Sssh Climate Change!

"ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion."
http://www.postcarbon.org/article/704040-the-great-carbon-bubble-why-the


We, and by "We" I mean everyone else, especially in the UK will NOT be discussing climate change this week. We have one the driest and warmest Decembers, followed by guess what, that's right one of the driest and warmest January's in history, but this last 10-days have seen pretty cold temperatures here in Blighty. If you can be bothered to check the weather maps it's not hard to see what's going on and let's face it, it's Winter people, so you'd expect some cold and icy weather. Or at least we used to see/expect "winter-like" temperatures and conditions.

So "We" can't even comprehend that we have quite a serious problem of climate change happening around us, ALL OF US, EVERYWHERE!

Of course the newspapers will confuse climate with weather and claim that a few cold days must dispell the rumour of climate change, this being demonstrably false and simply lazy journalism. But let's be fair to the journalists, they work for a money-making business which derives a majority of it's income from advertising revenue so can't really criticise too vociferously the hand that feeds them. (You can read the brilliant book Guardians of Power by David Edwards & David Cornwell for more insight into this!)

So who has the most to lose if climate change became an accepted norm and not a "fringe theory"? Look no further then those companies that EARN the most:

"And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.

It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.
Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.

Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money."
http://www.postcarbon.org/article/704040-the-great-carbon-bubble-why-the

As refeerenced in the above article, there is something quite beautiful, but also quite startling about this image courtesy of NASA, do you see?