I owe the USA Today Editorial Staff an apology. Their “Hellish July” editorial wasn’t the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. It wasn’t even the stupidest thing I’ve read this week…
Climate change denial won’t even benefit oil companies soon
Phil McDuff
The damage caused by our addiction to burning fossil fuels will be so widespread that nobody stands to gain
The year 2018 is on track to be…
[…]
One hot summer does not a changing climate make, but the trend in the global data is now irrefutable. When Michael Mann published the “hockey stick” graph back in 1998, there was vociferous public pushback, yet the observed temperature rises match what Mann had predicted. Today’s hockey stick graph isn’t a forward projection but a historical record. The world has been getting hotter, and it will continue to do so. The only question now is how much hotter it gets.
[…]
Maybe we are destined to become the civilisational equivalent of Monty Python’s Mr Creosote, a man who gorged himself until he literally exploded.
Regardless of the alternative histories and the might-have-beens, it may be too late to stop it, but we still need to learn an important lesson. If a CEO tells us that it would be bad for business if they weren’t allowed to pump poison into the air and water, then that’s too bad for them: one business is not an economy, and it certainly isn’t a biosphere. We’d have survived the crisis of an oil CEO missing out on his fifth yacht, but many won’t survive the consequences of letting them lead us by the nose into disaster.
• Phil McDuff writes on economics and social policy
Firstly, Phil gets a +42 for the Monty Python reference.
Secondly, I’ll let commentators ridicule this mind-numbingly stupid passage:
When Michael Mann published the “hockey stick” graph back in 1998, there was vociferous public pushback, yet the observed temperature rises match what Mann had predicted. Today’s hockey stick graph isn’t a forward projection but a historical record.
Thirdly, no oil company has ever denied “climate change.” Without climate change, sedimentary geology would be pretty boring and Earth probably wouldn’t have much in the way of fossil fuels. Oil companies benefit from climate change. If not for climate change, oil companies probably wouldn’t even exist.
Oddly enough, the relevance of climate change to sedimentary geology is also one of primary bits of “evidence” in the incredibly moronic #ExxonKnew fraud.
This may be even stupider than the McDuff nonsense…
Similarly, as Steve Coll5 wrote in Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012), the company’s
investments in skeptics of the scientific consensus coincided with what at least a few of ExxonMobil’s own managers regarded as a hypocritical drive inside the corporation to explore whether climate change might offer new opportunities for oil exploration and profit.
The company tried to use the work of one of its most celebrated earth scientists, Peter Vail, to predict how alterations to the planet’s surface made by the changing climate could help it discover new deposits of oil and gas. “‘So don’t believe for a minute that ExxonMobil doesn’t think climate change is real,’ said a former manager…. ‘They were using climate change as a source of insight into exploration.’”6
The New York Review of Books: The Rockefeller Family Fund Takes on ExxonMobil
Are these people so fracking stupid that they can’t differentiate the scientifically challenged AGW hypothesis from the application of paleoclimatology to sedimentary geology? That was a rhetorical question.
As stupid as that passage was, it did stumble upon one of the two pillars of sedimentary geology: paleoclimatology. The other pillar being paleogeography. It also ignorantly references one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in the history of geology: Sequence stratigraphy.
Well, this certainly qualifies as economics (or control thereof) and social policy. Not much else and certainly not a dedication to science.
According to Hollywood airhead Leonardo DiCaprio rejecting Global Warming/Climate Change is rejecting the truth and coming from someones who makes their career on a big game of LETS PRETEND frankly him and Al Gore need to be marooned on a island together
It Middleton so fricking stupid that he doesn’t understand an example of corporate hypocrisy when someone smacks one across his face like a dead fish? Exxon Mobile was funding a disinformation campaign to discredit science that they were simultaneously seeking to exploit in petroleum explorations.
Presumably they weren’t wasting large sums of money seeking ways to exploit something they didn’t believe to be real. That would be stupid, wouldn’t it?
@Greg: What I imagine was going on is that some executive read something about the agw myth and brought it up at a meeting. They formed a committee to study both sides to profit either way whether it is true or not. That’s how business works.
Difficult to imagine a greater disinformation campaign than the left’s global warming scam. Temperatures and sea levels have gone up and down throughout the earth’s history, but the left didn’t figure anyone would know that. They hype their doomsday scenarios to frighten people into turning their livelihoods and futures over to socialists.
We no longer have to worry California has banned straws they have saved the planet. Never mind the plastic syringes they hand out like candy how they litter the streets to be washed down the sewers and skewer people on public transport.
WOW just what I was searching for. Came here by searching for muggernaut
The climate has been changing since forever. We’ve adapted.
Giving politicians more money and power is not going to stop the climate from changing.
@kitt: Like global warming, the left has again identified a problem that wasn’t there. The reported quantities of straws being used each day was wildly exaggerated in order to give liberals an excuse to reduce some minor freedom the people once had. Of course, the memes making fun of this stupidity are VERY entertaining (even IF the Russians are producing them all just to make liberals look stupid).
@Deplorable Me: Banning straws was wholey supported by the Chinese laundries in San Francisco. Do you know how many more shirts are sent to the laundry if the chocolate malt is consumed using no straw vs using a tidy straw?
Paul Krugman of the New Your Times estimates that the number of shirts/blouses soiled by not having the use of a plastic straw will increase the number of shirts/blouses sent to laundries by a factor of 4.
Procter and Gambel supported this law because their top detergent product Tyde is especially adept at removing beverage stains from shirts/blouses. They estimate a 30% increase in the sales of Tyde.
Whirpool and other laundry appliance manufacturers have already requested their engineers to add a beverage stain removal mode for their products. This will only increase the cost to consumers for washers with this unique mode by 3.71% resulting to an additional $31, 962, 355.17 to their bottom line.
Immediately upon understanding the implication of banning beverage straws, Warren Buffit bought up 91.66% of the Chinese laundries in California and the exclusive rights to market the new washers with the unique stain removal mode.
Donald Trump noted the major increase in the GNP and the manufacturing activity in the US and took credit for pushing the GDP to over 5% for 2018. Of course, the Democrats refused to give Trump credit for the GDP increase stating that the increase was a result of the recent open border policies. Liberals just never understand the unintended consequences of their actions!!!!
@Randy: I guess we’ll need all those illegal immigrants to fold all the shirts in the laundry.
Interesting experience; I had commented on one of the numerous global warming/floods/droughts/disasters articles on the NYT Facebook page and I was challenged to provide some citations to back up my claims. I posted 13 citations but the person I was arguing with says they can’t see them. Then, he posted some citations. I posted four more, but he says he can’t see them. Of course, he accuses me of not having citations.
Is it possible the Facebook page of NYT can filter those links out?
May 13, 2019 — Climate crisis: CO2 levels rise to highest point since evolution of humans
*That is, summer temperatures in the Arctic were regularly 59° F. That’s how you eventually get a 25-meter rise in ocean levels.
@Greg: I wonder where the CO2 comes from? I wonder if we must sacrifice Greg or some other liberal into a volcano to stop the eruptions? As usual, Greg finds fake news to support his views.
There are five active volcanoes in Hawaii. They are:
Loihi
Kilauea
Mauna Loa
Hualalai
Haleakala
Kilauea is considered one of the worlds most frequently active volcanoes. If you just look at the number of Kilauea eruptions recorded since Europeans arrived, there have been 62 eruptions in 245 years, which comes out to 1 eruption every 3.95 years. However, this completely ignores the fact that some of the eruptions lasted a long time. For example, the current eruption started in January of 1983 and has been continuous ever since! Likewise, there was an active lava lake in the summit caldera from at least 1823 until 1924, while at the same time eruptions would take place elsewhere on the flanks of the volcano.
Mauna Loa is an active volcano and is due for an eruption. Mauna Loa has erupted 15 times since 1900. These eruptions have lasted from a few hours to 145 days. Since 1950 Mauna Loa has erupted only twice, in 1975 and 1984. The 1975 eruption lasted 1 day. The 1984 eruption lasted 3 weeks. Nearly all the eruptions begin at the summit. About half of these migrate down into a rift zone.
Haleakala began growing on the ocean floor roughly 1-2 million years ago. It erupted most recently in 1790 at La Perouse Bay.
Hualalai is an active volcano. The resort town of Kailua is on the southwest flank of the volcano. Hualalai last erupted in 1801 and sent lava from a vent on its northeast rift down to the ocean. Swarms of earthquakes in 1929 were probably the result of magma movement within the volcano but there was not an eruption. Hualalai is monitored by geologists of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. In the last 24 years there have been no swarms of microearthquakes nor any harmonic tremor. Since the early 1980’s the geologists have been surveying the volcano. Hualalai is not expanding at the present time nor has expanded since the geologists began making their measurements. If anything changes I’m sure we’ll hear about it.
Lo’ihi means “long one”, a reference to its elongate shape. For a 3-d image, check out the Hawaii Undersea Geological Observatory (HUGO) home. Right now, the summit of Lo’ihi is about 970 meters below sea level. It is growing on the lower flanks of its two neighbors, Kilauea and Mauna Loa, with its base at a depth of about 4000 meters below sea level, so you can say that Lo’ihi itself is about 3000 m high. We don’t really know when it will reach the surface or even if it will. There is an underwater volcano off the NW coast of the big island of Hawai’i named Mahukona, and there is debate about whether it ever grew above sea level, or died out prior to doing so. The most often-heard time required for Lo’ihi to reach sea level is about 10,000 years, but that is really only a guess. It might be 30,000 years for all we know. It is far enough away from the coastline of Hawai’i that I imagine that at first it will be a separate island when it breaks the surface. As it grows (and especially if Kilauea and Mauna Loa are still erupting) it will soon be joined to the island.
Sources of Information:
Lockwood, J.P., and Lipman, P.W., 1987, Holocene eruptive history of Mauna Loa volcano, in Decker, R.W.,
Wright, T.L., and Stauffer, P.H.: U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1350, Volume 1, p. 509-535
Heliker, C.,1991, Volcanic and seismic hazards of the Island of Hawaii: U.S. Geological Survey General Interest Publication, 48 p.
Asta Miklius, U.S. Geological Survey, Hawaiian Volcano Observatory
CO2 in a plantless volcano zone well how is that a sample for the entire planet?
@Greg: Relax man AOC said she was joking about the 12 years to doomsday.https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/05/13/aoc-recants-world-ending-in-12-years-due-to…
Even she is calling you an idiot now….
Proximity of the Mauna Loa crater does not actually affect the CO2 level measured, owing to the rapidity with which emitted CO2 gas disperses through the Earth’s entire atmosphere. Measurements taken there tend to be very consistent with measurements taken at the same time at other locations across the globe. You don’t get localized differences as you do with temperature or barometric pressure readings. No anomalous readings are noted owing to the volcano.
If you were to take measurements directly inside a smoke and gas plume during a volcanic eruption, we’d have a very different situation. The same could be true to a much lesser degree of measurements in the middle of a tropical forest during the light of day.
Mauna Loa measurements are frequently cited because the record of measurements taken there goes back the farthest in time. The rapid upward trend of the atmospheric CO2 level actually does mean something. On a planetary time scale, it’s something that’s happening in the blink of an eye.
@Greg:
That is IMPOSSIBLE to believe.
Then why were measurements from this particular and odd location used?
So they merely got as close as they possibly could.
You know, it it were to turn out that liberals are telling the truth about climate change, that would be THE only thing liberals are not lying about.
@Greg: 250 million years ago atmospheric CO2 could have been around 1500 ppm. What caused all that CO2? How much were the dinosaurs taxed to have their government solve that?
@Greg: You contain more than a whole herd of bulls! You have no clue as to what representative sampling is. Did you know that humans emit less than 2% of the Worlds CO2? 415 PPM is .0415% 2% of that equals .00083% of the Earths CO2 is human generated. Now tell me that makes a difference!
@Randy, #19:
Did you stop to think that human activity produces 2% more each year than nature had been keeping in balance, and that the annual excesses have been accumulating from one year to the next for a couple of centuries? This is why atmospheric levels are rapidly increasing.
It makes a difference. The fact that the percentage of atmospheric CO2 is very small doesn’t mean that slight variations in that percentage aren’t critical to the balance of the entire system. It’s know that it makes a difference not just in theory but in practice, because the temperature is rising along with the CO2 levels
@Greg: Did you stop to think how much CO2 was generated in CA last year because environmentalists would not allow cleaning out the forests? Do you include that in human caused CO2 generated? Do you have any idea what the ideal CO2 concentrations are? You know very little. If you knew something, the countries who signed the Paris Climate Accord , not the US are the countries who are increasing their CO2 generation.
@Greg: What did the dinosaurs do that got rid of the CO2? How were they producing so much? Why does AOC say you have the intelligence of a sea sponge?
Who got the climate model correct?
@kitt, #22:
The Carboniferous Era that most of our fossil fuels date from ended around 150 million years before the appearance of the dinosaurs, or 300 million years ago. CO2 levels were already much lower. All that excess carbon sucked out of the atmosphere by plant life via photosynthesis was already locked up and buried with the vanished Carboniferous swamps and forests. The planet cooled as a result.
We’ve been rapidly letting it back out into the atmosphere for a couple of centuries now by digging up and burning peat, then vast quantities of coal and oil. As atmospheric carbon levels rise, the climate will become more like it was in the distant past.
The difference in the average planetary temperature between the Carboniferous Era and now is only about 14 degrees F.