Edward teller global warming
Home / Scientists & Inventors / Edward teller global warming
According to the front page of the report, it was “given wide circulation to Exxon management” but was “not to be distributed externally.”
And Exxon did keep it secret: We know of the report’s existence only because investigative journalists at Inside Climate News uncovered it in 2015.
Other oil companies knew the effects their products were having on the planet too.
It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. It extends beyond (though includes) ExxonMobil. American oil’s awareness of global warming — and its conspiracy of silence, deceit, and obstruction — goes further than any one company. And he analyzes what legal strategies may be effective in holding fossil fuel companies accountable for the effects of their products.
And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. That depends on what we do now, with our slice of history.
This article was updated Oct. 28 with quotes from the hearing.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Subscribe to Trellis Briefing
Get real case studies, expert action steps and the latest sustainability trends in a concise morning email.
Benjamin Franta
Scientists warned the federal government about fossil fuels and global warming in the 1960s.
Other sources of funding came from lobbying groups such as the American Petroleum Institute, the Western Oil and Gas Association, and the Automobile Manufacturers Association. As a result, it creates a new timeline in which the fossil fuel industry was first aware of potential harmful impacts of burning fossil fuels, both on the climate and human civilization.
According to Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law, the documents add momentum to ongoing attempts to hold the oil and gas industries legally responsible for harm caused by climate change.
“These documents talk about CO2 emissions having planetary implications, meaning this industry understood extraordinarily early on that fossil fuel combustion was profound on a planetary scale,” Muffet said.
In that role, he gave the following testimony to a Congressional committee on the topic, “Tomorrow’s car: electric or gasoline powered?” He told the committee, “We in the petroleum industry are convinced that by the time a practical electric car can be mass-produced and marketed, it will not enjoy any meaningful advantage from an air pollution standpoint.
Our planet will get a little warmer. “Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes,” it warned. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. Whether it’s also a history of redemption, however partial, remains to be seen.”
The City of Angels looking smoggy.
Benjamin Franta's research answers this question and offers solutions for making progress in stopping the danger before us. Today, we have a copy of Laurmann’s presentation, which warned that if fossil fuels continued to be used, global warming would be “barely noticeable” by 2005, but by the 2060s would have “globally catastrophic effects.” That same year, the American Petroleum Institute called on governments to triple coal production worldwide, insisting there would be no negative consequences despite what it knew internally.
Exxon had a secretive research program too.
It was decades before I was born. Photo: Joel Muniz
Documents uncovered by an investigative climate journalist show correspondence that dates the fossil fuel industry’s knowledge of the link between CO2 emissions and climate change to 1954. It’s the earliest known instance of oil company supported climate research and five years before physicist Edward Teller warned the American Petroleum Institute of the danger posed by the oil industry.
The story, broken by journalist Rebecca John and published on the climate change publication Desmog, is significant because it reveals that parts of Charles Keelings’ research – a scientist known for inventing the Keeling curve, a daily record of global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration – was in part funded by the fossil fuel industry.
He seeks to inform litigation efforts and the public of the history that has led us to the present.