Guest ridicule by David Middleton
I owe the USA Today Editorial Staff an apology. Their “Hellish July” editorial wasn’t the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. It wasn’t even the stupidest thing I’ve read this week…
Climate change denial won’t even benefit oil companies soon
Phil McDuff
The damage caused by our addiction to burning fossil fuels will be so widespread that nobody stands to gain
The year 2018 is on track to be…
[…]
One hot summer does not a changing climate make, but the trend in the global data is now irrefutable. When Michael Mann published the “hockey stick” graph back in 1998, there was vociferous public pushback, yet the observed temperature rises match what Mann had predicted. Today’s hockey stick graph isn’t a forward projection but a historical record. The world has been getting hotter, and it will continue to do so. The only question now is how much hotter it gets.
[…]
Maybe we are destined to become the civilisational equivalent of Monty Python’s Mr Creosote, a man who gorged himself until he literally exploded.
Regardless of the alternative histories and the might-have-beens, it may be too late to stop it, but we still need to learn an important lesson. If a CEO tells us that it would be bad for business if they weren’t allowed to pump poison into the air and water, then that’s too bad for them: one business is not an economy, and it certainly isn’t a biosphere. We’d have survived the crisis of an oil CEO missing out on his fifth yacht, but many won’t survive the consequences of letting them lead us by the nose into disaster.
• Phil McDuff writes on economics and social policy
Firstly, Phil gets a +42 for the Monty Python reference.
Secondly, I’ll let commentators ridicule this mind-numbingly stupid passage:
When Michael Mann published the “hockey stick” graph back in 1998, there was vociferous public pushback, yet the observed temperature rises match what Mann had predicted. Today’s hockey stick graph isn’t a forward projection but a historical record.
Thirdly, no oil company has ever denied “climate change.” Without climate change, sedimentary geology would be pretty boring and Earth probably wouldn’t have much in the way of fossil fuels. Oil companies benefit from climate change. If not for climate change, oil companies probably wouldn’t even exist.
Oddly enough, the relevance of climate change to sedimentary geology is also one of primary bits of “evidence” in the incredibly moronic #ExxonKnew fraud.
This may be even stupider than the McDuff nonsense…
Similarly, as Steve Coll5 wrote in Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012), the company’s
investments in skeptics of the scientific consensus coincided with what at least a few of ExxonMobil’s own managers regarded as a hypocritical drive inside the corporation to explore whether climate change might offer new opportunities for oil exploration and profit.
The company tried to use the work of one of its most celebrated earth scientists, Peter Vail, to predict how alterations to the planet’s surface made by the changing climate could help it discover new deposits of oil and gas. “‘So don’t believe for a minute that ExxonMobil doesn’t think climate change is real,’ said a former manager…. ‘They were using climate change as a source of insight into exploration.’”6
The New York Review of Books: The Rockefeller Family Fund Takes on ExxonMobil
Are these people so fracking stupid that they can’t differentiate the scientifically challenged AGW hypothesis from the application of paleoclimatology to sedimentary geology? That was a rhetorical question.
As stupid as that passage was, it did stumble upon one of the two pillars of sedimentary geology: paleoclimatology. The other pillar being paleogeography. It also ignorantly references one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in the history of geology: Sequence stratigraphy.
Theory Caused a ‘Sea Change’ in Thought
Vail’s Ideas Were a ‘Breakthrough’
When Peter Vail presented his theory linking stratigraphic interpretation with global sea level changes at the AAPG Annual Meeting in Dallas in 1975, it was akin to a shot heard ’round the world in the geology profession.
Vail’s hypothesis was a unifying concept for stratigraphy: Sedimentary basins filled with different sediments, he theorized, but the sediments were deposited in an episodic manner by global sea level changes.
That public pronouncement was at once lauded and accepted by many members of the scientific community and decried by others.
In fact, the ensuing controversy and scientific discussion among E&P industry stalwarts and academicians continues in some circles even today, providing apt testimony that this was a man on the cutting edge of research.
Unfazed by the naysayers and confident in his convictions, Vail spent a whole career furthering the case for seismic stratigraphy, which revolutionized the geology practicioners’ view of stratigraphy and the way oil and gas exploration is conducted.
Given his profound impact on the profession of geology, it comes as no surprise to Vail’s many former colleagues and others in the geology community that he has been selected to receive the 2003 Sidney Powers Memorial Award, AAPG’s highest honor.
Long held in high esteem by the association, Vail previously was awarded Honorary Membership in AAPG. He also has been the recipient of the AAPG President’s Award and the Matson Award for best papers.
Other industry-based society awards received during his illustrious career include:
- Virgil Kauffman Gold Medal of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG).
- Individual Achievement Award from the Offshore Technology Conference.
- Twenhofel Medal of the Society of Sedimentary Geology (SEPM).
- Honorary Membership in SEG.
These are but a few of the plethora of honors bestowed upon this intrepid scientist who also has played a key role on various industry, government and academic steering committees and has been honored by universities at home and abroad in recognition of his work.
He has been a prolific contributor to professional literature, having authored more than 60 publications appearing in journals, textbooks and guidebooks.
[…]
A few eustatic sea level charts from Vail et al., 1977:
This knowledge of sea level change was locked away in ExxonMobil’s vault until intrepid journalists… Had you! Didn’t I?
So… Oil companies have never denied climate change.
Fourthly, this is the dumbest sentence from a mind-numbingly stupid article:
The damage caused by our addiction to burning fossil fuels will be so widespread that nobody stands to gain
Fossil fuels feed nearly half of Earth’s human population.
About 25% of bulk chemical natural gas consumption is used as a feedstock for fertilizer production, fossil fuels contribute to the value added to our economy by farming. The Haber-Bosch process, which manufactures synthetic fertilizer from natural gas and atmospheric nitrogen, feeds nearly half of the world population.
Even if one ignores the multitude of other benefits of fossil fuels, the ability to feed 48% of 7.6 billion people means that at least 3,648,000,000 people stand to gain from our continued “addiction” to fossil fuels. While the Haber-Bosch process doesn’t “burn” much natural gas, it accounts for about 3% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
References
Erisman, J. W., Sutton, M. A., Galloway, J., Klimont, Z. & Winiwarter, W. How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nat. Geosci.1,636–639 (2008)
Vail, P. R., R.M. Mitchum, and S. Thompson, III, 1977, Seismic stratigraphy and global changes of sea level, part 3: Relative changes of sea level from coastal onlap, in C.E. Payton, ed., AAPG Memoir 26: Seismic stratigraphy—Applications to hydrocarbon exploration: 63-97 (1977)
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“‘So don’t believe for a minute that ExxonMobil doesn’t think climate change is real,’ said a former manager…. ‘They were using climate change as a source of insight into exploration.’”
If Exxon Mobil was using the changing climate’s alterations to the planet’s surface to help it discover new deposits of oil and gas, it had to be related to climate change that occurred in the distant past, which had nothing to do with humans. It just goes to show that the climate has and can change naturally, without the influence of human beings. So why should we assume that the small changes in the climate that have occurred in modern times must be 100 percent human caused? It could be natural, or it could be a combination of natural and human factors. No one has enough information to know for sure. So the question is not whether climate change is real. The only question is ‘what is the underlying cause?’
“…the observed temperature rises match what Mann had predicted. Today’s hockey stick graph isn’t a forward projection but a historical record.”
Can anyone display a graph of observed temperatures next to Mann’s hockey stick graph to prove how wrong the above statement is?