A group of teenagers suing the government for not doing enough to prevent climate change want ExxonMobil to fork over communications from an alias email account used by the company’s former CEO.
“It’s possible that Rex Tillerson was communicating with people in government related to climate and energy policy using that email address,” Julia Olson, an attorney for the teenagers, said on Monday.
She was referring to recent reports suggesting Secretary of State Rex Tillerson used a private email account during sensitive discussions with company executives.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman told a judge earlier this month that Tillerson used the alias “Wayne Tracker” for years during email exchanges. The Democrat argued the supposedly hidden account was used exclusively to talk about how the company should approach climate change.
Schneiderman has been investigating Exxon under the belief the oil company worked for decades to hide climate research from its shareholders and the public. Most of the research Exxon has acquired over the decades has been readily available through public information searches.
The teenagers want to prove government officials and oil companies were aware of the supposed causes and effects of climate change, but refused to address the issue. The child crusaders also believe hiding information about so-called “man-made” warming violates their constitutional rights to a habitable planet.
The federal government, meanwhile, has argued in court that Americans are not constitutionally entitled to a habitable climate. Oil industry lobbyists for the American Petroleum Institute (API) have said there is not enough evidence on climate change to support the teenagers’ case.
The headline said ‚ÄúWarm February 3 times as likely because of human caused climate change‚Äù. Does that seem reasonable? Did we also cause the intense cold and snow in Eastern Europe and Siberia in January? How about the snow in the Sahara-first in 40 years? Is there any weather event that human caused climate change doesn’t effect? This is truly ‚Äúfake news‚Äù and needs to be questioned not accepted as factual.
Dr. Judith Curry’s recent review of climate models like the one mentioned under the noted headline stated that these models are unfit for attribution or policy purposes. CO2 recently added to the atmosphere natural or man made is expected to increase the radiative forcing by less than 2 watts per square meter while the uncertainty in latent heat flux is an order of magnitude greater (20Wm-2) leaving the anticipated flux unrecognizable in the uncertainty (Pierce et. al.2006 as quoted in IPCC AR5).
Several new papers show human emissions don’t even effect atmospheric CO2 enough to be detected (Humlum 2013, Harde 2017). Dozens of papers that demonstrate that the recent warming is not global, unprecedented, or remarkable (eg Wilson 2017, Leif 2017). There are over 100 papers in the last year that show the recent warming is likely almost entirely due to solar activity.
So the climate models can’t be used to isolate effects of increased CO2. The human emissions of CO2 can’t be shown to be the cause of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere. The uncertainty in the heat flux is 10 times the hypothesized effect of increased CO2, and nothing unusual is occurring in our climates. How can someone determine that the chances of some weather event is increased by a factor of 3 by human CO2 emissions?
This headline is propaganda not science.
Ms. Olson and Mr. Schniderman are implying that Mr. Tillerman knew back then more than the currant science can show. Is there any way the defendants can demand that the plaintiff demonstrate the “facts” they are accusing the defendant of obscuring are proven facts?
Once again the twisting of a self made definition . The” earth has a fever” cult know natural occurring climate variables have always been responsible for climate change so the solution was to create their very own definition of climate change that would exclude natural variables which still run the climate show . That way they can really be self righteous with most of the population being duped by the slight of hand illusion .
Ultimately who cares what Exxon or any other company knew about global cooling or global warming . Don’t buy the legally sold products if you have hurt feelings .Better than being a fuel using hypocrite .