Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Looks like a Consensus!… even to Oil Industry experts!

For all the crazy-making reruns the Republican science denying PR machine has been bombarding the public with since the Paris climate talks, the bottom line remains that their campaign is built on a card-house of lies and character assassination, bound together by the wishful thinking of people who's imagination and curiosity to understand our planet doesn't extend beyond their own self-interested pocket-books.  

The moranos, moncktons, and wattzers have nothing but their paranoia and loathing for others.  Well, they also have an acquiescent equally self-interested public that simply does not want to know about this challenging threat to our way of life.  Thereby making them an easy mark.

As it turns out, in the real world of our physical planet, the things I learned about climate science way back in the seventies turn out to have been quite accurate science that even oil industry experts agreed on.  From my perspective of paying attention to Earth observations since those days, that AGW understanding has been getting reaffirmed by the events of every succeeding year - all the while our right-wing PR machine keeps getting increasingly disconnected from down to earth realities.

Yet, all it takes to unravel the confusion is a bit of honest curiosity, objectivity, self-skepticism, and a willingness to allow the full spectrum of evidence to determine our understanding.  Oh, and a desire to understand our planet's global heat and moisture distribution engine is also a prerequisite!

Back to that consensus of experts who actually understand the fine details of these matters, it seems the understanding was way broader than we've been led to believe.  For that part of this story, I'll let Inside Climate News take over, 
(the following is a teaser, please link to their full article):


Members of an American Petroleum Institute task force on CO2 included scientists from nearly every major oil company, including Exxon, Texaco and Shell.

by Neela Banerjee, INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS  \   December 22, 2015

The American Petroleum Institute together with the nation's largest oil companies ran a task force to monitor and share climate research between 1979 and 1983, indicating that the oil industry, not just Exxon alone, was aware of its possible impact on the world's climate far earlier than previously known.

The group's members included senior scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company, including Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, Sohio and Standard Oil of California and Gulf Oil, the predecessors to Chevron, according to internal documents obtained by InsideClimate News and interviews with the task force's former director.

An InsideClimate News investigative series has shown that Exxon launched its own cutting-edge CO2 sampling program in 1978
in order to understand a phenomenon it suspected could harm its business... The previously unpublished papers about the climate task force indicate that API, the industry's most powerful lobbying group, followed a similar arc to Exxon's in confronting the threat of climate change. ...  

...

Bruce S. Bailey of Texaco offered "for consideration" the idea that "an overall goal of the Task Force should be to help develop ground rules for energy release of fuels and the cleanup of fuels as they relate to CO2 creation," according to the minutes of a meeting on Feb. 29, 1980.

The minutes also show that the task force discussed a "potential area" for research and development that called for ...



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