
Exxon's climate lie - henridf
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/14/exxons-climate-lie-change-global-warming
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snowwrestler
> In its greed Exxon helped — more than any other institution — to kill our
> planet.

This is an excellent article right up to the last sentence, which is the sort
of unfortunate hyperbole that often trips up McKibben in particular and many
climate activists in general. It's frustrating, in a discussion about how
Exxon misled the public, to see hyperbole in the other direction.

Climate change is not killing the planet. It is altering the environment in a
way that will interfere with human society, and will shift the balance for
some species.

Just to be clear: the planet is indeed being killed, in that a mass extinction
is taking place right now. But climate change is only a small factor in that.
Most species decimations have come from 3 other human sources:

1) Habitat destruction: converting wild areas (characterized by high
biodiversity) into farmland, towns, or cities (characterized by very low
biodiversity). This is the biggest impact on plant biodiversity.

2) Hunting and fish for food: taking breeding-age adults out of animal
populations faster than they can be replaced. This is the biggest impact on
ocean macrofauna, for instance.

3) Toxic pollution: point-source and non-point-source pollutants that depress
biodiversity by either directly harming plants and animals, or by altering the
local environment to make it less habitable (for example, when fertilizer
runoff feeds algal blooms that reduce free oxygen in the water).

~~~
kafkaesq
_Until now_ , species losses have been due to factors 1,2,3. But climate
change does threaten to greatly accelerate the rate of species collapse,
perhaps unstoppably so, in the coming decades and centuries.

So you're giving Exxon (and the fossil fuel industry generally) a hell of a
break, simply because thus far, we've barely been able to see the effects of
climate change.

~~~
snowwrestler
> But climate change does threaten to greatly accelerate the rate of species
> collapse, perhaps unstoppably so, in the coming decades and centuries.

What is the evidence for this? For example I'm not aware of any correlation
between the historical records of warming periods and historical records of
mass extinctions.

There is no reason that warmer temperatures or higher levels of CO2 should be
bad for life in general. As cold areas shrink, populations of species adapted
to cold habitats will suffer, but warm habitat species populations would
expand.

I'm not trying to take away from the reality or seriousness of anthropogenic
global warming, or give Exxon a pass. Just because something is real and is
bad in certain ways, that does not mean it threatens all of life on Earth,
which is how I interpret the concept of "unstoppable" species collapse.

