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posted by on Sunday March 12 2017, @01:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the playing-both-sides-of-the-fence dept.

Common Dreams reports:

Oil giant Shell also knew of the dangers of climate change decades ago, while it continued to lobby against climate legislation and push for fossil fuel development, a joint investigation by The Guardian[1] and the Dutch newspaper The Correspondent revealed [February 28].

Shell created a confidential report in 1986 which found that the changes brought about by global warming could be "the greatest in recorded history", and warned of an impact "on the human environment, future living standards, and food supplies, [that] could have major social, economic, and political consequences".

The company also made a 28-minute educational film in 1991 titled Climate of Concern that warned oil extraction and use could lead to extreme weather, famines, and mass displacement, and noted that the dangers of climate change were "endorsed by a uniquely broad consensus of scientists". The film was developed for public viewing, particularly for schools.

[...] Despite its own warnings, Shell invested billions of dollars into tar sands operations and exploration in the Arctic. It has also devoted millions to lobbying against climate legislation.

The revelations about Shell come after a separate investigation into ExxonMobil revealed that [that] company had also been waging a climate science suppression campaign and burying its own reports on the global warming impacts of fossil fuel use for decades. Exxon, whose former CEO is now U.S. secretary of state, is currently under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and state attorneys general for allegedly lying to investors about the risks of climate change.

In 2016, a group of lawmakers asked the Department of Justice to look into Shell's knowledge of global warming as well.

[1] Bogus link in TFA corrected.


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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by ngarrang on Sunday March 12 2017, @02:18PM (12 children)

    by ngarrang (896) on Sunday March 12 2017, @02:18PM (#478048) Journal

    Always.

    Their report pointed out something so obvious a child knows this. As the Earth proceeds around the sun in its wobble, angle and distance, in conjunction with solar activity, volcanic activity, and life activity, weather patterns shift around and climates change. Any poster in North America should be thankful for climate change, as its northern residents would be still be under a mile of ice right now.

    Humans do not CAUSE climate change. We have the ability to enhance it, but climate change happens whether SUVs have existed or not.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @03:04PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @03:04PM (#478057)

    Unfortunately the rate of change matters. Species will fail to adapt if the rate of change is too great. So doing what we can to mitigate that rate is important.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @06:28PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @06:28PM (#478133)

      Unfortunately the rate of change matters.

      This xkcd really drives home just how much the rate of change has changed.
      Basically there has been more change in the last 20 years than in the previous 4000 years.

      A Timeline of Earth's Average Temperature [xkcd.com]

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 13 2017, @07:03AM (2 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 13 2017, @07:03AM (#478327) Journal

        Basically there has been more change in the last 20 years than in the previous 4000 years.

        No. Change in the last 20 years is roughly 0.3 C, maybe less, if there is exaggeration of recent data. Eyeballing the lines on the xkcd graph, it is claimed that global mean temperature went from roughly 0.2 C down to -0.5 C and then up to +0.5 C fully describing the amount of change since 2000 BC. That's 1.7 C of change. In car terms, it's like claiming someone who drives on a long, round trip never went anywhere, because they ended up where they started.

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2017, @02:24PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2017, @02:24PM (#478407)

          Yes. You're ignoring the significance of the size of the scale involved. Yup it shifted a lot over millennia, but there is a severe uptick right about the industrial revolution and it goes up at a steeper rate than the millennia before it. That graph starts 20000 years BCE or before the common era. The part we are responsible for is the half inch to an inch at the bottom. Or do you dispute the fact that the earth has been here for that long in the first place and that it should be BC?

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 13 2017, @03:05PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 13 2017, @03:05PM (#478424) Journal

            Yes. You're ignoring the significance of the size of the scale involved. Yup it shifted a lot over millennia, but there is a severe uptick right about the industrial revolution and it goes up at a steeper rate than the millennia before it.

            Change is not rate of change. And I do dispute xkcd's characterization of past climate variation. For example, what happened to the warming pulse [nasa.gov] around the time of the Second World War? Where's the enormous error bars on any estimate of global temperature before roughly 1850?

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @03:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @03:21PM (#478061)

    The ignorance is strong with this one. You're pseudo scientific rebuttal sounds great at first glance but you've entered into it with a predisposition and a deliberate refusal to acknowledged what we really mean when we discuss climate change today. The natural climate shifts you discuss take centuries! Look carefully again at the numbers, its hard to miss the dramatic increase of mean temperatures that start squarely as we started the industrial revolution and rose in an ever increasing curve as more and more of us started to live more industrialized and post industrialized lives.

    But you probably don't care about anything that your zealot leader of choice hasn't spewed at you. Thinking is too hard so let someone else do it but only if they're telling me what I want to hear. This is going to be the true cause of humanity's destruction, weaponized ignorance.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 12 2017, @03:40PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 12 2017, @03:40PM (#478065) Journal

    Humans do not CAUSE climate change. We have the ability to enhance it, but climate change happens whether SUVs have existed or not.

    The obvious rebuttal is what happens when we can enhance climate change to the point it is heading opposite a direction it would normally take? The normal status of Earth is a glacial period. And there are a couple of factors right now that might even under normal circumstances lead to resumption of a several tens of thousands of years long glacial period: the weakening of the Gulf Stream and entry into a possible period of lower solar activity. Yet mean global temperatures are heading the other direction away from this particular global catastrophe.

  • (Score: 5, Touché) by sjames on Sunday March 12 2017, @03:41PM (2 children)

    by sjames (2882) on Sunday March 12 2017, @03:41PM (#478066) Journal

    We know that sometimes random chance causes someone on a ladder to fall to his death. Therefor there is no morel or ethical reason not to go around kicking ladders out from under the people on them. They might have fallen anyway.

    Or perhaps not...

    • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by VLM on Sunday March 12 2017, @05:29PM (1 child)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 12 2017, @05:29PM (#478110)

      The better ladder analogy is the globe is warming or cooling or some darn thing, but "We gotta do something(tm)" so we'll kick the ladder out from under a couple economies, after all, workers of the world unite and all that. The only relationship environmental politics has with science, is using science as a human shield. The conversations all go something like "As Marx wrote in his treatise about global warming in 1867, we must socialize the ..." "Nope that politics is bogus and obsolete" "What, how dare you attack our most holy of holies, Science!" "Huh I was making fun of the politics".

      With a side dose of its freaking 2017 and you can still troll trigger enviros by claiming to disbelieve in science. I mean, am I gonna be milking this in 2027? "bwahh ha ha ha ItsJustATheoryTheScienceIsn'tProven bwahh ha ha ha" and the triggering is epic for how little effort it takes.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @06:04PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @06:04PM (#478123)

        The only ones that equate scientific consensus as holy and religious are the religious who are threatened by it or the types that use this religious objection to their political advantage.