[HN Gopher] How an early oil industry study became key in climat...
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How an early oil industry study became key in climate lawsuits
Author : chmaynard
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-11-30 15:06 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (e360.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (e360.yale.edu)
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| By the same argument, couldn't you make the State liable for all
| scientific research it's been funding?
|
| So if some researcher published an article 50 years ago
| predicting a climate disaster, and even 1 random legislator at
| any time since votes against oil industry regulation, then you
| can presume the State knowingly chose to trade off future
| flooding and wildfires for short-term benefit and dismiss their
| case.
|
| In general, this would be an incentive to never talk to
| scientists if you think you're doing something with negative
| consequences. Don't deploy any mitigations at all, because
| mitigations are evidence you think there's something to mitigate.
| Never read any scientific research, except for the minimum to
| accomplish specific tasks, because anything more is
| infohazardous. That seems worse than a world where they try to
| find a cheap solution that mitigates environmental damage, even
| if the search is unsuccessful and they decide to cause the same
| damage anyways.
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| An interesting question might be perhaps --- when is there a
| dereliction of duty? We tend to think in terms of 'just vote
| them out', however, there is this category of active ignorance
| that can't truly be established as seemingly actively
| maliciousness, a category of behavior that ultimately
| undermines social structures such as government in a way we
| haven't accounted for prior.
|
| In North Carolina, for example, in 2012, a law was passed that
| sea level rise could only be predicted from historical trends
| and only projected within a 30 year period with regards to the
| coast development policy.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2018/09/13/647559482/north-carolina-coas...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Many nations are being sued for not living up to their
| responisibilities in regard to climate change, so yes.
| nickphx wrote:
| How can one say for certain that the industrial activities of
| earth's occupants have any meaningful, measurable impact when we
| lack the complete historical picture of the planet's cycles over
| the millions of years?
| ako wrote:
| If we can have an impact today is not related to what happened
| outside our control in the past. Our impact today is physics,
| it can be modeled, calculated and validated. We know that you
| can lock yourself in a garage with a running car engine to kill
| yourself. Engine exhaust has a measurable impact on your
| health. It's not strange to assume the effect of pollution on a
| global scale would be similar, with some additional effects.
| nickphx wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand how filling a constrained space
| with a exhaust gas is at all similar. I'm not saying that
| there is no measurable impact. I am saying I doubt there's a
| long lasting impact beyond a few thousand years.
| Sakos wrote:
| > I am saying I doubt there's a long lasting impact beyond
| a few thousand years.
|
| Sorry, what? If we make our environment uninhabitable for
| us, even "temporarily", it'll take FAR less than a few
| thousand years to wipe out our species, or even just most
| of it. It'll also take at least a multiple of that time for
| that environment to recover, if it's even possible to
| recover in any way useful to us without our direct
| intervention. We've only been at the industrialized stage
| for a bit over 100 years and we're already at a point where
| we're facing unimaginable upheaval and suffering for
| hundreds of millions of people. I don't understand how you
| or anybody else can make arguments like this in good faith.
| ako wrote:
| The earth's atmosphere is also a constrained space.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| If we stopped emitting carbon dioxide perhaps things would
| equalize in a few thousand years. But we're still emitting
| carbon and the changes we're most concerned about are those
| in 100 years. Those changes will lead to permanent
| destruction of various human constructed environments,
| major changes to weather patterns that devastate regions
| that have been farming for millennia, and the complete
| extinction of certain animal species. Whether or not the
| climate would balance out a few thousand years from now is
| really not the major concern of climate scientists, it's
| what's going to happen to our world a lifetime from now.
| rybosworld wrote:
| This question has been asked so many times, and answered in
| such detail, that it's exhausting to see it still raised.
| Especially considering, it's almost always coming from someone
| who has made up their mind that human driven climate change
| isn't real.
|
| It's not much different than asking how scientists can come to
| any conclusions about anything.
|
| Also, what makes you think that we need the entire historical
| record of the planet's climate to draw a conclusion like this?
| edgyquant wrote:
| This question hasn't actually been answered though. Also if
| your scientific explanation is questioned by half of the
| people then the problem is with your scientific explanation.
|
| Science is about making predictions, so save the
| condescension because questioning climate science is the more
| scientific view than accepting it by faith.
| rybosworld wrote:
| "This question hasn't actually been answered though." Yes,
| it has been.
|
| https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-
| chan...
|
| "Also if your scientific explanation is questioned by half
| of the people then the problem is with your scientific
| explanation"
|
| I don't know if half of all people have an issue with the
| explanation. Regardless, that seems like a strange thing to
| say. Most people aren't qualified to analyze the findings
| of most fields of science. Your disagreement with the
| finding, if it does not involve an alternate, evidence-
| based solution, is entirely irrelevant, and has nothing to
| do with the scientific claim.
| [deleted]
| Retric wrote:
| The history of earths climate going back thousands of years
| is irrelevant when it comes to global warming.
|
| I don't care about the history going back billions of years
| when building an actual greenhouse, just black body
| radiation how materials interact with different frequencies
| of light.
|
| Global warming is no more complicated than an actual
| greenhouse, it's only understanding the exact impacts of
| global warming on climate that's complicated.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I didn't say billion though, I said humans have been
| reshaping the earth for 20k years and that has macro-
| effects as well that may not have been immediate. You're
| being defensive about this because you're invested in it
| and don't care if there's more to it than what we thought
| half a century ago.
| Retric wrote:
| nickphx just said, "complete historical picture of the
| planet's cycles over the millions of years?" And you
| said, "This question hasn't actually been answered
| though." Suddenly you bring up 20k years because what
| semantic misdirection?
|
| I really don't care about your complete and utter
| ignorance, but at least try and keep up with a few posts
| in this thread.
|
| Global warming is fairly simple physics, predicting
| specific climate change gets really complex.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I hope this is sarcasm, we have many indirect sources we can
| cross-reference to obtain a fairly accurate estimate of
| temperatures over tens of millions of years, if not more.
| Including data on atmospheric and oceanic composition, the
| lifeforms it harbored, and weather patterns in various parts of
| the world, to an extent, thanks to the fossil (and glacial,
| albeit on a smaller scale) record -- some of which we burn in
| our cars.
|
| Here's a random link in my first page of results [1]. In case
| you are serious, you are probably going to dismiss my claim. In
| that case, feel free to dismiss anything else that bothers you.
| Rules are for NPCs after all; and climate scientists,
| geologists, meteorologists, archaeologists, paleontologists and
| chemists are notoriously unreliable and more biased, partial
| and bought out than in every other field. (yes, I'm being
| sarcastic, sorry about that).
|
| Re-reading your question, it has merit, if it didn't come
| across as dismissive of the hard work that has been done by all
| these people over the years. Correlation does not equate
| causation, but the correlation is undeniable, and hypothesis
| that have been formulated to test for anthropogenic climate
| change tend to be successfully validated. Furthermore, multiple
| physical phenomenon at play are well understood, even if their
| interactions are complex (full of feedback loops, and unknowns:
| what will happen when the Siberian permafrost will thaw?
| Methane emissions? How much?). All in all, the picture looks
| pretty bleak, and we should not play too much with stuff we
| don't fully understand.
|
| [1]: https://scitechdaily.com/66-million-years-of-earths-
| climate-...
| Retric wrote:
| Because global CO2 levels have been rising exactly as predicted
| based on emissions.
|
| Really the past history of earth is irrelevant here, it's like
| arguing we need to understand what the history of a forest is
| to understand if we can set it on fire. All that forests
| history is irrelevant in the face of someone with a few gallons
| of gas and a match.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Well, the earth would be a frozen ball of ice if it weren't for
| the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and over a period of a
| couple hundred years scientists figured out that the balance of
| carbon dioxide is critical to maintaining a certain average
| temperature of the planet. And then they started measuring the
| amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and they found it
| is rising annually in direct relation to human industrial
| activity. They further found that the average temperature of
| the earth was rising in exactly the amount we would expect when
| raising the carbon content of the atmosphere. Lots of
| scientists have looked for other explanations, and after doing
| tests and measurements they've found those factors not to be
| the cause.
|
| Basically, we've used the scientific method to examine the
| evidence and having done so it's quite clear that human
| emissions of carbon dioxide are the cause of changes to the
| greenhouse effect.
|
| Here's a great video on the history of this science which I
| just watched:
|
| https://youtu.be/GGtAilkWTtI
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| For those who are of a right-wing persuasion, this youtube
| channel, created by a right-wing geologist who used to work
| for oil companies is good, because it won't upset you by
| challenging any of your political beliefs, just the science
| related myths:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL82yk73N8eoX-
| Xobr_TfH...
|
| The first video in the series is 14 years old.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Oh great thanks! I always need content to share with my
| Dad. I will say the video I linked is happily neutral. I
| felt like I could share it with my Tucker-Carlson loving
| Dad.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| In particular the two part video here is good as a
| summary:
|
| A CONSERVATIVE solution to global warming (Part 1)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D99qI42KGB0
|
| Many of the other older ones are referring to old
| controversies, though I see the 14 year old one still has
| new comments from this year claiming it's all lies.
| pasttense01 wrote:
| This is nonsense: that the oil industry knew about climate change
| but that the academic world and government scientists didn't. In
| fact the scientific community knew about it for a long time (even
| back to the 19th century...) but public policy makers ignored it.
|
| "How 19th Century Scientists Predicted Global Warming: Today's
| headlines make climate change seem like a recent discovery. But
| Eunice Newton Foote and others have been piecing it together for
| centuries."
|
| https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicte...
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| 19th Century Scientists also claimed that heavier than air
| flight would be impossible.
|
| 19th century scientists though that space was filled with
| ether.
|
| The 19th century scientists predicted global warming trope is
| basically survival bias.
| compiskey wrote:
| They didn't predict global warming. They measured directly
| industrial emission accumulation and predicted an impact on
| human health.
|
| Global warming is a colloquialism. The researchers did the
| science that gives rise to it.
|
| Luminiferous Aether is just another name for electromagnetic
| field effects. Which do literally exist but our written logic
| works out better if we talk around it as an idea not a thing.
|
| You're just arguing semantics to look smurt. Qualitative
| ideas like survivorship bias are relative in when they apply.
| btilly wrote:
| For anyone who wants to dig further on this,
| http://ponce.sdsu.edu/global_warming_science.html explains
| the actual reasoning of the paper that came closest, which
| was an 1896 paper that laid out all of the actual facts
| behind global warming, minus the prediction that a rapid
| increase in usage of fossil fuels actually WOULD cause
| global warming. The author of that paper did come to the
| correct conclusion not long after, but I'm not aware of any
| record of his doing so before the year 1900.
|
| The paper itself is available at
| http://ponce.sdsu.edu/arrhenius_paper_1896.pdf.
|
| The first newspaper article that I'm aware of predicting
| global warming was in 1912. See
| https://theconversation.com/for-110-years-climate-change-
| has... for more on that story.
| jstanley wrote:
| The ether was a proposed _explanation_ for
| electromagnetism.
| compiskey wrote:
| Right; it came about as experiments suggested something
| actually did exist.
|
| It's not the same kind of gibberish "mechanical flight is
| impossible" ended up being.
| btilly wrote:
| In the defense of 19th century scientists, the best
| approximate solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations
| really did predict that mechanical aircraft should not be
| able to fly, curve balls should not curve in the air, and
| so on.
|
| It was not until 1904 that Ludwig Prandtl published _Uber
| Flussigkeitsbewegung bei sehr kleiner Reibung (On the
| Motion of Fluids in Very Little Friction)_ which first
| discovered the importance of boundary layers. The
| breakdown of approximations in those boundary layers
| allows for all sorts of behaviors that came as a
| surprise. In time science caught up up with practical
| engineering advances to finally understand how airplanes
| can fly, pitchers can throw curve balls, and so on. And
| even so, those old approximations are still used because
| they are mostly right!
|
| So they were wrong, but it wasn't gibberish either.
|
| For a similar example of a mostly correct scientific
| theory producing wrong results, until near the end of the
| 20th century the linear wave model predicted that rogue
| waves were impossible. Today we can look back at
| shipwreck records and laugh at their stupidity. But in
| fact you can spend a week looking at every wave that
| passes a point and probably won't find even a single wave
| that doesn't fit the theory.
|
| Scientific overconfidence in well-tested theories is a
| systemic error that we are likely to always be prone to.
| Most of the time it is well justified. But we do nobody a
| favor by dismissing past examples of this as "gibberish".
| MayeulC wrote:
| Indeed, and I am not sure if there was a consensus on that
| topic back then.
|
| However, it is remarkable that some predicted it, as not
| everyone was paying attention.
|
| One issue with "scientists" (and engineers, as well as other
| humans, including me and you, and everyone on HN) is that
| they can't help but give their "expert" opinion on every
| topic, even if they are not an actual expert (related to
| Dunning-Kruger, although I was recently pointed out[1] that
| what people call DK is not what the paper was about).
|
| And, from my experience, we tend to attach more credibility
| to claims by famous people than from skilled people. Or at
| least broadcast them more. Einstein said that after he became
| famous, people started asking his opinion on any topic, from
| politics to football.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29141367
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > is that they can't help but give their "expert" opinion
| on every topic, even if they are not an actual expert
|
| Aka being human.
|
| This all says more about the people invoking it than the
| supposed effect.
|
| That is, they expect otherwise smart people to not behave
| like people. But they do, and they talk about subjects they
| have no clue about, just like everyone else.
| est31 wrote:
| Survival is how science works. Some theories are proven
| wrong, others are proven right. The theories that are proven
| wrong are often still quite accurate except for some edge
| cases. We shouldn't use our advantage of having one entire
| century plus two decades of research history to ridicule
| scientists from 100 years ago. They didn't have python, excel
| or pocket calculators. Yet they were able to derive really
| fancy rules and laws. I think that's really impressive, even
| if they were wrong on some things. We are likely wrong on
| some things too, doesn't mean we should discard all of our
| science.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| We believe ancient greek math but not their religion today
| pengaru wrote:
| There was passing mention of atmospheric CO2's planet-warming
| effects in some old 1800s book I read on archive.org that was
| about nutrition and diet, and how evolution explains all one
| needs to know about which foods to eat.
|
| The CO2 blurb was made matter-of-factly as if it were entirely
| well understood, and it wasn't even a major component of what
| was being discussed. It was just a section explaining planetary
| temperatures and how/why they varied over time, and how that
| affected the course of evolution of life on earth. The wording
| was something like "CO2 acts as an invisible blanket on the
| planet, trapping in the heat gained from the sun" if memory
| serves...
| hammock wrote:
| The academic world and government scientists knew about global
| warming as well as they knew about global cooling...
| cherrypicking doesn't do anyone any good.
| btilly wrote:
| Pot. Kettle. Black. You should stop believing misinformation.
|
| The belief that they ever believed in global cooling is
| itself a result of cherrypicking. Most papers predicted
| warming. See https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-
| predictions-in-1970s-in... for details.
|
| The short version is that aerosols in the air have a cooling
| effect. Papers did predict that a massive increase in
| aerosols could cause cooling. That increase never happened
| thanks to the Clean Air Act. Similarly dust from a nuclear
| war would have the same effect. Thankfully this theory has
| not been put to the test.
| hammock wrote:
| _> The belief that they ever believed in global cooling is
| itself a result of cherrypicking. Most papers predicted
| warming_
|
| Who are "they"? If "most papers" predicted warming then
| some papers predicted cooling.
|
| Science and truth are independent of majority view. My
| point is not that one or the other of global warming or
| cooling is true, but that reaching into the past and
| surfacing research that points to warming - or cooling for
| that matter - is cherrypicking, and of limited value.
| btilly wrote:
| Sorry, but you're just arguing for intellectual
| dishonesty at this point.
|
| There were, in fact, papers like
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.173.3992.138
| which painted a "what if" scenario about what would
| happen if aerosol usage increased by a factor of 4.
| However it didn't actually predict that aerosol usage
| WOULD increase by that much, and the law that
| successfully reduced aerosol usage was actually passed in
| 1970. (Though it took a few years to demonstrate its
| success.)
|
| And even papers like that acknowledged that CO2 was
| creating a long-term temperature increase, while the
| cooling of aerosols will stop very shortly after we stop
| emitting them.
|
| Conversely we can choose to emit aerosols. See https://en
| .wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio... as
| evidence that this is being considered as a solution to
| climate change. (Sadly it does nothing to fix ocean
| acidification or the fact that plants grown in excess CO2
| have lower nutritional value.)
|
| There was no equivalence where some scientists said one
| thing and others said another so who knows. Instead there
| was an ever improving understanding of a complex reality
| which is easy to cherrypick to rhetorical ends. Exactly
| as you are doing right now.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Public policymakers initially worked to combat it. You can find
| Margaret Thatcher, George H W Bush, Newt Gingrich etc. all
| taking a totally sensible view on it.
|
| Sometime around 1988-1992 some of them changed tack
| dramatically and started fighting against efforts to fight
| against it.
| savanaly wrote:
| I would be very interested to read more about this, and any
| explanations for it. I assume they're grounded in political
| science realities but I would love to know the details if you
| can remember a source.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I already linked a video that covers some of this history
| ("A CONSERVATIVE solution to global warming") in another
| comment, but basically the Koch brothers and a few other
| fossil fuel magnates freaked out when George H W Bush was
| going to commit to Kyoto, and started the long term suicide
| pact of the American right and climate change denial:
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-
| examin...
|
| _"Kochland" Examines the Koch Brothers' Early, Crucial
| Role in Climate-Change Denial_
|
| > The meeting, in 1991, was sponsored by the Cato
| Institute, a Washington-based libertarian think tank, which
| the Kochs founded and heavily funded for years. As Leonard
| describes it, Charles Koch and other fossil-fuel magnates
| sprang into action that year, after President George H. W.
| Bush announced that he would support a treaty limiting
| carbon emissions, a move that posed a potentially
| devastating threat to the profits of Koch Industries. At
| the time, Bush was not an outlier in the Republican Party.
| Like the Democrats, the Republicans largely accepted the
| scientific consensus on climate change, reflected in the
| findings of expert groups such as the Intergovernmental
| Panel on Climate Change, which had formed in 1988, under
| the auspices of the United Nations.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I would say overall that oil and fossil fuels have done far more
| good for humanity than harm.
|
| They enable us to feed our population. The global trade network
| have lifted billions of people out of poverty. Global literacy is
| at the highest it has always been. Fossil fuels enable us to be
| able to accurately track and predict hurricanes. Basically, our
| whole modern economy is built on fossil fuels.
|
| The most valuable resource on earth is human knowledge and
| ingenuity. Thanks to our high population, reduction of poverty,
| and global education, that resource is the highest it has ever
| been.
| paganel wrote:
| > I would say overall that oil and fossil fuels have done far
| more good for humanity than harm.
|
| Without the oil and fossil fuels we wouldn't have had cheap and
| abundant fertilisers, that would have meant no Green
| Revolution, that means we wouldn't have been able (as a
| species, that is) to feed 8 billion people. Literally speaking
| hundreds of millions to billions of people wouldn't have been
| alive right now if it hadn't been for the industry of
| extracting hydrocarbons from underneath us.
|
| It's crazy to see how reactionary a lot of people have become
| when it comes to this subject, even apocalyptic.
| vc9999 wrote:
| That's not the point
| ako wrote:
| Water has done more for humans than oil, but that doesn't mean
| you can't die if you drink too much.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Correct. But that doesn't mean you get to sue the water
| company for supplying you with water, even if they knew that
| it is possible to drink too much water and die.
| lesuorac wrote:
| But what if they switched the water supply and tried to
| cover up the health effects of that?
| rybosworld wrote:
| I'd be surprised if anyone tried to argue that fossil fuels
| have been anything less than instrumental in achieving our
| modern comforts.
|
| The issue is:
|
| 1. Oil companies knew about fossil fuel harm to the
| environment, and then lied about/tried to cover it up. They've
| directly played a role in climate misinformation. They've done
| that so well that we now have armies of people with no relevant
| knowledge on the topic arguing that climate change is a hoax.
|
| 2. If the danger of fossil fuels was acknowledged long ago, we
| could have prepared for it in advance. This would have eaten
| into profits, hence the motivation to deny it's a problem.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I've met very few people who believe climate change is a
| hoax. The belief is that the climate is not static and that
| it's better for humans to adapt (as they always have) than to
| commit economic suicide.
|
| This is unpopular online, but is the actual view of a
| majority of Americans imo. The reason climate activists are
| not getting anywhere with these people is that they are
| having an argument with the climate denier in their head.
| rybosworld wrote:
| "The belief is that the climate is not static and that it's
| better for humans to adapt (as they always have) than to
| commit economic suicide."
|
| Whose belief? I don't understand how belief is relevant.
|
| "This is unpopular online, but is the actual view of a
| majority of Americans imo" Not true. Most Americans accept
| the scientific consensus - that recent changes in
| temperature are driven by human activities:
| https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/extreme-weather-
| poll-...
| edgyquant wrote:
| You didn't read my comment because you aren't engaging
| faithfully. I said that most people do believe it's
| caused by humans but that humans will have to adapt to it
| as they have to multiple other changes in climate.
|
| I'm not kidding about you arguing with yourself here.
| This comment is actual proof
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Oh you're one of those climate change denier deniers, who
| despite decades of video and written evidence to the
| contrary, are trying to gaslight (word of the year!) people
| into believing that it was all just a concern over cost
| benefit analysis and nobody thought it was a hoax. Because
| that would be stupid wouldn't it.
| [deleted]
| edgyquant wrote:
| Funny how I didn't mention anything about myself yet you
| still attacked me as if I had. Again, you're arguing with
| a climate denier in your head
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I was attacking the thing you said, in the comment I
| replied to:
|
| > I've met very few people who believe climate change is
| a hoax. The belief is that the climate is not static and
| that it's better for humans to adapt (as they always
| have) than to commit economic suicide.
| rybosworld wrote:
| This has been a lot more common in my experience.
|
| Driven primarily by folks realizing how wrong/ridiculous
| their views were years ago, and trying to rewrite
| history.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I've met many climate change deniers, both in real life and
| online. They used to be very thick on the ground on sites
| like this one and particularly on Slashdot. (Ugh, remember
| "Climategate"?) It has been something of a pleasure
| watching them gradually disappear from sites with more
| thoughtful readers. Sadly, the reason they're disappearing
| is because boldfaced climate denial doesn't fly with
| reasonably intelligent HN folks anymore, given what we can
| see with our own eyes.
|
| The smarter new ones have switched away from rants about
| "AGW" and scientists being untrustworthy. They now tell us
| climate change won't be that bad and we can "adapt."
| ako wrote:
| Continuing using oil as we do today might also end in
| economical suicide. And embracing more green technology
| might offer more economic opportunities than oil.
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