Sunday, April 21, 2013

On Climate Change, Money - Or Its Absence - Talks.

I can give you six hundred and seventy four billion reasons to believe the scientific consensus on climate change.

$674,000,000,000.00 - that's the amount the top 200 energy companies spent, just last year alone, on exploring for new fossil fuel reserves.   Gee, that sounds an awful lot like two-thirds of a trillion dollars, doesn't it?  Yes, yes it does.  Even in my world, that's serious money.

So, what does 674-billion dollars have to do with the scientific consensus on climate change?  In fact, just about everything.  It shows that, in the supposed dispute over whether climate change is even real, the fossil fuelers have the big bucks.

The scientific consensus is based on cumulative scientific research, an ever growing, multi-disciplinary body of knowledge.  That includes fields such as geology, biology, botany and zoology, medicine and especially epidemiology, chemistry, physics, atmospherics, hydrology, and more.   Each of those fields tests the theory and aspects of the theory against their own discipline.  They conduct experiments, do research, draw conclusions and put their data and conclusions in papers that are then reviewed by other scientists and, if approved, published.

All those reports, including the data and work-ups, are public.   Energy companies, the folks who have $674-billion to burn, could easily take a few hundred million, tops, to pick through those reports and do their own research debunking them if they're inaccurate or, worse, simply false.   Then they could take their scientific rebuttal research to their paid minions in Congress and blow the scientific consensus to smithereens in a matter of an afternoon at the outside.

They could do that.   They could but they haven't.  It's logical, given the trillions of dollars worth of carbon energy potentially at stake, to assume that they have paid their own scientists to try to poke holes in the consensus.  That's a safe bet but that's not what is important.   What matters is that, despite the open nature of the research and despite all the opportunity the fossil fuelers have had to refute it, they haven't presented any viable challenge to it.

When the energy majors have $674-billion to burn yet can't address the scientific consensus on climate change, that's about all you need to know.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't tell me. We read that in the Guardian didn't we, Bless their little cotton socks.
Touting their latest piece of presumptive social opportunism from that monument to Fabian folly, the London School of Economics.
What they seem to not realise, is that as more and more deposits of fossil fuels are discovered and while advancing technology makes more of it extractable, the price may drop but demand will surge as oil & gas deliver the world from its current economic recession.
And they style themselves as Economists.

Anonymous said...

There's no need for energy companies to waste their shareholders money on showing that there has been No Global Warming for 17 years (23 years if you believe the satellites), or on showing that the signature of anthropogenic warming, a tropical tropospheric hotspot, is missing entirely. No Global Warming during 17 years while the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere continued to rise steadily.
The rest is just confirmation that there was warming in the latter half of the 20th. century, for which no causal link to CO2 has been empirically established.