Guest ridiculing by David Middleton
Hat tip to Clyde Spencer
Exxon’s Climate Denial Set To Face First Public Scrutiny As Legal Woes Mount
Alexander C. Kaufman
HuffPost•March 19, 2019
It’s been nearly four years since leaked documents revealed Exxon Mobil Corp.understood that fossil fuel emissions caused the planet to warm before it began funding a Big Tobacco-style misinformation campaign to discredit climate science.Now the world’s largest publicly traded oil company will face public questions for the first time over its role in creating a climate crisis that threatens to upend human civilization and render dozens of major cities uninhabitable before the end of the century.
On Thursday, European Parliament members are set to hold a hearing in Brussels that could strip Exxon Mobil of lobbying access and deepen the oil giant’s mounting legal woes.
[…]
I don’t know which is funnier… The Huffington Post (hereinafter HuffPuff) blog post… Or the fact that Yahoo! thought this was news.
Exxon’s Climate Denial Set To Face First Public Scrutiny As Legal Woes Mount
You mean these legal woes?
On Thursday, European Parliament members are set to hold a hearing in Brussels that could strip Exxon Mobil of lobbying access and deepen the oil giant’s mounting legal woes.
HuffPuff
This will clearly deepen ExxonMobil’s nonexistent legal woes…
On 21 March 2019, the PETI and ENVI Committees will hold a joint Public Hearing on “Climate Change Denial.” The aim of the hearing is to explore the topic of climate change denial under different perspectives and to examine the communication techniques used in politics or by private companies and other actors in society to mislead the public on the negative impact of certain industrial activities or policies on the climate.
ExxonMobil declined the invitation to participate in the hearing.
The organizers say Exxon Mobil declined an invitation to testify. Spokesmen for the company did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.Under new rules, the European Union’s lawmakers could ban the company from lobbying the transnational parliament overseeing a market that in 2015 made up 14 percent of its global oil and gas production and into which it invested $2 billion last year to expand a new refinery.
HuffPuff
If ExxonMobil lobbyists were banned from the EU parliament, it would have this much effect on their business:
While the broad category “Europe” accounted for 14% of ExxonMobil’s 2017 “upstream” business sector, these were the highlights:
- Captured Cyprus offshore Block 10
- Generated significant cash flow with divestment of operated assets in Norway
- Supplied nearly 4 Bcfd of natural gas to European markets via pipeline gas and LNG
- Completed concept selection for Neptun Deep project offshore Romania
I suppose the EU could get that 4 Bcf/d of natural gas from Putin. However, the EU parliament-overseen “market” does not make “up 14 percent of its global oil and gas production.”
- The 4 Bcf/d of natural gas was produced elsewhere and sold to European nations.
- With the divestment of ExxonMobil’s operated assets in Norway, the oil & gas production is from non-operated assets: “We retain a large presence in Norway through significant equity participation in 20 partner-operated offshore fields, with net production of 102,000 barrels of liquids and 397 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.”
- The offshore projects in Romania and Cyprus aren’t producing yet and the EU Parliament has about as much control over this as the Obama Maladministration had over frac’ing.
The participants in the EU Parliament witch burning will be Naomi Oreske’s intern, Geoffrey Supran, and a handful of other political hacks.
The HuffPuff blog post actually became more Billy Madison as it went along…
In a boilerplate statement distributed since InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times published documents revealing the company understood the threat of climate change as far back as 1981, Exxon Mobil said: “We unequivocally reject allegations that ExxonMobil suppressed climate change research contained in media reports that are inaccurate distortions of ExxonMobil’s nearly 40-year history of climate research.”HuffPuff
“Inaccurate distortions of ExxonMobil’s nearly 40-year history of climate research” is an understatement. ExxonMobil and its predecessor companies didn’t know anything that wasn’t available to anyone with a subscription to the Journal of Geophysical Research and other publicly available journals.
This is typical of the inaccurate distortions…
1968 “THE ROBINSON REPORT”
In 1968, scientists with the Stanford Research Institute reported to the American Petroleum Institute about their research on atmospheric pollutants of interest to the industry. Summarizing the available science, the scientists saved their starkest warnings for carbon dioxide (CO2). They cautioned that rising levels of CO2 would likely result in rising global temperatures and warned that, if temperatures increased significantly, the result could be melting ice caps, rising sea levels, warming oceans, and serious environmental damage on a global scale.
One of the reproduced pages from this damning report referenced Möller (1963) as the source of a 1-7 °F rise in temperature due to a 25% rise in atmospheric CO2 …
1968 “THE ROBINSON REPORT”
Since Möller (1963) wasn’t a secret oil industry document, anyone else with a subscription to the Journal of Geophysical Research would have also been privy to this information. And anyone who even bothered to read the abstract of this damning paper would also know what we know today: “The theory that climatic variations are effected by variations in the CO2 content becomes very questionable” if you factor in clouds…
On the influence of changes in the CO2 concentration in air on the radiation balance of the Earth’s surface and on the climate
F. Möller
Abstract
The numerical value of a temperature change under the influence of a CO2 change as calculated by Plass is valid only for a dry atmosphere. Overlapping of the absorption bands of CO2 and H2O in the range around 15 μ essentially diminishes the temperature changes. New calculations give ΔT = + 1.5° when the CO2 content increases from 300 to 600 ppm. Cloudiness diminishes the radiation effects but not the temperature changes because under cloudy skies larger temperature changes are needed in order to compensate for an equal change in the downward long-wave radiation. The increase in the water vapor content of the atmosphere with rising temperature causes a self-amplification effect which results in almost arbitrary temperature changes, e.g. for constant relative humidity ΔT = +10° in the above mentioned case. It is shown, however, that the changed radiation conditions are not necessarily compensated for by a temperature change. The effect of an increase in CO2 from 300 to 330 ppm can be compensated for completely by a change in the water vapor content of 3 per cent or by a change in the cloudiness of 1 per cent of its value without the occurrence of temperature changes at all. Thus the theory that climatic variations are effected by variations in the CO2 content becomes very questionable.
Journal of Geophysical Research
The full text of the paper is even better…
In this case, we must distinguish between the assumptions that the water vapor content (in cm l.e.) remains unchanged in spite of heating (cooling) of the atmosphere and that it increases (decreases). Constant absolute humidity means that the relative humidity (f) decreases from 75 to 70.34 per cent with a 1° or lowered by 4.66 per cent per deg. According to the above-mentioned calculations, an increase in CO2 from 300 to 600 ppm gives us a temperature change ΔT = +1.5° for Δf = -4.66 per cent per deg, and a temperature change ΔT = +9.6° for Δf = 0.
[…]
We recognize that for Δf = 0.8 per cent per deg the temperature change becomes infinite. Very small variations effect a reversal of sign or huge amplifications.
It is not too difficult to infer from these numbers that the variation in the radiation budget from a changed CO2 concentration can be compensated for completely without any variation in the surface temperature when the cloudiness is increased by +0.006 or the water vapor content is decreased by -0.07 cm l.e.
[…]
These are variations in the cloudiness by 1 per cent of its value or in the water vapor content by 3 per cent of its value. No meteorologist or climatologist would dare to determine the mean cloudiness or mean water content of the atmosphere with such accuracy; much less can a change of this order of magnitude be proved or its existence denied. Because of these values the entire theory of climatic changes by CO2 variations is becoming questionable.
The idiots have even cited Vail’s work on sea level cycles as “evidence” of some sort of conspiracy. I hope that ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and/or Chevron file a RICO lawsuit against these @$$ hats. Every single one of the “secret” Exxon documents brandished by these morons can be parried in a similar fashion.
I’m surprised they haven’t gone after the authors of my college textbooks.
Historical geology…
Suggestion that changing carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere could be a major factor in climate change dates from 1861, when it was proposed by British physicist John Tyndall.[…]
Unfortunately we cannot estimate accurately changes of past CO2 content of either atmosphere or oceans, nor is there any firm quantitative basis for estimating the the magnitude of drop in carbon dioxide content necessary to trigger glaciation. Moreover the entire concept of an atmospheric greenhouse effect is controversial, for the rate of ocean-atmosphere equalization is uncertain.
Dott, Robert H. & Roger L. Batten. Evolution of the Earth. McGraw-Hill, Inc. Second Edition 1976. p. 441.
Meteorology…
FORECASTING THE FUTURE. We can now try to decide if we are now in an interglacial stage, with other glacials to follow, or if the world has finally emerged from the Cenozoic Ice Age. According to the Milankovitch theory, fluctuations of radiation of the type shown in Fig. 16-18 must continue and therefore future glacial stages will continue. According to the theory just described, as long as the North and South Poles retain their present thermally isolated locations, the polar latitudes will be frigid; and as the Arctic Ocean keeps oscillating between ice-free and ice-covered states, glacial-interglacial climates will continue.Finally, regardless of which theory one subscribes to, as long as we see no fundamental change in the late Cenozoic climate trend, and the presence of ice on Greenland and Antarctica indicates that no change has occurred, we can expect that the fluctuations of the past million years will continue.
Donn, William L. Meteorology. 4th Edition. McGraw-Hill 1975. pp 463-464
Physical geography…
The atmosphere’s blanketing effect over the earth’s surface has been compared to the functioning of a greenhouse. Short-wave sunlight passes as easily through the glass of the greenhouse as through the atmosphere. Because glass is opaque to the long-wave radiation from the warm interior of the greenhouse, it hinders the escape of energy.As a planet, the earth is not warming or cooling appreciably on the average, because it loses as much radiant energy as it gains.
Kolenkow, Robert J., Reid A. Bryson, Douglas B. Carter, R. Keith Julian, Robert A. Muller, Theodore M. Oberlander, Robert P. Sharp & M. Gordon Wolman. Physical geography today : a portrait of a planet. Del Mar, Calif. : CRM Books, [1974]. p. 64.
Funny thing, my Geomorphology textbook was written by Don Easterbrook… and it’s about the only Earth Science textbook I have that didn’t feature such “Big Tobacco-style misinformation.”
Even funnier thing, my college textbooks were turning a blind eye to the Climate Crisis du jour:
Fortunately climate models saved us from The Ice Age Cometh!
We know for a fact that ExxonMobil was not the source of That ’70s Climate Show. Leonard Nimoy was the source…
While ExxonMobil, in one of its earlier incarnations, was valiantly defending the world against the godless hordes of glaciers marching on New York City…
Meanwhile, the HuffPuff blogger hadn’t even begun to be-clown himself…
Yet, in January, a report by researchers at more than a dozen environmental groups calculated that U.S. oil and gas production, particularly in the vast Permian Basin of West Texas, is set to add 1,000 coal plants’ worth of climate pollution to the atmosphere by 2050. That would make reaching the emissions cuts called for in the latest United Nations report nearly impossible.Exxon Mobil’s response was telling. Two months later, the company said in a press release that it doubled its production in the Permian Basin last year and would “increase” and “accelerate” its output to 1 million barrels per day over the next five years.
HuffPuff
Hey Alexander C. Kaufman, HuffPuff blogger extraordinaire, here’s a hint: ExxonMobil is an “oil & gas company.” It is supposed to “increase” and “accelerate” its output… Technically, that’s what all businesses are supposed to do: “increase” and “accelerate” their output.
Alexander C. Kaufman, you earned five Billy Madison’s. Yahoo! News earned twenty-five Billy Madison’s for thinking his idiotic blog post was news.
Author’s note: If you have any doubt as to when I was being sarcastic and when I was being serious, err on the side of sarcasm.
Note to Clyde Spencer: a mutual textbook of ours is now available in digital format: The Oceans Their Physics, Chemistry, and General Biology by Sverdrup, Johnson & Fleming.
References
Donn, William L. Meteorology. 4th Edition. McGraw-Hill 1975.
Dott, Robert H. & Roger L. Batten. Evolution of the Earth. McGraw-Hill, Inc. Second Edition 1976.
Easterbrook, Don J. Principles of geomorphology.New York : McGraw-Hill, [c1969]
Kolenkow, Robert J., Reid A. Bryson, Douglas B. Carter, R. Keith Julian, Robert A. Muller, Theodore M. Oberlander, Robert P. Sharp & M. Gordon Wolman. Physical geography today : a portrait of a planet. Del Mar, Calif. : CRM Books, [1974].
Möller, F. (1963), On the influence of changes in the CO2 concentration in air on the radiation balance of the Earth’s surface and on the climate. J. Geophys. Res., 68(13), 3877–3886, doi:10.1029/JZ068i013p03877.
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)
Further Reading
What did ExxonMobil Know and when did they know it? (Part 1)
What did ExxonMobil Know and when did they know it? (Part Deux, “Same as it ever was.”)
What did ExxonMobil Know and when did they know it? (Part 3, Exxon: The Fork Not Taken
“Smoke & Fumes”… The dumbest attack on ExxonMobil evah’
Even dumber than the dumbest attack on ExxonMobil evah’
What Did Shell Know and When Did They Know It?
NY Attorney General Defies Judge’s Order in Exxon Case
Peoble should have known the impact oil use would do, and yet they continued using the products.
Should they stop selling it or should they have put a picture on with a burning globe?
“Now the world’s largest publicly traded oil company will face public questions for the first time over its role in creating a climate crisis that threatens to upend human civilization and render dozens of major cities uninhabitable before the end of the century.”
How is Exxon”s behavior different from the behavior of other oil companies? If all of them quit producing oil, how long before “major cites” become uninhabitable? Weeks before it is chaos. Months before food and basic necessities of life are unavailable!
It is time for oil companies to cut off governments that are governing against the interests of the public.
There is no possibility we can do without oil, in major cities. These prosecutors cannot want it to stop flowing. So the only end game here is a government takeover of oil production. Because that worked so well for Venezuela….