Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Naomi Oreskes, who believes that Climate Change is a problem, has written a dramatic expose of old Big Oil ads which actually told the truth about global warming.
The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing
Since the 1980s, fossil fuel firms have run ads touting climate denial messages – many of which they’d now like us to forget. Here’s our visual guide
by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi OreskesSupported by
About this content Thu 18 Nov 2021 21.00 AEDT
Why is meaningful action to avert the climate crisis proving so difficult? It is, at least in part, because of ads.
The fossil fuel industry has perpetrated a multi-decade, multibillion dollar disinformation, propaganda and lobbying campaign to delay climate action by confusing the public and policymakers about the climate crisis and its solutions. This has involved a remarkable array of advertisements – with headlines ranging from “Lies they tell our children” to “Oil pumps life” – seeking to convince the public that the climate crisis is not real, not human-made, not serious and not solvable. The campaign continues to this day.
As recently as last month, six big oil CEOs were summoned to US Congress to answer for the industry’s history of discrediting climate science – yet they lied under oath about it. In other words, the fossil fuel industry is now misleading the public about its history of misleading the public.
We are experts in the history of climate disinformation, and we want to set the record straight. So here, in black and white (and color), is a selection of big oil’s thousands of deceptive climate ads from 1984 to 2021. This isn’t an exhaustive analysis, of which we have published several, but a brief, illustrated history – like the “sizzle reels” that creatives use to highlight their best work – of the 30-plus year evolution of fossil fuel industry propaganda. This is big oil’s PR sizzle reel.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/18/the-forgotten-oil-ads-that-told-us-climate-change-was-nothing
To be fair some of the ads, which questioned whether the world was warming, likely called it wrong – though I would have liked to see the full text to be sure. Maybe they just said the mild warming we have experienced is not a problem.
But the underlying theme of most of those ads, that climate change is not a big deal, is only disputed by people who think broken computer climate models are evidence.
The only genuine threat global warming poses to our civilisation is the crypto communist economy wrecking policy responses.
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“We are experts in
the history ofclimate disinformation”Fixed it for ya!
In point of fact, Naomi Orekes isn’t an “expert” in anything but self promotion. The “climate disinformation” is just a side line which keeps her employed. Academia is rife with such preposterous imposters. They’re the trained noses in a fart sniffing contest.
Rory,
Isn’t that akin to the royal tasters from Medieval times? It seems that we should be talking about much more than the olfactory now!
Oh, she’s not just a pretty face. She does regularly leave her fare share of steaming piles.
Including right there at the Grauniad. Barely 8 paragraphs into the article, she’s spreading outright disinformation. The “Informed Citizens for the Environment,” under that specific name, never existed. The actual name, which I have already proved, was the “Information Council for the Environment” (ICE), a very short-lived pilot project public relations campaign undertaken by the Western Fuels Association, designed to counter the unsupportable propaganda that Al Gore was putting out in the early 1990s. Neither the “Chicken Little” newspaper ad, nor the “Doomsday” ad that Oreskes attributes to the ICE campaign, are indicated by official ICE documents to have been printed in any publication anywhere, and as I’ve detailed more than once at my GelbspanFiles blog, the “Reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” strategy was an unsolicited memo subset proposal to Western Fuels, it was rejected, and therefore was never implemented by any energy company anywhere as guidance for running disinformation campaigns.
Everyone realizes that she has long been getting by on her looks.
I don’t care what anyone says … that there is funny.
It is interesting how so many of those seemingly terrified of Global Warming prefer to holiday in quite warm places. If the alarmist predictions of instant death if the temperature rises a pitiful 1.5 degrees were actually to come to pass then the millions of fun- and warmth-seekers that annually migrate to warm places around the globe would have long ago perished. People live in cold places because that is where their jobs are located for the most part. Sadly, the majority of economic opportunity is located in areas of the globe that suffer cold temperatures in winter. Also seems like the greatest amount of land is clumped around the temperate zones.
Pamela M-K: “People live in cold places because that is where their jobs are located for the most part. Sadly, the majority of economic opportunity is located in areas of the globe that suffer cold temperatures in winter. Also seems like the greatest amount of land is clumped around the temperate zones.”
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Absolutely. One other reason is that the hordes of invaders tend not to go after the people in the cold regions. If a people can adapt to the cold, they don’t have to worry so much about being killed and their villages plundered and burned.
As best I know, there hasn’t been a lot of waves of conquering hordes running amok in Siberia.
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“Hey Fred… do we go raid Norilsk, Russia or should we sack Rome again?
What? You near froze your ‘nads off last time we went that far North?
Okay. I’ll go round up a horde of barbarians. Rome it is.”
😜
It’s worse than that. Most of the 1.5C warming that so terrifies their little souls, has already occurred. The reality is that the believe if the world warms up by as little as 0.2C to 0.3C, we are all going to die.
As I liked to say back in the hippy days of horrible and dirty hair (dating myself a bit), “Look at their hair. Imagine what their brain looks like.” Here, unkempt and not much brain.
Isn’t it amazing what people without consciences, without morals, that If they’re going to lie, they make it maximum falsehood.
ATheoK,
The biggest problem we have in the Western democracies seems to be the ascension of myriad sociopathic personalities into positions of power! Virtually every other societal problem seems to be a direct result of this! The US Constitution was designed to prevent such from occurring, but without a free and fair press the experiment fails!
Until humanity learns to recognize and isolate the criminally insane, and prevents them from gaining power over their fellow man; we will be subject to insane and irrational policies; perpetrated on the many, for the benefit of the few!
Decline became inevitable when the Senate went from being appointed by state governments to being elected by the people. In the old days, the Senate represented the interests of the states and served to prevent the accumulation of too much power at the federal level.
Once the Senate began to be elected by the people, there was nothing left in the system to prevent all power in the country from flowing to D.C., and for the states to become nothing more than vassals of the federal government.
Most of the nonsense we are seeing today with federal mandates dictating almost every aspect of our day to day lives would have been much more difficult, if not impossible had Senators still been appointed by state governments.
The second great mistake was an uncapped income tax. Combine a nearly unlimited source of revenue and no ability to check federal over reach, and the doom was set.
MarkW,
I’m not sure that the first could not be rectified by having a well educated population; but that would require the reversing of the degradation of our school system’s descent into neo-Marxist insanity, and a free and fair press that was held accountable for promoting lies and propaganda!
The second could be easily fixed by instituting a flat or fair tax, but that will never happen without the first being dealt with!
Your analysis is very sound, but I would add that so long as politicians can buy votes by promising to steal from a minority to give to a majority, democracy is ultimately unsustainable.
Without property right protections, democracy resembles two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for supper. Instead of equality under the law, you end up with the soft fascism that we currently have, with privileged elites lording over a system designed to serve their interests and apparently legitimized by elections. Those sham elections are largely won based on the threat of losing government benefits if the elites lose power.
It’s the flaw of universal suffrage that ultimately led to the 16th Amendment (Federal Income Tax).
If social payments could only be obtained by signing away voting rights for five years, that would be an effective check on overreach by the fascist elites. The people still allowed to vote in the next election would be the ones paying the bills and they wouldn’t vote for the elites and their vote-buying schemes.
They might still want to support a modest social safety net, anticipating the possibility of coming on hard times themselves, or out of sincere charitable concern for others, but the social hammock of welfare dependency that we have today would not happen.
Of course no such provision is remotely feasible at this point. Only the complete collapse of society could possibly bring about an opportunity for that sort of reform.
“The
fossil fuelClimate Alarmism industry has perpetrated a multi-decade, multibillion dollar disinformation, propaganda and lobbying campaign todelaydemand costly climate action byconfusingconvincing the public and policymakersabout thethere is a climate crisisand itsthat needs their solutions.”Fixed it.
When you want to know what a liberal is doing, just examine what they are accusing others of doing.
I believe it’s known as ‘confession by projection’. For example roughly a week before last years “election”, Pelosi let slip their intentions by accusing the Republicans of potential election fraud. She then said that they already had that covered and that Trump would get the surprise of his life.
Since current temps are below the well attested recent warm periods, since we’re still coming out of the Little Ice Age, and haven’t really come out of the Nig Ice Ace, none of the current warming is out of the ordinary. 2 or even 3 degrees per century is barely noticeable, and current trend is only 1.5 C/century as measured globally by satellites. About 10 times more people die due to cold than heat, so no Climate Emergency, unless you think the climate is too cold and dry – then I would agree with you.
Ice – when all else fails.
According to The Lancet approximately 20 times more die of cold … and not extreme cold, either.
“Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.htm
Hey Naomi, don’t go climbing ice fields or glaciers without a good ice ax.
Naomi Oreskes and her co-conspirators in the climate industry have perpetrated a multi-decade, multibillion dollar disinformation, propaganda and lobbying campaign to subvert sound science and promote the fake climate crisis scam, by confusing the public and policymakers about climate change.
There, I fixed it for ya, Grauniad.
And what is more, she (they) haven’t the vaguest interest in the effects of weather or whether any part of the AGW dogma is true or accurate. Their entire charade is ideological, a means to erode Western economies. One has to be near brain dead and functionally illiterate to believe and part of the AGW narrative.
“Their entire charade is ideological, a means to erode Western economies.”
If you want a good guide to how the climate change scam is being used to erode Western society read the book “Climategate” by Brian Sussman. He goes into a lot of the history of this effort to undermine Western society using the climate change scam to forward the UN’s socialist/communist plans for the world.
Griff ought to get himself a copy since he thinks the undermining of Western Society by the UN and the radical Left is just a hoax. If he reads this book he will see that this effort goes Way back in history. There are people who have been trying to undermine Western Society for a very long time, and they are still at it.
For those who are new to the climate change scam, here’s a good reading list that will catch you up with what has been going on over the years. Read these and you will be up to speed.
Climategate by Brian Sussman
The Hockey Stick Illusion by A. W. Montford
Climategate: The CRUtape Letters by Seven Mosher and Thomas W. Fuller
These are all exceptional books and they cover the same period of time more or less, but each book gives unique insights into the situation. Highly recommended.
What’s that Upton Sinclair quote about getting a man to realize he’s been fooled, when his paycheck depends on staying fooled?
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
– Upton Sinclair, 1934
This is similar:
“It is useless to argue with a man whose opinion is based upon a personal or pecuniary interest,”
– William Jennings Bryan, 1893
This is related:
“A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
– Paul Simon (lyrics, “The Boxer”), 1969
Andrew Montford’s book is particularly illuminating. Not only did I learn a lot about the lying scoundrel, Michael Mann, and the amazing, dogged detective work performed by Steve McIntyre, but in the process I also learned a good deal about methods employed in the fields of paleoclimatology, temperature proxies, statistical methods, bristlecone pine trees and principal components analysis.
I’d add Michael Crichton’s State of Fear to your list.
That was the first time I’d seen the sources of the data that purport to underlie the evidence-light “Catastrophic/dangerous, CO2-driven anthropogenic global warming/climate change” CONJECTURE.
Yes, Tom, all good reads filled with details and their effects on the narrative. I’d also add Donna Laframbuoise: ‘The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert‘ to your list. She exposes exactly what you’d expect to find on the insides of the IPCC.
Bur the likes of Griff or any of the other trolls around here would never pick them up, let alone read them.
Yes, I would include LaFrambuoise’s book too.
For a sneak peek at Ms. Laframboise’s work, here’s a outstanding lecture that she gave:
Many thanks. 🙂
If any of them actually believed climate change was the existential threat they claim it to be, they wouldn’t live as they do. Each and everyone of these climate crusaders has a carbon footprint 10 to 20 times greater than that of the people that are supposed to making these great sacrifices.
Well, that’s what is so important about entitlement. Once they become a paid up member of the Entitled Class, they don’t expect to be held accountable for their foot print in any respect. They’re beyond criticism.
“There, I fixed it for ya, Grauniad.”
Yes, you did. A fine job! 🙂
If a book could be written on the Oreskes et al. disinformation efforts, a good title would be “Merchants of Smear.”
This story was supported by TheGuardian.org, a “charity” set up to overturn capitalism
(ok, they don’t specifically say overturn capitalism)
There are plenty of modern day Bolsheviks who say exactly that.
Here’s a link to Allan MacRae’s post from 2012. His post points out that there’s more than just capitalism that they want to destroy.
They merely seek a Soviet style control over capitalism, so that the profits go into their personal Swiss bank accounts that nobody will be allowed to know about!!!
Technically the world isn’t warming, it is still cooler than for most of the current interglacial.
It’s actually warming back to normal after a cold period.
The problem is that you are still using the same word for both concepts.
Perhaps if you worded it a little differently,
The world isn’t warming, it’s only recovering from the Little Ice Age.
??
Ideology and rationality do not go well together. It does not help if you want things to be true that are’nt nor if you want things to be false that are true. Humans are not burning fossil fuels in spite of a better alternative because of some sugggested conspiracy of big oil. Big oil and gas enabled and enable civilisation and prosperity as we know it. For one thing it enabled us Dutch to stop burning our peat soil so not all the country is turned into a lake and lies below sea level. And the free market would come up with a better alternative if available, and most likely some day will. If Oreskes believes she has a great alternative not only will she become a billionaire but probably she will earn a Nobel Prize as well. Those are the blessings of a free market.
Too late for FLOP26 – the horse has bolted, what is a poor Grauniad to do?
Now back to sizzling steaks with my Propane gas grill!
Meanwhile UN Climate Finance czar, ex Bank of England chief, relentlessly, ruthlessly with focus (his own words on Bloomberg) is pursuing that $150 trillion green bubble with crypto currencies, also reported by :
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/23/mark-carney-dollar-dominant-replaced-digital-currency
This is the immanent danger.
You should start charging Mr Carney rent for living in your head so long.
Oreskes can’t look at anything or anyone connected with the fossil fuel industry without experiencing an involuntary gas chamber fantasy. She is an eco-Na3i.
Perhaps the potential reality of freezing to death in the dark has started to penetrate the fog of CAGW-induced stupidity at long last.
“Nov. 19 (Poor Richard’s Almanac) The Washington Examiner reports that Republican Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker announced Thursday that his state is pulling out of its commitment to a multi-state pact to reduce carbon emissions in the transportation industry. Furthermore according to last Wednesday’s Boston Herald, Connecticut is also backing out, citing high natural gas prices.”
What?!? People don’t like freezing in the dark? Who knew?
” We are experts ….. ”
Sez who?
( Expert:- drip under pressure. Professional:- person who makes a living doing something and who occasionally makes a mistake for which they apologise. )
“Their knowledge only grew. A 1979 internal Exxon study warned of “dramatic environmental effects” before 2050.”
Over 40 years later and not a hint of “dramatic environmental effects “. Maybe like 10 feet of SLR in several decades predicted by the EPA in 1983 that didn’t happen and is not going to happen by 2050. And this from 1979 when they were wondering about a 25 foot rise in sea level. Wrong again.
A lot of people have been wrong about the most cataclysmic concerns of AGW
A LOT of people.
Having read that 1979 internal memo, I find your characterization of it to be inaccurate.
I believe the phrasing was more on the line of stating that there are people who believe dramatic affects are possible.
Pretty much. Only the phrasing wasn’t “people” but rather predictions of “present climatic models”. If you compare the output of those models then to the actual results in the decades since, one thing becomes glaringly obvious, their predictions were totally GIGO. The memo even predicts as much by pointing out that even back then there was “great uncertainty in the existing climatic models” resulting in the need for “much more study and research” before any “major changes in energy type and usage could be recommended”.
Thank you for this….
“We are experts in
the history ofclimate disinformation”oops, looks like Zig Zag Wanderer beat me to it
Funny, but I don’t ever recall seeing one of these ads where Big Oil was saying what she says they were.
Agreed. The only ads I can recall are the greenwashing type—Beyond Petroleum and such like.
So much gaslighting.
You weren’t supposed to check it out, Tom. Believers take it all on faith.
Perhaps these ads are like that memo that was read by one executive then tossed.
From the article: “This has involved a remarkable array of advertisements – with headlines ranging from “Lies they tell our children” to “Oil pumps life” – seeking to convince the public that the climate crisis is not real, not human-made, not serious and not solvable. The campaign continues to this day.”
As well it should continue since there is no evidence CO2 is anything other than a benign gas, and that continues to this day.
Give it up, Naomi. You have no evidence. All you have are unsubstantiated assertions. That’s all the oil companies are saying: There’s no substantiation that shows CO2 is a problem. It was true way back when, and it’s true now.
Exxon *did* know, and they still know that Human-caused Climate Change has never been substantiated in any way. It’s a meme with no connection to reality.
What’s pathetic is how the oil companies try to get the attention off themselves by promoting green energy. They know it’s not needed, but they promote it for political reasons. To get Naomi off their backs. Good luck with that.
From the article: “As recently as last month, six big oil CEOs were summoned to US Congress to answer for the industry’s history of discrediting climate science”
Alarmist climate science discredits itself. It’s a science based on no evidence. It’s a science based on lies and distortions and dishonesty. And you are a big part of it, Naomi.
It’s not science.
Eric? The last line of your post needs to be on billboards all over the world!
The problem is that few billboard companies would permit such ads, fearing that the leftists would tear down the billboards rather than permit people to see or hear anything the leftists disagree with,
Kaepernick stated the other day stated that the Rittenhouse being found innocent is just proof that our entire system needs to be torn down.
I don’t know, here in western PA they don’t sweat that too much. Once you are outside Alleghany county it is still America. As for Colon only white leftards listen to anything it spews from its piehole.
From the article: “We are experts in the history of climate disinformation, and we want to set the record straight. So here, in black and white (and color), is a selection of big oil’s thousands of deceptive climate ads from 1984 to 2021.”
Those ads are not deceptive, they are telling us the state of the science,which is there is no evidence CO2 is harmful or is threatening the Earth’s atmosphere.
The one who is being deceptive is Naomi Oreskes. She claims there is certainty when there is no certainty. Not even close. Naomi has nothing to support her claims. She wants you to take her word for it. Don’t do it, because her word will lead you astray.
From the article: “But the underlying theme of most of those ads, that climate change is not a big deal, is only disputed by people who think broken computer climate models are evidence.”
Climate change is not a big deal.
Naomi, I think it is you who use bastardized computer-generated global temperature models as your evidence that CO2 is a harmful gas.
The problem with that is Mann’s Hockey Stick chart and Phil Jones instrument-era Hockey Stick chart, both of which claim we are living in the hottest times in the last 10,000 years, are both refuted by the evidence. Mann’s bogus Hockey Stick was shown to be a distortion of reality, and the bogus computer-generated, instrument-era Hockey Stick chart is refuted by the written, historical temperature record that looks nothing like the “hotter and hotter” bogus, bastardized Hockey Stick charts.
The written temperature record shows it was just as warm in the past as it is now, which means CO2 has very little impact on the Earth’s temperatures since there is more CO2 in the air now than in the past, yet it is no warmer now than in the past. How about that, Naomi?
This whole Human-caused Climate Change scam depends on what temperature record you use. The bogus, refuted records say we are hotter than ever. The legitimate records say there is nothing to see here.
Bogus Hockey Stick charts are all the “evidence” Naomi can cite for CO2 being the control knob of the Earth’s temperatures, and her “evidence” has been shown to not be fit for purpose. Yet she is so sure of herself. I think she is seeing what she wants to see, not what is there. A lot of people have that problem. Don’t listen to people like that.
There is no unprecedented warming today. Those who make this claim have no evidence this is the case. They could prove me wrong if they could, but they won’t, because they can’t.
Naomi Oreskes (in concert with the “Grauniad” propaganda operation) is, once again, attempting to lay the groundwork for the Holy Grail of the American ambulance chasing mass tort barratry and champerty racket— that Holy Grail being the deep pocket of the industry that is the backbone of the U.S. and Western economies.
Naomi (and other climate crackpots and co-conspirators like Michael Bloomberg, Jeremy Grantham, NPR, CNN, PBS, Pravda [a/k/a the New York Times], the La-La Times, the WaPo, the Beeb, CBS, MSNBC, et al) have orgasms at the thought of bringing the U.S. hydrocarbon producers under the jackbooted heel of Big Government by abuse of tort law. Their model is the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between the tobacco companies and the U.S. state governments which, in practical economic effect, made the state governments economic partners in the tobacco business.
It’s largely about money and power. It has very little to do with science.
They know that all it takes is one runaway jury.
“It’s largely about money and power. It has very little to do with science.”
That’s correct.
Close. It’s all about money and power, science is irrelevant except where it can be corrupted and abused in order to achieve the goal of money and power
People need to start confronting these people with the new evidence derived from NASA CERES.
““The TOA net flux was +0.75 W/m2 in 2020. The data shown in Figure 1, Figure 2 and Figure 3 suggest that the root cause for the positive TOA net flux and, hence, for a further accumulation of energy during the last two decades was a declining outgoing shortwave flux and not a retained LW flux. ” – Hans-Rolf Dübal and Fritz Vahrenholt, October 2021, journal Atmosphere, Radiative Energy Flux Variation from 2001–2020.”
The 21st century was warmed by solar energy and not the greenhouse effect. Throw it in their face and call them out. It turns out the oil companies have been exonerated completely and folks like Oreskes have been guilty of lying continually.
BTW, the only response you will get is denial. Their heads explode when faced with reality.
(Pressed enter before finishing…)
No, she doesn’t see it as a problem, merely an opportunity for her -ism.
Its funny that Naomi thinks oil companies stopped “meaningful climate action.” It is immutable economic laws that stopped “meaningful climate action.”
No, the greatest threat global warming poses is the varied policy mistakes in legislation, executive orders, institutional misdirection, financial market and regulatory distortion, judicial manipulation/legislating, and gangland-style science process with messy or synthetic data and models for the cause.
One thing in Oreske’s article is correct – she is an expert in climate disinformation, especially the production & dissemination of it.