Exxon Just Can't Quit the Climate Skeptics

by Diane Farsetta — June 3, 2009 - 2:26pm
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According to ExxonMobil's 2008 Corporate Citizenship Report and Worldwide Giving Report, the oil giant is still funding global warming skeptics. Following an unprecedented rebuke from Britain's Royal Society in 2006, Exxon said it would stop funding -- in the Society's words -- groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change." However, Exxon funding is still flowing to the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory, the home of skeptics Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. Baliunas "built her denial career downplaying the significance of the destruction of the ozone layer," at the George C. Marshall Institute, an Exxon-funded think tank. Soon has "become one of the go-to skeptics, appearing as a key speaker" at the Heartland Institute's conferences questioning climate change. Though the "Observatory is the research arm of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics," writes Greenpeace's Kert Davies, it "has little to do with either the Smithsonian or Harvard," while "Smithsonian has distanced itself from Baliunas, who discredits their name."

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Greenpeace, May 26, 2009

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Submitted by L Michael Hohmann (not verified) on September 9, 2010 - 10:15am.

I follow this discussion and find that most arguments are within the IPCC NewSpeak vocabulary which leads nowhere. I am slowly becoming convinced that the whole IPCC AGW pronouncements amount to the biggest political and intellectual fraud ever. Reason:
Consider published estimates of annual global carbon dioxide emissions in Gt C/year (Gigatonnes of carbon per year):
Gt C/year; average; % :
Respiration (humans, animals, phytoplankton) 43.5-52, avge 47.75, = 22.96%
Ocean outgassing (tropics) 90-100, avge 95, = 45.68%
Soil bacteria, decomposition 50-60, avge 55, = 26.45%
Volcanoes, soil degassing 0.5-2, avge 1.25, = 0.60%
Forest cutting, forest fires 0.6-2.6, avge 1.6, = 0.77%
Anthropogenic emissions (2005) 7.2-7.5, avge 7.35, = 3.53%
TOTAL 192-224, avge 207.95, = 100.00%
I find it hard to believe that about 7 Gt C/year out of total global emissions amounting to some 200 Gt C/year should alone and exclusively be responsible for affecting ‘global climate’, no less — let alone the unresolved question whether even the total of annual CO2 emissions does. Is profound scepticism not the only possible rational response in the light of these figures? I take a lesson from the Brothers’ Grimm ‘Die Sonne bringt es an den Tag’, i.e. ‘Truth Will Out’. And only sceptics will ever find it.