An Inconvenient Truth and Esso

[Vincey B]

I saw this film last night and wondered if anyone else had seen it and what they thought?

I would definetly recommend it - if you havent heard of it its basically a 90 minute lecture by Al Gore about climate change and puts to bed any doubt that climate change is happening and is a result of human activity.

ExxonMobile, the oil company that ownes Esso petrol stations is the biggest culprit for funding organisations that promote the idea that there is some "debate" in the scientific community about climate change, when in fact there is a complete consensus that it is happening because of mankind.

I would suggest that if you have the choice of petrol stations that you use please avoid Esso, if enough people did it would really make them notice how unpopular their stance on the subject is.

If you can get to see this film then I suggest you do, it will open your eyes to the complete lies and misinfomation that surround this subject.

Vince

[killa]

If you stop going to the Esso to get fuel and snacks you're not going to help the world.
It has already been fucked, the only people that can make a difference don't drive themselves anywhere and don't a toss.

I imagine the film is pretty scary, but you can't do shit about it.

I saw a film/doc on Bush, i want to go to America this year, and he's an absolute mentalist.
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[feef]

climate change is happening.

it's been happening long before mankind was around, and it'll keep happening long after we're gone.

we do have an effect on climate change, but the effect we have is similar to trying to steer a supertanker with an oar.

Is this the same Al Gore who (in 2000) controlled between $250,000-$500,000 of Occidental stock (he is executor of a trust that he says goes only to his mother, but will revert to him upon her death). After the sale, Gore began disclosing between $500,000 and $1 million of his significantly more valuable stock. It was finally all sold about 6 years ago, after he founded an investment firm to fund 'green companies', which happen to include promoting his own book. Occidental is one of Esso's big competitors, and i'm sure he still has friends there, who might like to see Esso damaged in some way.

Gore also received royalties from a Zinc mine till it shut in 2003..

as always, and like any other politician.. Gore seems more interested in money and will support any movement that is the flavour of the month, green or otherwise, to make a few dollars.

cynical? moi?

a
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[zaknafien]

[innominate]

[Vincey B]

Of course the climate has changed in the past, but when the recent changes are plotted against changes that have been recorded previously its obvious to even the most stubborn that the pattern does not fall within previously recorded levels.

It falls down to the same argument, which I seem to be loosing in this case - that there is debate that climate change is happening due to human activity, every single peer reviewed scientific journal has concluded that what is happening is not comparable to anything that has happened before and is being caused by the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

As for Al Gore, he has been an environmentalist all his political life, despite the fact that it gets you no where in US politics (his advisors told him to play down environment issues during his presidential campaign).

All I can say is, see the film, and see if your opinion changes.

[feef]

[RickHolt]

I think castles show how things aren't so bad.

Loads of them were built on coastlines around the UK. Go look at alot of them now and they have docks no where near the sea. Once sea levels get back up to and beyond the castles, I'll start to worry. Untill then, things are just going back to the way they were.

It's too convenient that the people being paid to research global warming are making it out to be a big issue.

Rick.

[Vincey B]

In response to feef...

Of the webpages you use as your proof, 1 of them was written in 1993, one is by an unknown scientist trying to sell a book (Just like Al,apparantly) and one of them concludes with this:

"This is one of several important pieces of evidence that suggest increasing human influence on global climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that, " .. most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases."

All those articles do however prove 1 important point, climate change is happening. The issue then it seems is what is causing it.

One of the facts given in Al Gores film is that of a random sample of almost 1000 peer reviewed papers on the subject, 0% suggested that climate change was not happening due to man, as opposed to a random sample of media reports on the issue where 53% suggested this was not due to mankind.

So...

Do you believe then that despite the majority of evidence being that its mans activity that causes climate change, the small amount of evidence suggesting it is merely natural change is the correct explanation? If so, then thats fine, were not going to get much further with this.

Also as someone who claims to be a sceptic can you not see that companies like ExxonMobile who have invested nothing in alternative energy have a huge vested interest in funding scientific studies and websites that cause people to doubt a general scientific consensus?

Going back to the film (which this thread is about) he draws a parallel with the evidence that tobacco was causing lung cancer in the 60's. Tobacco companies did all they could to debunk the evidence due to their vested interest and ability to manipulate government policy (ExxonMobile is the number 1 corporate contributor to President Bush's campaigns). The aim of the tobacco companies, like some oil companies today, is not to deny evidence altogether, but simply to raise doubts that prevent people from taking action.

All I would say is just see the film without bias and make up your mind based on the facts presented.

Vince

[Retro-Man]

tis all bollox

the steering a super tanker with an oar comment is pretty much spot on IMHO

Quote


Treating climate change as beyond argument

Much of the noise in the climate change discourse comes from argument and counter-argument, and it is

our recommendation that, at least for popular communications, interested agencies now need to treat the

argument as having been won. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that

individual actions are effective. This must be done by stepping away from the ‘advocates debate’ described

earlier, rather than by stating and re-stating these things as fact.

The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken. The certainty of

the Government’s new climate-change slogan – ‘Together this generation will tackle climate change’ (Defra

2006) – gives an example of this approach. It constructs, rather than claims, its own factuality.

Where science is invoked, it now needs to be as ‘lay science’ – offering lay explanations for what is being

treated as a simple established scientific fact, just as the earth’s rotation or the water cycle are considered.





taken from



https://www.ippr.org.uk/ecomm/files/warm_words.pdf



therefore all your arguments are null and void
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[stinkwheel]

The castle argument is null.

There is a well researched geological reason for this. ie. tectonic rebound. The Northern part of the UK was until recently covered in a sheet of ice a mile thick, which you have to admit, is going to be pretty damned heavy. This was basically pressing Scotland down into the mantle.

Since the ice sheets melted, Scotland has been slowly rising up out of the earth, England had been slowly sinking in a see-saw manner. Iron age people could walk between the Isle of Wight and the mainland. There are cliff arches made by costal errosion near Mallaig half a mile inland.

[Kickstart]

Hi

It is a very inconvenient truth for Al Gore that there is little evidence to support his scare tactics.

Bjorn Lomborg is a bit unpopular in the green industry. His comments on that film:-

[gavin]

ive got the book, signed by al gore himself. ive had it a while. not had a chance to see the film yet. ive read a bit of the book, only a bit, because i find myself trawling the web for evidence of each statistic he presents, of which there are many. ive already come to the conclusion that he dosent go far enough.

the film may well be full of emotional language for all i know, but what i do know is that the book is full of reasoned argument and plenty of scientific fact. a lot of it is presented graphically and is extremely compelling. not in the emotional sense, rather in the sense that it makes it easy to visualise the enormity of what is happening.

for a taster, google "lost glaciers".



https://i20.ebayimg.com/02/i/07/87/b8/2a_1.JPG

[Vincey B]

Bjorn Lombergs argument makes very little sense to me ie. climate change is happening because of humans, but lets do nothing about it at all and concentrate on other problems.

However looking at his profile I cant see anything to indicate why he should be taken seriously:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg


The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty cited The Skeptical Environmentalist for:

Fabrication of data;
Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation);
Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods;
Distorted interpretation of conclusions;
Plagiarism;
Deliberate misinterpretation of others' results.

[zaknafien]

[Kickstart]

[gavin]

the problem with wikipedia is that it can be written to and edited by almost anyone, as highlighted by scott mills on radio one a few months back, with chaotic consequenses. i believe they had to take the site off line for a while.

im sure the intentions were good, but unfortunately it has become a heat sink for disinformation on the web.

i think lomberg is quite correct about one thing, koyoto cant achieve anything. if the people who believe global warming is real are right, ultimately it is human activity per se that is the root of the problem, and the solution to that dosent bear thinking about.

there is also something rather obtuse ( or disengenuous, to use lombergs word) about throwing billions of dollars of capitalist generated wealth at a problem which is argued to be largely the result of globilization and capitalist generated wealth.

[killa]

Natural disasters happen and in a large number of cases we don’t see them coming, some disasters have happened and we can’t explain them even today. Global warming isn’t new, but the more we learn about it, the more wild assumptions come out of it as well.
The money that would be spent trying to stop the world from burning out is completely pointless, how about a few million towards the victims of Katrina, I’d like to see some homes rebuilt for those people. There are countless other people who need money like that.

Companies that expel a large amount of carbon dioxide, so therefore the culprits of the beginning of the end (in the eyes of Gore) probably know more than him about this problem, and I imagine over the years haven’t simply ignored the fact.

This film is going to be shown publicly, to people the world over, some of which thought the bloody Matrix was real and that we lived in a fucking computer AI of some sort (documentary on CH4, they were American).
I bet the film has some slow moving CGI of New York going underwater to the tune of Craig Armstrong’s – Weather Storm, reconstructions of women and children drowning in library and being saved by the only few emergency services…..hmmm sounds familiar
What the fuck am I supposed to do, write a letter to Esso and complain? Stop using my bike to go to work?
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[feef]

when it's all said and done, one of the most glaring errors and misnomers is how climate change/global warming is 'damaging the planet' or 'killing the earth'..

bollx.. the planet was around, and supporting life in MUCH more hostile environments than we have now, for millions of years before we appeared... the planet will continue to support life for millions of years afterwards.. what IS happening, if anything, is the climate change is affecting the way the planet's environment can support human life.

Dinosaurs once ruled the planet, they got wiped out.. now we 'rule', and one day we'll get wiped out.. the lump of rock we live on will continue to exist, and I doubt very much that it will cease to support all forms of life. Sure, thigs will change, and some creatures will dominate more than others when the conditions suit, but nature has a way of evening out the balance on the whole, even if it doesn't give as shit about a specific species in the process.

a
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[Vincey B]

https://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1877283,00.html

This article pretty much sums up this thread, and mentions in the 2nd paragraph that The Economist magazine rejected its previous stance taken that it would be to expensive to do anything about climate change.

As for Bjorn Lomberg, he was critisized but was not found guilty due to a lack of expertise or definitive answers on the subject.

There will always be a few individuals who propose alternative solutions to a major problem (he does at least agree the problem is there).

The point about Esso and ExxonMobile is that they dont even agree that there is a problem in the first place. Companies that expel large amounts of Co2 have no interest in anything that would restrict them from doing so, and yes some have completely ignored this fact where as some (like BP) are researching heavily into alternative forms of energy as they know they will have to change.

The film does not use sensational graphics, just clear concise and properly sourced and referenced charts. There is an illustration of what would happen to Manhatten if sea levels went up by 20ft, as well as illustrations of what would happen to China, the Indian sub continent and Northern Europe.

Again all I can say really, see the film, look at the facts and make up your own mind.

[Itchy]

forget about it , we can do nothing ,

the government wanting us to reduce emissions or what not is a convient excuse to tax us all even more ,

and even if WE cut back will India and China cut back? , no , hence we trying to plug a dam with our little finger.
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[Kickstart]

[craigie b]

fucking hell, the yanks first said we played no aprt n globalb warming...now they are reversing their opinion on this, you guys are regressing and supporting a line of argument that the very people who supported it are now trying to distance themselves from.

We put CO2 into the air, this causes the green house effect. Heat gets trapped. Simple. We are at least contributing to it.

Saying you can do nothing about it is bollocks as well. Turn of your air con in the summer and bung some shorts on. Stop leaving everything on standby. Get energy saving lightbulbs. Shit like that would reduce our overall energy consumption and help us save resources and pollute less.

As said, we ain;t fucking the earth, we're fucking our environment that we live in. But given most people want to consume stuff now, its highly unlikely anyone will give enough of a fuck until the sea water is filling their living room.

[Kickstart]

[Vincey B]

https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5368194.stm

Looks like someone else has fallen for it, hook line and sinker.

Sensational graphics would be a picture of ground zero with water over it and fish swimming around American flags, a satallite image with areas shaded is not what I would call sensational.