Making sense of the climate change news
Yesterday's Democracy Now recording echoed a report in the journal Science (not to mention the one in The Guardian) about Exxon. The headline started at about 2:45 of the recording, after Amy Goodman cited a couple of climate-change amplified weather disasters:
A new study in the journal Science confirms Exxon was fully aware of the link between fossil fuel emissions and global heating but spent decades refuting and obscuring the science in order to make maximum profits. The report finds that Exxon — as early as the 1970s — predicted with “breathtaking” accuracy the disastrous climate path that is now wreaking havoc around the globe.
The newsworthy part of this study is that the early Exxon assessments of climate change were potently accurate and quite prescient. A little poking will reveal that most of this headline is old news. We've known for some time already what Exxon was doing. Scientific American, in 2015, told us that "Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago":
Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation...
So, yeah, if you're still citing "climate skepticism" from one of Exxon's old campaigns, well, now you know that not only was the stuff you're citing stuff they didn't believe, but they were privately doing some very believable research on the phenomenon of abrupt climate change which contradicted what they were putting out. That "believable" part is the newsworthy part.
At any rate, the quickest summary of the existing climate change data can be found in a website called Berkeley Earth. This is, it might be added, why Jeffrey St. Clair cites it in his column. The coup de grace in favor of this sort of analysis can be found in the arguments located somewhere in the Grist piece titled How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic. (I'm not going to look it up.) The fact of the matter is THIS: There really is no comprehensive, convincing, competing account for why the climate is changing so rapidly today, and so the most convincing answer is the obvious one: more carbon dioxide amplifies the greenhouse effect of Earth's atmosphere, compelling a rapid increase in average temperatures as well as an increased frequency of weather disasters.
Now, climate science is basically a branch of meteorology. And meteorology is, by extension, a branch of physics, in the same sense in which chemistry is a branch of physics. (I distinctly remember learning about the Niels Bohr model of the atom in my high school chemistry class, back in 1978 or 1979. I doubt chemistry education has changed much in that respect since then.) An "academic field" is defined by how universities, research publications, professional associations and so on sort out the great masses of data they generate, not according to the fundamental theories coloring all of this data collection. What I am arguing here is, ultimately, that when we talk about a debate about whether or not the climate is changing, we are talking about a debate about physics, about physical reality, a debate which should be resolvable through data collection. The reality of climate change is based on issues of fact, not of value or policy.
At any rate, any standard academic department, caregiver of its defined "field," exhibits a split,a bifurcation, a divide-into-two, according to how the collected data is used. This is a different issue than the issue of whether or not climate change is or isn't actually happening -- it's an issue of what the collected data is for. The split is as follows:
1) A "field" collects data to train new people to enter it as a "field," and
2) A "field" collects data to explain what's wrong with the world (but not in any convincing way to tell anyone what to do about it).
The basic explanation of how this split works in Departments of Education is given in David F. Labaree's The Trouble with Ed Schools, but it's similar for all of them. With climate change, it means that the climate scientists can explain what's happening -- carbon dioxide is accumulating in Earth's atmosphere at a rather scary rate, conditioning a monumental climate change effect. However, the scientists can't use their authority over the data to tell everyone what we all ought to do about climate change, because the data do not by themselves compel any particular course of action.
Okay so far?
Comments
Certainly Exxon and their
Certainly Exxon and their sisters are at fault, but the responsible party for abrogating responsibility for the health of our environment is the federal government, corrupted completely by these energy monsters, but still just as informed, and most likely completely required to act due to federal legislations passed long ago. there is nothing to discuss and no one else to blame.
Well there is that book --
"They Knew," which goes through the various administrations of the past fifty years, showing how they all covered for the oil companies...
"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate
Yes and No
Easy answer -- No way, Jose. The real question is not whether the earth's climate is changing. There are plenty of non-ax-grinding reasons available to convince me that climate changes, and that the overall amount of thermal energy within the global atmosphere has been increasing for decades. It's getting hotter.
And the "news" of weather extremes over the last 50 years is very persuasive evidence of the consequences of this warming trend. The last three years have made me far more skeptical of "data." Since my college days 50 years ago, I've always distrusted this highfallutin' synonym for "facts," But my ignoramus tendency is not ironclad, and I am convinced that we are experiencing Global Warming, and that explains the reported phenomena of glaciers shrinking and rivers running dry and the prevalence of more violent storms.
Furthermore, it is very easy for me believe that the executives of oil companies have followed the example of the tobacco companies to garbage up "the" science of climate understanding with bogus "research."
The actual skeptic argument is not whether the world is getting hotter. It is about why. The human created carbon dioxide explanation seems very plausible to me -- plausible enough to justify curtailing emissions on the theory of better safe than sorry. But this is a question of causal link, something that requires judgment rather than just measurement of "data."
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is always a temptation.
But something other than the combustion of coal, oil and gas caused previous climate changes as ice ages are believed to have come and gone. I suppose that there are theories about this, but they are not necessarily correct. Some things remain unknown.
Overselling academic theories is something that these last three years have forced me to be more skeptical than ever of the Person in the White Coat.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
On the Why question,
why can't it be both human and natural causes? We might be uncertain as to the exact percentages of causation, but it would seem the good data and reasonable interpretations point to human-caused factors weighing more heavily on the scale, 2/3s or 3/4s of the responsibility being the most likely.
On trusting Science and data, we also shouldn't overlearn recent lessons. And actually the data and good science in the covid vaccines areas do show the alarm bells, so no rational reason to discard all data and rely on ... hunches or something.
As to Exxon and the oil industry's early knowledge, it is very similar to how the tobacco industry was made aware, back in the 50s, of the growing evidence linking smoking to lung and heart issues, and how a systematic and well-funded PR campaign was then launched to muddy the waters in the public mind. More studies needed, they say, as the current science is weak and undeterminative. Much the same playbook the health agencies used to discredit Ivermectin.
no shortage of petroleum industy marketing lobbyists
they work hard dishing out memes and nonsense about electric vehicles for lowbrow misedumacation. hard to judge from the flying quotation marks but it seems news, data and other concepts are being conflated with proper science. we did use to have such a thing. probably a geological epoch shift when the monsters decided they could just lie more easily and without real repercussions, than ever trying to play square.
I despise people who play games with the planet.
and try to pity the fools who cant decipher manure.
I somehow knew about the Exxon research
before I graduated from college in 1973. I live in Texas, The Oil Patch. Many family members worked in the industry.
The reveal hasn't had much impact, likely will not.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
I think the "explainers"
don't know what to do about it either. They know what's happening, and that we are at a point approaching or past a turning point. Faced with the entire world following the capitalist march to wealth, mainly by natural resource extraction and goods production, of all types, where do you start? Who has the power to defy the wealth hoarders, and how? All my life they gobbled up anything they wanted, still do, and nothing stopped them.
They don't.
But that's because they are too busy preserving capitalism. Those of us with no stake in capitalism must lead the way.
"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate
Very true
except we're all preserving capitalism. We have no stake in it, but we are forced to play the game. It's the only one there is. I'm a kind of a "field" person, the field of living. We all need food, health care, shelter, fairness, instead of industrial empty calories, medical bankruptcy and homelessness. I know what the problem is but I have no idea what to do to solve this.
Imagine being young and idealistic and going into a field of study thinking you are going to solve the big problems and ten years on finding you can't change a damn thing. So you grub along with the rest of us making the rich and powerful richer and more powerful, if we like it or not.
If we have no stake in more capitalism --
-- then we don't feel obliged to sit down and do nothing while the class war rages around us. We also have no stake in following "leadership." Aren't all of those people meeting in Davos right now to figure out how better to exploit the rest of us?
"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate
Yes and no again
Agreed that both ways is a very persuasive answer to the question of why. Who knows how to figure the "correct" percentage? Pretty much guesswork. As I stated above, as a political proposition, I am on board with mandating reduction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the theory of better safe than sorry. My post was a quibble with the certitude implicit in the OP.
Regarding the lesson of the bullshitisization of science: It is not so much that science is bullshit. The mediated way that we hear what research has "found" is just as unreliable as the various assertions about who is going to win a war or a ballgame or next year's Oscar. Plus, scientists gotta eat, just like everybody else, and the cig companies and oil companies show that you can buy science by the pound.
Civilization has reached yet another epistemological crisis, like the witch hunting fad of the early modern era so hysterically satirized in Monty Python's Holy Grail sendup. I don't think it is much of a reach to compare the furious rhetoric leveled by someone as respectable as Noam Chomsky against the unvaccinated to a witch hunt. His dismissal of the humanity of the unvaccinated was based on his understanding of science.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Understanding of science
Seems to me that 'science' has become almost a religion, a cult. Noam Chomsky ranting about the unvaccinated is typical. Since vaccinations are largely these days products cooked up by big pharma people being dubious and skeptical about their efficacy and safety seems healthy. Since when is Noam Chomsky a respectable expert about anything. When 'science' is used to sell any new product that big pharma cooks up pardon me if I'm leery of imbibing it. Side effects? Yeah right.
Healing people is more then just chemicals. Western pharmaceutical medicine may save lives but the damage to some done for profit is immense. Am I anti-science? No.
https://caucus99percent.com/comment/585730#comment-585730
noam
when someone stands in front of a mathematical equation
and starts waving their arms about some he said she said equivalency that the math cannot support,
that is a petroleum industry marketing lobbyist at work. and the pay is good.
the price, on the other hand...