8 ms·

This is an emotionally and politically charged topic that can be hard to discuss with any clarity. The Skeptoid episode What the Oil Companies Really Knew, par

This is an emotionally and politically charged topic that can be hard to discuss with any clarity. The Skeptoid episode What the Oil Companies Really Knew, part 2 of which can be found here: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4877 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4877, can be a good starting point because it is at least an attempt to try and provide a fair and factual overview. I think this passage is particularly relevant: > The message received from actually reading all of these documents is not — as is commonly reported — that oil executives' own scientists were warning them of the true nature of climate change. Instead, what they indicate is a broad pattern of scientists who were either outside their discipline or among the outliers who were unconcerned with the anthropogenic portion of CO2 buildup, advising those executives that no action was currently warranted. They were wrong, make no mistake; but that's what they were saying, and that's the information the oil companies were acting upon, at least through the end of the 20th century. > There's a point I've tried to make any number of times on Skeptoid, and that's if you want your argument to be robust and persuasive, don't include any bad evidence. Include only strong evidence that has been proven to survive scrutiny. If you present cherrypicked quotes, like the authors of so many of these articles have been doing, it is very easy for your opponents to discover that; and when they do, the only point you will have made is that your argument is weak and easily countered — and thus probably false. It's a bad time in human history to harm the cause of educating people about global warming.

zackees 3y ago
[flagged]
- 411111111111111 3y ago
  Literally all of your links are dead. Is this an LLM hallucinating non-existing evidence?
  - NavinF 3y ago
    First link is dead, but the two Twitter links work if you're logged in
  - zackees 3y ago
    No, it’s not dead, the first link is coincidental down for maintenance, per the message on the page. You can see the archived link here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170115133353/https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2009/12/post-8f16552a-802a-23ad-465f-8858beb85ac2 https://web.archive.org/web/20170115133353/https://www.epw.s... The other two links are alive but you need a twitter account to view them.
  - revelio 3y ago
    No it's just Twitter requiring a login now. None of the claims zackees is making are new or obscure. They're well known problems proven many years ago. For example so many thermometers are located next to runways because climatologists collect data from weather stations that were never intended for them. Airports need this data but then it gets mixed into datasets that are claiming to measure general change in climate. This can lead to absurd outcomes. The UK had a very hot day last year, with the Met Office reported a "record breaking" temperature. The problem is that this temperature was recorded by a thermometer right next to a military airbase runway at the exact moment three fighter aircraft were landing. The temperature spiked up to the record level for 60 seconds and then dropped again, with the spike+drop being quite massive. Finding this out took a year of FOIA requests, done by independent bloggers of course, not journalists. Jet exhaust shouldn't be reported as climate change, but it is, because climatologists don't seem to care much about data quality. The underlying networks they use have a lot of corruption in them from various sources and the error bars are wide, but the uncertainty is never reported or shown to the public. A couple of decades ago this problem flared up in the US and Congress spent the money to build out a new state of the art weather station network just for climatologists, with very carefully sited stations. It's called the Climate Reference Network and climatologists refuse to actually use its data. If you review the thermometer readings it generates you can see why: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-temperature-index/time-series/anom-tavg/1/0 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-tempera... For nearly 20 years it's shown no warming in the USA whatsoever.
    - chris1993 3y ago
      It shows a warming trend. https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/claim-of-no-us-warming-since-2005-is-directly-contradicted-by-the-data-it-is-based-on/ https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/claim-of-no-us-warmi...
      - revelio 3y ago
        Did you actually look at the data or just immediately Google for a rebuttal? The page you link to asserts there to be a trend, but then links back to the page I linked to, which: a. Doesn't plot trend lines. What are they trying to link to, exactly? b. Has no observable trend in it. You can see that with your own eyes. Look at the graph! BTW, in the text there's a claim there's a trend but, "the warming rate (trend) in USCRN annual temperatures is 0.86°F per decade, with uncertainties ranging from -0.58°F to 2.31°F per decade." In other words the trend is so tiny the uncertainty bound includes zero, which means they can't actually say if there's a trend at all. It might even be going down. This is all another way to say there's no observable problem in this data. It's called global warming, but in the country with the best temperature network it doesn't happen.
- godelski 3y ago
  I'm going to assume good faith. So let's look at the data and see how to read it. We'll even use the same sources! > Since the movie “Inconvenient Truth” the amount of ice of the world has increased significantly toward the mean. Let's go to that link (or read the top reply) and verify ourselves![0] Should be easy, right? Let's click "hide all years" on the side and also uncheck the median and ranges (so we have nothing). Then one by one, let's click the decade averages in the top right. Where does the graph move? We could also click every 5 years, or even 1 year and watch each line be drawn. Is there a trend? The one I see completely disagrees with that tweet. But why is the tweet misleading? That's a better question. Well, click 2022 and you'll see something interesting. In Jan-April there's actually a bit more ice than in 2006, with about 0.5 million km2 as a max differential. But July through December it goes far below, with a differential of about a million km2. But let's check other years, to see if there's a bias. Just select 2022, we'll add 2023 and down to 2017. Okay, we see 2022, 2017, and 2020 are a bit different, so let's keep those in mind. Now let's do the same thing around 2006. We see here that 2006 is a bit abnormal for the years surrounding it. Now let's select the bounding years and then compare the two. Does this make sense and agree with the averages? It should. Your alarm bells should have gone off in the first place because 2023 doesn't even have a full year to plot. Not even half of one. > Additionally nearly every climate sensor is located on the tarmac of an airport. Yeah! That's actually exactly right! We need a lot of thermometers and placed in a lot of locations. (I should also mention that there are a lot of thermometer systems that aren't based on airports though but we could also get deep into wet bulb vs dry bulb and all kinds of things. We'll just stay here for now) So we look for existing ones to work with and then use that data. What I find interesting about this tweet is that usually we're criticized for "manipulating" data rather than this. There's a surprisingly good and approachable article on all this here[1]. You'll find how we adjust surface temperature data to account for being near a black body, how ocean temperatures are adjusted based on the measurement techniques that are used (because each one introduces a different bias), and so on. Actually one thing you'll frequently find me complaining about is how difficult analysis actually is (though usually in the context of ML). This is quite similar. You can't ever really work with "raw" data, because your measurements have biases in them and if you don't account for them you'll get biased results which do not align with observations. But the best first check that you can actually do is look at prediction model and then look at the results and see how good the predictions were. Luckily with something like climate science we've had decades of this going on and so we can verify this pretty well. We just need to look at models created in the 80's, 90's, and 00's and see how good they predicted the subsequent decades of temperature rise[2,3,4]. So I can get the misunderstandings here and the reason to be skeptical. But I think we've thoroughly shown that the two tweets you linked to are either by people that are misunderstanding a highly complex thing (pretty understandable) or are not acting in good faith (which if they're claiming expertise with lacking knowledge, this too is not in good faith). Climate is a pretty complicated topic with a lot of moving parts that can appear to contradict one another if you aren't careful. I highly suggest drawing charts to keep track of how things connect. Most people aren't trained in these things and so it is understandable. But you also should focus on asking questions when you don't understand rather than asserting "facts". There's no reason to feel embarrassed for not knowing things. We all are pretty fucking stupid, myself included. But let's also try to not trick ourselves. The best way to do that seems to be to challenge our own beliefs. You set up a challenge of "how would I disprove myself" and then see if you can do so. If you can't, then congrats, your opinion should get stronger. If you do, dang, let's update our beliefs. Usually it is somewhere in between though and you don't have to tear everything down. But I have to admit, when the whole perception changes, it is kinda exhilarating. Finding out new things is quite a lot of fun. [0] https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-... [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/thorough-not-thoroughly-fabricated-the-truth-about-global-temperature-data/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/thorough-not-thoroug... [2] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-mo... [3] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL085378 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201... [4] https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200203_ModelsVsWorld.pdf https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200203_Models...
411111111111111 3y ago
> There's a point I've tried to make any number of times on Skeptoid, and that's if you want your argument to be robust and persuasive, don't include any bad evidence. I often have to wonder, how are these highly intellectual people able to have a world view like that? From my experience, bad evidence works wonders in arguments, because they're generally driven by emotions. It doesn't even matter if they're disproven later on, as the person will have moved on to new arguments. Rational discourse like this person seems to take for granted is - from my experience - beyond rare.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Bad evidence might help you "win" arguments, but the onlookers aren't going to be convinced.
  - 411111111111111 3y ago
    We're currently living in the age of misinformation precisely because this isn't true. The onlookers are the people that generally don't understand the topic that's being discussed, which creates this illusion of making a rational decision, even though it's entirely driven by emotion.
  - godelski 3y ago
    As much as I'd love this to be true, evidence suggests otherwise. We wouldn't be in a lot of this mess in the first place if this were true. In certain settings (e.g. academic) you're absolutely correct, but in public I don't think you are.
- godelski 3y ago
  > From my experience, bad evidence works wonders in arguments It is because people have different goals and are using different metrics. They are just getting confused and thinking they are aligned with the same goals. If you are seeking truthful arguments with debates between good faith and purely rational parties, then weak evidence isn't great, because (like the parent said) it just creates a man made of straw than can easily be torn down. BUT if your goal is to perpetuate arguing and drive up emotions, the tool is fantastic. Because it creates a man of straw which can easily be torn down! Everyone likes burning a big man. I hear they even do it yearly out in the desert. So people just aren't able to properly communicate because language is fuzzy and filling in gaps. That we're assuming those gaps are filled in the same way, but they aren't. Weak evidence is either very useful or very hurtful, but it depends on your settings and goals.
ttctciyf 3y ago
> an emotionally and politically charged topic that can be hard to discuss with any clarity. Not to mention the probable billions of dollars spent in an effort to increase public ignorance[1] around the issue. (See [2], for example.) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology 2: https://www.desmog.com/2014/10/31/oil-and-gas-industry-s-endless-war-fracking-critics-revealed-rick-berman/ https://www.desmog.com/2014/10/31/oil-and-gas-industry-s-end...
- nerdponx 3y ago
  As if people don't have the right to get a little emotional when this is what they're up against. Is there a name for this "appeal to-non emotion" line of non-reasoning? Maybe the "Vulcan Fallacy"?
  - Karunamon 3y ago
    Emotions are not reasoning, pure and simple. When what you want is to get to the truth, especially in the context of reading words on the screen, getting emotional is purely an impediment to the goal.
    - nerdponx 3y ago
      The truth is useful, but how often is it really the goal? What happens if it's unknowable, or if there simply isn't a single factual truth?
    - godelski 3y ago
      You can't have thoughts without emotions. There is such a thing as being too emotional and letting the emotions take control and prevent you from using proper reasoning, but this isn't the absence of emotions. Emotions are highly useful, but like anything it is more about balance. Don't try to be a Vulcan Mr Spock, you're human too.
      - Karunamon 3y ago
        Sure you can. What emotion do you feel when evaluating the correctness of the statement 2+2 = 4? More importantly, if you can even name one, what impact does it have on the outcome? Again, the claim was that emotions are an impediment to truth-seeking. They are not reasoning. They are useful for interpersonal relationships, but absolutely worthless when determining whether something is true or false. If we are going to play at tired pop-culture references, here is another: facts don't care about your feelings
nerdponx 3y ago
> scientists who were either outside their discipline or among the outliers who were unconcerned with the anthropogenic portion of CO2 buildup, advising those executives that no action was currently warranted. They were wrong, make no mistake; but that's what they were saying, and that's the information the oil companies were acting upon, at least through the end of the 20th century. Except that's way too convenient to be a coincidence. You mean to tell me that for decades all of the top scientists at all the major oil companies just so happened to be heterodox or hold highly conservative opinions about climate change? And all important decision-making executives just so happened to take them at their word, and never heard a contrary opinion? And if only they weren't so incredibly unlucky as to get consistently bad advice all consistently and conveniently giving them the answer they wanted to hear, they'd have acted on climate change sooner? That's an utterly absurd hypothesis, particularly coming from a "skeptical" source. It ignores the obvious incentive for oil executives to deliberately and exclusively seek out such scientists. This article is far far too accepting and apologetic, beyond the point of credible gullibility.
- revelio 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Epa095 3y ago
    Are you sure you are linking to the right place? Cause I can't see any proof of scientists lying in the one post from "Morgenstern".
    - revelio 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    > conservative I meant it in the general sense, not the political one. Beyond that, you're not really making any new point here. Yes, there was controversy and uncertainty and scientists in general were not prepared to give strong recommendations. But if you were hired by an oil company to research this topic, realistically, what would you tell the CEO? Maybe you'd be candid off the record, but certainly there is a huge incentive to ensure that any official/public communication remains equivocal and scientifically conservative. Rational corporations do not willingly expose their own existential threats.

zackees 3y ago

[flagged]

411111111111111 3y ago
Literally all of your links are dead. Is this an LLM hallucinating non-existing evidence?
- NavinF 3y ago
  First link is dead, but the two Twitter links work if you're logged in
- zackees 3y ago
  No, it’s not dead, the first link is coincidental down for maintenance, per the message on the page. You can see the archived link here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170115133353/https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2009/12/post-8f16552a-802a-23ad-465f-8858beb85ac2 https://web.archive.org/web/20170115133353/https://www.epw.s... The other two links are alive but you need a twitter account to view them.
- revelio 3y ago
  No it's just Twitter requiring a login now. None of the claims zackees is making are new or obscure. They're well known problems proven many years ago. For example so many thermometers are located next to runways because climatologists collect data from weather stations that were never intended for them. Airports need this data but then it gets mixed into datasets that are claiming to measure general change in climate. This can lead to absurd outcomes. The UK had a very hot day last year, with the Met Office reported a "record breaking" temperature. The problem is that this temperature was recorded by a thermometer right next to a military airbase runway at the exact moment three fighter aircraft were landing. The temperature spiked up to the record level for 60 seconds and then dropped again, with the spike+drop being quite massive. Finding this out took a year of FOIA requests, done by independent bloggers of course, not journalists. Jet exhaust shouldn't be reported as climate change, but it is, because climatologists don't seem to care much about data quality. The underlying networks they use have a lot of corruption in them from various sources and the error bars are wide, but the uncertainty is never reported or shown to the public. A couple of decades ago this problem flared up in the US and Congress spent the money to build out a new state of the art weather station network just for climatologists, with very carefully sited stations. It's called the Climate Reference Network and climatologists refuse to actually use its data. If you review the thermometer readings it generates you can see why: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-temperature-index/time-series/anom-tavg/1/0 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-tempera... For nearly 20 years it's shown no warming in the USA whatsoever.
  - chris1993 3y ago
    It shows a warming trend. https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/claim-of-no-us-warming-since-2005-is-directly-contradicted-by-the-data-it-is-based-on/ https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/claim-of-no-us-warmi...
    - revelio 3y ago
      Did you actually look at the data or just immediately Google for a rebuttal? The page you link to asserts there to be a trend, but then links back to the page I linked to, which: a. Doesn't plot trend lines. What are they trying to link to, exactly? b. Has no observable trend in it. You can see that with your own eyes. Look at the graph! BTW, in the text there's a claim there's a trend but, "the warming rate (trend) in USCRN annual temperatures is 0.86°F per decade, with uncertainties ranging from -0.58°F to 2.31°F per decade." In other words the trend is so tiny the uncertainty bound includes zero, which means they can't actually say if there's a trend at all. It might even be going down. This is all another way to say there's no observable problem in this data. It's called global warming, but in the country with the best temperature network it doesn't happen.
godelski 3y ago
I'm going to assume good faith. So let's look at the data and see how to read it. We'll even use the same sources! > Since the movie “Inconvenient Truth” the amount of ice of the world has increased significantly toward the mean. Let's go to that link (or read the top reply) and verify ourselves![0] Should be easy, right? Let's click "hide all years" on the side and also uncheck the median and ranges (so we have nothing). Then one by one, let's click the decade averages in the top right. Where does the graph move? We could also click every 5 years, or even 1 year and watch each line be drawn. Is there a trend? The one I see completely disagrees with that tweet. But why is the tweet misleading? That's a better question. Well, click 2022 and you'll see something interesting. In Jan-April there's actually a bit more ice than in 2006, with about 0.5 million km2 as a max differential. But July through December it goes far below, with a differential of about a million km2. But let's check other years, to see if there's a bias. Just select 2022, we'll add 2023 and down to 2017. Okay, we see 2022, 2017, and 2020 are a bit different, so let's keep those in mind. Now let's do the same thing around 2006. We see here that 2006 is a bit abnormal for the years surrounding it. Now let's select the bounding years and then compare the two. Does this make sense and agree with the averages? It should. Your alarm bells should have gone off in the first place because 2023 doesn't even have a full year to plot. Not even half of one. > Additionally nearly every climate sensor is located on the tarmac of an airport. Yeah! That's actually exactly right! We need a lot of thermometers and placed in a lot of locations. (I should also mention that there are a lot of thermometer systems that aren't based on airports though but we could also get deep into wet bulb vs dry bulb and all kinds of things. We'll just stay here for now) So we look for existing ones to work with and then use that data. What I find interesting about this tweet is that usually we're criticized for "manipulating" data rather than this. There's a surprisingly good and approachable article on all this here[1]. You'll find how we adjust surface temperature data to account for being near a black body, how ocean temperatures are adjusted based on the measurement techniques that are used (because each one introduces a different bias), and so on. Actually one thing you'll frequently find me complaining about is how difficult analysis actually is (though usually in the context of ML). This is quite similar. You can't ever really work with "raw" data, because your measurements have biases in them and if you don't account for them you'll get biased results which do not align with observations. But the best first check that you can actually do is look at prediction model and then look at the results and see how good the predictions were. Luckily with something like climate science we've had decades of this going on and so we can verify this pretty well. We just need to look at models created in the 80's, 90's, and 00's and see how good they predicted the subsequent decades of temperature rise[2,3,4]. So I can get the misunderstandings here and the reason to be skeptical. But I think we've thoroughly shown that the two tweets you linked to are either by people that are misunderstanding a highly complex thing (pretty understandable) or are not acting in good faith (which if they're claiming expertise with lacking knowledge, this too is not in good faith). Climate is a pretty complicated topic with a lot of moving parts that can appear to contradict one another if you aren't careful. I highly suggest drawing charts to keep track of how things connect. Most people aren't trained in these things and so it is understandable. But you also should focus on asking questions when you don't understand rather than asserting "facts". There's no reason to feel embarrassed for not knowing things. We all are pretty fucking stupid, myself included. But let's also try to not trick ourselves. The best way to do that seems to be to challenge our own beliefs. You set up a challenge of "how would I disprove myself" and then see if you can do so. If you can't, then congrats, your opinion should get stronger. If you do, dang, let's update our beliefs. Usually it is somewhere in between though and you don't have to tear everything down. But I have to admit, when the whole perception changes, it is kinda exhilarating. Finding out new things is quite a lot of fun. [0] https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-... [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/thorough-not-thoroughly-fabricated-the-truth-about-global-temperature-data/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/thorough-not-thoroug... [2] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-mo... [3] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL085378 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201... [4] https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200203_ModelsVsWorld.pdf https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200203_Models...

411111111111111 3y ago

> There's a point I've tried to make any number of times on Skeptoid, and that's if you want your argument to be robust and persuasive, don't include any bad evidence. I often have to wonder, how are these highly intellectual people able to have a world view like that? From my experience, bad evidence works wonders in arguments, because they're generally driven by emotions. It doesn't even matter if they're disproven later on, as the person will have moved on to new arguments. Rational discourse like this person seems to take for granted is - from my experience - beyond rare.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Dalewyn 3y ago
Bad evidence might help you "win" arguments, but the onlookers aren't going to be convinced.
- 411111111111111 3y ago
  We're currently living in the age of misinformation precisely because this isn't true. The onlookers are the people that generally don't understand the topic that's being discussed, which creates this illusion of making a rational decision, even though it's entirely driven by emotion.
- godelski 3y ago
  As much as I'd love this to be true, evidence suggests otherwise. We wouldn't be in a lot of this mess in the first place if this were true. In certain settings (e.g. academic) you're absolutely correct, but in public I don't think you are.
godelski 3y ago
> From my experience, bad evidence works wonders in arguments It is because people have different goals and are using different metrics. They are just getting confused and thinking they are aligned with the same goals. If you are seeking truthful arguments with debates between good faith and purely rational parties, then weak evidence isn't great, because (like the parent said) it just creates a man made of straw than can easily be torn down. BUT if your goal is to perpetuate arguing and drive up emotions, the tool is fantastic. Because it creates a man of straw which can easily be torn down! Everyone likes burning a big man. I hear they even do it yearly out in the desert. So people just aren't able to properly communicate because language is fuzzy and filling in gaps. That we're assuming those gaps are filled in the same way, but they aren't. Weak evidence is either very useful or very hurtful, but it depends on your settings and goals.

ttctciyf 3y ago

> an emotionally and politically charged topic that can be hard to discuss with any clarity. Not to mention the probable billions of dollars spent in an effort to increase public ignorance[1] around the issue. (See [2], for example.) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology 2: https://www.desmog.com/2014/10/31/oil-and-gas-industry-s-endless-war-fracking-critics-revealed-rick-berman/ https://www.desmog.com/2014/10/31/oil-and-gas-industry-s-end...

nerdponx 3y ago
As if people don't have the right to get a little emotional when this is what they're up against. Is there a name for this "appeal to-non emotion" line of non-reasoning? Maybe the "Vulcan Fallacy"?
- Karunamon 3y ago
  Emotions are not reasoning, pure and simple. When what you want is to get to the truth, especially in the context of reading words on the screen, getting emotional is purely an impediment to the goal.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    The truth is useful, but how often is it really the goal? What happens if it's unknowable, or if there simply isn't a single factual truth?
  - godelski 3y ago
    You can't have thoughts without emotions. There is such a thing as being too emotional and letting the emotions take control and prevent you from using proper reasoning, but this isn't the absence of emotions. Emotions are highly useful, but like anything it is more about balance. Don't try to be a Vulcan Mr Spock, you're human too.
    - Karunamon 3y ago
      Sure you can. What emotion do you feel when evaluating the correctness of the statement 2+2 = 4? More importantly, if you can even name one, what impact does it have on the outcome? Again, the claim was that emotions are an impediment to truth-seeking. They are not reasoning. They are useful for interpersonal relationships, but absolutely worthless when determining whether something is true or false. If we are going to play at tired pop-culture references, here is another: facts don't care about your feelings

nerdponx 3y ago

> scientists who were either outside their discipline or among the outliers who were unconcerned with the anthropogenic portion of CO2 buildup, advising those executives that no action was currently warranted. They were wrong, make no mistake; but that's what they were saying, and that's the information the oil companies were acting upon, at least through the end of the 20th century. Except that's way too convenient to be a coincidence. You mean to tell me that for decades all of the top scientists at all the major oil companies just so happened to be heterodox or hold highly conservative opinions about climate change? And all important decision-making executives just so happened to take them at their word, and never heard a contrary opinion? And if only they weren't so incredibly unlucky as to get consistently bad advice all consistently and conveniently giving them the answer they wanted to hear, they'd have acted on climate change sooner? That's an utterly absurd hypothesis, particularly coming from a "skeptical" source. It ignores the obvious incentive for oil executives to deliberately and exclusively seek out such scientists. This article is far far too accepting and apologetic, beyond the point of credible gullibility.

revelio 3y ago
[flagged]
- Epa095 3y ago
  Are you sure you are linking to the right place? Cause I can't see any proof of scientists lying in the one post from "Morgenstern".
  - revelio 3y ago
    [flagged]
- nerdponx 3y ago
  > conservative I meant it in the general sense, not the political one. Beyond that, you're not really making any new point here. Yes, there was controversy and uncertainty and scientists in general were not prepared to give strong recommendations. But if you were hired by an oil company to research this topic, realistically, what would you tell the CEO? Maybe you'd be candid off the record, but certainly there is a huge incentive to ensure that any official/public communication remains equivocal and scientifically conservative. Rational corporations do not willingly expose their own existential threats.