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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/30/fossil-fuel-industry-air-pollution-fund-research-caltech-climate-change-denial>
"The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate
science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the
early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve”
that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.
A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about
$158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in
measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.
Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at
the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This “Keeling curve” has tracked the
steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and
has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.
The fossil fuel interests backed a group, known as the Air Pollution
Foundation, that issued funding to Keeling to measure CO2 alongside a related
effort to research the smog that regularly blighted Los Angeles at the time.
This is earlier than any previously known climate research funded by oil
companies.
In the research proposal for the money – uncovered by Rebecca John, a
researcher at the Climate Investigations Center, and published by the climate
website DeSmog – Keeling’s research director, Samuel Epstein, wrote about a new
carbon isotope analysis that could identify “changes in the atmosphere” caused
by the burning of coal and petroleum.
“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the
atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of
equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable
significance to civilization,” Epstein, a researcher at the California
Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.
Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate
involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings
of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this
science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate
crisis.
“They contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry
was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth’s climate
on a scale significant to human civilization,” said Geoffrey Supran, an expert
in historic climate disinformation at the University of Miami.
“These findings are a startling confirmation that big oil has had its finger on
the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years – for twice my lifetime –
and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day. They make a mockery of
the oil industry’s denial of basic climate science decades later.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
