How did lobbyists halt #climate action 20 years ago? They hosted receptions for key congressional staffers claiming to “shatter consensus” about the dangers of #ClimateChange. I was there. It worked.
@Sheril Whatever happened to the 4 presenters? Have they recanted their views by now or continue to make a business out of holding an increasingly implausible contrarian view?
@albertcardona I don’t know but I doubt it. It was quite a briefing & I was one of the few actual scientist staffers in the room. Left an indelible impression on me bc unfortunately, it was so effective.
@Sheril We all want to hear global warming is a misinterpretation, a mistake in someone’s analysis. Appeals to our egos, speaks to us that we aren’t guilty. Yet we’ve known for so long:
“Big Oil companies knew all along too. As early as 1957, "H. R. Brannon of Humble Oil Company (now ExxonMobil)" understood the effect of CO2 emissions. And in 1959 Edward Teller further warned the oil industry about CO2 accumulation and its effect in elevating global temperature and sea-level rise by the end of XX century [3]. And by 1982, the likes of ExxonMobil knew exactly how much CO2 was contributing and projected to continue to contribute to global warming, with eerie precision. And yet chose to do nothing: acknowledging global warming would undermine its business model and profits. And this continues to be the case.” (Excerpt from my blog: https://albert.rierol.net/tell/20210407_two_centuries_of_global_warming_warnings.html )
The internal report from ExxonMobil is extremely incriminating: https://thinkprogress.org/exxon-predicted-high-carbon-emissions-954e514b0aa9/
@Sheril These 4 individuals, presenting their case of denial of global warming. It's all too easy to think of them as malicious, or evil, yet most likely, almost certainly, they weren't [0]. A combination of the drawer effect [1], unwitty p-hacking [2], and then the ego-stroking effect of being picked up by some of the media to underscore their narrative, receiving lavish praise and funding from "important" think tanks, and, eventually, even when deep inside the cleverer among them realised their mistakes, it's too late [3], a bit like the big bird site accounts crying out loud "but my followers", never mind the icky fellow travellers they picked up on the way, and the friends they left behind. The path of devastation that should forever haunt them is a reminder of how, at their time of calling, they failed, and seemingly brought us all down with them.
[0] Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
[1] The drawer effect or publication bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias
[2] p-hacking or data dredging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging
[3] Sinclair's "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
