From an Oregon State University Media Release (h/t to Leif Svalgaard)
Long debate ended over cause, demise of ice ages – may also help predict future
)
The above image shows how much the Earth’s orbit can vary in shape.
This process in a slow one, taking roughly 100,000 to cycle.
(Credit: Texas A&M University note: illustration is not to scale)
CORVALLIS, Ore. – A team of researchers says it has largely put to rest a long debate on the underlying mechanism that has caused periodic ice ages on Earth for the past 2.5 million years – they are ultimately linked to slight shifts in solar radiation caused by predictable changes in Earth’s rotation and axis.
In a publication to be released Friday in the journal Science, researchers from Oregon State University and other institutions conclude that the known wobbles in Earth’s rotation caused global ice levels to reach their peak about 26,000 years ago, stabilize for 7,000 years and then begin melting 19,000 years ago, eventually bringing to an end the last ice age.
The melting was first caused by more solar radiation, not changes in carbon dioxide levels or ocean temperatures, as some scientists have suggested in recent years.
“Solar radiation was the trigger that started the ice melting, that’s now pretty certain,” said Peter Clark, a professor of geosciences at OSU. “There were also changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and ocean circulation, but those happened later and amplified a process that had already begun.”
The findings are important, the scientists said, because they will give researchers a more precise understanding of how ice sheets melt in response to radiative forcing mechanisms. And even though the changes that occurred 19,000 years ago were due to increased solar radiation, that amount of heating can be translated into what is expected from current increases in greenhouse gas levels, and help scientists more accurately project how Earth’s existing ice sheets will react in the future.
“We now know with much more certainty how ancient ice sheets responded to solar radiation, and that will be very useful in better understanding what the future holds,” Clark said. “It’s good to get this pinned down.”
The researchers used an analysis of 6,000 dates and locations of ice sheets to define, with a high level of accuracy, when they started to melt. In doing this, they confirmed a theory that was first developed more than 50 years ago that pointed to small but definable changes in Earth’s rotation as the trigger for ice ages.
“We can calculate changes in the Earth’s axis and rotation that go back 50 million years,” Clark said. “These are caused primarily by the gravitational influences of the larger planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn, which pull and tug on the Earth in slightly different ways over periods of thousands of years.”
That, in turn, can change the Earth’s axis – the way it tilts towards the sun – about two degrees over long periods of time, which changes the way sunlight strikes the planet. And those small shifts in solar radiation were all it took to cause multiple ice ages during about the past 2.5 million years on Earth, which reach their extremes every 100,000 years or so.
Sometime around now, scientists say, the Earth should be changing from a long interglacial period that has lasted the past 10,000 years and shifting back towards conditions that will ultimately lead to another ice age – unless some other forces stop or slow it. But these are processes that literally move with glacial slowness, and due to greenhouse gas emissions the Earth has already warmed as much in about the past 200 years as it ordinarily might in several thousand years, Clark said.
“One of the biggest concerns right now is how the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will respond to global warming and contribute to sea level rise,” Clark said. “This study will help us better understand that process, and improve the validity of our models.”
The research was done in collaboration with scientists from the Geological Survey of Canada, University of Wisconsin, Stockholm University, Harvard University, the U.S. Geological Survey and University of Ulster. It was supported by the National Science Foundation and other agencies.
UPDATE: Science now has the paper online, which is behind a paywall. The abstract is open though and can be read below:
| Science 7 August 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5941, pp. 710 – 714 DOI: 10.1126/science.1172873 |
Research Articles
The Last Glacial Maximum
Peter U. Clark,1,* Arthur S. Dyke,2 Jeremy D. Shakun,1 Anders E. Carlson,3 Jorie Clark,1 Barbara Wohlfarth,4 Jerry X. Mitrovica,5 Steven W. Hostetler,6 A. Marshall McCabe7
1 Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA.
2 Geological Survey of Canada, 601 Booth Street, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0E8, Canada.
3 Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
4 Department of Geology and Geochemistry, Stockholm University, SE-10691, Stockholm, Sweden.
5 Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
6 U.S. Geological Survey, Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA.
7 School of Environmental Science, University of Ulster, Coleraine, County Londonderry, BT52 1SA, UK.
Nasif Nahle (19:55:16) :
Show me one from serious physics. I have shown you many authors supporting the real definition of heat.
I have already [e.g. Levitus, S., J.I. Anthony, T.P. Boyer, et al. 2009: Global ocean heat content 1955-2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems. Geophysical Res. Letters, Vol. 36, L07608], here are some more:
Sorry, Leif; in no one of your references heat is defined. I’ve checked out each one of them. Sorry, Leif… You need to quote what I asked for, serious physics references which include the definition of heat as you understand it. 🙂
All right! That’s enough! You! You go to your room! And you! To yours! Neither one of you has done your chores from all this arguing and it is driving mother Batty!!!!
Nasif Nahle (21:07:36) :
Are you suggesting that heat, a trajectory quantity between an internal energy state and a second internal energy state is a substance or something of the kind?
What I’m seeing in almost every paper on climate [and related subjects, like geophysics dealing with the heat stored in the Earth – even referred to as ‘fossil heat’] that I have come across [of which the ones in the previous post is but a small subset] is that ‘heat’ seems to have been ‘redefined’ as the kinetic energy [measured in Joules] of random jitters and that it with that definition can be stored and moved about [not thermodynamically, but by bulk movement of the medium by external forces], etc. The very idea that you can have an ‘amount of heat measured in Joules’ is perfectly compatible with this. If one does not adopt this new ‘definition’ or at least usage of the word [which is the real definition], the above papers don’t make sense, and I think they do. So, I stop being philosophical about it and stop nitpicking about it and go along, because that improves communication and understanding. That’s all.
Nasif Nahle (21:18:11) :
You need to quote what I asked for, serious physics references which include the definition of heat as you understand it.
Why should I do that? All of these papers take their implied definition of heat [as something that can be stored] as a given and don’t burden the reader by stating the obvious. I just go along and understand perfectly well what the papers are about.
For example, the paper
Willis, J.K., Roemmich, D., Cornuelle, B., 2003: Combining altimetric height with broadscale profile data to estimate steric height, heat storage, subsurface temperature, and sea-surface temperature variability. Journal of Geophysical Research, 108(C9), 3292, doi:10.1029/2002JC001755.
would not make sense if one beforehand took the view that heat cannot be stored.
Now, you can take the view that all of these people are completely wrong, confused, and their papers are nonsense. That is IMO much too extreme a view point and it is perfectly sensible to me to go along with their concepts, because they describe a physical, measurable reality.
Pamela Gray (21:29:43) :
All right! That’s enough! You! You go to your room! And you! To yours! Neither one of you has done your chores from all this arguing and it is driving mother Batty!!!!
My apologies, Pamela… It was not my intention. Sorry! 🙁
Leif Svalgaard (21:35:55) :
What I’m seeing in almost every paper on climate [and related subjects, like geophysics dealing with the heat stored in the Earth – even referred to as ‘fossil heat’] that I have come across [of which the ones in the previous post is but a small subset] is that ‘heat’ seems to have been ‘redefined’ as the kinetic energy [measured in Joules] of random jitters and that it with that definition can be stored and moved about [not thermodynamically, but by bulk movement of the medium by external forces], etc.
That’s the reason by which you’ve got an erroneous concept about heat. If it is not thermodynamically, how one could understand heat transfer? The “redefinition” of heat is plainly wrong. Point.
The very idea that you can have an ‘amount of heat measured in Joules’ is perfectly compatible with this.
Whit what? Heat is energy in transit, so it is expressed in Joules/second, watts, etc.
If one does not adopt this new ‘definition’ or at least usage of the word [which is the real definition], the above papers don’t make sense, and I think they do. So, I stop being philosophical about it and stop nitpicking about it and go along, because that improves communication and understanding. That’s all.
I agree, the above papers don’t make sense. Heat is not stored, what it is stored is energy, not the process quantity. Once stored, the energy is known as internal energy, that is, a state function. Heat is not kinetic energy and it cannot be stored. That’s all.
Leif Svalgaard (21:46:26) :
Nasif Nahle (21:18:11) :
Why should I do that? All of these papers take their implied definition of heat [as something that can be stored] as a given and don’t burden the reader by stating the obvious. I just go along and understand perfectly well what the papers are about.
No, that’s what you erroneously implied and deduced.
For example, the paper
Willis, J.K., Roemmich, D., Cornuelle, B., 2003: Combining altimetric height with broadscale profile data to estimate steric height, heat storage, subsurface temperature, and sea-surface temperature variability. Journal of Geophysical Research, 108(C9), 3292, doi:10.1029/2002JC001755.
would not make sense if one beforehand took the view that heat cannot be stored.
And it makes nonsense from your viewpoint on what is heat and heat storage. However, if we understand that the energy in transit (heat) from one system into another colder system is absorbed and stored by the system, it would make sense. But the flux of energy, which is what the term “heat” stands for, cannot be stored. You cannot store Joules/second.
Now, you can take the view that all of these people are completely wrong, confused, and their papers are nonsense. That is IMO much too extreme a view point and it is perfectly sensible to me to go along with their concepts, because they describe a physical, measurable reality.
Again, it is your understanding of heat what is wrong, not theirs.
Now, for respect to other cobloggers, I’ll stop writing on this topic. My last word is:
Leif, it was a superb debate. Nevertheless, I am right, you are wrong. 🙂
Nasif Nahle (22:23:41) :
I’ll stop writing on this topic.
So, I’ll not expect a reply to this [lest you show disrespect]. I am willing to accept their concepts of heat storage, heat storage errors, and heat content [which you say are not wrong – Their papers make perfect sense [to them and to me], and probably comes from a double meaning in English of ‘heat’, not shared by some other languages [as I have indicated]. There are other situations where ‘heat’ being defined as transit from a warmer to a colder body is being too narrow and not helping. For example, the heating of the solar corona. It was suggested ~130 years ago that the corona must be extremely hot [deduced from its extent and spectral characteristics], but that realization did not become accepted until the 1930s, held back for half a century by people who knew what heat was being strict followers of narrow thermodynamics that held that it was impossible for heat to flow from a colder [6000K] body to a much hotter body [1,000,000K].
I do not think it was a superb debate. Rather pedantic, narrow-minded, and crummy IMO.
Please! Just don’t start debating about the debate!
Now, where were we?
We need an international Organization to define the exact meaning of words in science; just the way the OICM has defined units of measure, ICAO has defined the words used in radio-transmissions in aviation, and the IPA defines the symbols for pronunciation.
After that is done, Dave and I will discuss why Americans use neither of them.
Leif Svalgaard (23:04:54) :
I do not think it was a superb debate. Rather pedantic, narrow-minded, and crummy IMO.
It never is “superb” for the loser.
Nasif Nahle (07:52:50) :
It never is “superb” for the loser.
Go tell Douglass and Knox that they are confused:
Ocean heat content and Earth’s radiation imbalance
D.H. Douglass and R, S, Knox
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, PO Box 270171, Rochester, NY 14627-0171, USA
What you don’t get is that ‘heat content of the oceans’ is a convenient short-hand for the cumbersome phrase ‘the amount of kinetic energy of the random, disorganized jitter of the molecules of the oceans, which can be calculated from its temperature’, and as such is a sensible and eminently useful phrasing that hardly could confuse anybody. It is not ‘the total energy in the oceans’ nor the photons in the oceans or any of the other irrelevancies you have brought up.
I thought you were done bothering the co-bloggers.
Leif Svalgaard (10:38:06) :
Go tell Douglass and Knox that they are confused:
Ocean heat content and Earth’s radiation imbalance
D.H. Douglass and R, S, Knox
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, PO Box 270171, Rochester, NY 14627-0171, USA
What you don’t get is that ‘heat content of the oceans’ is a convenient short-hand for the cumbersome phrase ‘the amount of kinetic energy of the random, disorganized jitter of the molecules of the oceans, which can be calculated from its temperature’, and as such is a sensible and eminently useful phrasing that hardly could confuse anybody. It is not ‘the total energy in the oceans’ nor the photons in the oceans or any of the other irrelevancies you have brought up.
I thought you were done bothering the co-bloggers.
I don’t care if Douglas et al are wrong. You are wrong and point.
Hi Smokey-
I won’t bother responding to most of your post, based as it is on discredited paid climate skeptic talking points, many of which you have apparently picked up from this blog.
You actually appear to question the existence of the methane hydrates, when their existence is a simple fact, documented by thousands of observations including sonar, physical sampling of them, and their nuisance value in plugging up gas pipelines.
What I will say is that yes, I can buy into the scare story of a methane catastrophe.
Why?
Because there appears to be an isotope signature left from these methane catastrophes in the rocks, seashells and sediments laid down during these mass extinction events.
Methane in methane hydrates is isotopically light, meaning that it is depleted in C13.
If trillions of tons of this C13 depleted methane is dumped into the atmosphere, you would expect that there would be a massive shift in the C12 to C13 ratios, leaving an isotope signature in the sediments and seashells deposited during these events.
That is exactly what is seen, sad to say, during several past extinction events, according to many scientists. These shifts are so massive, it is difficult or impossible to account for them by any other scenario.
Some of these peer reviewed scientific papers are listed as references in the Wikipedia article on the “clathrate gun” hypothesis – the hypothesis that methane hydrates can dissociate and lead to runaway positive feedback driven global warming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun
Since you got such a giggle out of killerinourmidst.com, be sure to check these out:
How to Kill (Almost) all Life: The End Permian Extinction Event
http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/Benton/reprints/2003TREEPTr.pdf
Snowball Earth Termination by Destabilization of Equatorial Permafrost Methane Hydrates
http://faculty.ucr.edu/~martink/pdfs/Kennedy_2008_Nature.pdf
Warming the Fuel for the Fire: Evidence of Thermal Dissociation of Methane Hydrates during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~jzachos/pubs/TZBTB_02.pdf
As a greenhouse gas much more potent (twenty five times more potent, on timescales of a century) than CO2, methane is the real worry, IMO. Methane concentrations have increased by more than twice, from something like 700 ppb to something like 1750 ppb, in the past couple of hundred years. Like CO2, methane is increasing “geologically instantaneously” at rates close to one percent per year.
So, yes, I do think that the methane hydrates might “get us”.
No, I’m not ashamed to say so.
What I am afraid of is a series of runaway positive feedback effects, such as methane and CO2 evolving from melting permafrost, CO2 being emitted by burning forests, Arctic melting leading to increased heating by the ice/Albedo effect, evolving methane from the Arctic and Antarctic terrestrial hydrate deposits, and so on. Estimates of the carbon contained in the permafrost run to about 1.5 trillion tons, and estimates of the amount of carbon released from melting permafrost run to a couple of billion tons per year – twice as much as U.S. coal use, and some of it in the more potent form of methane as opposed to CO2.
What I’m worried about is that the pulse of heat generated by these preliminary feedbacks could start dissociating the oceanic methane hydrates, by heating them. Once this is started, it would be essentially impossible to stop.
As I’ve posted before, it’s a strange value system displayed on this blog. Normal caution with everything in the universe that we know about that is valuable to human beings is portrayed as “alarmist”. It’s a very strange value system, adopted by heavily propagandized people, I think.
What you should wonder about, Smokey, is where these climate skeptic talking points which you have internalized are coming from. Certainly, ExxonMobil, for example, made something like 40 billion dollars in profit a couple of years ago, and is known to have used some of it’s vast profits to fund a network of climate skeptics.
Have as good a day as you can, and get your pleasure where you can.
The sadness of a doomed people may be all we have to look forward to, IMO.
@ur momisugly Leland Palmer
Interesting choice of a posting name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leland_Palmer
“Leland” says:
Hey! Was I supposed to get paid?!??
I’m going to talk to my union rep and find out why I wasn’t paid for my “talking points”! [Truly, “Leland”, you come across as a goron tool when you try to categorize anyone with a different opinion as being ‘paid’. It discredits you.]
My point, which I think I made very clear, was if methane [AKA energy] was lying around on the sea floor for the taking, energy companies would have long since taken advantage of that essentially free money and harvested the goodies.
What does that mean? Well, it means that there is no such thing as methane ices lying around ready to be exploited. It would certainly be much easier to harvest methane ices from the sea floor than to drill thousands of feet under the continental shelf in a hit-or-miss chance of finding natural gas.
Hi H.R.-
About my name- It’s the one I was born with, it’s not a posting name. That David Lynch would use it for a very nasty character on Twin Peaks is just a coincidence. There is also a real actor who has the same name, I think. Of course, I was born long before David Lynch decided to create a fictional murderer with that name. Talk to my parents and David Lynch, I had nothing to do with it. 🙂
Hi Smokey-
Methane hydrates have been investigated as a source of energy, of course, but not as much as they should have been, in my opinion. The Japanese have actually succeeded in tapping into some of this vast source of natural gas:
Japan’s Arctic methane hydrate haul raises environment fears
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3740036.ece
Our National Energy Technology Laboratory is also investigating:
http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/oil-gas/futuresupply/methanehydrates/about-hydrates/about_hydrates.htm
Over the past three decades, expeditions to polar regions and deep-water continental shelves all over the globe have consistently returned reports of methane hydrate. Today, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that methane hydrate may, in fact, contain more organic carbon than all the world’s coal, oil, and non-hydrate natural gas combined. The magnitude of this previously unknown global storehouse of methane is truly staggering and has raised serious inquiry into the possibility of using methane hydrate as a source of energy.
The Russians in Siberia may have been tapping into this source of natural gas for years in their Messoyakha gas field in Siberia, although this has been disputed. Certainly, the Russians have produced huge amounts of gas from this field, which does not appear to be declining as fast as conventional natural gas fields.
So, yes, although they are fragmented and often thinly distributed, it might be possible to tap into these deposits as a source of energy.
In a stable climate, this appears to be almost inevitable. This methane could also be burned using carbon capture and storage technology, and the resulting CO2 sequestered.
There is even a plan to harvest the methane hydrates in situ by exchanging the methane in them with CO2, and substituting CO2 hydrates for methane hydrates, in these huge deposits on the ocean floor.
Many things would be possible, except that we are now apparently experiencing runaway global warming. The changes we have been seeing in the Arctic and Antarctic are happening much faster than was predicted.
That’s part of the ongoing tragedy of what we are experiencing. By destabilizing the earth’s climate, we appear to be foreclosing on our future.
In a stable climate, yes, it would very likely be easy to extract methane from methane hydrates, and even use captured CO2 to displace the methane from them, substituting more stable CO2 hydrates for the less stable methane hydrates.
With a stable climate, many things are possible. Without a stable climate, many fewer things are possible.
And if we ignite a methane catastrophe, maybe life itself will not be possible.
Oh, on edit:
The paragraph below the NETL (DOE) link is quoting from their site, I didn’t write it. I meant to enclose this paragraph in “blockquote” html, but apparently forgot to do so.
Hi Smokey-
About getting paid-
What I said was that you had apparently internalized some paid climate skeptic talking points, and that you should wonder what the ultimate source of those talking points was. There are apparently paid climate skeptics, and ExxonMobil has been widely reported to have spent at least 26 million dollars in the last decade supporting a network of such skeptics.
Another such network of skeptics was apparently being coordinated by Mark Morano out of Senator Inhofe’s office, according to some blogs.
I did not imply, nor do I believe, that you are getting paid.
What I do think is that some of the people that you listen to, and whose talking points you have apparently internalized and believe, are getting paid.
Of course, none of us know, because of the nature of the Internet, if the people we are talking to are actually paid “ringers”. That’s just the nature of this form of communication, I guess.
One thing I do know is that I am not getting paid.
Leland, cue the world’s smallest violin when you say “The sadness of a doomed people may be all we have to look forward to.” Doomed!! So melodramatic. Do you need a hanky?
The good news is, you can relax. On another thread Bill Illis pointed out:
See? You’re worrying about a non-problem.
Why is an atmosphere whose composition of non-CO2 gases of 99.970 is percent good — but one with 99.955 percent is bad?? Worrying about a change in a very *minor* trace gas is silly. You’re just frightening yourself needlessly, Leland. The climate is well within its normal parameters. Nothing unusual is occurring. Nothing. The climate is normal. Being frightened about a completely normal climate is the real problem. As the esteemed Dr. Richard Lindzen of M.I.T. observes:
The rank hypocrisy of the alarmist crowd is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Are you personally living in a mud hut with no electricity? Have you traded in your car for a mule? Have you repented for having carbon spewing children?
No.
Yet you preach at us like a true believer, instructing us that we must get off our fossil fuel use; stop having children, etc., etc. Of course, anyone has the right to be a hypocrite. It’s not against the law. Good thing, huh, Leland?
Finally, about money changing hands. If a non-government energy company funds their point of view, it’s somehow evil. But when one of your heroes like George Soros lavishly shovels money into James Hansen’s pockets to push his globaloney agenda, and who also financially supports realclimate, it’s A-OK with you. Lucky for you there’s cognitive dissonance, which allows you to justify that contradiction.
Hi Smokey-
Like I said, it’s a strange value system displayed on this blog.
If we ignite a methane catastrophe, and we do appear to be on the track to doing this, none of the human race’s past accomplishments, including free market economics, matter at all.
Several past mass extinctions have apparently been associated with catastrophic release of methane from methane hydrates, which you seem to have stopped denying the existence of.
The bottom line is that there is a plausible scenario leading to another, perhaps even bigger and more abrupt methane catastrophe, triggered by our continued fossil fuel use.
Quoting IPCC leader Chris Field:
http://i1.democracynow.org/2009/2/26/member_of_un_environment_panel_warns
The most likely outcome of business as usual is disaster, IMO.
This suggests that we need to change.
It’s a strange value system, that places business as usual over survival itself.
Oh, on edit-
Chris Field said there was a billion tons of carbon content in the permafrost. He meant a trillion tons, and the latest estimates come in at about 1.6 trillion tons. This is enough carbon to release billions of tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, as permafrost frozen plant material thaws and decays. The tropical forests look ready to release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere before 2100 – a quantity comparable to the industrial revolution.
And waiting at the bottom of the oceans, are trillions of tons of methane hydrates a greenhouse gas tens of times more potent than CO2, whose zone of stability will shrink under global warming.
@Leland Palmer (02:35:56) :
“Hi H.R.-
About my name- It’s the one I was born with, it’s not a posting name. That David Lynch would use it for a very nasty character on Twin Peaks is just a coincidence. There is also a real actor who has the same name, I think. Of course, I was born long before David Lynch decided to create a fictional murderer with that name. Talk to my parents and David Lynch, I had nothing to do with it.”
Then allow me to change my comment from “interesting choice” to “interesting coincidence.”
You also wrote:
” Certainly, ExxonMobil, for example, made something like 40 billion dollars in profit a couple of years ago, and is known to have used some of it’s vast profits to fund a network of climate skeptics.
I see that factoid from time to time. You wouldn’t happen to have a list of the network members handy, would you? I’d be interested in seeing it.
Oh. “profit” is not a 4-letter word. The only reason anyone in the world besides subsistance farmers and hunter-gatherers has a single morsel of food to eat is because of profits.
Hi H.R. –
Actually, I misspoke.
There is no coincidence.
It’s just my name.
I used to hate it, because I thought it made me sound old, when I was a kid. One day I blew up, and told my mom that I hated the name, and she explained it was my uncle’s name, who was my father’s favorite younger brother, that he took care of when they were kids. Since then, I haven’t really minded the name, since inflicting that name on the children seems to be a family tradition.
Leland, by the way, means something like “in the lea of the land” meaning something like downwind? Dunno.
A palmer though, was a holy man, in England, who had journeyed to the holy land, and gotten a palm tree tattooed on his back, as a sign of his devotion. He could then beg in the streets, and people would give him money because he was so holy. Of course, there are rumors that some people just stayed home and got the tattoo, instead of actually going all the way to the Middle East. 🙂
Anyway, enough chitchat.
Greed in the service of destroying the planet is no virtue, in my opinion.
People can make a profit in other ways, other than in spinning what I believe is a true threat to the continued existence of humanity and even possibly life itself on this planet.
Regarding ExxonMobil, much of the money they made during the Bush years was off oil as a commodity, traded an average of something like 30 times before it ever got to the consumer.
At the same time that they were doing this, they were spending at least 26 million dollars of these inflated profits to fund a network of climate skeptics to tell lies about global warming that their own scientists were telling them were lies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/science/earth/24deny.html
I’m sorry, but it would take talents of persuasion beyond even those commonly encountered on this blog to sell such actions as a virtue, at least to me.
Oh about the list of skeptics-
Here’s some good info on it, from Greenpeace-
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/exxon-secrets