Climate Change and the Battle for Your Mind
Imagine it’s January 1, 2015, and you’re given $65 million with the proviso that you must spend every nickel of it by the end of the year, solely to communicate a certain specific message to the world. What would that message be? Ban the bomb? Find Jesus? Go solar? Feed homeless veterans? Ban assault rifles? Pass universal healthcare?
That’s essentially the dilemma the American Petroleum Institute faced in 2015. Of course, as the lobby organization for Big Oil, their choice was the ultimate no-brainer: escalate the already ferocious attack on the mind of the common American to the effect that climate change is a hoax, and the so-called “consensus” among climate scientists to the contrary really does not exist. $65 million went a long way with the disinformation campaign, in particular, to the hiring of fake scientists who would publish reports disputing the theory of human-caused global warming. Why? All because of the war that’s being fought over the space between your ears.
I hope you’ll check out the short video linked above.
Craig,
Let’s examine the basic information of these videos.
1) Since the 1950’s the American Petroleum Institute has been worried about climate change and devised an expensive cunning conspiracy to cover up these scientific findings?
2) A conspiracy than ran for more than 60 years,involving tens of thousands of people, but never “leaked’ out until now ?
3) Had the world known, they would have immediately stopped using oil products. (in fact all fossil fuels) ?
4) Had the shareholders been aware they wouldn’t have bought shares in oil companies ?
This ludicrous video, like all conspiracy theories is obvious nonsense. Environmental science in the 1950’s was in it’s infancy. It’s quite true position papers, even suggested scenario’s were available from various academics concerning fossil fuels, the most accepted being M Hubert King’s theory of “peak oil “.
The scientific world aboundes with theories, mostly based on little more than conjecture.
This video falls into the same category as ” Who killed the Electric Car Video”. The viewer is asked to accept a whole bunch of speculative suppositions and distorted information designed to evidence a preposterous conspiracy theory.
In the case of WKTEC, the theory was that if EV 1 had been mass produced it would have found a eager buyers. As subsequent developments have revealed, the video is ludicrously bereft of valid facts or accuracy. That hasn’t deterred hard core conspiracy theorists still believing GM guilty of a world wide conspiracy, in conjunction with the oil industry, to suppress the development of the electricvehicles.
Likewise, the video reveals one line of a long “secret report”, (the rest is shaded)purportedly “leaked’ from oil company files.
In fact there’s nothing “secret” at all ! The report is not from “oil company sources” or the “American Petroleum Institute”. The page is from an academic paper submitted to Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences (until 1962 titled Journal of Meteorology) in 1971 ! (not 1959).
Scientific debate about “global warming” began in 1954 when Dr Gilbert Plass in a interview with Time Magazine, expounded theories on global warming and in 1956 stated publishing a series of papers on the subject.
In 1963, the hugely influential head of the US Global Atmospheric Research Program and President of the International Association for Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics (IAMAP) Professor Fritz Moller after studying calculations of surface temperature changes due to a doubling of carbon dioxide, formed the opinion these calculations were extremely sensitive to the model assumptions, and wrote about climate modelling in Journal of Geophysical Research.
He concluded, “the theory that climatic variations are affected by variations in the CO2 content become very questionable”.
In 1967, two of Professor Moller’s former assistants published what has become the seminal paper of climate change modelling when they submitted to the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, “Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity”, by Dr Syukuro Manabe and Dr Richard. T. Wetherald.
The academic debate continued, largely unnoticed except in academic publications, for the next thirty years. Over the years Shell Oil, Chevron, Texaco and other oil companies, especially BP, continued funding research (including Dr Manabe) into all aspects regarding the effects of industrial emissions.
In the late 1960’s and early ’70’s oil company research information was used to support California’s catalytic converter legislation and other automotive emission legislation.
Publication of Climate change material dramatically increased in the late 1990’s, from 4 or 5 papers per year until 1999, to over 120,000 by 2105 ! Some authors are really prolific, such the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat and de l’Environment’s Dr Philippe Ciais with over 120 published articles on climate change since 2006.
Prof Richard Tol, an economist from the University of Sussex, has written more than 118 papers, while the top ten most prolific scientists have written more than 1100 combined.
So much for a conspiracy !
From the earliest times information about climate change has been available in the public domain. It would also be fair to say the overwhelming body of scientific opinion until the millennium was dubious about the nature and effect of global warming.
Nor does “climate Change” pose a threat to oil company profits. The only threat to oil company profits has come from their own success in providing an oil glut. Demand has not decreased, not because of any “conspiracy” but because Oil and gas, (and to a lesser extent coal) is essential to human civilization.
Even crusaders like yourself, use oil products on daily basis.
The World’s oil companies don’t need to conspire to persuade people to use their products. demand exceeds supply.
All of the journals and publications are in the public domain, and always were. Opposing academics were never in the “pay” of oil companies.
Eric Schneiderman doesn’t drive a Tesla, Leaf, or even a hybrid ! He is typical of someone who wants to hold others responsible for his own choices.