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I still find the fact that Exxon internal researchers knew about the incoming crisis since 1982. The fact that they didn't act upon the information to me is min

by Arrezz 7y ago

I still find the fact that Exxon internal researchers knew about the incoming crisis since 1982. The fact that they didn't act upon the information to me is mind-boggling, I guess the profit motives were too strong. I wonder how they rationalized it to themselves, if we don't do it then someone else will?

fromthestart 7y ago
>I still find the fact that Exxon internal researchers knew about the incoming crisis since 1982. I'll keep posting about it untill this hysteria dies, though I fear that given social pressures regarding anything representing "denial" will keep it alive indefinitely. No one knew about an incoming crisis in the 80s. People were aware about the possibility of climate change in the 80s. It took 30 years of data collection, research, and computational modeling on increasingly modern hardware, which allows for exponentially larger and more precise models, before we had amassed enough evidence in a totally model driven field to conclude that we may be terraforming on the scale of 100 years.
- adrianN 7y ago
  The IPCC was formed in 1988 and published their first report two years later where they already concluded that anthropogenic climate change is happening. I think it's fair to say that scientists knew about this by the late eighties and probably earlier. The confidence intervals have been getting ever smaller since then, but the effect was already known.
- vidanay 7y ago
  Yeah, it's like a 12 year old kid taking a first drag off a cigarette in 1938 and exclaiming "That shit will kill you" as he hacks and coughs. Not the same thing as factual scientific evidence.
- mturmon 7y ago
  Your wording is somewhat oblique ("this hysteria"), and you are making distinctions that are not clear ("no one knew" vs. "people were aware of the possibility"; "terraforming" as a feel-good substitute for unplanned global climate change), and claims that are very strong, sweeping, and incorrect ("totally model-driven field"). Let's correct two of these. Of course there are empirical observations related to climate. There is a definition of 54 "essential climate variables" (ECVs), see [1]. One of these is greenhouse gases [2]. At the bottom of the link, you can see observing programs for CO2 and CH4, both in situ and satellite. These are well-measured variables, with well-characterized error bars, and models are tested against these observations. For instance, the ~400 ppm CO2 ECV is measured to within 1ppm quite regularly and has been for many years. This is how we improve the models. The same kind of monitoring/model-improvement feedback loop is in place for almost all of the ECVs, including clouds and sea surface properties like temperature and salinity. Another correction, relating to "no one knew" about a future crisis in the 1980s. Here is a paper [3] from James Hansen in Science magazine, in 1981, that clearly warns of crisis-level consequences. From the abstract -- In the 21st century, we will see "creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage." For whatever it's worth, this appeared on the NYTimes front page in 1981. That's just one publication. Throughout the 1980s there were broad-based studies, mandated by Congress, that indicated the scope of the problem. See [4], from 1983. [1] https://gcos.wmo.int/en/essential-climate-variables https://gcos.wmo.int/en/essential-climate-variables [2] https://ane4bf-datap1.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wmod8_gcos/s3fs-public/ghg_ecv_factsheet_201905.pdf?TJO3Z20j79hzWgwL4sT.qEhqWA3rf3Dz https://ane4bf-datap1.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wmod8_gcos/... [3] https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html [4] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18714/changing-climate-report-of-the-carbon-dioxide-assessment-committee https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18714/changing-climate-report-of...
  - fromthestart 7y ago
    >terraforming" as a feel-good substitute for unplanned global climate change), Not true, please don't put words in my mouth. I use the term terraforming to emphasize the magnitude of the claim. We are fundamentally changing the properties of an entire planetary atmosphere, inadvertently. >and claims that are very strong, sweeping, and incorrect ("totally model-driven field"). Also not true. The point is that climate science by nature cannot be experimental. We can only make predictions and then proof amounts to measuring how well decades of measurements line up with predictions/models. >Another correction, relating to "no one knew" about a future crisis in the 1980s. Here is a paper [3] from James Hansen in Science magazine, in 1981, that clearly warns of crisis-level consequences. From the abstract -- In the 21st century, we will see "creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage." For whatever it's worth, this appeared on the NYTimes front page in 1981. Again, given the non experimental nature of climate science, this was a massive claim which requires decades of data collection and modeling to verify before committing to sweeping social and economic policy reform which has costs of its own. People underestimate the fact that climate change is one of the most radical ideas ever proposed by the modern scientific establishment, in terms of the scale of the changes, the disastrous predicted consequences, and the scale of societal change required for mitigation. We're talking about a potential irreversible, runaway global extinction accidentally triggered by humans 100-1000+ times faster than any measured natural rate. Due diligence, in a non experimental field, limited by 80s modeling hardware, took time. Meanwhile we all benefited from the fossil fuels we (and our parents) burned.
    - mturmon 7y ago
      You said Climate Science is a "totally model-driven field" and I provided facts correcting that sweeping claim. It's not uncommon to hear this kind of claim on HN - sometimes people seem to not really have on-the-ground information about how climate science works, and are instead going by how they might imagine it works -- a bunch of modelers working in isolation. That's not how climate science is done. For more on the relationship of climate models to observations, see an old comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15613090#15620293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15613090#15620293 -- Your reply says that you meant to say that Climate Science "cannot be experimental". This, it turns out, is also not true. There are cases where nature runs the experiment for us. For instance, the large methane leak recently in the LA area allowed us to understand the effectiveness of the inversion algorithms that are used to turn observations of concentrations into observations of the emissions that caused those concentrations. For instance, to understand the correctness of wind models. Wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and ENSO onsets often serve as nature-given checks on climate science predictions. They basically provide a "step function" input that is a tool to characterize the system response to a shock. For instance, we got a lot of science out of the varying climate-system responses to different volcanic eruptions. -- You said that "no one knew" about a possible future crisis in the 1980s. I supplied links showing that this is not the case -- the science establishment, the Congress, and the readers of the front page of major newspapers knew. Your reply counters with "what should we have done". That's another question, isn't it?
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  I think "terraforming" means "changing planetary climate to be more like Earth climate". We are doing something rather opposite. You can use "geoengineering" if you want a sarcastic term similar to how rocket people use "rapid unplanned disassembly" instead of "crash".
- specialist 7y ago
  Some of us were paying attention. -- My 4th grade teacher (1978) was brain washing us into being tree huggers. Conserve water while brushing our teeth was "magic". Turn down the heat. Recycle. Etc. I recall hippie flavored propaganda in the school library asking if we wanted Earth to become a Red Planet (industrial) a Green Planet (farming) or Blue Planet (natural ecosystems), or some combination. My (much older) cousin was a physicist studying submarine acoustics. He's always known, patiently explained the whatnots to us younger skeptics. I worked at a civil engineering firm while still in high school (1980s). All the adults seemed to know what was happening, even if we didn't yet know all the causes. I vividly remember my boss (from Canada) telling me his childhood neighborhood lake was no longer safe to play hockey on. I volunteered thru the 1990s at an org trying to save the PNW salmon. The staff scientists knew our local snow packs were shrinking. (Need the melt for salmon runs.) Now our mountains are bare most of the year, of course. Terrifying. Maybe because I read a lot of sci-fi, I've always "known". Most memorable to me have been John Brunner's Shockwave Rider, The Sheep Look Up, and Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia. But of course, post-apocalyptic is a popular storyline, so there have been zillions others. -- PS, for the down voter(s), one of the minor plot lines from the TV show Dallas was Bobby Ewing's renewable energy efforts, in opposition to older brother JR Ewing's doubling down on carbon. In debating with Bobby in front of Daddy Ewing, JR's money quote was "We've been running out of oil since the first oil well." So, ya, climate change was part of the (most) popular culture too.
  - okmokmz 7y ago
    This is a weird comment... am I understanding right that you do believe in climate change and believe that people were aware in the 1980's? The first couple lines where you talk about a teacher "brain washing" you into "tree huggers" and seeing "hippie flavored propaganda" comes off a lot like how ignorant, far-right climate change deniers sound. However, towards the end it sounds like you are saying that you knew about global warming. Care to clarify?
    - specialist 7y ago
      I've long wondered how and why I became a tree hugger. Despite the dominant culture. It wasn't from my family, church, peers, media. Growing up, my father just poured used motor oil into the sewer (ffs). My best guess is that one teacher slyly taught environmentalism on the down low. It certainly wasn't part of the curriculum. And some how her message stuck with me. Given my own experience, and my readings about "Language is a virus", Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, memetics, Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation, Luntz's Words of Power, etc: It's mostly a waste of time and effort and goodwill trying to persuade any body of anything. It's better to focus imprinting kids with the values and ideals they'll need to better compete in the future. For better or for worse. Mostly for worse.
- akuchling 7y ago
  People often don't realize how old the science behind climate change is. There's an excellent discussion at https://history.aip.org/climate/20ctrend.htm#M_35_ https://history.aip.org/climate/20ctrend.htm#M_35_ ; quoting from that paragraph: "Returning to old records, in 1986 the group produced the first truly solid and comprehensive global analysis of average surface temperatures, including the vast ocean regions, which most earlier studies had neglected. They confirmed that there had been considerable warming from the late 19th century up to 1940, followed by some regional cooling in the Northern Hemisphere. Global conditions had been roughly level until the mid 1970s. Then the warming had resumed with a vengeance. The warmest three years in the entire 134-year record had all occurred in the 1980s."
jackstraw14 7y ago
Corporations like Exxon aren't rational, they only exist to make more money, so that's what they did.
- donclark 7y ago
  Do publicly traded corporations have different interests than actual human beings? Is there main concern only money/profits? If not, what is it?
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    Humans have different interests from other human beings. Take a wide enough sampling of humanity (i.e. not people who already know each other) and you'll find a wide variety of divergent interests. But the prime directive of any entity - whether it's a living being, or abstract idea like a corporation or nation state - is to continue existing. After all, every entity that failed in this is no longer with us. Society moving away from oil is an existential threat to ExxonMobil-the-corporation. Climate change is only an existential threat to a large fraction of humanity, and a largely disjoint one from individual decision-makers at Exxon. So their incentives are somewhat misaligned here.
    - Retric 7y ago
      > to continue existing That seems obvious, but suicide and extreme risk taking demonstrates many other things are considered more important. In the corporate world banks fail all the time because the people running them don’t care about failure nearly as much as their next bonus. This is also why pensions and other long term liability’s are generally under funded.
      - nostrademons 7y ago
        You can explain both of those by moving up a level from individuals to systems. Suicide is a consequence of shame. Human beings have evolved an emotional mechanism that lets them function as groups; this mechanism functions by giving each individual an unconscious sense of whether they "measure up" to the standards of the group around them. One consequence of that is that some fraction of individuals won't, oftentimes with tragic results for the individual. But groups that have this mechanism killed or absorbed all individuals that don't (well, not quite - psychopathy is the absence of shame, and it's usually maladaptive but some high-functioning psychopaths can blend in among normal society), and so the world we live in includes suicide. Banks serve financial markets. It's okay for individual banks to fail as long as the market as a whole continues to function; in fact, proper functioning of the market requires some banks to fail. It's the same as ant colonies or human microbiomes. When you step on an individual ant, the colony doesn't care, because the unit of survival is the colony. When you crap out intestinal bacteria, you don't shed a tear, because the unit of survival is the individual human and not the bacteria within them. In fact, the perspective with which you look at the world says a lot about the degree of interaction within the system. We think of a human as an individual entity; it took us a long time to think of a cell as an individual entity; and unless you're a dedicated biologist you probably don't think of a mitochondria as its own entity, despite them being independent bacteria at one time. You could look at global capitalism as being one super-organism, much like an ant colony, and individual humans are, well, workers. Capitalism doesn't care if it chews up and spits out human lives, because there will always be more of them. Its prime directive is to sustain capitalism itself. (Note also that global capitalism doesn't care if ExxonMobile lives or dies, and it's highly likely that it'll die. It'll just get replaced by some solar energy company. This conflict between levels goes all the way up the hierarchy - the interests of your cells are not necessarily aligned with yours, your interests are not necessarily aligned with your employer, your employer is not necessarily aligned with the market.)
philipov 7y ago
The extrapolation of I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone is "By the time it's a problem, we'll be dead."
Gravityloss 7y ago
They did act. IIRC they started sponsoring anti climate change material producing organizations and supporting its dissemination. A wildly succesful project that has probably paid itself back with a large factor.
- tossAfterUsing 7y ago
  They also (as i read) started building their ocean based drilling platforms a little bit taller to account for sea-level rise.
  - kleton 7y ago
    Oil rigs float.
    - tossAfterUsing 7y ago
      some are floating some are actually platforms with legs that touch the ground. furthermore, i was wrong to write "drilling" platforms... as those are only used during the field's construction, until the wells are in place.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I think a good strategy is to sponsor anti climate change activities to keep current profits flowing while at the same silently investing in businesses and tech that will do well in the world climate change creates. I think that's what they are doing.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I mean... yea, it's a good strategy for them it isn't a good strategy for everyone else though.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      That’s usually not a concern.
ekr 7y ago
I still find it mind-boggling how some people can be so surprised by the fact that people in general act in their own interest. A normal, healthy human being is exclusively concerned by its own well-being and that of its immediate family. To the extent that we witness altruistic behavior, it is executed for signalling purposes (this is the reason why there's virtually no completely anonymous charity, see "The elephant in the brain"). There is a part of the brain that is responsible for integrating events into a continuous narrative. That part of the brain is why we perceive ourselves as an integral being and not a set of parts, but that part is also severely biased in healthy humans, biased to paint ourselves as kinder, more altruistic, more intelligent, while also rewriting the motivation we cite for our past actions, so as to put ourselves in the best possible light. But no, there's nothing special about those Exxon researches, that's just normal human behavior. And to go further, acting against ones own interest requires going over a strong emotion. The body let's you know that you shouldn't be doing something through a gut feeling. Repeatedly ignoring or repressing those emotions is not healthy for the nervous system, and much has been written on this subject. LE: And regarding claims that stopping global warming was in their own interest back in the 1980s, there's the hyperbolic discounting effect (among other things).
- komali2 7y ago
  This implies one needs to act against one's interests to take action on climate change. Lack of imagination on Exxon's part could explain this as well. They could have started ringing alarm bells and used their massive strength to push for environmental research and favorable regulations.
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    > They could have started ringing alarm bells and used their massive strength to push for environmental research and favorable regulations. i.e., acting against their own interests. Spending the last 40 years using their strength against environmental research meant that the people who in 1980 owned and managed Exxon extracted great benefit to themselves (at the cost of others) for the rest of their lives (either they're already dead, or will be before any serious consequences may hurt them); doing what you propose would have benefitted the world but greatly hurt their own interests.
lacker 7y ago
What would you have done about it, if you were the CEO of Exxon in 1982?
- munk-a 7y ago
  Why was the CEO of Exxon allowed to do this in 1982? And why didn't the government fund science to figure this out first?
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    The government knew about it, as did most of the population. Al Gore sponsored the first congressional hearings on climate change in 1976, and I remember putting on a play about environmental issues (including global warming) in 4th grade (1990). It's very difficult to rally people around a problem until they see tangible evidence of it in their own lives. Global warming was an abstraction in the 80s; we knew it was happening, we knew it would have a big impact, but we were too busy trying not to get nuked by the Soviets (or rather, trying to make them think we were gonna nuke them so they bankrupted themselves). In a democracy you can't get political support for policies until a majority of people agree with you. When it comes to giant systems like the environment, that's too late. There are probably a number of other problems that can see right now that we are doing nothing about - trust pollution (where you have no idea what's true anymore), mass migration (which I guess we're doing something about, but that "something" is putting kids in cages), erosion of the rule of law, potential infectious diseases, a looming demographic crisis, etc. But all of these are too big to wrap our head around a solution until they become a crisis - we're too busy dealing with climate change - and so they'll just blow up society and we'll be left to pick up the pieces.
  - inscionent 7y ago
    He was the CEO of Exxon. He had economic power. He used it. Why would the government bother? The experts from the companies who helped get them elected told them it wasn't a problem. > In 1981, he was appointed to President Ronald Reagan's National Productivity Advisory Committee and later served on the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control.[6] He served as Chairman of The Business Council in 1983 and 1984. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_C._Garvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_C._Garvin
aczerepinski 7y ago
Exxon not taking it seriously in the 80s seems less extreme than politicians denying it in 2019 when the physical evidence is all around us.
justin66 7y ago
> The fact that they didn't act upon the information to me is mind-boggling, I guess the profit motives were too strong. You're seriously overestimating Americans, circa 1982. We were still fighting about whether cigarette smoke causes cancer (correlation is not causation!) and we had a president who claimed that trees pollute the environment more than cars do (who went on to be reelected). Politically influential Christian public figures rationalized how the deadly sin of greed should be considered a virtue while also blathering about how HIV was a manifestation of God's wrath toward homosexuals. And everyone kind of assumed our odds of surviving the cold war weren't great anyway, so you want to worry about something about temperature increasing, and also didn't you say there was going to be an ice age or something, blah blah blah? It's a minor miracle that we managed to cease the destruction of the ozone layer given the level of stupidity we were operating at. A person aware of current events and capable of making analogies might question how much progress we've truly made, but that's a separate topic.
- mncharity 7y ago
  > You're seriously overestimating Americans, circa 1982. Circa 1982? Some months ago, the NYTimes did a story on Coke/Pepse/Nestle sugar drink/food causing simultaneous systemic obesity and malnutrition in Central/South America. Company leadership was quoted as expressing surprise at this "unexpected" impact. TPP had ISDS provisions to permit companies to sue governments to recover profits lost to health policies. And so it goes. Today.
- coffeecat 7y ago
  I have a non-rigorous pet theory that the combined effects of lead plumbing and leaded gasoline produced generations of Americans, from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, whose population-wide intelligence levels were adversely affected by lead exposure.
- okmokmz 7y ago
  >It's a minor miracle that we managed to cease the destruction of the ozone layer I'm not sure you can say that we ceased destruction of the Ozone layer. Certainly slowed, and in some cases ozone is increasing but not universally. Ozone levels in the upper levels have been slowly increasing, but the lower levels are still being depleted and there is evidence of an increase of short-lived ozone depleting substances. https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/18/1379/2018/ https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/18/1379/2018/
inscionent 7y ago
It isn't mind boggling. It is contemptuous and greedy but exactly in line with keeping and maintaining economic power. This isn't about the environment.

by Arrezz 7y ago

fromthestart 7y ago

>I still find the fact that Exxon internal researchers knew about the incoming crisis since 1982. I'll keep posting about it untill this hysteria dies, though I fear that given social pressures regarding anything representing "denial" will keep it alive indefinitely. No one knew about an incoming crisis in the 80s. People were aware about the possibility of climate change in the 80s. It took 30 years of data collection, research, and computational modeling on increasingly modern hardware, which allows for exponentially larger and more precise models, before we had amassed enough evidence in a totally model driven field to conclude that we may be terraforming on the scale of 100 years.

adrianN 7y ago
The IPCC was formed in 1988 and published their first report two years later where they already concluded that anthropogenic climate change is happening. I think it's fair to say that scientists knew about this by the late eighties and probably earlier. The confidence intervals have been getting ever smaller since then, but the effect was already known.
vidanay 7y ago
Yeah, it's like a 12 year old kid taking a first drag off a cigarette in 1938 and exclaiming "That shit will kill you" as he hacks and coughs. Not the same thing as factual scientific evidence.
mturmon 7y ago
Your wording is somewhat oblique ("this hysteria"), and you are making distinctions that are not clear ("no one knew" vs. "people were aware of the possibility"; "terraforming" as a feel-good substitute for unplanned global climate change), and claims that are very strong, sweeping, and incorrect ("totally model-driven field"). Let's correct two of these. Of course there are empirical observations related to climate. There is a definition of 54 "essential climate variables" (ECVs), see [1]. One of these is greenhouse gases [2]. At the bottom of the link, you can see observing programs for CO2 and CH4, both in situ and satellite. These are well-measured variables, with well-characterized error bars, and models are tested against these observations. For instance, the ~400 ppm CO2 ECV is measured to within 1ppm quite regularly and has been for many years. This is how we improve the models. The same kind of monitoring/model-improvement feedback loop is in place for almost all of the ECVs, including clouds and sea surface properties like temperature and salinity. Another correction, relating to "no one knew" about a future crisis in the 1980s. Here is a paper [3] from James Hansen in Science magazine, in 1981, that clearly warns of crisis-level consequences. From the abstract -- In the 21st century, we will see "creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage." For whatever it's worth, this appeared on the NYTimes front page in 1981. That's just one publication. Throughout the 1980s there were broad-based studies, mandated by Congress, that indicated the scope of the problem. See [4], from 1983. [1] https://gcos.wmo.int/en/essential-climate-variables https://gcos.wmo.int/en/essential-climate-variables [2] https://ane4bf-datap1.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wmod8_gcos/s3fs-public/ghg_ecv_factsheet_201905.pdf?TJO3Z20j79hzWgwL4sT.qEhqWA3rf3Dz https://ane4bf-datap1.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wmod8_gcos/... [3] https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html [4] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18714/changing-climate-report-of-the-carbon-dioxide-assessment-committee https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18714/changing-climate-report-of...
- fromthestart 7y ago
  >terraforming" as a feel-good substitute for unplanned global climate change), Not true, please don't put words in my mouth. I use the term terraforming to emphasize the magnitude of the claim. We are fundamentally changing the properties of an entire planetary atmosphere, inadvertently. >and claims that are very strong, sweeping, and incorrect ("totally model-driven field"). Also not true. The point is that climate science by nature cannot be experimental. We can only make predictions and then proof amounts to measuring how well decades of measurements line up with predictions/models. >Another correction, relating to "no one knew" about a future crisis in the 1980s. Here is a paper [3] from James Hansen in Science magazine, in 1981, that clearly warns of crisis-level consequences. From the abstract -- In the 21st century, we will see "creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage." For whatever it's worth, this appeared on the NYTimes front page in 1981. Again, given the non experimental nature of climate science, this was a massive claim which requires decades of data collection and modeling to verify before committing to sweeping social and economic policy reform which has costs of its own. People underestimate the fact that climate change is one of the most radical ideas ever proposed by the modern scientific establishment, in terms of the scale of the changes, the disastrous predicted consequences, and the scale of societal change required for mitigation. We're talking about a potential irreversible, runaway global extinction accidentally triggered by humans 100-1000+ times faster than any measured natural rate. Due diligence, in a non experimental field, limited by 80s modeling hardware, took time. Meanwhile we all benefited from the fossil fuels we (and our parents) burned.
  - mturmon 7y ago
    You said Climate Science is a "totally model-driven field" and I provided facts correcting that sweeping claim. It's not uncommon to hear this kind of claim on HN - sometimes people seem to not really have on-the-ground information about how climate science works, and are instead going by how they might imagine it works -- a bunch of modelers working in isolation. That's not how climate science is done. For more on the relationship of climate models to observations, see an old comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15613090#15620293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15613090#15620293 -- Your reply says that you meant to say that Climate Science "cannot be experimental". This, it turns out, is also not true. There are cases where nature runs the experiment for us. For instance, the large methane leak recently in the LA area allowed us to understand the effectiveness of the inversion algorithms that are used to turn observations of concentrations into observations of the emissions that caused those concentrations. For instance, to understand the correctness of wind models. Wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and ENSO onsets often serve as nature-given checks on climate science predictions. They basically provide a "step function" input that is a tool to characterize the system response to a shock. For instance, we got a lot of science out of the varying climate-system responses to different volcanic eruptions. -- You said that "no one knew" about a possible future crisis in the 1980s. I supplied links showing that this is not the case -- the science establishment, the Congress, and the readers of the front page of major newspapers knew. Your reply counters with "what should we have done". That's another question, isn't it?
UnFleshedOne 7y ago
I think "terraforming" means "changing planetary climate to be more like Earth climate". We are doing something rather opposite. You can use "geoengineering" if you want a sarcastic term similar to how rocket people use "rapid unplanned disassembly" instead of "crash".
specialist 7y ago
Some of us were paying attention. -- My 4th grade teacher (1978) was brain washing us into being tree huggers. Conserve water while brushing our teeth was "magic". Turn down the heat. Recycle. Etc. I recall hippie flavored propaganda in the school library asking if we wanted Earth to become a Red Planet (industrial) a Green Planet (farming) or Blue Planet (natural ecosystems), or some combination. My (much older) cousin was a physicist studying submarine acoustics. He's always known, patiently explained the whatnots to us younger skeptics. I worked at a civil engineering firm while still in high school (1980s). All the adults seemed to know what was happening, even if we didn't yet know all the causes. I vividly remember my boss (from Canada) telling me his childhood neighborhood lake was no longer safe to play hockey on. I volunteered thru the 1990s at an org trying to save the PNW salmon. The staff scientists knew our local snow packs were shrinking. (Need the melt for salmon runs.) Now our mountains are bare most of the year, of course. Terrifying. Maybe because I read a lot of sci-fi, I've always "known". Most memorable to me have been John Brunner's Shockwave Rider, The Sheep Look Up, and Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia. But of course, post-apocalyptic is a popular storyline, so there have been zillions others. -- PS, for the down voter(s), one of the minor plot lines from the TV show Dallas was Bobby Ewing's renewable energy efforts, in opposition to older brother JR Ewing's doubling down on carbon. In debating with Bobby in front of Daddy Ewing, JR's money quote was "We've been running out of oil since the first oil well." So, ya, climate change was part of the (most) popular culture too.
- okmokmz 7y ago
  This is a weird comment... am I understanding right that you do believe in climate change and believe that people were aware in the 1980's? The first couple lines where you talk about a teacher "brain washing" you into "tree huggers" and seeing "hippie flavored propaganda" comes off a lot like how ignorant, far-right climate change deniers sound. However, towards the end it sounds like you are saying that you knew about global warming. Care to clarify?
  - specialist 7y ago
    I've long wondered how and why I became a tree hugger. Despite the dominant culture. It wasn't from my family, church, peers, media. Growing up, my father just poured used motor oil into the sewer (ffs). My best guess is that one teacher slyly taught environmentalism on the down low. It certainly wasn't part of the curriculum. And some how her message stuck with me. Given my own experience, and my readings about "Language is a virus", Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, memetics, Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation, Luntz's Words of Power, etc: It's mostly a waste of time and effort and goodwill trying to persuade any body of anything. It's better to focus imprinting kids with the values and ideals they'll need to better compete in the future. For better or for worse. Mostly for worse.
akuchling 7y ago
People often don't realize how old the science behind climate change is. There's an excellent discussion at https://history.aip.org/climate/20ctrend.htm#M_35_ https://history.aip.org/climate/20ctrend.htm#M_35_ ; quoting from that paragraph: "Returning to old records, in 1986 the group produced the first truly solid and comprehensive global analysis of average surface temperatures, including the vast ocean regions, which most earlier studies had neglected. They confirmed that there had been considerable warming from the late 19th century up to 1940, followed by some regional cooling in the Northern Hemisphere. Global conditions had been roughly level until the mid 1970s. Then the warming had resumed with a vengeance. The warmest three years in the entire 134-year record had all occurred in the 1980s."

jackstraw14 7y ago

Corporations like Exxon aren't rational, they only exist to make more money, so that's what they did.

donclark 7y ago
Do publicly traded corporations have different interests than actual human beings? Is there main concern only money/profits? If not, what is it?
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Humans have different interests from other human beings. Take a wide enough sampling of humanity (i.e. not people who already know each other) and you'll find a wide variety of divergent interests. But the prime directive of any entity - whether it's a living being, or abstract idea like a corporation or nation state - is to continue existing. After all, every entity that failed in this is no longer with us. Society moving away from oil is an existential threat to ExxonMobil-the-corporation. Climate change is only an existential threat to a large fraction of humanity, and a largely disjoint one from individual decision-makers at Exxon. So their incentives are somewhat misaligned here.
  - Retric 7y ago
    > to continue existing That seems obvious, but suicide and extreme risk taking demonstrates many other things are considered more important. In the corporate world banks fail all the time because the people running them don’t care about failure nearly as much as their next bonus. This is also why pensions and other long term liability’s are generally under funded.
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      You can explain both of those by moving up a level from individuals to systems. Suicide is a consequence of shame. Human beings have evolved an emotional mechanism that lets them function as groups; this mechanism functions by giving each individual an unconscious sense of whether they "measure up" to the standards of the group around them. One consequence of that is that some fraction of individuals won't, oftentimes with tragic results for the individual. But groups that have this mechanism killed or absorbed all individuals that don't (well, not quite - psychopathy is the absence of shame, and it's usually maladaptive but some high-functioning psychopaths can blend in among normal society), and so the world we live in includes suicide. Banks serve financial markets. It's okay for individual banks to fail as long as the market as a whole continues to function; in fact, proper functioning of the market requires some banks to fail. It's the same as ant colonies or human microbiomes. When you step on an individual ant, the colony doesn't care, because the unit of survival is the colony. When you crap out intestinal bacteria, you don't shed a tear, because the unit of survival is the individual human and not the bacteria within them. In fact, the perspective with which you look at the world says a lot about the degree of interaction within the system. We think of a human as an individual entity; it took us a long time to think of a cell as an individual entity; and unless you're a dedicated biologist you probably don't think of a mitochondria as its own entity, despite them being independent bacteria at one time. You could look at global capitalism as being one super-organism, much like an ant colony, and individual humans are, well, workers. Capitalism doesn't care if it chews up and spits out human lives, because there will always be more of them. Its prime directive is to sustain capitalism itself. (Note also that global capitalism doesn't care if ExxonMobile lives or dies, and it's highly likely that it'll die. It'll just get replaced by some solar energy company. This conflict between levels goes all the way up the hierarchy - the interests of your cells are not necessarily aligned with yours, your interests are not necessarily aligned with your employer, your employer is not necessarily aligned with the market.)

philipov 7y ago

The extrapolation of I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone is "By the time it's a problem, we'll be dead."

Gravityloss 7y ago

They did act. IIRC they started sponsoring anti climate change material producing organizations and supporting its dissemination. A wildly succesful project that has probably paid itself back with a large factor.

tossAfterUsing 7y ago
They also (as i read) started building their ocean based drilling platforms a little bit taller to account for sea-level rise.
- kleton 7y ago
  Oil rigs float.
  - tossAfterUsing 7y ago
    some are floating some are actually platforms with legs that touch the ground. furthermore, i was wrong to write "drilling" platforms... as those are only used during the field's construction, until the wells are in place.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I think a good strategy is to sponsor anti climate change activities to keep current profits flowing while at the same silently investing in businesses and tech that will do well in the world climate change creates. I think that's what they are doing.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I mean... yea, it's a good strategy for them it isn't a good strategy for everyone else though.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    That’s usually not a concern.

ekr 7y ago

I still find it mind-boggling how some people can be so surprised by the fact that people in general act in their own interest. A normal, healthy human being is exclusively concerned by its own well-being and that of its immediate family. To the extent that we witness altruistic behavior, it is executed for signalling purposes (this is the reason why there's virtually no completely anonymous charity, see "The elephant in the brain"). There is a part of the brain that is responsible for integrating events into a continuous narrative. That part of the brain is why we perceive ourselves as an integral being and not a set of parts, but that part is also severely biased in healthy humans, biased to paint ourselves as kinder, more altruistic, more intelligent, while also rewriting the motivation we cite for our past actions, so as to put ourselves in the best possible light. But no, there's nothing special about those Exxon researches, that's just normal human behavior. And to go further, acting against ones own interest requires going over a strong emotion. The body let's you know that you shouldn't be doing something through a gut feeling. Repeatedly ignoring or repressing those emotions is not healthy for the nervous system, and much has been written on this subject. LE: And regarding claims that stopping global warming was in their own interest back in the 1980s, there's the hyperbolic discounting effect (among other things).

komali2 7y ago
This implies one needs to act against one's interests to take action on climate change. Lack of imagination on Exxon's part could explain this as well. They could have started ringing alarm bells and used their massive strength to push for environmental research and favorable regulations.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  > They could have started ringing alarm bells and used their massive strength to push for environmental research and favorable regulations. i.e., acting against their own interests. Spending the last 40 years using their strength against environmental research meant that the people who in 1980 owned and managed Exxon extracted great benefit to themselves (at the cost of others) for the rest of their lives (either they're already dead, or will be before any serious consequences may hurt them); doing what you propose would have benefitted the world but greatly hurt their own interests.

lacker 7y ago

What would you have done about it, if you were the CEO of Exxon in 1982?

munk-a 7y ago
Why was the CEO of Exxon allowed to do this in 1982? And why didn't the government fund science to figure this out first?
- nostrademons 7y ago
  The government knew about it, as did most of the population. Al Gore sponsored the first congressional hearings on climate change in 1976, and I remember putting on a play about environmental issues (including global warming) in 4th grade (1990). It's very difficult to rally people around a problem until they see tangible evidence of it in their own lives. Global warming was an abstraction in the 80s; we knew it was happening, we knew it would have a big impact, but we were too busy trying not to get nuked by the Soviets (or rather, trying to make them think we were gonna nuke them so they bankrupted themselves). In a democracy you can't get political support for policies until a majority of people agree with you. When it comes to giant systems like the environment, that's too late. There are probably a number of other problems that can see right now that we are doing nothing about - trust pollution (where you have no idea what's true anymore), mass migration (which I guess we're doing something about, but that "something" is putting kids in cages), erosion of the rule of law, potential infectious diseases, a looming demographic crisis, etc. But all of these are too big to wrap our head around a solution until they become a crisis - we're too busy dealing with climate change - and so they'll just blow up society and we'll be left to pick up the pieces.
- inscionent 7y ago
  He was the CEO of Exxon. He had economic power. He used it. Why would the government bother? The experts from the companies who helped get them elected told them it wasn't a problem. > In 1981, he was appointed to President Ronald Reagan's National Productivity Advisory Committee and later served on the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control.[6] He served as Chairman of The Business Council in 1983 and 1984. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_C._Garvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_C._Garvin

aczerepinski 7y ago

Exxon not taking it seriously in the 80s seems less extreme than politicians denying it in 2019 when the physical evidence is all around us.

justin66 7y ago

> The fact that they didn't act upon the information to me is mind-boggling, I guess the profit motives were too strong. You're seriously overestimating Americans, circa 1982. We were still fighting about whether cigarette smoke causes cancer (correlation is not causation!) and we had a president who claimed that trees pollute the environment more than cars do (who went on to be reelected). Politically influential Christian public figures rationalized how the deadly sin of greed should be considered a virtue while also blathering about how HIV was a manifestation of God's wrath toward homosexuals. And everyone kind of assumed our odds of surviving the cold war weren't great anyway, so you want to worry about something about temperature increasing, and also didn't you say there was going to be an ice age or something, blah blah blah? It's a minor miracle that we managed to cease the destruction of the ozone layer given the level of stupidity we were operating at. A person aware of current events and capable of making analogies might question how much progress we've truly made, but that's a separate topic.

mncharity 7y ago
> You're seriously overestimating Americans, circa 1982. Circa 1982? Some months ago, the NYTimes did a story on Coke/Pepse/Nestle sugar drink/food causing simultaneous systemic obesity and malnutrition in Central/South America. Company leadership was quoted as expressing surprise at this "unexpected" impact. TPP had ISDS provisions to permit companies to sue governments to recover profits lost to health policies. And so it goes. Today.
coffeecat 7y ago
I have a non-rigorous pet theory that the combined effects of lead plumbing and leaded gasoline produced generations of Americans, from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, whose population-wide intelligence levels were adversely affected by lead exposure.
okmokmz 7y ago
>It's a minor miracle that we managed to cease the destruction of the ozone layer I'm not sure you can say that we ceased destruction of the Ozone layer. Certainly slowed, and in some cases ozone is increasing but not universally. Ozone levels in the upper levels have been slowly increasing, but the lower levels are still being depleted and there is evidence of an increase of short-lived ozone depleting substances. https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/18/1379/2018/ https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/18/1379/2018/

inscionent 7y ago

It isn't mind boggling. It is contemptuous and greedy but exactly in line with keeping and maintaining economic power. This isn't about the environment.