Climate 411

Exxon Changes its Tune

By Bill Chameides / Published: February 22, 2007

What a difference nine years makes!

For more than a decade, Exxon has been a major player in a campaign to spread doubt about global warming. We know this for a fact because a 1998 internal Exxon memo titled “Global Climate Science Communications: Action Plan” was leaked to the press. The stated goal of the plan, whose authors include Randy Randol of Exxon Corp, Sharon Kneiss of Chevron Corp, and Joseph Walker of the American Petroleum Institute, was to change the American public’s view that global warming was a threat so that policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions could be stopped. The memo laid out a wide range of strategies and tactics to achieve this goal, budgeting nearly $6 million plus the cost of advertising.

But suddenly Exxon has changed its tune.

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Posted in Partners for Change / Read 2 Responses

This Week's Ignoratio Elenchi Award

By Bill Chameides / Published: February 22, 2007

ignoratio elenchi n.
A logical fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but has nothing to do with the proposition it purports to prove. Also known as “irrelevant conclusion”. [Lat. ignorance of refutation.]

On Monday, an article appeared in the Washington Times that offers so many outrageous examples of the logical fallacy of irrelevant conclusion (formally, ignoratio elenchi) that I’m beginning a new series of posts – the Ignoratio Elenchi Awards – for the most flagrantly misleading arguments against curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

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Posted in News / Read 1 Response

Picturing a ton of CO2

By Bill Chameides / Published: February 20, 2007

Tons of CO2 pollution. We are always hearing about how many tons of CO2 pollution we emit. The average American car emits about seven tons of CO2 in a year; the average American family, about 24 tons; the United States as a whole, over seven billion tons; and worldwide, almost 30 billion tons. The Virgin Earth Challenge (see last week’s post) offers $25 million to whoever can economically remove one billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year.

But what is a ton of CO2?

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Posted in Basic Science of Global Warming / Read 54 Responses

Lincoln’s Little-Known Legacy

By Bill Chameides / Published: February 16, 2007

This post is dedicated to the two great Americans we will honor on Presidents’ Day this Monday.

Everybody knows about Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address; they are a big part of why Lincoln’s birthday is honored. Most people don’t know that Lincoln also established the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

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Posted in News / Read 1 Response

Vacuum Up Greenhouse Gases?

By Bill Chameides / Published: February 15, 2007

Everybody’s always talking about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. What you don’t hear so often is a suggestion to clean up what’s already there. How would you do that? Good question! And it’s the question that Virgin Earth Challenge is posing to the world. Come up with a commercially viable way to remove a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year, and win $25 million.

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Posted in Geoengineering / Read 5 Responses

The Kyoto Card Up George's Sleeve

By Bill Chameides / Published: February 14, 2007

Newsweek is running an article by George Will titled “Inconvenient Kyoto Truths“. Will says, “It is time to call some bluffs … President Bush should give the world something amusing to watch. He should demand that the Senate vote on the [Kyoto] protocol.” He then goes on to say that America is not disproportionately responsible for global warming, that global warming isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, that we don’t know how to stop it anyway, and that any efforts to do so could cost “tens of trillions”. And for all these reasons, he says, the Kyoto protocol was correctly rejected by the U.S.

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Posted in International / Read 10 Responses