How an early oil industry study became key in climate lawsuits
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
"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...
Sometime around 1988-1992 some of them changed tack dramatically and started fighting against efforts to fight against it.
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.
19th century scientists though that space was filled with ether.
The 19th century scientists predicted global warming trope is basically survival bias.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not the same kind of gibberish “mechanical flight is impossible” ended up being.
It was not until 1904 that Ludwig Prandtl published Über Flüssigkeitsbewegung 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
That is nonsense, but I don't see it in the article.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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-...
I’m not kidding about you arguing with yourself here. This comment is actual proof
Except, I quoted most of your comment directly.
"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."
You absolutely did not say this.
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."
It's a justified belief. Climate isn't static. For example, Sahara desert used to be an oasis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period
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.
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://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL82yk73N8eoX-Xobr_TfH...
The first video in the series is 14 years old.
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.
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.
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-...
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?
Science is about making predictions, so save the condescension because questioning climate science is the more scientific view than accepting it by faith.
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.
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.
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.
As to being defensive, the basic science for global warming is really straightforward. People pretending it’s debatable is like people debating relativity it’s really not in question. Predicting the impact is of course more complex but the underlying effect is both widespread and not particularly complicated. Absorption spectroscopy is incredibly easy to observe, measure, predict, and model.
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.