By Spencer Walrath, Energy In Depth
The New York Times Magazine has published an entire issue devoted to a single investigative piece on climate change, which observes that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, “everybody knew” it was happening. The conclusion is a major blow to climate activists, who have spent years engaging in a political campaign targeting energy companies for supposedly covering up the risks of climate change, and thus preventing global action.
The author, Nathaniel Rich, writes that from 1979 to 1989 humanity had the best opportunity it has ever had to solve global warming and that “nothing stood in our way – nothing except ourselves.” Rich even goes as far as to say that “[a] common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry,” but during the time when “everybody knew,” oil companies “including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.”
This lengthy report shreds the narrative put out by anti-oil and gas activists in recent years. As Rich told PBS NewsHour:
“By 1979, there was a strong consensus within the scientific community about the nature of the problem. The fundamental science hasn’t really evolved since then. It’s only been refined really. There was no politicization of the issue throughout the decade. A number of prominent Republicans were leading the charge to insist on a major climate policy, and industry, which we now blame for much of our paralysis, had not turned against science or truth and if anything, especially in the early part of the decade, was engaged in trying to understand the problem and determine solutions…
“By the mid-50s, you had top government scientists speaking about the issue. You had major articles in Life Magazine and Time. So it wasn’t just industry that was following it. It was at the highest levels of government. Lyndon Johnson sent a special message to Congress in 1965 that discussed the problem.” (emphasis added)
If all of humanity was informed of the dangers of climate change in the 1970s and agreed that something needed to be done, how can activists lay the blame for global inaction at the feet of the industry and political partisanship? As Rich writes,
“The rallying cry of this multipronged legal effort is ‘Exxon Knew.’ It is incontrovertibly true that senior employees at the company that would later become Exxon, like those at most other major oil-and-gas corporations, knew about the dangers of climate change as early as the 1950s. But the automobile industry knew, too, and began conducting its own research by the early 1980s, as did the major trade groups representing the electrical grid. They all own responsibility for our current paralysis and have made it more painful than necessary. But they haven’t done it alone.
“The United States government knew. Roger Revelle began serving as a Kennedy administration adviser in 1961, five years after establishing the Mauna Loa carbon-dioxide program, and every president since has debated the merits of acting on climate policy. Carter had the Charney report, Reagan had ‘Changing Climate’ and Bush had the censored testimony of James Hansen and his own public vow to solve the problem. Congress has been holding hearings for 40 years; the intelligence community has been tracking the crisis even longer.
“Everybody knew. In 1958, on prime-time television, ‘The Bell Science Hour’ — one of the most popular educational film series in American history — aired ‘The Unchained Goddess,’ a film about meteorological wonders, produced by Frank Capra, a dozen years removed from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ warning that ‘man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate’ through the release of carbon dioxide. ‘A few degrees’ rise in the Earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps,’ says the film’s kindly host, the bespectacled Dr. Research. ‘An inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.’ Capra’s film was shown in science classes for decades.
“Everyone knew — and we all still know.” (emphasis added)
This conclusion – that #EveryoneKnew – is even supported by activists, though they haven’t yet followed their arguments to their logical conclusion.
Groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace were quick to follow #ExxonKnew with #ShellKnew and #UtilitiesKnew, blaming every company they don’t like while failing to acknowledge their own amnesia on climate change. The idea that energy companies “knew everything there was to know about climate change,” as Bill McKibben likes to say, and that the rest of us didn’t know about it until James Hansen testified before Congress in 1988, “is one of the worst examples we have of the cultural amnesia of this country and especially around this issue,” Rich told NewsHour.
Confirming that Rich’s narrative is a direct threat to the multi-million-dollar campaign they have waged in recent years, anti-energy activists intensely criticized the report before it was even released.
The loudest pre-buttal came from Hunter Cutting, a director of strategic communications for Climate Nexus, a project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The Rockefellers have funded every aspect of the #ExxonKnew campaign, and are no doubt alarmed by the New York Times contradicting the very basis for their campaign.
The activist group 350.org also condemned the story shortly after it was published.
350 dot org ✔@350
Maybe news to NYT, but a movement millions strong knows who’s really to blame—fossil fuel billionaires. And we sure as hell haven’t lost yet. #RiseForClimate https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html …
For several hours after the report was released, the umbrella group for the #ExxonKnew campaign dedicated its Twitter page to criticizing Rich’s narrative and retweeting others who were scrambling to control the damage.
Rich’s story ultimately concludes that it’s too simplistic to point your finger at one company, industry, or political party for inaction on climate change, which is a complex global problem. The issue was receiving mainstream media attention and was the subject of multiple Congressional hearings in the 1970s and 1980s, long before the supposed “disinformation campaign” that environmental activists cite ever began.
It may not have been the intent of New York Times Magazine to throw cold water on a fringe environmental activists campaign, but the damage has clearly been done. The attempt at damage control from the #ExxonKnew campaign is only beginning.
Full story here
Lol. Nice wordsmithing on the part of the NTM author. “Everybody knew” and “climate change” and “1970s” only makes sense if one remembers that the scare at that time, and the 50s and 60s, was global cooling. Caused by burning of fossil fuels. The idea was that the particulates and sulfates would block the sun and cause a new ice age.
It wasn’t “global warming” until the late 80s. Then it became “climate change” when the Great El Niño of 1998 didn’t permanently raise global temperature.
They think we won’t remember. But I remember, and I’m explaining it and educating my children, and their friends. And their friend’s parents.
And I’m not alone. The “climate crisis” was lost because they lied. Should’ve just told the truth and not made a moral case about it.
Oops. That’s not quite right….. “Actually everyone knew that Global Warming due to the effects of anthropogenic sources of CO2 was a cynical political hoax agenda and a scam for acquiring grant money as far back as 1979….” There, fixed.
Apparently a few people didn’t know:
“Climate forcings in the Industrial era
James E. Hansen*, Makiko Sato, Andrew Lacis, Reto Ruedy, Ina Tegen, and Elaine Matthews National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY 10025
Contributed by James E. Hansen, August 18, 1998
ABSTRACT The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change. Anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs), which are well measured, cause a strong positive (warming) forcing. But other, poorly measured, anthropogenic forcings, especially changes of atmospheric aerosols, clouds, and land-use patterns, cause a negative forcing that tends to offset greenhouse warming. One consequence of this partial balance is that the natural forcing due to solar irradiance changes may play a larger role in long-term climate change than inferred from comparison with GHGs alone. Current trends in GHG climate forcings are smaller than in popular ‘‘business as usual’’ or 1% per year CO2 growth scenarios. The summary implication is a paradigm change for long-term climate projections: uncertainties in climate forc- ings have supplanted global climate sensitivity as the pre- dominant issue. “
http://m.pnas.org/content/95/22/12753.full.pdf
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA
Vol. 95, pp. 12753–12758, October 1998
Ah yes, the 1970s when the next ice age was said to be just around the corner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lin-a2lTelg
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
The article included a picture of Gordon MacDonald on the steps of the Capital that was in People Magazine in October 1979. He’s holding his hand above his head and the caption says “At the Capital in Washington, Gordon MacDonald shows where sea level would be in 2020 if his theories prove correct”. The article says “People magazine had profiled Gordon MacDonald, photographing him standing on the steps of the Capitol and pointing above his head to the level the water would reach when the polar ice caps melted. “If Gordon MacDonald is wrong, they’ll laugh,” the article read. “Otherwise, they’ll gurgle.””
It never bothers to point out just how far off that prediction, just like Hansen’s, really was.
It certainly blows the whole #exxonknew conspiracy out of the water.
This NYT article is utter drivel.
My formal review follows:
“Mr. Madison, what you just said is the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone is this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKjxFJfcrcA
🙂
The moral puritans always consume themselves in the end.
It’s like watching someone play that old snake game on GSM mobiles… inevitably the head will consume the rear end, there can be no other eventual outcome
if the NY Times really cared about the environment, they would stop using so much paper.
Well, as print subscriptions have been on a downward trend for several years now, they likely are using less paper. Still a total waste whatever amount they are using.
But some people still own birds (parrots, canaries, cockatoos) and need something to line the cage with.
The NYT author (Rich) cherry picks his facts: His go to “scientist” on AGW, Gordon MacDonald, also was notable for being a a “fixist” who didn’t believe in plate tectonics. MacDonald also thought aerosols caused global cooling.
If he was anything, he was mostly an “alarmist”.
They mean the climate-assisted takeover they had planned is never going to happen. It never occurred to them that the internet would allow competing narratives to reach the public, and put a stop to it. Now the religion is falling apart, and even they realize it won’t be coming back, they have no concrete steps to point to and say “this is what stopped global warming”. Truly a difficult admission for the true utopians.
I heard Nathanial Rich on NPR spewing his hypothesis about how we were “this close” to solving climate change back in the 80s. What a freakin’ joke. He’s living in a Naomi Oreskes inspired delusion land, with a serious science-crush on James Hanson. He essentially claims that one advisor in the George H.W Bush administration single-handedly changed the mind of a Republican administration, and thereby shut down all the self-evident and good public policy behavior that was needed, and that emboldened Exxon and the oil companies, who he thinks were on board with everything. He never mentions the cronyism of natural gas suppliers using environmental alarm to gain a competitive advantage over coal in electricity generation, nor the fundamental differences in transportation fuel vs electricity generation. He ignores the high costs of renewable generation, even though there is clear data now that was not available back then. In spite of all the things that ARE known, now, he thinks we could and would have abandoned coal and oil by now, if only a few conspirators had not scuttled the whole thing.
He slyly referred to the Kyoto agreement without saying the word, Kyoto, or talking about how when it was submitted to the Congress, almost the entire body representing the American electorate flatly rejected it. He ignores the reasons for that, completely. That potential treaty, just like Paris, allowed huge emissions and unfettered economic development in China and India, and penalized Western nations, demanding money and restitution and redistribution. Even though the 80s were bouncing back from the disastrous Carter years, manufacturing jobs and labor were beginning to shift to Japan and Asia, and China was looming very large. Rich manufactures a false memory of what most Americans wanted, needed, or had agreed to. They had agreed to nothing, knew very little. In spite of their tolerance (far too much, IMO) to wild, crazy claims of future disaster, they were also okay with the energy status quo and wanted cheap gas, electricity and air fares. Back then, this was novel, and Americans were waiting for a stronger case to be made and actual solutions to win in the marketplace. Sadly, for delusion sufferers like Rich, that stronger case has never been made. Not politically and not scientifically. In fact, the intervening years have undercut the crazy Venus warming model of James Hanson, and crazy Man-Bear-Pig political predictions by Al Gore and his ilk. So many predictions of tipping points and alarmist deadlines have come and gone without appreciable change, such that now something that didn’t happen then, does happen now. In order to keep their delusions alive, alarmists now claim every storm death and wildfire death as “climate change” created. This is in opposition to the IPCC, Far too little shame (and cut-offs of funding) have been suffered by these Chicken Littles. The crazy stuff is not happening, and people know this. I would not trust a single conclusion from Nathanial Rich. He can go pound sand.
At first glance I thought that “nyt mag” said “nut mag.”
Who cares what the New York Slimes says — whatever it happens to be?
New York Times lost their way in the past decade and have become an ultra left-wing echo box. Don’t read it anymore which is a shame because I used to read NYT every day back in the 1980s. I’m not sure what the NYT staff is today, but “journalists” is not on the list.
I read the “full story”
but not the NY Times article
but am not sure what they
are talking about.
It’s hard to think like a liberal.
In fact “think like a liberal”
is an oxymoron !
“Everyone knew” climate change
was happening for 4.5 billion years.
That’s correct.
But if “everyone knew” climate change
was leading to a climate catastrophe,
then ‘everyone’ believed in nonsense !
I’ve been reading about climate science
for 21 years, and have yet to identify
any problems from adding CO2
to the atmosphere.
In fact, based on real science,
our planet, especially the plants
used for food by humans and animals,
is better off from more CO2 in the air.
CO2 is the staff of life.
Anyone who thinks CO2 is a pollutant
is a misguided fool, or a leftist —
I repeat myself sometimes!
Based on junk science, and computer games
that make wrong forecasts, I suppose leftists
have come up with an alternative conclusion
abut CO2, based on their feelings — their opinion
is certainly not based on real science.
With real science no one would accept
a majority of surface temperature data
being wild guessed (aka infilled), using
numbers that can never be verified,
or falsified !
With real science, wrong climate model predictions
for 30 years in a row would mean something
— they would mean the ‘CO2 controls
the average temperature theory
has been falsified.
Real science is almost entirely missing
from the claim that more CO2 in the air
is a problem, or a crisis, or a catastrophe.
A lot of government bureaucrat scientists
jumping to self serving (job security) conclusions
by wild guessing the future climate,
is not real science.
Having a science degree does not mean
the work you do is real science !
And after 30 years of grossly inaccurate
global warming predictions,
the government bureaucrat scientists
should be ashamed of themselves
for continuing to push the
coming climate crisis fairy tale.
Leftists also used junk science
to declare the crises with DDT,
the hole in the ozone layer,
acid rain, global cooling,
GMO foods, and RoundUp.
How many times will Americans allow
the leftist “scientists” to ‘cry wolf’ ?
My climate change blog
with over 19,000 page views:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
How exactly do you have a “strong consensus”? You either have consensus or you do not. The weazle language of the left wing lawyer replaces the concise mathematical language of what used to be called a scientist.
While Rich mentioned the tobacco industry’s disinformation campaign as a guidebook the fossil fuel industry followed, I must say that part of that campaign was the “everyone knew” mantra. Sure, “everyone knew” tobacco wasn’t good for you. But they didn’t know how; they didn’t know why; only in recent decades–despite the 1964 Surgeon General’s report— has the public even begun to know about lung cancer. Let alone heart disease, etc. They didn’t know HOW bad it was. They didn’t know the specifics.
Meanwhile, tobacco ads abounded touting the “benefits” of various brands. So really, even though they’d heard some bad things– apparently, based on what was all around them, it wasn’t a big issue, it wasn’t all that bad. Or else, as one teen in the 90s was quoted as saying, “If they were so bad, then how could they possibly advertise them?”
The Romaine lettuce crisis? I went to numerous businesses that SHOULD have been attending to this much-covered issue–hospitals, restaurants, schools–and NOT ONE had even heard there was an issue.
I’m saying that the “everyone knew” mantra is a shibboleth. It takes A LOT to have information filter down to the common man on the street, who certainly has enough to do in his/her life, without attending to each and every scientific development.
Unless, of course, you have the money and will to advertise as prolifically as the tobacco industry.
The new addition to the NYT editorial board. https://twitter.com/ArminNavabi/status/1025015489729196032/photo/1
If “they all knew”, then just WHY did the ‘Greenies’ fight so hard against nuclear power?
Yeah, everyone knew ECS by 1950, even though ECS estimates are still all over the board seventy years later. Riiiiiight.
The NYT (which employed Walter Duranty) really has a hard time distinguishing “knowledge” from “speculation.”
hundreds of articles quoting scientists on the danger of global cooling
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html
Hubert Lamb, Director of CRU, Sep 8 1972: “We are past the best of the inter-glacial period which happened between 7,000 and 3,000 years ago… we are on a definite downhill course for the next 200 years….The last 20 years of this century will be progressively colder.” http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=336&dat=19720908&id=AiwcAAAAIBAJ&sjid=0VsEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5244,2536610
John Firor, Excecutive Director of NCAR, 1973: “Temperatures have been high and steady, and steady has been more than high. Now it appears we’re going into a period where temperature will be low and variable, and variable will be more important than low.”
ex.:The 46 scientists who gathered at Brown Univeristy, Providence R.I., for a symposium on “The End of the Present Interglacial” agreed that there is evidence of an ominous world-wide cooling of temperatures in the past two decades.
ex:CIA — “Leaders in climatology and economics are in agreement that a climatic change is taking place and that it has already caused economic problems throughout the world.”
“Nature’s reaction could be something drastic… another Ice Age is possible” William Cobb, NOAA scientist, 1973 http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=o0M_AAAAIBAJ&sjid=2FEMAAAAIBAJ&pg=3160,2814827