The big climate change cover up: When did it widely begin?
March 7, 2019 5:49 PM
As light starts to shine in dark places, we're finding Big Oil and other companies were studying climate change significantly from the late 60s ... but have there been further discoveries in other industries that show that it may go even further back, the idea that climate change is not only an issue but one that must be obfuscated as much as possible, as long as possible?
Dealing in Doubt: The Climate Denial Industry and Climate Science (Greenpeace, via DeSmog 3/26/2010)
This report describes 20 years of organised attacks on climate science, scientists and the IPCC. It sets out some of the key moments in this campaign of denial started by the fossil fuel industry, and traces them to their sources.posted by Little Dawn at 6:37 PM on March 7, 2019
The Forgotten History Of Climate-Change Science (NPR 5/13/2014)
By treating climate science as a field too new, unstable and politicized to trust, denialists in this country have sown enough doubt to blunt a real debate over real responses.Climate change denial: a history (New Statesman 6/1/2010)
So, let's set the record straight. When was human-driven climate change discovered and when did the world of politics/policy first take notice?
[...] The first calculation of the greenhouse effect to include human-driven release of greenhouse gases came about 100 years ago. Using estimates of coal burning, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius built on other calculations he'd made and estimated that doubling the CO2 content of the planet's atmosphere would raise it's temperature by 2.5 to 4.0 degrees Celsius.
In the late 1970s, scientists first came to a consensus that global warming was likely to result from increasing greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels. This idea had been around since the turn of the century, but the development of computer models now made it possible to make quantitative predictions. Almost immediately, a small group of politically connected and conservative scientists began to question these conclusions. As the scientific evidence got stronger, their attacks became more unprincipled. They used data selectively and often misrepresented what was being published in the scientific literature. [...]posted by Little Dawn at 6:58 PM on March 7, 2019
When one of us (Naomi Oreskes) published a review in the journal Science of the book The Republican War on Science, in which we noted some connections not pursued in that book, Science was threatened with a lawsuit unless it published a rebuttal. (We supplied documents, Science held firm, and the threat went away.) [...]
“Climategate", and the wider attacks on climate science, had nothing to do with the science itself, and neither did the entire earlier history of global-warming denial we have studied. Scientists have just been an easy target. The real issue is the politics of defending the free market.
Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
The titular decade is the 1980s, but it covers the prior history as well. LONG.
posted by intermod at 8:29 PM on March 7, 2019
The titular decade is the 1980s, but it covers the prior history as well. LONG.
posted by intermod at 8:29 PM on March 7, 2019
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by tilde at 5:50 PM on March 7, 2019