How Bad Is Global Warming?

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Thu Feb 13, 2020 7:26 pm

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ate-crisis

Earth just had hottest January since records began, data shows

- Average global temperature 2.5F above 20th-century average
- Antarctic has begun February with several temperature spikes


Oliver Milman @olliemilman Thu 13 Feb 2020 17.42 GMT Last modified on Thu 13 Feb 2020 20.20 GMT

Last month was the hottest January on record over the world’s land and ocean surfaces, with average temperatures exceeding anything in the 141 years of data held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The record temperatures in January follow an exceptionally warm 2019, which has been ranked as the second hottest year for the planet’s surface since reliable measurements started. The past five years and the past decade are the hottest in 150 years of record-keeping, an indication of the gathering pace of the climate crisis.

According to Noaa, the average global land and ocean surface temperature last month was 2.5F (or 1.14C) above the 20th-century average. This measurement marginally surpassed the previous January record, set in 2016.

A pulse of unusual warmth was felt across much of Russia, Scandinavia and eastern Canada, where temperatures were an incredible 9F (5C) above average, or higher. The Swedish town of Örebro reached 10.3C, its hottest January temperature since 1858, while Boston experienced its hottest ever January day, at 23C (74F).

Meanwhile, the Antarctic has begun February with several temperature spikes. The southern polar continent broke 20C (68F) for the first time in its history on 9 February, following another previous high of 18.3C just three days previously. Scientists called the readings “incredible and abnormal”.

Noaa said the four warmest Januaries on record have occurred since 2016, while the 10 warmest Januaries have taken place since 2002.

The world’s governments agreed in 2015 to keep the global temperature increase to well below 2C, compared with the pre-industrial era, in order to stave off disastrous flooding, food insecurity, heatwaves and mass displacement of people.

However, planet-warming emissions from human activity are not showing any sign of decline, let alone the deep cuts needed to meet the 2C goal and address the climate crisis. According to scientists, the world must halve its emissions by 2030 to stand any chance of avoiding disastrous climate breakdown.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby BenDhyan » Thu Feb 13, 2020 11:38 pm

^ Yes, it surpassed the previous record set in 2016 by only 0.04°F (0.02°C).

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202001
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Fri Feb 14, 2020 1:46 am

"Only"? Also from your link (my bold):

January 2020 marked the 44th consecutive January and the 421st consecutive month with temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th century average.

January 2016 and 2020 were the only Januaries with a global land and ocean surface temperature departure from average above 1.8°F (1.0°C). The four warmest Januaries have occurred since 2016; while the 10 warmest Januaries have all occurred since 2002.


It just keeps getting warmer and warmer. 0.02°C may not sound like much, but year over year it adds up, and on a planetary scale that's a hell of a lot of heat being trapped. That's bad. Humanity has thrived because we've had a relatively stable climate with only long-term shifts with plenty of time to adapt up until now. Now we're changing things so fast that we can literally see it changing in front of our eyes.

We've probably passed several tipping points already, and risk our climate rapidly changing to a new state. Many places can become uninhabitable, as in, you will die if you go outside and sit completely still in the shade for an hour. That's going to fuck up our food supply (no, we can't just start planting in the areas that thaw out, the soil is shit) and access to water, and that's going to lead to mass migrations, starvation, war and fascists on the rise everywhere.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby BenDhyan » Fri Feb 14, 2020 2:42 am

DrEvil » Fri Feb 14, 2020 3:46 pm wrote:It just keeps getting warmer and warmer. 0.02°C may not sound like much, but year over year it adds up, and on a planetary scale that's a hell of a lot of heat being trapped.

It has been getting warmer, no dispute, but it is not year after year, that increase is over 4 years, which means at this rate, if my calculations are correct, it will take 200 years for the temperature to become 1°C warmer.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby brainpanhandler » Fri Feb 14, 2020 9:57 am

:fingerwag:
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Fri Feb 14, 2020 6:17 pm

BenDhyan » Fri Feb 14, 2020 8:42 am wrote:
DrEvil » Fri Feb 14, 2020 3:46 pm wrote:It just keeps getting warmer and warmer. 0.02°C may not sound like much, but year over year it adds up, and on a planetary scale that's a hell of a lot of heat being trapped.

It has been getting warmer, no dispute, but it is not year after year, that increase is over 4 years, which means at this rate, if my calculations are correct, it will take 200 years for the temperature to become 1°C warmer.


Yes, it is year after year, with some small variations due to natural cycles like El Nino, but the trend is consistently going upwards.

Your calculations are also wrong. You picked two years with a small difference in temperature and extrapolated it out 200 years.

Image
https://xkcd.com/605/

Temperatures go up by about 0.2C per decade, so in 200 years it will be 4 degrees warmer, but that trend might very well accelerate because of various feedback effects, like the permafrost thawing and ice coverage getting smaller, reflecting less sunlight.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Cordelia » Tue Feb 18, 2020 4:58 pm

Jeff Bezos says he's giving $10 billion — about 7.7% of his net worth — to fight climate change

Rebecca Harrington Feb 17, 2020, 1:36 PM

Jeff Bezos said on Monday that he's giving $10 billion to fight climate change.

The Amazon CEO and richest man in the world announced in a post on Instagram that he'd start the Bezos Earth Fund. He said he expects to start giving out grants this summer.

With an estimated net worth of nearly $130 billion, his pledge accounts for about 7.7% of his wealth.

"Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet," Bezos said. "I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share."

https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-be ... nge-2020-2


That’s about $1.30 per person on the planet, give or take a cent or two in a fluctuating population. (Leaves him with only about $119.99 Billion.)

I'm committing $10 billion to start and will begin issuing grants this summer. Earth is the one thing we all have in common — let's protect it, together.⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣
—Jeff



It'll be interesting, how he allocates his funds; late last year he said:

We have to go to space to save Earth...”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ts/598363/


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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Tue Feb 18, 2020 5:51 pm

^^He's already spending about one billion a year on his space program, so I'm assuming his climate fund will be separate from that. He could start with electrifying his own fleet of delivery vehicles, and maybe do something about his fleet of airplanes (largest air cargo hauler in the world I think).

Also, he's not wrong about going to space, at least in the long term. Earth has finite space, energy and resources, space does not. He's wildly optimistic on some aspects, but going there is a no-brainer in my opinion.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Elvis » Thu Mar 12, 2020 10:11 am

https://www.ftm.nl/dutch-multinationals ... te-sceptic

About the Shell Papers

This article is part of the Shell Papers, a joint research project conducted by Platform Authentieke Journalistiek and Follow the Money, into the ties between the Dutch government and the oil giant. In April 2019, we filed a total of 17 FOIA requests, demanding copies of all Shell-related documents from nine ministries, three provinces and five municipalities.

As of March 2020, the FOIA procedures are still ongoing. You can track their progress here: [button]

For nine years, multinationals like Shell and Bayer funded a prominent climate denier
By Bas van Beek, Alexander Beunder, Jilles Mast and Merel de Buck

The personal archives of prominent Dutch climate denier Frits Böttcher (who died in 2008) reveal that he received over a million guilders – close to half a million in euros – from Shell and other Dutch multinationals during the 1990s. The explicit objective: to question human responsibility for global warming.

This article in one minute

Between 1989 and 1998, Dutch multinationals paid over one million guilders (close to half a million euros) to prominent climate sceptic Frits Böttcher (1915-2008), with the explicit goal of sowing doubts about climate change and humanity’s role in it.

Böttcher used the money to set up an international network of climate sceptics. He produced multiple reports, books and opinion pieces. In these he wrote, for instance, that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist and that CO2 is not dangerous, quite the opposite: it’s ‘good for plants’.

The doubt created led, among other things, to a lack of political support for regulatory measures with regard to CO2 reduction during the 1990s.

Funding for Böttcher’s ‘CO2 project’ finally ran out in 1998 . His 24 sponsors were concerned about public opinion and the climate scepticism lobby proved incapable of stopping the Kyoto Protocol being signed in 1997.

This research is part of the Shell Papers, a joint research project conducted by Platform Authentieke Journalistiek and Follow the Money, into the ties between the Dutch government and the oil giant.




This article was published in English on March 3, 2020. Read the original article in Dutch here.

Frits Böttcher would later refer to it as a ‘historic moment’. On December 21, 1989, the retired chemistry professor visited Shell’s headquarters in Amsterdam. That day, Shell supervisory director Jan Choufoer was going to introduce him to the head of the company: managing director Huub van Engelshoven.

Böttcher was highly regarded in the Netherlands. He’d been teaching at Leiden University for decades, and he was on various supervisory boards: Pakhoed, Hoogovens, Elsevier Scientific publishers and 11 others. He was an active member of the VVD [conservative-liberal political party] and – from 1966 to 1974 – he was the President of the Raad van Advies voor het Wetenschapsbeleid [the government’s advisory council on scientific policy] and from 1973 to 1976 he was a member of the Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid [scientific council for government policy]. Choufoer and Böttcher had become acquainted when the chemistry professor acted as one of the permanent advisors of Shell’s research department.

To the general public, Böttcher was primarily known as the co-founder and former chair of the Dutch branch of the Club of Rome. This informal association, founded in 1968 by political, academic and business leaders, had issued a resounding alarm about unbridled economic and population growth, as well as the finite nature of fossil fuels in its 1971 report The Limits to Growth.

But according to Böttcher, the Club of Rome’s worrying conclusions didn’t mean that the whole system had to be upended. On the contrary: he disagreed with the call from left-wing environmental movements for far-reaching government intervention. For example, in the autumn of 1989, he published two opinion pieces in NRC Handelsblad [a Dutch broadsheet], in which he resisted the ‘witch hunt’ on CO2 – a chemical ‘the entire food chain on the planet is based upon’. The title of his first piece: ‘Our planet is not a greenhouse’.

To Böttcher’s delight, this message had also been adopted by Shell’s boardroom. ‘I allowed myself to be persuaded by a number of contacts – generally from Shell circles – to take on a CO2/greenhouse effect project,’ he wrote in one of the countless letters he left to posterity, which are now stored at the Noord-Hollands Archief [North Holland Archive] and which Platform Authentieke Journalistiek was able to peruse. In another note, he wrote about his first meeting with Van Engelshoven: ‘At the end of the meeting, Huub stated that Shell wanted to make 80,000 guilders available for my project.’


About this investigation

Frits Böttcher (1915-2008) admitted that he ‘could never throw anything away’. The whopping 15.9 metres of documents that are stored at the Noord-Hollands Archief in Haarlem prove that he wasn’t exaggerating. He meticulously recorded all his meetings and conversations, whether on the telephone or in person, sometimes even adding a brief biography of the person he had spoken with.

This article is based on the folders that were organised under the name ‘CO2/greenhouse project’. In the past few months, PAJ has combed through these folders. We did so in the context of the Shell Papers, a major investigation into Shell, in cooperation with Follow the Money. The documentation provides unique insight into the manner in which a considerable proportion of the Dutch business community deployed Böttcher’s name and skills to raise doubts about the causes of climate change as well as the necessity of reducing CO2 emissions.

Some of Böttcher’s notes are handwritten and merely state the name of a company sponsor and the sum donated, while others are extensive minutes of meetings, written out by one of his assistants. The attention to detail is remarkable: there are even documents that note who sat where or which wine was served during a business lunch or dinner.


Separate bank account

Van Engelshoven set one important precondition for the financial support of the CO2 project: Böttcher had to convince at least three other companies to co-sponsor it. An easy assignment for Böttcher, who had held over a dozen supervisory board positions and was therefore properly integrated into various company networks. He soon convinced AkzoNobel, Hoogovens and the ANWB. ‘I had that taken care of in less than a week,’ he later wrote with some glee. In 1990, Samenwerkende Elektriciteits-Productiebedrijven (SEP), DSM, KLM and Pakhoed joined as well.

The archived documents revealed 15 other companies and organisations that supported the CO2 project, including NAM, Gasunie, Texaco, Schiphol and the German chemical giant Bayer. For example, on 2 May 1996, Willem Lindenhovius, head of Public Affairs at the NAM, wrote to Böttcher: ‘On behalf of [NAM director] Jan Oele it is our pleasure to confirm that the NAM is willing to donate f 12,500 this year and the next, specifically for the CO2 greenhouse activities.’

At Hoogovens, both the 1988-1993 chairman of the board Olivier van Royen and his successor Maarten van Veen happily sponsored Böttcher. Furthermore, the chemistry professor’s archive contains letters from DSM board member Ruud Selman and chairman of Gasunie’s board George Verberg, all promising to sponsor him. Böttcher got in touch with the Samenwerkende Elektriciteits-Productiebedrijven (SEP) via chairman of the board Niek Ketting, who was – like Böttcher - also an active member of the VVD. Ian Christmas, chairman of the International Iron and Steel Industry(IISI), personally ensured that this international trade association also provided funding.

In Böttcher’s opinion however, no company’s support was as important as Shell’s. He wrote that the oil company is the project’s ‘godfather, so to speak’ and was its ‘number one’ sponsor. In a document dated 1995, Böttcher lists his ‘loyal ‘supporters’ in ‘Shell’s corner’: ‘In alphabetic order: Harry Beckers, Jan Choufoer, Peter van Duursen, Huub van Engelshoven, Hein Hooykaas, Henny de Ruiter, Karel Swart, Gerrit Wagner, Ernst Werner.’ In 1997 and 1998, the project’s two final years, John Jennings, Peter Langcake and the later CEO Jeroen van der Veer were involved in sponsoring on Shell’s behalf.

The payments are routed via Böttcher’s Global Institute for the study of natural resources. Böttcher also opened a separate bank account, ‘Conto separato CO2’, for company donations. All in all, he received well over one million guilders in donations for the CO2 project.

Böttcher did not spend the money on himself: most of it was used to pay two assistants who arranged meetings, kept minutes and typed out letters for the professor. The remaining funds were spent on travel expenses, including multiple trips to the United States, Germany and Brussels, as well as on various lunches and dinners with his many contacts. The chemistry professor himself worked pro bono, convinced by the need to fight against ‘the CO2 witch hunt’.

Böttcher’s personal motivation to partake in the climate debate, however, didn’t mean that he wasn’t influenced by his funders’ wishes. Early on, the participating companies ask him to internationalise the CO2 project; he responds by contacting renowned climate sceptics in the USA. When Shell manager Van Engelshoven asks for a combative article in the trade publication De Ingenieur [The Engineer], Böttcher delivers: he entitles the piece ‘Climate Change and the CO2 Myth’, and attacks politicians who ‘promote unrealistic objectives’.

In the media, Böttcher insists that the IPCC is politically motivated, that CO2 does not contribute to rising temperatures, that sea levels will decrease, not rise and that, taking population growth and increasing energy demands into account, it’s an illusion to believe that a climate treaty could lead to a reduction in CO2. And, finally, his hobby horse: CO2 is good for plant growth.

In a 1995 interview with 2Vandaag, a public tv news programme, he claims that ‘Plants are craving for more CO2 in the atmosphere. [..] The current increase, from 0.028 to 0.035 percent, is merely the first step in the right direction for the plant world. Let’s emphasize the positive, instead of harping on about CO2.’

[video in Dutch]


The Club of Rome man

Böttcher’s CO2 project is a Dutch example of a strategy that is applied globally by the fossil fuel industry, described extensively in books such as Merchants of Doubtby Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, and De Twijfelbrigadeby Jan-Paul van Soest. The strategy boils down to this: find a renowned scientist, fund him to sow doubt about the damaging consequences of your product, and subsequently build your lobby against government regulation upon this foundation.

It’s not by sheer accident that the Dutch multinationals throw in their lot with Böttcher at the end of the 1980s, when climate change enters the public debate. For example, the UN Climate Panel IPCC was founded in 1988 and during the campaign for the general elections of 1989, Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers (christian democrats) revealed his party’s intention to reduce CO2 emissions by 2 percent per year in the Netherlands. Six weeks before Böttcher’s meeting with Van Engelshoven, in November 1989, global leaders convening in Noordwijk (NL), almost agreed upon an international treaty to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

In Frits Böttcher, the fossil fuel industry found a partner who was a media darling. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t a climate scientist at all, but a professor in chemistry. ‘I don’t think he cared for the real science behind it,’ says former climatologist Wieger Fransen, who started his career at Böttcher’s Global Institute and subsequently worked for the scientific department of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI). ‘Böttcher didn’t bother with scientific climate publications,’ remembers Fransen. ‘He got his information from newspapers or magazines such as New Scientist. All secondary publications, and no peer reviewed articles.’

Böttcher was thoroughly aware of his image as a socially engaged academic. From his notes on a meeting he had in 1994 with Shell’s Van Engelshoven: ‘Huub emphasised again that, as a scientist, I am perceived as more neutral than people from the business community are.’ His role in the Club of Rome was convenient: ‘The Club of Rome and particularly my actions as part of the latter are a myth,’ he wrote in December 1996. ‘It should be kept alive.’


Cherry-picking

In the USA, in the 1980s, the fossil fuel industry had managed to attract major scientists willing to disperse doubt about climate change. Those included Frederick Seitz and Fred Singer, two physicists with impressive academic careers who were, among other things, involved in developing the atom bomb.

Seitz, Singer and a handful of other American scientists became deeply engaged in the climate debate. Sometimes they spoke out personally, other times on behalf of organisations such as the Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) and the George C. Marshall Institute, which were both co-funded by the industry. ‘They used their scientific credentials to present themselves as authorities, and they used their authority to try to discredit any science they didn’t like,’ Oreskes and Conway wrote, summarizing the approach of these scientists.

Industry interests were huge, but that wasn’t their sole motivation, Van Soest explains: ‘Funding of this kind is correlated with a certain ideological conviction; conservative, and convinced of the blessings of the free market. They were also trying to justify themselves.’

In 1989, Frederick Seitz published the report Global Warming: What Does the Science Tell Us? on behalf of the Marshall Institute. Oreskes and Conway describe how Seitz and his people ‘cherry-picked the data,’ in order to distort the assessment of the causes of the temperature increase observed. “Their initial strategy wasn’t to deny the fact of global warming, but to blame it on the sun,’ Oreskes and Conway wrote, leaving the impression that CO2 didn’t matter.

Even though it received a barrage of criticism, What Does the Science Tell Us proved incredibly influential. John Sununu, chief of staff of the then US president George Bush Senior was holding it up ‘like a cross to a vampire, fending off greenhouse warming’, according to somebody present at the climate conference in Noordwijk in 1989. Sununu would subsequently play a ‘leading role’ in thwarting this conference’s aims.

Frits Böttcher was deeply impressed by the Marshall Institute’s report. He forwarded it to Elsevier science editor Simon Rozendaal, who used it in his first article as a climate sceptic, published in February 1990: ‘Hoezo broeikas?’ [‘Greenhouse? What greenhouse?’].

[video in Dutch]

Meanwhile, Böttcher had developed close ties with the report’s author Seitz. He’d also befriended Fred Singer and Donald Pearlman – known as the ‘High Priest of the Carbon Club’, by dint of his work for the fossil fuel industry and willfully derailing several climate conferences. Böttcher consulted all three substantively and strategically about how to fight the IPCC and the ‘climate witch hunt’.

On 5 July 1992, Böttcher receives an invitation from Fred Singer. It’s a token of appreciation: ‘I hope you agree to join SEPP’s advisory board. Your advice and commitment are important to us.’

Encouraged by Huub van Engelshoven, Böttcher tries to set up a European sister organisation for the George C. Marshall Institute. Initially, he fails: the organisation wishes to keep a tight control over activities taking place in its name. However, the board expresses their hope that Böttcher will find another way to persevere. Eventually, in 1994, he does. With the Brits John Emsley and Roger Bate, Böttcher founds the European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF), a European network of climate sceptic scientists. In the mid 1990s, ESEF publishes two climate sceptical books. ESEF would later be absorbed by the Heidelberg Appeal Nederland and, yet later, by the Groene Rekenkamer [Green Accounting Office], which is still active.


In the board rooms

While Böttcher’s simplistic but clear and crisp narrative about ‘the CO2 myth’ played well in the media, the majority of his work took place behind closed doors. On February 2 1994, he wrote DSM board member Ruud Selman that his objective was to provide ‘ammunition' to opponents of climate policy and to ‘help them prevent all kinds of harping being pushed through’.

The archived materials reveal that Böttcher’s strategy was very similar to that of his American colleagues. He would write a climate sceptic book or article, and his contacts and sponsors within the business community would then disseminate it amongst colleagues, politicians, journalists and, of course, the IPCC.

And it worked. For example, the World Coal Institute, the global federation of coal companies, copied parts of Böttcher’s pamflet Science or fiction (1992) in its newsletter. The institute subsequently handed out that newsletter during the environment conference in Rio, to great acclaim, and later gave it to the IPCC working parties that would prepare the first ever climate conference. Ian Christmas, chair of the International Iron and Steel Industry (IISI), made sure that Böttcher’s books were disseminated to all steel company board members globally. And Lois Johnston, Texaco’s press spokesperson, did the same, approaching all her colleagues in the oil industry and her media contacts.

Böttcher also managed to get his message across to business leaders and politicians in his home country. ‘He was held in high esteem by the intellectual elite, particularly because of his Club of Rome background,’ explains Pier Vellinga, co-founder of the IPCC and, in the early 1990s, the first climate change professor in the Netherlands. ‘He would give lectures at events where the Dutch elite met. That’s how his climate denial stories got to infuse both politics and policy.’

Vellinga would regularly give lectures about his work for the IPPC at the same events. ‘Usually, a deafening silence would follow my speech,’ he says. ‘Or Böttcher’s sympathisers would attack me, claiming that – as a TU Delft graduate – I lacked the proper background in meteorology.’


Intricate network

Böttcher had an impressive network. This is how the former ceo of KLM, Jan de Soet, described Böttcher on the occasion of his 80th birthday, in October 1995: ‘Throughout his life he has held positions in a wide range of circles, colleges, guilds and countless associations and companies. He operates in a mystical, intricate network that comprises almost all spiritual and social movements in our society. A cluster of which the once so formidable ‘200 van Mertens’ could only dream of.’

The chemistry professor was a member of two informal associations that admitted only the absolute top of the Dutch political and economic elite: the Tafelronde, and De 8CHT. He himself founded the latter in 1972; the group met approximately six times a year. Other members included Allerd Stikker (DSM), Jan de Soet (KLM), André Spoor, Hans Wiegel (VVD), Nout Wellink, Henny de Ruiter (Shell advisory board ), Karel Vuursteen (chairman of the board at Heineken) and Hans Wijers.

‘He regularly dropped by at the energy department at [the Department of] Economic Affairs,’ says Frans W. Saris, who was the director of the Energy Research Centre (ECN) from 1996 to 2002. Stan Dessens, who headed the Energy division at the Department of Economic Affairs between 1988 and 1999, admits that he supported Böttcher: ‘I opined that, as the spokesperson of a countervailing position, he should be given a proper platform. After all, he had academic standing and a fine reputation, and wasn’t someone you’d expected to be politically opportunistic.’

Parliamentary archives show that especially the VVD welcomed Böttcher’s scepsis. Jan te Veldhuis, who was their environmental spokesperson between 1982 and 2003, referred to Böttcher when he called for a ‘realistic CO2 policy’ in 1992. Te Veldhuis would continue to emphasise scientific dispute and doubt in the following years.

In an interview, Te Veldhuis informs us that he and Ad Lansink (CDA) ‘pushed’ for Böttcher’s invitation to speak before Parliament’s climate committee in 1995. During that talk, Böttcher went off on his hobby horse: ‘The only fact is that CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing [..] and that this is beneficial for plants. Everything else is hypothetical.’

His soundbite made it into the evening news. ‘I was the only speaker at that meeting who got on TV,’ Böttcher wrote afterwards to Dirk Hudig, a lobbyist for Imperial Chemical Industries. ‘I was on the eight ‘o clock news and got my point across well.’


Funding dries up

‘I have gradually reached the point at which, in my country, I am viewed as the opposition leader regarding the subject,’ Böttcher writes IISI’s Ian Christmas in early 1996. Nevertheless, his status proved no match for the Zeitgeist. By then, the chemistry professor has been hoping for months that Shell would recommence its support for the CO2 project. Shell no longer wanted to fund climate sceptics directly, ‘fearing public opinion,’ Böttcher writes.

Finally, in September 1996, Henny de Ruiter calls. De Ruiter is a member of Shell’s advisory board and, at that point in time, one of the most influential people in the Netherlands. He had bad news to impart, Böttcher writes ‘[De Ruiter] spoke to [John] Jennings [director of Shell Trading in London, eds.], who acknowledged that he hesitates to support me, because Shell has already made other mistakes such as the Brent Spar, and Nigeria.’

But there’s a sliver of hope. Böttcher – whose notes, incidentally, show no ire about the nefarious events with which his work is apparently lumped in – is given an opportunity. [Jennings] allowed himself to be persuaded,’ Böttcher writes. ‘I can come in and plead my case.’

Böttchers new strategy is revealed in his extensive notes on the conversation with Jennings at Shell’s London headquarters. If Shell is afraid to fund climate sceptics, the company should finance Böttcher’s new project instead: ‘energy and sustainable development’.

Böttcher explains his interlocutors that this new project is about the ‘dominant role of energy in society’ and will serve to ‘warn politicians and economists who are glib about the implementation of drastic energy taxes and comparable interventions’.

The subject is eminently important to Shell. The company knows that heads of state are about to take measures aimed at reducing CO2 emissions at the upcoming 1997 Kyoto summit. And the concept of a European energy or CO2 tax has already been raised by environment ministers such as Angela Merkel (Germany) and Margreeth de Boer (Netherlands).

Jennings is enthusiastic about Böttcher’s proposal: ‘[Jennings] basically decided on the spot,’ Böttcher writes, ‘and told me that Peter Langcake would take care of the agreement and the ensuing supervision.’

In a letter to Bovag director Joop Hoekzema, Böttcher later writes: ‘On the one hand, [Jennings] no longer felt up to supporting a project that runs contrary to popular opinion. On the other hand, he was so enthusiastic about my new project “energy and sustainable development”, that he decided within the hour that Shell International would provide the entire sum required for this project in 1997: f 80,000. He has given me free reign.’

Shell’s support for the ‘energy and sustainable development’ project would turn out to be relatively short-lived. In 1998, Shell pledged support one last time – Böttcher would receive a final 30,000 guilders for completing ‘activities with regard to CO2 and sustainable energy’ – and that would be the end of it.

Texaco and other CO2 project sponsors withdrew that year too. The preceding year, Böttcher had already noted that the American company seemed to be getting nervous: Texaco had asked him to ‘continue’ the CO2 project, but to ‘appear to be working on something else’. To this end, Böttcher renamed his ‘Conto Separato CO2’ into ‘SD’, for Sustainable Development.



DSM had a different reason to cease its funding: ‘[the decision] is based on our impression that the impact of your lobby is dwindling,’ the company informs him. The context isn’t stated in DSM’s letter: the Kyoto Protocol had amply demonstrated that the world paid more heed to the IPCC than it did to a handful of sceptics.

Böttcher, never one to be disparaged, persisted and right up until his death in 2008, he continued to lobby, to network and to provide environmental advice to his friends and contacts in the business community. Just a few months after the CO2 project was closed down, he told IISI’s Ian Christmas how happy he was with ‘the freedom’ he now had to elect his own subjects. From now on, he could disregard the matter of ‘sustainability’: ‘We will continue the battle that we’ve been fighting for years’.


Foundations of climate scepticism

So what did Böttcher achieve with his efforts? That’s where opinions differ. His main credit seems to be that he triggered a debate whether climate change exists, and if so, whether it was caused by human intervention. In September 1996, he told Clement Malin and Jaap Meinema of Texaco that, although ‘few reports and books are actually read,’ they do have an effect: ‘People realise that the opposition is growing.’

Moreover, Böttcher laid the foundations for Dutch climate scepticism, a movement that still garners plenty of attention via organisations such as Clintel and right-wing political parties such as the PVV and Forum voor Democratie, that are often bandying the same points that Böttcher harped on about in the 1990s.

Climate professor Pier Vellinga describes Böttcher as ‘instrumental’ in delaying climate policy in the Netherlands in the 1990s. ‘His publications reached all the way up to the Department of Economic Affairs and were used to contend that things weren’t that bad and that there were too many unanswered questions.’ Vellinga believes this to be one of the reasons why the Netherlands, other than Germany, never implemented any effective policy concerning CO2 reduction.

Margreeth de Boer (PvdA / Labour) was minister of Housing, Planning and Environment from 1994 to 1998. She negotiated the Kyoto Protocol on behalf of the Netherlands. When she presented the results – an intention to reduce CO2 emissions by 6 percent in 2012, relative to 1990 – she got the cold shoulder. In fact: ‘people were downright unhappy’. The target was never met: between 1990 and 2012 Dutch CO2 emissions managed to increase by 1.2 percent.



According to De Boer, compulsory measures such as a CO2 tax were ‘on the table every now and then,’ but there was never enough support for them. When we spoke with her, she explained that it was mainly the Department of Economic Affairs that thwarted such measures: ‘Hans Wijers was definitely convinced that it would be bad for the economy and for businesses. We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, he claimed, and that was also the VVD’s point of view.’

Wijers, currently on ING’s advisory board, qualifies De Boer’s statement: ‘My position was that we definitely had to take climate change seriously, but we also needed to ensure that we wouldn’t close the most efficient gas fuelled power plants in the Netherlands while Germany was still fuelling its power stations with lignite.’ Wijers claims that this didn’t rank high on De Boer’s department’s list of priorities: ‘They were a bit more visionary and thought: “we’ll figure out the rest later”.’

In retrospect, Wijers recognises that the Netherlands could and should have done more at the time. But support was lacking, he claims, both in society and in the cabinet. ‘Our country tends to cast itself in a visionary role, while it’s actually in the rearguard.’ Nowadays the Netherlands is dangling somewhere at the bottom when considering the share of sustainable energy in the total energy production.

But is that Böttcher’s ‘merit’? Former president of De Nederlandsche Bank Nout Wellink was a member of Böttcher’s De 8CHT and discussed climate with him there. According to Wellink, Böttcher was ‘a first-class scientist’, but when asked about the impact of his work on political policies, the answer is resolute: ‘None, at least not insofar as I observed. And he definitely was the type of man who would boast about that kind of thing.’

Hans Wiegel doesn’t agree. ‘Of course he was influential,’ the prominent member of the VVD and of De 8ACHT claims. ‘He was everywhere, everybody knew him. But he himself would never admit that. He wasn’t vain.’

Wiegel himself definitely seems to have been influenced by Böttcher’s ideas. In a 2015 opinion piece in NRC Handelsblad he wrote: ‘I am hesitant to write this, but years ago the only Dutch member of the Club of Rome, the late professor Frits Böttcher, said that all these alarming stories about climate change are unsubstantiated.’






The CO2 project was funded by the following companies and organisations: AkzoNobel, Amoco, ANWB, Bayer, Bovag, DSM, Fluor Daniel, Foundation BBMB, Gasunie, Hoogovens/Tata Steel, IISI, ING, KLM, Lions Club, Mabanaft, NAM, Pakhoed (Vopak), Schiphol, SEP, Shell, Texaco, ThyssenKrupp and VNA.

AkzoNobel stated it was ‘difficult’ to respond because it was ‘so long ago’. The company did inform us that its objective is to reduce its CO2 emissions by 50% in 2030 in comparison to 2018.

The ANWB [Royal Dutch Touring Club] confirmed that the organisation funded Böttcher. At the time, according to spokesperson Ad Vonk, ANWB wanted objective scientific information about what the climate problem entailed and owing to Bottcher’s ‘excellent scientific reputation’ he was selected to this end. After internal criticism from the environment department of the lack of scientific substantiation for Böttcher’s contentions in his publication ‘Science or Fiction’, the department urged then director Nouwen to stop funding the latter. It is unclear whether this was actually done, says Vonk. The ANWB did underwrite the necessity of “turning around the increased CO2 emissions” as early as 1990 in a ‘draft standpoint’.

Bayer informed us that it was “hard” to answer the question whether they provided financial support to Böttcher because the people involved are no longer in the company’s employ. The German company could not find the name Böttcher or Global Institute in its archives. Bayer declared that it wishes to manufacture in a carbon-neutral manner in 2030.

Bovag admits it sponsored Böttcher.‘There is little to be found on the subject, but we have indications – and we assume – that these are right,’ stated a spokesperson. However: ‘BOVAG in the 1990s was a different organisation to BOVAG in 2020’. The company is a Formula E (electric car racing) member, says it supports the Paris climate objectives and is convinced that CO2 emissions must be reduced.

DSM says it is ‘unlikely’ that it supported research that set out to undermine scientific findings. The chemical company also stated that it had already concluded a covenant with the Dutch government in 1993 aimed at energy saving and that, as early as the 1990s, it explicitly stated the importance of reducing CO2 emissions.

Gasunie was split into GasTerra and Gasunie in 2005. The archive for the years before 2005 is lodged with GasTerra. When asked, the company indicated it had been unable to find anything about financing Böttcher.

ING stated: ‘Unfortunately, we can no longer ascertain whether this limited donation took place 25 years ago, nor why this would have been made or at whose request’. To the bank it is ‘abundantly clear’ that there is a climate crisis and it says it does its best to align its loan portfolio with the Paris climate agreement.

KLM states ‘there is no indication whatsoever’ that the airline company made a payment to Frits Bottcher 30 years ago. KLM strives ‘to create a sustainable future for air travel’ and points out that it started implementing sustainability measures in the 1990s.

NAM, which is owned by ExxonMobil and Shell, informed us that: ‘It is correct that during this period NAM provided a small financial contribution to Professor Böttcher’s work. We can no longer properly ascertain what kind of work this concerned exactly.’

Schiphol ‘Cannot confirm nor deny having availed itself of Mr Böttcher’s services in any way in the past.’

Shell’s press serviceresponded on behalf of CEO Marjan van Loon as follows:‘This was 25 - 30 years ago and we cannot speculate about what exactly happened and in which context. We are going to look into this. I think it is important to keep in mind that science has conducted a great deal of research into the climate issue, for decades. This made energy transition increasingly societally relevant. Shell has been very clear about its position on climate change and CO2’s role for a long time now. We have been reporting on this in our annual reports and sustainability reports for well over two decades.’ According to Van Loon it is important for society to focus on achieving the Paris Climate Agreement’s objectives. ‘Shell fully backs these objectives. We support the various initiatives that will accelerate energy transition including the Nederlandse Klimaatakkoord [National Climate Agreement] and the European Union’s target of no net CO2 emissions by 2050. This is what our strategy focuses on.’

Tata Steel,which absorbed the former Hoogovens, informed us that it took cognisance of ‘the fact that financial support was provided to the climate sceptical activities of the late Professor Böttcher during the 1990s’. Tata Steel’s current board of directors was unaware of this. Tata Steel says it underwrites the Paris Climate Agreement and has introduced initiatives aimed at reducing CO2 emissions and energy consumption. For the record, the company wishes to point out that Böttcher was the co-founder of the Club of Rome and was a member of the Wetenschappelijke Raad voor Regeringsbeleid.

ThyssenKrupp responded as follows: ‘We cannot confirm that we ever had anything to do with Prof. Böttcher. You refer to matters which took place 25 years ago, far beyond the statutory archiving timeframe. We can however confirm that we do not support climate scepticism’. The head of media relations at ThyssenKrupp stated that the company has set itself the goal of operating in a climate neutral fashion in 2050.

Vopak, the legal successor of Pakhoed, stated that promoting climate scepticism does not align with its donation policy and that no information could be found in the company’s archive that confirms a donation to Böttcher. Vopak emphasises that it underwrites concerns about climate change and it has an ‘active policy’ to ‘play a facilitating role in the energy transition’.

SHV Energy has found proof that the company supported the ‘Energy and Sustainable Development’ project financially. ‘SHV, in all its facets, focuses on sustainability and contributing to improving the climate. Denial or scepticism is not part of that,’ according to their spokesperson.

Amoco, Texaco, Fluor Daniel, Foundation BBMB, IISI, Mabanaft and the Lions Club have - despite repeated efforts - not commented. SEP’s legal successor, the Nederlands Elektriciteits administratiekantoor, is permanently closed. VNA was dissolved.


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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Sounder » Thu Mar 12, 2020 2:55 pm

It is a great wonder of life that different people will take any given information presented and only see the same things they saw before the presentation, and with diametrically opposite opinions on the same material.

I see a guy that was there at the founding of the Club of Rome and knew what bullshit it was from the beginning. He didn't try to get rich off of promoting his convictions, unlike notable others on the other side of the issue. He kept good records, indicating he was not embarrassed by his convictions, unlike that Mann fellow and his hockey stick who couldn't seem to keep any records other than a scary picture.

Then I also wonder how it is that these largest corporations in the world all got the memo in 1998 that Climate Change Alarmism is something they should support rather than oppose. Could it be that the big bosses at big corp. have bigger bosses than themselves?
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Thu Mar 12, 2020 6:06 pm

^^Or.... physics is a thing that does stuff.

You do know that the hockey stick is real and that Mann didn't fudge any of his numbers, right?

It is a great wonder of life that different people will take any given information presented and only see the same things they saw before the presentation


My irony detector just exploded.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Sounder » Fri Mar 13, 2020 9:30 am

What's ironic is that you can say; '^^Or.... physics is a thing that does stuff', as if waving a magic wand to refute what I said, and it works! At least for fellow alarmists.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby DrEvil » Fri Mar 13, 2020 6:45 pm

So you're saying that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas?
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Mar 13, 2020 10:13 pm

On the 9th I was having a conversation with a friend who live is Las Vegas at about 3pm his time when he remarked about how warm it was there, 70 degrees F. (21C) Oh, it really warm here today, in NY, 75 degrees F. (24C)!. Don't know the temp on that date for the in between years, but in 2016 it was 81 Degrees F. (27C) on March 9th here.

For the past half-dozen or so years, perhaps longer, we've not had much of a spring; the seasons seems to have slipped directly from cold winter into hot summer,
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Sounder » Sat Mar 14, 2020 7:53 am

I don't care for alarmism for aesthetic reasons such as the IPCC being totally dependent for their legitimacy with the need to prove the assumption that is their reason for being. This represents a further institutionalization of corruption into science.

To bad that this anti-science attitude is acceptable to so many people.

Also, people that censor the opposition, such as Wiki, are technocratic social controllers and a red flag for critical thinkers.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... r_a_change


14) The ‘Svensmark Theory’ says rising solar-magnetic output, by deflecting more
cosmic rays, reduces cloudiness. This allows more of the Sun’s warmth to heat the
ocean and atmosphere (Bullet 28) instead of being reflected by clouds. In support, a
NASA study of satellite data spanning 1979-2011 (during the ‘Modern Warming’;
Bullet 12) showed decreasing cloud cover.

15) Vocal climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf (Wiki) of the Potsdam Institute for
Climate Impact Research wrongly said in 2008: "there is no viable alternative ... [to CO2
as driver of 1940-2005 warming, as] ... different authors agree that solar activity did not
significantly increase”. Yet in 1999, physicist Dr Michael Lockwood FRS (Wiki) wrote
in prestigious Nature journal: "the total magnetic flux leaving the Sun has risen by a
factor of 1.4 since 1964” and 2.3 since 1901 !

!
p.!3!of!4!
16) Lockwood showed that averaged solar magnetic flux increased 230% from 1901
to 1995, i.e. more than doubled ! The final peak value was 5 times the starting
minimum value ! Bullets 17 and 18 likewise support Svensmark’s theory.

17) After the ~300AD solar Grand Maximum (Bullet 12), within 100 years Earth
warmed to near or above today’s temperature. Then ‘sawtooth’ cooling mimicked
the Sun’s 1,000-year sawtooth decline into the Little Ice Age.

18) From 8000 to 2000BC, Earth was sometimes warmer than now for centuries. Then
unsteady cooling from 3000BC to the Little Ice Age paralleled unsteady solar decline
after the ‘Super-Grand Maximum’ of ~3000BC.

19) This 4,500-year-long cooling mocks IPCC computer models that instead predict
warming by the simultaneous (slow) rise in CO2. This is the ‘The Holocene
Temperature Conundrum’ of Liu et al. (2014). See also Bullet 6.

20) Embarrassingly for IPCC, the 8000-2000BC warm interval (Bullet 18) was already
called the ‘Holocene Climatic Optimum’ (Wiki) before IPCC's 'CO2 = pollutant'
fallacy induced today's AGW hysteria and pointless multi-trillion-dollar climate-
change industry. The warmth may have benefitted human social development.

21) Since thermometer records began (~1850; Bullet 1), sawtooth global warming
(Bullets 11, 12) correlates well with solar-magnetic flux by applying an 85-year lag,
attributable to oceanic thermal inertia (vast volume, high heat capacity and slow
mixing cause slow response to changes in solar-magnetic flux, hence cloudiness),
grossly underestimated by IPCC (Bullet 22). Thus Modern Warming is driven ~100%
by the Sun, dwarfing any CO2 effect (Bullets 5, 6).

22) The IPCC assumes this time-lag (Bullet 21) is much shorter (< 1 year) and
therefore it claims that ongoing global warming despite solar weakening (since 1991;
Bullet 12) must mean that the warming is driven by CO2 !

23) The last interglacial period, ~120,000 years ago, was warmer than our Holocene
interglacial. Humans and polar bears survived ! CO2 was then about 275 ppm, i.e.
lower than now (Bullet 8), at a time of greater warmth !

24) The joint rise of temperature and CO2 is a ‘spurious correlation’, a fluke. So
IPCC demonising CO2 as a ‘pollutant’ is a colossal blunder, costing trillions of
dollars in needless and ineffectual efforts to reduce it. Instead, governments need to
focus urgently on the imminent metre-scale Sun-driven sea level rise.

25) Although the Sun is now declining since its 1991 magnetic peak, sawtooth
warming will continue until ~2075 due to the 85-year lag (Bullet 21). Rising CO2 will
continue to raise global food production. Cooling will begin ~2075 and last at least
28 years (i.e. post-1991 solar decline to date). Our benign Holocene ‘interglacial’
period will eventually end, unfortunately.

26) IPCC says sea level (SL) from 0 to 1800AD varied < 25 centimetres (and <1 metre
since 4000BC) and never exceeded today’s SL, therefore the 30-centimetre SL rise
since 1800 (average 1.5 millimetres/year) is abnormal (they say), blaming industrial
CO2. But this claim, based on flawed cherry-picked evidence, ignores dozens of
studies of geological and archaeological 3000BC-1000AD SL benchmarks globally,
!
p.!4!of!4!
which reveal 3 or 4 rises (and falls) of 1-3 metres in < 200 years each (i.e. > 5
millimetres/year), all reaching higher than today, long before industrial CO2.

27) If humans were to halt the growth in their fossil-fuel use, CO2 would soon
stabilise at a new equilibrium value (nearer the optimum for plants).

28) By blaming global warming on atmospheric CO2, the IPCC implies that ongoing
warming of the ocean (e.g. Cheng et al. 2020) occurs via the atmosphere. But this is
backwards. In reality the Sun warms the ocean, which in turn warms the air.
Humlum et el. (2013) showed that small changes in sea-surface temperature precede
corresponding changes in air temperature by 2 months, and precede changes in
CO2's growth rate by 12 months (because warming ocean releases CO2; Bullet 9).
Thus Bullet 28 alone destroys IPCC's argument that global warming is by CO2.

29) In March 2020 I exposed Wikipedia's November 2019 deletion of its 'List of
scientists who disagree with the scientific consensus on global warming', which
named dozens of renowned PhD scientists (each with his/her own Wikipedia entry),
from diverse sciences, brave enough to publically challenge the global CO2 madness.
(Tens of thousands of other 'skeptical' scientists are too timid to join in.) Thus, your
children may never know that many prominent, impartial scientists disagree with
the claim by the under-qualified (Bullet 1) IPCC that global warming is due to man-
made CO2. This is censorship. Fortunately the list survives, both online (for now)
and hard-copy (see
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