ExxonMobil, the Rockefellers and Antarctic climate

FORCE team members at Mt. Bitgood.

Photo © Steve Tucker 

Now that we are getting a new U.S. president it’s worth asking how Trump sees the science of climate change. On the campaign trail, he called it a hoax. And he vowed to tear up the Paris Climate Agreement. He may be waffling a bit now – we’ll see, but the question I have is how did we get here? How did a man who will lead us and the world end up thinking so little if at all of climate science and climate change? It turns out he’s not the only one who got fooled. Here’s the story.

The New York Review of Books published an essay this week¹ (first of two parts) authored by two members of the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF). The essay charges that ExxonMobil (Exxon) scientists knew about the rising threat of climate change and warned senior management that the company needed to heed these warnings. Instead ExxonMobil buried the findings under artificial argument, casting doubt on the science behind the findings – by their own scientists.

The RFF commissioned a group at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to look into the public record of what Exxon knew and when, and what they then did. The Columbia group found that Exxon scientists first reported the threat of climate change to their business and our planet in 1977. Several other Exxon studies and reports reinforcing these findings followed through the decades. The article gives some powerful quotes from these scientists, that show they found and understood the threats, and passed them on to Exxon executives. A 1982 internal report by Marvin Glaser specifically warned of the melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet in the twenty-first century.

Mount Luyendyk, Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica

Mount Luyendyk. Photo © Christine Siddoway 

Faithful Followers.

I have been absent for quite a while now working on revisions to my book White Ocean. One of the interesting things that happened in the last year was the naming of a mountain in Antarctica for me! What an honor! I owe it my my former student and now Professor Christine Siddoway who nominated my name to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. Such a warm feeling I have for a truly frigid place!

Our team camped at the foot of Mount Luyendyk over Christmas 1989. At that time the mountain was named “1070” on a reconnaissance map. The photo on this page was taken by Christine during a fly-in on a subsequent visit in 2010.

Our 1989 visit was notable for the dramatic scenery and stunning weather - that didn’t last long. We were hit by a ferocious blizzard followed by a whiteout that kept us tent-bound for several days.

Here are details:

Geographic Names Information System

Mount Luyendyk

76 29 20.63 S; 146 01 37.05 W

1070 meters (approx.)

“A summit, the northern portion of the Mount Iphigene massif in the northwestern part of Fosdick Mountains of the Ford Ranges, 2.5 miles south of Thompson Ridge between Marujupu Peak and Birchall Peaks. Named by Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names for Bruce P. Luyendyk, professor (emeritus) at the University of California Santa Barbara who has been active in international Antarctic research for 25 years. He was responsible for two expeditions and was principal investigator for five marine geophysical expeditions focusing on the Ross Sea area. His cumulative research, findings, and publications have significantly increased scientific knowledge in Antarctica.”

A news release from UC Santa Barbara about Mt. Luyendyk is here!

What is happening to Antarctic ice shelves and why should we care?

Front of Ross Ice Shelf from research icebreaker Palmer.
Photo © Bruce Luyendyk

Antarctic ice shelves are thinning. What are ice shelves and are they important in any way? These massive floating sheets of ice border over a third of the Antarctic coast. 

Ice shelves are not frozen ocean. That is sea ice. In the simplest notion they are floating glaciers and part of the cryosphere cycle in Antarctica and Greenland. The largest Antarctic ice shelf is the Ross Ice Shelf, about the size of Texas (or France) and formed by the merging of glaciers flowing off the Antarctic continent. This shelf for example, is hundreds of meters thick (up to two thousand feet or more) and floats over sea floor hundreds of meters deeper.

This spring Science magazine published a research study on the state of the Antarctic ice shelves¹.

Two Degrees Global Warming, Geoengineering, West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse!

A break in the clouds on October 29, 2014, allowed scientists
the opportunity to fly over Pine Island Glacier—one of Antarctica’s
most rapidly changing areas. The flight was part of NASA’s
Operation IceBridge, a mission that makes annual surveys
 of Greenland and Antarctica with instrumented research aircraft.
Photo Michael Studinger

Is Earth headed towards warming of two degrees Celsius this century? If yes, can it be reversed? Should it be? How would it be done? 

Two recent publications offer some startling insights. The first by hockey-stick author Michael Mann estimates when the Earth can be expected to reach a level of 2°C warming (3.5°F) of the atmosphere. The answer it seems is very soon. Mann assumes business as usual in carbon emissions, which are increasing in amount every year, and the effect of the carbon dioxide (CO2) already in the atmosphere. These numbers are easy to come by, but he has to come up with a climate sensitivity model to translate the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere into warming. He determines that an equilibrium climate sensitivity about midway between estimates of the IPCC best-fit recent climate data. From this he projects forward and estimates the year Earth’s atmosphere reaches 2°C warming is 2036, twenty-one years from now. This is much sooner than estimates by the IPCC.

DoD, IPCC, GOP – all spell out trouble

Iceberg in Ross Sea, Antarctica seen from bridge of 

icebreaker N.B. Palmer. Photo © Bruce Luyendyk

Over the last two weeks significant news has occurred on the Climate Change front. First was the report from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) on the security threat posed by Climate Change, second was the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and last was the takeover of the U.S. Senate by the Republican party (GOP).

The DoD report analyses the U.S. military’s place in combating and adapting to climate change. The U.S. has over 7000 bases around the globe all of which need to deal with Climate Change. Defense Secretary Hagel, who as senator once signed a resolution labeling Climate Change as more or less baloney, has come around. “… we will integrate Climate Change considerations into our planning, operations and training,” he told an audience recently.

The IPCC report follows on its last one in 2007 (AR4). (For a brief note on what, who the IPCC is go here IPCC .)

What has changed since the AR4 is that the situation has worsened and the time to address Climate Change has shortened.

Antarctic Snow School, German style

Excerpt from Chapter 11. 

GANOVEX VII team practices crevasse rescue at 

Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand. 

Photo © Bruce Luyendyk 

[Scene. Bruce and Christine are part of a German Antarctic expedition. Before departure for the Antarctic the GANOVEX expedition trained for snow and ice safety at Mount Cook National Park in New Zealand.]

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“Tomorrow they’re goin’ to fly us up to the peaks to practice crevasse rescues.” Chris said she had heard their plan. Early next morning helicopters took us up to a broad snowfield perched in the highest peaks of the park. It was summer in New Zealand but sunny winter up there. The experience to fly up the faces of the cliffs to the peaks can’t be imagined – the vertical relief must have been near a mile. The pale blue glacial waters of Lake Pukaki lay below us as we ascended above the tree line, flew by the gray rock above and below – a magical elevator ride where at the top floor we landed in a brilliant white snow plateau settled between black sawtooth peaks under a clear deep blue sky.

Bradley was our instructor, a middle-aged man like me, Kiwi, soft-spoken, grayed, weathered. He pointed to a snow canyon at the base of a peak about 500 yards away from our group. “That snow scoop over there is more than fifteen stories deep, has a nice vertical cliff edge - we’ll practice crevasse rescues there,” he said. We walked across the snow over to the canyon - a deep chasm in the snow carved by incessant winds that rebounded off the peak next to it. The scoop, a couple of hundred yards across, semi-circled the peak, as a part moat - I could see its walls left and right of where I stood. They extended down for almost two hundred feet. My stomach turned over. I looked at Chris as to say “Holy shit. Is he kidding?” but I didn’t, because he wasn’t.

Bradley explained. “Three people will tie-in on a rope, walk in a line towards the edge. The lead person jumps off the cliff and the other two drop to the snow, arrest the fall, then pull the man out with a Z-Pulley¹ rescue setup. Monty and I will show you how to rig it.”

We had done this in McMurdo Survival School a couple of years ago, but not over a canyon, nothing like this. I looked around at my classmates. Most had experience, not all of them looked in top physical shape. We had a few former East Germans with us, no Antarctic expeditions on their résumé.

My turn, I tied–in at the lead of the rope, two burly Germans tied-in behind me about fifty and a hundred feet back. Had they done this before? I walked to the edge, didn’t look down and jumped off. I fell, hit the snow wall, and bounced. The rope stretched. I jerked to a stop about forty feet down. The Germans caught my fall. I looked up to see Bradley at the cliff edge - pieces of snow I had knocked loose fell past me. I gave thumbs up, acted like I was cool. He acknowledged then helped the two guys on the rope above me rig the Z-Pulley. I waited at the end of the rope. Then I felt heave stop, heave stop, and repeat. They dragged me up to the edge. I was pulled over the lip and out. I thought, that was fun, but did I need to have the crap scared out of me?

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 1 A Z-Drag or Z-Pulley is an arrangement of lines and pulleys commonly used in rescue situations. The basic arrangement provides a theoretical mechanical advantage of three. The name comes from the fact that the arrangement of lines is roughly Z shaped. Besides the mechanical advantage to pulling, it also uses only part of the total length of the rope for the block and tackle arrangement. (Wikipedia)