Who knew what when? refers, obvs. But today's lesson is taken from a twat by Geoffrey Supran, pushing an amicus brief wot he has writ in conjunction with a pile of the usual suspects. As is traditional, it is badly written, starting with At least 50 years ago, Defendants [the usual Evil Fossil Fuel Interests] had information from their own internal research, as well as from the international scientific community, that the unabated extraction, production, promotion, and sale of their fossil-fuel products would endanger the public. Defendants failed to disclose this information... yes, that's right: the EFFI are being accused of failing to disclose info from the international scientific community. This makes no sense at all. Being slightly less literal, they knew nothing that the ISC didn't know, so accusing them of failing to disclose duplicate info makes no sense either.And now I look, FFS, this is just recycled drivel - or perhaps my use of the word "traditional" was more approriate than I thought - so you'll have to forgive me the picture, it too traditional - from Yet more bollox from Oreskes. It is the same junk they wrote then. Give me strength.
But I shall struggle on a bit further because I can recycle one of my own posts. They continue, "In 1959, physicist Edward Teller delivered the earliest known warning of the dangers of global warming to the petroleum industry, at a symposium held at Columbia University. Teller described the need to find energy sources other than fossil fuels to mitigate these dangers, stating a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York....". But the point is that Teller was hopelessly wrong, as I said before. No-one should, or did, act on Teller's warning, because at that point, no-one knew. As Teller so helpfully demonstrates.
Note that this is all orthogonal to the question of "was there a PR campaign to delay and obfusticate", to which the answer is Yes.
Notes
1. I briefly covered the suit in Yet moah climate suing.
Refs
* TALIBAN PROMISES FIRST CARBON NEGATIVE JIHAD
Is it correct to say that at least in part the oil giants are charged with reading published papers that speculate on the outcome of human contributions to climate change?
ReplyDeleteAnd, apparently, failing to disclose what they'd read. Quite how that makes any sense is a mystery to me.
ReplyDeleteThere used to be a few climate scientists that were regulars at my two blogs. One of them said that Teller was flogging CAGW to promote nuclear as far back as the early 50s. Mosher said he'd run into a few others saying the same thing.
ReplyDeleteI have also heard that Monckton was advising Thatcher and brought up GW as an argument to be used against striking coal miners. Have you heard anything about that?
As to Thatcher, the GW-against-miners is a trope I've heard before; it is plausible, but I know of no positive edivdence for it. Monckers being involved seems less likely and more likely his usual fantasy.
ReplyDelete