropomorphic,” as used in your reply, did not appear to make any sense in context. Maybe there is some meaning of “anthropomorphic” that is unknown to me; failing that, one wonders what “joke” you were trying to make.
The “Mr. Big Mouth” joke wasn’t bad, however.
NorthLeft12
@SFAW: I think I should have emphasized that the public nature of the flip [ie. conceding climate change is real, man made, and potentially reversible with the proper actions] will deny the Repubs a fair bit of cover for their position that it is unproven and still in dispute.
The silence of corporations [especially blue chip energy and manufacturing which have the most to lose/pay] has been a huge boon for the Repubs. It will make their position much, much more difficult to defend.
Although I would expect some kind of dismissal by Repubs, saying it is a public relations/political correctness by the corporations, and that they were bullied into it.
boatboy_srq
@The Pale Scot: @Baud: Ah, but their True Believers don’t know that. For all they know those are the
Three HundredNinety-FiveTwentyTen Commandments right there. (I do love how, reading between-the-lines, it sounds like the Greens wrote up the documents as if these pieces were samples for the mosaic they’re putting in the museum atrium and not priceless artifacts for the displays).sherparick
@Baud: Judith Curry, Watt’s UP, & Climate Audit are cheering Lamar Smith on. At the same time they constantly wave the victim flag saying their “free speech” to spout denialist bullshit is suppressed when criticized for their bullshit.
Matt McIrvin
@SFAW: It’s his super ninja strategy! Keep losing until they least suspect it, then, bam! Suddenly pull out the winning he had hidden in his Brinks truck!
MomSense
Exxon lied and the planet died. This is not getting nearly the attention it deserves from corporate media. Hmmm, wonder why (not).
SFAW
@NorthLeft12:
In a rational world, I would completely agree. But we live in a country where Sarah Palin is considered by far-too-many to be someone worth listening to, where a (probably) sociopathic nutcase retired neurosurgeon is polling well, where the Talibangelicals consider themselves Christians.
That being said, I hope this is an inflection point, when the country finally comes to its senses.
@MomSense:
Outstanding. Should be a bumper sticker, should be shouted from the rooftops.
jl
@MomSense: Bernie ‘Feel the Bern’ Sanders is already on it, and has introduced a bill to start an investigation for racketeering, and he says it is legally similar to what the tobacco industry did.
I’m surprised by the Scientific American article, because it downplays the history of the science, simply noting that the science is so simple that ‘of course they knew’.
I don’t understand why the statistical models and results get so much emphasis (and being a statistician I guess I should like that, but statistics is not everything). The basic science has been known for over 100 years now, even if they got some of the details of how CO2 trapped and stored the heat wrong 100 years ago.
The predictions of temperature as a function of output of CO2 into the atmosphere from the early models holds up pretty well, and their predictions look wildly off now because the scientists working back then vastly underestimated the rise in CO2 emissions over the 20th century, not because their predictive models were wrong. Plug in the historical emissions and their early predictions hold up pretty well.
shomi
Opinions around here are so childishly simplistic sometimes with Cole leading the stupid parade. It’s quite incredible for a political blog site. Normally one would expect a higher level of intelligence.
Of course they knew. Are you just figuring that out?
Also, is the crack IT person who runs this site ever going to figure out how to set comments to not be cached so you don’t get duplicate/triplicate ++ comments all the time?
AnonPhenom
@MomSense:
Exxon lied and the planet died.
NCSteve
Well duh! Exact same industry playbook we’ve seen used time after time for a century and they use it because it works and because the press isn’t allowed to see what they’re doing even when it’s right there in front of their eyes.
It’s what the radium watch dial and health supplement industries did. It’s what the auto and chemical and paint industries did with the tetraethyl lead that gave us the rising crime rates that peaked in the 80’s as atmospheric lead began to abate. It’s what the tobacco industry did with the health affects of smoking, with the addictiveness of nicotine and with the defeat technologies they used to make cigarettes appear to give smaller doses of tar and nicotine in the testing apparatus. It’s what the auto industry did again over seat belts and then again over airbags. It’s what Syngenta and Bayer are doing right now over their bee-killing insecticides. And yes, it’s what Big Energy has been doing with climate change.
Fund corrupt scientists to manufacture false or misleading data and research, smear, intimidate or corrupt those who are doing the real research and spend decades hiding behind the false research to wring another few decades of profit out of products that are doing devastating damage. Because the cult of false balance has always been with us.
J R in WV
Thanks John!
I knew this, even back then, and am not surprised that big industry is still trying to hide the scientific facts.
You would think that they would use their advanced knowledge to have begun building ports and refineries that won’t be ruined by rising sea levels years ago, building cities upstream where the riding tides won’t drown everyone back when building things was much less expensive, etc.
And then making money off their prepared new positions.
But no, that makes too much sense…
John T
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
This book came out in 2010 and drew explicit connections between strategies used by tobacco corporations to deny the health risks of smoking (decades after science had proven the causality) and contemporary energy corporations’ efforts to promote climate change denialism. I’m glad to see that this connection is beginning to gain mainstream traction.