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CEO and Chairman of ExxonMobil Rex Tillerson saying of global warming: "... clearly there is going to be an impact."
And Tillerson explicates: "... increasing CO2 emissions [in] the atmosphere is gonna have an impact, a warming impact."
Now, why would one of the most powerful men in the world admit to the science of climate change....
Mystery to me -- :)
Rex Tillerson: AGW is Real. Get Used to it. - YouTube
Global warming ‘manageable’, says Exxon chief
By Ed Crooks in New York
FINANCIAL TIMES
Global warming is a “manageable” problem, but will require policy changes to adapt to its effects, the chief executive of ExxonMobil, the largest US oil and gas producer, has said.
Rex Tillerson said at a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that climate change was a “great challenge”, but it could be solved by adapting to risks such as higher sea levels and changing conditions for agriculture.
“As a species that’s why we’re all still here: we have spent our entire existence adapting. So we will adapt to this,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.”
Exxon, the world’s largest oil company by market capitalisation, has long been attacked by environmental campaigners for its stance on climate change.
Lee Raymond, Mr Tillerson’s predecessor as chief executive, questioned whether the earth was really warming, and said the attempt to limit greenhouse gas emissions “defies common sense”.
Mr Tillerson, who took over at the start of 2006, has modified that position, but continued to be sceptical about the benefits of plans to cut emissions.
Speaking on Wednesday, Mr Tillerson said: “Clearly there’s going to be an impact. I’m not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere ... will have a warming impact.”
However, he added: “How large it is what is very hard for anyone to predict. And to tell you how large it is then projects how dire the consequences are.”
He said Exxon had for many years been involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-backed scientific body that reviews and assesses information about the climate, and funding research, but said climate modelling still contained large uncertainties.
“The competences of the models are not particularly good,” he said. “Our ability to predict with any accuracy what the future’s going to be is really pretty limited.”
He added: “In the IPCC reports ... when you predict things like sea-level rise, you get numbers all over the map. If you take what I would call a reasonable scientific approach to that, we believe those consequences are manageable. They do require us to begin to spend more policy effort on adaptation.”
He said there were other issues that were “much more pressing priorities”, including poverty, which could be relieved by access to electricity and fossil fuels for cooking, to replace traditional sources such as animal dung.
“There are more people being dramatically affected because they don’t have access to fossil fuels to burn. They’d love to burn fossil fuels, because their quality of life would rise immeasurably,” he said.
Under Mr Raymond, Exxon provided grants to several think-tanks and other groups that challenged the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions to avert the threat of global warming.
While Mr Tillerson has been CEO, most of that funding has been cut.
One remaining grant was the $50,000 that Exxon gave last year to the Heritage Foundation, which promotes a range of conservative and free-market policies, including the argument that “the costs of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, most notably carbon dioxide, far outweigh any benefits for individuals”.
“There’s No Economy on a Dead Planet”: Reflections on a Missing Election Issue:
http://www.zcommunications.org/there...by-paul-street
Candidates Flee East Coast as Frankenstorm Takes Revenge for their Ignoring Climate Change
by Juan Cole
Mitt Romney and Joe Biden have canceled campaign events planned for this weekend at Virginia Beach as a massive storm bears down on the east coast of the US. The candidates are fleeing from the East Coast, even though they won’t talk about the key environmental issue of our time.
http://www.commondreams.org/sites/co...lite-image.jpg
The candidates in this year’s presidential election completely ignored climate change in their debates and their campaigning, even thought it is the most deadly issue facing this country and all humankind. Human beings are dumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning coal, natural gas and petroleum at feverish rates. They have already increased temperatures significantly since 1750, and are on track to put up the average surface temperature of the earth by 5 degrees C. or 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century, enough to turn everyplace on earth over time into a sweating tropics, melt all surface ice, and, over the long term, submerge a third of the current land mass. A global state of emergency would be necessary to keep the temperature increase to 2 degrees C. or less, but the window is rapidly closing for this curbing of disaster.
Big oil is pouring money into the Romney campaign or superpacs supporting him, so as to make sure they keep their tax breaks but those for wind power are abolished. The power of big Carbon money is preventing climate change from being discussed in the campaign, even though it affects every American voter. Romney’s energy policies will cause global disaster, but even Obama doesn’t seem to realize the severity and urgency of the problem (or else he does and feels his hands are tied).
A new study appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that uses accurate tide measurements since 1923 removes any doubt that hurricanes are more frequent and stronger in warm years (the number of warm years has steadily increased over the past century and especially in the past decade).
[pdf] For every increase of 1 degree Fahrenheit, US hurricanes will likely get 2% stronger (i.e. they are already 5% stronger than 2 centuries ago). In hurricanes, a 5% increase in ferocity matters quite a lot.
One mechanism for the increased severity is that higher temperatures produce more high-altitude clouds, called “deep convective clouds,” associated increased rainfall.
One recent study [pdf] found that torrential downpours in the United States are occurring a third more often than in 1948. New England has been the worst hit, with torrential downpours 85% more common now than in 1948. Note that these findings are based on actual historical records, and are not a matter of projection.
Across the board, storms are 10% more intense now than when Truman was president.
Hurricanes are a more contentious issue than storms but models show that the speed of hurricane winds could increase by as much as 13 percent over the next century as a result of our production of carbon dioxide, and rainfall rates will increase 10-31 percent in hurricanes. Because of the rising level of the seas, hurricanes will cause larger storm surges.
A Tel Aviv researcher has shown that every one degree increase Celsius produces a 10% increase in lightning, with the attendant dangers of increased forest and other fires.
Those who talk about solar energy being “more expensive” than coal or natural gas are not figuring in the expensiveness of climate change. In many markets, wind and solar are already competitive, and if the damage hydrocarbons are doing to our economy were taken into account, they’d be the only game in town.
One of the many indexes of the failure of American democracy is that our candidates can’t even publicly say the name of our worst nemesis.
© 2012 Juan Cole
https://www.commondreams.org/sites/c.../juan_cole.jpg
Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan
Let’s not try too hard to find solutions for our survival, here; we could kill all hope for the rest of our planet’s species…
Who knows if a blue whale or one of the few thousands living chimpanzees are not reading these posts at this very moment.
Reading "at this moment"... on their chimp pads?Quote:
Originally Posted by danthepoetman
or do you mean at some future point when we are extinct and a new civlisation has recovered the digital archive?
or was it just a tad too much of that good whisky?
According to Stephen Hawking, humans have about 1,000 years left before 'they' trash the planet, thereby creating a need for the revival of Mars or some other habitable spot in space, though what humans do for water I will leave to the Lucasian Prof. Leaving aside his lack of judgement, making his predictions as comical as Malthus, I live in a country sleepwalking into an energy deficit which means domestic power will be in crisis in the next 25 years, which may not be a safe prediction, but I am assuming 25 years is easier to handle than a thousand. Well, unless you have a coalition government that cant make up its mind.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...a-century.html
It's not the planet that calls out for salvation but the human soul. Solution: Tell the least corrupted man to build an ark, make it 300 cubits, by 50 cubits by 30 cubits. Then get him to go and and gather etc. etc.
On a more serious note, I am surprised that someone like Hawking does not acknolwedge how ingenious humans have been in finding solutions for what at various times seem like critical issues that are about to spell the end of society as we know it. There are some real issues in energy, in this country for example because of complacency that has been built on what was once an abundance of North Sea oil and gas, the current row over wind farms does not address the longer term issue of where mass energy sources are going to come from, or become dependent on gas from Russia. I am not so worried about population growth because the informed opinion is that it will peak around 2050 and then decline so that forecasts of the world's population in 2100 are now much smaller than once they were. The regional/local issues will be more critical than the global -drought in the prairies of North America and across the fringes of the Sahel in Africa; floods in the foothills of the Himalayas and so on.
As for boats, I am already too corrupt to be given the task, and as I am no good with my hands I will not be in a boat -not with a pride of lions either. I mean, what are they going to eat?
What exactly are the examples? When has science ever saved a civilization from collapse or extinction? Science is the study of nature, not the problems of civilization. It can only unveil the workings of nature one curtain at a time. The problems that are ripe for the picking are ones that we pluck. True, the discoveries that science makes, (because they are working models of the world rather than mere fictions and fantasies) are often quickly put to use (not always good use) by governments and entrepreneurs. The idea that human ingenuity, science and technology will find a way out of our predicaments all to often is used as an excuse to prolong the very practices that undermine our continued security. I think it just as likely (perhaps more likely) that human ingenuity will fail to rise to the occasion.Quote:
I am surprised that someone like Hawking does not acknolwedge how ingenious humans have been in finding solutions for what at various times seem like critical issues that are about to spell the end of society as we know it.
Energy and climate change go hand in hand. Through our accelerated consumption of fossil fuels we are thickening the blanket of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. We are simply burning up a resource for fuel (that has many other valuable uses) and cooking ourselves with it at the same time. Can we stop? China is opening up fifty new coal plants every month. That’s because at the current rate of consumption China has enough coal to last ten centuries. It’s not enough for technology to make it possible to substitute solar and wind or some other source for fossil fuel, it has to make it cheaper too.
There are nearly seven billion persons on the planet. We would like each one to have a quality standard of living. Does that mean consuming the energy of an average European? That would be a lot of energy. Unless the situation becomes so dire that we start cooperating, or the world is conquered by an empire that forces it to cooperate, I don’t see us significantly curbing our appetite for fossil fuels. Nor if by some miracle seven billion people suddenly switch to solar am I convinced that we won’t quickly discover a downside. We cover the planet. Whatever we do on mass we do on a planetary scale and our on mass actions will have planetary consequences.
We may find, as in the Life of Pi, that the lone survivor in a boat is one who has eaten every other survivor.
It is always a dangerous argument that as we got this far, so we will be OK in the end. Science tells - no doubts - what will happen to the planet (bit of doubt as to exactly when) but it doesn't tell us how to stop the process or find a magic cure. The "stopping" must come from our leaders and ourselves recognising that we can't go on like we are. "Magic cure" - that's the job of us engineers. We gave you Deepwater Horizon and Three Mile Island. We're good!!!
Yeah - bet the Dinosaurs had the same thought (if they were in any way capable of abstract thought) . We're the biggest, we're the meanest and we've been around forever. Nothing can go wrong no.....
Same with the Neanderthals.
Maybe another species will one day say... foolish Homo Sapiens.
And Chernobyl Martin - don't forget that one.
Darn it Trish - I've not read The life of Pi and now you've gone and given the end away!
Shit. I'm sorry. I should've given a spoiler alert. If it helps, the book (imo) wasn't really "all that," and given your intellect you probably would have guessed the ending half-way through. But I do apologize.Quote:
Originally Posted by Prospero
Pi's irrational anyway
I was joking.
But the people in the following video aren't. You see lefty scientific intellectuals types like you - bleating about climate change etc - have got it all so very wrong.
Hurricane Sandy was a warning from God to demonstrate what is in store for us all if we don't repent our evil ways. (Other fundamentalist pastors have said it was because of the sinfulness of those in NYC - all the fags and whores etc etc. I got told off in another thread for mentioning it.)
So here is a nice religiousdifferent take on what is happening.
Beisner: Hurricane Sandy Was Sent By God As "A Matter Of Grace" - YouTube
When God wants to talk to us, I think He needs to find a better, less rude, way of getting our attention. How about just a big voice coming out of the clouds saying, "Why haven't you people been persecuting the gays lately?" Still not exactly polite, but it's certainly more efficient in getting the message across.
sure... but he "moves in mysterious ways."
The movement you need is on your shoulder___Lennon & McCartneyQuote:
Originally Posted by Prospero
On the one hand many great empires have been and gone; yet on the other hand, much also has survived, and thus in the modern world I offer:Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
1. The Zuider Zee Project: It was declared by the American Society of Civil Engineers to be one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World -you might not be impressed by this feat of scientific engineering, the Dutch would say otherwise.
Zuiderzee Works - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2. The eradication of Smallpox in the 20th century -how many lives saved? They cannot be counted.
3. The creation of Qanats in various regions of the Middle East was a scientific solution to the distribution of water which kept many societies going that would otherwise have upped tent or shack and moved elsewhere.
Three cases where human ingenuity transformed an environment to make it habitable in a way that had been hazardous before, saved lives, and supplied water without which we cannot survive for very long. Your statement Science is the study of nature, not the problems of civilization, is worthless rubbish.
Haven't heard of Qanats before. Thanks for example. The Qanats and the Zuider Zee are indeed excellent examples of technological solutions to difficult problems that utilized reasonably well understood principles or the existing science of the time.
The smallpox vaccination is indeed closer to being an example where science itself had to be advanced to solve a serious problem. Human societies were afflicted by smallpox for at least ten millennia before it's eradication. Before coming up with preventive vaccination science had to await the development of the germ theory of disease. The actual eradication of smallpox (impossible without the vaccination and the science that led to it) was a large cooperative project of world governments, charities and medical organizations more akin to an enormous engineering project than science.
But your examples do show that at some crucial times in the past human ingenuity, commitment and cooperation have solved huge problems that threatened, the quality of life of hundreds of thousands of individuals. In all these examples it took more than science. It took more than engineering. It also took commitment to the project and cooperation in carrying it out. Two things that are missing in the current energy/climate equation.
Maybe Limbaugh is right. And all the climate scientists are wrong. So, maybe we should base and decide public policy on what Limbaugh believes. It's a very rational and democratic way to go about things -- ;) :)
Rush Limbaugh Laughs in the Face of Climate Change, Hurricane Sandy - YouTube
Vote for Obama, fight climate change: N.Y. Mayor Bloomberg
A vote for Barack Obama is a vote to combat climate change, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in an endorsement of the Democratic president published Thursday, as his city struggled to recover from superstorm Sandy.
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/electio...yor-bloomberg/
I just don't think you can separate science from civilisation; the precise relationship can often be hostile -consider Galileo and the Catholic Church as one example-and, for all its thousands of years of duration, the civilisation of China produced in Mao Zedong a man with no real knowledge of science, and the mad ideas that sprang up -for example during the Great Leap Forward which led to the deaths of maybe 30 million- were a depature from 'normal science' (in fact you can't develop a steel industry in someone's back yard) and when real scientists were too afraid to speak -and yet the same relationship produced the Pyramids in Egypt and Central America, and there are all the latter achievements of other civilisations and empires, European or not in architecture, engineering, medicine and so forth. I have an idea that when Empires have declined, collapsed, or withered away, science was not a leading factor, but politics. Military science made the First World War longer and more destructive than its Generals had believed would be the case, but it was the politics that started (and ended) the war. It is, nevertheless, an important and fascinating problem that Niall Ferguson, in his irritating way addressed in his book/tv series Civilisation -flawed in my view.Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
I don't think the long term future of the species if at risk, as long as one doesn't call long term a billion years or however long the sun survives; ultimately, humanity is doomed unless it can find another planet to live on; but I do think that the energy transition away from fossil fuels will be as important a challenge as the provision of water for humans. Other issues, like halting forest clearances, can be dealt with now -but again that's politics, not science. Even if the Arctic is opened up and free from sea ice, the total volume of oil and gas is on unreliable estimates less than the total reserves of the Middle East discovered since 1908. If fossil fuels decline by 2100 to be what they were in say 1900, I assume the green fanatics will be vindicated and with a declining world population, planet earth in 2150 may actually be a cool place to hang out in. Minus Polar Bears, whales, tigers and other wild animals...
Forget it, people: we’re doomed, and it’s ok too. We’ll leave what remaining species we spared a good breather.
I didn’t intend to say science was separate from civilization, rather that at any given moment science is only equipped to solve that problems that are amenable to the current knowledge of science. That was what I was attempting to say when I pointed out that smallpox had been around for ten thousand years before medical science discovered the germ theory of disease and acquired a vague idea of how immunity against disease works. Only then did the notion of inoculation occur to Dr. Jenner. The eradication of smallpox could not have been accomplished without Dr. Jenner, but Dr. Jenner alone was powerless to eradicate smallpox. The eradication took an effort as huge as a wordwide military campaign. That’s what it’s going to take to solve the energy/climate problem.
Science has informed us of climate change due to greenhouse gas emission. It’s fairly well understood science...not really Nobel Laureate sort of stuff. What is new is the scale of human interaction with the planet due to industrialization, the worldwide adoption of modern technology, modern lifestyles and of course the logistically increasing population which is still in exponential phase. The scale of human intervention is now planetary. Humans have inadvertantly begun terraforming the planet (just the way photosynthesizing plants accidently terraformed the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago adding oxygen to an atmosphere that virtually had none). Only a planetary scale intervention can restore and stabilize the climate.
We now know of a number of sources of energy: solar, gravitational (e.g. hydroelectric), wind, nuclear and fossil fuels. Some of them are ancient and some of them relatively modern. Neanderthals knew they could warm themselves in the Sun and Victorians brewed solar tea, but modern technology has given us the solar cell. Will science find a brand new source? What if there isn’t any? Will engineers invent a new technology to develop an old but unexpected source (perhaps we can sap energy from the Earth’s rotation and at the same time length the workday)? Or will engineers develop a new super-efficient, super cheap solar cell? It’s possible, but it’s no sure thing either. Scientists will continue to do science, and engineers will continue to work on energy solutions. But we need to be prepared for the most likely scenario: that no such miracle will be immediately forthcoming. The world needs to cooperate and commit itself to energy conservation, the discontinuation of greenhouse gas emissions, the continued development of solar, wind, hydro and nuclear sources of energy.
The average U.S. citizen consumes energy at an annual rate of about 340 million BTU. That’s about 11 kilowatts of power. Presumably we want every person on the planet (there are 7 billion of us) to enjoy a quality of life equal to our own. If that means every one on the planet should be able to draw power at the same rate an American does, then we need to produce 2.4 quintillion BTUs of energy annually (410 trillion barrels of oil, which is about 20 times the estimated amount of oil on the planet).
What this says to me is that we have already acclimated ourselves to a world with severe economic inequities. Developing countries with huge fossil fuel deposits will continue to extract those reserves for their own economic development or to fill the pockets of their dictators. The western world will continue to consume. As fossil fuels become rare they will become more valuable and the rate of their extraction will increase. At some point fossil fuels will become too expensive for industry to rely upon. At that point gas, oil and coal companies will have already diversified into more profitable pursuits. The switch to other fuels will already be in progress but the overall production will already have been on the decline. The coasts will have already moved further inland, the world population will be in the tens of billions and the quality of life for the 99% will be miserable. It won’t be the end of the world. We won’t be in danger of extinction. It won’t be the wonderful wild west anarchism that survivalists who stockpile food and guns fantasize about. We’ll simply go on living normal lives, consuming less, having less, knowing less while putting up with more and more stress and strife.
I agree with most of what you say, Trish, except that the world's population is not expected to grow beyond 10 billion max, and then is projected to decline (see this link).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...=ILCNETTXT3486
I also don't think the major independent oil companies can be relied on to diversify because they tried it in the 1970s and then sold off their non-core businesses in the 1980s and 1990s because they were not profitable. I also think a positive spin on solar energy will happen when the problems of technology, storage, mass production are solved, and I think they will be, but not soon, and not soon enough. In practical terms, policies that can be adopted now, are the end of deforestation in South America, Indonesia and parts of Russia which has to stop or those places will end up looking like Mars. Fundamentally, the politics is still weak, denial is strong. But the issues won't go away.
In population studies fertility stands for relative birth rate. First world economies tend to have lower fertility than third world economies. If quality of life improves around the world we can expect fertility to decline and yes perhaps the world population will stabilize at ten billion. But if we don’t resolve our energy/climate issues, then can we count a worldwide improvement in the quality of life?
Agreed.Quote:
In practical terms, policies that can be adopted now, are the end of deforestation in South America, Indonesia and parts of Russia which has to stop or those places will end up looking like Mars. Fundamentally, the politics is still weak, denial is strong. But the issues won't go away.
If you watched Sarah Harper's talk in the link she does point out that infertility is a growing issue and a key indicator of the general slowing of population growth over the long term; and that Vietnam has a declining fertility/increasing infertility rate -is Vietnam a 'third world economy'? I thought that third world was now a distant memory.Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
Demongraphers agree that fertility is in decline in many regions of the world. Some nations are even alarmed by their falling fertility rates and attempting to put in place incentives to halt the drop (e.g. Putin). There is less agreement on the cause of fertility decline. Most likely fertility rate is a complex response to economic and political conditions. Perhaps it is no longer true that poorer populations see larger families as insurance against destitution in old age. In some regions the drop in fertility may be a response to perceived overpopulation.
Modern technology also has a role to play. As you mentioned, Vietnam has declining fertility. This seems to be due to parents being able to prenatally select sons over daughters. The deliberate “masculinization” of the population has the effect of lowering the overall population’s fertility. Interestingly, even though Vietnam has declining fertility, it’s population is expected to grow through the decade. This is because their “baby boomers” are in their child bearing years.
http://vietnam.unfpa.org/public/pid/5880
If the future sees a substantial decrease in the world’s supply of affordable energy, and if this is concomitant with the frequency and magnitude of climatic disasters what will be the effect on fertility? Will large families once again become valuable insurance against hard times? Or will large families be too expensive to maintain? Will plagues devastate our populations or will populations rebound exponentially. The current demographics (imo) can only tell us the trend all things being equal. My point is that diminishing energy supplies and climate change do not meet the “all things being equal” criterion.
And of course we cannot rule out the emergence of a disease (probably a crossover from animals) that cannot be cured that wipes out a large proportion of a country's/region's/world population.
Anyone of you knows the show entitled "Life After People"? I love that one! You know that it's almost certain that after only a thousand, or at worst a few thousand years after our disapearance, all traces of our passage would be erased. I find that idea strangely comforting. It gives me a sense of our real place in this world...
Jungle thinking
The day bees become extinct that's humans finished!
I'll let the birds and the bees live when they pay for the use of my private property. I'm not running a wildlife sanctuary for freeloading animals here. Robins wanna nest in my trees they can pay rent. (Just trying on the teabertarian ideology for size. It has the same effect on me as on everybody else...it makes one's ass look big).
Quote:
Originally Posted by danthepoetman
The last evidence of us would probably some space junk and what we left on the Moon or Mars. That's about it
In victory speech, Obama calls for climate action, citizen engagement:
http://grist.org/politics/obama-call...en-engagement/
It will be Christmas in the jungle and the savannah, in the forest and in the tundra, in the depth of the oceans and in the sky if one day the disappearance of our specie is announced… If any of this still exist…
You're absolutly right, Martin. I completely forgot about that. It's spoiling my fun a little, but hey! I'll survive... or will I????Quote:
Originally Posted by martin48
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the objects in orbit will fall eventually. On the moon, you're right: forget it: it will be there till the expansion of the sun.
Aren't Timothy Leary's last mortal remains journeying into deep space now. Maybe the old guru of LSD will land p in some solar system in a galaxy quintillions of light years away and be considered even more alien than when he walked this planet?
Whoops forgot my medicine.