Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; The US House of Representatives is apparently being told that the green energy revolution is so fragile, an oil company which expressed a few doubts was enough to derail climate action for decades.
Tracing Big Oil’s PR war to delay action on climate change
BY Alvin Powell Harvard Staff Writer
DATE September 28, 2021Harvard researchers chart evolution from denial to misdirection as House inquiry widens
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee earlier this month widened its inquiry into the oil industry’s role in fostering doubt about the role of fossil fuels in causing climate change. A letter from the panel to Darren Woods, ExxonMobil chief executive, said lawmakers were “concerned that to protect … profits, the industry has reportedly led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change.” The Gazette spoke with Geoffrey Supran, a research fellow in the History of Science, who, together with Naomi Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, published a series of studies in recent years, the most recent one in May, on the climate communications of ExxonMobil, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies.
GAZETTE: Tell me about your research on the oil and gas industry’s role in spreading climate disinformation.
SUPRAN: In 2017, I and Naomi Oreskes published a series of three papers focused on what you might call traditional climate-science denial by ExxonMobil. Then, in May of this year, we shifted gears slightly, releasing a new study looking at the company’s more subtle forms of climate propaganda.
GAZETTE: What kinds of issues do you suspect the House committee will find?
SUPRAN: In 2017, our research was the first peer-reviewed analysis of ExxonMobil’s 40-year history of climate-change communications. And what we discovered was that there were systematic discrepancies between, on the one hand, what Exxon and ExxonMobil scientists said about climate-science privately and in academic circles, versus what Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil said to the general public in The New York Times and elsewhere. That analysis showed that ExxonMobil misled the public about basic climate science and its implications. They did so by contributing quietly to climate science, and loudly to promoting doubt about that science.
Our work and others’ in that area provides evidence for the committee, demonstrating ExxonMobil’s long history of attacking science and scientists in order to undermine and delay climate action. Our more recent work, this May, is an evolution of that study in that it focuses on how, beyond outright disinformation, ExxonMobil has used language to subtly but systematically shape the way the public thinks about climate change, often in misleading ways. That study demonstrates how the company has selectively emphasized some terms and topics in public while consistently avoiding others.
The takeaway message across all of our work is that over and over, ExxonMobil has misled the public about climate change by telling the public one thing and then saying and doing the opposite behind closed doors. Our latest work shows that while their tactics have evolved from outright, blatant climate denial to more subtle forms of lobbying and propaganda, their end goal remains the same. And that’s to stop action on climate change.
…
Read more: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/09/oil-companies-discourage-climate-action-study-says/
So what did Exxon actually know?
Judge for yourself. The following is the 1982 Glaser Report, an internal document prepared for Exxon management, which is commonly cited by “Exxon knew” conspiracy theorists (original document source Inside Climate News).
Consider the “warning” at the bottom of Page 4, continuing to the top of Page 5:
“There is currently no unambiguous evidence that the earth is warming. If the earth is on a warming trend, we’re not likely to detect it before 1995. This is about the earliest projection of when the temperature might rise the 0.5° needed to get beyond the range of normal temperature fluctuations. On the other hand, if climate modelling uncertainties have exaggerated the temperature rise, it is possible that a carbon dioxide induced “greenhouse effect” may not be detected until 2020 at the earliest”.
Imagine you were an Exxon executive in 1982 reading a statement like that. Would you have a) hit the panic button and explained to shareholders you were going to close the company, or b) regarded Glaser 1982 as an interesting scientific document, of little importance to current operations?
At the bottom of Page 5, Glaser 1982 provides advice on the appropriate response;
Overall, the current outlook suggests potentially serious climate problems are not likely to occur until the late 21st century, or perhaps beyond at projected energy demand rates. This should provide time to remove uncertainties regarding the overall carbon cycle and the contribution of fossil fuel combustion as well as the roles of the oceans as a reservoir for both heat and carbon dioxide. It should also allow time to better define the effect of carbon dioxide and other infrared absorbing gases on surface climate. Making significant changes in energy consumption patterns now to deal with this potential problem amid all the scientific uncertainties would be premature in view of the severe impact such moves could have on the world’s economies and societies.
Charges against Exxon that they concealed knowledge of dangerous climate change are clearly false.
Exxon executives received an indication there might be a problem with global warming in the future, but the picture was confused. Some internal reports took an alarmist position, others like Glaser 1982 suggested immediate action would be premature, that the case for immediate action was weak.
Executives had to make a decision based on competing viewpoints, so they chose the more conservative viewpoint. That is what senior executives in a major company do.
Internal documents like Glaser mostly provided a review of existing public domain scientific knowledge, so the charge that Exxon was concealing something is absurd. The information Glaser summarised in the internal document was public knowledge. Glaser just put existing public knowledge together into a neat document, and supplied an opinion as to the best interpretation of that knowledge.
Glaser advised Exxon it was premature to do do anything radical to address global warming – so Exxon executives chose to follow Glaser’s advice.
Lets not forget, 1982, when Glaser wrote the review for Exxon, was just nine years after the 1973 oil crisis. Exxon executives in 1982 would have felt a strong sense of duty to ensure the reliable supply of oil, to prevent anything like the 1973 oil crisis from ever happening again.
Glaser 1982 advice that climate change might not be a problem to date has been vindicated – nothing bad is happening to the global climate. Even NASA says the world is greening. Observational evidence to date suggests anthropogenic CO2 is good for plant life and food production. The only indication anthropogenic CO2 might not be a good thing is a bunch of defective computer models which have never demonstrated useful predictive skill.
Even today, climate scientists cannot tell us if we have a problem. NASA GISS director Gavin Schmidt recently admitted his climate models are running implausibly hot, and stated that climate scientists cannot just keep ignoring the problem.
… But as climate scientists face this alarming reality, the climate models that help them project the future have grown a little too alarmist. Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast. In advance of the U.N. report, scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong and how to turn the models, which in other respects are more powerful and trustworthy than their predecessors, into useful guidance for policymakers. “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. …
Read more: https://www.science.org/news/2021/07/un-climate-panel-confronts-implausibly-hot-forecasts-future-warming
Renewable energy, the “climate action” most Exxon Knew conspiracy theorists advocate, is a hopelessly flawed solution to a problem which only exists in the output of deeply flawed climate models. Even some greens are recoiling in horror at the wholesale destruction of natural wildernesses which occurs when the renewable entrepreneurs move in.
As the renewable revolution haemorrhages support, and as government attempts to embrace renewables cause very public catastrophic power outages in California, Texas, Britain and even China, remaining advocates desperately need a smokescreen to try to distract the public from the increasingly blatant evidence that renewable energy is a total failure.
Stepping up baseless attacks on Exxon and other oil giants in my opinion is part of a political last ditch stand by the few remaining advocates of the failed green energy revolution
The fossil-fuel-combustion-drives-dangerous-global-warming mantra is a fifty-year-old fraud.
CLIMATE CHANGE, COVID-19, AND THE GREAT RESET
A Climate, Energy and Covid Primer for Politicians and Media
By Allan M.R. MacRae, Published March 21, 2021, Update 1e published May 8, 2021
https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/climate-change-covid-19-and-the-great-reset-update-1e-readonly.docx
THE CATASTROPHIC ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING (CAGW) AND THE HUMANMADE CLIMATE CHANGE CRISES ARE PROVED FALSE
By Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc.(Eng.), M.Eng., January 10, 2020
https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/the-catastrophic-anthropogenic-global-warming-cagw-and-the-humanmade-climate-change-crises-are-proved-false.pdf
THE REAL CLIMATE CRISIS IS NOT GLOBAL WARMING, IT IS COOLING, AND IT MAY HAVE ALREADY STARTED
By Allan M.R. MacRae and Joseph D’Aleo, October 27, 2019
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/10/27/the-real-climate-crisis-is-not-global-warming-it-is-cooling-and-it-may-have-already-started/
“Unbelievable” is a word coming to my mind!
40 year old models should proof anything while modern models fail to overlap with the real world data!?
I see it as a scheme aimed at the judges and juries in various countries to blindly stab for court cases. .if you file enough eventually a few might be victorious
All religions need a devil.
Green Blight! (Khan!)
That said, weather extremes and climate change over tridecadal periods can be completely explained with natural processes and phenomena. The conspiracy theory of carbon and oxygen atoms colluding in what is ostensibly Her Choice is neither required nor helpful. And, in fact, CO2 is a first-order forcing of a lush and viable planet with a net neutral temperature perturbation. Go green. Recycle.
One can argue what ExxonMobile executives and scientists thought or didn’t think about what was then an early emerging thesis about global warming in 1982, just a couple of years after the end of nearly 40 years of global cooling.
The cogent point here is the age old and ongoing slander of any opinion differing from the warmunist narrative as “prima facie” (Latin for “on its face”, or glaringly obvious) illegitimate. In other words, if you offer any dissent it can only be due to you being an illegitimate party merely engaging in propaganda.
This is the oldest trick of the professional propagandist, which is to dodge from having to argue on the basis of facts and data or observations.
This is much like the old lawyers joke (lawyers are of course all professional propagandists):
“When the evidence but not the law is on your side, pound the table and argue the evidence.
When the law but not the evidence is on your side, pound the table and argue the law.
But when neither the evidence or the law is on your side, pound the table”.
The warmunists have been reduced to table pounders.
Finally, some common sense about global warming nonsense.
The only sort of scientist whose opinion on AGW is worth anything is a highly competent atmospheric molecular spectroscopist. Exxon woul have no reason in 1982 to be employing one of these guys Therefore any opinion that the company may have entertained then would be based on ignorance and guesswork
It’s still guesswork. There is no evidence that CO2 is detrimentaly affecting the Earth’s atmosphere. Exxon doesn’t have this evidence, and the Alarmists don’t have this evidence. There is no evidence for this, so claiming “Exxon Knew” is ridiculous, and is assuming something not in evidence.
The true irony being that what “Exxon knew” was a summary of publicly available information. Some “secrets.”
As for all the talk about “propaganda,” that’s classic projection on the Climate Fascists’ part.
If every industry or corporation that the Left doesn’t like were to shut down, the economy would have collapsed a long time ago. Am I the only one who is getting really sick and tired of the Left’s demonization narratives?
I wonder if that which drove the Salem witch hunts in 1692 really died out.
The method is the same, over and over again. Only the particulars change.
<puts on Philosophical Hat and ponders>
I suppose that folks like these actually do serve a purpose in this Big Old World – as a reminder/warning of what its like to waste your life being pointless, bitter, twisted and vindictive.
Thereby most other folks can avoid doing same….
<ends floffosloffikal hat>
still ponders tho
Don’t know how to ‘show you pictures’ unless the artist recorded the stream but: Twitch TV is playing in my background right now.
A Canadian DJ who is ‘the spitting image’ of either/both my twin daughters is playing, ’twas their 30th the day before yesterday.
Just as I joined her ‘Throwback Party’ she was playing ‘Just an Illusion‘ by Imagination
If the stream is available recorded, go to about 4 hours in.
Check out the lyrics to that song – it’s uncanny how it describes Climate Change, esp that Bleeding Heart Guy who just went past, there’s ‘illusion’ for ya, should that be ‘delusion’…
Somebody, somewhere, has a Sense of Humour
So no, in The Real World not an illusion.
Magic, because magic is real.
PS. Stream just ended and was recorded here but only available to ‘subscribers’
Can’t say I didn’t try…..
A spitting image, huh. Pretty girls. A synthesis of mom and dad, right?
I read an interesting article yesterday about twins. Doctors can now tell whether a twin is an identical twin or a fraternal twin. The indentical twins have similar modifications to their DNA.
I didn’t even know this was an issue before reading the article.
One thing I’m curious about is it is common knowledge that if one twin gets injured, the other twin feels it either mentally or physically, or at least, that’s the anectdotal claims. I’ve never met a set of twins that didn’t have a story like this, where they were separated, sometimes at great distances, and yet they were somehow aware of what was going on with their other twin in real time.
So, if that’s true, does this connection exist only between identical twins or does this happen with fraternal twins, too?
The politics based on the climate change hoax reminds me of an Arab saying: the dogs bark but the caravan moves on.
We sceptics are doing the barking.
I spent a little time signing letters for Amnesty International, before I realised that I disagreed with them on some issues. One thing I learned from this was all those individual letters they send might not have much impact individually, but the aggregate effect was significant. Every voice raised in objection increases the chance we shall succeed in stopping them.
And we are having an impact – if people objecting to the green crusade had no impact, there would be no reason for greens to whine COP26 is already looking like a failure.
It looks like Biden’s Green New Deal might also be a failure. Senator Joe Manchin is standing guard at the bridge, and refusing to vote for the $3.5 Trillion porkbarrel spending bill. I may have to give this guy a campaign contribution. He may single-handedly be saving the American dream.
Manchin says we need a “Pause” in spending. Arizona U.S. Senator Sinema may also be a Democrat “No” vote.
It’s so bad that Biden may not even get the $1.5 Trillion infrastructure bill that passed the U.S. Senate but may not pass in the U.S. House because the Democrat radicals are saying if they can’t have the $3.5 Trillion bill, they won’t vote for the $1.5 Trillion infrastructure bill.
It’s looking better all the time. If we can just get the damage delayed about 15 months, then the Republicans will retake Congress and shut Joe Biden and the Democrats down.
I only read the summary but I thought it was very close to my understanding of the situation, not bad considering the report was produced almost forty years ago. Here we are in 2021 and the world is still just fine and looks to be fine for a very long time. CO2 is not the demon it is claimed to be, merely a bit influencer and not worthy of the intense study committed to it.
The planet is fine, but Western civilisation is teetering on the edge of collapse, largely due to ClimateChange™ policy…and the underlying greed and irresponsibility that it is a symptom of.
The Liberal Left has mouthed the falsity that while the planet is in dire trouble, right thinking and a global rest will fix everything.
Unfortunately the planet is fine, but the lack of any thinking, that is lauded and applauded by the Left, has reduced the popoulation to abject dribbling idiocy.
It’s not so much feminization, it is more infantilization. We have been turned from a society of rational beings into one consisting of spoilt brats.
And we are not even allowed to spank them any more.
Back in 2015 the ‘big climate news’ was supposedly how much “Exxon Knew” about the certainty of CAGW. What would be fun to see is an all-inclusive compilation of Exxon docs – with highlighted text – showing everyone just how much Exxon didn’t know jack about the certainty of CAGW.
The author of The Black Swan, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, also wrote a follow-on book titled Anti-Fragile. In Anti-Fragile, Taleb correctly describes how top-down, command-directed solutions of public policy are Fragile.
Top-down directed public policies have no support or authority in the market place other than by political diktat. They need the public to accept the manipulation. These structures easily crumble if they are, as usual, counter-factual to the truth. Green energy is counterfactual to the truth. Wind and solar power projects billed as “green” are outright lies. Scams on the middle class to induce energy poverty.
This makes the cram-down public policy for them fragile. Thus the socialists pushing this green lies must maintain the propaganda and lies.
There has been NO dangerous climate change! The planet is greening and the temperatures at high latitudes are becoming slightly warmer; something that virtually every species benefits from!
The greatest dangers at present are the killing of the poor through energy poverty, and the abuse of children by filling their heads with scary tales from the Book of Modeled Climate Catastrophes; the modern day testament of the Climastrologists! Neither would be of much concern were it not for the evil intentions of the Gretatards to increase the maim, murder and abuse in pursuit of their true passion; power at ANY cost!
Climate alarmists have all the rationality of the Bai Den Regime’s border policy where drug mules and human traffickers are given unfettered access to our country; while citizens and green card holders must wait their turn! At least the Border Patrol will have to prove they have received the experimental mRNA treatments, as they are forced to release thousands of untested and unidentified aliens into the hinterland! Maybe they should identify as aliens, too!
Naomi Oreskes serial liar and full greentard
Imagine you were a Pfizer executive in 2021 reading VAERS reports…
————
There was a time I took Congressional Oversight Committee Investigations & Harvard seriously, but now all they are good for is are two minute comedic vignettes on YouTube, as some Democratic Senator has a “Spartacus Moment“.
In another interview Sowell said that Harvard allowed him to do his Senior Thesis on Marxist Economics and when he discovered, after attending the Chicago School of Business under the tutelage of Milton Friedman, that his thesis was completely bogus, he hasn’t returned to Harvard since.
I sometimes wonder if Gavin is repositioning himself, so he can keep his job when this farce is over
The Vicar of Bray alluded to was Simon Alleyn, or Allen, who held his place from 1540 to 1588. He was a Papist under the reign of Henry the Eighth, and a Protestant under Edward the Sixth. He was a Papist again under Mary, and once more became a Protestant in the reign of Elizabeth. When this scandal to the gown was reproached for his versatility of religious creeds, and taxed for being a turn-coat and an inconstant changeling, as Fuller expresses it, he replied: ‘Not so neither; for if I changed my religion, I am sure I kept true to my principle, which is to live and die the Vicar of Bray.’”—Disraeli.
Where did Exxon get their information? Oh I know. They had this fantastic atmosphere lab AND KEPT IT FROM EVERYONE ELSE! The swine!
Big oil is in cahoots with Big green.
As soon as they realised that the one technology that would not affect conventional oil and gas prices was renewable energy, and the three that would were coal, fracking and nuclear, the brown envelopes started circulating.
Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing staff at large corporations write when advising management of potential future trends that are uncertain both in their reality and their scale, if they are real.
You’d probably find briefings of similar tone in the archives of most phone companies as the Internet started to take off as a consumer product. Was voice over IP an interesting technical oddity, or was there really a serious chance that it would take over from traditional switching, and in the light of the available evidence what if anything should we do, and when?
In these situations, where you have large uncertainty about whether some game changing events will happen, and how large they will be if they do, staff will generally avoid advising management to bet the company on an early radical change of direction, and will generally offer some milestones and tests by which it will be clear whether the thing is real and how large it is.
The quoted briefing paper seems to be one of these very sensible bits of advice. The summary would be, here it is, some people think this will be big, there is no unambiguous evidence yet that it is, keep it in mind, and check to see if the following kinds of events which will shed more light are occurring.
Its what you would write as a planner, and its what you would want to get as a manager. If you get one of these you probably schedule a review in a year or two as part of the strategic planning round. To call this a coverup is just ridiculous.
You are exactly correct. I worked in one of the big telephone companies. I supported our Directory Assistance (411) operation. I remember well a presentation I gave that mobile phones would continue to evolve and would take over. We would no longer have control of the info needed for DA. Text messages would be the death knell for pagers.
I also gave a presentation on what the internet and PC’s would do to the service. This was in the days of dial-up modems, ftp, gopher, telnet, etc. You could see the handwriting that people would clamor for direct access to the telephone number data rather than paying for individual calls.
I saw all as kind of a revolution like the airplane. Bigger, faster, more convenient and quickly advancing.
Of course Exxon knew, as would anyone who employed quality scientists, engineers and mathematicians…
…that CAGW was bunk, even as far back as 1982.
Their crime is that they let the CAGW scam happen, that they lied about it, knowing that it would lead inevitably to higher oil prices, and that so long as it followed the false trail of renewables, it would not be commercially harmful, but instead extremely profitable
As a planner in these circumstances you are trying to steer between bad alternatives, first failing adequately to inform, and second exaggerating the significance of possible events that may never happen or not on a big enough scale to matter. Either one, and you have failed your management.
And your approach is going to be how to deal with it institutionally. Your usual answer will be to slot it into the usual multi-year planning process.
So your first priority is to give an outline of the subject so they at least understand what the issue is. Your second is to offer them a summary of the state of the evidence at the moment. This is what this paper seems to do.
Your third is to propose some reasonable institutional method of incorporating the issue into the planning and budgeting process, should it seem large enough to justify that. I haven’t seen anything to this effect, but it would be astonishing if its not in the archives. And probably the minutes of the planning rounds would regularly say, not there yet, here’s the evidence to date, here are the implications if it does happen, review during the next round.
This is how long term planning is done at large multinationals, its works generally, and its probably the only way that does.
They lost me at Naomi Oreskes.
” Claims such as those made recently that the CMIP6 ensemble ‘runs hot’ are very easily misconstrued to imply that all CMIP6 models have too high ECS values (or indeed all models in general), when really it is only a subset. Discussions of the mean CMIP6 sensitivity is, to my mind, pointless, not least because the ‘CMIP6 mean’ is based on a somewhat arbitrary selection of models that doesn’t take into account model independence nor the fact that CMIP6 itself is a moving target as more models are still being added to the database. And given that all the temperature projections in IPCC are constrained projections, the raw CMIP6 mean and its properties are simply irrelevant for any of the AR6 conclusions.
It is true that *some* models have high ECS beyond what can be reconciled with our understanding of paleoclimate change, and in those models the cloud feedback particularly in the Southern Oceans is more positive than previously. But it is not the case that all the CMIP6 models ‘run hot’, nor is it true that the model projections in AR6 are affected by these high ECS values. We should therefore avoid giving that impression.”
-Gavin Schmidt
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/08/notallmodels/
That sounds like big exercise in Gavin covering his arse. The man is a weapons grade wally.
The question is, do we have a model or a set of models which provide forecasts sufficiently robust to base public policy on.
This posting by Smith basically admits we do not. We have a set of models, we are adding to them and changing them all the time, some of them run too hot, we do not know why.
The question is what it always has been. You have a bunch of models, most of which fail when tested against real world observations. You have one which has turned out to be very accurate – the Russian one.
Why do you keep averaging the outputs from badly failing models, moderately failing models and the one good model together, and claim that the result is a good guide for public policy?
You would never think of doing this with models predicting aircraft air-worthiness, vaccine safety or effectiveness, bridge loading calculations… etc.
Why is it acceptable to do it for climate forceasts and for public policy decisions on energy and climate?
Tell us one that runs cold under certain circumstances! That should be the first indication of being close to having a proper mix of variables. Always running hot just means the program has been developed with a confirmation bias built in.
When the models begin to fluctuate around true temps, I might start to watch them.
ECS is a bogus and useless metric that has no measurable component. Its only use is for meeting the confirmation bias need for an indicator of how well programs use CO2 as a control knob.
They ought to throw all the models away except the Russian model. It’s the closest one to reality.
But as we know, or can surmise, the Russian model may be getting things right for the wrong reasons. That is potentially a larger problem than recognizing other models not being fit for purpose.
Naomi Oreskes is one of the two principal liars responsible for the 97% consensus fraud. The other being John Cook of SkepticalScience. The actual is 0.03%.
Per: climatologist Dr. Tim Ball’s great handbook for the layman.
Human Caused Global Warming The Biggest Deception In History.
Only 121 well illustrated pages reveals all.
We’ve all heard the argument that we must believe that there is a ‘climate emergency’ because there is a scientific consensus that there is a climate emergency. And most of the people who read this website will know the fundamental weaknesses of that argument. Nevertheless, I think it might be of interest to read this short extract from a book I am reading.
“The root of the matter is a logical problem. How should the importance of consensus be evaluated? If two scientists working on the same problem propose different hypotheses which nonetheless agree at one or more points, what importance does the agreement have? It cannot constitute proof that those parts of the respective hypotheses are true, for such agreement may proceed from a common presupposition made by both investigators that in fact is false.
“But what if the number of investigators be increased to ten and once again differing hypotheses are proposed which nonetheless continue to agree at the same point or points as the original two? Should this predispose the impartial observer to think that this agreement represents a consensus that can be scientifically relied upon in a way the diverging parts of the hypothesis cannot be relied upon? Once again the answer is “No”, because the agreement could have proceeded from a single presupposition shared by all investigators. And if that presupposition is false it might even be the prime reason why the respective investigators are proposing conflicting hypotheses. Therefore, as the number of investigators increase, and no one hypothesis emerges as the best solution to all the various aspects of the problem concerned, the presence of a small point of agreement common to the many diverging hypotheses should be examined as a possible clue to some commonly held false presupposition, which is, in fact, putting every investigator who accepts it on the wrong track in his search for a solution.”
Interestingly this observation had nothing whatever do with the so-called scientific consensus regarding climate change. It actually comes from a book called ‘The Synoptic Problem’. The Synoptic problem is a matter relating to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The book was published in 1963.
Alba,
That makes perfect sense when you consider that CAGW is part of a religious cult!
The Gretatards base their beliefs on their deeply held feelings that humans are evil unless they are blindly obedient to their ClimaCult leaders! They spend all their time quibbling over minor points of their dogma, while refusing to debate or even look at science except where they can find nuggets to bolster their heterodoxy!
For them there is no past climate to consider; only the last 20, 40, 50 or 100 years are to be viewed! And only when the data are supportive of their catechism! Millions of years showing current temps and CO2 levels among the lowest ever must be thrown on to the pyre for their blasphemy! The RWP, the MWP and the LIA must be disappeared for daring to contradict the pronouncements of priests! Even altering data is allowable if it enhances the argument; it’s for your own good!
You can’t handle the Truth Revealed; Greta, Mikey and Al are merely vessels for the holy revelations of Gaia!
Follow the science… The Political Science, that is.
From the article: “So what did Exxon actually know?”
Exxon doesn’t know anything that others don’t know. They don’t have any special knowledge about the Earth’s climate just because they produce fossil fuels.
There is no evidence that CO2 is detrimental to the operation of the Earth’s climate. The alarmists say there is evidence, and they say that Exxon is evil for not telling everyone this science fiction story.
The problem for the alarmists is they can’t convict someone for hiding something when there is nothing to hide. The alarmists say CO2 is causing harm, but there is no harm being seen beyond natural variability.
I would love to argue this case in front of a judge.
The way I see this is that Exxon and other oil companies are being sued for not being soothsayers 40 years ago and accurately predicting what temperatures may or may not do along with the reasons why. The IPCC provides the answer by admitting that they are unable to make predictions even now after 40 years of research but only projections of what might happen.