Politics of Global Warming

[Tyger]

Opinion piece -

Imagine 100 million more refugees... By Thom Hartmann, Nov. 18, 2015
LINK: Imagine 100 million more refugees...

TEXT: "If we don't strengthen our fight against climate change, 100 million more people may be pushed into extreme poverty within the next 15 years.

"That's Oxfam International's response to a stunning, new report by the World Bank. That analysis is called “Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty,” and it is the first to consider how global warming will be felt at a household level.

"In other words, the researchers considered how heat waves, floods, droughts, and public health issues will impact poor people, rather than simply considering how nations as a whole will deal with such problems.

"The report explained, “Poor people and poor countries are exposed and vulnerable to all types of climate-related shocks – natural disasters that destroy assets and livelihoods; waterborne diseases and pests that become more prevalent during heat waves, floods, or droughts; crop failure from reduced rainfall; and spikes in food prices that follow extreme weather events.”

"While those who can afford to withstand these events will be able to adapt to climate change, those who don't have the means to move or pay higher food prices may suddenly find themselves in a desperate situation.

"In order to reduce these risks, and help more people survive on our warming planet, Oxfam and the World Bank insist that we must reduce poverty as we ramp up our climate fight.

"They call for “rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development” to help people cope with short-term climate change, and “pro-poor mitigation policies” to limit the long-term impact.

"A senior economist at the World Bank said, “The report demonstrates that ending poverty and fighting climate change cannot be done in isolation – the two will be much more easily achieved if they are addressed together.”

"The fact is, we can no longer look at the climate fight and the effort to end inequality as two separate issues. If we want our species to survive, we better get to work and deal with both."​

 

[Tyger]

Climate Change Helped Spark Syrian War, Study Says: Research provides first deep look at how global warming may already influence armed conflict. By Craig Welch, for National Geographic PUBLISHED MARCH 02, 2015
LINK: Climate Change Helped Spark Syrian War, Study Says

Published on Monday, November 16, 2015
Amid Terror Fever, [Bernie] Sanders Refuses to Back Down on Climate Threat Stance
"If we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you're going to see all sorts of international conflict," said candidate, repeating previous assertion that climate change is our greatest national security threat by Lauren McCauley,
LINK: Amid Terror Fever, Sanders Refuses to Back Down on Climate Threat Stance

 

[mike_thoth]

EDIT NOTE: mike_thoth is another poster I regret being testy with. He was making excellent points. Would love a conversation with him now.

I have followed this global warming story for the last 10 years or so, I have covered many scientific subjects and many subjects covered by the Paracast. I also work in a broad sense in the scientific community where when statements are made and need to be backed up with evidence, citing papers etc…. And the global warming debate is much like the debate of whether the UFO phenomena is real regardless of its origin.

For instance in the "Science world" UFOs are not considered real, the "Skeptics" in this case demand evidence, they want physical evidence but lacking physical evidence, any documentary evidence from pilots for instance is also not compelling, as the person in question could have misidentified the phenomena.

When radar and multiple witness sightings occur, the radar could have been a flock of birds, a temperature inversion whilst at the same time the witness misidentified something. In other words they claim no evidence exists but are largely unaware of the excellent cases and any physical evidence left behind. This is why a cosmologist like Hawking can say only lunatics see UFOs (I am paraphrasing here) when one of his distinguished colleagues Michio Kaku has looked into the subject himself and found many cases compelling. In other words, an Air Force Pilot or Astronaut are not lunatics.

On the other side lets take global warming. I am firmly in the skeptic camp on this front for one reason, the scientists promoting Global Warming alarm act very much like the skeptics or debunkers in the anti UFO camp.

They act unscientific first of all by claiming a consensus exists. The consensus is also that UFOs are not real. It used to be consensus that women should not vote. These consensus arguments are always used when there is a lack of genuine proof. The alarmists ignore science, by claiming that CO2 is a pollutant and that we MUST lower the atmospheric concentration of this evil molecule before the earth overheats.

Over geological time periods temperature & CO2 concentration simply do not have a lock step relationship, that is not an argument that is fact. They also ignore the ecological benefits of CO2. Higher yields of crops, increase in vegetation, global greening and the receding desert. Should the UNIPCC get their way and lower the CO2 concentration to 150ppm or lower like they have expressed in official documents, then life on Earth would start to die off as many plants cannot exist in an atmosphere with so little CO2. As plants die off and then animals. This anti scientific mind set has co opted so many environmentalists these days that in order to be considered an environmentalist, you must identify with the group calling for a ban on fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels MUST be replaced because of the CO2 they emit. If we were to ban all fossil fuels today, or in 5 years or 10 years, what would follow would be mass die offs. All of our farming techniques to feed our populations require of fossil fuels, there is no replacement available.

Now this leads to another topic that has also been covered on this thread, over population. If we go back in time to Giammaria Ortes or to Thomas Malthus, or even to the writings of "The Old Oligarch" population control was always considered a major problem. From having too many people pushing down on the breast of Mother Earth to rising living standards and wealth of the ordinary man, elites have always considered population the road to ruin. We also have more contemporary examples, in Science we have the likes of James Hansen and more popular of all, the ultimate doomsayer of humanity, Paul Erlich. Both these men couldn’t predict a day would follow the night, there are so many examples of the irrational predictions they make, it could almost be called cruel to bring them up. But again like so many people, they fail to comprehend that science and technology can improve the lives of people, that population means historically….wealth. Consider the elites today, the wonderful British Royal Family, who often talk of over population and one particular member, wishes to return as an Ebola virus to help thin out the stock.

So what are we left with just on the global warming front? We have first a very tentative hypothesis which says CO2 means higher temperatures. Well it may make a difference but in all likely hood it is impossible to detect a human fingerprint to assign a percentage of warming to human factors. Computer models are being used to estimate the warming expected and these models over predict the real world by factors of 2, 4, 8 or higher. So we are meant to use computer models to enact policy? Lunacy.

We have the benefits of slight warming clearly understood, in the UK given the stupid green energy policies enacted here, means that prices for heating the homes of people have shot up, so we can expect this many deaths of our most vulnerable people because of cold, and because they cannot afford the energy thanks to the green tariffs enacted.

Around the world these days the usual suspects point to each weather event and claim it proves global warming, or climate change. Just imagine being in an argument where the public are told that more rain, less rain, more snow, less snow, more heat, less heat, more hail less hail, terrorism, murders, rapes, car theft, late trains (and I could cite dozens of papers funded because in the grant proposal the word climate was carefully inserted) are all proofs of their hypothesis. Its an argument that cannot be lost but it is absurd.

In Paris soon leaders will all turn up for a jolly old meeting just before Christmas where millions of dollars will be spent, potentially enacting policies which will cost trillions annually, to save us from a problem that exists inside a computer system and not in the real world. I look around the world today and see the same weather patters and variation as was in existence when I started school, no change. This is a threat that exists only in the minds of wealthy westerners; it’s a hypochondria of the world that developing nations do not care about, because they have real problems like poverty and they need to get their populations out of said poverty. That is where money should be spent.

In 10 years time I will come back to this blog where the alarmist supporters will still be here. However in 2025 they will be saying "we warned you that by 2035 if we don’t cut CO2 drastically we will get sea level rise" etc.… In other words, the only thing that will have changed would the date for this impending catastrophe. Just like has recently with Michael Mann, Al Gore, Prince Edward, it’s the easiest game to play on Earth, wait until the next tipping point date comes, and then simply add 10 or 20 years.

I am not waiting 20 years, I have officially had enough of this. It is time that money were put to better use and not used to enact policies that will ultimately take away peoples freedoms.

 

[DaveM]

I occasionally drop in to see what is posted here. It seems to be the same... long winded posts that go nowhere. I see lots of statistics but one thing is always missing. No one ever states what they are personally going to do to change matters. Please do not say that you plan to vote in a different set of politicians. Politicians take their money and orders from whatever interest groups and nothing really changes.

All the hot air expended is not going to change the environment.

 

[Tyger]

First EPA chief accuses Republicans of ignoring science for political gain: William Ruckelshaus, who this week will receive the presidential medal of freedom, says candidates are harming US’s reputation ahead of Paris climate talks - November 23, 2015
LINK: First EPA chief accuses Republicans of ignoring science for political gain

TEXT: "The man considered the father figure of environmental protection in the US has attacked Republicans for “going through all the stages of denial” over climate change, accusing leading presidential contenders Donald Trump and Marco Rubio of ignoring science for political gain. William Ruckelshaus, who on Tuesday is to receive the nation’s highest civilian honor, the presidential medal of freedom, told the Guardian that leading Republicans are harming the US’s reputation by attempting to stymie efforts to tackle climate change.

"The criticism is particularly stinging as Ruckelshaus previously ran for election as a Republican and was appointed by Richard Nixon as the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Ronald Reagan appointed him to a second term at the federal regulator in 1983. “The [Obama] administration is trying to lead on climate change but they aren’t getting much support from the Republicans who have turned it into a partisan issue, which is too bad,” Ruckelshaus said. “If they are successful, that will set us back a fair bit. It won’t look good to the world and it won’t be good for the US.”

"Republican leaders, who have signaled their opposition to any deal at looming climate talks in Paris, have attempted to dismantle key elements of Barack Obama’s strategy to lower emissions. The Republican-dominated Senate voted on Tuesday to repeal Obama’s centerpiece policy that uses the EPA to enforce rules to cut pollution from power plants. Mitch McConnell, the senate majority leader, said Republicans were protecting middle-class Americans from “deeply regressive energy regulations that would eliminate good-paying jobs and punish the poor”. Obama has vowed to veto any repeal, but any Republican who succeeded him as president appears unlikely to follow suit. Trump, a leading contender for the Republican nomination, has called global warming “bullshit” and a “total and very expensive hoax”.

"Ben Carson, another potential nominee, has said climate change is “not a big deal”, while Florida senator Marco Rubio said last year that scientists have taken “a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that’s directly and almost solely attributable to man-made activity. I don’t agree with that.” Ruckelshaus criticised the current Republican leadership for “resisting doing anything” on climate change in a bid to appease the party’s increasingly conservative voting base.

"The 83-year-old was appointed the first administrator of the EPA in 1970 by Nixon, leading the landmark introduction of pollution regulations before standing down in 1973. He then served a second stint heading the federal regulator under Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1985. Prior to the EPA, he ran for the Senate as a Republican.

" “The Republicans aren’t helping, they are just responding to the convictions of the base that climate change isn’t a real problem and feeding that back to them – it’s a vicious cycle,” he said. “Instead of treating it as a serious problem they are going through all the stages of denial. They are now at the stage of saying that it’s too expensive to do anything about climate change, which is no solution at all, they may as well just deny it’s a problem.

" “I don’t know what Trump actually knows about climate change, I don’t think Trump thinks much about many of the issues. Rubio shifts around a lot because he hears a lot of different messages from his constituents but what he’s essentially saying is that climate change isn’t a big enough problem to address. That comes down to not dealing with it. It’s concerning and I don’t understand why they don’t see this as an opportunity rather than something to be denied.”

" “There was huge resistance from the auto industry, they pushed back very hard,” Ruckelshaus said. “The difference from then until now is that the public demanded something be done about pollution and the government listened. The four major auto companies sent their CEOs to lobby against the Clean Air Act and they got about three votes in the Senate and not many more in the House. They thought they’d get it reversed in the House and they didn’t get anywhere.

" “In those days you could smell and touch the pollution, it was a bit like how China’s cities are today. That had a galvanizing effect. The greenhouse gases of today, you can’t see or taste or feel them. And it’s got way too partisan. The atmosphere today is completely different to the 1970s; Republicans’ arguments are all partisan driven, they aren’t based on any legitimate analysis of science.”

"Under Obama’s plan to slash the US’s output of greenhouse gases, the EPA will treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant and will ensure that power plants cut emissions by 32% by 2030 on 2005 levels. A coalition of 24 states and a coal mining companies have filed lawsuits against what they call the “flatly illegal” regulations, claiming that they represent an overreach of executive power. But Ruckelshaus said the new use of the EPA’s powers was “exactly how the Clean Air Act was meant to work in the first place. If the states didn’t meet standards to protect public health, the federal government stepped in, that’s how it was set up,” he said. “Congress is now threatening all sorts of things but if you don’t like the laws you rewrite them not complain about them. The EPA has to keep enforcing the law, they don’t have a choice. It would be underreach if they didn’t enforce the law and protect public health.”

"The former EPA administrator will be honoured primarily for his environmental work but he is also known for resigning as deputy attorney general in October 1973 amid the Watergate crisis after refusing to dismiss the special prosecutor in the case. “Not all the calls I’ve received from the White House have been welcome ones, but this latest one certainly was,” he said. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be honoured like this.”

William Ruckleshaus
1932: Born in Indianapolis, Indiana.

1960: Made deputy attorney general of Indiana at 28 years old.

1968: Ran for the US Senate as a Republican, losing narrowly to Birch Bayh.

1970: Appointed the first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency by President Richard Nixon.

1973: After bringing in landmark regulations of transport pollution and banning the pesticide DDT, Clean Air Act is enshrined in US law. Ruckelshaus shifts to become acting director of the FBI.

1973: In the same year, Ruckelshaus is appointed deputy attorney general of the US Department of Justice. He subsequently resigns the position, along with his boss Elliot Richardson, rather than obey an order from Nixon to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosector in the Watergate scandal. The event is known as the ‘Saturday night massacre’.

1983: Appointed to second stint as EPA administrator by President Ronald Reagan.

1985: Retires as EPA head.

2008: Endorses Barack Obama for president.​

 

[Tyger]

A good quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair

Have to start listening to the Climate Scientists who are actually doing the research. He gives good advice: Google Scholar to see if someone has actually published a paper on what they are commenting on.

Slaying the "zombies" of climate science | Dr. Marshall Shepherd | TEDxAtlanta

TEXT: "Published on May 29, 2013: About This Talk - One of the nation's leading climate scientists explains how he goes about knocking down the "zombie theories" that plague our discussions about climate change. What is a zombie theory? Says Shepherd: "It's one of those theories that scientists have refuted or disproven time and time again, but they live on like zombies in the blogs and on the radio stations."

"About This Speaker - As the 2013 president of the American Meteorological Society, Shepherd is a leading international expert in weather, climate and atmospheric sciences, and recently briefed the U.S. Senate on climate and extreme weather. A professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia, Shepherd is director of the University's Atmospheric Sciences Program. Shepherd spent 12 years as a research meteorologist in the Earth-Sun Division at NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center. Shepherd was recently named the UGA Athletic Association Professor in Geography and 2004 was honored at the White House by President Bush with a PECASE award as one of the top young scientists and engineers in the country."

 

[Tyger]

Lukewarmers – the third stage of climate denial, gambling on snake eyes: Lukewarmers are trying to make climate science denial more acceptable and mainstream - May 13, 2015
LINK: Lukewarmers – the third stage of climate denial, gambling on snake eyes | Dana Nuccitelli

TEXT: "It’s the hottest trend in climate denial. Long gone are the days when people can publicly deny that the planet is warming or that humans are responsible without facing widespread mockery. Those who oppose taking serious action to curb global warming have mostly shifted to Stage 3 in the 5 stages of climate denial.

• Stage 1: Deny the problem exists
• Stage 2: Deny we’re the cause
• Stage 3: Deny it’s a problem
• Stage 4: Deny we can solve it
• Stage 5: It’s too late

"Each of the 5 stages shares one main characteristic – all can be used to argue against efforts and policies to slow global warming. If the planet isn’t warming, or if we’re not causing it, or if it’s not a problem, or if we can’t solve it, or if it’s too late, in each case there’s no reason to implement climate policies.

"People who favor the status quo will often bounce back and forth between the various stages of climate denial. However, as Stages 1 and 2 have become increasingly untenable, Stage 3 has become more popular. As a result, so-called “Lukewarmers” have emerged. This group believes that the climate is relatively insensitive to the increasing greenhouse effect, and hence that climate change will proceed slowly enough as to not be a serious concern in the near future. This group has also become known as “Luckwarmers,” because they essentially want to gamble our future on the small chance that the best possible case scenario will come to fruition.

"The Luckwarmer Case
"It’s akin to rolling dice and betting all of our money that they’ll come up as snake eyes. For the Luckwarmer case to be true, first the climate sensitivity must be close to the lowest end of possible values. This requires rejecting the vast body of evidence suggesting that the climate is in reality quite sensitive to the increasing greenhouse effect.

"Second, even if the climate is relatively insensitive to the increasing greenhouse effect, the planet will nevertheless continue to warm if we continue to pump carbon pollution into the atmosphere. Thus the Luckwarmer case also generally depends on the impacts associated with that climate change being relatively benign. Contrarian climate scientist Judith Curry recently made this case in testimony to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology:

"The concern about inaction comes from concern about passing the 2°C ‘danger’ threshold, possibly by mid-century. This concern relies on a very weak assessment that 2°C of warming is actually ‘dangerous’ and that we can believe the climate models (which seem to be running too hot)."
​

"Former NASA climate scientist James Hansen recently outlined the scientific evidence behind why even 2°C warming is very dangerous for our long-term future. The most vulnerable developing nations agree. Scientific research seems to keep revealing more and more negative impacts associated with further global warming; most recently the likelihood that wheat yields will decrease in a hotter world as demand rises from a growing population.

"The claim about climate models running hot is a popular one among Luckwarmers, but observed temperatures are within the range of model simulations, and all signs point toward the reliability of long-term model projections.

"The Luckwarmer argument relies on both the climate sensitivity and climate change impacts being about as low as the scientific evidence suggests they could possibly be. But that requires rejecting all the evidence supporting the possibility of the worst case, or even the most likely case scenarios. Each of the dice could come up showing any number from 1 to 6. Betting that they’ll both come up showing 1 is a risky gamble.

"Is Stage 3 Denial a Positive Development?
"In The Observer, climate scientist Tamsin Edwards recently wrote,

"Call me naive – others have – but I choose to see the positive in this lukewarming of the debate. Widespread acceptance that humans do affect climate means we can focus on the genuine open questions in science and policy."
​

"On the one hand, it would be nice not to have to keep debunking myths about the reality of human-caused global warming. On the other hand, Stage 3 denial isn’t all that different from Stages 1 and 2. Ultimately they’re all based on denying some set of inconvenient scientific evidence, they’re all used to oppose policies to curb global warming, and people will bounce back and forth between the various stages of climate denial anyway.

For example, President George W. Bush’s FEMA director, Michael Brown (of “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” Hurricane Katrina infamy) recently voiced his Luckwarmer views on Twitter:

"I am a denier. I deny that man is causing climate to an extent we need public policy to stop it. Man can't stop climate change."
​

This is a combination of Stage 2 and 3 denial, explicitly used to justify opposition to climate policies. The aforementioned Judith Curry has also bounced between Stages 2 and 3, recently voicing doubts about the undeniable physical reality that humans are responsible for the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, writing,

"...the mass balance approach is naive zeroth order."
​

" 'The mass balance approach' refers to the principle that when we burn fossil fuels and release carbon pollution, that carbon has to go somewhere (based on the fundamental principle of the conservation of mass). Professor Gavin Cawley explains the science nicely in the Denial101x course.

UQx DENIAL101x 3.2.1.1 Upsetting the natural balance by Prof. Gavin Cawley

TEXT: "Published on May 11, 2015: Climate change is real, so why the controversy and debate? Learn to make sense of the science and to respond to climate change denial in Denial101x, a MOOC from UQx and edX. Denial101x isn’t just a climate MOOC; it’s a MOOC about how people think about climate change. Any research used to develop this content has been cited on a references page within the subsection for this lecture."
​

"Since the rate of buildup in the atmosphere is only about half as fast as the rate at which humans are producing carbon pollution, it’s undeniable that we’re causing the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Or at least it should be.

"Luckwarmers Usually Oppose Climate Policies
"Other examples of Luckwarmers include Matt Ridley, Nic Lewis, and Bjorn Lomborg. The University of Western Australia has been caught up in a major Luckwarmer controversy, having taken federal funds to set up a center from which Lomborg was expected to argue that the government’s money would be better spent on issues other than curbing global warming. In a sign that even Stage 3 climate denial is starting to become untenable, the resulting uproar forced the university to cancel plans for the center.

"Matt Ridley and Nic Lewis are both contributors to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The GWPF advocates against most policies that would significantly cut carbon pollution and slow global warming. Matt Ridley often explicitly advocates for the continued heavy use of fossil fuels.

"Is Stage 3 Denial a Negative Development?
"Thus it’s hard to make a convincing case that the shift towards Stage 3 climate denial is a positive development. If anything it just gives arguments against climate policies undeserved credibility. For example, The Observer sub-headline read,

"There are climate change sceptics, mainstream scientists – and a significant group [Luckwarmers] in the middle."
​

"In reality it’s mainstream climate scientists who are in the middle, between contrarians/luckwarmers and doomsayers. The former believe the climate is so insensitive that we needn’t take action, while the latter believe it’s so sensitive that we’re already doomed to catastrophe.

"If Luckwarmers succeed in shifting the Overton Window in this fashion to make climate denial and arguments against climate policies even more mainstream, then the shift to Stage 3 climate denial may do much more harm than good."​

 

[Tyger]

Congresswoman Defends NOAA Scientists From Lamar Smith 'Witch Hunt': Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson sends Lamar Smith, chair of the House science committee, a blistering critique of his 'ideological crusade.' BY KATHERINE BAGLEY, INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS NOV 23, 2015
LINK: Congresswoman Defends NOAA Scientists From Lamar Smith 'Witch Hunt'

TEXT: "Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson delivered a blistering critique of a Republican campaign to discredit the work of federal climate scientists, branding the effort "hyper-aggressive oversight," a "fishing expedition" and an "ideological crusade."

"The months-long probe of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers is being led by Texas Republican Lamar Smith, chair of the House science committee. Johnson is the committee's ranking democrat. "In six separate, and increasingly aggressive, letters," Johnson wrote in a Nov. 19 letter to Smith, "the only thing you accused NOAA of doing is engaging in climate science—i.e., doing their jobs." The letter charges Smith of "political posturing intended to influence public opinion" ahead of the Paris climate talks.

"Smith responded to Johnson on Monday, calling her "characterization of the Committee’s efforts to obtain data from a government agency under its jurisdiction… inaccurate and misleading." The congressman is targeting a June 4 study by federal researchers that refutes the so-called "hiatus" in global warming. The hiatus theory—favored by climate denialists—argues warming has paused or slowed since 1998. The study was led by Tom Karl, director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, and published in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

"Since July, Smith has sent NOAA letters and subpoenas asking the agency to provide "all documents and communications" related to the study. NOAA has refused to comply with Smith's requests for emails, citing the importance of confidentiality among scientists. "The whole thing is really disconcerting...somebody doesn't like the result you publish and all of a sudden you have this huge hammer of a congressional subpoena hanging over your head. It has a chilling effect on scientists," said Andrew Rosenberg, the director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"In her letter, Johnson, also from Texas, criticized Smith for not explaining why he was investigating NOAA, as well as for making "sweeping indictments" to media that federal scientists manipulated data to advance President Obama's climate change agenda. "In one fell swoop, you have accused a host of different individuals of wrongdoing," Johnson wrote. "You have accused NOAA's top research scientists of scientific misconduct. By extension, you have also accused the peer-reviewers at one of our nation's most prestigious academic journals, Science, of participating in this misconduct (or at least being too incompetent to notice what was going on). If that weren't enough, you are intimating a grand conspiracy between NOAA and the White House to doctor climate science to advance administration policy. Presumably this accusation extends to [NOAA] Administrator [Kathryn] Sullivan herself. "And all of these indictments are conjured out of thin air, without you presenting any factual basis for these sweeping accusations—exposing this so-called 'investigation' for what it truly is: a witch hunt designed to smear the reputations of eminent scientists for partisan gain."

"Johnson first contacted Smith with her concerns about the investigation in October. When Smith didn't respond, she decided she needed to write him again, said Kristin Kopshever, a House science committee spokeswoman for Johnson. "Over the past couple of years, the committee has had a lot of investigations," said Kopshever. It has investigated the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation, she said. In September, Smith launched an investigation of Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist at George Mason University in Virginia who called for a federal probe into whether fossil fuel companies knowingly misled the public on climate change.

"What made her word these recent letters [to Smith] so strongly, Kopshever said, "is that he doesn't have any fact-based allegations against NOAA for wrongdoing or misuse of power or funds that would typically prompt an investigation." Smith also wrote two letters to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker urging her to pressure NOAA to cooperate with the House committee probe. The most recent one was sent on Nov. 18. In it, Smith claimed to have whistleblower communications that show "wrongdoing." "Information provided to the Committee by whistleblowers appears to show that the Karl study was rushed to publication despite the concerns and objections of a number of NOAA scientists," Smith wrote. Pritzker was out of the country last week and asked Sullivan of NOAA to respond on her behalf. "Let me assure you that I am not engaged in or associated with any 'politically correct agenda,' Sullivan wrote in the Nov. 20 letter. "I have not and will not allow anyone to manipulate the science or coerce the scientists who work for me."

"Johnson requested that the whistleblower information be shared with Democratic members of the science committee. She called Smith's criticism that the study was "rushed" a "mild accusation"—one not serious enough to warrant a congressional investigation. "The Constitution doesn't provide you with a blank check to harass research scientists with whose results you disagree," she wrote.

"In his response letter Monday, Smith said that asking for the source's information "in a public setting is not only harmful to the Committee’s current investigations, but may have a chilling effect on the willingness of federal employees to report waste, fraud, and abuse to the Committee in the future."

"Read the full letter: [see linked article for graphic of letter] "​

 

[Tyger]

This is going on today - November 31, 2015 - starting today and for the next two weeks.

A Massive Climate Summit Is Going On in Paris. Here's What You Need to Know. Diplomats and scientists are descending on the French capital Monday. They'll try to save the world. - By Tim McDonnell Fri Nov. 27, 2015
LINK: A massive climate summit is going on in Paris. Here's what you need to know.

TEXT: "On Monday [Today] roughly 40,000 heads of state, diplomats, scientists, activists, policy experts, and journalists will descend on an airport in the northern Paris suburbs for the biggest meeting on climate change since at least 2009—or maybe ever. The summit is organized by the United Nations and is primarily aimed at producing an agreement that will serve as the world's blueprint for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the impacts of global warming. This is a major milestone in the climate change saga, and it has been in the works for years. Here's what you need to know:

"What's going on at this summit, exactly? At the heart of the summit are the core negotiations, which are off-limits to the public and journalists. Like any high-stakes diplomatic summit, representatives of national governments will sit in a big room and parse through pages of text, word by word. The final document will actually be a jigsaw puzzle of two separate pieces. The most important part is the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). These are commitments made individually by each country about how they plan to reduce their carbon footprints. The United States, for example, has committed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, mostly by going after carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. Nearly every country on Earth has submitted an INDC, together covering about 95 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. (You can explore them in detail here.) The video above, from Climate Desk partner Grist, has a good rundown of how this all really works.

"The Paris summit has already been somewhat successful, and now we'll see just how far that success can go. The INDCs will be plugged in to a core agreement, the final text of which will be hammered out during the negotiations. It will likely include language about how wealthy nations should help pay for poor nations' efforts to adapt to climate change; how countries should revise and strengthen their commitments over time; and how countries can critically evaluate each other's commitments. While the INDCs are unlikely to be legally binding (that is, a country could change its commitment without international repercussions), certain elements of the core agreement may be binding. There's some disagreement between the United States and Europe over what the exact legal status of this document will be. A formal treaty would need the approval of the Republican-controlled US Senate, which is almost certainly impossible. It's more likely that President Barack Obama will sign off on the document as an "executive agreement," which doesn't need to go through Congress.

"Meanwhile, outside the negotiating room, thousands of business leaders, state and local officials, activists, scientists, and others will carry out a dizzying array of side events, press conferences, workshops, etc. It's basically going to be a giant party for the world's climate nerds.

"But what about the terrorist attacks in Paris? Of course, all of this will be happening while the French capital is still reeling from the bombings and shootings that left 129 dead on November 13. Shortly after the attacks, French officials affirmed that the summit would still happen. But it will be tightly controlled, with loads of additional security measures. As my colleague James West has reported, many of the major rallies and marches that activists had planned will be canceledat the behest of French authorities. So the festive aspects of the summit are likely to be toned way down, with attention focused just on the formal events needed to complete the agreement. The summit could also direct a lot of attention to the links between climate change, terrorism, and national security.

"Is this actually going to stop climate change? Short answer, no. The latest estimate is that the INDCs on the table will limit global warming to about 2.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. As I wrote in October, "That's above the 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) limit scientists say is necessary to avert the worst impacts—but it's also about 1 degree C less warming than would happen if the world continued on its present course." No one expects that this summit will be the end of the battle to stop climate change. As technology improves and countries get more confident in their ability to curb greenhouses gases, they'll be able to step up their action over time. That's why it's essential for the agreement to include a requirement for countries to do so. In any case, even if the whole world stopped burning all fossil fuels right now, warming from existing greenhouse gas emissions would continue for decades, so adaptation is also a crucial part of the agreement.

"It's basically going to be a giant party for the world's climate nerds. Some environmentalists have criticized that incremental approach as not urgent enough, given the scale of the problem. They could be right. But the fact is that right now, there's no international agreement at all. The Paris talks will lay an essential groundwork for solving this problem over the next couple of decades. And there's a pretty good chance the talks will be successful. At the last major climate summit, in 2009 in Copenhagen, negotiations crumbled because officials couldn't agree on a set of global greenhouse gas limits that would hold most countries to the same standard despite differences in their resources and needs. That's why, this time around, the approach is bottom-up: Because countries have already worked out their INDCs, there's no ambiguity about what they're willing to do and no need to agree on every detail.

"Meanwhile, the mere existence of the talks has already spurred a wave of new investment in clean energy, new commitments from cities and states around the globe, and other actions that aren't part of the core agreement.And the international peer pressure around the INDCs has already made it clear that simply ignoring climate change isn't a realistic geopolitical option, even for countries like Russia or the oil-producing Gulf states. That's a significant change from what would be happening in the absence of the talks. In other words, it's safe to say that the Paris summit has already been somewhat successful, and now we have the opportunity to see how far that success can go.

"So everything is peaches and cream? Not quite. There are some big remaining questions about how much money the United States and other wealthy countries will commit to help island nations, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and other places that are highly vulnerable to global warming. The international community is still far short of its goal of raising $100 billion annually by 2020 to fund adaptation. The legal status of the agreement remains unclear. We don't know whether countries can agree on a long-term target date (say, 2100) to fully cease all greenhouse gas emissions. And it's unclear how much tension there will be between juggernauts such as the United States, China, and the 43-country-strong negotiating bloc of highly vulnerable developing nations.

"At Climate Desk, we'll have an eye on all these questions, and more—both from the ground in Paris and from our newsrooms in the United States. So stay tuned."​

 

[aNorthernSoul]

Lukewarmers – the third stage of climate denial, gambling on snake eyes...

If you do not read this as nothing more than blatant money driven propaganda than you are clearly an idiot. I am sorry, but that is a fact.

 

[Tyger]

CONFIDENTIAL MEMOS OF THE REAGAN ERA REVEAL A HUGE GOP LIE ON CLIMATE CHANGE
LINK: Confidential Memos Of The Reagan Era Reveal A HUGE GOP Lie On Climate Change

TEXT: "When it comes to climate change, the GOP is about as obstinate as it gets. We’ve gone from rational, intelligent discussions of climate change to hearing, “It’s a hoax!” from Republicans every time it’s brought up. They have different reasons for thinking that way, but those reasons boil down to the idea that it’s all a big hoax, so we shouldn’t waste time and resources on it. A newly released set of memos, though, shows the urgency of the problem, and guess what? These memos didn’t come from the Obama administration, or even George Bush the Lesser’s administration. They didn’t come from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), or the U.N. They came from the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations.

"Way back in the days of Reagan, our Republican leaders were actually eager to take a global lead on combating climate change. They knew it was a thing. They knew scientists knew climate change was a thing, but today’s GOP pushes the lie that scientists disagree. These memos, which have been kept under wraps for decades, show how Reagan and George H.W. Bush would be ostracized today for how they saw the problem. The full memos are below:

Memorandum by Frederick M. Bernthal – Feb. 9, 1989​

 

[Tyger]

If you do not read this as nothing more than blatant money driven propaganda than you are clearly an idiot. I am sorry, but that is a fact.

There is really no substance to what you say, given that you more characterize than supply rebuttal. What you mean by your statement has to be inferred since you choose to be covert rather than overt in your meaning.

Fact is, when you have the dominant - and up until very recently, only - energy sources being employed by the industrialized world identified as the sources of a lethal kind of pollution, there is bound to be economic repercussions. No surprise there.

For a long time the alternatives to the fossil fuels were but at the speculative and planning stages. We are at a very different juncture now. Alternate energy sources are now accessible and are a reasonable replacement for the offending energy sources.

Urban planning now factors in the realities of the on-coming climate shift impacts. In my area there has been substantial new building happening in an area that was under water in the 1920's and will be again in a few decades from the civic maps being supplied showing the impact of various sea level rise scenarios. This past week I realized when driving by the new series of complexes, that they have been built with a massive lower level that houses no living space or retail space. Everything has been lifted up a solid two stories - interesting foreword thinking - though it still leaves the question of the roadways. How them?

 

[Tyger]

The following video is actually from 2013. We are already on the other side of some of the issues - like the Tar Sands, etc. The last presidential election had just taken place but I feel the videos remain relevant though here at the end of 2015, as we enter the 2016 presidential election cycle, the reality has moved much farther along.

Those who think there is a debate going on about the science are dinosaurs at this point. There is no debate. Sadly, there is no debate about the severity of the warming that we are facing between now and 2100 - it's more a question of how hot will the planet's temperature rise to. Mitigation is the great hope but the reality is far more sobering imo.

Fact is far too much is going on globally to have much hope that this issue will be reasonably addressed. The issue of armaments production - and the resulting profit making from war - is the elephant in the room.

The Great Debate: CLIMATE CHANGE - Surviving The Future (OFFICIAL) - (Part 1/2)

TEXT: "Published on Jun 17, 2015: View Part 2/2: Are we beyond the tipping point for survivable climate change?"

Krauss: 3:30 Intro
James Hansen: 19:20
Susan Solomon: 32:40
John Ashton: 46:10
Sander Van Der Leeuw: 59:09
Klaus Lackner: 1:12:00
Wallace Smith Broecker 1:25:00
Ends at 1:31:40 - at which point the whole previous video gets repeated.


This is the interesting part of the exchanges, as the presenters answer audience questions.

The Great Debate: CLIMATE CHANGE - Surviving The Future (OFFICIAL) - (Part 2/2)

TEXT: "Published on Jun 17, 2015: Are we beyond the tipping point for survivable climate change?"

 

[Tyger]

December 16, 2015
Congress Just Sold The Entire United States To The Oil Fracking Industry
LINK: Congress Just Sold The Entire United States To The Oil Fracking Industry (IMAGE)

TEXT: "Congress agreed to end a 40-year ban on oil exports Tuesday night as part of a $1.1 trillion dollar omnibus spending package. The decision to lift the ban spells disaster for Earth’s climate and for the United States. The lifting of the oil export ban presents a huge win for lawmakers controlled by the oil industry. In exchange for lifting the ban, tax breaks set to expire for the solar and biofuel industries will be extended.

"According to a recent study, lifting the ban on oil exports will increase U.S. oil production by 3.3 million barrels a day. Lifting the oil export ban would mean that “oil companies would drill an average of 26,385 new oil wells in the United States every year between 2016 and 2030 if the crude oil export ban is lifted, or approximately 7,600 more wells on average per year than if the ban remains in place,” according the study. Most of those oil wells are expected to be fracked."​

 

[Tyger]

A very serious methane leak that is 'only just' getting national attention, albeit in the alternative press, not the corporate press. The local schools in Porter Ranch have been closed for the rest of the school year. Families are being relocated.

ALERT: MASSIVE METHANE LEAK IN LA COUNTY

TEXT: "Published on Dec 17, 2015: Excerpt from "Down The Rabbit Hole" with Popeye, RadChick, & Joe Joseph -
Program air date December 16th 2015.

*FULL INTERVIEW at DTRHRadioArchives:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUqQc...

Show description: "On this edition of DTRH Popeye welcomes back two close friends as his guest co-hosts. First is researcher, and radio show host Christina Consolo aka Rad Chick.; Second is researcher, and radio host Joe Joseph. The three of them get into a great discussion which covers: The massive methane leak in a suburb of Los Angeles which is causing evacuations, and airline flight path changes; Earth changes like sinkholes, earthquakes, and ground upheavals and their affects on road infrastructure; And spaceweathers role in this whole “environmental shit show” as Christina calls it.

"Residents began calling the 9-1-1 emergency line, the fire department and air quality officials a day after the leak erupted, complaining about the smell of a gas odorant called mercaptans. They also reported getting headaches and nosebleeds...
Resident Matt Pakucko had made such calls and was told of a gas leak. He called the Gas Company early on Monday Oct. 26, and said a call center worker told him the situation was normal..."

Well. 7 weeks later and this leak is STILL going on. Experts from Kuwait oil fires being brought in indicates (imo) that situation is very very serious... Planes being told not to fly into affected area or they could IGNITE...FAA No-Fly zone in effect until March 8th 2016.

*This Thursday Dec 17th at 6 PM PST John & Ken of Los Angeles talk radio station KFI 640AM will be live broadcasting a discussion of the well problems with the local residents and guest Erin Brockovich:Listen to KFI Radio Live - Stay Connected - Los Angeles

FAA:
http://ktla.com/2015/12/11/temporary-...

RSOE EDIS LINK:
http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/database...

Must Watch: Erin Brockovich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Discuss Massive Methane Leak in Porter Ranch: "This well was created the year I was born, 62 years ago." ~ Robert F. Kennedy Jr
http://ktla.com/2015/12/12/erin-brock...

Remember this?? From June 2015 - Geologists discover evidence of helium and carbon dioxide leakage from the Earth's mantle in the Los Angeles Basin: http://www.sott.net/article/298465-Ge...

WIRED: California Has a Huge Gas Leak, and Crews Can’t Stop It Yet:http://www.wired.com/2015/12/massive-...

Coincidental outgassing happening along Wasatch fault:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasatch...

**Required reading: http://jumpingjackflashhypothesis.blo...

Twitter: Christina Consolo (@RadChick4Cast) | Twitter

Website and all links:
RadChick Radiation Research and Mitigation | Climate Viewer News

All DTRH links at full interview listed above.


How Is This Not National News?

TEXT: "Published on Dec 28, 2015: A massive methane leak in Porter Ranch, California, has displaced thousands of residents and is releasing over 30,000 kilograms of methane per hour."

 

[Tyger]

Read it and weep.

Exxon’s Never-Ending Big Dig: As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now — entirely legally — is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in human history.
BY BILL MCKIBBEN | FEBRUARY 19, 2016
LINK: Exxon's Never-Ending Big Dig - BillMoyers.com

TEXT: "Here’s the story so far. We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth and 16th largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. And that’s just the beginning. As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now — entirely legally — is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story.

Back in the fall, you might have heard something about how Exxon had covered up what it knew early on about climate change. Maybe you even thought to yourself: that doesn’t surprise me. But it should have. Even as someone who has spent his life engaged in the bottomless pit of greed that is global warming, the news and its meaning came as a shock: we could have avoided, it turns out, the last quarter century of pointless climate debate.

As a start, investigations by the Pulitzer-Prize winning Inside Climate News, the Los Angeles Times, and Columbia Journalism School revealed in extraordinary detail that Exxon’s top officials had known everything there was to know about climate change back in the 1980s. Even earlier, actually. Here’s what senior company scientist James Black told Exxon’s management committee in 1977: “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.” To determine if this was so, the company outfitted an oil tanker with carbon dioxide sensors to measure concentrations of the gas over the ocean, and then funded elaborate computer models to help predict what temperatures would do in the future.

The results of all that work were unequivocal. By 1982, in an internal “corporate primer,” Exxon’s leaders were told that, despite lingering unknowns, dealing with climate change “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.” Unless that happened, the primer said, citing independent experts, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered… Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.” But that document, “given wide circulation” within Exxon, was also stamped “Not to be distributed externally.”

So here’s what happened. Exxon used its knowledge of climate change to plan its own future. The company, for instance, leased large tracts of the Arctic for oil exploration, territory where, as a company scientist pointed out in 1990, “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs.” Not only that but, “from the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic,” Exxon and its affiliates set about “raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic.” In other words, the company started climate-proofing its facilities to head off a future its own scientists knew was inevitable.

But in public? There, Exxon didn’t own up to any of this. In fact, it did precisely the opposite. In the 1990s, it started to put money and muscle into obscuring the science around climate change. It funded think tanks that spread climate denial and even recruited lobbying talent from the tobacco industry. It also followed the tobacco playbook when it came to the defense of cigarettes by highlighting “uncertainty” about the science of global warming. And it spentlavishly to back political candidates who were ready to downplay global warming.

Its CEO, Lee Raymond, even traveled to China in 1997 and urged government leaders there to go full steam ahead in developing a fossil fuel economy. The globe was cooling, not warming, he insisted, while his engineers were raising drilling platforms to compensate for rising seas. “It is highly unlikely,” he said, “that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now.” Which wasn’t just wrong, but completely and overwhelmingly wrong — as wrong as a man could be.

Sins of Omission

In fact, Exxon’s deceit — its ability to discourage regulations for 20 years — may turn out to be absolutely crucial in the planet’s geological history. It’s in those two decades that greenhouse gas emissions soared, as did global temperatures until, in the twenty-first century, “hottest year ever recorded” has become a tired cliché. And here’s the bottom line: had Exxon told the truth about what it knew back in 1990, we might not have wasted a quarter of a century in a phony debate about the science of climate change, nor would anyone have accused Exxon of being “alarmist.” We would simply have gotten to work.

But Exxon didn’t tell the truth. A Yale study published last fall in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that money from Exxon and the Koch Brothers played a key role in polarizing the climate debate in this country.

The company’s sins — of omission and commission — may even turn out to be criminal. Whether the company “lied to the public” is the question that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman decided to investigate last fall in a case that could make him the great lawman of our era if his investigation doesn’t languish. There are various consumer fraud statutes that Exxon might have violated and it might have failed to disclose relevant information to investors, which is the main kind of lying that’s illegal in this country of ours. Now, Schneiderman’s got backup from California Attorney General Kamala Harris, and maybe — if activists continue to apply pressure — from the Department of Justice as well, though its highly publicized unwillingness to go after the big banks does not inspire confidence.

Here’s the thing: all that was bad back then, but Exxon and many of its Big Energy peers are behaving at least as badly now when the pace of warming is accelerating. And it’s all legal — dangerous, stupid, and immoral, but legal.

On the face of things, Exxon has, in fact, changed a little in recent years.

For one thing, it’s stopped denying climate change, at least in a modest way. Rex Tillerson, Raymond’s successor as CEO, stopped telling world leaders that the planet was cooling. Speaking in 2012 at the Council on Foreign Relations, he said, “I’m not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It’ll have a warming impact.”

Of course, he immediately went on to say that its impact was uncertain indeed, hard to estimate, and in any event entirely manageable. His language was striking. “We will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around — we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.”

Add to that gem of a comment this one: the real problem, he insisted, was that “we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas, science, math, and engineering, what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.”

Right. This was in 2012, within months of floods across Asia that displaced tens of millions and during the hottest summer ever recorded in the United States, when much of our grain crop failed. Oh yeah, and just before Hurricane Sandy.

He’s continued the same kind of belligerent rhetoric throughout his tenure. At last year’s ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, he said that if the world had to deal with “inclement weather,” which “may or may not be induced by climate change,” we should employ unspecified “new technologies.” Mankind, he explained, “has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity.”

In other words, we’re no longer talking about outright denial, just a denial that much really needs to be done. And even when the company has proposed doing something, its proposals have been strikingly ethereal. Exxon’s PR team, for instance, has discussed supporting a price on carbon, which is only what economists left, right, and center have been recommending since the 1980s. But the minimal price they recommend — somewhere in the range of $40 to $60 a ton — wouldn’t do much to slow down their business. After all, they insist that all their reserves are still recoverable in the context of such a price increase, which would serve mainly to make life harder for the already terminal coal industry.

But say you think it’s a great idea to put a price on carbon — which, in fact, it is, since every signal helps sway investment decisions. In that case, Exxon’s done its best to make sure that what they pretend to support in theory will never happen in practice.

Consider, for instance, their political contributions. The website Dirty Energy Money, organized by Oil Change International, makes it easy to track who gave what to whom. If you look at all of Exxon’s political contributions from 1999 to the present, a huge majority of their political harem of politicians have signed the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform that binds them to vote against any new taxes. Norquist himself wrote Congress in late January that “a carbon tax is a VAT or Value Added Tax on training wheels. Any carbon tax would inevitably be spread out over wider and wider parts of the economy until we had a European Value Added Tax.” As he told a reporter last year, “I don’t see the path to getting a lot of Republican votes” for a carbon tax, and since he’s been called “the most powerful man in American politics,” that seems like a good bet.

The only Democratic senator in Exxon’s top 60 list was former Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, who made a great virtue in her last race of the fact that she was “the key vote” in blocking carbon pricing in Congress. Bill Cassidy, the man who defeated her, is also an Exxon favorite, and lost no time in co-sponsoring a bill opposing any carbon taxes. In other words, you could really call Exxon’s supposed concessions on climate change a Shell game. Except it’s Exxon.

The Never-Ending Big Dig

Even that’s not the deepest problem.

The deepest problem is Exxon’s business plan. The company spends huge amounts of money searching for new hydrocarbons. Given the recent plunge in oil prices, its capital spending and exploration budget was indeed cut by 12 percent in 2015 to $34 billion, and another 25 percent in 2016 to $23.2 billion. In 2015, that meant Exxon was spending $63 million a day “as it continues to bring new projects on line.” They are still spending a cool $1.57 billion a year looking for new sources of hydrocarbons — $4 million a day, every day.

As Exxon looks ahead, despite the current bargain basement price of oil, it still boasts of expansion plans in the Gulf of Mexico, eastern Canada, Indonesia, Australia, the Russian far east, Angola and Nigeria. “The strength of our global organization allows us to explore across all geological and geographical environments, using industry-leading technology and capabilities.” And its willingness to get in bed with just about any regime out there makes it even easier. Somewhere in his trophy case, for instance, Rex Tillerson has an Order of Friendship medal from one Vladimir Putin. All it took was a joint energy venture estimated to be worth $500 billion.

But, you say, that’s what oil companies do, go find new oil, right? Unfortunately, that’s precisely what we can’t have them doing any more. About a decade ago, scientists first began figuring out a “carbon budget” for the planet — an estimate for how much more carbon we could burn before we completely overheated the Earth. There are potentially many thousands of gigatons of carbon that could be extracted from the planet if we keep exploring. The fossil fuel industry has already identified at least 5,000 gigatons of carbon that it has told regulators, shareholders, and banks it plans to extract. However, we can only burn aboutanother 900 gigatons of carbon before we disastrously overheat the planet. On our current trajectory, we’d burn through that “budget” in about a couple of decades. The carbon we’ve burned has already raised the planet’s temperature a degree Celsius, and on our present course we’ll burn enough to take us past two degrees in less than 20 years.

At this point, in fact, no climate scientist thinks that even a two-degree rise in temperature is a safe target, since one degree is already melting the ice caps. (Indeed, new data released this month shows that, if we hit the two-degree mark, we’ll be living with drastically raised sea levels for, oh, twice as long as human civilization has existed to date.) That’s why in November world leaders in Paris agreed to try to limit the planet’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or just under three degrees Fahrenheit. If you wanted to meet that target, however, you would need to be done burning fossil fuels by perhaps 2020, which is in technical terms just about now.

That’s why it’s wildly irresponsible for a company to be leading the world in oil exploration when, as scientists have carefully explained, we already have access to four or five times as much carbon in the Earth as we can safely burn. We have it, as it were, on the shelf. So why would we go looking for more? Scientists have even done us the useful service of identifying precisely the kinds of fossil fuels we should never dig up, and — what do you know — an awful lot of them are on Exxon’s future wish list, including the tar sands of Canada, a particularly carbon-filthy, environmentally destructive fuel to produce and burn.

Even Exxon’s one attempt to profit from stanching global warming has started to come apart. Several years ago, the company began a calculated pivot in the direction of natural gas, which produces less carbon than oil when burned. In 2009, Exxon acquired XTO Energy, a company that had mastered the art of extracting gas from shale via hydraulic fracturing. By now, Exxon has become America’s leading fracker and a pioneer in natural gas markets around the world. The trouble with fracked natural gas — other than what Tillerson oncecalled “farmer Joe’s lit his faucet on fire” — is this: in recent years, it’s become clear that the process of fracking for gas releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, and methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. As Cornell University scientist Robert Howarth has recently established, burning natural gas to produce electricity probably warms the planet faster than burning coal or crude oil.

Exxon’s insistence on finding and producing ever more fossil fuels certainly benefited its shareholders for a time, even if it cost the Earth dearly. Five of the 10 largest annual profits ever reported by any company belonged to Exxon in these years. Even the financial argument is now, however, weakening. Over the last five years, Exxon has lagged behind many of its competitors as well as the broader market, and a big reason, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI), is its heavy investment in particularly expensive, hard-to-recover oil and gas.

In 2007, as CTI reported, Canadian tar sands and similar “heavy oil” deposits accounted for 7.5 percent of Exxon’s proven reserves. By 2013, that number had risen to 17 percent. A smart business strategy for the company, according to CTI, would involve shrinking its exploration budget, concentrating on the oil fields it has access to that can still be pumped profitably at low prices, and using the cash flow to buy back shares or otherwise reward investors.

That would, however, mean exchanging Exxon’s Texan-style big-is-good approach for something far more modest. And since we’re speaking about what was the biggest company on the planet for a significant part of the twentieth century, Exxon seems to be set on continuing down that bigger-is-better path. They’re betting that the price of oil will rise in the reasonably near future, that alternative energy won’t develop fast enough, and that the world won’t aggressively tackle climate change. And the company will keep trying to cover those bets by aggressively backing politicians capable of ensuring that nothing happens.

Can Exxon Be Pressured?

Next to that fierce stance on the planet’s future, the mild requests of activists for the last 25 years seem… well, next to pointless. At the 2015 ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, religious shareholder activists asked for the umpteenth time that the company at least make public its plans for managing climate risks. Even BP, Shell, and Statoil had agreed to that much. Instead, Exxon’s management campaigned against the resolution and it got only 9.6 percent of shareholder votes, a tally so low it can’t even be brought up again for another three years. By which time we’ll have burned through… oh, never mind.

What we need from Exxon is what they’ll never give: a pledge to keep most of their reserves underground, an end to new exploration, and a promise to stay away from the political system. Don’t hold your breath.

But if Exxon seems hopelessly set in its ways, revulsion is growing. The investigations by the New York and California attorneys general mean that the company will have to turn over lots of documents. If journalists could find out as much as they did about Exxon’s deceit in public archives, think what someone with subpoena power might accomplish. Many other jurisdictions could jump in, too.

At the Paris climate talks in December, a panel of law professors led a well-attended session on the different legal theories that courts around the world might apply to the company’s deceptive behavior. When that begins to happen, count on one thing: the spotlight won’t shine exclusively on Exxon. As with the tobacco companies in the decades when they were covering up the dangers of cigarettes, there’s a good chance that the Big Energy companies were in this together through their trade associations and other front groups. In fact, just before Christmas, Inside Climate News published some revealing new documents about the role that Texaco, Shell, and other majors played in an American Petroleum Institute study of climate change back in the early 1980s. A trial would be a transformative event — a reckoning for the crime of the millennium.

But while we’re waiting for the various investigations to play out, there’s lots of organizing going at the state and local level when it comes to Exxon, climate change, and fossil fuels — everything from politely asking more states to join the legal process to politely shutting downgas stations for a few hours to pointing out to New York and California that they might not want to hold millions of dollars of stock in a company they’re investigating. It may even be starting to work.

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, for instance, singled Exxon out in his state of the state address last month. He called on the legislature to divest the state of its holdings in the company because of its deceptions. “This is a page right out of Big Tobacco,” he said, “which for decades denied the health risks of their product as they were killing people. Owning ExxonMobil stock is not a business Vermont should be in.”

The question is: Why on God’s-not-so-green-Earth-anymore would anyone want to be Exxon’s partner?​

 

[Tyger]

Here is the award-winning reporting from the Los Angeles Times - mentioned in the above article by Bill McKibben.

Big Oil braced for global warming while it fought regulations
By Amy Lieberman And Susanne Rust December 31, 2015
LINK: http://graphics.latimes.com/oil-operations/

TEXT: "A few weeks before seminal climate change talks in Kyoto back in 1997, Mobil Oil took out a bluntly worded advertisement in the New York Times and Washington Post. “Let’s face it: The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil,” the ad said. “Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase, by how much and where changes will occur.”

One year earlier, though, engineers at Mobil Oil were concerned enough about climate change to design and build a collection of exploration and production facilities along the Nova Scotia coast that made structural allowances for rising temperatures and sea levels. “An estimated rise in water level, due to global warming, of 0.5 meters may be assumed” for the 25-year life of the Sable gas field project, Mobil engineers wrote in their design specifications. The project, owned jointly by Mobil, Shell and Imperial Oil (a Canadian subsidiary of Exxon), went online in 1999; it is expected to close in 2017.

The United States has never ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse emissions.

A joint investigation by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Energy and Environmental Reporting Project and the Los Angeles Times earlier detailed how one company, Exxon, made a strategic decision in the late 1980s to publicly emphasize doubt and uncertainty regarding climate change science even as its internal research embraced the growing scientific consensus.

An examination of oil industry records and interviews with current and former executives shows that Exxon’s two-pronged strategy was widespread within the industry during the 1990s and early 2000s.

As many of the world’s major oil companies — including Exxon, Mobil and Shell — joined a multimillion-dollar industry effort to stave off new regulations to address climate change, they were quietly safeguarding billion-dollar infrastructure projects from rising sea levels, warming temperatures and increasing storm severity.

From the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic, the companies were raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic.

The industry contends that the difference between its public relations effort and its internal decision-making was not a contradiction, but a strategy to protect its business from misguided federal regulations while taking into account the possibility that the climate change predictions were valid.

“During planning and construction of major engineering and infrastructure projects, it is standard practice to take into account many types of risks both short-term and long-term, likely and unlikely,” said Alan Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, which merged in 1999. “These risks would naturally include a range of environmental conditions, some of which could be associated with climate change.”

The gas platform "Troll" is the world's largest concrete construction, standing 1,548.6 feet high. In this 1995 photo, a boat tows the platform from Stavanger in Western Norway to its position in the North Sea. (Associated Press)
By the late 1980s, calls by scientists and environmentalists to limit fossil fuel emissions were gaining traction. A growing scientific consensus was emerging, suggesting a link between climate change and carbon dioxide emissions, and a concern that those changes could cause global upheaval — from warming temperatures to rising sea levels and melting glaciers.

Governments across the globe took heed.

In 1988, Democratic Sen. Timothy Wirth of Colorado called a congressional hearing on the topic, and James Hansen, a NASA scientist, asserted “with 99% confidence” that global warming was occurring. That same year, the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to examine its future impact.

Facing a growing environmental and political movement, a collection of energy companies, primarily from the coal sector, created the Global Climate Coalition to fight impending climate change regulations.

The group approached the American Petroleum Institute for funding and support in the early 1990s.

William O’Keefe, executive vice president of the Petroleum Institute at the time, delivered. The major oil companies, he recalled, decided “something has to be done.”

By 1993, he was sitting on the board, and within a few years, he was chairman. He brought with him support from the trade group, as well as individual trade group members, including Exxon, Mobil, Shell and others.

For the next 10 years, the coalition, whose annual revenue peaked at about $1.5 million before Kyoto, spent heavily on lobbying and public relations campaigns. As part of the effort, it distributed a video to hundreds of journalists, the White House and several Middle Eastern oil-producing countries suggesting that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were beneficial for crop production, and could be the solution to world hunger.

The coalition’s campaign emphasized the uncertainty surrounding climate change science, and warned of dire economic consequences for consumers should regulations on the industry be enacted.

Two recent papers published in the journal Nature Climate Change and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest that the coalition effort helped polarize public discourse on climate change.

“The ramifications of this multiyear effort by these funders are immensely important,” said Justin Farrell, a sociologist at Yale University and author of the studies, which looked at how the industry’s messaging affected the public debate. Their influence explains, he added, why the issue went from being bipartisan to polarizing.

O’Keefe said no one in the coalition denied the existence of global warming, but there was uncertainty about how well the models could project its future impact.

What coalition members felt certain about, he said, was that any government-mandated emission reductions would have “a clear negative impact,” including unemployment, higher energy prices and a drop in the U.S. standard of living.

When it came to their own investments, though, coalition members relied on scientific projections — from rising sea levels to thawing permafrost — to design and protect multibillion-dollar investments in pipelines, gas developments and offshore oil rigs.

O’Keefe, who is now chief executive of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank that focuses on science and policy issues, contends that there was nothing inconsistent in the industry’s actions. “Companies always take into account a range of possible outcomes” before making billion-dollar investments, he said, and they didn’t “dismiss the potential of increased warming.”

Shell Oil announced in 1989 that it was raising its "Troll" North Sea natural gas platform a meter or two in anticipation of climbing sea levels caused by climate change. (Morten Hval / Associated Press)
In 1989, before Shell Oil joined the Global Climate Coalition, the company announced it was redesigning a $3-billion North Sea natural gas platform that it had been developing for years.

The reason it gave: Sea levels were going to rise as a result of global warming.

The original design called for the platform to sit 30 meters above the ocean’s surface, but the company decided to raise it by a meter or two.

The company’s then-chief offshore engineer, Chris Graham, said rising sea levels and increasing wave heights were “really showing” during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the company was taking them seriously. A rash of storms and monster waves that had battered the North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico during those years was particularly concerning, and engineers wondered whether climate change might be behind it.

“The tipoff to there being changes came from hurricanes,” said Bob Bea, another Shell offshore engineer at the time who also worked for the global engineering firm Bechtel. “Even back in those days ... hurricane intensities were changing.”

In 1994, representatives from the oil industry, insurance companies and several North American and European governments formed a quasi-governmental organization called Waves and Storms of the North Atlantic Group to determine whether climate change was behind the worsening weather.

The group concluded that if carbon dioxide levels continued to climb, there’d be “moderate increases of surges along the North Sea coast and of wave heights in the North Atlantic.”

That same year, industry engineers submitted a document to European authorities on the construction of the Europipe, a natural gas pipeline leading from a North Sea offshore platform to the German coastline, via the ecologically fragile Wadden Sea.

In it, the engineers noted that sea levels had risen over the last century, and suggested there could be a “considerable increase of the frequency of storms as a result of a climate change.” They concluded that although climate change was a “most uncertain parameter,” their pipeline designs should include protections against its impact.

The Europipe was jointly operated and owned by a group of companies, including Shell, Exxon, Conoco, Total and the biggest investor, Norway’s Statoil. They included climate change protections in their design specifications in part to convince German authorities to give them the go-ahead, according to Romke Bijker, a Dutch engineer who co-wrote the design specifications.

“We had to think at the time, what are the most important aspects we have to include if we look 50 years ahead,” he said.

By the mid-1990s, though, Shell had joined the Global Climate Coalition, and with its partners was publicly questioning the science behind climate change and casting doubt on its projected impact.

“There has been a great deal of speculation about a potential sea level rise,” the coalition said in a 1995 mission statement obtained by Greenpeace. But, the statement continued, “most scientists question the predictions of a dangerous melting of Greenland or Antarctic ice caps.”

In a section on the science of sea level projections, the document concluded that warmer air temperatures could actually “increase snowfall, decreasing the likelihood of sea level rise due to polar ice cap melting.”

Curtis Smith, a spokesman for Shell, declined recently to comment on the company’s actions two decades ago. However, he said Shell recognized the “importance of the climate challenge and the critical role energy has in determining quality of life for people across the world.”

Shell left the Global Climate Coalition in 1998 after the Kyoto agreement had been effectively derailed.

The Rowan Gorilla V jackup oil rig is silhouetted in the evening light near Sable Island. (Peter Parsons / Herald)
During this period, Mobil Oil (now part of Exxon Mobil) considered climate change when designing its Sable gas development off Nova Scotia.

Big storms, monster waves and sea level rise were “all part of the discussion,” said Bassem Eid, author of the report. Eid’s firm, Maclaren Plansearch, was hired by Mobil to conduct the company’s environmental assessment for the Canadian government.

“I used the engineering standards of the day to incorporate potential impacts of Global Warming on sea-level rise,” Eid said in an email. “It was a hot topic in the early 1990s.”

Regulators and engineers at the time were beginning to incorporate such planning into other large infrastructure projects, including a bridge designed to span Northumberland Strait from New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island. Climate change was discussed as project plans were assembled, according to regulators and contractors who worked on the project.

In public, though, the coalition partners, including Exxon’s CEO, Lee Raymond, said that the impact of climate change was uncertain, and that even if the models did prove to be accurate, the effects from warming were not imminent.

“It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now,” Raymond told a 1997 gathering of energy executives at the World Petroleum Congress in Beijing.

By the early 2000s, the Canadian government explicitly required companies to consider climate change in their operations.

Exxon Mobil’s Canadian affiliate, Imperial, addressed the effect that climate warming could have on its plan to build pipelines, gas processing and separation facilities, airstrips, helipads and barge landings in the Northwest Territory’s Mackenzie Delta. Its conclusion: very little.

In a 28-page report examining the effects of climate change on the project, Imperial concluded that although “uncertainty exists” and “climate change could affect the northern environment,” those changes were unlikely to have any meaningful impact.
However, at a public hearing on the project, an Imperial engineer told an audience that “the project generally accepts that climate warming is occurring and that’s generally included in the design calculations.” At other hearings, company engineers noted that Imperial had incorporated climate change projections into its plans.

During this same period, Exxon Mobil provided money to organizations questioning that science, including more than $200,000 in 2004 to the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, which supported the work of Willie Soon, a well-known climate change skeptic. Between 1998 and 2005, Exxon Mobil’s foundation provided more than $15 million to similar organizations.

“There is nothing inconsistent about Exxon Mobil managing potential environmental risks while speaking publicly about the limits of scientific knowledge and advocating for effective public policy approaches,” said Exxon Mobil’s spokesman, Jeffers, referring to all of the company’s projects at the time, including those in Canada. “Any suggestion to the contrary would be inaccurate and a distortion of the company’s position.”

When Shell left the Global Climate Coalition in 1998, it was followed by Ford Motor Co., Daimler Chrysler, Texaco, Southern Co. and General Motors. The organization disbanded in 2002.

O’Keefe, the coalition’s former chairman, said he had recommended it be shut down because members were “taking a lot of heat” for a job they had already accomplished — effectively quashing any regulation that would have limited fossil fuel use.

Today, all of the major oil companies publicly acknowledge the risks of climate change.

In the mid-2000s, the American Petroleum Industry began funding a project by the National Center for Atmospheric Research to better understand the relationship between climate change and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2007, Exxon Mobil disclosed to shareholders — for the first time — the potential risks that climate change posed to its bottom line.

“What is most unfortunate,” said Farrell, the Yale sociologist, “is that polarization around climate change ... was manufactured by those whose financial and political interests were most threatened.” Even today, he added, that polarization has crippled any hopes for bipartisan policy solutions.

Meanwhile, the sea level along the Nova Scotia coast, as Mobil Oil’s engineers originally forecast, is indeed rising — and at rates higher than the global average.

Michael Phillis, Masako Melissa Hirsch, Elah Feder and Asaf Shalev contributed to this report.​

 

[Tyger]

Naomi Klein: This Changes Everything - Capitalism vs. The Climate

TEXT: "Published on Oct 17, 2014: Klein has been exploring the interface between environmental degradation and capitalism since her first book, No Logo, appeared in 1999. Her provocative new book, This Changes Everything, argues that carbon is not the ultimate cause of climate change; the real enemy is capitalism. She provides a far-reaching explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems. Who benefits from the status quo? How deeply are the current power structures embedded in our political economy? How difficult will it be change them?

"Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of The New York Times and international bestseller, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which The New York Times called “a movement bible.”

"She is a contributing editor for Harper’s and reporter for Rolling Stone, and writes a regular column for The Nation and The Guardian that is syndicated internationally by The New York Times Syndicate. In 2004, her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Additionally, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail, El Pais, L’Espresso and The New Statesman, among many other publications. A collection of her writing, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate was published in 2002. Klein is a member of the board of directors for 350.org, a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. She is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics. In 2014 she received the International Studies Association’s IPE Outstanding Activist-Scholar award.

"This talk was filmed at First Parish in Cambridge on Thursday, October 16, 2014."

 

[Tyger]

What is fascinating is not only how far back the Oil Companies knew (1960's), but how accurate their predictions were (targeting the year 2000). The disinformation was calculated. Whole swaths of the US population swallowed the lies whole.

As Mark Twain famously said: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

A great quote from Mike Papantonio in this interview: "A man with a briefcase can do a lot more harm than a man with a gun."

Criminal Oil Cronies Knew They Were Poisoning the Earth And Did NOTHING

TEXT: "Published on Apr 15, 2016: We now have even more evidence that the fossil fuel industry knew about global warming DECADES ago and covered it. America’s Lawyer, Mike Papantonio, discusses this with Thom Hartmann."

 

[pixelsmith]

The "Politics of Global Warming" is far simpler than the previous 20 pages would indicate...

Listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:

“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So... what is the goal of environmental policy?

“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.