Interview with Neela Banerjee, lead reporter on the bombshell series of revelations from Inside Climate News, – what Exxon knew about climate change, and when they knew it.
The oil company was actually doing cutting edge research in the late 70s and early 80s, working with world class organizations like Columbia University and Scripps Institute of Oceanography – and made projections very much in line with the very best science of the day – in fact astoundingly accurate as to what we are observing today.
Also interviewed is former Exxon scientist Ed Garvey, who conducted CO2 measurements from oceangoing oil tankers in the early days of the program.
To the discomfort of conservatives, Pope Francis doubled down on his environmental concerns Wednesday that climate change “can no longer be left to a future generation.”
Speaking from the White House lawn, the pope’s speech emphasized the global need to protect the planet from the impacts of climate change. The pope will also give a speech to Congress on Thursday.
Above, new video of the recent strange, vitriolic, and mystically tinged press conference by the Heartland Institute attacking the Pope’s acknowledgement of science. Includes comments by ex-con and “science advisor”, Jay Lehr.
Truth, it seems, burns climate deniers like holy water burns vampires.
I’m a long lapsed Catholic – I think if I went to communion at this point I’d likely burst into flames. But I resonated with the piece below.
The most important statement on climate change in a very long time came out this summer and it didn’t come from the IPCC or the National Academy of Sciences. No it came from Pope Frances
Now, I’m not a Catholic, but I play like one when I’m in my mountain home in Mexico. I go to the 200 year old church of Our Lady of the Clean Conception (Nuestra Senora de Concepcion Limpiada) almost everyday to pray to a particularly tortured Jesus back to the right of the apse. However the real star is St. Frances. Folks from all over Mexico come to this church to see him. Many of them walk and some walk on their knees. For St Frances is known as a healer and this church is known for its healing power.
And Pope Frances is doing his part to try to heal the world in his encyclical on Care for our Common Home. There has been a lot of reporting about the Pope’s position and how it may or may not effect change and mobilize the billion Catholics in the world. Already the Catholic Rs in the US have made it clear that the Pope should stick with Religion since he’s not a scientist. (actually he is)
But very few reports have actually shared the actual language of the letter. And it is really quite inspired. Pope Frances begins
1. “LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”.[1]
2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.
There are several interesting things about this graph. First, it was made in the 1980s, which proves that an IBM Selectric can make graphs. But never mind that. The graph shows the range of global surface temperature (vertical axis) over time (horizontal axis) in the past and future. If there was no effect from the human generated greenhouse gas CO2, global surface temperature would range, and had previously ranged, between about a half a degree C (Kelvin in the graph, but one degree K is one degree C) above and below a hypothetical baseline. However, given the influence of human generated greenhouse gas, the temperature rises.
When I saw this graph, I was reminded of several other graphs, such as the current surface temperature graphs showing rather shocking warming over the last few decades (since the Exxon graph was first typed). I was also reminded of the IPCC projections for warming, and the Hockey Stick graph of Mann, Hughes and others. It is notable that Exxon scientists, even before the marriage of the increasingly refined paleo-record with the increasingly detailed instrumental record that clearly demonstrated global warming, essentially had it right.
So I decided to see how right they were. To do this I made a graph that I’ll call a “Thumbsuck Estimate” (a phrase I picked up working in South Africa) of what the instrumental record of global surface warming, the IPCC projections, and Exxon ca 1981 indicated. My source graphs, other than the one shown above, included a graph of NOAA’s instrumental record (moving 12 month average) put together by my colleague John Abraham to include the most recent data:
After months of declining to take a position on the Keystone XL pipeline, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says she opposes the construction of the project.
“I think it is imperative that we look at the Keystone XL pipeline as what I believe it is: A distraction from the important work we have to do to combat climate change, and, unfortunately from my perspective, one that interferes with our ability to move forward and deal with other issues,” she said during a campaign event in Iowa Tuesday.
“Therefore, I oppose it. I oppose it because I don’t think it’s in the best interest of what we need to do to combat climate change.”
The United States Department of Justice has the power to prosecute Exxon’s deliberate deception under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act – just as the DOJ did to the tobacco industry for knowingly lying about the dangers of cigarette smoking.
“When I arrived there, I was quite surprised to discover that people in the research lab were very aware of the increase in the growth rate of carbon dioxide measurements in Hawaii [at the Mauna Loa observatory],” Morrel H. Cohen, a senior scientist at Exxon Research from 1981 to 1996, said in a recent interview. “They were very aware of the greenhouse effect.”
As the researchers alerted Exxon’s upper management about the CO2 problem, the scientists worked to provide better estimates of when the warming trend would create noticeable damage, and how large the impacts might be.
One scientist, Werner Glass, wrote an analysis in 1981 for a senior vice president that said the rise in global temperatures would begin to be noticed in a few decades. But Glass hedged his bet, saying the magnitude of the change would be “well short of catastrophic” in the early years.
“I think that this statement may be too reassuring,” Cohen, director of the Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Laboratory at Exxon Research, wrote in an August 18, 1981 memo to Glass.
Inside Climate News: