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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Eric
You noted that the BBC feels, “scientists who express doubts about extreme climate claims have been corrupted by their political beliefs.” Funny how only skeptics can be corrupted.
The comment about geeks with great computers jumped out at me too. Has the guy ever heard of garbage in garbage out.
Yup, when your programming is truly deficient in mimicking a complex reality, ‘great’ computers only deliver the predictive garbage faster. And leftists regularly unintentionally reveal their own secret conduct as they whine about asserted methods their opposition unfairly employs.
Anyone recall years of claims of Russian collusion in the last American presidential election issued by the ‘progressive’ candidate and know just who it turned out was using Russian sourced slanders against a confirmed capitalist’s campaign, all the while blaming them for so improbably engaging in common cause with the former head of the Soviet KGB? These are quite reliable liars because they have no fundamental hesitation about doing so. What they don’t get is the eventual reaction to them of those who do.
Clearly, the oil industry is responsible for the models being wrong… /Sarc?
“I created a model that showed the Earth would be warming very significantly. ”
Of course you did. No computer model, or any program for that matter, will ever show you more than it was programmed to do. They are not magic portals into the future. The programmers simply coded it to give them the answers they wanted to see. They wanted a computer program to blow their minds, and that’s what they designed and built. Sorry guys, next time ask Madam Marie to tell your fortunes.
It never fails to amaze me that people think “models” are unbiased science, rather than a reflection of the biases of the people who build them.
Which is why the should always be tested for predictive ability, and the assumptions/logic scrutinised.
‘The BBC is continuing to push their narrative that opposition to climate change is ideological, and that scientists who express doubts about extreme climate claims have been corrupted by their political beliefs or by funding from industry’
but that is ABSOLUTELY the case: climate skeptics posting here are primarily posting a political opinion, that climate change is a leftist political activity…
And if I had had my coffee this morning, I can post you a long, long list of fossil fuel funding of climate skepticism and some undoubted cases where political belief informs the ‘results’ of scientific ‘research’.
Go on then Griff, post the list. We all like a good laugh.
I didn’t get back here yesterday and I still haven’t had any coffee today…
But let’s see…
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-money-funds-climate-change-denial-effort/
“The study, by Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle, is the first academic effort to probe the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the climate denial movement.
It found that the amount of money flowing through third-party, pass-through foundations like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital, whose funding cannot be traced, has risen dramatically over the past five years.
In all, 140 foundations funneled $558 million to almost 100 climate denial organizations from 2003 to 2010.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/25/fossil-fuel-firms-are-still-bankrolling-climate-denial-lobby-groups
https://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-institute-exposed-internal-documents-unmask-heart-climate-denial-machine
And a little nugget in here:
https://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-funding-disinformation-echo-chamber
Citing all the FAKE and FARCE in the gruniad and from desmog..
Comments on “disinformation” from those two FAR-LEFT political echo chambers.. ROFLMAO
And then trying to spin that AGW is not a political motivated farce…
No wonder your comments have below ZERO-CREDIBILITY, griff
Funding for AGW collaborators is several MAGNITUDES MORE.
Again..
Please tell us what is “denied” that you have solid scientific proof for.
There is no such thing as a “climate denial organisation” except ones that YOU keep citing.
They are the ones DENYING climate changes naturally.
HeartLand is just trying to get the truth out there.
You should try it some time.. except that you can’t face the truth.
And the list of renewable funding to climate collaborators is at least 2-3 magnitudes more..
Your comment yet again, slaps you in YOUR face.
Do you have any evidence of warming by atmospheric CO2 ????
Nothing “political” about it.. just MISSING science.
Let’s deal with JUST the science, then griff.
1.. Do you have any empirical scientific 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. ??
Science griff.. do at least try.
You can just google it.
There is ample evidence from respected and long established scientific institutions on temperatures, climate patterns, ice, extreme weather.
I recommend especially the NSIDC on arctic ice.
the basics of how CO2 operates has been known since Arrhenius’s time. If anyone can disprove the atmospheric physics, you go do it – you’ll get a Nobel prize.
NSIDC shows a drop from the extreme high of 1979, a meaninglessly short period of time.
There is ample evidence that current sea ice levels are still FAR higher than most of the last 10,000 years.
You could google it, you know… rather than DENYING it.
Great to see you STILL faffing around avoiding producing any evidence of warming by atmospheric CO2. Its almost as if YOU KNOW that there isn’t any.
Arrhenius worked with glass jars..he showed that CO2 was a radiative gas…
He made a baseless UNPROVEN assumption of atmospheric warming, .
SCIENCE has progressed since then, and balloon data has now shown that warming by atmospheric CO2, if there is any, is basically immeasurable.
It has NEVER been observed or measured anywhere in the atmosphere, existing only in erroneous theory and models.
And since then NO-ONE has been able to actually produce any scientific evidence that it doe.
Do you live in a glass jar.?
… more likely the bottom of a glass bottle, would explain your stunted brain development
You are welcome to produce some actual evidence..
… or just keep up your mindless yabbering
griffool = ZERO-SCIENCE and ZERO-EVIDENCE
“You can just google it.”
And apparently you CAN’T.
Otherwise you would do it. !
Its your fantasy, up to you to provide the evidence.
You are such a moronic putz, griff. !!
Skeptics posting here are merely asking alarmists like yourself, bbc, abc, Forbes, etc, to show empirical evidence that CO2 from human activities leads climate change. All you and others like you have produced so far, are correlations, proxy data, models, projections, but no proof. You can’t be taken seriously and are dismissed as a troll because you fail to produce scientific evidence, but politicise the issue whenever you run out of rational arguments.
Why would climate change corrupt our judgement Griff?
Most of us are fans of nuclear power. There is unequivocal evidence nuclear power is a viable option – France converted most of their fossil fuel plants to nuclear in the 1970s without breaking the bank, they kept costs down by mass producing standardised components for the reactors.
When I first started reading about climate claims, I thought “great, they’re going to build more nuclear plants”. It didn’t occur to me to question the science until I realised greens were telling us the world is facing a climate catastrophe, but nuclear is still out of the question. The sheer irrationality of that position prompted me to dig a little deeper.
I’m not necessarily questioning your judgement – I’m pointing out that your position is political, not science based. Would you like to count the posts mentioning leftists or communists? The frequent articles and posts from a right wing Republican viewpoint?
We agree completely that AGW is a far-left political construct, not based on any real science.
Thanks for the agreeing with us, griffool. !
“I’m pointing out that your position is political, not science based.”
The height of irony from a SCIENCE-DENYING far-left idea log. !
How can you look in a mirror after making that idiotic comment, griff..
… except to preen yourself, of course.
No such list exists, which is why griff is inventing excuses for not providing it.
Wrong as usual, Griffendope. Classic case of projection, since Climate Belief is ideological, and emotion-based.
So some guy made a model in 1984 and he “couldn’t believe what he saw”. Maybe he couldn’t believe it because it was acutally BS.
Anyone working on a “great computer” in 1981 would likely have access to a mainframe IBM or a Vax 11/780 or similar.
My current smartphone probably has significantly more computer power than either of those computer systems back then.
I recall that on the Vax 11/780 I started working on in 1984, we had up to 40 users logged in simultaneously. It could take 30 minutes just to login, never mind edit a file and submit it to the batch queue. Data was processed tape-to-tape – the entire system had a scratch disk for the batch queues with 20 Mb of capacity.
You read that right. 20 Mb was the entirety of available hard disk for everything on that system.
ThinkingScientist – I went to work for DEC in 1985. The VAX 11/780 and 785 were very big deals in those days. All of the computer science programs in the country were looking to upgrade from their PDP 11s. And then DEC added clustering and LAT terminal servers and routers and the internet was just taking off. Good times, good times. I’m at the end of my career in IT all these years later. It was a lot more fun in those days.
Just to be clear, here is the list of the 30 “best scientific experts” (according to the BBC Trust) whom the BBC invited to the notorious 2006 seminar which resulted in the BBC’s catastrophic decision to abandon objective reporting of climate change. The BBC spent tens of thousands of pounds on legal fees successfully attempting to stop the names being published as the result of FOI requests, only for it to be discovered that the BBC had already published the names themselves. Here they are:
Robert May, Oxford University and Imperial College London
Mike Hulme, Director, Tyndall Centre, UEA
Blake Lee-Harwood, Head of Campaigns, Greenpeace
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen
Michael Bravo, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Andrew Dlugolecki, Insurance industry consultant
Trevor Evans, US Embassy
Colin Challen MP, Chair, All Party Group on Climate Change
Anuradha Vittachi, Director, Oneworld.net
Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation
Claire Foster, Church of England
Saleemul Huq, IIED
Poshendra Satyal Pravat, Open University
Li Moxuan, Climate campaigner, Greenpeace China
Tadesse Dadi, Tearfund Ethiopia
Iain Wright, CO2 Project Manager, BP International
Ashok Sinha, Stop Climate Chaos
Andy Atkins, Advocacy Director, Tearfund
Matthew Farrow, CBI
Rafael Hidalgo, TV/multimedia producer
Cheryl Campbell, Executive Director, Television for the Environment
Kevin McCullough, Director, Npower Renewables
Richard D North, Institute of Economic Affairs
Steve Widdicombe, Plymouth Marine Labs
Joe Smith, The Open University
Mark Galloway, Director, IBT
Anita Neville, E3G
Eleni Andreadis, Harvard University
Jos Wheatley, Global Environment Assets Team, DFID
Tessa Tennant, Chair, AsRia
Really?
Yes, really.
See Andrew Montford’s 28-gate investigation at Bishophill. The BBC refused to divulge the names. A pensioner took them to court, the BBC fielded 5 barristers. At the same time Mauricio Osorio (?) then found online that the conference organizers had accidentally posted the delegate list, making the court case moot.
On the basis of these “best scientific experts” the BBC secretly decided to prevent any sceptic views as they considered they gave “false balance” in the climate narrative.
BBC policy since 2007.
I formerly complained, took it all the way to the BBC Trust (highest possible level of complaint). Totally dismissive at all stages. The BBC is beyond the pale really. They are out of control and basically do what they like. Scary power to have in a broadcaster with so much income, all guaranteed by law, with no means to hold them to account.
MP’s won’t go near criticising the BBC in case they are accused of trying to “muzzle them” or interfere with the free press.
Which of these has a vested interest (grant money) in AGW? Are any of these specialists in partial differential equations or numerical analysis? I do not recognize any of them as such.
Jerry
The problem with the BBC is the method of financing it. Many American readers may not realize how it works.
In the UK you need government permission to watch broadcast TV. If you watch it without having such a permission in the form of a license you are committing a criminal offense.
Recently there was an exemption for over 75s, which has now ended. This exemption however was to the payment, not to the requirement for a license. It seems incredible in a Western democracy, but it was true: lawfully to watch TV, even if you were exempt from the tax and none was due, you still needed permission from the government.
The fee for this license is a form of taxation. The proceeds of this tax go to the BBC. So basically it is a criminal offense in the UK to watch broadcast TV without paying the BBC.
It is a totally wrong system. It cannot be right to have to obtain written government permission, under pain of criminal prosecution, to do something as ordinary as watch TV. No matter how you want to fund the BBC, the present method is simply wrong.
They might as well require permits to read books, join libraries or a gym, go for walks, listen to music, access the Internet, use a PC or smartphone. Grow vegetables. Eat in a restaurant.
It is that bad. To be allowed to do a perfectly ordinary activity you have to get government permission.
No matter how people want to fund the BBC, this is wrong. They absolutely need to decriminalize it.
“michel September 21, 2020 at 1:46 am
It is a totally wrong system.”
It was perfect for the time. In 1922 (Radio), today? Not so much.
It was never a good system, as evidenced by countries that never implemented it.
It was always designed to make sure that ensure that the population could never get away from government propaganda.
You need to go look up the history because you are wrong with your assertion.
Sounds like something out of North Korea, being criminal activity to watch a TV broadcast without a licence. I guess a hangover from WW2 when everything was controlled and rationed. I once read that was one of the inspirations for George Orwell’s 1984 state control of everything, similar to the USSR. Similar to the Nazi law about being caught listening to a BBC radio broadcast during WW2.
But that people would put up with that in peace time is mind boggling. Sheeple is the first thing that comes to mind, that the population is so weak as to allow later state propaganda like ‘climate science’ to become official state broadcast pseudoscience that spreads like a cancer to the rest of the world. I suppose it could be worse…a bullet in the head when you are caught watching the illegal unauthorized TV reception without a licence. I’d like to see any Gov’t try that in Texas. There would be a revolution and anyone proposing that would have their head handed to them.
In Tejas? Radio X, babee. Texicans are hard to shut up. And when all of them oppose you it gets sticky, fast.
I’m currently reading why trust science which from what I can make out so far appears to believe that a wide range of views must be included in the scientific process, but then it contradicts that by justifying why non experts, or non relevant experts and those who might, in their view, have an interest in distorting the science in order to prevent or arrive at certain conclusions must be excluded.
If we look at engineering where mistakes are more obvious and cannot be swept under the carpet, and the lessons engineering and the wider system has to learn and implement, I think peer review, consensus, experts do not significantly feature in the answer as to why trust engineering (e.g. aviation, automotive), it is more about lessons learned, procedures, independent audit, certifications. I think we should add supplier/customer interactions. Each customer has to be sceptical that what they are buying will do what it says on the tin because there is a lot at stake if it fails or you waste your time, money, effort on something you don’t need. Each customer may not be an expert in designing and manufacturing the product they are buying but the supplier has to listen to them. I think we often learn in engineering that mistakes happen the apparent consensus of experts said could not happen or was not their fault and often it takes those “non expert” customers further down the supplier/customer chain to make us see the real problem. I think this is a major factor improving product reliability and safety particularly in aviation and automotive.
If those in and supporting climate science want to discount the views of sceptics because they think there is a conflict of interest, doesn’t that work both ways so they must be included to bring balance and to exclude them is a dangerous mistake.
Shouldn’t we perhaps instead be seeing oil companies as a most important customer of climate science; they are trying to supply our energy needs so they need a correct assessment to make the correct decisions for our benefit. I presume in order to survive in a competitive environment they must be very good in many scientific fields, how to question their own scientists and take or go against their advice. And therefore they could well be asking the right sort of questions, making important suggestions and have a lot of very useful knowledge climate science could learn from about science and how to do or use it. i.e. just as in engineering a new customer may teach you a lot about how to do engineering, new approaches to finding the faults in your product, challenge your assumptions so you don’t make dangerous mistakes, climate science should be seeking to work with them and learn from them, not treat them as enemies.
Models are crap. Computer geeks are crap. Crap plus crap equals more crap.
It’s global cooling that’s the killer. Not much fun living under a mile thick glacier, unless you’re some kind of an ice fetishisist.
Would you be willing to give up everything that has been developed by models?
Would you be willing to live life without any product that is being provided with assistance from computers?
Or are you just a hate filled nut case?
MarkW,
When computers are used judiciously they are wonderful tools. Unfortunately the results are often claimed to prove something when all aspects of the model violate all the necessary requirements to do so. That is exactly what the climate modelers have done. I repeat the following post.
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.
G’Day Eric,
A couple of statements attracted my attention in this post.
“As climate change becomes a focus of the US election,…”
really? I thought the focus was ‘orange man bad’ on one side and on electoral fraud and the implications of Biden’s mental health on the other. I don’t recall gullible warming rating much mention this election. Sort of like quite a few recent elections where the cheer-squad wanted us to believe gullible warming was the central issue even as voters demonstrated a massive failure to give a sh!t.
This is the point I would have stopped reading the BBC news article, had I given in to some masochistic urge to insult my intelligence by reading anything those woke whackers say to spin their ‘impartial’ yarns in the first place.
“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…”
Ahem, try telling a Kung-Flu science adviser that.
From today’s latest news on lockdown sceptics in Blighty, https://lockdownsceptics.org/2020/09/21/latest-news-141/#oxford-university-scientists-demolish-government-case-for-second-lockdown .
“…Why is it that the Government is once again in the grip of doom-mongering scientific modellers who specialise in causing panic and little else?…”
Doesn’t that assessment of Kung-Flu modelling sound quite familiar in the context of this post?
I submit that climastrologists and their feeble computer games appear to be in good company down at incompetent panic-merchant’s central. Along with the self-appointed ex-spurts on politics who’ve been consistently predicting the exact opposite result of just about every election or referendum for the last ten years, the wizards who’ve been seeing peak-oil in their crystal balls for over half a century or the ghouls who’ve been wishing for years for a global famine of biblical proportion to prove there are too many people so they can say “I told you so”. It’s unfair to accord climastrologists special mention for their acceptance of broken, poorly performing, error ridden computer models; all the other bullsh!t artistes will feel left out and might need a tax-payer funded safe-space to cry in.
Does anyone know how the outcome of this 2016 complaint against BBC errors and bias ?
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/bbc-trust-complaint-4541.pdf
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/bbctrust-annexes-45361.pdf
You could ask Paul Homewood, it’s his site and he will have made the complaints.
Paul’s the one who thinks Falun gong newsheets are reliable information on the German electricity industry, isn’t he?
Poor griffool,
You are the one that thinks gruniad and other far-left media and “renewables” propaganda reports are reliable information, aren’t you ?
I dunno. It seems epidemiology, tax policy, and econometric models are often dumbed down to the point of failure.
Exactly. Vaccine “science” is more transparently fraudulent than climatology which is superficially consistent. It’s hard for a 12 years old to discuss the merits of the claims of relaxation and vibrational modes and heat transfer and radiation and convexion but easy to debunk the arguments of a medical PhD for hep B vaccine. In fact just tweeting to advocate of the vaccines at different times makes them forget their last take and contradict themselves. (They are extremely dumb.)
It’s easy to write dumb history for dumb people.