ExxonMobil has a long history of peddling misinformation on climate change. Lengthy investigations last year by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News revealed that, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company—then just Exxon—conducted its own extensive research on the subject. Its scientists found that the continued burning of fossil fuels would indeed alter the climate dramatically, and warned that “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered.” But instead of considering the possibility of catastrophe—or perhaps in spite of such consideration—the company discontinued its own research efforts and began to try to undermine those of others. Behind the scenes, it attacked the work of government scientists and donated generously to groups that did the same. In public, it promoted the notion that climate change was a matter of debate.
“Currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive,” Lee Raymond, the company’s chairman at the time, said in 1997, more than a decade after Exxon’s in-house scientists had concluded just the opposite.
.. ExxonMobil was still contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to groups promoting climate misinformation. These included the American Legislative Exchange Council, which, among other things, advocates teaching climate denial to schoolchildren, and the National Black Chamber of Commerce, which asserts on its Web site, “Actually, there is no sound science to support the claims of Global Warming.” ExxonMobil contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars more to what might be called the country’s most influential denialist group: the Republican majority in Congress.
Say What, Al Gore, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump?
For a man who seems to learn mostly from those in his friendship circle, or from TV news shows, such an unbalanced team made many of Trump’s bad instincts worse. Some of those characters were from the coal and oil industries, and they saw in Trump their last chance to kill the renewable energy revolution at a time when many other Republicans were already moving on.
One hopes that Ivanka is telling her father that nothing would force his critics — in America and abroad — to give him a second look more than if he names serious scientists to the key environmental jobs.
Coffee And Climate Change: In Brazil, A Disaster Is Brewing
A new report from Australia’s Climate Institute says coffee production worldwide is in danger because of climate change. It cites a study that says “hotter weather and changes in rainfall patterns are projected to cut the area suitable for coffee in half by 2050.”
.. “Coffee depends on a lot of water,” says Perseu Perdoná, an agronomist with the local coffee cooperative. And coffee plants are already sensitive to temperature. “Climate change is happening,” he tells me, “we can see it. Add to that deforestation, which means the ground can’t retain water when it rains.”
He fears that in the near future, unless something drastically changes, coffee will disappear from this region.
.. “The rivers have run dry,” he says. “Even in the city, we have water rationing — one day we have water, one day we don’t. We never expected this.”
xkcd: A Timeline of Earth’s Average Temperature
When people say “The Climate Has Changed Before” these are the kinds of changes they’re talking about.