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Comments 5601 to 5650:
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nigelj at 07:02 AM on 15 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
I have to agree with MAR that Nick Palmers evidence regarding Greenpeace and fossil fuel companies is rather anecdotal and unreliable looking ( I think thats what MAR is saying). Same thought occured to me but I had given up on this discussion. However out of curiosity I just did a five minute google seach "fossil fuel companies promoting climate scepticism, doubt and denial" , and literally about the first four hits showed that people have researched this in depth, and come up with utterly compelling hard evidence, company documents etc,etc that shows fossil fuel companies have promoted climate denial, doubts etc. I dont know how Nick can deny this. The examples:
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MA Rodger at 22:45 PM on 14 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
I am always of the view that long passages of argument are a sign of a poor understanding. This big long comment interchange, now 18,000 words long, provides a good example of the phenomenon.
Nick Palmer @37,
You write "Perhaps it might help if you and the other two knew three things which might help you to realise that I'm not just making this up." [**My emphasis]
You then set out these "three things." First there is some anonymous late-night conversation overheard back in the 1980s discussing "Greenpeace ... going down a slippery slope." Second, a couple of your school chums now work for big oil and they aren't evil people. (I'm not sure where your G7 comments and GreenPeace=AntiNuclear comments fit in with this.) Third GreenPeace were not enthusiastic about supporting Cold Fusion.
** The "this" you insist you are "not just making up" concerns what you term "the insinuative narrative that just about everyone seems to have accepted." I would have thought the existence of such an "insinuative narrative that just about everyone seems to have accepted" could be demonstrated easily enough without all this massive wordage. And apart from your "three things" setting out the notion that GreenPeace is evil or something, and that you tell us this "insinuative narrative" was "originated largely by GreenPeace," I fail to see any reason for sharing these "three things."
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Bob Loblaw at 06:30 AM on 14 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Oh, I"m addicted. Phillippe asks Nick:
"At what point in time did the science become strong enough to demand action?"
I'd like to ask Nick a slightly different question:
At what point in time did the science become strong enough that arguing that "it is all wrong and global warming is not going to happen" became an unwarranted attack?
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Philippe Chantreau at 05:16 AM on 14 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
OK, I understand what you're saying. You're still not addressing some of Bob's and my points. There is a big disconnect in your discourse. Clarify a few things for me:
At what point in time did the science become strong enough to demand action?
For one principled as you are on communicating the science, at what point does denial rethoric become unacceptable?
As of now, only baby steps have been made, in large part because vested interests have been successful at delaying significant action over the past 20 years, way beyond the 80s or 90s. Was this justified?
As much as activist organizations can ask for ending fossil fuel use now, it has a zero probability of happening and even a zero probability of being attempted. You contradict yourself by stating on one hand that corporations are worried that the public would buy into that extreme activist threat, and on the other that their view is "non-starter" for at least half the population.
Your argument appears to boil down to this: it's ok to support false/misleading denial rethoric because, if it's not out there, these activist groups will convince the world of ending all fossil fuel use from one day to the next. That's a stretch reaching the breaking point. In fact, it is not believable at all.
Was it ever desirable for denial rethoric to be so successful as to prevent any effort at a transition, even one that did not present the existential threat you mentioned?
Since you have spent so much effort combating misinformation, would you say it was ever desirable to have such a large proportion of the public buying into all the myths this site debunks?
Is BAU and a never ending status-quo desirable?
Can we honestly say that nothing between the extremes of status-quo and end-it-all now could possibly be worked out?
Is it realistic to consider that, if fossil fuel companies accepted the conclusions of the science, they would instantly disappear, in view of how ingrained fossil fuel use is to our economies and all aspects of our lives?
As for nuclear, as I have said earlier, I am not opposed, at least in principle. They just need to get their sh*t together and stop being over budget and behind schedule.
Fusion sounds great, but is unrealistic as short or even mid-term solution. Cold fusion has not been beyond the pipe dream level. The best hot fusion to date is the recent 101 seconds at 120million deg at EAST. Nowhere close to breaking even, let alone produce anything. ITER is supposed to be complete in 2025, I doubt they'll see plasma before 2026.
Meantime, the multiple wedges approach that we could have adopted 20 years ago (a very reasonable approach completely removed from extreme views) has not happened on any significant scale and we sailed passed 400ppm.
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Nick Palmer at 04:39 AM on 14 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Incidentally, I'm going to re-link to the video of greenman3610 - Pete Sinclair - interviewing Marc Morano because I spotted many contributions by me to the comments below it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFnhTo6Wd80
My screen name back then (8 years ago) was aylesmerep. Most of the denier/sceptics myself and my tag team partner yubedude (who I never knew the real name of - anyone know who they were?) took on deleted their comments because we 'whupped their arses', so it's very difficult to follow the threads nowadays but I remember their content. Realoldone2 was a cracker! I think Robert '1000frollyphd' Holmes was there too.
I find it fascinating to see how arguments in the climate science wars have changed so much in such a short period. Back then many denier comments to such videos were really smart and they always argued the science and nothing but the science. It's only really the last few years that the 'reds under the bed' hypothesis to explain why climate science was, they assert, faked up has taken off like wildfire in the general and conservative media. It doesn't help that some well known climate science media 'go to' figures, such as Professor Kevin Anderson, who is one of Greta Thunberg's support team, is nakedly left in his politics and his choices of solutions he thinks appropriate.
I think what has happened is that the 'debate' has become rapidly polarised recently on political ideology grounds and the various political stances of major figures are now being increasingly blatantly paraded. I wish the political biases of the various protagonists could be stripped out of the public arena, as this development is wholly counter-productive in my view -
Bob Loblaw at 04:37 AM on 14 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
All this is getting way off topic as far as Michael Mann's book is concerned.
Nick: you are sounding here like a fossil fuel apologist, Lefties, Greenpeace, socialism, accusing others of following a "gospel", etc.
You seem to feel that it was OK for Big OIl to fund B.S. I do not. Let's leave it at that.
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Nick Palmer at 04:07 AM on 14 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Bob wrote "I really hope that you do not consider sound science (even with uncertainties) to be "an unwarranted attack".
and "If you are referring to non-scientific organizations such as Greenpeace, then I hope that you are not saying that unwarranted attacks justify B.S., simply because it is "effective"."
I am stating that the science was not strong enough back then for the world to have any real confidence that the balance of negative and positive outcomes projected for various amounts of global temperature rise from the rudimentary knowledge of the various sensitivities would be bad, good or neutral.
Bob wrote "Using phrases such as "top climate scientist" represent an argument from authority. I was already teaching undergraduate and graduate climatology courses when Andrew Dessler was still a grad student."
You sound like a denialist! They don't like anyone quoting the statements of top climate scientists either and often accuse one of using the argument from authority 'logical fallacy'. The thing is, quoting an actual 'go to' authority in the field of climate science is not really invalidated by dismissing it as a logical fallacy. I'll take Dessler's viewd over yours any day, particulary as I have interacted with him a little in the past. Sorry... -
Nick Palmer at 03:45 AM on 14 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Phillippe wrote: "That is why I find it kind of puzzling that you would make excuses for the promoters of such disinformation"
It's not excuses, it's an alternative explanation to the insinuative narrative that just about everyone seems to have accepted. I think that narrative is fundamentally flawed and was constructed by people with a strong ideological bias as a way to socially engineer the public towards a position that public otherwise might reject. This was originated largely by Greenpeace and is now aided and abetted by Oreskes/Supran and similar who get quoted in articles/programmes in major media where the mass of the voting public can be influenced by them.
Perhaps it might help if you and the other two knew three things which might help you to realise that I'm not just making this up. First, I was at a conference of the environmental organisation I was a part of at the time in the 80s. It was late night in the corridors and the top directors were 'relaxedly' discussing the way Greenpeace were going down a slippery slope precisely because they were abandoning a focus on reasonably presented peer-reviewed science in favour of 'scare stories' to gee up their followers and recruit more by 'empowering people' - in short they were going political to get more power and the direction was not to the right or centre.
Like it or not, even those of the public who don't support the tactics of Greenpeace mostly trust them to be 'telling truth to power' and so industry and commerce have respect for what the public believes if it might impact on their bottom lines. Greenpeace's rhetoric on climate change has swung sharply towards the draconian 'stop all fossil fuel use now' extremity and has been taken up by street activists and social media influencers and warriors. Their top guys have got brains so, considering that if the world actually did this it would almost overnight be immediately thrown into the mother of all global economic crashes which would cause far more devastation, hunger, death and destruction than anything climate change is projected to do for many decades, one has to speculate on hidden motivations for an explanation.
Second, a couple of childhood friends of mine, who came from a long time 'oil industry' family, ended up pretty high in the executive hierarchies of the major international oil corporations, so I have had quite an insight into their company's corporate attitudes over the years, so that's why I think the waay exagerrated (or wrong) insinuations of corporate 'evil' by those trying to push a political ideology which, in their case, appears to outrank whatever environmental ideology they may still have, stink. That's why I said that "they have kids and grandkids they worry about too". There are obviously some psychopaths in top board rooms who actually are in denial but despite anti-corporate propaganda, they really are not anywhere near being in the majority.
The G7 meeting, which is just down the road from me, has just finished. The White House has just issued this, to my mind, very good document.
FACT SHEET: G7 to Announce Joint Actions to End Public Support for Overseas Unabated Coal Generation by End of 2021
Just watch the 'usual suspects' jump on the word 'unabated' and loudly denounce it as 'weasel words', because the development and use of carbon capture and sequestration technology is a direct threat to what they appear to want to happen, which is the destruction of Big Fossil Fuel as some sort of 'punishment' for what they believe, or choose to pretend to believe, the corporations did and as a means of bringing in their almost certainly unworkable pie in the sky vision, that the majority would reject voting for, as to how the world should live.
Much though I regretted it, about 50% of the US voted for Trump both at the start and the finish of his term. Greenpeace's headline socialism-heavy hippy-dippy harmony - Nature! - vision is a non-starter for huge numbers of people and not just in the US. I'm pretty sure that explains why most of the major environmental organisations are still virulently against nuclear power even though the majority of studies show that it will be an essential part of the future energy portfolio of the world. One has to wonder why they are still so against it, even though their arguments against it have become increasingly thin, outdated or invalid. I submit this is because their underlying plans are making them reject anything which promises to rescue the world's use of so much energy and this bias is based on their ideological drive to have a low energy use world.
Third. One incident which cemented my views as to the naked political undercurrents beneath the superficially 'green' stance of some top environmental organisations, was round about 1989. This was when two electrochemists in the U.S thought they had discovered a brand new form of nuclear energy - cold fusion - which created no nuclear waste or ionising radiation and offered no potential for 'nuclear proliferation' or misuse by terrorists. In short, it promised a world where everyone could have a pollution free megawatt unit in their garage. I was associated with some of the people who checked out and ran experiments to validate (or not) the findings and I took it upon myself to contact Greenpeace U.S. (by phone! wasn't cheap!) to suggest they should throw their weight behind getting public acceptance and investment for this new miracle 'save the world, not just the whales' technology. They went very quiet and the temperature metaphorically dropped below freezing. You'll just have to believe my assessment of what was happening as I can't prove it, but it seemed very clear that they were very hostile to the possibility that this new energy source could keep our current society going, decarbonise cement, steel and industry, enable 'indefinite range' electric cars, give abundant cheap energy to the Third World etc and many other 'good' things that, on the face of it, they should have been for. -
Philippe Chantreau at 01:51 AM on 14 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Nick,
I have been at this for a number of years, so I am well aware of your contribution in fighting misinformation. That is why I find it kind of puzzling that you would make excuses for the promoters of such disinformation.
What constitue an unwarranted attack? If you want to argue that accusations of nefarious intent back in the days of high uncertainty were unwarranted, I can't disagree with that. If you want to argue that calling for efforts toward a real energy transition in the more recent times of much more limited uncertainty constitute unwarranted attacks, I can not agree.
So the activist you mentioned take liberties with the scientific information, they exaggerate and distort. Nonetheless, the direction in which they are pushing is indeed the one called for in view of what the science actually shows, whereas the inaction promoted by the fossil fuel supported outlets, that exaggerate and distort in other ways, can not be justified.
Is it warranted to work our way to doubling of pre-industrial concentration just to see what happens? If it really goes to hell, will the very rich individuals who profited from the extended status-quo pitch in to help? In view of the threat, and the magnitude of the task, what is truly unwarranted?
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MA Rodger at 20:54 PM on 13 June 2021Antarctica is gaining ice
wideEyedPupil @506,
There is a 'Global Maps' page on the GISTEMP website HERE that you may find useful. It maps the warming across the globe between any time periods as well as providing a graph of warming by latitude.
If you set the 'Time Interval' to something a decade-long (so perhaps 2010 to 2020 from the ) and for the full year, the warming of the Arctic since the 'Base Period' is obvious, as is "the slowest warming around Antartica." Surrounded by a doughnut of slow-warming oceans, the warming over the continent of Antarctica is less obviously exceptional.
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Jim Hunt at 17:23 PM on 13 June 2021Antarctica is gaining ice
Hello again WEP,
That is certainly the case for the Arctic. Here are some brief instructions on how to answer that sort of question for yourself:
https://GreatWhiteCon.info/2021/05/steve-koonins-unsettled-arctic-science/#WRIT
Here's just one example, which hopefully answers your question?
I leave producing the Antarctic version as an exercise for the interested reader. -
wideEyedPupil at 13:58 PM on 13 June 2021Antarctica is gaining ice
Thanks Bob, guess the bit I'm trying to clear up is the question i asked:
My understanding has been that while Land masses do warm faster than oceans (for more than one reason) but that warming at the polar regions had been more like 2-3 °C compared to the global average of 1.0-1.1 °C.
is true of either the North or South poles that they're warmed more than the global mean?
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nigelj at 13:50 PM on 13 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Nick Palmer @31, I do understand where you are coming from but I have a couple of disagreements.
"I thought I'd already addressed that. The short answer is that Big Oil continued to support the "B.S. factories" because they were effective at trying to protect those corporations against unwarranted attack."
That doesn't mean the corporations don't also use lobby groups to help spread denial. You seem a little bit stuck in an either / or mindset.
"Anyone who regularly takes on the really incorrigible denialists, as I do - I don't mean the brainwashed rank and file Hicksville idiots, but the much smarter ones - soon discovers that beneath all the high sounding 'alternative science' of the 1000frollyphds, the B.S. factories, Heartland's James Taylor, Quora's James Matkin etc are people who are almost always actually motivated by just a couple of things, of which by far the most common is extreme ideological antipathy to the 'big government' solutions promoted by extremist activists - the deep green environmentalists, the 'Smash Capitalism' closet reds and the 'System Change, not Climate Change' demonstrators."
This extreme ideological antipathy to big government is indeed common thing with the denialists, a libertarian and conservative leaning thing, but you need to understand many of these people define big government as anything beyond military and policing! They are opposed to anything that isn't very small government. So to say climate denlialism is the fault of a few extreme political activists proposing very big government is flawed logic.
"The 'Greenpeace knew' report and the recent Oreskes/Supran paper really are not evidence showing which way the truth lies being, as I've suggested before, chock full of cherry picking and insinuation and, in my view, the leading-the-reader attribution of malignant motives to innocent(ish) behaviour because of the underlying ideology of the authors. Oreskes is known to be significantly left wing and long ago Greenpeace's leaders adopted similar, or stronger, politics and I find their campaigning and assertions have got increasingly slanted and deceptive too."
I thought Orekses book was actually quite good if a bit too general, but there is plenty of hard evidence tying oil companies to spreading denialism of you look around. Read the book Dark Money for a start.
"What is noticeable is that no matter how convincingly one may have demolished their case, give them several weeks, or a couple of months, and one will often find them using exactly the same flawed logic, cherry picked facts and deceptive framing as before. This could mean either they have some sort of mental condition where their mind edits out their defeat so, like psychics who forget all their wrong predictions and only remember any correct ones, they maintain a spurious sense of their own abilities or they don't care much if you demolish their case in public because their only goal is to sway the public mind to their desired end and they know that the public has a very short memory and that the short denialist memes 'it's the Sun, it's cooling, it's cold now in Hicksville, it's cosmic rays etc have a very powerful ability to fool, or at least induce doubt and uncertainty in, the public's minds."
Yes its some sort of mental condition of a sort. Some people have difficulty admitting to themselves they are wrong or have been sucked in, so they hang onto beliefs. They become stubborn and entrenched. We probably all do a bit at times. With others the stubborness and arrogance is more extreme. Google narcissistic personality disorder. Combine this with small government leanings and a smart mind and a reasonable knowledge of science and you have a nuclear powered denialist, and the internet gives them the whole world to preach to. It's really frustrating to say the least.
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Bob Loblaw at 06:10 AM on 13 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
One additional point, related to timing.
The Heartland institute, a major player in the climate science denial industry, was founded in 1984. According to the Wikipedia entry linked above, it moved into tobacco industry work in the 1990s, and into climate change lobbying in the 2000s.
To say this was justified by uncertainties in climate science as known in the 1970s seems a stretch.
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Bob Loblaw at 05:42 AM on 13 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Oh, Nick. You're repeating yourself, and it does not stand you in good stead.
"The short answer is that Big Oil continued to support the "B.S. factories" because they were effective at trying to protect those corporations against unwarranted attack."
I really hope that you do not consider sound science (even with uncertainties) to be "an unwarranted attack".
If you are referring to non-scientific organizations such as Greenpeace, then I hope that you are not saying that unwarranted attacks justify B.S., simply because it is "effective".
"...most seem to have been happy to accept Greenpeace et al's interpretation of events as gospel..."
A strawman position...
"I refer you again (3rd time) to my quote of Carbonbrief's article and the words of top climate scientist Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M Uni."
Repeating the quote is certainly not necessary. Using phrases such as "top climate scientist" represent an argument from authority. I was already teaching undergraduate and graduate climatology courses when Andrew Dessler was still a grad student. I had and have direct knowledge of the primary peer-reviewed scientific literature from that time.
I hope that you do not think that the 1.5C to 4.5 C sensitivity range is a complete summary of climate science.
I hope that you do not think that there was a huge amount of uncertainty regarding the lower limit back in the 1980s. There was lots of uncertainty of regional effects. Lots of uncertainty about cloud feedback effects (but unlikely to be strongly negative).
From the 1990 IPCC sumamry for policy makers:
There are many uncertainties in our predictions particularly with regard to the timing, magnitude and regional patterns of climate change, due to our incomplete understanding of:
• sources and sinks of greenhouse gases, which affect predictions of future concentrations
• clouds, which strongly influence the magnitude of climate change
• oceans, which influence the timing and patterns of climate change
• polar ice sheets which affect predictions of sea level rise
These processes are already partially understood, and we
are confident that the uncertainties can be reduced by
further research However, the complexity of the system
means that we cannot rule out surprisesTHe 1990 IPCC report includes quite a bit of discussion about these uncertainties, and what needs to be done to sort them out.
One of the very few sources of a realistic argument for low sensitivity was Lindzen's "Iris effect". As Lindzhen had a good reputation as a meteorologist, this hypothesis was taken seriously. It did not pan out.
Most of the rest of the "sensitivity is low" arguments were B.S. Many were clearly B.S. in the 1980s - and are still B.S. now, even though they keep getting repeated..
Dessler may feel that the uncertainty was underestimated. Do you have any evidence of an actual number that he would put on it?
Did Exxon choose to push the known uncertainties and realistic scientifically-supportable possibitiies? No. As you admit, they chose the Baffle Them With B.S. option.
You seem to feel that was justified on their part. I do not.
"...the views of sensitivity at the time were just not solid enough to mandate massive corporation change..."
...but they were solid enough to start to invest considerable money (albeit probably peanuts for Big Oil) in the B.S. factories, in an attempt to preserve and maximize corporate profits for as long as possible.
If Big OIl's approach was so honorable, then why did they try to hide the path of the money and keep their name off it?
If you were to argue that Big Oil's corporate responsibility is to maximize shareholder value regardless of ethics, then I would concede the point.
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Nick Palmer at 02:48 AM on 13 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
I realise I've got an uphill struggle with you lot because you are unlikely to have heard anyone arguing this position before - most seem to have been happy to accept Greenpeace et al's interpretation of events as gospel without deconstructing it enough. When one has been deconstructing the deceit, delusion and/or dumbness from the various denialist factions for decades, as I have, one can't help it if one sometimes notices the very same methods being used by our 'side'. I personally think that demonising Big Oil's past activities and misrepresenting them as if they were real denialism is very counter-productive. Apart from anything else, one of the most powerful arguments I use against tricksy denialist rhetoric is that these days even Big Fossil Fuel fully accepts mainstream climate science and they acknowledge that something serious needs to be done to avoid the very unacceptable risks. I point that if there was a trace of reality in the arguments that have sucked them in, Big Oil's scientists would have noticed and their corporate execs would have then beaten a wide path to the doors of the sceptic/contrarian/denialists with wheelbarrows full of cash to learn about their magic get-out-of-jail-free cards. When I challenge denialists to explain, if they are so sure of their beliefs, why this is not happening, and never did happen, they either shut up or go off into the lala land of conspiracies I list later on. In either case, the wider audience sees they have nothing real...
Bob Loblaw@25 wrote:
"Give me a break. I was studying climatology for 10 years before Hansen's speech, and a dozen years before the 1990 IPCC report"
I refer you again (3rd time) to my quote of Carbonbrief's article and the words of top climate scientist Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M Uni.
C.B.: "In 1979, the Charney Report from the US National Academy of Sciences suggested that ECS was likely somewhere between 1.5C and 4.5C per doubling of CO2. Nearly 40 years later, the best estimate of sensitivity is largely the same.
However, Prof Andrew Dessler at Texas A&M University pushes back on this suggestion. He tells Carbon Brief:I think that the idea that ‘uncertainty has remained the same since the late 1970s’ is wrong. If you look at the Charney report, it’s clear that there were a lot of things they didn’t know about the climate. So their estimate of uncertainty was, in my opinion, way, way too small"
"Back in 1979, climate science was much less well understood than today. There were far fewer lines of evidence to use in assessing climate sensitivity. The Charney report range was based on physical intuition and results from only two early climate models.
In contrast, modern sensitivity estimates are based on evidence from many different sources, including models, observations and palaeoclimate estimates. As Dessler suggests, one of the main advances in understanding of climate sensitivity over the past few decades is scientists’ ability to more confidently rule out very high or very low climate sensitivities."
I'm not disputing that the basic science of radiative physics and the simple climate modelling of ECS of 'how many degrees per doubling' has been around a long time. As a matter of fact, as a science geek, I knew about some of the scientific views in my later teens (early 70s) - about the time I stopped buying aerosols (apart from WD40...) to protect the ozone layer. The uncertainty of outcome referred to by Dessler is to the 'known unknowns' and 'unknown unknowns' at the time and these were very significant. The (some of) CMIP6 model problems were mentioned just to show that even today some crucial feedback mechanisms affecting ECS are still being nailed down 40 years later.
It is the solidarity or otherwise of the climate sensitivity figures AT THE TIME of the memos and documents cherry picked in 'Exxon Knew' which is at the very nub of whether, as the populist environmentalist narrative goes, Exxon were evil or, as I am convinced, just cautious because the views of sensitivity at the time were just not solid enough to mandate massive corporation change without a lot more scientific work to more reliably figure out what ECS was (not to mention the Transient and Earth system sensitivities too). If Exxon's scientists told their bosses that, as Dessler wrote, Charney's figures were waay more uncertain than Charney thought they were, that is not evidence of psychopathic evil, it's just evidence of good scientists offering a very valid criticism of another scientist's work.
Sure, at the time, Exxon's own scientists acknowledged the basic 'settled' science but of course they would also acknowledge the great uncertainties which the 'anti's turned a blind eye to. There was nothing sinister about that and it is the attribution of malignant motives to Big Oil by Greenpeace et al that I have a serious issue with. There is so much deceit, deception, propaganda, selective and misleading information from all sides out there that I think our 'side' should clean up its act and disavow all that stuff and just stick to the best peer reviewed science, the best risk analysis and not indulge in dubiously demonising (probably) innocent'ish corporate behaviour that has been, in my view, massively misrepresented or rule out many solutions, as Mann has done, which have great potential thus making 'the answers' much harder to achieve.
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Nick Palmer at 01:20 AM on 13 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Well, there's too much to address there! Just a couple of points.
Phillipe@28 wrote: " However, that would leave one wondering why they continued to support the bullshit factories churning out propaganda favorable to their short-term financial interests in the following 30 years, as uncertainty dwindled away."
I thought I'd already addressed that. The short answer is that Big Oil continued to support the "B.S. factories" because they were effective at trying to protect those corporations against unwarranted attack. Pharmacological/vaccine corporations are currently coming under similar COVID19 propaganda type attacks to their detriment - they have less of a need to use 'B.S. factories' because most of the population have been familiar with vaccination most of their lives, so they know that the attacks are mostly baseless. The general voting public have no such familiarity with climate change, and the effectivess or otherwise of the many and various solutions put forward out there, so they are vulnerable to political manipulation by ideologically motivated types who think 'the answer' to the whole (not just climate change but biodiversity loss, inequality, 'white supremacy', LBTQ+ gender inequality etc etc) situation is to change 'the system' to end up with a world where we all live in some sort of vaguely defined harmony with nature and everybody is equal and all the wealth is redistributed to achieve their faith-based dreams of a socialist paradise. Part of that playbook is undermining established big industry and 'decentralisng'.
Anyone who regularly takes on the really incorrigible denialists, as I do - I don't mean the brainwashed rank and file Hicksville idiots, but the much smarter ones - soon discovers that beneath all the high sounding 'alternative science' of the 1000frollyphds, the B.S. factories, Heartland's James Taylor, Quora's James Matkin etc are people who are almost always actually motivated by just a couple of things, of which by far the most common is extreme ideological antipathy to the 'big government' solutions promoted by extremist activists - the deep green environmentalists, the 'Smash Capitalism' closet reds and the 'System Change, not Climate Change' demonstrators.
I really don't know if these 'denialist/lobbyist' people truly believe all the propaganda they put out, in which case they would have been driven to delusion to protect their favoured clients and industries to sabotage the 'stop all fossil fuel use today and indict the corporations types' or if they cynically know that they are deliberately spreading deceit and misdirection to achieve the same end.
The 'Greenpeace knew' report and the recent Oreskes/Supran paper really are not evidence showing which way the truth lies being, as I've suggested before, chock full of cherry picking and insinuation and, in my view, the leading-the-reader attribution of malignant motives to innocent(ish) behaviour because of the underlying ideology of the authors. Oreskes is known to be significantly left wing and long ago Greenpeace's leaders adopted similar, or stronger, politics and I find their campaigning and assertions have got increasingly slanted and deceptive too.
BTW, when I refer to left wing I am not referring to centre'ish politics like that of the US Democrats but more towards the sort of Utopian student revolutionary type beliefs.
Blowing my own trumpet, I am one of the very few climate science denier fighters who can actually beat them to the point where they shut up (the smarter ones) or else (the dumber/madder ones) they resort to increasingly irrational conspiracy theory ideology to respond (not 'the scientists are all faking it for grant money' conspiracy but full-on Rothschilds, Bilderbergers, Illuminati, New World Order - even the shape shifting lizards!) which lets the reading/listening audiences see 'what lies beneath'. What is noticeable is that no matter how convincingly one may have demolished their case, give them several weeks, or a couple of months, and one will often find them using exactly the same flawed logic, cherry picked facts and deceptive framing as before. This could mean either they have some sort of mental condition where their mind edits out their defeat so, like psychics who forget all their wrong predictions and only remember any correct ones, they maintain a spurious sense of their own abilities or they don't care much if you demolish their case in public because their only goal is to sway the public mind to their desired end and they know that the public has a very short memory and that the short denialist memes 'it's the Sun, it's cooling, it's cold now in Hicksville, it's cosmic rays etc have a very powerful ability to fool, or at least induce doubt and uncertainty in, the public's minds.
A clear example of the second type is Marc 'Climate Depot' Morano who is so confident of the validity of his position that he even proudly described it on camera to greenman3610 (Pete Sinclair).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFnhTo6Wd80
He still appears to believe in his 'in denial of mainstream climate science' position but he does admit here to using misleading rhetoric etc to achieve his ends, which are to sway the views of the public. He more or less admits to using 'the game' to propagandise. Even this is not necessarily smoking gun evidence of 'evil' if he truly believes his own rhetoric is accurate, it's just yet another example of what I call 'non-clinically diagnosable insanity' of which the online world is now suffering a tsunami!
My main point is still this. I'm just about certain that the underlying motivations and beliefs of all major figures in the climate change wars are far more nuanced, and often hidden, than the simplistic 'they knew', 'they're evil', 'they're stupid' etc epithets flung at them by their opponents, whose motivations are similarly complex. -
nigelj at 08:07 AM on 12 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
OPOF @29 yes the engineering design philosophy and its approach to harm minimsation and being generally cautious is very useful. I used to work in achitectural design and we had much the same things. Unfortunately the related building codes were relaxed in the mid 1990s by a neoliberal leaning Ronald Reagon loving government to "minimise costs and regulation" . The end result was a leaky homes nightmare of massive proportions that has cost the country billions of dollars, and a lot of hidden psychological stress.
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Bob Loblaw at 06:44 AM on 12 June 2021California, ‘America’s garden,’ is drying out
sfkeppler:
Virtually every land surface receives a portion of the water that falls on it as precipitation from the oceans. How do I know this? Virtually every land surface has streams and rivers that eventually return water to the oceans, and the only way for it to get back from the oceans to the land is for it to evaporate from the oceans and get transported through the atmosphere back over the land.
The processes that control this are the weather and hydrological cycle.
For the specifics in your question: California gets much of its water from the Pacific Ocean. A lot less Pacific Ocean moisture reaches far inland, though, due to the west coast mountains. For much of the U.S. east of the mountains, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean are major sources. Further north, into Canada (especialy the mid-west), you start to see some moisture that finds its way from the Pacific, across Alaska, and then back down into the continental areas.
For the Amazon (and any oher forests), as long as there are streams and rivers draining to the ocean, they will be getting more in preciptation than they are losing by evaporation.
In Europe, much comes from the Atlantic Ocean. Asia? Look to the Indian Ocean for central areas, and the Pacific for eastern areas.
Exact pattern vary with daily and seasonal weather patterns, but there are some dominant consistent patterns. There is an interesting animation on this page:
https://gpm.nasa.gov/education/videos/water-vapor-animation
and that same resource has good information on the hydrological cycle in general.
A nice image of the dominant patterns is in this Wikipedia image:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_cell#/media/File:Earth_Global_Circulation_-_en.svg
Here is a smaller version of the image:
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One Planet Only Forever at 03:25 AM on 12 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
nigelj,
I agree that it is irrational to claim that the extreme presentations from the climate-action side of this faux-debate cause climate science denial or the many other efforts to delay the undeniable required rapid ending of the many harms produced by attempts to benefit from fossil fuel use and the related loss of status by people whose perceptions of status are tied to benefiting from fossil fuel use.
As an engineer, to limit harm done any potentially harmful uncertainty is addressed by designing a solution that will deal with very extreme requirements for the uncertainties (see my comment @11). That means:
- conservatively limiting the potential for harmful results. People wanting to benefit from the harm done would call that extremely over-doing the avoidance of harm. They would want to compromise those understandings and actions.
- conservatively identifying the harm and risk impact levels of concern. People wanting to benefit from the harm done would call that extremely over-stating the identified potential harm.
- conservatively implement the means to address the conservatively established concerns of harmful outcomes. People wanting to benefit from the harm done would call that extremely over-reacting to limit the potential for harm.
It is important, not harmful, for very severe harmful climate impact outcomes based on uncertainty to be presented.
Leadership should be striving to limit harm done by human activity. It is faulty logic, actually unethical, to try to argue that it is harmful to restrict economic activity that is potentially or actually harmful. It does not matter how popular or profitable an activity has become, or how much poorer and less powerful some supposedly superior people would become.
Harmful activity needs to be kept out of economic and political competition for popularity and profit or potentially helpful things like Capitalism and Democracy (which are being proven to be potentially very harmful due to the competitive advantage of selfishness and misleading marketing) will suffer failures that unjustly discredit their potential for being sustainably helpful.
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MA Rodger at 03:22 AM on 12 June 2021CO2 lags temperature
Ducked @632,
There is indeed a wobble in the MLO CO2 record that matches a preceding wobble in the global temperature record of a few months earlier, both of these wobbles matching an even earlier wobble in ENSO. The actual thing wobbling CO2 is rainfall which promotes/reduces CO2 absorption by the likes of the Amazon rain forest. (See map from this NOAA webpage below.) There is quite a literature covering this phenomenon (eg the likes of HERE or HERE) but be warned - there are a few papers by swivel-eyed denialists lurking within the proper work.
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sfkeppler at 03:07 AM on 12 June 2021California, ‘America’s garden,’ is drying out
Does someone think about the origin of the humidity which forms the rains in California and all America, up to Greenland, Scandinavia and hole Europe? This is no Joke! - Look at the stratospheric and climate occurance over the carribian see. There is always coming some humidity from the pacific, mixing up with the humidity of two mighty vapor producers, the Amazon and the Orinoco basins. I have no doupt, that if we want to bring rain to America's gardens, we should inhance Amazonia's evapotranspiration.
Actually lots of the floodable forests, Várzea and Igapó are severely desturbed. Especially during the dry season in the Amazon, this leeds to a severe vapor-deficit in the upper layers of the atmosfere. As a consequence, there is savannization of the nonflooded forests and drought in the northern and southern hemispheres, which depend on that moisture.
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Philippe Chantreau at 02:58 AM on 12 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Nick Palmer,
I can not agree that your characterization of CMIP6 as running "too hot" accurately reflects the performance of the models involved in the exercise. Some of the models have a higher ECS than any found in CMIP5 and thus pulled up the average ECS for the ensemble. They may be wrong, and the Zelinka paper suggests a possible reason, but that is no reason to discount the rest of them, and not even a reason to consider their high ECS as impossible. Everyone would love to see a low ECS materialize, especially so-called skeptics, but AFAIK nobody has shown that any ECS significantly lower than the most common 3degC estimate has a higher probability of being real than one that is much higher. The high ECS models tend to perform lower at hindcast, but that also says only so much.
I did not find at Real Climate anything that would remotely confirm the blunt language you used, which is awefully similar to the types you condemn. When inputting CMIP6 in the RC search box, I found these posts:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2019/11/sensitive-but-unclassified/
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/06/sensitive-but-unclassified-part-ii/
Both are good reads for anyone truly interested in understanding what goes on in the CMIP6 exercise. Zeke Hausfather has a great take on the CMIP6 issue, which I suspect was posted before publication of the Zelinka paper:
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/cold-water-hot-models
Forgive me if I misinterpreted, but the overall tone of your remarks on models seem to suggest that their performance has been poor, in general, and that they can't be trusted. This couldn't be further from the truth, as shown by Gavin Schmidt in the latest update at RC on the subject:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/01/update-day-2021/
I don't really know what the Oreskes and others' message is, as I don't read much from advocacy groups. It seems you have a beef with the idea that accusing Exxon, among others, of wrongdoing back in the pre-1990 times is misleading. That may be so. However, that would leave one wondering why they continued to support the bullshit factories churning out propaganda favorable to their short-term financial interests in the following 30 years, as uncertainty dwindled away.
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Bob Loblaw at 01:10 AM on 12 June 2021CO2 lags temperature
Ducked:
The quote/question about time lags is actually on the page following the one you linked to in your first link (reached by clicking "next"). The two pages do not appear to have different URLs, though, so readers will have to navigate to the next page after following the initial link.
The quote about 5 months time lag (from the second link, which only gets me to the abstract) appears to come from a study that looks at the past 30 years of data. The article is paywalled (I might be able to get to it via work), but my guess is that if they are looking at only 30 years of data, then they are looking at monthly or more frequent readings.
Atmospheric CO2 measurements from locations such as Mauna Loa show strong seasonal variation. This short-term variation is driven by different fluxes and reservoirs from long-term changes. This will affect any calculations of time lag, when compared to long-term patterns on the century scale (fossil fuel combustion) or millenial and longer scales (geologic processes). Geological records of temperature and CO2 will not be capable of resolving monthly values, so a 5-month lag in seasonal patterns is not visible.
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Ducked at 00:13 AM on 12 June 2021CO2 lags temperature
I don't have much of a problem with CO2 lagging behind temperature at the end of a glacial period. It isn't all that surprising and the explanations are convincing.
That CO2 still lags behind temperature (though apparently by only a matter of months rather than hundreds of years,"Changes in carbon dioxide content lag those in temperature by five months."[1} is more of a puzzle to me and I havn't seen an explanation for it yet.
I'm sure there is one that wont require denial of recent anthropogenic climate change, but I don't know what it is.
This enquiry arose because I'm teaching using an online resource that includes the following question for students
https://authoring.concord.org/sequences/47/activities/282/pages/1753/3a7c351a-50c0-4646-8824-e2eef8f53762
5. Using Models To Make Predictions"Why is there a lag between changes in CO2 levels and temperature?
(Hint: Remember that there are many reservoirs for carbon dioxide. Where can carbon dioxide be stored when the temperature is low?)"I find this question unclear (Do they mean changes in atmospheric CO2, in which case the "hint" doesn't appear to make any sense?) and it implies that CO2 leads temperature change, which wasn't the case in 1990
{1} Kuo, C., Lindberg, C. & Thomson, D. Coherence established between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature. Nature 343, 709–714 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1038/343709a0
Moderator Response:[BL] Links activated.
The web software here does not automatically create links. You can do this when posting a comment by selecting the "insert" tab, selecting the text you want to use for the link, and clicking on the icon that looks like a chain link. Add the URL in the dialog box. -
nigelj at 12:35 PM on 11 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Clarification to my comment at 26: However its not tenable to claim these far left environmentalist somehow triggered any of the climate denialism.
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nigelj at 08:31 AM on 11 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Nick Palmer @23
I didn't say Exon had clear and certain knowledge of the dangers of climate change way back then. I think the oil companies knew there was a problem, but not the full extent, like anyone else at the time. Remember I said this "Exon knew there was a climate problem but told the public a different story. Theres no way of excusing this. Even if Exonn didnt really understand the true extent of the problem it doesn't change the utterly mixed messaging."
While you're right that companies use lobbying organisations to fend off government regulation, its very hard to believe that big oil funded these lobby groups but didnt realise they were promoting denialism, or didn't fund them to assist in promoting denialism . The most I would concede is that not all fossil fuel companies would be the same.
Yes many of the very active environmentalists lean very left politically and want to smash capitalism. Michael Moore's film Planet of the Humans perhaps falls into that category. It was a very frustrating film full of inaccurate information and anti renewables rhetroic. I fall into the camp that thinks capitalism needs some reforms, but I don't think anyone has come up with a completely new alternative thats workable or ever will. I find the far left almost as annoying as the far right. But environmental activists will do what they do and believe what they beleive just as libertarians do the same.
However its not tenable to claim these far left environmentalist somehow triggered right wing climate denialism. If you look at the history of denialism of science in general its driven by a variety of things from vested interests, political views, religion, human psychology and some of these are politically neutral things. The far left environmentalists might have added a bit to the polarisation of the climate issue. But so have the far right denialists! Hugely so.
Of course big oil won't have its own internal documents talking about denialist myths like solar forcing and cosmic rays. They are not stupid. They outsource this to the lobby groups. But like I said in my previous comment, demonising the oil industry on and on seems ultimately a bit pointless.
Ok maybe I was too dismissive of Stephen Schneider. However the point I'm trying to make is the number of climate scientists that come across as serious, over the top alarmists is in a minority. In my admittedly anecdotal experience most seem pretty measured in their comments. The IPCC reports are very measured. So its unfair to accuse the scientific community of over stating the nature of this climate problem. One or two scientists go crazy, claiming climate change will kill billions of people in a decade, etc,etc. I find this rather frustrating because it feeds the denialists, but they are in a small minority.
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Bob Loblaw at 07:57 AM on 11 June 2021Antarctica is gaining ice
WEP. Yes, the two key early papers that Manabe was involved in were:
Figure 16 from the second paper illustrates the stratospheric cooling associated with surface warming:
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Bob Loblaw at 07:36 AM on 11 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Nick Palmer:
I agree with what Phillip and NigelJ have said to a much larger extent than I agree with what you have said. I will focus on a few points in your latest comment.
"I was referring to the definite and real uncertainty in the science BEFORE Hansen's 1988 speech"
Give me a break. I was studying climatology for 10 years before Hansen's speech, and a dozen years before the 1990 IPCC report. I did not need Greenpeace or any other media reports to know what was going on - I was reading the primary literature. I found about papers like Manabe and Wetherald (1967) by reading them when they were still <20 years old.
"It is less than honest of people to assert that our modern established science in any way is comparable to the nascent science back then,"
It is less than honest for people to assert that there was not a lot that we knew back then, either. We knew in the mid 1980s that Sherwood Idso's arguments for negligible warming were wrong. That did not stop special interests from funding him for decades afterwards. That funding was not intended to pursue a legitimate sicentific goal - it was to sow doubt.
Climatology was not "nascent" in the 1980s. It was "nascent" in the 1880s.
"I submit that these tactics of Big Oil were just ordinary political manoeuvring to resist irrationally draconian 'green/red' calls until the science got strong enough. "
I submit that if this were the case, then Big Oil would have tried to argue the real science and legitimate uncertainty, instead of funding positions that were already known to be bunk.
"...government pandering to the views of misinformed activists ..."
You mean like the denial industry that was created specifically to maximize the extent to which politicians and the public were provided with misinformation? As you point out, right-wing politicians like Margaret Thatcher had a reasonably realistic view of the science several decades ago. Something - someone - managed to convince them otherwise.
"It is a matter of record that the fossil fuel industry increasingly deserted the early 'denialist' fossil fuel organisation - which was formed in 1989 - the 'Global Climate Coalition' - until by the early 2000s it was disbanded, and this was because the science had got strong enough."
Alternate explanation: as early denial organizations lost credibility, it was easier to let them die and fund new organizations that could spout the same misinformation under a new name. Until that organization loses it credibility. Or don't even wait - just create a whole bunch of them and make it look as if there is widespread doubt.
Much of the rest of your comment dives into "the mean lefties made them do it". I heard the same kind of arguments being made about general environmental issues when I worked in the oil patch in the early 1980s. It was not a reaction to climate isuses - it was a standard rhetorical tactic long before then.
"BTW, are there are any links to Big Oil documents which actually deny the science in the way that deniers do - it's the Sun - it's cooling - it's cosmic rays - the temperature record was tampered with - it's all fraud etc? I've never seen any actual full-on denialism in them. "
Because they learned from the problems the tobacco industry ran into over their internal documents? And funneled the money through shell corporations or institutes to hide the source, letting the denial groups do this for them? People that don't want to get cuaght doing what they are doing usually figure out eventually to not keep records.
It doesn't matter if Big Oil believed the denialism or not - they sure funded it. Out of the goodness of their hearts, or because they thought it made good business sense?
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One Planet Only Forever at 04:01 AM on 11 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Nick Palmer @18 and 23,
I have the following perspective to add to the responses provided by Philippe and Nigel.Be careful. You may be presenting a defence similar to claims that atrocious things, like slavery and racism, unjustly prolonged by previous generations were done "at a time when people did not know better".
Reading evidence based presentations like "A People's History of the United States", by Howard Zinn, exposes that what people today often fail to understand is that better understanding did exist but failed to be "Beneficial to the wealthy and powerful" and as a result it failed to be "Popular".
Also, claims of the Boon to humanity from fossil fuel use is misleading. There is very little lasting benefit for humanity from this burst of harmful unsustainable human activity. Many technological developments did not occur because of the use of fossil fuels. In fact, a focus on benefiting from fossil fuel use significantly distracted effort from other potentially less harmful and more sustainable developments. And the easy access to power has allowed far more harm to be done by humans than the harmful climate change impacts. Any perceptions of advancement that depends on cheaper higher artificial energy use is destined to fail to continue in the future. The perception so ending poverty are a particularly galling case. Any part of that perception that relies on fossil fuel use or comparably cheap energy use has no future. Sustainable development limits the need for artificial energy and requires all the artificially generated energy to be obtained sustainably, which include not using up non-renewable resources and requires no lasting accumulating harm to be done by the energy production, distribution or use.
In spite of global wealth rising far faster than global population there continues to be horrid inequity and injustice. Getting richer and more powerful clearly does not mean getting better. Note that at the time of slavery there was a very long period of time where the unacceptability of slavery was understood, but popularity of profit and other benefits traumatically prolonged the activity. And the worst part of the end of slavery in Europe was that in the end the rich people decided that their peers who were wealthier because of slavery would be financially compensated when the forced end of slavery happened, with no compensation give to those who had been enslaved and were now disadvantaged by the socioeconomic-political system and on their own.
I strongly urge everyone to be better informed about what is harmful and what is sustainably helpful.
- Read "The Age of Sustainable Development", by Jeffrey D. Sacks, or take the MOOC of the same name. It is not new. It is the result of continued pursuit of increased awareness of the harm being done by human development.
- Read the first global recognition of the harmful unsustainability of human actions that was recognized globally as early as 1972 at the Stockholm Conference.
Claiming "Exxon didn't know better" fails to admit that they were not "responsibly thoughtfully doing what the most responsible and thoughtful people were aware of and doing at the time".
The “Fog of misleading marketing compromised democracy, consumerism and capitalism” is like the Fog of War, a lousy excuse for horrible things being done.
Exxon had been on a more helpful leadership track in the 1970s. But something changed in the 1980s (Reagan/Thatcherism was a significant result of that change). And Exxon's approach to climate science appears to have changed at that time as well. The timing of Reagan/Thatcherism looks like a reaction to the growing awareness and understanding of harmful human developments that needed to be corrected, a fearful aggressive misleading marketing response to the increasing awareness and improving understanding that things needed to change and government action was required to make it happen. It was a reaction to the realization that the Free Competition for superiority in systems like Capitalism causes problems it resists correcting (popular and profitable things are hard to correct). And that realization meant that some wealthy powerful people would not maintain their developed sense of status. And the required corrections and potential for wealthy people to be losers would be in many industries like chemical and food companies, not just fossil fuels.
More than a decade ago, the understanding developed that a rapidly increasing Price on Carbon along with other Government actions to curtail fossil fuel use, including actions to encourage renewable energy system implementation and development of improved renewable energy systems.
The questions become things like:
- Was Exxon's messaging leading the promotion of that helpful understanding?
- Or was Exxon pushing misleading marketing like claiming that corrective action to limit harm should not happen until there was "More certainty" regarding the need for the corrections? That is the way the current system has developed so harmfully and so harmfully resists correction.
- Did Exxon promote a significant and rapidly increasing Price on Carbon along with other Government actions to more rapidly end the use of fossil fuels? Or did they promote the idea that a fixed certain "Price on Carbon" could be determined by an economic evaluation comparing benefits that would have to be given up today to reduce the harm done to future generations, with the future harm discounted (see my comment @17)?
- Did Exxon executives do what the law of the USA regarding Publicly Traded corporations requires them to do - “whatever they can get away with to maximize shareholder wealth”? Exxon could have been sued by shareholders if they acted to educate about the need to reduce fossil fuel use. That is an example of the harmful flaws that have developed in the Freer competition for superiority that so many wealthy people, and people who want to be like that, will excuse and defend.
Raising awareness and improving understanding regarding harmful activity and how to limit harm done should not be done by misleading marketing. But misleading marketing that achieves that objective is helpful in spite of perceptions of harm done. Without “Dramatic attention getting” the issue would be something people are less aware of and less understanding of. As for “getting more people to support the actions” ... Leadership compromising awareness and understanding and delaying required corrections in order to appeal to more people is Harmful Unsustainable Leadership. The sooner that type of Leadership fails to be influential the better the future for humanity will be.
Perceptions of success and progress based on unsustainable activity, especially harmful activity, are delusions no matter how popular or profitable they are at the time. And undeserving wealthy powerful people have been masters of harmful delusion, misleading marketing, throughout history. That is what needs to change. And that means a deserved loss of status for many high status people rather than “excuses, appeasement and delays trying to maintain undeserved perceptions of superiority” that compromise what is understood to be required to limit harm done so that humanity can have a sustainable improving future on this one amazing planet that may be the only planet that humans can be certain of being able to sustainably live on for many millions of years into the future.
The unjustified lack of leadership through the past few decades by the wealthiest and most powerful on the transition to rapidly ending the accumulating harm done by fossil fuel use is a travesty. The wealthy and powerful cannot claim they were “unaware”. They also have little ability to claim uncertainty about the magnitude of impact. The fact that fossil fuel use was unsustainable needed no research. Burning up non-renewable resource has no potential in the future of humanity. It was only ever a temporary ability for some to benefit in ways others never would be able to. Even now people try to argue that the less developed portion of the human population should not be allowed to use fossil fuel energy at the level that the Supposedly more Advanced, higher status, portion of the population still do (30 years after clear indications of the need to end fossil fuel use). And using Bob Loblaw’s concern “what if I am wrong?”, the 1.0C of warming already experienced is producing harmful climate changes impacting many people, especially the poorest. And that warming is less than the low end of the 1.5C to 4.5C warming due to a doubling of CO2.
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Nick Palmer at 02:05 AM on 11 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Phillipe and NigelJ. I think you two have somewhat missed that I was referring to the definite and real uncertainty in the science BEFORE Hansen's 1988 speech and the formation of the IPCC. That is when the documents in 'Exxon Knew', which are now held up as evidnec of 'certain' knowledge and associated deceit, were created. It is less than honest of people to assert that our modern established science in any way is comparable to the nascent science back then, upon which it would have been simply wrong to base far-reaching, global economy affecting/dismantling policies. It is verging on deceit to cast aspersions at targets who are not guilty or, at least, very much less guilty than they are being accused of being, using sophisticated rhetoric, cherry picking, misattribution of motivation etc and all the liguistic techniques that such as John Cook has clarified the denialist 'side' as using.
The uncertainty I was referring to (ordinary man-in-the-street definition, not the scientific one), at the relevant time, and what was not well understood then, was of such a magnitude (look again at the Dessler quote I gave) that it was entirely justified that Big Oil did not turn on a sixpence and shut down when the environmental organisations seized on this new way to attack Big Industry by using activist's frequent tendency to make unwarranted speculations on fragmentary evidence, then deciding that whatever unlikely speculative doomy result they came up with is almost certain to happen and then using that to justify calling for bans and authoritarian restrictions to avoid that end.
There can be no doubt that Big Oil sponsored think tanks, Institutes and lobbying organisations that used actual denialist rhetoric as part of their portfolio of techniques to try to influence politicians and policy formulations but, and I think this is where a lot of people go wrong, this should not have caused people to jump to the conclusion that Big Oil was deliberately spreading denialism because they were actually in denial of climate science - pause for a lot of screaming and gnashing of teeth by the extremists! I submit that these tactics of Big Oil were just ordinary political manoeuvring to resist irrationally draconian 'green/red' calls until the science got strong enough. The primary function of such lobbying organisations is to help their clients fight back against what they see as heavy handed legislation or inappropriate policy making by government pandering to the views of misinformed activists and those members of the voting public whose views have been changed by them to the point where they would vote in such draconian and misconceived action.
It is a matter of record that the fossil fuel industry increasingly deserted the early 'denialist' fossil fuel organisation - which was formed in 1989 - the 'Global Climate Coalition' - until by the early 2000s it was disbanded, and this was because the science had got strong enough.
"The GCC dissolved in 2001 after membership declined in the face of improved understanding of the role of greenhouse gases in climate change and of public criticism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Climate_Coalition
Anyone who engages with denialists, the right wing or who defends the basic priciples behind environmentalism (which are, of course, still very valid) will pretty soon be accused of being a 'watermelon' - green on the outside, red on the inside, by which they mean that environmentalists have a superficial layer of concern for the environment masking a far left 'smash capitalism' ideology underneath. This is not a conspiracy theory! It is clear that many recent significant spokespersons indeed do have a very deep seated antipathy towards the capitalism system, upon which they lay the blame for all sorts of mankind's woes and they have an ideological zeal that only their pet version of international socialism will save us all - which goal, to them, justifies the deceit and propaganda they use as they try to 'socially engineer' the masses.
It is these 'fifth columnists' who created the Patrick Moore's, the Patrick Michael's, the Bjorn Lomborg's and who gave such as the Heartland Institute such large amounts of ammunition to doubt the integrity of the genuine, reasonable scientifically based policies. Bear in mind that one of the very earliest politicians to warn about the dangers of potential climate change in public and political circles was the rather far right Margaret Thatcher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnAzoDtwCBg&t=30s
and it was the far left who more or less started denialism off by insinuating that it was all fake science to justify shutting coal mines down, to handicap the development of the Third World and to accelerate the expansion of nuclear power. It was only afterwards that the left realised that if they became anti-global warming they could have a powerful stick to hit Big Industry, the international monetary system etc and slip their desired political outcomes in by the back door. That change in outlook in turn created the right wing/libertarian opposition - first to the 'solutions' the left claimed were mandatory and then their political 'chess moves' generated out and out deceitful-but-plausible-sounding denialism to undermine the legitimate science by appealing to the U.S.'s conservative blue collar population that it was actually a reds-under-the-bed attempt to undermine their freedoms.Here is the very rational Zion Lights explaining why she disavowed her earlier extreme, ideology based, environmental beliefs and how she sees those beliefs as counter-productive these days.
https://quillette.com/2021/05/31/the-sad-truth-about-traditional-environmentalism/
Whether activists like it or not, I believe it was the environmental organisations excessive and unwarranted views, and the political engineering of (some) of their leaders, which led them to make simplistic and ill thought out (or craftily planned) demands for policy changes which would have been disastrous. A far more likely explanation of Big Fossil Fuel's stance and acts is not that their execs were real denialists possessed of a psychopathic disregard for humanity but that their adverts and public facing statements were their attempt to resist politicians moving against them and implementing the type of draconian policies called for by those with fallacious, or at least well over-the-top, views in some cases motivated by an underlying 'closet' political ideology - Smash Capitalism! - that the public would never actually vote for if it was expressed out loud.
BTW, are there are any links to Big Oil documents which actually deny the science in the way that deniers do - it's the Sun - it's cooling - it's cosmic rays - the temperature record was tampered with - it's all fraud etc? I've never seen any actual full-on denialism in them. That's why I made my point that the words in the documents have likely been mischaracterised by Oreskes and Supran et al to insinuate and attribute motives which really weren't there.
I think you really shouldn't characterise Stephen Schneider's views as "the opinion of one person". He was a very well regarded early climate scientist, who was also acknowledged as a brilliant communicator of that science to the public. His (unedited by denialists) quote which I gave is still a very accurate statement on the science and its communication and comprehension by the public. Unfortunately, in this area, he is almost peerless these days. Richard Alley, Katharine Hayhoe, Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann are really good but, in my opinion, they are not quite at the same level. Schneider could take on a hostile audience of denialists and either defeat them or make their apparently plausible views look as irrational as they really are.
BTW, Phillipe, I actually referred to the CMIP6 models (not the CMP5 ones, as you incorrectly stated I did) running (considerably) too hot. This is not contentious. Ask Gavin Schmidt or any other similarly credentialled scientist...
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Jim Hunt at 16:35 PM on 10 June 2021DMI show cooling Arctic
Hi WEP,
The "freezing point" of salty sea water is below 0C. As luck would have it DMI "Arctic" temperature has just surpassed that temperature for the first time in 2021, and earlier than the climatology:
https://GreatWhiteCon.info/2021/06/facts-about-the-arctic-in-june-2021/#Jun-09
Note that the blue line at 0C is therefore actually above the "melting point" of ice floating in said salty Arctic sea water. Note also that air temperature above the ice won't rise very far above that line for the rest of the brief Arctic summer. -
wideEyedPupil at 14:28 PM on 10 June 2021DMI show cooling Arctic
"car" → "case"
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wideEyedPupil at 14:27 PM on 10 June 2021DMI show cooling Arctic
"e plate" → "polar"
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wideEyedPupil at 14:26 PM on 10 June 2021DMI show cooling Arctic
Is the mean ocean temperature and/or mean air temperature at the e plat regions greater than the global mean (1.0-1.1 °C in the car of air temperature) or less than. I take it from this thread that it's the ice mass which determines the air temperature, rather than the other way around, acknowledging there must be a conservation of energy.
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wideEyedPupil at 14:07 PM on 10 June 2021Antarctica is gaining ice
Edit> "predicted in 1967 that the lower atmosphere and the stratosphere would act in opposite ways: that warming in the former would be accompanied by cooling in the later"
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wideEyedPupil at 14:03 PM on 10 June 2021Antarctica is gaining ice
I was reading today that Manabe and Werherald, working at NOAA, predicted in 1967 that lower atmosphere would act in opposite ways warming in the former would be accompanied by cooling in the later. And that it wasn't until 2011 that atmospheric testing was able to confirm this until 2011. Another prediction by Manabe and two other scientists is that land areas warm faster than oceans, with the slowest warming around Antartica. My understanding has been that while Land masses do warm faster than oceans (for more than one reason) but that warming at the polar regions had been more like 2-3 °C compared to the global average of 1.0-1.1 °C.
is there a different thread on this site where I can learn about polar warming in comparison to other regions? And the relevant mechanism. I'm aware of ozone depletion over Antartica for example which is a seperate but interconnected mechanism.
thanks in advance. the book I'm reading (The Wizard and the Prophet, an excellent read) may have got it wrong I guess but Charles C Mann is a long time science writer/journalist.
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KR at 13:23 PM on 10 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Micawber - I'm reminded of the quote (which may or may not be real, but still relevant):
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
― Winston S. Churchill
The same applies to peer review. There are occasional failures, biases, and downright foolishness (especially for off-topic or denier controlled venues) - but in the end it's the best system we have, and inherently (over time) self-correcting.
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KR at 13:15 PM on 10 June 2021The day Oil Giants lost the Climate Fight
Encouraging note: the company behind the XL Pipieline (tar sands crude oil from Canada, massively polluting in extraction and use) has officially dropped the project given Biden Administration resistance.
www.cnn.com/2021/06/09/energy/keystone-pipeline-canceled/index.html
Nice to see some good climate news.
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nigelj at 08:16 AM on 10 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Nick Palmer @18, I think you are largely wrong about the fossil fuel companies, especially the view that their own internal scientists were outspoken alarmists who exaggerated things. Stephen Schneider's views that climate scientists exaggerate and use scare stories are the opinion of one person. All the material I've seen from the IPCC is conservatively worded and full of caveats, ifs and buts. Theres no reason to believe Exons own internal scientists were much different. At worse they may have said theres potentially a big problem here, and there would be nothing wrong with saying that. Yes climate activists do sometimes get carried away, but they are not the scientists.
Exon knew there was a climate problem but told the public a different story. Theres no way of excusing this. Even if Exonn didnt really understand the true extent of the problem it doesn't change the utterly mixed messaging.
Lets look at oil companies more generally. At least some oil companies have clearly been involved in spreading campaigns to create doubt, amply proven in books like Dark Money. I've seen polling studies showing most employees of oil companies are climate sceptics. This is probably not surprising because they are obviously worried about losing their jobs. But the fact remains oil companies have helped spread denialism and doubt. They may be worried about their kids and the climate problem but that doesnt mean they arent sceptics of one sort or another or oppose mitigation.
However theres obviously another side to it. Its fair to say that expecting oil companies to just shut down their operations in a voluntary way is unrealistic. They aren't breaking any laws, and there is no society wide consensus that they should just shut down. Companies exist to make profits and ignore environmental issues the "tragedy of the commons problem". People are rightly worried about their job security. Climate change is a complex costly sort of problem but doesn't fall into the same category as an immediate threat to people lives like an industrial toxin. If companies cover up issues like that they would be potentially legally liable. But I can still understand the anger of the climate activists.
The issue is entirely about what society and its governments does about oil companies. This is about what laws, regulations and taxes it applies. Without that nothing much will change. I notice that the Netherlands have recently imposed a law requiring Shell oil to cut emissions 40%. Other countries are imposing carbon taxes.
Of course its also about individual carbon footprints. Another issue.
Yes you are right theres hypocrisy and finger pointing etc on both sides of the debate, but theres a huge volume of people that are less vocal and strident in their views.
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Philippe Chantreau at 04:17 AM on 10 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Nick,
You just reiterated the points you made earlier.
Uncertainties have not been represented inadequately in the IPCC reports. Cloud feedbacks have always been at the top of the uncertainty ladder.
You are sliding toward the very behavior you condemn by saying the CMIP5 models run "too hot." In reality they run slightly warmer than observations, and slightly is even generous. There is plenty of good posts on that RealClimate and even here showing how well within models' expectations the observations have been. The cloud feedback underestimation has not prevented actual temps of increasing beyond .15 degC/decade. Everything considered, the models have performed remarkably well, even the old ones. Describing it as "too hot" does exactly the same as what all the sides you accuse of taking liberties with the facts do.
I'll add that over-emphasizing uncertainty is Judith Curry's preferred method of manipulation and it is every bit as bad than anything done by so-called alarmists. It is a free pass for do nothing or slowly do a little, neither of which are adequate.
I can understand the pressures and imperatives that a business like Exxon has to reconcile. The state of their knowledge, and the remarkably reasonable tone in most of the old documents (see the wayback machine link) are so far removed from the propaganda they pushed that your excuse falls short. Why such an immense disconnect? Sure there was significant uncertainty in 1979. Less so in 1989. Much less in 1999. All the uncertainty that could justify not seriously starting a transition was gone in 2009. Exxon kept on pushing the same narrative, and still does, through the same actors.
I do not disagree that, if one wants to understand the science, the message coming from activist organizations is often not helpful. I do not disagree that some have a wholefully unrealistic perception of the difficulty of a full energy transition. The energy transition we are faced with is a major undertaking. Both the magnitude and urgency of it have been made far worse by the decades of inaction caused by the fossil fuel backed opinion campaigns.
As for myself, I strive to be reality-based and firmly believe that no option should be off the table, except those whose range of consequences can not be well assessed )atmsopheric geo-engineering comes to mind). I am not opposed, in principle, to nuclear. I believe that existing dams that can produce electricity and allow to store water should be kept. I think that enhanced geothermal deserves more attention. I also know for sure that a world in which the pursuit of more profit at any cost all the time is the main driver is a world doomed to fail.
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Nick Palmer at 00:01 AM on 10 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Here's a live link to the skepsci article which I neglected to do in my previous long comment
https://skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity.htm -
Nick Palmer at 23:49 PM on 9 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
When activists try to bad mouth Exxon et al they speak from a 'post facto' appreciation of the science, as if today's relatively strong climate science existed back when the documents highlighted in 'Exxon knew' were created. Let me explain what I think is another interpretation other than Greenpeace/Oreskes'/Supran's narratives suggesting 'Exxon knew' that climate change was going to be bad because their scientists told them so as far back as the 70s and 80s. Let me first present Stephen Schneider's famous quote from 1988 (the whole quote, not the edited one used by denialists).
"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both."
I submit that part of the apparently damning content of the documents was exactly caused by Exxon's scientists, Schneider-like, simplifying their message to initially present it to their corporate employers. In exactly the same way that the denialosphere combed though the Climategate emails to find apparently damning statements and then interpreted them through a filtered 'lens' to insinuate fraud and data manipulation, usually by editing out context etc and even previous and subsequent sentences which changed the meaning completely, I submit that Greenpeace's 'Exxon knew' team did that too. They knew that the majority of people who read their report would assume that the current science that projects the bad consequences that we are (fairly) sure about today was as rock solid back way back then as it is now and would therefore jump to their desired conclusion that Big Capitalist Oil was just being evil. I'm absolutely not suggesting that Greenpeace's team were consciously being deceptive, just that they allowed their zealotry to run away with them so they saw just what they wanted to see...
Today's science, that projects bad outcomes, was by no means solid back then. I think that what Big Oil should be fairly accused of is the much less 'evil' culpability of not adequately informing the public about the full probabilities of the risks - which again is the 'Schneider' method of tailoring one's output for one's audience. Perhaps they didn't get "the right balance is between being effective and being honest" quite right. As denialists will endlessly tell us, the use of fossil fuels has been on balance a huge boon to humanity and I suspect that past one-dimensional calls by activists (including those I naively made!) to not use or explore for any more fossil fuels almost overnight, to a corporate mind, would require a public relations strategy to counter that extremist view while waiting for the science to get solid enough to start serious corporate planning for change should it be needed.
'Ban all exploration for or use of fossil fuels today' is a frequent call of today's extremists and no doubt they are sincere that they think the risks are such that such draconian action must be justified, and that things such as new technology, carbon capture, Gen3/4 nukes, agricultural changes etc must be Machiavellian Big Industry just manouevring to do nothing now to protect their financial bottom lines - delaying tactics that must be resisted. I think Professor Mann too has fallen in to the trap of feeling 'certainty' about what he thinks the solutions should be and this has lead to his dismissal, even libellous characterisations, of those who offer up a more nuanced way forward. Activists who call for an immediate ban on fossil fuels and 100% renewables by next Tuesday do not seem to realise that they are thinking in a one-dimensional way. Their 'solution' might address climate change, but such a solution would instantly cause enormous global disruption and would likely spark off the mother of all global economic recessions, which would rapidly cause long lasting extreme global hardship much greater, at least in the short to medium term, than anything global warming is scheduled to do for several decades.
So what were the 'uncertainties' back then? Some of the most important parameters plugged into climate models are those for climate sensitivity. While (widely varying) estimates existed before 2000 it only got well constrained and modelled within firm(ish) limits by papers published after then. Check out the links in this Skepsci article to see when the major papers were published.
https://skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity.htmHere is Carbonbrief.org explaining the lack of certainty back then
"From Carbon Brief https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-scientists-estimate-climate-sensitivity
"In 1979, the Charney Report from the US National Academy of Sciences suggested that ECS was likely somewhere between 1.5C and 4.5C per doubling of CO2. Nearly 40 years later, the best estimate of sensitivity is largely the same.
However, Prof Andrew Dessler at Texas A&M University pushes back on this suggestion. He tells Carbon Brief:I think that the idea that ‘uncertainty has remained the same since the late 1970s’ is wrong. If you look at the Charney report, it’s clear that there were a lot of things they didn’t know about the climate. So their estimate of uncertainty was, in my opinion, way, way too small"
"Back in 1979, climate science was much less well understood than today. There were far fewer lines of evidence to use in assessing climate sensitivity. The Charney report range was based on physical intuition and results from only two early climate models.
In contrast, modern sensitivity estimates are based on evidence from many different sources, including models, observations and palaeoclimate estimates. As Dessler suggests, one of the main advances in understanding of climate sensitivity over the past few decades is scientists’ ability to more confidently rule out very high or very low climate sensitivities.""
Activists try to insinuate that the documents and memos show that Big Oil 'knew the scientific truth' back then and adopted a position of denial, or psychopathic deception for the sake of profits, in the face of noble environmental groups campaigning against them because they also 'knew the truth' too. Much though it pains me to admit it, I was part of the campaigning certainy of those groups back then. I used to coordinate a Friends of the Earth area group and all the material I saw did not mention any of the scientific doubts and the uncertainties which featured in the scientific literature. I trusted it - it was the same thing we see today when such as Extinction Rebellion go waay over the top with the certainty of their assertions and the cherry picked nature of the information they present to the public. This is why I think that all sides - denialist/alarmist/doomist/sceptic etc - use misleading rhetoric to spin their narratives. I realise that many of the environmental activist 'troops' in their crusades like to feel certain that they know the 'truth' that Evil Big Industry had psychopathically tried to hide but I think total honesty is necessary to enable the public to judge the situation properly, so that policy changes we need are not based on the shifting sand that the 'divine deception' of the rhetoric of extremist campaigners and political forces is. Noble cause corruption is not a good strategy whether it is that of the greens, the left or right.
It's not as if even today's science is completely bulletproof, as a new paper about clouds shows. Consideration of it offers up an explanation as to why the new CMIP6 models are running too hot, and that is because observations show that some parameters plugged into current cloud models about longevity, warming and precipitation are wrong which mean that clouds cool more than previously thought. It doesn't,as it happens, change what we need to do but it does demonstrate that even today a fairly major part of the mechanics of climate changee can - uh hm - be changed.
New paper on clouds
https://www.carbonbrief.org/cooling-effect-of-clouds-underestimated-by-climate-models-says-new-study -
One Planet Only Forever at 05:07 AM on 9 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Bob Loblaw,
I will definitely check out The Authoritarians, reading the complete book. A shorter read on Authoritarianism is On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder.
There are many other helpful references including How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley. Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind, also presents important understanding, however, I suggest being skeptical of his recommendations regarding how to deal with them. Harmful people should not be engaged by compromising efforts to limit harm done.
I have read many books laying out reasons for the tragic ease of obtaining popular support for harmful Nationalism, Authoritarianism and Capitalism.
The key is Governing to limit harm done based on the constant pursuit of increased awareness and improved understanding of what is harmful. Some people will responsibly self-govern that way. But many people develop temptations to not self-govern that way. And harmful wealthy people maintain and increase their status relative to others through misleading marketing and appealing beliefs in systems that are actually unjust and unfair, especially if awareness and understanding of what is harmful is not diligently pursued.
Any socioeconomic-political system can be compromised by harmful pursuits of status "Winning". But misleading marketed Capitalism and Free Market Consumerism is potentially very harmful because the harmful stuff can become popular and profitable which makes it seem even more justified and excusable. And Capitalism has a fundamental need for constant expansion which is a serious problem on a finite planet. The Capitalist free market requires significant effort to identify and limit harm being done. And history proves that the participants in the system will not do that very well. A clears example is the stagnation of opportunity for the middle and lower classes in the USA since the 1970s in spite of massive increases in perceptions of total wealth. And very little of the economic activity that generated those perceptions of wealth are sustainable. And much of the activity is harmful.
A nasty climate impact example of unjustified justification and excusing is the way some people try to compare "their evaluation of the Benefits that would be lost if the Harm to future generations was reduced" with "their evaluation of the Harm done to future generations, with the future harm done discounted because that is what you can do with future harm". Having an MBA, I appreciate the merits of net-present-value obtained by discounting future costs and revenue when comparing investment alternatives. But I understand that methodology should not be applied to cases where a person or group benefits at the expense of others, especially future generations. Even Stern's use of a low discount rate is likely inappropriate. Harm done is not justified by benefits obtained that way.
An even nastier reality of those Benefit-Harm evaluations is that the people doing them claim that whatever Status Quo has developed has to be maintained and improved on, even though the wealthier people who benefit form harm done deserve a loss of status. And they over-state the Benefits that have to be given up, including ignoring the activity in the alternative economy. And they understate the harm that will be done. Then they discount that low-balled harm because it happens in the future they will likely not experience.
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Philippe Chantreau at 04:35 AM on 9 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
One of the links in the SkS post I linked is no longer working, but this one does:
The complete investigation by ICN is available on kindle, titled "The Road not Taken."
Plenty of documents from inside Exxon available through the wayback machine:
The Harvard paper perhaps says it best:
"[A]ccounting for expressions of reasonable doubt, 83% of peer-reviewed papers and 80% of internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12% of advertorials do so, with 81% instead expressing doubt. We conclude that ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science—by way of its scientists’ academic publications—but promoted doubt about it in advertorials. Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public."
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f
Is it of any interest to know why they misled? What is that going to change? It's not like any of these people will ever experience any serious consequence to their (possible, right Nick?) harmful actions.
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Philippe Chantreau at 04:15 AM on 9 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Of course Nick, they do.
However, I'm sure that I don't have to remind you of the infinite ability of humans to rationalize any decision they make. It is entirely possible that these executives feel that their children will be shielded from adverse consequences because their parents have amassed a little fortune, which can afford one a lot of protection against a degrading world. It is possible that they find that to be enough.
It is entirely possible that they estimated that every parent should do what they can to protect their own children and that if they fail, it's their fault, regardless of the obstacles these parents face.
It is entirely possible that they have convinced themselves that it's natural cycles, or this, or that, and they sincerely believe it to be the case. Executives are good at finance and the human relations of power games, but they can very well suck at judging scientific information.
It is entirely possible also that they made a risk/cost/benefit analysis that, somehow, placed profits at the top of the priority scale. Stranger things have happened. Look at the opiates crisis.
It is possible that these executive have absolutely zero notion about ecosystem services, treshold events in biodiversity and all sorts of concepts that belong in areas of studies and activity other than the ones where they operate. Even if they do hear about, they will be much more likely to dismiss such seemingly "abstract" concepts in the face of hard financial targets.
Anything is possible, we'll never know because we are not in their heads. What we do know is what Exxon's own research showed in the early 80s, and the direction the company took in the late 80s and 90s, SkS has actually looked at that:
https://skepticalscience.com/1982-exxon-accurate-prediction.html
One is free to draw any conclusion about the executives' motivations or thoght processes from the company's actions. I agree that it is indeed of little usefulness to do so. Fighting the disinformation put forth by the actors they supported and still support to this day is more useful. It does fit into that effort, however, to point attention toward the extreme dissonance between the serious research done by the company and the crackpottery they decided to promote instead, and continued to promote even after it failed to be confirmed by all the rest of the scientific litterature.
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Bob Loblaw at 04:04 AM on 9 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
Nick:
I have been studying climatology for about 45 years - since I started my undergraduate program. I have seen all the attempts to discredit the science, even as I have seen the science develop. For me, the first IPCC reports represented a summary of what I had already learned about climatology over a period of 15 years - not a news story. The attacks on the science grew exponentially as the science grew stronger.
I said above that I always keep in mind "what if I am wrong?", but I have very little doubt that that massive efforts were made by the fossil fuel industry to deflect risks to their business model. They did not develop the skills on their own - they had decades of tobacco industry activity as a guideline to what worked and what did not.
Have you ever read Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science? It details how similar approaches have been taken by right wing politics and industry for a wide variety of topics. This did not start with climate science.
Not all people want the same things for their children and grandchildren. Maybe try following the link I gave above to The Authoriarians - or go directly to the link on that page that has a more recent discussion of Bob Altemeyer's new book in the context of other books on Donald Trump. Read that, and ask, what does it suggest about the Trump family's desires for its children and grandchildren? I'm willing to bet that it is not the same as yours.
https://theauthoritarians.org/updating-authoritarian-nightmare/
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Nick Palmer at 02:56 AM on 9 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
3 very thought provoking comments from Nigel J, OPOF and Bob Loblaw. I'm still considering Supran/Oreskes' paper and Supran's presentation. So far I'm still seeing that a (possible) misattribution of motives for the actions of Exxon/Big Oil is at the root of the (possible) misrepresention to the public that these two, and in particular Greenpeace's prior 'Exxon knew' report, have created. I'm not attibuting sinister motives to the researchers, they're probably sincere in the beliefs and judgements that framed their interprations, but I can see other far more benign interpretations than the simplistic one we are presented that 'Big Oil is evil, knew the dangers they were subjecting the public to and didn't care as long as the dollars kept rolling in'.
Perhaps people ought to remember that Big Fossil Fuel's executives and C.E.O.s have got children and grandchildren they worry about too... -
Bob Loblaw at 23:47 PM on 8 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
One of the basic principles I try to keep in mind is "what happens if I am wrong?".
Unfortunately, the highly partisan, toxic environment that much of the 'debate" happens in includes a large number of people that absolutely refuse to consider the possibility that they are wrong. My impression is that this tendency is much stronger on the side of Authoritarians - a life view that is generally stronger on the right wing part of the political spectrum. I strongly recommend reading The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer. (https://theauthoritarians.org/) The original eBook is long, but I see the web page has a recent commentary.
Much open "debate" is geared towards shifting the Overton Window (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window). Make an extreme position look reasonable, whle trying to make a reasonable middle-of-the-road evaluation look as if it is extreme.
...and of course, there is always the aspect of tellng people what they want to hear, so you can manipulate them.
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One Planet Only Forever at 23:14 PM on 8 June 2021The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews
The questioning of Mann’s actions and statements, which would extend to others who express similar perspectives, has prompted me to develop a set of questions for everyone who is questioning Mann’s, or any other person’s, actions. The questions are apolitical. And they apply to any socioeconomic-political environment a person has developed in. And they apply to the full range of important considerations like the Sustainable Development Goals, not just the important Climate Change impact issue.
As a lead in to the questions I will share how my perspective developed. I continue to develop my thinking on this issue. As a Canadian Registered Professional Engineer, my starting point is the things that make Engineering successful. The things that make Engineering successful, and also apply to many other situations, are:
- not allowing harmful things to be done (Do No Harm, to the environment or any other people)
- because there is always uncertainty, focus on reducing and limiting harm and risk of harm
- constantly pursue increased awareness and understanding of the potential harm of things, especially for any new way of doing things before they are implemented, but also of already developed and built things
- if something has been built and in service or is being built but is learned to be harmful or risky it is repaired or removed from use.
The following are an incomplete set of questions, perhaps not in the best order or phrasing, that people questioning things, or thinking about or doing things, should consider (everyone should be curious and question and wonder about things):
- Who is responsible when something develops popularity or profitability but is discovered to be harmful?
- Are the developers of a new activity or institution (institution meaning: a developed cultural belief or formal aspect of social organization) responsible for thoroughly investigating the potential for harm?
- Are the first consumers or beneficiaries of the activity or institution responsible for thoroughly investigating the potential for harm?
- Is a person who benefits more from the activity or institution more responsible for thoroughly investigating the potential for harm?
- Is a person of higher status (wealth, power, or influence) obliged to also provide a higher level of leadership regarding awareness and understanding of what is harmful and how to limit or stop harmful actions?
- Are the higher status people obliged to help lower status people live better (live at least a basic decent life, not be harmful), including by setting a good example for others to aspire to?
- What about Marketing or Educating? What is the Merit of marketing or education that does not pursue and promote increased awareness and improved understanding of how to be less harmful and more helpful to Others?
- Should something that is understood to be harmful be allowed to continue until something more popular or more profitable is developed to displace it?
- Who should be determining how harmful something is? Should people who benefit from the harmful activity or institution have a say regarding how harmful it is? Should people who would potentially benefit from something harmful be allowed to compromise the efforts to limit the harm done?
- In what situations is it acceptable for an evaluation of benefit to be used to negate or counter an evaluation of harm being done?
The perspective a person develops as they consider these questions can relate to their pathology. It is important to consider each question from a perspective of not knowing what position or role you would have in any situation. A responsible rational person would adopt the perspective of a person potentially being harmed. A harmfully selfish person, however, would adopt a perspective of hoping to benefit from harm done.
I support the position that actions like CCS, afforestation, nuclear, soil regeneration etc are harmful actions if they are used to justify ‘more fossil fuel use’, or in the case of nuclear are considered to be a sustainable solution that future generations can continue to benefit from and face no risk of harm. In addition, it is undeniable that the energy consumption by the highest consuming people, the ways of living that less fortunate people would see as the example to aspire to, need to be reduced. And harmful risky unsustainable systems like nuclear used to prolong the over-consumption of energy by the more fortunate is unacceptable. These things are helpful as temporary actions in addition to rapidly ending fossil fuel and reducing the energy demands of the highest demanding people. Attempts to claim that curtailing fossil fuel use, especially by the more fortunate, can be slower if these action are employed are indeed misleading marketing games played by the likes of 'delayers, dismissives, inactivists'.
A root of the socioeconomic-political problems that develop appears to be that harm done will often be ignored or excused, especially when there are potential benefits. Medical treatments where the potential benefit for the patient outweigh the potential harm are exceptions where benefits should be allowed to excuse harm. Another example would be a business investment where the person or group of people making a financial investment will be solely at risk for any financial loss. Things get problematic when there are personal differences in Benefit and Harm, when the person or group benefiting more is not the person or group harmed more. Particularly problematic are cases where the harmed people cannot effectively penalize those who harmed them such as: future generations, people in other legal jurisdictions, people with different degrees of legal power.
Problems develop in Business and Social matters when the focus on “Do No Harm” that produces engineering success fails to be rigorously applied. The result can be the development of the unethical/immoral/unjustified belief the “Harm Done can be Justified by Benefits Obtained”.
If something harmful or risky is allowed to compete for popularity or profit, the risk is that it will become popular or profitable. And something that has developed popularity or profitability becomes harder to correct or stop, especially with the power to abuse misleading marketing.
An obvious conclusion is that misleading marketing is a serious part of the problem. What is required is significant penalties for participating in being misleading, with more serious penalties applied to wealthier and more influential people, including penalties for elected representatives who participate in being harmfully misleading or who fail to properly learn and educate others on important issues.
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