"But Global Warming is a HOAX!!!"

[newyorkguy]

The terrible truth is, there is little reason to be optimistic. Look at the chart below showing global emissions.

[IMGW=700]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=1474&pictureid=13634[/IMGW]

I read comments by a scientist several years ago in a New Yorker profile. This man had been a biologist, now he was working on AI projects. That was what the article was about, the development of AI. But almost as a segue-way, he mentioned believing the window of opportunity to avoid future catastrophe from climate change had closed. I posted that in another thread and someone replied, "Oh so we just give up then?" But he wasn't suggesting that at all. He was just admitting to a feeling he has. Look at the chart above. After all the studies and warnings, going back a good forty years, this is the best we can do? What does your gut tell you?

 

[newyorkguy]

An article by Guardian science editor Robin McKie, published last October, made clear the danger the World is facing. It was published under the headline: "Cop27 climate summit: window for avoiding catastrophe is closing fast."

Scientists warn that if the world is to have a chance of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and so prevent the breaching of the 1.5C limit, global emissions will have to be cut by 5% to 7% a year. At present, emissions are rising between 1% and 2% a year with little sign of that increase being halted.

It has been an alarming time for climate scientists. One by one, the grim scenarios they had outlined for the near future have been overtaken by events: extreme storms, droughts, floods and ice-sheet collapses whose sudden appearances have outstripped researchers’ worst predictions...“Many of the impacts of climate change such as increased weather extremes are now playing out faster than predicted, even though the warming itself is very much in line with model projections,” said the American climatologist Michael E Mann, of Pennsylvania University. Guardian news link

Probably many scientists are privately as pessimistic as the one quoted in the New Yorker article I referenced. That scientist felt events had made clear that humankind's fatal flaw was our continuing inability to reach a political consensus on the need to drastically reduce carbon emissions. As recently as a few years ago an American president insisted that climate change was "a hoax." Last year a member of Congress scoffed at the dangers of rising temperatures saying, "People die from the cold." These are the people we need to convince and we need to do it fast.

Only we can't.

 

[Ryan O'Dine]

One of the slogans, is also mentioned in The Parrot and the Igloo (p. 177):



In The Guardian:



There are several attempts at repositioning global warming as theory in this thread. It isn't very different from the attempts of Creationists to reposition evolution as theory and to 'teach the controversy' - except that capitalism has no real interest in the latter.
(Speaking of fossils ...)

Thank you for that link. Another part of the strategy is the relentless attacks against environmental spokespeople and activists. Al Gore wasn't the first to be mocked and villainized, and Greta Thunberg won't be the last. It's all part of the same MO -- undermine the truth and its messengers. It's shameful.

 

[dann]

Profits over Planet: The Fossil Fuel Industry's Gaslighting Campaigns

Another part of the strategy is the relentless attacks against environmental spokespeople and activists.

Indeed!

As the globe bakes under some of the longest, hottest heat waves in recorded history, reducing emissions to curb climate change is clearly an existential imperative. But climate change driven by human activity and the burning of fossil fuels has been in the news for more than 110 years. By the 1980’s, Congress was already seriously discussing the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So what happened? Since then, the fossil fuel industry has set out to reshape the narrative surrounding climate change, global warming, and the consequences of burning fossil fuels. It's a decades-long, multi-billion dollar campaign to influence our politics, gaslight people to question scientific consensus, and maintain our addiction to fossil fuels.
Big Oil’s decades-long gaslighting campaign (MSNBC on YouTube, July 23, 2023 - 6:57 min.)

From the video:

"Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places. This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels."
Lyndon B. Johnson,
Address to Congress
February 8, 1965

So what happened? How is it that we have been having more or less the same conversation for so many decades?

Well, there are a lot of reasons dating back to the first Global Climate Convention in Stockholm in the 1960s. But one major reason we've stalled out is the oil industry and the fossil fuel companies that worried that their profits were at risk.

In 1998, a now infamous internal memo from the American Petroleum Institute led by representatives from Exxon, Chevron and Southern Company came to light, in which strategists laid out their plan for climate-related messaging.
The memo states that part of their "victory" would involve making sure that the general public had "uncertainty" about existing climate science.
And to be clear, it's not that these companies had any genuine doubt themselves.

Internal memos from some of the bigger oil companies like Exxon revealed that their own scientists had been warning about the dangers of increased emissions for decades already since at least the 1970s. And since then the fossil fuel industry has set out to reshape the narrative surrounding climate change, global warming and the consequences of burning fossil fuels.

It is a decades-long, literally decades-long, campaign to gaslight people out of what was and remains scientific consensus. For instance, according to a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists in the early 2000s, a group of fossil-fuel companies gave a Smithsonian scientist a combined 1.2 million dollars in funding to publish papers asserting that the global warming trends were the result of a natural normal cycle of the sun.

The same report, which included contributions from the Climate Investigation Center and Greenpeace compiled a long list of the oil industry's efforts.
The report found that oil companies sent their own employees to stage protests against green initiatives. They created fake grassroots campaigns in support of oil as an American stable.
They sent letter to congress posing as non-profit organization opposed to clean-energy bills.
The list goes on and on. Exxon-Mobile pushed back on the report defending its actions.

The Big Oil's efforts to control the narrative around climate change, to sow doubt and denial, to posit fossil fuel companies themselves as a key to green energy solutions and to influence climate and energy policy, that effort is well documented.
A climate change article published by leading scientific research publisher Springer Nature shows that train and energy groups led by oil and gas companies outspent clean-energy groups 27 to one in advertising, lobbying and political contributions.
Big Oil's profits doubled in 2022, by the way, bringing in about 220 billion dollars, and they are only expected to increase.

.

 

[dann]

Horror and Exasperation

Driving all this is the fossil fuel industry. Enabling it are political leaders unwilling to bring this industry under control and who promote policies such as offsetting and massive gas expansion that simply enable this industry to continue.
(...)
I don’t know how many more warnings the world needs. It’s as if the human race has received a terminal medical diagnosis and knows there is a cure, but has consciously decided not to save itself.
‘No one wants to be right about this’: climate scientists’ horror and exasperation as global predictions play out (The Guardian, July 24, 2023)

To stay within the medical analogy, it's more as if the fossil-fuel industry has put on the gowns of doctors and is telling people not to believe in the unambiguous, well-documented medical diagnosis.
See post 244:

The same report, which included contributions from the Climate Investigation Center and Greenpeace compiled a long list of the oil industry's efforts.
The report found that oil companies sent their own employees to stage protests against green initiatives. They created fake grassroots campaigns in support of oil as an American stable.
They sent letter to congress posing as non-profit organization opposed to clean-energy bills.
The list goes on and on. Exxon-Mobile pushed back on the report defending its actions.

The Big Oil's efforts to control the narrative around climate change, to sow doubt and denial, to posit fossil fuel companies themselves as a key to green energy solutions and to influence climate and energy policy, that effort is well documented.

Big Oil is the quack killing people while telling them that science can't be trusted.

 

[Hercules56]

Like they said in the movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still":

"only at the precipice of destruction, do we change".

Seems that will likely be true. Hopefully won't be too late.

 

[dann]

Like they said in the movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still":
"only at the precipice of destruction, do we change".
Seems that will likely be true. Hopefully won't be too late.

"We" are not the problem.
And the attitude of the fossil fuel industry is not likely to ever change, and it will probably continue to pay and promote the most prominent three percenters to tell their lies:

In 2004, Naomi Oreskes examined 928 refereed papers published during the decade of peak Dr. Singer and peak Dr. Seitz. She could not find a single peer-reviewed study to dispute that current climate change was man-made. The piece (published in the refereed journal Science) made her name. "Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists," Oreskes wrote. "That impression is incorrect."
There was a 2010 follow-up, in the (refereed) Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Among active-duty climate researchers, acceptance of man-made change ran at 97 percent.
The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, p. 316 (GoodReads)

The doctors mentioned in the quotation, Singer and Seitz, are two of the many villains in the book.

Meet Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Frederick Seitz (Wikipedia). They both started out lying for Big Tobacco before they started lying for Big Oil. (And at one point even for Sun Myung Moon. Singer had a column in The Washington Times!)
They have probably contributed to the deaths of more people than the doctors working in KZ camps.

 

[MRC_Hans]

Meet Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Frederick Seitz (Wikipedia). They both started out lying for Big Tobacco before they started lying for Big Oil. (And at one point even for Sun Myung Moon. Singer had a column in The Washington Times!)
They have probably contributed to the deaths of more people than the doctors working in KZ camps.

Well, seems the best one can say about them is they're both dead.

Hans

 

[IsThisTheLife]

Planet-brain Democrat Ilhan Omar (on July 18th);

"The earth just broke the record for the hottest day in 120,000 years. In fact, we broke in on three separate days."

 

[Hercules56]

LOLOLOL!!!!!

She's brilliant.

 

[IsThisTheLife]

I don't know, but maybe the BBC are being slightly alarmist with their news coverage;

... Climate Scientists predict UK temperatures could reach 4000°C next week as government urges people to "get jabbed now" to protect the elderly from spontaneous combustion.

 

[lobosrul5]

Whew its all a false alarm. The BBC made a typo, and a politician said something dumb, we can continue on with our heads buried in the sand.

 

[Hercules56]

Whew its all a false alarm. The BBC made a typo, and a politician said something dumb, we can continue on with our heads buried in the sand.

No, but when idiots of influence say stupid things regarding important issues, it does us no good. It only helps the enemy.

 

[newyorkguy]

Whew its all a false alarm. The BBC made a typo...

A typo? It appears to be made up.

...government urges people to "get jabbed now" to protect the elderly from spontaneous combustion.

I'd love to see a link to that BBC 'report'!

 

[lobosrul5]

A typo? It appears to be made up.


I'd love to see a link to that BBC 'report'!

Ahh, I just saw the 4000C, and figured it was supposed to be 40.00C.

It is, exactly 40C where I'm at right now.

 

[TheGoldcountry]

No, but when idiots of influence say stupid things regarding important issues, it does us no good. It only helps the enemy.

"Sure, the oil industry has been lying for 60 years.... but Biden stuttered during his speech! I just don't know who to trust!"

 

[lomiller]

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=1446&pictureid=13635[/qimg]

LOLOLOL!!!!!

She's brilliant.

It's certainly plausible. The fact that you think it's funny says a lot more about you than it does her.


FYI there are multiple reconstructions that say we've already passed the Holocene maximum. To go back to a clearly warmer period you need to go back 125K years. It's not unreasonable to think that the warmest 3 days in the current period are also the warmest over that entire stretch of time.

 

[Glunn11]

I'm a long time basically-virgin lurker, so I apologize for my inability to link anything. But we're, to my eye, clearly on the threshold of irreversible chaos. South Florida ocean surface temps hit 100°F today. Antarctic Sea Ice extent is in freefall relative even to recent years. GOP and Fox News are already starting to retcon their stance on global warming. I think that is the biggest red flag of them all, edging out even the fact that Florida and Louisiana are hemorrhaging insurers like my great state of Idaho is hemorrhaging obstetricians.

It feels surreal, really. I haven't gotten to the grief stage yet, and of course I'll be happy if something swoops in and saved the day, but I am mentally preparing myself for the worst as best I can.

I can't believe all the members of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints© who are currently alive are actually right this time. Should SHTF I probably should get away from the big cult nearby... or no? Hm.

It's probably extremely earnest and totally off-brand for this board, but I am concerned about the lack of engagement on this topic, unless there's another thread? Like, I want to say that I'm being a doomer or whatever but I just do not understand how you can objectively look at what we're seeing this summer and thinking that we're not going to suffer soon. And it feels palpably urgent in the midst of all the OTHER sh*shows we have going on concurrently.

Anyway, hope everyone is doing all right here and continue to do so for a long time yet. Thanks for letting me share a completely unsourced reply in my quest to finally hit 15 posts.

 

[Pixel42]

The main thread on climate change is in the Science forum. It's most recent continuation is here:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=326576

For a long time it was the only thread on the subject permitted (for easier policing by the mods) but that rule was eased some time ago. We used to get quite a few outright deniers here, but they either got banned or ran away.

Not sure what you mean about the LDS being right, they're provably wrong about most of their distinguishing beliefs. Not actively denying the obvious facts about climate change isn't much to set against that.

 

[dann]

Well, seems the best one can say about them is they're both dead.

But not soon enough. And there are plenty of them where they came from. The Parrot and the Igloo describes the mindset of researchers who sell themselves to promote the lies of Big Oil (or Big Tobacco). They are often mediocre scientists in higher positions than their research merits, and yet they feel entitled to more, and Big Oil or other lobbyists (Sun Myung Moon) give them the appreciation (and wealth) they feel they deserve.

Not unlike a guy like Clarence Thomas, according to many recent articles. Harlan Crow gives him the appreciation he deserves, so why not give Crow and his cronies what they want? It's only fair, and Thomas just knows that he's entitled to the gifts he receives so why report them?