Zeitgeist Spam

If corporations are people, why isn't ExxonMobil on death row? Said otherwise, even if corporations aren't people, why hasn't ExxonMobil been shut down? (Rhetorical questions, of course)

ExxonMobil misled the public about the climate crisis. Now they're trying to silence critics

 

Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes

 

from the Guardian, 16 Oct 020

Newly leaked documents reported by Bloomberg News show that ExxonMobil’s climate dishonesty is even worse than we thought

A group of climate activists rally across from a courthouse where ExxonMobile was sued by the New York attorney general, November 2019. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

Fri 16 Oct 2020 13.42 BST

 

In 2017, we published the first peer-reviewed analysis of ExxonMobil’s 40-year history of climate change communications. We found that the company and its parents, Exxon and Mobil, misled the public about climate change and its severity. Central to this conclusion was the contrast between what Exxon and ExxonMobil scientists said in internal reports and scientific articles versus what Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil told the public in non-peer-reviewed publications and in “advertorials” – paid advertisements dressed up to look like opinion pieces – in The New York Times.

Newly leaked documents, reported recently by Bloomberg News, show that ExxonMobil’s climate dishonesty is even worse than we thought. While the company privately has an internal “plan for surging carbon emissions…by as much as the output of the entire nation of Greece,” according to Bloomberg, ExxonMobil executives “shield their carbon forecasts from investors.” In other words, ExxonMobil drew up plans to expand fossil fuel production, internally calculated how much this would increase their carbon dioxide emissions, then failed to disclose those estimates to investors. Indeed, the company has never publicly disclosed its emissions forecasts. In response to the Bloomberg report, ExxonMobil claimed that the leaked documents were not up-to-date, but declined to provide “any details on the new projections,” according to Bloomberg.

ExxonMobil has launched a new attack on our research, penned by ExxonMobil Vice President Vijay Swarup in the academic journal where we published our original study. In fact, ExxonMobil, in trying to dismiss our findings, has inadvertently made them stronger. They have done so in three ways, which we summarize today in a peer-reviewed rebuttal.

First, ExxonMobil has not challenged any of our findings about the 187 documents analyzed in our original study. They do not deny that Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil all had early knowledge that their products have the potential to cause dangerous global warming. Nor do they deny that Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil all promoted doubt about climate science and its implications in order to delay action.

Second, ExxonMobil accused us of analyzing “less than 3%” of their advertorials. This is misleading: less than 4% of their advertorials concerned climate change; most were irrelevant. Nevertheless, we have expanded our research program to include advertorials of which we were originally unaware, and found that – spoiler alert – “the results strengthen our original finding.”

Third, ExxonMobil claims that our original publication “obscur[ed] the separateness” of Exxon and Mobil prior to their 1999 merger. This is incorrect and misleading: when Exxon and Mobil merged, ExxonMobil inherited legal and moral responsibility for both. Moreover, as we summarize in today’s rebuttal, additional work we have done in response to ExxonMobil’s complaints “further demonstrates that both Exxon and Mobil separately misled the public, and continued to do so once they merged to become ExxonMobil Corp.”

All told, “we can now conclude with even greater confidence that Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil Corp have all, variously, misled the public.”

Unable to disprove our findings, ExxonMobil’s critique has resorted to quoting a non-peer-reviewed report commissioned and paid for by the company. Instead of subjecting their positions to the independent scrutiny of academic peer-review, as we (and all scientists) do, ExxonMobil found a backdoor, so that they could then claim that our work has been refuted.

These Big Tobacco-style tactics – doubt-mongering, character assassination, intellectual hitjobs, and undisclosed conflicts of interest – are precisely the sort of product-defense maneuvers that ExxonMobil perfected while attacking climate science and climate scientists. The only difference now is that they are coming after the social sciences, too.

But it’s hardly the first time. When we published our study, ExxonMobil immediately responded with a straw man, a falsehood, cherry picking, and ad hominem attacks. Last year, they sent a now-leaked memo to Members of European Parliament in an attempt to discredit one of us (Geoffrey Supran) who had been invited to testify to that parliament as an expert witness about the company’s history of climate denial. And for the past three years, ExxonMobil has run a social media campaign accusing us of publishing “manufactured” science at the behest of “a political campaign.” It has been viewed millions of times.

With ExxonMobil so evidently offering its critiques in bad faith, we hesitated whether to engage at all. They don’t need to win this debate, they just need to make it seem like there is one. Personally, we don’t care what ExxonMobil says about us. But their attempts to smear our research do matter, because – in the face of mounting lawsuits, surging public protests and crumbling market value – ExxonMobil is swinging for a way to discredit the work that demonstrates what they have done.

Alas, it is a swing and a miss. ExxonMobil’s reaction to our work is nothing more than a case in point of the deceptive behavior we described in our original study. ExxonMobil is now misleading the public about its history of misleading the public. Indeed, as Bloomberg’s new report reveals, the company is hiding climate information, too.

• Geoffrey Supran is a Research Associate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University and co-Director of the Climate Social Science Network at Brown University

• Naomi Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, the author of Why Trust Science? and the co-author, with Erik M Conway, of Merchants of Doubt

Just about says it all ...

Canada's last intact ice shelf broke off. It took our research station with it. Plus, David Wojnarowicz's "Science Lesson"

Frida Garza

Wed 14 Oct 2020 08.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 14 Oct 2020 16.24 BST for the Guardian

In August, Adrienne White – an ice analyst at the Canadian Ice Service who monitors the Canadian Arctic for changes in sea ice – was reviewing satellite imagery when she spotted something remarkable. The enormous Milne ice shelf, which was the last intact ice shelf in Canada and which White had studied closely before as a PhD student, was dissolving.

A huge chunk larger than Manhattan, roughly 43% of the shelf, broke off in one piece. And as it collapsed into the ocean, it took with it much of the equipment her former colleagues had left there.

“It is lucky that we were not on the ice shelf when this happened,” one colleague, Derek Mueller, wrote in a blogpost following the discovery. “Our camp area and instruments were all destroyed in this event.”

Mueller had been studying a channel that ran below the surface of the Milne ice shelf, like a river. In 2017, a team of researchers discovered scallops, sponges, worms and other organisms living some 20 meters deep, inside the ice shelf. Animals have been found living beneath ice shelves before, but never – to Mueller and his colleagues’ knowledge – inside of one.

Mueller is one of Canada’s leading ice shelf experts, along with Luke Copland, who supervised White’s PhD. Together and separately, the three have been studying the Arctic for years. They had observed rifts appearing over the Milne ice shelf throughout their careers. Still, the breakup – known as a calving event – is significant. Copland believe ice shelves are “a canary in the coalmine” in the climate crisis, given that they are especially susceptible to atmospheric changes.

We spoke them about what that day was like, and where they go from here.

How did you first learn of the calving event?

Adrienne White: At the Canadian Ice Service, we use satellite imagery to chart sea ice in Canadian waters. We also use this imagery to monitor glaciers and ice shelves for calving events that can produce large ice islands. The day I discovered the Milne ice shelf calving event was a typical day; I came into work and was looking along the coastline of Ellesmere Island [to which the ice shelf was connected] for any changes; over the previous week, I’d noticed there was a lot of open water in the area, which can lead to destabilization.

Looking first at the optical imagery, the same type of imagery you would see on Google Earth, I could see that there was a darker area on the Milne, but there were a lot of clouds on the image that I couldn’t see through. Then I used radar satellite imagery, which can penetrate clouds, and with that we were able to clearly see the ice islands were separating from the ice shelf, and that the calving event was taking place.

What was your first reaction?

Derek Mueller: Shock and sadness, in some ways. It’s like hearing bad news. It’s not an easy thing to get used to.

White: I was really surprised. We think of these as semi-permanent features. But the breakup of these ice shelves is really quite inevitable at this point; along the coast of northern Ellesmere Island, we’re seeing open water and warmer temperatures almost consistently every summer.

Luke Copland: I got a text from Adrienne – I remember it clearly – and it just said: “The Milne ice shelf is gone.” I saw it and thought, ‘Crap, is that real?’ We’d both spent a lot of time working and living on the ice shelf, flying around it, studying it, so I texted her back and she described the process and the timing.

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 Luke Copland maintains a small weather station on the Milne ice shelf. Photograph: Adrienne White

Did you see it coming?

Mueller: All of the other ice shelves had broken up in past years, so it wasn’t a question of if for this particular ice shelf. It was a question of when.

Copland: If you look at the changes [over time], we’ve lost more than 90% of ice shelves in the last hundred years. We’d seen increased melting on the surface and the bottom [of the Milne], as well as long-term thinning. So we knew things were changing. Still, this ice shelf is huge, it’s bigger than large cities are, and it’s very strange to look at a satellite image one day and then look at [the same area] the next day, and the thing doesn’t exist any more.

White: I always thought that the Milne was one of the more stable of the ice shelves; we had seen major breakups from the neighboring Serson and Peterson ice shelves, but the Milne seemed less susceptible to breakup. Part of my PhD was looking at what made it so stable, [including] the fact that it was so much thicker and attached to the walls of this fjord.

That being said, it did have large fractures going across it that had been widening over the past few years. And we had seen the southern edge, the part of the ice shelf at the back of the fjord, starting to melt away more and more each year. Still, it was a shock to see the thickest, strongest part of the ice shelf break apart in this one big piece.

Did you ever think you’d lose your equipment to an event like this?

Mueller: It’s one of those things: We need the data year-round and we can’t stay there year-round, so it’s always a risk. You could put a weather station on a tripod on a glacier and it could fall over. There’s lots of instruments floating around the Arctic that people [had] put out. We got two full years of data from ours, so we count ourselves lucky in that sense.

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 The team’s camp on the ice shelf in July 2018. Photograph: Jérémie Bonneau

Does this change your plans to study the area?

White: Absolutely not. It only shows us how important it is to continue monitoring this coastline and acquiring imagery in this specific area at even higher resolution

Copland: We’re shifting more towards [studying] satellite images. A colleague of mine actually died [in the field]; he was one of the world leaders studying glaciers in the Arctic, and he fell through a crevasse on the Greenland ice sheet. And it seems that that crevasse is filled with water, which is ultimately the result of climate change.

There’s also been a shift over the last few years to studying [the Arctic] by helicopter. There’s so many measures that we can’t make unless we’re in the field; for example, we can’t really measure how thick the ice is from space. Moving forward, we’re still planning fieldwork, but being very careful and planning around safety.

Mueller: The ice shelf is still half there. Our key study site on the ice shelf was lost, but we can find another study area potentially.

Is it too late to save Canada’s remaining ice shelves from further breakup?

Copland: For ice shelves, we can lose them very quickly; when they break up, that piece of the ice shelf is gone, it floats away. That takes a day. But to form an ice shelf, it takes hundreds to thousands of years, because you need a gradual buildup of snow and ice. You need a cold climate for centuries to form an ice shelf, but to lose one, you lose them immediately.

White: This is really an area that has changed from [once] being completely ice-covered. You [used to] have old sea ice attached to the coast and ice shelves filling fjords and bays. Now, every year, we’ve seen open water along the entire coast of Ellesmere Island. The entire icescape has changed.

Mueller: I always have to say yes, it’s too late. Ice shelves were already vulnerable to change. But the action we take now will prevent this – or mitigate it, anyway – in the future, in other places. It’s critically important that we heed these warnings. If we can make a change and hit these Paris climate accord targets, there is opportunity.

[JBR: THAT LAST SENTENCE BEGINS WITH THE MOST FUTILE IF IN THE HISTORY OF IFS]

RIP Chris Killip

Moriyama Dog Pillow

Yesterday we had clouds

Matthew Buckingham, "The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 C.E." ...

Geologists believe it will take approximately 500,000 years for the portraits of the four U.S. presidents carved on Mount Rushmore to erode and become unrecognizable. "The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 C.E." asks the viewer to consider Mount Rushmore as a cultural, political, and social symbol by imagining Rushmore's inevitable disappearance and slow return to "nature." As its power to represent fades, the paradox of Rushmore's meaning as a "shrine to democracy"—on land stolen from the Sioux and carved by an artist who was an active member of the Ku Klux Klan—intensifies. (quote from Matthew Buckingham)

The Batagaika Crater (to keep things in proportion ... some day people will look back on 2020 and say, oh, you mean when they had it easy)

Photo: Alexander Gabyshev, Research Institute of Applied Ecology of the North

"Record-setting summer temperatures across Siberia are opening up the Batagaika megaslump, which locals call the “gateway to the underworld,” at an unprecedented pace, scientists say.

The Batagaika crater in the eastern Siberian republic of Sakha appeared in the 1960s after forest in the area was cleared, causing the land to sink. Currently the world’s largest megaslump at about 1 kilometer in length and 100 meters deep, it continues to grow in size and depth as climate change melts the fast-heating region’s permafrost layer.

Batagaika’s diameter is now advancing outward at roughly 12 to 14 meters per year, Science magazine cited University of Potsdam permafrost researcher Frank Guenther as saying last week. Before 2016, it had advanced at 10 meters per year, he said.

As the crater expands, scientists and archaeologists are discovering well-preserved remains of animals and plants that have been extinct since the Ice Age. The site also offers insight into 200,000 years of climate data.

 

Kseniia Ashastina, a paleobotanist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, told Science magazine that local indigenous groups fear the crater, saying “it’s eating their land, swallowing up the trees and their sacred places.”

The news comes as Russia’s Arctic and Siberian regions, already warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world, face a historic summer heat wave accompanied by wildfires, fuel spills, crop failures and more.

The town of Verkhoyansk, located 75 kilometers from Batagaika and one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth, saw temperatures hit 38 Celsius, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic, in June.

In late May, a fuel tank owned by a subsidiary of Norilsk Nickel leaked 21,000 metric tons of diesel fuel into a river near Norilsk in what has been described as the worst-ever fuel spill in the Arctiс. The company has linked the spill to melting permafrost beneath the tank’s supporting pillars which caused the tank to crack."

And this, along with fires around the world, hopped up storms, record-setting temperatures, coastal flooding, the extinction of species and the spread of ones, like lyme-disease-carrying ticks into new territories, the increasing number of climate refugees, and so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby, oooh sha sha, is just the beginning ...

"He was really cranky, so we put him in the car seat and drove him around til he fell asleep"

New Photo