Exxon CEO: Warming Happening, But Fears Overblown 288
Freshly Exhumed writes "In a speech Wednesday, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will be able to adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling are well understood and can be mitigated, he said. And dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain, he said. Tillerson blamed a public that is "illiterate" in science and math, a "lazy" press, and advocacy groups that "manufacture fear" for energy misconceptions in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations."
Here it comes (Score:5, Informative)
The natural progression:
1. There is no such thing as global warming!
2. Global warming is theoretically possible, but it's not happening.
3. Global warming is happening, but it's no big deal.
4. Ok, we should probably do something about this global warming before it gets worse.
5. We're really f*cked now.
typology of global warming denial (Score:5, Informative)
We're actually entering an Ice Age.
Global warming isn't happening.
It's happening, but we didn't cause it.
It's happening, and we're causing it, but there's nothing we can do about it.
It's happening, and we're causing it, but there's nothing we can do about it at a price we're willing to pay.
We don't know what's going to happen, so we need to wait until more evidence is in.
The first few are often accompanied by:
It's just a liberal plot to destroy industry
(as if offshoring hasn't already destroyed it).
Re:Standard PR (Score:5, Informative)
I'll just go ahead and cut/paste my last comment to this same misrepresentation by headlines:
Headline should be: One of the smaller Antarctic shelves stable for 2 years, new field data show.
It's large, by comparison to your backyard at 120x60 miles, but here's an illustration of how large it is compared to the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet:
http://www.npolar.no/npcms/export/sites/np/images/ice/maps/Antarktisk-Fimbulisen.jpg [npolar.no]
It's an interesting data point, but it doesn't show "Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all" any more than "OMG it's farking cold this morning" shows that the planet is cooling.
Comprehension; it's hard.
Re:Standard PR (Score:5, Informative)
Irrelevant to the current event.
Why would you thing there can only be one reason?
It's like saying someone can't be found guilty of murder because some different case has gone unsolved.
FACTS:
1) CO2 , among others, is a green house gas
2) we put billions of tons of CO2 in the air
3) the temperature change is no top of normal cycle
4) every other other possible reason has been shut down.
5) the organisations the it will hurt the most are agreeing with the evidence.
Never, ever, ever quote something from the register. For or against, it's a horrible rag .
No model is perfect. But looking at the whole scope of events and denying them because of events like these is stupid. In fact, it's the very base of cognitive dissonance.
Did you read the study? I assume not because then you would know how stupid it is to quote the article.
Explain to me how this means there isn't man made global warming: .. simply stupid.
~~
The mechanisms by which heat is delivered to Antarctic ice shelves are a major source of uncertainty when assessing the response of the Antarctic ice sheet to climate change. Direct observations of the ice shelf-ocean interaction are extremely scarce, and present ice shelf-ocean models struggle to predict reason able melt rates. Our two years of data during 2010-2012 from three oceanic moorings below the Fimbul Ice Shelf in the eastern Weddell Sea show cold cavity waters, with average temperatures of less than 0.1 {degree sign}C above the surface freezing point. This suggests rather low basal melt rates, consistent with remote sensing based, steady state mass balance estimates in this sector of the Antarctic coast. Oceanic heat for basal melting is found to be sup-plied by two sources of warm water that enter below the ice: (i) eddy-like bursts of Modified Warm Deep Water accesses the cavity at depth during eight months of the record; and (ii) a seasonal inflow of warm, fresh surface water flushes parts of the ice base with temperatures above freezing, during late summer and fall. This interplay of processes implies that basal melting cannot simply be parameterized by coastal deep ocean temperatures, but is directly linked to both solar forcing at the surface as well as to coastal processes controlling deep ocean heat fluxes.
~~
Cherry picking data is bad, but cherry picking wrong data is
lower then expected is not 'flat wrong'.
Do you even understand what a model it?
Lets be clear about that letter:
1) Melting not as fast.
2) In no way throws gloabale warming out the window.
" block them from your mind"
fuck you and your LOL.
Re:C'mon (Score:5, Informative)
Re:C'mon (Score:4, Informative)
Don't take this speech lightly. T was given at the CFR, the think tank that is funded by conservative wealth and includes Bush Sr and ole Rumsfeld at the top.
The CFR wrote a plan to invade Iraq in 1998 and pushed it through lobbies.
Scary.
Re:Do horses produce more greenhouse gasses than c (Score:4, Informative)
Because there is 227 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is methane? Also CO2 and methane absorb IR in different bands and the band that methane absorbs in radiated at a lower energy level than CO2's. Finally, most atmospheric methane breaks down into CO2 and water within a decade or two so in the long run one methane equals one CO2 anyway.
Re:C'mon (Score:3, Informative)
Not true.
Re:C'mon (Score:5, Informative)
That article is completely untrustworthy, here's an article [yalescientific.org] about the same study that doesn't ramble incoherently and use pejorative slang every other sentence.
You might notice that the main point of the study has been distorted in the article you linked, only one group of people actually became more sceptical as their knowledge of science and math increased. That's "heirarchical individualists", or more plainly speaking they're capitalist libertarians. It's may even be more accurate to say that scientifically illiterate conservatives are not concerned as much about climate change because there are issues with how the study measured scientifically literate. The "higher levels" of scientific knowledge included such skill testing questions as "How long does it take the earth to rotate around the sun? A) 1 year, B) 1 month, C) 1 day", which if I remember correctly from the actual paper, only 34% of the responders were able to answer correctly.
It seems that the bar "scientifically literate" seems to be set really, really low.