Exxon Climate Predictions Were Accurate Decades Ago. Still It Sowed Doubt 126
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Decades of research by scientists at Exxon accurately predicted how much global warming would occur from burning fossil fuels, according to a new study in the journal Science. The findings clash with an enormously successful campaign that Exxon spearheaded and funded for more than 30 years which cast doubt on human-driven climate change and the science underpinning it. That narrative helped delay federal and international action on climate change, even as the impacts of climate change worsened.
Over the last few years, journalists and researchers revealed that Exxon did in-house research that showed it knew that human-caused climate change is real. The new study looked at Exxon's research and compared it to the warming that has actually happened. Researchers at Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research analyzed Exxon's climate studies from 1977 to 2003. The researchers show the company, now called ExxonMobil, produced climate research that was at least as accurate as work by independent academics and governments -- and occasionally surpassed it. That's important because ExxonMobil and the broader fossil fuel industry face lawsuits nationwide claiming they misled the public on the harmful effects of their products. "The bottom line is we found that they were modeling and predicting global warming with, frankly, shocking levels of skill and accuracy, especially for a company that then spent the next couple of decades denying that very climate science," says lead author Geoffrey Supran, who now is an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami.
"Specifically, what we've done is to actually put a number for the first time on what Exxon knew, which is that the burning of their fossil fuel products would heat the planet by something like 0.2 [degrees] Celsius every single decade," Supran says.
The report notes that ExxonMobil "faces more than 20 lawsuits brought by states and local governments for damages caused by climate change." These new findings could provide more evidence for those cases as they progress through the courts, says Karen Sokol, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.
"What Exxon scientists found and what they communicated to company executives was nothing short of horrifying," says Sokol. "Imagine that world and the different trajectory that consumers, investors and policymakers would have taken when we still had time, versus now when we're entrenched in a fossil fuel based economy that's getting increasingly expensive and difficult to exit," says Sokol.
Over the last few years, journalists and researchers revealed that Exxon did in-house research that showed it knew that human-caused climate change is real. The new study looked at Exxon's research and compared it to the warming that has actually happened. Researchers at Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research analyzed Exxon's climate studies from 1977 to 2003. The researchers show the company, now called ExxonMobil, produced climate research that was at least as accurate as work by independent academics and governments -- and occasionally surpassed it. That's important because ExxonMobil and the broader fossil fuel industry face lawsuits nationwide claiming they misled the public on the harmful effects of their products. "The bottom line is we found that they were modeling and predicting global warming with, frankly, shocking levels of skill and accuracy, especially for a company that then spent the next couple of decades denying that very climate science," says lead author Geoffrey Supran, who now is an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami.
"Specifically, what we've done is to actually put a number for the first time on what Exxon knew, which is that the burning of their fossil fuel products would heat the planet by something like 0.2 [degrees] Celsius every single decade," Supran says.
The report notes that ExxonMobil "faces more than 20 lawsuits brought by states and local governments for damages caused by climate change." These new findings could provide more evidence for those cases as they progress through the courts, says Karen Sokol, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.
"What Exxon scientists found and what they communicated to company executives was nothing short of horrifying," says Sokol. "Imagine that world and the different trajectory that consumers, investors and policymakers would have taken when we still had time, versus now when we're entrenched in a fossil fuel based economy that's getting increasingly expensive and difficult to exit," says Sokol.
If you're not part of the solution... (Score:5, Insightful)
...there's real money to be made in prolonging the problem.
Re: If you're not part of the solution... (Score:2, Insightful)
That is why you never ask a "corporation" it's opinion on anything as it never changes...
Re: If you're not part of the solution... (Score:1)
Re:If you're not part of the solution... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, if your wealth is in financial assets, and you keep a reasonably diverse portfolio, you will (a) make money creating the problem and (b) make money selling people goods and services they need to adapt to the new reality created by the problem, without ever having to think about the problem itself.
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This is oh so familiar with tobacco companies. The absolutely knew the harms, but there were profits to be made.
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Its different. With tobacco, you can actually stop using it, and save yourself a case of cancer. But with petroleum, it doesn't matter if the earth will burn to a cinder next September 28 and everybody knows it, you still have to get from point A to point B in order to make money to survive, go here, go there, and it's all done with petroleum because we don't yet have the hardware to do it all with wind machines and solar panels. Stop using petroleum and farming stops, trucking stops, food store shelves
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> Not until we get advanced enough to run everything on green energy.
And newly released reports tell us it probably can't be done
https://www.simonmichaux.com/g... [simonmichaux.com]
The scales are just off. Usage reduction it must be.
Which might happen anyway: Conventional crude oil world production peaked around 2007 (IEA confirmed. In their 2018 report, I think). Now the same circles are talking about a possible all-oil peak that might have been 2018. Covid disruptions mean we won't know until around 2025.
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History is littered with the dry, bleached bones of those that went on hollering that something can't be done.
One of the points is supposedly we can't ever store enough backup power from wind and solar to make them reliable. I disagree.
The solution is simple, can be built anywhere not just in mountainous regions like pumped hydro, and will not evaporate like pumped hydro. Gravity storage by lifting weight to an altitude is long-lasting. Once you lift the weight, it will be available until the earth's g
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> History is littered with the dry, bleached bones of those that went on hollering that something can't be done.
Here are my ballpark numbers: I took the "energy vault" as a baseline, and put a block at 50tonnes (that's one entire Energy vault structure and some). Assuming 1000m shaft, that's about 140 000kWh of potential energy per shaft. That's about 70TWh of storage using all 500k shafts.
So yeah, it'll help, but is still far from the 1000+ TWh of storage required for the business as usual green transit
Re: If you're not part of the solution... (Score:3, Interesting)
Are we really to believe that people found Exxon more believable than climate scientists, and if the Exxon Execs publicly agreed with the climate scientists then climate change could have been averted?
I contend no one trusted oil company executives that oil didn't affect the climate, and they would have made no difference to the decades-long debate that still rages on no matter what position they took.
The greatest argument against man-made climate change were, I contend, the climate activists that made insa
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With a user name that low you should be old enough to remember people taking Exxon sponsored research seriously. I know I am.
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Talk about a stupid argument.... Tell me, how much coverage in the media did climate scientists have, vs. how much one of the world's largest companies, spending heavily on lobbying and advertising had?
And if you say 'but climate scientists', you know that you're a liar.
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Well, THERE is a convincing rebuttal!
Adhom them to death! WHEE!
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Indeed. There is also money in killing (often slowly) tons of people. And there are always psychos willing to take that money.
It's not accurate... (Score:1)
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"Biden sold himself to the highest bidder - China and Ukraine"
And your evidence for this is what, precisely?
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Have you lost the plot?! It's a narrative, man. Evidence is for the guys in lab coats, rhetoric is for the rest of us.
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"Biden sold himself to the highest bidder - China and Ukraine"
And your evidence for this is what, precisely?
QAnon
Re:It's not accurate... (Score:4, Informative)
Fossil fuel use is much higher than originally estimated by Exxon, and the warming trend (per the satellite record - the only truly global dataset we have) is 0.13 deg C/decade.
For context, the satellite record is not surface air temperature (the satellites look down through the whole atmospheric column, you can't see just the surface), it is TLT temperature. TLT is "temperature lower troposphere", where "lower troposphere" means, roughly, the average from about 0 to 7 km altitude.
Since the signature of greenhouse effect is low-altitude warming and high-altitude cooling, you can't compare satellite measurements of TLT with model predictions of surface air temperature.
(I'll also point out that TLT isn't actually measured; what's measured is TTT, average of about 0 to 12 km, then TLT is calculated from this using stratospheric measurements to subtract out the higher altitudes according to a model.
Wikipedia has an article that's a little out of date, but is still probably the most understandable summary for beginners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
Yeah but it isn't awful (Score:3)
delta satellite to other estimates is within cooee, eg https://skepticalscience.com/g... [skepticalscience.com] from SS,
Of course they ignored the scientists (Score:4, Interesting)
If they felt bound by the research the scientists produced they never would have allowed them to create it in the first place.
That's the way it always goes, people trust and respect the science, until it tells them something they don't like.
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If they felt bound by the research the scientists produced they never would have allowed them to create it in the first place.
That's the way it always goes, people trust and respect the science, until it tells them something they don't like.
In this case it told them something they wanted to know, namely that they needed to get ahead of the curve on "informing" people.
Of course they did! (Score:2, Insightful)
By law, a publicly traded company must act in the fiduciary interest of the owners, not the general public.
Had they disclosed the problems with fossil fuels, they could very well have faced a shareholder lawsuit. This is American Corporatism. Profit above all else, to the extent that doing the right thing(tm) is illegal if it could negatively affect profits. Executives could have faced jail time.
Now, I'm not saying this is the way thing should be, but it's the way things are. There is no "market so
Re:Of course they did! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a little too easy to jump to "fiduciary interest" when these topics come up. By suppressing information like this, the company exposed themselves to future liability, which is very much not in the shareholder's interests. The best interests of the shareholders are not simply a profit gain/loss consideration - it's all the things that safeguard the going concern that is the corporation. Less profit in the name of longevity is a perfectly acceptable application of this interest.
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It's a little too easy to jump to "fiduciary interest" when these topics come up. By suppressing information like this, the company exposed themselves to future liability, which is very much not in the shareholder's interests. The best interests of the shareholders are not simply a profit gain/loss consideration - it's all the things that safeguard the going concern that is the corporation. Less profit in the name of longevity is a perfectly acceptable application of this interest.
How many corporate decision-makers think that far ahead? Most seem more interested in optimizing the next quarterly report, and letting the future go to hell in a handbasket.
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And that's how they get into trouble. I'm not saying companies get this right all the time. Lots do not. I'm only saying the term is more complicated that the parent seems to think.
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Show me where in the US code is says that companies have to act in a certain way. Furthermore, show me where fiduciary equals financial, to the exclusion of all else.
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You are repeating a common misconception. For-profit companies can behave ethnically without fearing action by the SEC or losing a derivative lawsuit. Though they may have trouble fighting a hostile takeover--Twitter was taken over because a few billionaires disagreed with the values they practiced.
I hope some State AG brings a false advertising or similar claim. But I think it will be a tough case because Exxon's predictions were far from a certainty and it isn't like any individual's decision to use foss
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"Acting in the shareholders interest" ... well, that includes thinking about the possibility of a future multi billion, even trillion dollar lawsuit.
It doesn't say "short term interest", does it?
They were clearly warned, by their own scientists of causing potentially catastrophic damage to the world, and therefore being exposed to the subsequent legal risks. They clearly ignored this warning and went on with "business as usual" - and even set up special fake groups to lie about it, ie attempting to cover up
There's answers to these "oil company" issues. (Score:3, Interesting)
- Nationalize all oil companies - completely. No stragglers.
- Incentivize to retain the people in the structures, but remove the corporation profit factor - i.e. pay them WELL
- Accept all losses as government losses
- Begin to implement the reduction plans
This trades the pressures of profit for those of politics.
The reasons this won't happen:
- As long as the "big bad corporations" are there, the government has a target for blame
- This would make the government completely responsible
- Even if it did, the political pressure to not hurt the individual consumer would push any reductions into the indeterminate future - "never".
- The cost to pay out the shareholders would be astronomical - the option to not do it would be a non-starter.
Politicians are even less trustworthy than oil execs.
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- Nationalize all oil companies - completely. No stragglers. ...
And thus governments get the profits of selling fossil fuels, and hence giving governments the vested interest in downplaying and denying climate change.
...and the argument "if we reduce fossil fuel use your taxes would go up, because the trillions of dollars in fossil fuel profit would go away.
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Politicians are even less trustworthy than oil execs.
Are they now.
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Yes.
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- Nationalize all oil companies - completely. No stragglers.
- Incentivize to retain the people in the structures, but remove the corporation profit factor - i.e. pay them WELL
- Accept all losses as government losses
- Begin to implement the reduction plans
This trades the pressures of profit for those of politics.
The reasons this won't happen:
- As long as the "big bad corporations" are there, the government has a target for blame
- This would make the government completely responsible
- Even if it did, the political pressure to not hurt the individual consumer would push any reductions into the indeterminate future - "never".
- The cost to pay out the shareholders would be astronomical - the option to not do it would be a non-starter.
Politicians are even less trustworthy than oil execs.
According to this WSJ article from 2010 https://www.wsj.com/articles/S... [wsj.com] state-owned companies control more than 75% of all crude oil production
"Name the biggest oil company in the world. ExxonMobil? British Petroleum? Royal Dutch Shell? In fact, the 13 largest energy companies on Earth, measured by the reserves they control, are now owned and operated by governments. Saudi Aramco, Gazprom (Russia), China National Petroleum Corp., National Iranian Oil Co., Petróleos de Venezuela, Petrobras (Brazil) a
Woke! (Score:2)
Now they have to invent an oil company to say it paid for science to try to "prove" the AGW. Where's all that CO2 gonna go? Prove that. We already have air on the surface of the planet! Wake up sheeple and follow the money!
A healtheir planet (Score:2)
Losing a hundred million customers was cheaper than paying for a healthier planet. So now we've got a sick planet and a billion people saying it's not their fault.
So the thing I don't understand (not sarcastic) (Score:3)
Asking this un-sarcastically, but accept any answer may come with \. level snark...
Re:So the thing I don't understand (not sarcastic) (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks for the honest question. There are two parts to the answer:
1) The earth was hotter at the time of the dinosaurs. At the time the T-rex was stomping around, it was about 4 degrees Celsius warmer [sciencefocus.com], thanks in part to the high CO2 content of the atmosphere [phys.org].
2) Releasing all the CO2 locked up in fossil fuels would be devastating, and not just because of the speed of the change. Our sun is hotter now. [popsci.com] The resulting warming would be much higher, and the speed of the change could cause ecosystem collapse.
It Doesn't Matter (Score:1)
It doesn't matter if the planet gets warmer. It has happened before. Then it got colder again. Extra taxes and fees are a foolish waste of money.
Re:It Doesn't Matter (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if the planet gets warmer. It has happened before. Then it got colder again. Extra taxes and fees are a foolish waste of money.
Yes, but in the past, these climate cycles have happened on the scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. The current, human CO2-induced change is happening on a scale of decades, i.e, thousands of times faster. Just like how moving at 60mph is harmless, but getting rapidly accelerated from 0 to 60mph (hit by a truck) is deadly!
XKCD has a nice graph that illustrates the scale of the change: https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
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It doesn't matter if the planet gets warmer. It has happened before. Then it got colder again. Extra taxes and fees are a foolish waste of money.
So you won't have a problem if the planet gets as hot/cold as it ever has been over a short period of time?
Have you put a moment's thought into how disruptive that would be? All the shifts in who has the best cropland and water supply, and all the wars that result from it?
Asteroids have hit the earth before too, but that doesn't mean another one would be no big deal.
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You are an idiot. The only time it may have gotten warmer or colder with the speed we are facing now is when the great comet hit. You know, that time were most species died out.
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I suggest you move to the equatorial band, preferably somewhere where they get monsoon-like rains. 40C at 90%+ humidity should tell you what "warmer" does to mammals.
This is not a surprise. (Score:3)
Ok, ignoring the blame game for a second? (Score:2)
I'm looking at this chart and essentially, it's a pretty simple/linear temperature rise it predicts that doesn't change from decade to decade, even projecting forward to 2080 and beyond.
Does anyone here question the accuracy of that part of it, vs it predicting the situation accurately from the past to the present day?
I guess all I'm saying is, I had often heard it said that sure, humans are contributing to climate change/temperature rise with the burning of fossil fuels. But it was #1, only a relatively sm
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I guess all I'm saying is, I had often heard it said that sure, humans are contributing to climate change/temperature rise with the burning of fossil fuels. But it was #1, only a relatively small portion of the total rise that we'd see even without burning any fossil fuels (natural reasons accounting for the majority of it),
Inaccurate, if you're referring to the current warming. Natural reasons account for climate change on the time scale of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.They do not account for the current warming trend. We know this because we measure the natural effects.
and #2, there was a possibility temperature increases would "plateau" if total fossil fuels burned annually stayed roughly consistent year to year.
No. Temperature rise goes proportional to the logarithm of greenhouse concentration. It doesn't "plateau". The current rise isn't even out of the linear range.
Everyone outside of a handful (Score:1)
It's messed up priorities but a lot of them are old enough they'll be dead before the worst of it happens. Consequence free living
Itâ(TM)s all a HOAX (Score:2)
If you look for utter evil... (Score:1)
... there you can find it. These people are basically traitors to all of the human race. Lining them against a wall and disposing of them would be too kind.
Imagine that world and the different trajectory (Score:2)
"Imagine that world and the different trajectory that consumers, investors and policymakers would have taken when we still had time
Too bad we learned about climate change just last year /s. Nobody want to lose money to prevent climate change, losing money because of climate change is more acceptable.
It is a bizarre argument (Score:2)
The argument seems to be, generalized, as follows.
It is 2022. We are trying to figure out whether someone 'knew' A in (eg) 1990. We know that he said it then. Did he 'know' it?
A is a prediction of an event in (eg) 2020 and beyond. We look at the year 2020 and discover that what he predicted did actually happen.
So we conclude that he 'knew' in 1990 that it was going to happen.
We then look at what people around him said in 1990, when he made that prediction. There are a variety of public comments, some fr
To see how comic this is.... (Score:2)
I just predicted that this argument will fail in court. Predicted it in public.
Go forwards a few years, and it turns out that it does indeed fail.
At this point someone argues, he predicted it, he was right, so he knew. He said it in public, the legal team bringing the case read it, so they too knew.
This guy now sues the legal team for damages. LegalCo, he says, using the same argument they had used, obviously knew they were going to fail, since they had heard of a prediction of failure which has turned o
There's nothing unusual here (Score:2)
A research department made some predictions. Other departments had a different opinion. Managers weighed the conflicting information and made decisions based on business goals. What part of this sounds unusual?
There's a legal framework for this... (Score:1)
It's difficult (Score:3)
It's tough to take the climate alarmists seriously when they all travel in private jets and with motorcades burning 10x the fuel any of us use in a week for one day. While purchasing beachfront real estate and screaming that nuclear is bad and can't even be considered.
Even if I think the worst predictions are true, why should I give a fuck when the people "most concerned" obviously do not?
All the so-called "solutions" amount to killing 50%+ of the people, or everyone except them has to go stone age. Neither of those is going to happen without a LOT of death and fighting from those people they want to kill or disadvantage. They want to take natural gas from people. That will cause people to die from cold. Those people will not just sit down and die. They will burn whatever they can to try to stay alive, and it will pollute far worse than even a poorly maintained natural gas burning setup will. And they WILL resort to violence if the situation gets bad enough. That's just basic human nature.
Without storage and/or huge grid upgrades, renewables can't do it. And that's from someone that owns a good size rooftop solar array (~15kw). Nuclear could, though it has its own problems. And if you want to replace gas heating, you are going to require huge upgrades to the grid. Even with modern heat pump designs, that is a LOT of electricity that needs to move around. And that ignores EVs and other loads they want to add. And that's before you get into the costs to replace all that gear, not the mention the environmental costs for manufacturing it.
If you want to see change and be taken seriously, you and your leaders need to live it and provide realistic solutions that people will accept. For example, we have mostly replaced incandescent lights with more efficient tech. Once it worked well and was reasonably priced, it was obviously better and people adopted it. If you can't do that, you need to accept that prevention is impossible and move to mitigation. I don't think we're there yet, but we will be if the alarmists keep this crap up. The more they yell while insisting that the rules don't apply to them, the less people will listen.
Re: (Score:1)
What's funny is that one of the few studies to "get it right" was funded by a petroleum company. Compare that to your typical vocal climate activist.
How many years left do we have, Greta?
Re: Survivorship bias. (Score:1)
Your comment makes no sense. Exxon Mobile predicted the end of the human race. They just ignore that prediction.
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Re: Survivorship bias. (Score:2)
0.2 degrees every ten years is not "the end of the human race" - your hyperbole causes people to dismiss what may be your valid views/opinions because you only speak in absolute hyperbole.
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.2 degrees every ten years isn't the end of the human race in ten years, certainly. But sustained over centuries, it could be. If only the climate criers could state it that way, and discuss rational solutions. But they've knee-jerked against the tendency of humanity to only care about what happens this quarter, this year, this decade, maybe within their own lifetimes. So, the hyperbole builds in order to get someone to pay attention at all, then when the predicted disaster window isn't met, the reaction is
Re:Survivorship bias. (Score:4, Funny)
What's funny is that one of the few studies to "get it right" was funded by a petroleum company. Compare that to your typical vocal climate activist.
How many years left do we have, Greta?
Why don't you ask her personally?
One of the funniest things about Ms Thunberg is she is obviously a troll level 100+.
The deniers and Republicans go nuts about her up on her because she is an expert triggermonger, and she lives rent free in the heads of climate deniers, republicans and sex traffikers living in Romania.
Re: Survivorship bias. (Score:2)
No, we laugh and move on - we really don't care about her and her apocalyptic predictions and childish finger-wagging.
Seriously, we don't care.
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Conservative talk show hosts talk about her an awful lot for a bunch of people presenting to a crowd that doesn't care about her.
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The problem is that Greta is emblematic of the vast majority of "Climate Crusaders".
Wild rhetoric, cherry picking and inability to actually discuss things in a calm, rational manner.
It's all "WE ALL GONNA DIIIIIE!!!!!!!!!" at best.
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The problem is that Greta is emblematic of the vast majority of "Climate Crusaders".
Wild rhetoric, cherry picking and inability to actually discuss things in a calm, rational manner.
It's all "WE ALL GONNA DIIIIIE!!!!!!!!!" at best.
So? Does her asshattery mean anyone who has confidence in AGW is the same thing?
I could really give a rats ass about Thunberg, other than the denialists reactions to her are pretty entertaining.
But if you want to deny physics because she's an asshat - go ahead. You opinion or hers doesn't affect it one way or another. Otherwise she does seem to be living in your head. To me, she's just a young lady with Aspergers who is pretty good at trolling.
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Can you show her peers papers disputing her?
Who do you consider her peers?
What does her research show and what are her conclusions based on her research?
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Again, no.
I'm talking about a small, loud contingent of whacked out "activists".
People who're like "I woke up this morning! IT WAS GLOBAL WARMING!"
Sure. It's just like any other politicized thing. The extremes are not thinking based on facts. Humanity isn't going to disappear because it is going to be warmer, unless we do something stupid like nuke ourselves into oblivion over the changing local conditions of various countries who have the ability to do such.
But Thunberg is just one side. The other side is the nuts who fewel compelled to put out their own version of bullshit, those who might be paid trolls there to sow dissension for all we know.
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Again, it's not Thunberg. It's the pathological altruists and "true believers" who center her idiocy that inflame people.
What it is, is people who want to think like that. It's like Musk fans, who are largely not technologically or physics savvy, but hang on every word he utters like god's lips to their ears.
Cult of personality stuff, although they've quieted down a bit with his deteriorating mental state, possibly trying to grok how a free speech absolutist has the inclination to censor anyone who disagrees with him. As well as has the time to immerse himself in a stupid social media company while his Soviet N1 rocket rebo
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Thank you for that foray into projection fantasy.
Explain the projection. Tell us my thoughts. Explain the fantasy. Y'all don't just go making personal attacks, unless that is all you got.
You are hereby challenged.
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What's funny is that one of the few studies to "get it right" was funded by a petroleum company. Compare that to your typical vocal climate activist.
How many years left do we have, Greta?
For the life of me, I can't see what you're trying to argue here. It looks like some smart-arse attempt to contrast how clever the oil company must be to how dumb the typical vocal climate activist is, but what you're actually suggesting is that these climate activists funded studies that got it wrong. Or did I misread what you wrote?
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Re:Survivorship bias. (Score:5, Insightful)
Singling out "dozens" of studies that turned out to be wrong to hang the literally hundreds of thousands of studies that largely got it right (and when they didnt clearly marked their error bars), is dishonest at best.
And its not "survivorship bias" when the vast majority of the field has been consistent about whats going on for the 150 years scientists have been warning about AGW based on fundamental physics and for the last 50 years actual observation.
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Their dogma won't let them admit they're wrong.
Re:Survivorship bias. (Score:4, Interesting)
Singling out "dozens" of studies that turned out to be wrong to hang the literally hundreds of thousands of studies that largely got it right (and when they didnt clearly marked their error bars), is dishonest at best.
And its not "survivorship bias" when the vast majority of the field has been consistent about whats going on for the 150 years scientists have been warning about AGW based on fundamental physics and for the last 50 years actual observation.
You are tying to argue with denialists. This is the same crowd that believes the earth is flat, we never landed on the moon, and that vaccines have a 5G chip in them and make you magnetic.
It's pointless, other than to have fun trolling stupid people,
I have yet to see any scientific date that proves that an atmosphere does not retain energy based on it's gaseous or vapor level, and the concentrations of each. On the other hand, there is one metric shit ton of data saying it does.
The only point I digress from the standard wisdom is that I have pretty fair confidence that we have passed the so-called tipping point some years ago. The weather aside from being warmer, is unstable. While we had the very short cold snap here in the northeast, (PA) it's been pretty warm for the depths of winter since then.
Yeah, that's weather, but I don't know when the last time was I used a full tank of gas in the snowblower over an entire winter. Probably 8 years or more? At some point, you start calling it climate.
Regardless, I'm pretty confident that the ride has begun. Let's just hope the Methane clatrates in the oceans aren't released. Then shit's really gonna get real.
Re: Survivorship bias. (Score:2)
Yeah, that's weather, but I don't know when the last time was I used a full tank of gas in the snowblower over an entire winter. Probably 8 years or more? At some point, you start calling it climate.
So the weather (clinate) is wise than ever because it's as bad as it was 8 years ago? And in the intervening 7 years it was milder, so that proves what, exactly?
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Yeah, that's weather, but I don't know when the last time was I used a full tank of gas in the snowblower over an entire winter. Probably 8 years or more? At some point, you start calling it climate.
So the weather (clinate) is wise than ever because it's as bad as it was 8 years ago? And in the intervening 7 years it was milder, so that proves what, exactly?
That you're a third-rate cherrypicker.
Re: Survivorship bias. (Score:4)
Yeah, that's weather, but I don't know when the last time was I used a full tank of gas in the snowblower over an entire winter. Probably 8 years or more? At some point, you start calling it climate.
So the weather (clinate) is wise than ever because it's as bad as it was 8 years ago? And in the intervening 7 years it was milder, so that proves what, exactly?
I think you need to re-read what I wrote. You seem to have taken the opposite of what I wrote.
It's a lot warmer here now, and it has been a lot warmer for quite a few years.
We used to get a pretty fair amount of snow back in the day. But For at least the last 8 years, we've received rather little snow. That's why in recent times, I use maybe ten percent as much gasoline in my snow clearing snow blower now, as I did when we got a lot more snow.
In the middle of Pennsylvania, once upon a time, we got hella snow every winter. Back in the 90's when I first moved here, I went through maybe 10 gallons of gas every winter. But now? Less than a gallon per winter. Why? Snowblowers don't work very well on rain.
It's tending to rain instead of snow. That's because the winters have been warmer. And it has been a trend. That is all.
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the Anti brigade do not have analytical skills hence the position they adopt.
True, dat. People straight out of Demon Haunted World.
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We have only recently (last century) started to have an impact on climate with our emissions, and to date the impact has been so small it could not be noticed on the level of extremism you suggest. The proposition of AGW is that severe impacts will eventually occur if we don’t change. I’m sorry but your observations are based on recency bias and and other dissonances. I’m sure looking at annual temperature data for your area for the last 50 years will highlight your bias for you.
You do realize that the date set for the large scale release of sequestered Carbon dioxide is 1750, around the beginning of the Industrial revolution, do you not?
It is measured in Watts per square meter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] This is an accurate post on Wikipedia
So you fail at your first claim.
Can you show me the research that proves it wrong, and that there was no impact before 1923. You wrote it, you defend it.
I've cited no papers, only personal experience, So you claim I'm wrong - s
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You are right about the futility of trying to change that commenter's mind, but there are two reasons why it is still useful. First, it's not necessarily right to lump all denialists together. Perhaps they aren't yet full on denialists. Second, we're on a public forum, where others read along, so it's always worth to dr
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You are tying to argue with denialists. This is the same crowd that believes the earth is flat, we never landed on the moon, and that vaccines have a 5G chip in them and make you magnetic.
Not "magnetic", electrostatic, geeeez.
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You are tying to argue with denialists. This is the same crowd that believes the earth is flat, we never landed on the moon, and that vaccines have a 5G chip in them and make you magnetic.
Not "magnetic", electrostatic, geeeez.
Also, The list of horrid things the vaccines do is neverending.
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"There are dozens of anthropogenic climate change studies that failed to correspond with future data"
Okay, how about you list a couple dozen for us, just so we can be sure you aren't talking out of your....ear.
CMIP6 for one (Score:2)
and CMIP5 for another. When back tested they are running 2-3 times the CS that the actual temp and CO2 record show.
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Two if far short of two dozen.
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"There are dozens of anthropogenic climate change studies that failed to correspond with future data"
Okay, how about you list a couple dozen for us, just so we can be sure you aren't talking out of your....ear.
Pfft. He lives in a world where there are different types of CO2 and methane. The stuff we un-sequester and release isn't the same stuff.
Somehow.
Even moreso, he lives in a world where any idea must be born fully accurate and perfect from the very first step, rising from the sea like Venus, perfectly formed.
It's like Astronomy isn't real, because we thought the sun was a big lump of burning coal at one time.
Re:Survivorship bias. (Score:4, Interesting)
All models are wrong. That's the basic nature of science. But wrong is a spectrum, not an absolute, and the models produced over the last couple of decades have been reasonably accurate. The fact is that the major oil companies knew decades ago what was going to happen.
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This is a trite bit of bullshit. All models, at least so far, are incomplete. We capture that with error bars. A model that makes predictions within its stated domain that fall within the error bars is not "wrong."
It's a quote [Re:Survivorship bias.] (Score:5, Informative)
This is a trite bit of bullshit. All models, at least so far, are incomplete.
He was quoting statistician George Box: "All models are wrong, but some are useful".
Can't argue with him (because he's dead).
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I'm aware of where the quote comes from. It gets thrown around far too much.
You can't argue with a dead man, but since people continue to insist on quoting him, you can point out that things he might have called quotables, his kids might have called a soundbites, and their kids might call tweets, often make up in pithiness what they lack in veracity.
Re:Survivorship bias. (Score:4, Informative)
Climate models have proved remarkably accurate at projecting the statistical trajectory [instagram.com] of climate change, but it's trivially easy to convert an accurate statistical forecast into an inaccurate prediction. You just impart more precision than it has, and cherry pick a set of model runs and act like they're representative as a whole.
For example suppose 10% of your runs have a geographic model cell that includes Boulder Colorado experiencing July daily highs average 92F by 2022. You then turn that into a prediction that's *at least* 90% likely to be wrong by saying "Models show average July highs in Boulder reaching 92F by 2022." Now you plot those model results on a box-and-whisker chart it's clear they're outliers. If you plotted the *actual* July 2022 temperatures in Boulder and found the actual month looks like an outlier, that wouldn't say anything about the model either.
The media is prone to do this because it doesn't understand math or science, and is biased toward reporting outlier results. If a paper back in 1990 said that *under certain circumstances* sea level could rise faster than expected, in some instances 2.5 m by 2020, the media will report that as "Climate scientists predict 8 feet of sea level rise by 2022", even though the paper does no such thing and if it did climate scientists *in general* never accepted that as a prediction.
This makes it trivially easy to maintain a denialist stance in the fact of pretty solid scientific evidence.
Re:Survivorship bias. (Score:4, Interesting)
There are dozens of anthropogenic climate change studies that failed to correspond with future data
But the main ones that scientists have relied on for decades have been remarkably accurate.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/... [nasa.gov]
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]
Re: Survivorship bias. (Score:1)
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There are dozens of anthropogenic climate change studies that failed to correspond with future data; picking one out that happens to have been correct doesn't tell us anything. Additionally, none of these studies show what happens if all anthropogenic emissions are set to zero.
There are dozens of anthropogenic climate change models that show climate change is happening (and vanishingly few that show it's not); Exxon's studies are of interest because:
And as a kicker, they were overshadowed by well d
Re: Survivorship bias. (Score:1)
My point is that without (a) error bars and (b) the model showing that temperatures did not rise absent human emissions, the modelâ(TM)s correspondence with later measured temperatures does not represent predictive power.
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My point is that without (a) error bars and (b) the model showing that temperatures did not rise absent human emissions, the modelâ(TM)s correspondence with later measured temperatures does not represent predictive power.
If that was indeed your point, you made it exceedingly poorly. You don't need error bars to show a trend, you just need a line for that. You don't need to model zero (further) emissions, as the state when you start measuring is assumed to be the starting level. If you're complaining that they didn't pick some pre-coal-age starting point as year zero, it would have been less accurate than an accurate measurement of when they did start.
All of that is immaterial though - what you're really trying to do is co