Gosh, president Johnson knew, and did nothing? Regular readers of this website have been following the ridiculous #ExxonKnew campaign put together by Al Gore and a smattering of activist attorney generals, aided by 350.org nutty activist “Weepy” Bill McKibben. It isn’t going well, as there has been setback after setback, with some AG’s being ordered to appear in court, and refusing to do so.
Thanks to a tweet by Associated Press activist journalist Seth Borensten, I became aware of this November 1965 report from the President’s Science Advisory Committee titled: Restoring the Quality of Our Environment Link: PSAC-1965-Restoring the Quality of Our Environment (PDF)
Borenstein makes this claim:
52 years ago today fed report warned 25% jump in co2 = 1.1-7.0 dF warming; Since 1965 co2 up 26%; temp up 1.6 dF https://t.co/eKmbUa5iRa pic.twitter.com/e3lFzM5mjZ
— @borenbears (@borenbears) November 5, 2017
From Seth’s point of view, it looks like an “open and shut case”, and no further investigation is needed. However, one commenter was quick to remind Seth that “global warming” was reported well before 1965:
Always important to remember: #Scientists have reported #GlobalWarming for more than a #Century. #ClimateChange https://t.co/Bho6dk0pXQ
— Dr. Jonathan R. Buzan (@JonathanRBuzan) November 5, 2017
Indeed. But Al Gore, the activist AG’s, and the McKibbenites tried to make a manufactured big deal out of the fact that Exxon scientists had internal reports on climate change back in 1977, and “did nothing” with them, especially not advising shareholders. This ludicrous claim has caused much climatic caterwauling such as we see in the former jewel of science magazines, Scientific American: Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago
Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking.
Gosh, that’s 12 years after President Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas), knew, and did nothing. Here’s the money quote from that 1965 report:
SciAm foolishly thinks that the “ground zero date” for public awareness of CO2 and climate was June 1988, when James Hansen went before congress with his famously modeled 3 scenarios, and told the world we have a serious problem.
What most people don’t know, is that Hansen’s science was so…so…er, “robust” at the time, that he and his sponsor, Senator Timothy Wirth (D-Colorado), had to do some stagecraft by choosing a hot day for testimony (thanks to Weather Bureau forecast), and opening the windows, which negated the air conditioning. I kid you not, they needed the room “hot” to convince legislators to throw money at them.
This transcript excerpt is from PBS series Frontline which aired a special in April 2007.
TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.
DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.[Shot of witnesses at hearing]
Watch the Frontline video
Science and stagecraft, for the cameras, for the funding, for the win!
So, to recap…a Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson, knew in November 1965, well before it “became a public issue” in June 1988, that “increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of human beings” and did nothing.
Gosh.
Surely Johnson can now be labeled a “denier”. I’m sure Al Gore, the activist AG’s and the McKibbenites will jump right on that, and work hard to smear the name of President Johnson, and sue his estate for his “crime against humanity” of knowing, and doing nothing.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Mr. Watts,
You were entirely correct the first time and should not have crossed out the word “activist” when describing Seth Borenstein.
He certainly is not an even-handed reporter or journalist when it comes to climate-related topics.
Oh no! Blame anyone who did not buy into Svante Arrrhenius’ observation back in the late 1890’s, and immediately stop burning fuel./s
Johnson and his scientist advisors did not “know.” They CONJECTURED about human CO2 emissions. (See above-quoted “Conclusions and Findings”)
Thus, the above article is good, but missing a key piece of information:
CO2 UP. WARMING NOT.
That is, the MAIN point needs to be, not whether Johnson or Smith or Jones or Pinkerton believed human CO2 might cause significant shifts in the climate zones of the earth,
the MAIN point is:
their conjecture means NOTHING.
**** Game over ****
there’s been a government coverup for 100 years…..William McKinley knew
/snark
I find it interesting that the first specualtive consequenc of increased co2 on mankind mentioned in the conclusion is “deleterious”. I wonder if the report states as a possibility any positive consequence. If not, it would show you that, as early as the 60’s, government scientists and administrators were pushing the negative interpretive bias for CO2, totally ignoring the posible benefits to mankind of added CO2. Something that continues to this day 60 years on…smh.
“We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.”
The hearings were on the 23rd of June, and I’d be surprised if the hottest day if the year isn’t normally in July.
AD 1965 was during the postwar global cooling, 1945-77, which occurred despite rising CO2. Some scientists “knew” that more CO2 should slightly warm the planet since c. 1900, but it hadn’t done so.
The range in the report of 1.1 to 7.0 degrees F per doubling is ludicrous. It assumes feedback effects from a little bit net negative to wildly positive.
Gotta love the charts with a truncated time span which provides a dramatic effect for the interior of the chart.
Give me500 year or 1000 year span and a dramatic difference will occur. I always look at the ‘Y’ axis range to immediately cause my BS Meter to alarm.
The voice of a scientist’s scientist:
{emphasis mine}
“Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety; Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making).” (quoted in WUWT 10th Ann. anthology from a WUWT article which is no longer available)
(Source for WUWT article: James Delingpole article:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100058265/us-physics-professor-global-warming-is-the-greatest-and-most-successful-pseudoscientific-fraud-i-have-seen-in-my-long-life/. And double-hooray! The letter appears on this later WUWT post: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/16/hal-lewis-my-resignation-from-the-american-physical-society/ .)
Have I read correctly?
What is really astounding to me is how badly these AGs miscalculated the amount of support and traction they would get. One could almost feel sorry for them. Well maybe not really. Ok, not at all.
Fine! The schadenfreude is delightful.
Happy?
I am completely dumbfounded at the claim that public knowledge of climate change (this time round, concern over the warming) only became known in the late 1980’s. This is manifestly untrue.
There had been expeditions to the melting arctic amidst much public interest (Royal Society 1818) Numerous Conferences, Government meetings (1947 and earlier) and numerous newspaper reports from the 1700’s onwards with a particular flurry in the 1920’s onwards. At that time Bob Bartlett undertook numerous expeditions to the melting arctic which was filmed for Pathe newsreel which were seen by millions of our cinema going forefathers as news inserts in the main film offering.
The warming world was a ‘hot’ issue and in various of my articles I cite many hundreds of papers, newspaper clippings books etc that reference it.
Here is a short summary of the long standing interest in climate change which reached a peak in the early 1970’s cooling (following the concerns about warming from 1920) and was immediately followed by concerns of warming again. In that context the global cooling scare can be seen as a short term interruption in the centuries long (intermittent) warming.
—– —- —-
From my article ‘the long slow thaw.’
Reginald Jeffery observed in his book ‘Was it Wet or was it fine,’ “By 1708 the middle aged would say where are our old winters?”
This query was being echoed on the other side of the Atlantic around the same time as the records of the Hudson Bay Company demonstrate that climate change was not restricted to Europe.
“Over the fifteen years between 1720 and 1735, the first snowfall of the year moved from the first week of September to the last…”
Thomas Jefferson -third President of the United States- kept extensive weather records and referring to the period around the 1770’s remarked;
““A change in our climate however is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie, below the mountains, more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely a week. They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now. (54)
A few decades later Noah Webster, 1758-1843 (founder- Webster’s dictionary) commented;
“The temperature of the winter season, in northern latitudes, has suffered a material change, and become warmer in modern, than it was in ancient times. … Indeed I know not whether any person, in this age, has ever questioned the fact.”
Towards the end of the 19th Century a correspondent in the Canadian Horticulturist monthly of 1880 (page 7) remarked;
“I do not know whether or not the climate of Ontario is really becoming permanently milder than formerly, but I do know that for the past 18 years or 20 years we have not experienced the same degree of cold as the seven years preceding.”
Writing in 1931 after several decades of compiling his book ‘Was it wet or was it Fine’ Reginald Jeffery remarked;
“I have been asked so often during the period that I have been doing this work this question, well after all this grubbing into the wealth of the past, do you think that our climate is changing or has changed? Where are the old snow storms? We never quite know where we are with regards to weather.”
Whilst around the same time a farmer from Buchan in Scotland wrote to his local newspaper;
“1934 has opened true to the modern tradition of open, snowless winters. The long ago winters are no precedent for our modern samples. During the last decade, during several Januarys the lark has heralded spring up in the lift from the middle to the end of the month. Not full fledged songs but preliminary bars in an effort to adapt to our climatic change.”
It then goes on to say;
“It is unwise to assume that the modern winters have displaced the old indefinitely” and also; “Our modern winters have induced an altered agricultural regime”
—– —— —–
If the public interest in climate change and global warming was not being discussed until the late 1980’s then it appears all these references were cleverly hidden in plain view.
tonyb
Let me see: damage Lyndon Johnson’s reputation any more than he did all by himself, or has been done over time by what he left behind? No, that’s impossible. He made a mess out of his administration without any help from anyone else.
A 1967 memo https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v34/d228 shows that his administration was active in the mess that was already starting to raise its head in the Middle East.
That was in the middle of the Vietnam War. No, LBJ did plenty of damage to his reputation on his own. This bit of hogwash cooked up out of dust bunnies is just that – hogwash.
I am starting a #Spielbergknew campaign. As evidenced by his 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg knew that space aliens were here, and just biding their time until their Big Invasion coming soon. George Lucas will also be named in the suit, as well as others, all of whom knew about space aliens, yet not only profited from it, but also pretended it was just fiction, for our amusement only.
Who’s with me?
Well, lemme see. For a 26% increase in CO2 we got a 1.6deg F increase in temp? This is catastrophic? Hells bells, it beats the ice age that “scientists” were predicting in the ’60s.
amazing
What’s even better, Armand Hammer knew, and helped start Al Gore Senior’s career.
Funny to see you refer to SciAm as “the former jewel of science magazines.” I see my recollection of events meshes well with what you report here. I remember that in the late 80s (and my memory also says “1988”) SciAm ran what was (I believe) its first article on global warming (I wonder if it was written by Hansen). I remember reading it and calling “BS”. I thought the model probably lacked certain feedbacks (like heating-increased cloud cover-increased albedo) and later proved to be correct. I had, at the time, subscribed to SciAm for over a decade. At this same time (late 80s) I had been perceiving a noticeable leftist slant in its stories and allowed my subscription to lapse shortly thereafter. Now I only buy an occasional special issue on safe (from politicization) topics like cosmology.
“knew in November 1965”
That was just before the height of the GLOBAL COOLING scare, wasn’t it !!
In the year of my Ph.D., Austin, the one TV station controlled by LBJ, the 1965 government science report linked showed heavy reliance on administrators (1 from UT) and government officials. One W. J. Youden has only an address, in Washington. I only know something of the scientific credentials of two on in the list, Ruth Patrick and Lionel Walford, probably good choices. Of the different section chairmen, nearly all are apparently non-administrators from universities.
Of course, Roger Revelle was the head of the carbon dioxide section. Compared to government reports nowadays this seems to be a great piece of science, showing both pros and cons and maybes. As to pH they only mentioned freshwater and “This will have no significant effect on most plants,” and they mentioned the fertilizing effect of carbon dioxide. Back in those days we knew the difference between acids and bases and we still had lots of real pollution in LBJ land to deal with. They also knew cod populations followed temperature, something fisheries scientists lost in their computers and are having to rediscover. Nevertheless, there were some with solutions looking for problems.
This has been beat to death but here it goes again:
What is it that they knew decades ago, which they did not share with the world that they should be held accountable for?
1. Booming biosphere and greening planet? No
2. Record crop yields and world food production? No
3. Best weather/climate in at least 1,000 years for life……since the Medieval Warm Period that was this warm? No
4. Decreasing strong/violent tornadoes with the decreasing meridional temp. gradient from warming the higher latitudes? No
5. No trend in hurricanes/typhoons? No
6. No acceleration in sea level increase? No
7. Increase in atmospheric moisture of around 2% since that time frame and corresponding slight increase in extreme rain events. This happened
8. Melting Arctic sea ice. This happened
9. Slight increase in heat waves in some regions. This happened
10. Global climate model projections of temperature that have been too warm and no skill at predicting region weather. This happened and are the entire basis to build the case for catastrophic human caused climate change on.
Items 1-9 are based on authentic science. Item #10 is based on a political agenda and is also the one that they are actually being held accountable for. If they had sounded the false alarms sooner, the hijacking of climate science could have commenced much earlier and the politics based on junk science might well have(given a decade head start) been successful at committing the world to non scientifically based, transfer of wealth agreements, like the Climate Accord…….before the observations and data caught up and busted the exaggerated versions of the busted speculative theories……..like they are doing right now.
Seth Boringstone again lives up to his name and submerges us in witless prattle. Svante Arrhenius was a Nobel-Prize winning Swedish scientist who knew that a warmer world would be a better world. Nothing that we see now, shows that Arrhenius was wrong, but Boringstone is.
That 1965 document was indeed a “consensus” report from many of the leading scientits of the day. And it warmed in dramatic terms about the rise of CO2. Yet this is the time when some are telling us that they were preoccupied with a cooling scare?
Back in the 1960’s, 1 car produced as much real pollution as around 25 cars today. In the 1960’s we knew what real pollution was and thanks to the catalytic convertor, the most ingenious/effective pollution fighting device in history…..we helped reduce a massive source of it.
Funny thing about pollution since then. Catalytic convertors, create a bunch of CO2. In the 1960’s this was still considered a beneficial, non toxic, colorless, odorless, benign gas which played its most important role in the law of photosynthesis, enhancing plant growth.
Now, it’s being defined as carbon pollution and the increase in CO2 is the leading cause for model simulations of our atmosphere going out 100 years that project human caused catastrophic climate change.
3 way catalytic convertor:
1. Reduction of nitrogen oxides to nitrogen and oxygen: 2 NOx → x O2 + N2
2. Oxidation of carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide: 2 CO + O2 → 2 CO2
3. Oxidation of unburnt hydrocarbons (HC) to carbon dioxide and water: CxH2x+2 + [(3x+1)/2] O2 → x CO2 + (x+1) H2O.
Who could have guessed back then that we were just converting air pollution with well known and observed adverse health effects on humans into an even worse form of pollution that remains in the atmosphere for a century and is a much worse threat to life on this planet………..based on programmed models that simulate the atmosphere for a century…… via interpretations by the main gate keepers of our climate science.
The ExxonKnew case I find so confounding every time I look at it. Here are some interesting points:
— The scientific assessment reports in the DoE carbon dioxide program in the early 1980s was that there was no empirical evidences of the proposed effect, and that first detection is not likely until the new century. They therefore saw their work as preparing for how best to establish first detection.
— The first international assessment report “Scope 29″ in 1985 did not even suggest a date when first detection might be achieved.
— The first IPCC report said that detection is not likely for decades.
— In the second IPCC report, first it said in response to the question of when the empirical science might arrive” ‘we don’t know’. When this was removed in a late revision, the conclusion was still only ‘points towards’ a discernible human influence. So, even in 1996 there was no conclusive evidence according to scientific assessments. There were lots of papers at the time expressing doubt about the empirical evidence including the paper by Santer that was the main basis for the IPCC claim — when it was eventually published.
— If we go to individual scientists claiming detection, we have George Plass in the 1953 and 1956, and before that Callendar in 1938. So #PlassKnew and #CallendarKnew. Its only that they were heavily criticized by the experts, including notably Roger Revelle.
So ‘Exxon knew’ can only be about contentious claims of Callendar and Plass….or conjecture (as Janice Moore says above). And the conjecture goes right back to Svante Arrhenius etc in the late 19th century that was persuasively critiqued by Ångström in 1900.
Back to 1965. This blog post above quotes a subsection to the Appendix to the report that was given to the new president Johnson early in 1965. The author, Revelle, speculates about CO2 warming melting of the Antarctic ice cap at a rate of 4 feet per decade and so after 1000 years a rise of 400 feet. That is the highest speculated AGW sea level rise I have seen.
— Not only did Johnson know but less than 3 weeks after his inauguration (8 Feb 65), in a special message to Congress on pollution, President Johnson commented:
see here: http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650208.asp
— And #ExxonKnew folks know #JohnsonKnew. See Naomi Oreskes here:
See here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/31/AR2007013101808.html
So, there is nothing new here for the #ExxonKnew. And this is why I am so perplexed. What exactly is the claim about Exxon? I just don’t understand how these folks are seeing the history.
( For details of the history see the timeline here:
https://enthusiasmscepticismscience.wordpress.com/chronology-of-climate-change-science/ )