Arguments
Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation
Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to improve their understanding. Yet this isn't what happens with climate change denial. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet embrace any argument, op-ed, blog or study that purports to refute global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming skepticism. Do their arguments have any scientific basis? What does the peer reviewed scientific literature say?
2015 SkS Weekly Digest #50
Posted on 13 December 2015 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights... Toon of the Week... Quote of the Week... SkS in the News... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... 97 Hours of Consensus...
Credit: tcktcktck
SkS Highlights
Betting against global warming is a sure way to lose money by Dana Nuccitelli (Climate Consensus - 97%, The Guardian) attracted the highest number of comments among the articles posted on SkS during the past week. The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget by Andy Skuce garnered the second highest number.
Toon of the Week
Hat tip to I Heart Climate Scientists
2015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #50
Posted on 12 December 2015 by John Hartz
A chronological listing of the news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook page during the past week.
Sun, Dec 6
- Denmark, a Green Energy Leader, Slows Pace of Its Spending by Mellisa Eddy, New York Times, Dec 5, 2015
- Why I’m optimistic on climate change despite the impossible goals of the Paris talks by Bhaskar Chakravorti, Washington Post, Dec 4. 2015
- Financial Industry Faces Daunting Transformation for Climate Deal to Succeed by John H. Cushman Jr., InsideClimate News, Dec 4, 2015
- Paris climate change talks yield first draft amid air of optimism by Lenore Taylor & Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, Dec 5. 2015
- Scientists enlist the big gun to get climate action: Faith by Seth Borenstein, AP (Associated Press), Dec 5, 2015
- The Chennai Floods Are a Devastating Preview of Unnatural Disasters to Come by Eric Holthaus, Slate, Dec 4, 2015
- Fuelling its growth with coal, India champions the poor in Paris by Alister Doyle & Tommy Wilkes, Reuters, Dec 6, 2015
New Peter Sinclair video: What Exxon Knew
Posted on 11 December 2015 by greenman3610
Wind energy is a key climate change solution
Posted on 10 December 2015 by John Abraham
When we think about climate change, it’s easy to focus on reducing emissions in order to maintain a healthy global temperature. But any real progress has to be complemented by a significant increase in clean and renewable energy. Fortunately, businesses have plans to build on recent successes and supply the world with the energy we need to grow economies.
A great example is Vestas, a major renewable energy company. I had the pleasure of communicating with the Vestas CEO Mr. Anders Runevad. He has served as CEO since 2013 and prior to that he worked at Ericsson and Sony Mobile. Mr. Runevad combines a technical background and education with business training to chart out pathways for companies to build capacity in the rapidly evolving energy market.
Vestas is a company very familiar to people like me who work in the wind power industry. They are the largest manufacturer of wind turbines in the world. Just this year, they have reached 7 GW of announced orders; their turbines can supply energy to supply the needs of 75 million Europeans.
But providing energy to the developing world is only part of the energy solution. Solving the climate change problem means we also need to revolutionize the power grids in the developing world. Companies like Vestas are working on that problem too.
Mr. Runevad recently met with India’s Prime Minister Modi and presented a plan to build blades at a new factory in India. They also have plans to increase the renewable energy supply in that country. As of now, Vestas has installed nearly 5,000 turbines in India and employs approximately 900 people there. Vestas has also committed to investments in Kenya by participating in the development of a wind park. The goal is to supply 15% of the electrical needs of Kenya, a country that is plagued by expensive and unreliable energy sources.
The Road to Two Degrees, Part Three: Equity, inertia and fairly sharing the remaining carbon budget
Posted on 9 December 2015 by Andy Skuce
In the first part of this series, I examined the implications of relying on CCS and BECCS to get us to the two degree target. In the second part, I took a detailed look at Kevin Anderson's arguments that IPCC mitigation scenarios aimed at two degrees are biased towards unproven negative-emissions technologies and that they consequently downplay the revolutionary changes to our energy systems and economy that we must make very soon. In this last part, I'm going to look at the challenges that the world faces in fairly allocating future emissions from our remaining carbon budget and raising the money needed for climate adaptation funds, taking account of the very unequal past and present.
Until now, economic growth has been driven and sustained largely by fossil fuels. Europe and North America started early with industrialization and, from 1800 up to around 1945, this growth was driven mainly by coal. After the Second World War there was a period of rapid (~4% per year) economic growth in Europe, N America and Japan, lasting about thirty years, that the French refer to as Les Trente Glorieuses, The Glorious Thirty. This expansion was accompanied by a huge rise in the consumption of oil, coal and natural gas. After this there was a thirty-year period of slower growth (~2%) in the developed economies, with consumption fluctuations caused by oil-price shocks and the collapse of the Soviet Union. During this time, oil and coal consumption continued to grow, but not as steadily as before. Then, at the end of the twentieth century, economic growth took off in China, with a huge increase in the consumption of coal.
Source of the emissions data is from the CDIAC. See the SkS post The History of Emissions and the Great Acceleration for further details.
If we are to achieve a stable climate, we will need to reverse this growth in emissions over a much shorter time period, while maintaining the economies of the developed world and, crucially, allowing the possibility of economic growth for the majority of humanity that has not yet experienced the benefits of a developed-country middle-class lifestyle.
Here are the the annual emissions sorted by country and region:
Betting against global warming is a sure way to lose money
Posted on 8 December 2015 by dana1981
In 2008, a paper was published in the journal Nature predicting that global surface temperatures would cool slightly in the years 2005–2015 as compared to 1994–2004. The authors of that paper thought that during that time, the cool phase of natural ocean cycles would be enough to more than offset warming from the increased greenhouse effect, before human-caused global warming caught up again thereafter. At the time, the paper and its cooling prediction received a tremendous amount of media attention.
There was some truth to the prediction. From about 1999 to 2012, there weremore La Niña than El Niño events, with the former having a short-term cooling influence on global surface temperatures, and the latter having a short-term warming effect. So, it’s true that natural ocean cycles had a temporary cooling effect during that time period.
But, the authors of the paper predicted that global surface temperatures would fall. The climate scientists who blog at RealClimate were so confident that temperatures would continue to rise that they offered the authors a bet.
If the average temperature 2000-2010 (their first forecast) really turns out to be lower or equal to the average temperature 1994-2004, we will pay them € 2500. If it turns out to be warmer, they pay us € 2500. This bet will be decided by the end of 2010. We offer the same for their second forecast: If 2005-2015 turns out to be colder or equal compared to 1994-2004, we will pay them € 2500 – if it turns out to be warmer, they pay us the same.
The authors of the paper declined to accept the bet, which was a good decision, because it turns out they would have lost. Despite the temporary cooling influence of natural ocean cycles and low solar activity since 1999, temperatures have continued to rise due to the strength of the increased greenhouse effect. They have risen more slowly than they would have otherwise, but temperatures have continued to rise nevertheless. As the climate scientists at RealClimatewrote,
It is clear that prediction of global cooling or even stasis was way off the mark, with global warming continuing and observations running more than 0.15ºC warmer than the Keenlyside et al forecast … Had our bet been accepted, it is clear we would have won unambiguously.
Observed global surface temperature data from NASA GISS (gray) and 10-year averages (blue) vs. Keenlyside et al. (2008) cooling predictions. Illustration from RealClimate.org.
Analysis: the key announcements from Day 1 at COP21
Posted on 7 December 2015 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief
The opening day at COP21 in Paris has seen a blizzard of announcements and speeches.
More that 150 world leaders travelled to the French capital to show their support for the much-anticipated climate conference, which aims to secure a global deal on tackling climate change in the post-2020 period.
Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, opened the leaders summit by saying: “This is a pivotal moment for the future of your countries, your people and our common home. You can no longer delay.”
Carbon Brief is in Paris for the next two weeks covering the event. Here, we take a closer look at the key announcements made on Day 1.
Leaders’ Speeches: Barack Obama
Barack Obama said that the US, along with other nations, would pledge new money today to the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDC Fund) — a fund that is specifically responsible for reducing vulnerability in the world’s poorest countries (see below for more details). He said that new money would be pledged tomorrow towards risk insurance initiatives “that help vulnerable populations rebuild stronger after climate-related disasters”.
2015 SkS Weekly Digest #49
Posted on 6 December 2015 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights... Toon of the Week... Quote of the Week... New Rebuttal Article Added... Coming Soon on SkS... SkS in the News... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... 97 Hours of Consensus...
SkS Highlights
How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming? by Dana generated the most comments of the articles posted on SkS during the past week. Scientists' open letter to the Wall Street Journal re: Ridley and Peiser , reposted from the Climate Feedback website garnered the second highest number comments.
Toon of the Week
Hat tip to I Heart Climate Scientists
Quotes of the week
Marcia McNutt, a former U.S. Geological Survey director and Science magazine editor who is about to become the head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, can't say enough about the importance of the pope's message.
"You can argue the science until cows come home, but that just appeals to people's intellect," McNutt said. "The pope's argument appeals to someone's heart. Whenever you appeal to someone's heart that's a much more powerful message."
Scientists enlist the big gun to get climate action: Faith by Seth Borenstein, AP (Associated Press), Dec 5, 2015
Laurence Tubiana, the French envoy for the talks, said: “We could have been better, we could have been worse. The job is not done, we need to apply all intelligence, energy, willingness to compromise and all efforts to come to agreement. Nothing is decided until everything is decided.”
Paris climate change talks yield first draft amid air of optimism by Lenore Taylor & Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, Dec 5. 2015
SkS in the News
In his Slate article, Researchers: Exxon, Koch Family Have Powered the Climate-Denial Machine for Decades, Eric Holthaus states:
John Cook, whose website skepticalscience.com has become a de-facto clearinghouse for exposing climate denial memes, called Farrell’s research a “crucial piece of the puzzle.”
2015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #49
Posted on 5 December 2015 by John Hartz
A chronological listing of the news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook page during the past week.
Sun, Nov 29
- African Countries Feeling Exposed to Extreme Weather Changes by Justus Wanzala, Inter Press Service (IPS), Nov 28, 2015
- The Paris Climate Talks by the Numbers by Jack Martinez, Newsweek, Nov 27, 2015
- As World Leaders Kick off Paris Climate Talks, Prescriptions Abound, from a Carbon Tax to a New Nuclear Push by Andrew C. Revkin, Dot Earth, New York Times, Nov 29, 2015
- Climate change protests across Australia – tens of thousands march by Ben Doherty and Shalailah Medhora, The Guardian, Nov 29, 2015
- George Osborne ‘has undermined UK role in climate talks’ by Robin Mckie, The Guardian, Nov 28, 2015
- Short Answers to Hard Questions About Climate Change by Justin Gillis, New York Times, Nov 28, 2015
- The Paris Climate Change Talks Represent a Critical Moment for the World by Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, Nov 29, 2015
- 1.8 million sign faith call for climate action ahead of Paris climate talks by Tierney Smith, tcktcktck.org, Nov 29, 2015
Scientists' open letter to the Wall Street Journal re: Ridley and Peiser
Posted on 4 December 2015 by Guest Author
The following is an open letter from seven professors contributing to Climate Feedback, in response to an error-riddled Matt Ridley and Benny Peiser op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. For a point-by-point analysis of the op-ed, see this Climate Feedback post.
The opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal by Matt Ridley and Benny Peiser (“Your Complete Guide to the Climate Debate” Nov. 27, 2015) is riddled with false statements, cherry-picked evidence and misleading assertions about climate science, according to an evaluation by a dozen scientists.
The article attempts to throw clouds of uncertainty around the hard facts about climate change that are agreed to by the scientific academies of every major country in the world and the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists. Here are just a few examples:
- The statement that the world has warmed at half the rate predicted in 1990 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is false. The IPCC predicted that warming between 2015 and 1990 would be between about 0.35 and 0.60 °C. The actual temperature change during that period is 0.5 °C. The statement, besides being false, also ignores that the world has already warmed a total of 1 °C since the start of the industrial revolution, and that as temperatures continue to climb, we are headed into territory not seen in thousands of years. The assertion that the world has been warmer several times in the past 10,000 years is not supported by the most comprehensive temperature reconstructions, and ignores the fact that a continued temperature rise this century will rapidly take the world beyond any climate experienced in that 10,000 year period.
- The statement that there has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of storms, floods or droughts also is flat-out wrong. A recently-released UN study found that both the frequency and intensity of storms and floods has increased over the past decade, and that weather-related disasters are occurring at almost twice the rate as they did two decades ago. The authors also ignore the clear increases in the most deadly type of extreme events caused by climate change — heat waves.
New research finds that global warming is intensifying wildfires
Posted on 3 December 2015 by John Abraham
A new paper was just published which provides a glimpse into the future of wildfires. The paper is titled “Extreme fire season in California: A glimpse into the future?” It was published as the second chapter of “Explaining Extreme Events of 2014” which is from by the American Meteorological Society and it is available here. The lead-in summary to the article is very much to the point. It states,
The fire season in northern California during 2014 was the second longest in terms of burned areas since 1996. An increase in fire risk in California is attributable to human-induced climate change.
The authors, Jin-Ho Yoon and colleagues make the point that California has been under drought conditions since 2012 and that the drought worsened recently. As is obvious, drought exacerbates the threat from wildfires. Last year, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection saw many more fires than have occurred in the prior five-year averages.
While the influence of drought and wildfires may be obvious, the authors bring some important and sometimes subtle insights. For instance, in a warming world, we also expect more rainfall. So it stands to reason that fires may actually decrease. So which effect wins out? The warming or the wetting? Also, how do the decreasing snowpack or early snowmelt factor in?
Deep Ocean: Climate change’s fingerprint on this forgotten realm
Posted on 2 December 2015 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Roz Pidcock at Carbon Brief
From overfishing to mineral mining, we humans subject our oceans to myriad stressors. Many hundreds of metres below the surface, the deep sea isn’t untouched by climate change either.
With the global oceans getting warmer and more acidic as they absorb heat and carbon dioxide, habitats and food webs are changing with them, a new perspective in the journal Science explains. The paper is part of a new special issue, looking at the oceans and climate change.
But while the consequences of biodiversity loss will affect us all, the deep sea exists in a “policy vacuum”, the authors argue. Next month’s climate summit in Paris needs to serve as a forum to get the deep ocean more attention on the world stage, they say.
Prof Nadine Le Bris, a marine chemist and co-author on the new paper, tells Carbon Brief:
So far, the attention has been mostly directed on terrestrial environments and quite recently coastal areas. There are still big gaps, particularly the open ocean and ocean floor ecosystems.
Deep water corals provide habitat for other species (Lacaze-Duthiers canyon, Western Mediterranean Sea, 520 m depth). Credit: LECOB_Chaire UPMC-Foundation Total
Uncertainty is Exxon's friend, but it's not ours
Posted on 1 December 2015 by Guest Author
Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol who studies uncertainty in climate-human interactions.
Richard Pancost is a Biogeochemist who studies ancient climates and is the Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.
Timothy Ballard is a cognitive scientist at the University of Queensland.
Beginning in the late 1970s, Exxon scientists started telling their top executives about the risk from climate change. By the 1980s, Exxon scientists shared the consensus view that the global climate was sensitive to greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.
However, when the issue of cuts to carbon emissions became prominent in the early 1990s, Exxon assumed a different position in public and embarked on a campaign against the increasingly clear fact that the Earth is warming from greenhouse gas emissions. This campaign was centered on scientific uncertainty: time and again, Exxon executives expressed their doubts about the science, turning their backs on their own scientists’ research.
This was no accident: Appeals to uncertainty to preclude or delay political action are so pervasive in political and lobbying circles that they have attracted scholarly attention under the name “Scientific Certainty Argumentation Methods”, or “SCAMs” for short. SCAMs are politically effective because they equate uncertainty with the possibility that a problem may be less serious than anticipated, while ignoring the often greater likelihood that the problem may be more deleterious.
How much does animal agriculture and eating meat contribute to global warming?
Posted on 30 November 2015 by dana1981
This is the new rebuttal to the myth 'animal agriculture and eating meat are the biggest causes of global warming.' It's available at the short URL sks.to/meat
The burning of fossil fuels for energy and animal agriculture are two of the biggest contributors to global warming, along with deforestation. Globally, fossil fuel-based energy is responsible for about 60% of human greenhouse gas emissions, with deforestation at about 18%, and animal agriculture between 14% and 18% (estimates from the World Resources Institute, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and Pitesky et al. 2009).
Global human greenhouse gas emissions flowchart, from the World Resources Institute.
2015 SkS Weekly Digest #48
Posted on 29 November 2015 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights... El Niño Watch... Toon of the Week... Quote of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... 97 Hours of Consensus...
SkS Highlights
The Road to Two Degrees, Part Two: Are the experts being candid about our chances? by Andy Skuce attracted the highest number of comments of the articles posted on SkS during the past week. Two-faced Exxon: the misinformation campaign against its own scientists by Dana Nuccitelli drew the second highest number of comments.
El Niño Watch
GENEVA – The “El Nino” phenomenon, which sparks global climate extremes, is this year the worst in more than 15 years, the U.N. weather agency said in the middle of November, warning it was already causing severe droughts and flooding.
The World Meteorological Organization said El Nino, which occurs every two to seven years, had resurfaced a few months ago, become “mature and strong,” and was expected to become even more powerful by the end of the year.
“Severe droughts and devastating flooding being experienced throughout the tropics and subtropical zones bear the hallmarks of this El Nino, which is the strongest in more than 15 years,” WMO chief Michel Jarraud said in a statement.
World weather agency issues El Nino warning, AFP-JIJI/Japan Times, Nov 28, 2015
Toon of the Week
Hat tip to I Heart Climate Scientists
2015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #48
Posted on 28 November 2015 by John Hartz
A chronological listing of the news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook page during the past week.
Sun, Nov 22
- India backs 2 degree global warming limit - French ministry source by Emmanuel Jarry, Reuters, Nov 21, 2015
- Climate change boosted Australia’s 2010 floods by Tim Radford, Climate News Network, Nov 21. 2015
- Unmitigated Climate Change to Shrink Global Economy by Ben Gruber, Reuters/Climate Central, Nov 21, 2015
- Senate Republicans Just Promised To Undermine The Paris Climate Negotiations by Samantha Page, Climate Progress, Nov 19, 2015
- Conflict makes countries more vulnerable to climate change - index by Megan Rowling, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Nov 22, 2015
- Yes, the Paris climate change conference can save the planet, Op-ed by Ed Miliband, The Guardian, Nov 22, 2015
- Alberta launches $3 billion climate change strategy with carbon tax by Darcy Henton & Chris Varcore, Calgary Herald, Nov 22, 2015
A Buoy-Only Sea Surface Temperature Record Supports NOAA’s Adjustments
Posted on 27 November 2015 by Kevin C
This is an update of an update of an article which originally appeared at Climate Etc. The authors are grateful for the helpful comments which have informed the updates.
By Zeke Hausfather and Kevin Cowtan
Significant recent media and political attention has been focused on the new NOAA temperature record, which shows considerably more warming than their prior record during the period from 1998 to present. The main factor behind these changes is the correction in ocean temperatures to account for the transition from ship engine room intake measurement to buoy-based measurements and a calibration of differences across ships using nighttime marine air temperatures (NMAT). Here we seek to evaluate the changes to the NOAA ocean temperature record by constructing a new buoy-only sea surface temperature record. We find that a record using only buoys (and requiring no adjustments) is effectively identical in trend to the new NOAA record and significantly higher than the old one.
The changes to the prior NOAA global land/ocean temperature series are shown in Figure 1. There are some large changes in the 1930s that are interesting but have little impact on century-scale trends. The new NOAA record also increases temperatures in recent years, resulting a in a record where the period subsequent to 1998 has a trend identical to the period from 1950-1997 (and giving rise to the common claim that the paper was “busting” the recent slowdown in warming).
Figure 1: New and old homogenized global land/ocean records from Karl et al, 2015.
The paper that presented the revised record, Karl et al, didn’t actually do much that was new. Rather, they put together two previously published records: an update to the NOAA sea surface temperature record (called ERSST) from version 3 to version 4, and the incorporation of a new land record from the International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI) that makes use of around 32,000 land stations rather than the 7,000 or so GHCN-Monthly stations previously utilized. The new land record is quite similar to that produced by Berkeley Earth, though it has relatively little impact on the temperature trend vis-à-vis the old land record, particularly during the recent 1998-present period.
The Road to Two Degrees, Part Two: Are the experts being candid about our chances?
Posted on 26 November 2015 by Andy Skuce
The first part of this three-part series looked at the staggering magnitude and the daunting deployment timescale available for the fossil fuel and bioenergy carbon capture and storage technologies that many 2°C mitigation scenarios assume. In this second part, I outline Kevin Anderson's argument that climate experts are failing to acknowledge the near-impossibility of avoiding dangerous climate change under current assumptions of the political and economic status quo, combined with unrealistic expectations of untested negative-emissions technologies.
In plain language, the complete set of 400 IPCC scenarios for a 50% or better chance of meeting the 2 °C target work on the basis of either an ability to change the past, or the successful and large-scale uptake of negative-emission technologies. A significant proportion of the scenarios are dependent on both. (Kevin Anderson)
Kevin Anderson has just written a provocative article titled: Duality in climate science, published in Nature Geoscience (open access text available here). He contrasts the up-beat pronouncements in the run-up to the Paris climate conference in December 2015 (e.g. “warming to less than 2°C” is “economically feasible” and “cost effective”; “global economic growth would not be strongly affected”) with what he see as the reality that meeting the 2°C target cannot be reconciled with continued economic growth in rich societies at the same time as the rapid development of poor societies. He concludes that: “the carbon budgets associated with a 2 °C threshold demand profound and immediate changes to the consumption and production of energy”.
His argument runs as follows: Integrated Assessment Models, which attempt to bring together, physics, economics and policy, rely on highly optimistic assumptions specifically:
o Unrealistic early peaks in global emissions;
o Massive deployment of negative-emissions technologies.
He notes that of the 400 scenarios that have a 50% or better chance of meeting the 2 °C target, 344 of them assume the large-scale uptake of negative emissions technologies and, in the 56 scenarios that do not, global emissions peak around 2010, which, as he notes, is contrary to the historical data.
I covered the problems of the scalability and timing of carbon capture and storage and negative emissions technologies in a previous article.
From Robbie Andrew, adjusted for non-CO2 and land-use emissions.Note that these mitigation curves assume no net-negative emissions technologies deployed in the latter part of the century.
Two-faced Exxon: the misinformation campaign against its own scientists
Posted on 25 November 2015 by dana1981
Investigative journalism by Inside Climate News (ICN) into Exxon’s internal documents revealed that the company was at the forefront of climate research, warning of the dangers posed by human-caused global warming from the late-1970s to the late-1980s. As Harvard climate historian Naomi Oreskes noted,
But Exxon was sending a different message, even though its own evidence contradicted its public claim that the science was highly uncertain and no one really knew whether the climate was changing or, if it was changing, what was causing it … Journalists and scientists have identified more than 30 different organizations funded by the company that have worked to undermine the scientific message and prevent policy action to control greenhouse gas emissions.
Exxon has responded to the ICN allegations by pointing out that over the past three decades, the company’s scientists have continued to publish peer-reviewed climate research.
Our scientists have contributed climate research and related policy analysis to more than 50 papers in peer-reviewed publications – all out in the open. They’ve participated in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its inception – in 1988 – and were involved in the National Academy of Sciences review of the third U.S. National Climate Assessment Report.
Finally, I’ll note that we have long – and publicly – supported a revenue-neutral carbon tax as the most effective, transparent, and efficient way for governments to send a signal to consumers and the economy to reduce the use of carbon-based fuels.
While the ICN investigation focused on Exxon’s internal reports, Exxon’s spokesman pointed to the peer-reviewed scientific research published by the company’s scientists between 1983 and 2014 – 53 papers in all.
Exxon scientists’ 100% global warming consensus
I reviewed all 53 of the papers referenced by Exxon’s spokesman, and they indeed consist of high-quality scientific research. Most of them implicitly or explicitly endorsed the expert consensus on human-caused global warming; none minimized or rejected it. This means that there is a 100% consensus on human-caused global warming among Exxon’s peer-reviewed climate science research – even higher than the 97% consensus in the rest of the peer-reviewed literature.
Of the 53 papers, 45 were co-authored by Haroon Kheshgi. I spoke to several climate scientists who worked with him and all agree, Kheshgi is a top-notch climate scientist, for example having constructively contributed to the first IPCC reports that identified a human influence on global warming.
Katharine Hayhoe, one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people, did a summer internship with Kheshgi at one of Exxon’s facilities as part of her masters’ thesis research, and subsequently co-authored a number of papers with him. Hayhoe described her experience with Kheshgi and Exxon,
Haroon himself is an outstanding scientist - careful, detailed, methodical, and committed to doing good science, just as we all are. In my experience with Exxon and with Haroon, I never met a scientist who expressed any opinions counter to those prevalent in the academic community.
Much of Exxon’s early research in the 1980s dealt with climate modeling, for example projecting that the planet’s surface temperatures would warm 3–6°C above pre-industrial levels by the year 2100. Their research has often discussed the dangers associated with this degree of global warming, and many studies published by Exxon scientists investigated the possibility of mitigating climate change by sequestering carbon in the deep ocean.
The peer-reviewed research published by Exxon’s climate scientists was entirely in line with the expert consensus that humans are causing potentially dangerous global warming, and that we need to explore ways to mitigate the associated risks.
Exxon funded climate denial misinformation campaign
While Exxon’s own scientists and research were 100% aligned with the expert consensus on human-caused global warming, the company simultaneously funded a campaign to manufacture doubt about that scientific consensus.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science found that groups with funding from corporations like Exxon have been particularly effective at polarizing and misinforming the public on climate change. Since 1998, Exxon has given over $31 million to organizations and individuals blocking solutions to climate change and spreading misinformation to the public.
What #ExxonKnew vs what #ExxonDid. Illustration: John Cook, SkepticalScience.com
Study drives a sixth nail into the global warming ‘pause’ myth
Posted on 24 November 2015 by John Abraham
Despite the organization and funding behind groups which try to cast doubt about the causes and implications of climate change, the facts have spoken. The world continues to warm and their favorite myths have died.
We know that human-emitted heat-trapping gases warm the planet. In fact, this has been known for well over a century. With modern instruments (like ocean thermometers and satellites among others) we are now measuring the change. With advanced climate models, we can predict the changes. The measurements and the predictions are in excellent agreement, despite what cable news and second-rate skeptical scientists say.
And this year, the data are in. Using measurements to date, and long-term weather forecasting to predict the last 40 days of the year (while it may seem a bit early) we now know. As my colleague Dana Nuccitelli recently noted, 2015 is the hottest year on record. When the final numbers come out in January, the NOAA 2015 global averaged surface temperature anomaly over both land and ocean will be 1.6°Fabove the long-term average. For the NASA GISTEMP dataset, it will be 1.5°F above the long-term average. This comes on the heels of last year’s record and recent record ocean heat content. So, the bad news is we continue to break records.
