Junk Science Alert: More Biased, Misleading Nonsense from Naomi Oreskes & Geoffrey Supran
Naomi Oreskes is at it again. The calumnious climate alarmist has again partnered with protégé Geoffrey Supran to publish what may just be their dumbest paper yet. This new paper, yet another Rockefeller-funded attack on oil giant ExxonMobil for its alleged climate ‘denial,’ is so nonsensical one has to wonder why anyone still takes this duo seriously. The paper’s entire premise is so utterly groundless it can be effortlessly debunked with just a couple of advertorials from the 2000s. Furthermore, it is a textbook classic example of the kind of denial Oreskes and Supran loudly accuse others of.
Merchants of Muck
I introduced readers to Oreskes, a self-proclaimed “Historian of Science,” back in March last year when I exposed the complete lack of verifiable data behind her shambolic 2004 Science paper which audaciously claimed there was no dissent in the peer-reviewed literature with the official anthropogenic global warming (AGW) consensus.
As I detailed in my previous article, her claim was a blatant lie. It is an indisputable fact there were numerous peer-reviewed papers expressing doubt and even outright rejection of the AGW theory during the period for which Oreskes’ analysis allegedly covered.
Another highly unflattering fact about Oreskes is that she is an "Agenda Contributor" to the dubious World Economic Forum (WEF), the globalist platform headed by fascist technocrat Klaus Schwab. The WEF has an agenda, alright – it is part of the machinery designed to assist the UN in implementing its technocratic Agenda 2030. This is being done under the guise of creating a more sustainable and equitable "stakeholder economy," but as the WEF's "Global Redesign Initiative" repeatedly makes clear to those who bother reading it, the "stakeholders" in question are Schwab’s wealthy and powerful buddies at the helm of "multinational corporations, governments and [billionaire-funded] non-governmental organizations," and "intergovernmental organizations (IGOs, i.e. the World Bank, the International Energy Agency, regional development banks)."
The plan for the rest of us, it turns out, is abject poverty and abolition of property rights. "You will own nothing and be happy," the WEF declared in a video outlining its highly dystopian vision for 2030. Klaus and his billionaire buddies who congregate in Davos each year, meanwhile, will selflessly sentence themselves to unhappiness by owning everything.
None of this sounds very ‘equitable’ to me.
Climate change alarmism, along with preorchestrated pandemics, is part of the grand plan to herd us all into a compliant corral by 2030. As people become increasingly tired of pandemic hysteria and the idiotic lifelong ‘booster’ charade, expect authorities to place an increased emphasis on ‘climate emergencies.’ The climate fear-mongering fomented by the likes of Oreskes is part and parcel of the Orwellian psychological campaign to facilitate the removal of our freedoms in the name of saving the planet.
The Rockefeller-funded Supran, meanwhile, is a Research Associate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, which is where he came under the influence of Oreskes. An interview with Supran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences tellingly describes his journey as one "From scientist to climate activist."
And that is exactly what a “Historian Of Science” appears to be: An activist and dogmatist, not a scientist. The works of Oreskes and Supran are far more akin to those of sniping gossip columnists than serious researchers. The primary aim of their work is not to factually refute disputation of the AGW theory in a scientific manner, but to smear and deride those who dare question the untenable AGW paradigm. If they truly cared about the environment, they would be vigorously attacking Shell and BP for their atrocious environmental records. If they truly cared about humanity, they would vigorously attack BP and ExxonMobil for sidling up with brutal military regimes.
But they don’t. Instead, they focus their angst on ExxonMobil’s alleged refusal to acknowledge AGW. If that doesn’t alert you to their true motivations, then brew yourself a long black to wake those slumbering brain cells, and read on.
The Disingenuous Woke War on ExxonMobil
If you’ve examined the AGW sham at even a cursory level, you’ve likely noticed many proponents of this theory have an obsession with ExxonMobil, the multinational oil and gas giant headquartered in Irving, Texas. Incidentally, ExxonMobil is the largest direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, which was broken up into dozens of smaller companies over a hundred years ago as the result of an anti-trust suit. Which means, most ironically, that the AGW movement’s most-hated company ultimately owes its existence to the co-founder of one of the AGW movement’s most prolific private funders: The Rockefeller Foundation.
To believe the social justice warriors of the AGW movement, ExxonMobil is the epitome of climate change ‘denial,’ an evil capitalist behemoth hellbent on profiting from fossil fuel extraction even if it means the Earth will get hotter and hotter and then hotter again, until it one day ignites, explodes, and becomes a giant fireball, kind of like a stolen car torched by joy-riding methheads in the Adelaide suburb of … well, any Adelaide suburb really.
Now here’s the somewhat less hysterical reality.
ExxonMobil might be the second-largest oil company in the world, but its market capitalization is but a quarter of Saudi Aramco, the oil industry’s undisputed reigning heavyweight. But, funnily enough, we don’t see shrill articles claiming “Saudi Aramco Knew!” plastered throughout Science and the LA Times, do we? Here in the Anglo-West, we have other companies like BP and Shell who do pretty much what ExxonMobil do – but in a far more reckless manner. But again, no “BPKnew!” or “ToHellWithShell!” campaigns to be found anywhere.
As I’ll explain at length in my next article, ExxonMobil’s environmental track record - while indeed leaving much to be desired - is easily overshadowed by those of the environmentally reckless cowboys at British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell. To call the environmental malfeasance of the latter two behemoths “disgusting” would be an understatement, which leaves one wondering why ExxonMobil has instead become the AGW movement’s favourite whipping boy.
The answer to that question is simple. The AGW movement is not about saving the environment, and never has been. At the upper echelons of the movement, it’s about control, power, defusing the so-called “population bomb” (i.e. enacting depopulation) and money. At the lower ‘grassroots’ level, it’s about giving modern-day useful idiots an avenue to feel good and righteous while they unwittingly enable the power-grabbing agenda of a bunch of evil globalist psychopaths.
Again, if it was about the environment, then the likes of Oreskes and her woke activist protégé Supran would be all over BP and Shell like a rash. But unlike ExxonMobil, which had the temerity to urge caution in our response to climate change, BP and Shell cunningly paid much lip service to the AGW sham, loudly promising to ‘transition’ to ‘clean’ energy - while continuing to produce increasing amounts of fossil fuels, to the tune of hundreds of millions of barrels per year.
Oreskes: Cherry-Picking Harder than an Army of Backpackers
Oreskes began publicly attacking ExxonMobil circa 2007. In a chapter she wrote that year for a book titled Climate change: What it means for us, our children, and our grandchildren, Oreskes singled out ExxonMobil for running “a highly visible advertising campaign” in the New York Times in 2004. “Its carefully worded advertisements … suggested that climate science was far too un-certain to warrant action on it.”[p. 78]
Oddly enough, Oreskes – the same ‘historian of science’ who claimed three years earlier her literature search did not retrieve a single dissenting abstract on AGW – admitted: “Not many would argue with this commonsense conclusion.”
So what, then, was the problem?
“But our scientists” added Oreskes, “have concluded that existing research warrants that decisions and policies be made today.”[p. 78]
Ah, the old, “act now, worry about scientific clarity later” jump-the-gun approach favored by the reckless AGW crowd. These geniuses earnestly insist we go ahead and implement world-changing policies immediately, to hell with all the uncertainty and disagreement among climate scientists.
And who, exactly, were “our scientists”? Certainly not the hundreds of prominent and highly accomplished scientists who’ve publicly expressed their disagreement with the AGW thesis!
Oreskes complains some of the oil giant’s advertisements were “written and formatted to look like newspaper columns and called op-ed pieces by ExxonMobil.” But examination of archived copies of these advertisements fails to reveal any evidence of sophistry. The pieces were readily identifiable as advertorials and there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who created them; ExxonMobil made no attempt whatsoever to assign the authorship of the advertorials to anyone but itself. Its corporate logo featured prominently in each one and, together with its slogan and web address, occupied similar space to the headlining title. If these pieces were “called op-ed pieces by ExxonMobil” it was because … they were essentially op-ed pieces by ExxonMobil.
But that’s not all. The aforementioned advertorials, cited by Oreskes, were placed in 2004. Below are two more from 2005 and 2007 that, in the grand tradition of agenda-driven cherry-picking, Oreskes blissfully ignored. They were also conveniently ignored by her and Supran in their 2017 Environmental Research Letters hit piece on ExxonMobil.
So why did our intrepid AGW activists masquerading as science historians ignore these pieces?
Because both advertorials failed to conform to their anti-Exxon thesis, that’s why.
The 2005 piece by ExxonMobil clearly states the company agrees “entirely” that “climate change is a serious and long-term challenge that affects every part of the globe.” It then further discusses initiatives to reduce greenhouse gases with which ExxonMobil is involved. The 2007 piece explains how ExxonMobil was employing the use of co-generation in order to address “the risks of climate change.”
After extensive criticism of their poorly contrived and clearly biased 2017 paper, Oreskes and Supran quietly published an ‘addendum’ in 2020 featuring brief quotes from 2005 and 2007 advertorials similar to those above. However, they continue to reference the misleading 2017 paper in their subsequent work, including the new paper published on 13 June.
That’s hardly what I’d call honest and ethical behavior, especially when it emanates from a duo with a hair-trigger tendency to denounce anyone critical of AGW as a “denier,” “merchant of doubt,” and a disseminator of “disinformation” and “misinformation.”
Two key facets of an effective propaganda campaign are distraction and projection: Accuse others of that which you are guilty.
The bottom line is that the claim “Exxon Knew!” but simultaneously denied climate change is complete nonsense. By mentioning greenhouse gases and the need for their reduction, ExxonMobil even appears to be conceding to the AGW sham (climate change and anthropogenic global warming are not the same thing. Climate change has been occurring long before humans ever walked the Earth).
There you have it. An entire axe-grinding campaign, to which Oreskes and Supran have devoted so much time over the years, easily debunked by a couple of New York Times advertorials.
Ouch.
Excoriating ExxonMobil, Praising Even Bigger Environmental Vandals
While unfairly excoriating ExxonMobil for its alleged climate insubordinance, Oreskes made a point of commending two of the world’s biggest polluters in her 2007 essay: “some petroleum companies, such as BP and Shell, have refrained from participating in misinformation campaigns.”[p. 94]
Take careful note: Of all the oil companies Oreskes could have mentioned as having refrained from ‘misinformation,’ she happens to mention just two. And those two, BP and Shell, just happen to be the only two oil companies that sponsor her friends at the pivotal AGW-pimping Climactic Research Unit at East Anglia University in the UK. BP and Shell even kept money flowing to the controversial CRU unit after the highly embarrassing Climategate email leak, which revealed just what a bunch of nasty, nepotistic, anti-scientific bullies were at the helm of UK and US climate change ‘research.’
ExxonMobil, meanwhile, ‘refrained’ from handing over money to the charlatans at CRU. Instead, in what was evidently viewed as an egregious slap in the face to the self-entitled AGW crowd, it gave funding to conservative think tanks and commentators.
Oreskes’ selective praise of BP and Shell also reveals much about the mentality of AGW warriors in general. BP is responsible for some of the worst environmental disasters in history, while Shell’s environmental record and human rights abuses are nothing short of horrific. But Oreskes doesn’t seem to care about any of that; the two oil behemoths are on board with the AGW agenda, so as far as she’s concerned they’re OK.
In her 2010 ad hominem tome Merchants of Doubt, released just over a month after the monumental BP Gulf of Mexico disaster, BP and Shell again escaped Oreskes’ wrath. In fact, they garnered nary a mention from Oreskes, despite their very long track records of environmental damage. ExxonMobil, however, did not escape Oreskes’ venom. Not for its environmental damage, mind you. Citing around $9 million of funding provided by the company to various think tanks, $90,000 to organizations run by Fox News columnist Steve Milloy, and $95,000 to TechCentralStation.com, Oreskes sneered:
“ExxonMobil’s support for doubt-mongering and disinformation is hardly surprising.”[p. 246-247]
What is hardly surprising is Oreskes’ kid glove approach towards BP and Shell, who just happen to pay stipends to the AGW movement.
“Doubt-mongering,” a term manufactured by Oreskes, is an intelligence-insulting one that essentially means nothing, unless you consider it an offense (as many in the extremely self-entitled and hypocritical world of wokeness evidently do) to doubt and question mainstream beliefs. The issuance of “disinformation”, however, is a far more serious charge. But while quick to ‘out’ those who received money from ExxonMobil, she fails to detail just what false information they disseminated.
The Idiotic “Exxon Knew” Caper
Despite the lameness of their case against ExxonMobil, Oreskes and Supran are still desperately flogging the dead “Exxon Knew!” horse. A few days ago, on Friday January 13, Supran loudly announced, via Twitter, the publication of his and Oreskes’ latest paper in – where else – Science. They co-authored the paper with Stefan Rahmstorf, a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University, Germany. Lest you have any doubts who helps push low-grade but agenda-compliant researchers into the spotlight, the funding section - buried in tiny print right at the end of the article - notes that head author Supran is supported by a grant from none other than the Rockefeller Family Fund.
The Rockefellers also funded the 2017 paper by Oreskes and Supran, along with InsideClimate News and the Columbia School of Journalism, both of whom produced anti-ExxonMobil stories in 2015. Despite denials from both InsideClimate News and Columbia, Lee Wasserman with the Rockefeller Family Fund admitted he paid for the stories attacking ExxonMobil.
As of this writing, the full text of the new Supran/Oreskes/Rahmstorf paper can be freely accessed here.
Normally I’d dissect the paper in detail, but there’s really not much to dissect. It is, quite frankly, a load of simple-minded rubbish.
So much so, that most of what we need to know from the paper features in Supran’s bombastic Friday the 13th Tweet session.
"This is the first ever systematic assessment of an oil and gas company's climate projections," proclaims Supran. "We began by collecting every available global warming prediction reported by Exxon scientists in internal memos & peer-reviewed papers. This yielded 16 temperature projections from 1977-2003 in 12 graphs."
This, and the published paper, give the misleading impression that this was all ExxonMobil’s own research, conducted by its in-house scientists. As Roger Pielke Jr, professor and political scientist from the University of Colorado, points out, “the selection of 'ExxonMobil’s global warming projections' is kind of ridiculous.” For instance, it includes Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections (because a single Exxon employee was among the hundreds of contributing authors) & US Department of Energy publications like this one, which is referenced repeatedly in their article:
They might be Harvard faculty, but Oreskes and Supran are apparently incapable of grasping the ridiculously obvious: ExxonMobil and the US DOE are not the same thing, and citing someone else’s research does not necessarily mean you agree with their findings.
Oreskes and Supran also repeatedly snipe at ExxonMobil for its temerity to mention the Great Ice Age Scare of the 1970s. In his bombastic Tweetfest, the truth-challenged Supran writes:
“And here's Mobil and ExxonMobil cultivating the myth that in the 1970s, there was a scientific consensus that the planet was going to cool down rather than heat up.”
This is “Box 3” from the January 13 paper, re-posted in his Twitter thread, that supposedly illustrates the oil giant’s perpetuation of this “myth”:
Read it carefully and note that nowhere does ExxonMobil say there was a “scientific consensus” on global cooling during the 1970s – or at any other time. The best the barrel-scraping Supran/Oreskes/Rahmstorf can muster is to cite a 2004 report by the Cato Institute that stated back in the 1970s “the ‘coolers’ had the upper hand.”
What has a report by the Cato Institute got to do with ExxonMobil? Well, according to our genius trio, Cato Institute was funded by ExxonMobil. Yes, but the Cato Institute was also funded by:
[Deep breath so we can read them all out in one go] …
Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Bell Atlantic Network Services, BellSouth Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation, GTE, Microsoft, Netscape, NYNEX Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Viacom, American Express, Chase Manhattan Bank, Chemical Bank, Citicorp/Citibank, Commonwealth Fund, Prudential Securities, the now-defunct Salomon Brothers, Chevron Companies, Exxon Company, Shell Oil, Tenneco Gas, American Petroleum Institute, Amoco, Atlantic Richfield Foundation, Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, Castle Rock Foundation (reformed Coors Foundation), Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, Earhart Foundation, JM Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Carthage Foundation, and David H Koch Foundation.
[Exhale]
So dozens of companies and foundations - including numerous other oil companies - have sponsored the Cato Institute, but Supran/Oreskes/Rahmstorf only mention one:
ExxonMobil.
I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to suggest these three anti-geniuses are suffering from a little something known as “bias” …
Stay tuned for a sensational new paper called “Parishioners Knew!”, in which 3 dimwitted activists accuse anyone who put money in the tray at Sunday service during the 1970s of deliberately “cultivating” child abuse by priests. The globalist pedophiles who fund this new paper, for some strange reason, will not be singled out for any attention whatsoever by the authors.
Welcome to ‘science,’ 2023-style.
Actually, Global Cooling Was a Thing During the 1970s. A Big Thing...
The subject of global cooling is worthy of further discussion, if only to further emphasize what a bunch of shameless deniers Oreskes, Supran and their ilk really are.
During the 1940-1970s, and despite continually rising CO2 (you know, the greenhouse gas that we are incessantly told causes warming), a decades-long spell of colder-than-usual weather occurred, prompting many researchers to conclude that an Ice Age had either begun, or was a real future possibility. The mainstream media, never one to shy away from alarmist headlines, ran countless stories warning an impending Ice Age was on the way.
Temperatures, as we now know, began rising again after this protracted cool spell. That represents something of an embarrassment to the AGW crowd, because it demonstrates that climate scientists can and do get their predictions wrong, and that a so-called ‘scientific consensus’ doesn’t mean diddly squat when reality has other ideas.
Not to worry: The AGW crew deal with this embarrassment the same way their hero Michael “Hockey Shtick” Mann dealt with the highly embarrassing and paradigm-destroying Medieval Warm Period:
They pretend it never happened.
In support of their reality-defying revisionism, they inevitably cite a truly atrocious paper by Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley and John Fleck titled “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus.”
The prime mover behind this 2008 paper was Cambridge-based ‘scientist,’ Green Party activist and AGW fanatic, Connolley who - along with Michael Mann and NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt - is a co-founder of the realclimate.com blog. As a British parliamentary report on the Climategate scandal noted in 2010, the blog is used to "promote the AGW hypothesis and suppress dissent." The report also noted the site was registered to Environmental Media Services, an outfit associated with media strategy company Fenton Communications. As the report poignantly asked, "Should publicly-funded scientists be blogging on a political lobbying site?"
Another of Connolley’s dubious claims to fame is his rabid ‘editorial’ activities on Wikipedia. Beginning in 2003, Connolley has been quietly re-writing or removing thousands upon thousands of dissenting articles about the AGW theory on the web's most famous information source.
What a disingenuous world we live in. If AGW skeptics from the US or UK systematically edited or deleted pro-AGW entries, it would automatically be shouted down as “Russian disinformation.”
In light of Connolley’s surreptitious tendencies, it should come as little surprise the 2008 paper he co-authored with Peterson and Fleck was a load of disingenuous rot. The trio claimed to have searched the literature for peer-reviewed articles on climate change published between 1965 and 1983. They further claimed their survey identified only seven articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming.
The Connolley-led trio arrived at this tally using the same fact-scrubbing methodology Connolley uses on Wikipedia: Changing or deleting information that doesn’t conform to their preconceived agenda. They also deliberately tailored their inclusion criteria to exclude papers like the 1972 one by pioneering climate scientist George Kukla, which stated:
"A new glacial insolation regime, expected to last 8000 years, began just recently. Mean global temperatures may eventually drop about 1°C in the next hundred years."
They completely ignored the massive 1975 US Government report which included a paper by University of California meteorologist Hugh W. Ellsaesser, who stated:
"Since 1945 there has been a cooling trend and we are now nearly back down to the averages of the early 19th century. None of the calculations of which I am aware found that the man- augmented CO2 could have contributed more than a small fraction of the warming up to 1940. Whatever the cause of the warming, the post-1940 cooling appears to be primarily a return to normal."
They ignored a 1975 paper by meteorologist Ronald T.H. Collis, from the Stanford Research Institute, which stated:
"It is not clear how such favorable and relatively consistent conditions are related to the higher temperatures in this century or the peaking of temperatures around 1940. The reversal of this warming trend, however, could mark the beginning of a new ice age as some climatologists have indicated. It should be noted, though, that even if we are in fact heading for another ice age, many years or decades will elapse before this will become apparent."
Concern about the cooling trend’s impact on agriculture was so serious that even the CIA, for whom climate had not previously "been a prime consideration of intelligence analysis", weighed in on the issue. In August 1974, the agency released two reports. One of these, Potential Implications of Trends in World Population, Food Production, and Climate, clearly acknowledged the current cooling trend, and assessed the issue of global food security under the following two scenarios:
“Assuming Normal Weather”;
“Assuming The Cooling Trend Continues”.
The other report, A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems, was also devoted to the impact of climate on food security, and assessed various climatic schools of thought to see which held the best hope for predicting future climate trends. In the last sentence of the report’s summary, the CIA declared, “The climate of the neo-boreal time period has arrived.” For those wondering, the more common term for “neo-boreal” is Little Ice Age.
Connolley et al would argue the CIA reports were not peer-reviewed, and that their analysis included only peer-reviewed papers.
Except that it didn’t.
Explaining their methodology, the three hopelessly biased activists noted: “a few prestigious reports that may not have been peer reviewed have been included in this literature survey because they clearly represent the science of their day.” Exactly what method they used to determine a report’s “prestige” was not revealed, but it seems the world’s most famous intelligence agency lacked the requisite snob factor sought by Connolley and his compatriots.
When their pedantic and carefully-tailored inclusion criteria still wasn’t enough to eliminate a pesky cooling paper from their analysis, there was always the option of simply reclassifying it as a “neutral” or, most audaciously, as a “warming” paper. The former is what they did with the 1975 National Academy of Sciences report Understanding Climatic Change, despite the fact page 59 of the report clearly stated global temperatures had been cooling:
"As shown by Mitchell (1970), the average surface air temperature in the northern hemisphere increased from the 1880's until about 1940 and has been decreasing thereafter."
As did page 148: "This [surface temperature] index clearly suggests a worldwide warming beginning in the 1880's, followed by a cooling since the 1940's."
As for whether this cooling trend would continue, the authors of the report had little doubt. To them, the issue was not if, but when:
"There seems little doubt that the present period of unusual warmth will eventually give way to a time of colder climate, but there is no consensus with regard to either the magnitude or rapidity of the transition. The onset of this climatic decline could be several thousand years in the future, although there is a finite probability that a serious worldwide cooling could befall the earth within the next hundred years.”
A 1970 paper by George S. Benton of John Hopkins University that concluded the cooling effect of volcanic activity would override any alleged heating effect of man-made emissions was audaciously shunted into the pro-warming category!
NASA scientists S. Ichtiaque Rasool and Stephen Schneider also found their names in the pro-warming category, despite their 1971 Science paper that discussed aerosols and their potential cooling effect on global climate:
“It is found that, although the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does increase the surface temperature, the rate of temperature increase diminishes with increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. For aerosols, however, the net effect of increase in density is to reduce the surface temperature of Earth.”[Bold emphasis added]
“An increase by only a factor of 4 in global aerosol background concentration may be sufficient to reduce the surface temperature by as much as 3.5°K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.” [Bold emphasis added]
And on it goes. The 2008 Peterson/Connolley/Fleck is a shameless and patently dishonest exercise in agenda-driven revisionism. But, hey, what else could we expect from a paper whose key author was an AGW fanatic and lobbyist who runs a pro-AGW blog and uses Wikipedia to surreptitiously convey a one-sided argument in favor of the AGW theory?
The AGW revisionists also disingenuously ignore the multitude of media reports from the 1970s immortalizing the existence of the 1970s Great Ice Age Scare. A post at the website Popular Technology links to over 100 media stories from the 1970s, with titles such as “Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century” (The Boston Globe, April 16, 1970), “Ice Age Around the Corner” (Chicago Tribune, July 10, 1971), “Ice Age Begins A New Assault In North” (The Age, September 12, 1972), “Ice Age Predicted In About 200 Years” (The Portsmouth Times, December 14, 1972), “New ice age 'could be in our lifetime'” (The Canberra Times, November 22, 1974), “B-r-r-r-r: New Ice Age on way soon?” (Chicago Tribune, March 2, 1975), “The Armadillos Are Heading South; Ice Age Coming? Chilling Thought for Humanity” (Chicago Tribune, June 2, 1975), “Oil Spill Could Cause New Ice Age” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 11, 1975), and “Current Winters Seen Colder Than In Ice Age” (The Telegraph, January 3, 1978).
So while ExxonMobil never claimed a “scientific consensus” on global cooling during the 1970s, they would not have been lying if they did. Especially considering the manner in which today’s hopelessly dishonest AGW shills falsely claim a 97% warming consensus that simply doesn’t exist.
Now, Back to Next Decade’s Weather
After presenting the above-mentioned ‘Exxon’ temperature graphs in his explosive January 13 Twitfart, Supran then tweets:
"Exxon’s average projected warming (0.20° ± 0.04°C per decade) was, within uncertainty, the SAME as that of independent models (0.19° ± 0.03°C per decade) … Global warming projections modeled by Exxon scientists had an average ‘skill score’ of 72 ± 6%, with the highest scoring 99%. For comparison, NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen’s predictions presented to US Congress in 1988 had skill scores of 38 to 66%."
Australia's agenda-compliant ABC, reporting on the study, also acknowledged the ExxonMobil graphs "forecast the coming warming with precision equal to or better than government and academic scientists."
Stop for a moment and think about what these eminently woke entities are admitting: ExxonMobil, an oil and gas producer, does better climate predictions than grossly overpaid AGW ‘experts’ (read: alarmists) from government and academia, like James Hanson!
Of course, we’re supposed to ignore this screaming irony and instead embrace the claim, once again, that “Exxon Knew!”
Knew what, exactly?
This new paper disingenuously references Oreskes’ and Supran’s shady 2017 paper as ‘proof’ the company privately acknowledged climate change but publicly denied it.
Ah yes, the same 2017 paper that conveniently omitted the 2005 and 2007 advertorials published in the New York Times - one of the world’s most widely-read newspapers – in which ExxonMobil explicitly acknowledged climate change.
So the underlying and supposedly Earth-shattering thesis of their new paper is that ExxonMobil produced temperature predictions as good and sometimes more accurate than mainstream AGW scientists, all the while denying or downplaying the existence of climate change.
But we’ve already established, beyond doubt, that ExxonMobil publicly acknowledged climate change and its alleged risks, along with its initiatives to reduce greenhouse emissions, many years ago.
Have spokespeople from ExxonMobil stated the science of climate change is uncertain? Absolutely - and they are 100% correct. There are many branches of science plagued by uncertainty and disagreement, and climate research is one of them. Shady Science papers falsely claiming a complete lack of dissent notwithstanding, the fact remains hordes of accomplished scientists around the world have publicly stated their disapproval with the AGW paradigm. If Oreskes and Supran refuse to acknowledge these realities, then they are the indisputable “deniers.”
Which all means the thesis underlying the Supran/Oreskes/Rahmstorf paper is a load of rubbish. Their bizarre paper is essentially a meaningless waste of time.
Supran and Oreskes, I again remind you, hail from Harvard, the World’s Most Prestigious University!™ I hate to say it, but if this is the kind of intellectual prowess we can expect from the ‘best’ educational facility in the world, then humanity is in big, big trouble.
The response of Supran’s Twitter followers doesn’t give much cause for hope, either. To appreciate just what a pack of easily-aroused and -manipulated numbskulls Homo boobanensis is, a read through some of the replies to Supran’s tweets is highly instructive.
All this indignance and outrage, for what? A non-existent conspiracy promoted by a WEF “Agenda Contributor” and her Rockefeller-funded activist protégé, both of whom have a clear bias and a demonstrable inability to present a fair and balanced analysis? These Twitter Twats were born ignorant and have been losing ground ever since, making them easy prey for every shambolic woke cause the globalist puppeteers can think of.
These, ladies and gentlemen, are the techno-fascist’s modern-day useful idiots – simpletons with limited critical faculties, easily aroused into anger, spite and litigation fantasies in support of the current thing.
Never mind that the current thing is complete bullshit.
To cap the absurdities, Supran triumphantly declares in this Twitter thread: "In sum, our study is #ExxonKnew2point0."
No, it's "#ResearchersWhoShouldGoFindaRealJob2023."
So Why Does the AGW Movement Really Hate ExxonMobil?
I don’t claim to be a mind-reader, but I believe the real reasons center around money and ExxonMobil’s less-than-enthusiastic embrace of the AGW sham.
While Shell and BP have gone to great lengths to disingenuously re-brand themselves as “clean” and “green” entities (while continuing to extract fossil fuels and wreak havoc on the environment), ExxonMobil has been something of a laggard. While indeed acknowledging climate change – in contrast to the lies of the “Exxon Knew!” crowd - it hasn’t shown the same enthusiasm as its British and Dutch counterparts. Indeed, the company has warned against hurriedly embracing extreme measures because they could have widespread economic and societal impacts – a perfectly rational and commonsensical stance.
Worse, in the eyes of the AGW crowd, it has remained open and friendly to the other side of the argument. The company has given significant sums of its own (not taxpayers’) money to various think tanks, and to politically incorrect commentators like Steve Milloy and TechCentralStation.com.
Meanwhile, the Climate Mafia does not appear to have enjoyed the financial largesse of ExxonMobil. As noted earlier, British Petroleum and Shell are among the financial benefactors of the pivotal Climatic Research Unit in the UK, while ExxonMobil is not.
While unfairly maligned skeptics like Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (the independent duo largely responsible for debunking Michael Mann’s dubious “Hockey Stick” charade) never sought funds from anyone to help with their research, a number of leaked Climategate emails from 2000 revealed CRU staff were busy, not only chasing largesse from Shell and BP, but also from Exxon-Mobil’s UK subsidiary, Esso.
It seems that, unlike Shell and BP, neither ExxonMobil nor its subsidiary Esso would hand over money to one of the world’s most prominent pro-AGW research centers. The anti-scientific behavior exposed by the Climategate emails confirm the wisdom of that refusal, but it seems the AGW crowd, like a mafia crew that hasn’t received its weekly protection stipends from a holdout shop-owner, isn’t going to forget nor forgive.
In the next article, we’ll further explore the sheer irrationality of the AGW movement’s campaign against ExxonMobil. We’ll discuss how its deranged angst towards the US company is so great, that it happily ignores far more serious transgressions by Shell and BP. Once you learn of the BP and Shell environmental travesties that are blissfully ignored by the AGW movement, you should be left with no doubt this movement has absolutely nothing to do with saving Planet Earth.
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Competing interests: None. The author has no ties to fossil fuel companies and has not received a cent from ExxonMobil or any of its subsidiaries. Unlike the hypocritical billionaire globalist sociopaths and WEF puppets who (literally) pollute Davos each year, the author lives a modest life, has almost always owned four cylinder cars, has never owned a private jet, and has never created a gargantuan ‘carbon footprint’ in order to attend climate change conferences that shamelessly exhort the common man to reduce his energy usage. Nor does he get paid $10,000 or more to fly across the country in big fossil fuel-burning jets and preach about the evils of burning fossil fuels, like Oreskes, Mann and their ilk do.