A month and a half ago, a story was published about Exxon's internal climate scientists warning executives of the certainty of anthropocentric climate change back in 1977. The scientist's report included statements such as the general scientific agreement
that it is human-caused, the risk of agricultural output reduced or destroyed
, and that man has a time window of five to ten years before hard decisions might become critical.
Further studies conducted by their scientists reported that there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered.
Ten years later, Exxon stopped funding climate research and started funding climate change denial in the form of public reporting and federal lobbying.
I'd learned of this story from On The Media the weekend after it was published. On that show, they summarized the report and confronted Exxon's Senior Adviser for Global Public Affairs with aggressive questioning (eliciting, naturally, no answers). Since its publication, I expected it to be discussed more in the public sphere than it has. Here's a timeline of what I see as key articles:
Arctic ice is at it's smallest since the mid 1900s, continuing an escalating trend that climate scientists predicted; Romney--not the most timely of joke tellers--mocked commitments to slow climate change during the RNC. (Guardian's article on Arctic ice re-emphasized a connection for me, but I didn't like how they expressed it.) The conservatives' god-of-the-gaps move from "it's not happening" to "it's not caused by man" to "it's not caused primarily by man" to "it's too far along to fix" is no longer humorous. It's been know for a long time, and their mincing uncertainty in order to serve corporations puts the blame wholly on them.
After reading The Windup Girl earlier this year, I became hyper-aware of stories related to crops and genetic engineering.
non-renewable traits.