Guest post by David Middleton
If you thought Part 1 was a doozy, “you ain’t seen nothing yet”…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98AJUj-qxHI
Exxon Believed Deep Dive Into Climate Research Would Protect Its Business
Outfitting its biggest supertanker to measure the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide was a crown jewel in Exxon’s research program.
Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song, David Hasemyer
Sep 21, 2015
In 1981, 12-year-old Laura Shaw won her seventh-grade science fair at the Solomon Schechter Day School in Cranford, N.J. with a project on the greenhouse effect.
For her experiment, Laura used two souvenir miniatures of the Washington Monument, each with a thermometer attached to one side. She placed them in glass bowls and covered one with plastic wrap – her model of how a blanket of carbon dioxide traps the reflected heat of the sun and warms the Earth. When she turned a lamp on them, the thermometer in the plastic-covered bowl showed a higher temperature than the one in the uncovered bowl.
If Laura and her two younger siblings were unusually well-versed in the emerging science of the greenhouse effect, as global warming was known, it was because their father, Henry Shaw, had been busily tracking it for Exxon Corporation.
[…]
Henry Shaw was part of an accomplished group at Exxon tasked with studying the greenhouse effect. In the mid-70s, documents show that Shaw was responsible for seeking out new projects that were “of national significance,” and that could win federal funding. Others included Edward E. David, Jr., a former science advisor to President Richard Nixon, and James F. Black, who worked on hydrogen bomb research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1950s.
Black, who died in 1988, was among the first Exxon scientists to become acquainted with the greenhouse effect. Esso, as Exxon was known when he started, allowed him to pursue personal scientific interests. Black was fascinated by the idea of intentionally modifying weather to improve agriculture in arid countries, said his daughter, Claudia Black-Kalinsky.
“He believed that big science could save the world,” she said. In the early 1960s, Black helped draft a National Academy of Sciences report on weather and climate modification. Published in 1966, it said the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “agrees quite well with the rate of its production by man’s consumption of fossil fuels.”
In the same period, a report for President Lyndon Johnson from the President’s Science Advisory Council in 1965 said the burning of fossil fuels “may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate” by the year 2000.
By 1977, Black had become a top technical expert at Exxon Research & Engineering, a research hub based in Linden, N.J., and a science advisor to Exxon’s top management. That year he made a presentation to the company’s leading executives warning that carbon dioxide accumulating in the upper atmosphere would warm the planet and if the CO2 concentration continued to rise, it could harm the environment and humankind.
[…]
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/16092015/exxon-believed-deep-dive-into-climate-research-would-protect-its-business
Firstly, the Earth’s atmosphere is not air in a jar.
Secondly, the Black presentation was dated in 1978.
Thirdly, the Black presentation was just another survey of government and academic publications on the so-called greenhouse effect.
Here’s what Exxon knew in 1978…
“Same as it ever was…”
“Same as it ever was…”
“Same as it ever was…”
“Same as it ever was…”
Inside Climate then bemoaned the fact that Exxon management scrubbed a science project…
Exxon’s enthusiasm for the project flagged in the early ’80s when federal funds fell through. Exxon Research cancelled the tanker project in 1982, but not before Garvey, Shaw and other company engineers published an initial paper in a highly specialized journal on the project’s methodology.
“We were anxious to get the word out that we were doing this study,” Garvey said of the paper, which did not reach sweeping conclusions. “The paper was the first of what we hoped to be many papers from the work,” he said in a recent email. But the other publications never materialized.
I never worked for “big oil,” however, “little oil” tries to avoid spending money on science projects.
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Exxon didn’t “know” very much. It assumed a lot, mainly that the cAGW conjecture was real, and could eventually affect the energy business. So did many others. Those were the Dark Ages of climate research. Now, we know better. There is way more information, and readily available, all showing that the cAGW conjecture has failed. The only thing keeping it going now is that it has become a huge, trillion dollar industry based on a lie, and politics.
Indeed, temperature is not cooperating with the storytelling (I hate the spin word narrative, reminds me of downsizing when your fired).
The momentum is theirs so the counter to the stagnant weather is that it’s just within some new and improved range of projected temperature change. Middleton’s squiggly line does a good job illustrating how a skeptic says there is no evidence and a warmista can say it’s in a lull.
I think one of the big clues to the wild and wicked storytime is the historical pattern of late Clinton era interest in carbon cap n trade followed by the no interest Bush Kyoto period then followed by the Al Gore truth fruit loops movie.
Dems specialize in organizing, supporting and creating thru codification the concept of protected classes. NGOs represent these groups as special interests. The identification of CO2 as a pollutant was a major victory which allows the further pandering to oppressed classes thru future class action lawsuits.
They are not ready to roll out national CO2 attainment criteria. Correction, they are ready but the timing to release them isn’t ripe. The satellite that spins around the globe is measuring localized CO2 differences that are being compared to protected class disparate impacts.
That’s the prize here.
Appease the pockets of the protected classes and you assure a voting block.
Exxon is guilty of knowing things that haven’t happened. An unusual indictment. Meanwhile we the pea wait for resources promised to us by the screeching giants on the other side. John Beale must be chuckling as he washes dishes at the penitentiary.
So, for sure, …. from 1981 to present day (35 years), the US Public School System has been teaching their students the evils associated with CAGW.
And therein is the primary problem that must be addressed and corrected.
Thus an “all out attack” to discredit the Science curriculum being taught in the Public Schools must be initiated post haste. Doing so would/should force the PS Administrators and School Boards to explain why “junk science” is being taught to their “captive” student attendees.
“Thus an “all out attack” to discredit the Science curriculum being taught in the Public Schools must be initiated post haste. Doing so would/should force the PS Administrators and School Boards to explain why “junk science” is being taught to their “captive” student attendees.”
Ever notice how most people shy from conflict ? Lessons learned from how they did it. They crept in slowly. It wasn’t a full frontal assult. They replaced it with something that felt good.
People, all people, hate being embarrassed … or being seen as the fool. If you could figure out an easy why for people to identify BS, you’d capture their attention and THEN be able to direct them towards your version of the better way.
Why sb way … ugh
That “easy way” is called “education” …… and it begins with parental nurturing … and continues with the teaching of the Public School curriculum.
If the Public Schools are teaching a BS curriculum …… then the parental nurturing will follow suite when the aforesaid students start birthing children.
Recommend reading Brian P. Flannery’s letter dated March 18, 2002 from the Inside Climate website.
http://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/Exxon%20Scientist%20Lobbies%20the%20White%20House%20%282002%29.pdf
Good summary of the problem areas in climate studies and politization of the entire subject. Inside Climate is banking on people not reading the source material or checking beyond its own press releases, which, come to think of it, is how it often works.
Wow. I had no idea Exxon had PowerPoint in 1978. Imagine the killing they could have made if they’d gone public with it back then…
During a presentation I was making a few weeks ago, I asked, “How did we ever manage to get by without Excel and PowerPoint?” One of my fellow geo’s replied, “We had drafting departments back then.”
My father once worked as a chemist for Esso I think he worked for them for about a month back in the 1950s. I guess I shouldn’t admit that, I might be get sued. On Earth day 1971 I came home from school very scared about the coming ice age my teachers told me about, my father said “people have been worried about ice ages and warming for centuries, first they worry about one and then they worry about the other.” little did I know that Esso knew all about climate change was were covering it using the code word “put a tiger in your tank.”
I remember Oppenheimer, when asked how to keep atomic secrets from
the Russians, said the secrets of Nature couldn’t be concealed.. So what
did Exxon do to keep others from learning about climate????
Look where my hand was.