Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; The BBC is continuing to push their narrative that opposition to climate change is idealogical, and that scientists who express doubts about extreme climate claims have been corrupted by their political beliefs or by funding from industry.
How the oil industry made us doubt climate change
By Phoebe Keane
BBC NewsAs climate change becomes a focus of the US election, energy companies stand accused of trying to downplay their contribution to global warming. In June, Minnesota’s Attorney General sued ExxonMobil, among others, for launching a “campaign of deception” which deliberately tried to undermine the science supporting global warming. So what’s behind these claims? And what links them to how the tobacco industry tried to dismiss the harms of smoking decades earlier?
To understand what’s happening today, we need to go back nearly 40 years.
Marty Hoffert leaned closer to his computer screen. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. It was 1981, and he was working in an area of science considered niche.
“We were just a group of geeks with some great computers,” he says now, recalling that moment.
But his findings were alarming.
“I created a model that showed the Earth would be warming very significantly. And the warming would introduce climatic changes that would be unprecedented in human history. That blew my mind.”
…
But he noticed a clash between Exxon’s own findings, and public statements made by company bosses, such as the then chief executive Lee Raymond, who said that “currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate”.
“They were saying things that were contradicting their own world-class research groups,” said Hoffert.
…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53640382
The article continues on with the usual tired narratives about Exxon, tobacco, industry funding, and the author’s concerns that some scientists have political views the author appears to dislike.
But what I love about Phoebe’s opening statements is how neatly she inadvertently encapsulates all that I believe is wrong with alarmist climate predictions.
“We were just a group of geeks with some great computers”
Untold billions wasted, millions of people needlessly frightened, because of the fearful prognostications of a bunch of geeks playing computer games, geeks who created a set of models which arguably have never demonstrated useful predictive skill.
Only climate science appears to accept the output of broken, poorly performing, error ridden computer models at face value. Everyone else prefers to thoroughly test their computer models before they get excited by the output.
Even the data climate models are based on is questionable, as study after study has demonstrated.
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You know the BBC is wrong because they are acting as cheerleaders for one outcome over another.
If the BBC or any media entity for that matter was, as they are suppose to be, impartial, simply reporting facts and questioning hypothesis. There could be no challenge to this point.
To support a position that opposition to the Man Made Climate Change theory is ideological and support of that theory is not is simply “rooting for your team to win and supporting a disparate use of penalty flags.
The BBC is always right. That’s why they don’t allow comments on their website. No comment could be more right than the BBC post, and it would only confuse readers … 🙂
ABC in Australia is the same – what is it with taxpayer funded news services?
Their prime imperative is “keep the money coming.”
CBC in canada is not allowed to have a broadcast without some nod to the “climate emergency”.
Fully bought and paid for, very ideologically left
It all adds to the growing feeling in the west, “We’re not part of this”. If sentiment in British Columbia ever moves that way as well, Canada as Canada is toast.
…
opposition tosupport for climate change is idealogical …Never forget that the BBC’s explicit policy is that the alarmist viewpoint should not be balanced by the skeptical viewpoint. Defund the Beeb.
Note there is no evidence provided, simply the assurance that failure to believe is heretical! This is the same stunt pulled by faith healers the world over… YE ARE HEEYULLED!!! you shall have no more diabetes, ever! And so the believer wants to show his friends that he’s healed, does a quick blood sugar check, and when he finds it out of range, the healer replies, “But your faith wavered! If you had retained your faith, you would have had no need to check your blood sugar!” And that more than anything proves environmentalism has become a religion, even a cult, where heretics shall be shunned! Cast out! Canceled!
…it’s classic gaslighting
The BBC held a secret “training seminar” with climate activists in 2006, during which they agreed to ignore their statutory charter rule of impartiality when reporting on ‘climate change’. The meeting was so secret the BBC even refused FOI requests for a list of attendees or a report of the discussions.
From that date on, the BBC has not allowed airtime or debate with any scientist if they question the percentage of global warming attributable to humans. Climate change propaganda can be found in virtually all their output and they regularly name call and belittle anyone not agreeing with their climate religion group think.
https://www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/booker-bbc.pdf
The early, very important problems and the root of all later problems in climate science are: 1) science; and 2) “I created a model that showed the Earth would be warming very significantly.” Models are not science and the consensus via modeling is not science. The IPCC approach is to qualify a series of forecasts made by running similar but subtly different models. But there is no substantiating so call proof, they are created and selected as “good” by people, actually an enormous number of people that are hugely vested in the climate science story is doomsday and manmade line. I personally believe climate change is real but like to stand back and question narratives. Just how big is the climate change industry including university departments, international organizations, large political related efforts – congress, lobbying, protesters (including what’s her name… Greta Thunberg who has been very significantly and shamefully manipulated by the climate crowd.
Danley,
It has been mathematically proved that the global climate models are based on the wrong atmospheric dynamical system. They must now explain how they supposedly can obtain the right answer with the wrong equations, let alone with the large continuum errors from excessive dissipation and discontinuous and inaccurate parameterizations. I include the following comment I posted earlier.
The only way any results from a climate model could be trusted are:
The continuum errors in both the dynamical and physical equations approximated by the model are smaller than the truncation errors of an accurate (almost convergent) numerical solution.
Now let us discuss each of these requirements in detail.
1. All current global climate models are approximating the wrong dynamical system (the hydrostatic system) of equations. This has been mathematically proved in my peer reviewed manuscript that appears in the September issue of the journal Dynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans and in another thread on this site.
2. The physical equations are approximated by discontinuous parameterizations that have large continuum errors and that violate the necessary requirements that the continuum solution be expandable into a Tayor series. The necessary unrealistically large
dissipation needed to prevent the model from blowing up due to these discontinuities leads to a large continuum error and destroys the numerical accuracy as shown by the Browning, Hack, and Swarztrauber cited in the above manuscript.
3. As the requirements for a numerical method to converge to an accurate approximation of the continuum equations are violated, the numerical solution will never be close to the true solution.
So, in layperson’s terms, climate models are sh!t then.
Seems about right.
Philinca,
My peer reviewed manuscript was reviewed by a well known atmospheric dynamicist and in the end even he agreed with the mathematics that the system in use by climate modelers is wrong. That is just the first of the many serious mistakes that the modelers have made. Using discontinuous forcing (parameterizations) means that the continuum solution is not differentiable
and that means that the requirements to apply a numerical approximation
are violated. And the use of excessive dissipation leads to a continuum error that means they are solving a fluid closer to molasses than air.
Jerry
The oil industry had nothing to do with it. The incessant spewing of lies from EVERY “news” source and leftist politician makes people doubt humans are destroying the climate. Add to that the unending stream of lies spewed forth by “scientists” and of course no sane person believes any of this crap.
We have seen that the AGW collaborators that troll this site are totally incapable of providing any evidence at all that shows that human CO2 has cause ANY of the slight but highly beneficial warming since the LIA.
Its all just suppository nonsense.
Another morning low of 30 here in western PA, and the “warming in the 15 day forecast looks quite anemic. Winter be on the way, with a vengeance, just like it always comes around this time of year. Just not this early.
If Hoffert’s model was so great why did they not include it in the article along with a comparison to the reality of the last 40 years?
“It was 1981….” And forty years later we’re all here and all is well.
If Hoffert’s model was so prescient then they would have included its predictions in the article compared to what has actually happened over the last 40 years.
The trouble is that Big Gas (the other face of Big Oil) absolutely loves the climate change narrative. Gas is a low value, hard to handle fuel that is dangerous to have in quantity. Gas does however fit very nicely as a rapid response power backup for unreliable energy. So, if you manage to demonise dirty coal then you have knocked out your major power generation competitor.
Get idiot politicians to tax us to pay for all of this nonsense so that they can virtue signal how well they are “saving the planet” and what could possibly go wrong? Remember the scene in Braveheart where Robert the Bruce asks his father why they are betraying William Wallace? Backing both sides is a winning strategy for Big Oil.
Logic problem Philip. They could have the whole electrical generating field on the basis of having the lowest cost dispatchable power without renewables. Anyway renewables are only a few percent of the power makeup so if they went away, gas would still be preferred.
Finally, gas producers are not designing and building turbines. The abundance of gas is what it is and power producers buy it because it is cheap in operating AND capital costs. If coal producers want to give the coal away it would be dominant again.
Gary,
Climate Change is all about Machiavellianism.
“The term Machiavellianism was coined by psychologists Christie and Geis in the 1970s as an attempt to explain the manifestation of power motive by exploiting and manipulating others in a deceitful and unscrupulous fashion.”
https://thequintessentialmind.com/philosophy-machiavelli-tactics/
How lack of Climate Change made us doubt Climate Change.
What is normally quoted as evidence is extreme weather events. However people in their 70’s have seen worse before. Also, these events are usually a one shot deal – you don’t see the same events repeating in the same place at the same time year after year.
Rain stopped play for two days in a row at an Old Trafford test match is not evidence of climate change.
I remember the devastating damage, fifty years ago, when some ten inches of rain fell in one night – normally a year’s rain – and swept through the town and my parents’ shop. The town was in a dry river bed with no recorded history of this kind of flood and none have occurred since. However, journalists and a seventeen year old Swede, that are still wet behind their ears, tell us they know better.
https://youtu.be/vTlYYlRN0LY
Good to see that projections made at that time were grossly exaggerated.
So Jackass.
Shell were wrong, but did manage to heavily promote OIL and Natural Gas over coal…
There has been no damage due to human caused “climate change”
And you know you cannot prove there has been.
You can’t even find any scientific evidence of warming by human released atmospheric CO2.
In what way has the global climate changed in the last 50 years , that can be scientifically proven to caused by human anything.
How is life at the bottom of Graham’s hierarchy?
Jack Dale dodges questions he can’t answer.
Typical green shill.
That’s pathetic even from you, jackass.
Try again… once you crawl out from your green slime sewer.
In what way has the global climate changed in the last 50 years , that can be scientifically proven to be caused by human anything.
I seem to recall him saying he had a Ph.D. Quite possibly entitled “Studies in the Art of Dodging Simple Questions”.
Now Dick Dale would be worth listening to:
Classic strat through a Fender “Showman” cranked to 11.
“Let’s Go Tripin” “Miserlou” “Moon Dawg” ….,
Yeah, I could dig that. I’d even crank up Barney, my faithful B-3 and comp
Poor jackass….. refuting the point is at the TOP of the triangle.
You seem ignorant of even that. !
You actually missed the triangle completely..
…. does it have a waste outlet underneath, that you inhabit?
So dispassionate, so persuasive. What a thoughtful contribution.
Yes, jackass should really try harder, and not be such a sad-sack of s***
1.. Do YOU have any evidence for warming by atmospheric CO2, Loy??
2.. In what way has the global climate changed in the last 50 years , that can be scientifically proven to be caused by human anything.
2.. In what way has the global climate changed …?
Big up-tick in meaningful, thought-provoking comments by witty, courteous, urbane gentlemen like your good self. Dazzling. Keep up the good work.
Thanks, loy,
…. for confirming that the global climate has NOT CHANGED in any way that is provable caused by humans.
Thanks also for confirming that there is no evidence of warming by human released CO2.
You are doing a great job. 🙂
I mean, if a scientific giant like you think you are, can’t provide any evidence……
……. pretty sure there isn’t any.. wouldn’t you agree 😉
Would any evidence sway you Fred? If so, what might it look like?
Your childish attempt at distraction and evasion are getting quite hilarious.
If you don’t know what actual science is, no-one can help you.
poor sad loopy-loy !!
Is it just me, or have our trolls given up on trying to actually argue points of fact and logic?
Seems the best they can do lately is insult, duck and weave.
Evidence that the Earth is warmer than the average of the last 10K years would be a good start.
Pointing out that the earth has warmed up from the coldest period in the last 10000+ years is not impressive.
I couldn’t stomach the whole thing, after I saw them “discuss” how the temperature was rising through the 1930’s, then immediately skip over to the 1980’s completely eliminating the 1940’s and 1970’s cooling! As it stands now, no one can find any Anthropogenic Global Warming outside of computer models and Urban Heat Island Effect, and a record of the surface temperature over the last 80± years using only thermometers that are certifiably free from UHI can’t even find any Global Warming! And nobody can find any Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming anywhere!!!
“Only climate science appears to accept the output of broken, poorly performing, error ridden computer models at face value.”
Climate science needs a better computer model. Here’s one for them to try out
Return to Earth: A New Mathematical Model of the Earth’s Climate
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342109625_Return_to_Earth_A_New_Mathematical_Model_of_the_Earth's_Climate
The infiltration of the major resources companies ( including oil companies) by left wing climate activists is extremely comprehensive and widespread whether this is via board and CEO appointments or by activist shareholders. Yet the climate industry seems to continue with the tired narrative that the oil industry is funding campaigns of sceptical scientists.
The money flows to the alarmists from the resources sector goes almost all in one direction to the alarmists and in Australia the biggest companies ( BHP and RIO) have been firmly ensconced with the green ideology of climate change alarmism. Globally it is also interesting to see how many major private donors to the climate cause have made all or part of their fortune from oil.
The question no one ever asks is, has the climate changed where you live in your lifetime? I’ve lived in western Canada all my life, and I’m 68. The winters are milder than they once were, but the summers are noticeably warmer. Have changes in the climate hurt me in any way? No.
Of course the alarmists just say, you can’t predict the future from the past. Meaning that sudden, drastic change is on the way, and so far so good is not a reasonable basis for preparation for future events. So they’ve got you. “What if something bad happens?” is all the justification you need to destroy successful energy production now and replace it with strange new production measures that obviously can’t work.
This argument reminds me of proactive defence measures against earthquakes. I took a Geology course in the seventies, and the professor confidently told us that there would be a catastrophic earthquake in Los Angeles within twenty years. Why would he say that? Well, earthquakes happen. We can’t predict when they will happen, but we can say categorically that they will happen. Why twenty years? Well, it was just a number he said off the top of his head. If he turned out to be wrong, nobody was going to remember or care what he said twenty years ago. That is similar to the level of the science predicting climate change.
“The question no one ever asks is, has the climate changed where you live in your lifetime?”
Hang on, I thought the climate and temperature were the same all over the planet hence climate change?
The UK? No change really. All sorts of weather in the same day. Average annual temperature still about 9C.
Ian
I question that summers are warmer
I see steady trend to cooler and wetter here in calgary over last 15 years
Was pretty hot and dry 82 to late 90s then started to shift
As to winters, definitely used to be more snow
But February 2019 set record for consecutive days below -20c, all kinds on broken water mains that spring
Hello, Pat. I typed the wrong thing. (I’m elderly) I meant to say that the winters (in Edmonton) are milder but the summers are NOT noticeably warmer. The computer will tell you the second you spell something wrong, but not when you type something stupid. Sigh.
If they did the climate modellers would be out of a job
The lack of supporting data capable of withstanding honest scientific scrutiny has made me doubt anthropogenic climate change.
With the irony, of course, being that if some supporting data does ever emerge from the background, this site will be the first place where you will find it.
What sort of data would sway you David? Are you talking about temperature data?
Poor loopy-loy..
…. now admitting it doesn’t have a clue what scientific evidence is.
So funny 🙂
Un-tampered and smeared, non-UHI temperature data shows that warming only occurs at El Nino events.
No evidence of any human cause whatsoever.
1.. Do YOU have any evidence for warming by atmospheric CO2 ?
2.. In what way has the global climate changed in the last 50 years , that can be scientifically proven to be caused by human anything.
STILL waiting……… and laughing at your clownish antics.
At a minimum, you would need to provide evidence that anything that has happened in the last 100 years is in any way, shape or form unusual in the last 10,000 years.
….. AND that humans have caused this “unusual”.
LIA was unusually COLD, and the planet is just a small bump out of that cold anomaly.
The BBC must think ordinary people are stupid and unable to comprehend what climate change is all about. Many of us have lived in very different climate zones, experienced bitter cold and blazing heat, seen floods and droughts, fierce gales and days with no wind. Our views do not depend on what oil companies say or on artificial academic models. Our frame of reference comes from careful empirical observations including those by our parents, grandparents and their parents – sometimes even recorded in meticulously kept journals (sadly an abandoned habit). It comes from seeing fifty years of ludicrous and alarmist predictions by experts working in ivory towers.
The British colonists who settled Australia experienced an abrupt climate change of at least +10C, yet most of their farm staples thrived in their new habitat. Some of the new animals like rabbits thrived a little too well.
Alarmists have never made a convincing argument to explain why 1-2C or even 4-5C warming would make such a difference.
Climate Change In My Life
Born in Utah and raised in western Montana. I lived in the Bitterroot before spotted knapweed. Came to Bozeman for school in 66-hotter, drier summers and colder winters than Hamilton. Lots of my classmates moved to Southeast Asia for a while after school. I never met one of them that preferred that climate but it wasn’t the change of climate that killed several of them. Worked in north east Montana for a while still more extreme heat and cold. Several friends went to work in Iran in the 70s. They complained about the heat and sand storms but got out before the ayatollahs took over. I went to Alaska and worked north of the Brooks Range. That was an extreme climate. Nearly all of the chopper pilots that serviced the pipeline construction had been trained by the army and flown in Vietnam. Every one I ever asked preferred the climate in Toolik to that in Saigon. Back in the Gallatin in the 80s. Not much climate change since school in 1970 – maybe a little less extreme winters and summers. Still several days over 100 in the summer and a half dozen or more below -30 in the winters. It is noticeably milder here now but the precipitation and wind patterns seem mostly the same to me. Everywhere I went there were folks that called it home and would not want to live in Bozeman but I was always glad to return and never noticed much climate change since my previous visit.
I can not accept that there is a climate emergency based on my experience and have to question any effort aimed at turning the climate back to 1850.
I submitted this to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle as a letter to the editor but they rejected it.
The left has taken over the schools and universities precisely so that they can churn out individuals that are stupid and unable to understand even the most basic of science.
There are no climate computer models.
They are only computer games.
They predict whatever their owners want predicted.
There is no attempt to make accurate predictions.
The predictions do not get more accurate over time.
One Russian model seems to make decent predictions by predicting more of the same (mild, harmless global warming) so the mainstream media ignores that model.
There would have to be a precise climate physics model as the foundation of a real climate model
No such climate change physics model exists.
Therfore, no real climate model is possible.
The assertion that only man made CO2 matters. and natural causes of climate change do not, is an unproven and unbelievable claim. For that to be true, 4.5 billion years of natural causes of climate change would have had to end in the 20th century. Yet no climate alarmist bothers to explain why that would happen, or how that could happen.
Meanwhile, we are told that, even with very haphazard measurements, the climate was perfect in about 1750, and any change from then is bad news. That’s a theory for morons. People living in 1750 thought the climate was too cold, since about 1650.
The headline:
“BBC: “How the oil industry made us doubt climate change”
. . . makes me ask whom the “us” is.
Sounds as though the “us” claims to have been brainwashed.
George Romney, running for President, said he had been “brainwashed” by government officials. Big mistake. Smart folks are not supposed to allow their brain to be washed. He soon dropped out of the race.
How soon can we expect the BBC to close up?
In case you were wondering, Martin Hoffert is from New York City!
“We were just a group of geeks with some great computers,”
And that is still all they are. !
Glorified computer gamers.. nothing more.
““currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate”. ”
So, absolutely ZERO progress in climate science.
Still absolutely zero real evidence.
“Marty Hoffert leaned closer to his computer screen. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. It was 1981, and he was working in an area of science considered niche. We were just a group of geeks with some great computers,” he says now, recalling that moment. But his findings were alarming. I created a model that showed the Earth would be warming very significantly. And the warming would introduce climatic changes that would be unprecedented in human history. That blew my mind.”
In 1981, Marty says they had some great computers. Well, I think Pong and Pac-Man were about the state of the art computer games then, and computing power was a mere fraction of todays computing power compared to my Apple iPhone and watch, and we can’t even really do clouds yet in climate modelling.
He should of started off his diatribe with “It was a dark and stormy night and Marty leaned closer to his computer screen in horror. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.”
Some 275,000 households in the UK didn’t pay the BBC tax last year resulting in a GBP40million drop in revenue. The UK Govn’t also dropped their OAP (Old Age Pensioner) subsidy too, which was worth about GBP175million annually. The BBC are sacking older, but very well liked presenters, in favour of younger, more diverse and more “woke” ones. There is a strong drive to defund the BBC, decriminalise the license fee and it looks like it will happen sooner than most think.
I don’t think you can decriminalise the license fee. It is, and always will be, criminal to charge for the sad sack of [expletive deleted] that the BBC is these days, and had been for decades.
From my file of quotes and smart remarks:
What is the global climate?
leitmotif asks: What is the global climate?
Ans: some sort of average temperature
Two days ago I commented on Paul Homewood’s site to a similar idea.
. . . within the current “existential crisis” the temperature concept is the “climate” definer. This is why so much effort, technology, and money has been spent on everything from treemonitors to stalagmites to satellites.
The Köppen-Geiger classification of areas via vegetation types (Köppen was an experienced botanist) was based on what types of vegetation grow where. Doing this for all of Earth is too costly and a bit subjective, so simple physical parameters became widely used, and modified.
I live east of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. We get 7-9 inches of precipitation, a lot of that as winter snow. Winters are cold and summers are hot. An ecotone is a transition area between two biological communities. We live where forested mountains give way (going east) to Sagebrush/Steppe.
Earth’s average temperature, if such exists, is not of great concern to the plants that have been growing here for the last 10,000 years.
There is no sense trying to communicate with the “Climate Cult” researchers and activists using the term climate as proposed by Köppen.
See: Humpty Dumpty Theory of Language
“As climate change becomes a focus of the US election….”
I love it when they lie in the first sentence. It saves me so much time.
Big Oil made me doubt “Global Warming” (aka “Climate Change)?
Oddly enough, in my personal story, it was The Weather Channel, Al Gore that prompted me to look up the record highs and lows for my little spot on the globe. That was back in 2007. (Most record highs were set before 1950 and most record lows after 1950.)
I “found” WUWT in 2012.
That prompting me to compare the then record highs and lows didn’t match the old records. (And bore some the the readers with lists of my little spot on the globe’s 2007 vs 2012 lists.)
“Big Oil” had nothing to do with it.
The BBC is the socialist propaganda arm of the defunct communist movement in Britain, though they haven’t realized it yet. I await the Sturm und Drang when they no longer receive license fees.