[Patrickov]

I notice Sivad is questionning the entire 'ecology movement.'

Well, I'm not. I'm just accusing Greta of being part of the corporate spin that stops humanity from doing anything real about it.

Having a lady on TV say nice things about the environment isn't even a first step to changing the way we live. But change is coming, whether we like it or not. And all this procrastinating just ensures that we will be much worse off when the carbon hits the fan.

IMHO the best response (which I mostly do) is just ignore any soundbite and just do whatever perceived as right -- with common sense, as well as sufficient information and analysis, of course.

[Sivad]

the scientists working for the coal and oil industries reported that man made global warming was real in the 60s and 70s but their employers suppressed it.

That's such retarded propaganda, in the 60s and 70s it was just a fringe hypothesis that industry scientists were aware of and discussed in their reports but it's not like they had overwhelming evidence and suppressed it, that's just retarded alarmist bullshit.

If I was forced to choose a single set of data that points to warming due to changing atmospheric gas composition it would be the stratospheric and tropospheric microwave temperature measurements.
They confirm that the lower atmosphere is trapping more heat and less energy is escaping into space.

Climate sensitivity in light of the latest energy imbalance evidence
https://judithcurry.com/2020/01/10/clim ... -evidence/

[Pants-of-dog]

That's such retarded propaganda, in the 60s and 70s it was just a fringe hypothesis that industry scientists were aware of and discussed in their reports but it's not like they had overwhelming evidence and suppressed it, that's just retarded alarmist bullshit.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... years-ago/

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.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical." In other words, Exxon needed to act.

But ExxonMobil disagrees that any of its early statements were so stark, let alone conclusive at all. “We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest,” ExxonMobil spokesperson Allan Jeffers tells Scientific American. “The thing that shocks me the most is that we’ve been saying this for years, that we have been involved in climate research. These guys go down and pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.”

One thing is certain: in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional hearing that the planet was already warming, Exxon remained publicly convinced that the science was still controversial. Furthermore, experts agree that Exxon became a leader in campaigns of confusion. By 1989 the company had helped create the Global Climate Coalition (disbanded in 2002) to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change. It also helped to prevent the U.S. from signing the international treaty on climate known as the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 to control greenhouse gases. Exxon’s tactic not only worked on the U.S. but also stopped other countries, such as China and India, from signing the treaty. At that point, “a lot of things unraveled,” Oreskes says.
But experts are still piecing together Exxon’s misconception puzzle. Last summer the Union of Concerned Scientists released a complementary investigation to the one by InsideClimate News, known as the Climate Deception Dossiers (pdf). “We included a memo of a coalition of fossil-fuel companies where they pledge basically to launch a big communications effort to sow doubt,” says union president Kenneth Kimmel. “There’s even a quote in it that says something like ‘Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science.’ So it’s pretty stark.”

Since then, Exxon has spent more than $30 million on think tanks that promote climate denial, according to Greenpeace. Although experts will never be able to quantify the damage Exxon’s misinformation has caused, “one thing for certain is we’ve lost a lot of ground,” Kimmell says. Half of the greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere were released after 1988. “I have to think if the fossil-fuel companies had been upfront about this and had been part of the solution instead of the problem, we would have made a lot of progress [today] instead of doubling our greenhouse gas emissions.”

Experts agree that the damage is huge, which is why they are likening Exxon’s deception to the lies spread by the tobacco industry. “I think there are a lot of parallels,” Kimmell says. Both sowed doubt about the science for their own means, and both worked with the same consultants to help develop a communications strategy. He notes, however, that the two diverge in the type of harm done. Tobacco companies threatened human health, but the oil companies threatened the planet’s health. “It’s a harm that is global in its reach,” Kimmel says.

To prove this, Bob Ward—who on behalf of the U.K.’s Royal Academy sent a letter to Exxon in 2006 claiming its science was “inaccurate and misleading”—thinks a thorough investigation is necessary. “Because frankly the episode with tobacco was probably the most disgraceful episode one could ever imagine,” Ward says. Kimmell agrees. These reasons “really highlight the responsibility that these companies have to come clean, acknowledge this, and work with everyone else to cut out emissions and pay for some of the cost we're going to bear as soon as possible,” Kimmell says.

It doesn’t appear, however, that Kimmell will get his retribution. Jeffers claims the investigation’s finds are “just patently untrue, misleading, and we reject them completely”—words that match Ward’s claims against them nearly a decade ago.

Climate sensitivity in light of the latest energy imbalance evidence
https://judithcurry.com/2020/01/10/clim ... -evidence/

Are you expecting us to read this to you and write your argument for you?

[QatzelOk]

Pants (aka Pants-of-dog), I realize you feel very strongly about Greta, but did you have to post the entire article along with the link?

Do you think the quantity of unnecessary text that you dumped into the thread is going to convince anyone?

[Sivad]

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977,

Exxon was aware of the hypothesis, but that's all it was and all it still is. There is no consensus to this day so what was Exxon aware of exactly? That some scientists were speculating that it may be a problem in a hundred years?

[maz]

Those scientists of who she speaks are people like Ed Hawkins and other authors of the IPCC reports.

As for scientists fading into the background. Michael Mann is currently on a very public tour of Australia, giving their politicians a hard time.

I know who the scientists are so sorry if it wasn't clear that I was being rhetorical. My point was that Greta never names these scientists, and very rarely quotes their scientific research.

She speaks as if the scientists have handed down the sacred scrolls to her and because she is in possession of the secret knowledge we must believe her.

[Sivad]

"to suggest that we had definitive knowledge about human-induced climate change before the world's scientists is not a credible thesis."

[maz]

"to suggest that we had definitive knowledge about human-induced climate change before the world's scientists is not a credible thesis."

Also, they apparently knew the exact causes of global warming and that it was man made, decades before they had even begun pouring billions of dollars into studying it.

[Pants-of-dog]

Exxon was aware of the hypothesis, but that's all it was and all it still is. There is no consensus to this day so what was Exxon aware of exactly? That some scientists were speculating that it may be a problem in a hundred years?

People can read the article for themselves and decide what Exxon knew.

Your emotional bias is irrelevant.

[Sivad]

Also, they apparently knew the exact causes of global warming and that it was man made, decades before they had even begun pouring billions of dollars into studying it.

Anyone claiming that anyone back in 1977 had good reason to believe that anthropogenic carbon emissions were going to be a major problem is either an idiot or a liar.

[Sivad]

James Black continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical."

So holy shit, they were doing the 10 years till doom schtick all the way back in 1978.

All we really have to do is politically stalemate these idiots for another couple decades and the whole charade will just collapse under the weight of it's own failed predictions.

We all know that 20 years from now there's gonna be plenty of ice in the arctic, plenty of polar bears, plenty of permafrost, and plenty of islands that have failed to sink beneath rising seas. And when this one collapses it's gonna take the whole Science! establishment with it. The collapse of the CAGW hoax is gonna be a major turning point in the struggle for human freedom.

What's happening to the political establishment right now is what's gonna be happening to the Science! establishment in another 20 years. And all us skeptics who fought this bullshit are going to be completely vindicated and all the babbitt dinks are gonna be exposed as crazy fucking liars who tried derail human civilization.

[Sivad]

People can read the article for themselves

I'd like to believe that but honestly, I doubt it. They can obviously sound out the words for themselves but I doubt they can reason it through properly. Most won't even bother to read it and most of the ones that do read it won't apply any critical thinking to it.

[Pants-of-dog]

Again, people can read for themselves.

If you think people are stupid because they came away with a different interpretation, rest assured that some think the same as you. But your anger and judgement are not arguments.

[Sivad]

If you think people are stupid because they came away with a different interpretation

I think people are stupid because people are stupid. Uncannily stupid. The only people who doubt that are stupid people.

[Pants-of-dog]

Your anger is so boring.

———————————

On topic:

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/0504 ... s-lawsuits

Internal company documents uncovered by a Dutch news organization show that the oil giant Shell had a deep understanding, dating at least to the 1980s, of the science and risks of global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions.

They show that as the company pondered its responsibility to act, Shell's scientists urged it to heed the early warnings, even if, as they said, it might take until the 2000s for the mounting evidence to prove greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were causing unnatural climate change.

"With the very long time scales involved, it would be tempting for society to wait until then before doing anything," company researchers wrote in a 1988 report based on studies completed in 1986. "The potential implications for the world are, however, so large that policy options need to be considered much earlier. And the energy industry needs to consider how it should play its part."

Otherwise, a team of Shell experts said, "it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation."

......

So, Exxon knew and did nothing.

Shel knew and did nothing.

Any other major fossil fuel companies we should check out?

[Kaiserschmarrn]

Because we live in a capitalist system and everything is done this way. You are literally pointing out how normal this all is.

Please point us to some comparable examples. Thanks.

AOC and Greta have only recently entered the public eye. Before that right wingers denied climate change because they didn't want to drive smaller cars or spend money on cleaner energy.

These tendencies have been noticeable for years and if nothing else, the two examples can be regarded as a vindication of previous suspicions. As mentioned, the passionate opposition to clean nuclear energy has also been an environmentalist mainstay.

This whole thread is a red herring. Complaining that elites are trying to co-opt Greta is like complaining that high speed trains require public investment. Let's just ignore the billions spent by fossil fuel companies to buy elections and public opinion. Let's ignore the billions governments spend to build and maintain roads and airports.

I'm not asking anybody to ignore anything and to me it looks like you guys are the ones insisting that we ignore information that you regard as negatively implicating the Thunberg phenomenon. In fact, some of you seem to be getting cross about the very existence of this thread.

Apart from that, it's also difficult to not notice that while both sides have corporate backing and special interests behind them, one side is being hailed as a grassroots movement of innocent children, led by an unlikely child leader, who are saving us soiled and sinful adults from ourselves.

Your view, then, is based on your emotions and feelings. Because you have an antipathy to the spiritual, you are ignoring science, because for once, the 'spiritual' people are on the scientifically-correct side. It's not that industry financing means something can be dismissed - it's that spiritual support means it can.

I'm just making observations and stating my interpretation of them. I also don't feel any antipathy towards spiritual or religious people, but I'm now wondering when it has become controversial among centrists and lefties to point out corporate/industry involvement or the spiritual/religious elements of a movement. I'm even more surprised that it has apparently become acceptable among the same group of people to put existential fear into children and teenagers, trying to make them believe that they have no future.

I think it's quite likely that environmentalists had some influence in restricting choices when it comes to acceptable solutions to climate change. They were almost certainly part of the reason why Germany not only chose to phase out nuclear power but decided to do so early (after Fukushima). I strongly doubt that they are on the scientifically correct side regarding this.

What can we do to get you to listen to climate scientists, rather than your emotions?

There's nothing you can do to make me less skeptical about the confidence of climate scientists regarding the extent of the human contribution to global warming, because I do not believe that what is presented as a virtual certainty can currently be attained in this field.

It's also difficult to rationally explain the salience this issue now has in comparison with other threats that to me seem more likely to be able to lead to extinction or at least to a collapse of human civilisation, such as pandemics or nuclear war. This together with the solutions that have been adopted or proposed makes me skeptical about the rationality and/or sincerity of the people purporting to believe in a "climate emergency".

For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not talking about a conspiracy. Rather, I think it is a confluence of circumstances, politics, special interests, group dynamics and irrationality that has led us to this point.

[Pants-of-dog]

Please point us to some comparable examples. Thanks.

Do you want examples of people who also work in the capitalist system?

Because that is literally almost all of us.

Do you want examples of environmental activists who have to work in the capitalist system?

Again, almost all of them.

[Sivad]

I love this bit:

Shell's scientists urged it to heed the early warnings, even if, as they said, it might take until the 2000s for the mounting evidence to prove greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were causing unnatural climate change.

don't wait for evidence, start cutting off the lifeblood of civilization now before it's too late!!!

[SpecialOlympian]

That's such retarded propaganda, in the 60s and 70s it was just a fringe hypothesis that industry scientists were aware of and discussed in their reports but it's not like they had overwhelming evidence and suppressed it, that's just retarded alarmist bullshit.

Exxon conducted studies on global warming back then and concluded that it was real and that they had to fight anyone advocating for lower carbon emissions. People in the 19th century were aware of the idea that if you radically changed the planet's atmosphere and increased the amount of carbon dioxide that it would act as an insulator. Only morons believe otherwise now, but they pump themselves up by pretending that they're into some dumb esoteric knowledge or whatever. But it lightens my heart to see that you lack object permanence, like a newborn babe, and assume that just because you don't know something that knowledge never existed. It's cute.

Haven't read the past several pages but I'm guessing Sivad, as usual, has horse shoed his way into becoming the Supreme Leftist who somehow came to the same conclusion as hardcore rightwingers.

Like here's one of the results from a casual Google search on the subject so you don't throw a shit fit.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... nformation

Also I'm surprised people engage seriously with Kaiser. The mod who loves nazis regularly posts in the Gorkiy transphobia thread. That's a really good look for the mod staff.

[QatzelOk]

Exxon was aware of the hypothesis, but that's all it was and all it still is. There is no consensus to this day so what was Exxon aware of exactly?:

You are describing Exxon-Mobil - a trillionaire multinational that has more mercenaires than most countries - as if it were an innocent 9-year-old boy, on the verge of his coming of age.

A Side effect of all the PR you've absorbed?