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  1. Hi there... Can you please quickly check to make sure your email address is up to date here? Just in case we need to reach out to you or you lose your password. Muchero thanks!

Exxon Scientists Predicted Global Warming in 1970’s

Discussion in 'Too Hot for Swamp Gas' started by 108, Jan 13, 2023.

  1. carpeveritas

    carpeveritas GC Hall of Fame

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    Where did I say Schneider fabricated it. Schneider even owned up to the fact that his predictions were wrong as many predictions are. Don't get me wrong people genuinely believe this stuff even scientists. What people and scientists fail to understand is the planet is ever changing and does not conform to a static laboratory experiment. What you discover in one area of this planet you will not find in others and to impute what you discover is global in nature is nothing more than audacious arrogance and hubris.
     
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  2. mdgator05

    mdgator05 Premium Member

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    Lol. I am now picturing this meeting that you are setting up.

    Scientist #1: Guys, we tried to convince everybody that there was going to be an ice age. We thought people would be concerned about things like glaciers moving down their streets and all the farmland freezing over. But they all decided that they would just leave their houses and become mammoth hunters (after mammoths evolve in decades) and survive. So now, we need to come up with something new.

    Scientist #2: How about we take a different tactic to scare the public into paying for our research? Let's speculate that the other pollutant, CO2, which most of us that have been doing research have hypothesized is likely to cause a warming effect that is more impactful than the cooling effect of aerosol pollution, is likely to cause the world to heat up by a few degrees. Then, we will convince a coal miner in West Virginia, where it is 25 degrees today, that it will be devastating if it was 28 degrees instead. He will totally get the impact that such a thing will have on desertification in Africa, and its cascading effects on global cyclone energy, shifts in global currents, and how small changes in temperature could cause climactic shifts that would cause both floods and drought in different areas. That just seems much more tangible for a guy with a high school education that didn't really pay attention in science class.

    Scientist #1: Genius! How didn't we think of this before?

    BTW, global sea levels are at record highs, arctic sea ice is down about 50% from the time frame when this mythical scientific get together in the 1970s occurred, and Antarctic sea ice has also been reduced, although not by as much because it started later (although is going faster).

    I wonder if the fact that you missed these changes undermines your argument about how terrified people might be of a slow change in something that they will likely never see (e.g., sea ice extent)?
     
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  3. GatorRade

    GatorRade Rad Scientist

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    Im sorry. md posted about Schneider, and you responded about following the money, so I inferred that you were making that claim.

    As for your grander claim that people and scientists don’t understand that the Earth is always changing, I wonder how it is that you were able to grasp this point? Wasn’t it scientific inquiry that informed us that the Earth changes and displays regional heterogeneity?

    Further, could we not extend your logic to the many other spheres of complex systems, such as the economy and nation? Why is it not audacious arrogance and hubris to claim that additional immigrants or taxes will have particular effects on an economy?

    I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to your overall point of view, but since the point you are making seems pretty simple, I wonder why we should be satisfied to just assume that thousands of intelligent scientists do not understand it. And to apply the same logic to the opposing view, is it not a form of hubris to be completely confident that there could not possibly be any climatic effect of tripling the Earth’s concentration of atmospheric CO2 in just a few centuries? If the Earth is so complex, how could we know that for sure?
     
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  4. carpeveritas

    carpeveritas GC Hall of Fame

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    Follow the conversation as I replied to @oragator1 post #10, #14, #15, #16, #17 and @mdgator05 jumps in at #19. Tell me what that conversation was all about.
     
  5. GatorRade

    GatorRade Rad Scientist

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    I think you are arguing here that I misunderstood your position about the money. I have already attempted to apologize for that. Sorry if that apology wasn’t worded well enough to be clear. I understand this was my mistake, and you didn’t intend to make that claim.

    I still think we have a (perhaps slight) epistemic dispute about what we should conclude from the current Earth science data. Though I admit great uncertainty with all kinds of aspects of this data, I don’t think it’s entirely irrational to conclude we are running risks with our current fossil fuel use.
     
  6. carpeveritas

    carpeveritas GC Hall of Fame

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    We run risks with everything we do concerning our energy situation regardless if we are talking fossil fuels, hydro, nuclear, thermal, wind and solar. Everyone of these options carries risk and every one of these options contributes carbon to the atmosphere. Each solution has merit yet none of the solutions will replace fossil fuel which gets the biggest rap of all. None of this is clean energy it is all dirty energy.
     
  7. chemgator

    chemgator GC Hall of Fame

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    Global warming just took a turn for the worse. Antarctica is experiencing winter right now. The ice along the shores should be re-forming, but its not. Scientists are calling this a one-in-7.5-million-years event. If the ice does not re-form along the coast, the earth will start absorbing a lot more of the suns rays (instead of reflecting them) and the earth will heat even faster.

    A ‘once every 7.5 million years’ event is currently unfolding in Antarctica: ‘To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough’

     
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  8. Orange_and_Bluke

    Orange_and_Bluke Premium Member

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    [​IMG]
     
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  9. l_boy

    l_boy 5500

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    years ago when the attic ocean showed signs of summer melting the common response was “yeah what about Antarctic ice?”
     
  10. okeechobee

    okeechobee GC Hall of Fame

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    I don't know why anyone would buy along the coast these days. Imagine buying property on a small island.
     
  11. chemgator

    chemgator GC Hall of Fame

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    To give some perspective about how rare this event is, most of the development of the human race, from the Stone Age to iPhones, occurred in less than 7500 years. It hasn't been this warm in 1,000 times this long. Homo sapiens have been on the planet for 300,000 years; it has been 25 times longer than that since the earth was this hot.
     
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  12. Emmitto

    Emmitto VIP Member

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    This thread happened in my first days on here. Repeatedly.

    Gray (RIP) and C&G (whereabouts unknown) had pretty much these same debates.

    Including all the ludicrously wrong denialism, except in those days the talking points were different.
     
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  13. slocala

    slocala VIP Member

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    seems like a compelling reason to paint rooftops white or install rooftop solar

    Urban Heat: Can White Roofs Help Cool World's Warming Cities?
     
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  14. GatorRade

    GatorRade Rad Scientist

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    The classics are classics for a reason, Emmitto.
     
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  15. BigCypressGator1981

    BigCypressGator1981 GC Hall of Fame

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    Technically we are.
     
  16. duggers_dad

    duggers_dad GC Hall of Fame

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    Climate Change is religious gobbledegook.
     
  17. slocala

    slocala VIP Member

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    None of us will live long enough to know… maybe you can Buck Rogers yourself?

    [​IMG]
     
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  18. G8trGr8t

    G8trGr8t Premium Member

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    We definitely chose a lighter color shingle for our hosue jsut due to this. Big trend now for black shingles in SW Fl. Stupid.

    To Ease Global Warming, the Whitest of Paints - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

    In 2020, Dr. Ruan and his team unveiled their creation: a type of white paint that can act as a reflector, bouncing 95 percent of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface, up through the atmosphere and into deep space. A few months later, they announced an even more potent formulation that increased sunlight reflection to 98 percent.

    The paint’s properties are almost superheroic. It can make surfaces as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air temperatures at midday, and up to 19 degrees cooler at night, reducing temperatures inside buildings and decreasing air-conditioning needs by as much as 40 percent. It is cool to the touch, even under a blazing sun, Dr. Ruan said. Unlike air-conditioners, the paint doesn’t need any energy to work, and it doesn’t warm the outside air.

    In 2021, Guinness declared it the whitest paint ever, and it’s since collected several awards. While the paint was originally envisioned for rooftops, manufacturers of clothes, shoes, cars, trucks and even spacecraft have come clamoring. Last year, Dr. Ruan and his team announced that they’d come up with a more lightweight version that could reflect heat from vehicles.


    “We weren’t really trying to develop the world’s whitest paint,” Dr. Ruan said in an interview. “We wanted to help with climate change, and now it’s more of a crisis, and getting worse. We wanted to see if it was possible to help save energy while cooling down the Earth.”
     
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  19. Orange_and_Bluke

    Orange_and_Bluke Premium Member

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    Pretty cool.
    We chose a medium gray metal roof over the sharp looking black.
    My electric bill is still moving in the wrong direction though.
     
  20. Trickster

    Trickster VIP Member

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    See my Mark Twain quote below. To deny man's contributions to global warming is "stupid". It certainly applies to a few folks, thankfully a small minority.
     
    Last edited: Aug 11, 2023
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