Scroll down to listen to the podcast with Jerry Levine.
In today’s podcast we interviewed Jerry Levine. A chemical engineer, Jerry Levine’s working career stretched from polyester to politics. He led the team at Amoco Chemicals that conquered the production problems in making polyester in the 1960s.
Jerry then learned what it was like to live under Communism when he helped set up a polyester plant in East Germany well before the Berlin Wall came down.
He later returned to Amoco’s corporate office in Chicago, finding his niche as a lobbyist for the company and “Big Oil.”
Jerry holds the view that Global Warming fears have been fueled by faulty and sometimes deliberately contrived data to protect scientific jobs and reputations, and to build political careers. He feels that ardent advocates of Global Warming theories often have “no growth” philosophies which mask hidden Socialist agendas.
Question: Do you believe global warming is mostly caused by human activity?
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23 Comments
Yes.
Yes! From people like Al Gore, a lot of Hot Air!!
What a surprise that a former oil industry engineer doesn’t believe that what he did (and others are doing) has contributed to our rapidly warming environment! And the historical data that he cited is incorrect–at least according to NASA.
“As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.” https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php
Yes, according to Scientists around the world. I trust them more then some guy sending out tweets while we are sleeping.
There are a huge amount of scientists who do not follow the global warming scam .
Including these 31500 scientists
http://www.petitionproject.org/index.php.
The NIPCC debunks the IPCC reports – and remember the IPCC is a political organisation not a scientific one .
Yes,
About a dozen years ago I was reading a masters thesis about the albedo of Kansas (the state). I came to realize that global warming – climate change is the gift that keeps on giving for the academic community. Picking a relevant masters or phd thesis is the biggest challenge for any aspiring candidate. With global warming there is a never ending source of topics and funding that need never be verified. Like the Farmers Almanac you predict the worst and if you are right you get publicity and if you are wrong no one remembers.
Negative. Man is a pimple on the butt of climate change.
Global warming is the biggest hoax ever perpetuated on mankind .
Evidenced by the climategate emails , the fact the scientists have consistently been proven wrong on very one of their alarmist claims
Eg Arctic ice is doing fine
Polar bears are thriving
Pacific Ocean Islands are GROWING
etc etc
The earth was warmer than today during the Medieval Warm period and the Roman warm period and there are many PORTS from that era that are miles inland today .
Tectonic plates move. That could explain the moving of ancient ports inland. Arctic ice may be ok (I don’t know), but glaciers in the rest of the are melting fast. I haven’t heard that polar bears are thriving either, in fact, I’ve only heard the opposite. Same with pacific islands.
My final point is that I would not believe anything that a lobbyist says.
Polar bears are thriving
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/25/despite-climate-change-polar-bears-thrive/
Glaciers are melting because the earth has been climbing out of the Little Ice age and been steadily warming for the past 400 years – so 99.99% of the malting happened over 50 years ago . AND where they melt we find the remains of FORRESTS – meaning the earth was warmer long before we came along .
Finally – to help you read up on the complete no problem with Pacific Islands that are GROWING
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/07/12/remember-when-sea-level-rise-was-going-to-cause-pacific-islands-to-disappear-never-mind/
Pacific Islands are growing
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1
Polar bears are thriving
https://www.thegwpf.org/susan-crockford-healthy-polar-bears-less-than-healthy-science/
and Tectonic plates moved the ports inland – please show me any research anywhere on the planet that suggests this is the reason .
The reason is sea levels were way higher during the Roman warm period when the earth was so much warmer than today – and all was good .
YES!!!!! I find it depressing when this question gets asked. I took three environmental studies classes in my undergraduate program, how many has everyone else here taken? Green house gases, carbon dioxide, methane, etc. store more heat than nitrogren and other gases that comprise our atmosphere. That heat causes more moisture to be absorbed and intensifies our storms. It also messes up our cycles by putting too much rain in some places and not enough in others. Our oceans are acidifying causing devastating blanching of our coral reefs. The great barrier reef is already half dead and it doesn’t grow back. The lack of coral exacerbates storm surges, causing more flooding during these century storms we seem to keep getting regularly now. The oceans and forests hold most of our carbon that doesn’t get absorbed into the atmosphere but the oceans are becoming saturated with these compounds and forests are being torn down much faster than they are being replanted. The planets capacity to hold excessive carbon is rapidly deteriorating and once it can’t hold anymore, well, we don’t know what happens next because we’ve never tried it. Many of these climate changing processes are accelerating and predictions are difficult to reach a consensus on because the scale of the sample size, our entire planet! But ALL scientists agree it doesn’t look good and is going to get a lot worse before we can make it better, if we even have that capacity. We are emitting more now than ever before as our population continues to grow. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist you may have seen online, says the experiment we are conducting on this planet is the dumbest mankind has ever embarked on. A 2 degree Celsius rise in the average temperature of this planet is the point of no return and we are rapidly approaching that threshold. If we stop emitting green house gases today, the temperature will continue to rise close to that threshold before it plateaus. Oh and the lawson shelf c in the Antarctic is giving way like a damn about to burst, exacerbating the decay of the polar icecaps and sea level rise.
Climate change will do several things, deplete our FEMA resources, cause mass refugee crises across the world, economic unrest, war, flooding, coastal city destruction. Not only do I know climate change is real and that we are already feeling its effects, but I’m not optimistic on our changes of reversing course (despite this podcast episode). We won’t be emission free tomorrow which was really our last chance, and doubt we will be in thirty or fifty years from now when the effects are magnitudes worse than now, when you’d be laughed at for raising this question. This is a passionate topic for me, I find this ignorance terribly frustrating, why my heart rate is elevated and grow frustrated that my lack of rhetoric will fall deaf on your ears. The most important take away on this topic is that its not political! Is science. We discovered gravity, we discovered climate change, deal with it.
Don’t ask a smoker if smoking causes lung cancer, ask a doctor!
BY FAR the biggest ” greenhouse gas ” is water vapour .
CO2 is present as only 400parts per MILLION and light spectre it absorbs overlaps almost completely that of water vapour – which is why there is no proof anywhere that CO2 causes global warming and which is why the IPCC models manage to claim miniscule warming that had to be amplified by the Transient Climate Response – which ahs been revised down just very year since the first report as the science is SO NOT settled .
The oceans are NOT acidifying and nothing is happening on the coral reefs that hasn’t happened 30 years ago before we started looking .
realismatwork: Do you believe the earth is flat too?
Re your “Do you believe the earth is flat comment .”
This is a typical ad-hominem response from someone who won’t debate the facts .
Next I’ll be a racist .
Grow up mate .
Hey Aaron! Thanks for commenting, and listening btw.
Jerry is not denying the existence of climate change, just that man doesn’t have a huge impact on it.
Good points though. I need to read some Niel Degrasse
Readers, feel free to enlighten yourselves by reading this article about how half of the coral in great barrier reef has died in the past couple of years. Remember this is centuries of development and growth wiped out in town. Rebuilding could take as long if not longer, if rebuilding can happen at all. I’d get peer reviewed papers but I’m too lazy.
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” – Daniel Patrick Moynihan
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/since-2016-half-the-coral-in-the-great-barrier-reef-has-perished/558302/
Corals have lasted millions of years and corals grow very happily in warmer waters than the Barrier reef .
The corals in the “hottest ” part of reef (5deg warmer than the coolest part ) are the parts growing the best .
Bleaching has been caused by hurricanes and sunscreen the reefs are all recovering nicely.
http://joannenova.com.au/2017/09/scientists-surprised-that-reef-that-survived-the-hotter-holocene-is-already-recovering-from-2016-bleaching/
As Noah points out, I am a skeptic, not a “Denier.” “Denier” is the type of pejorative that’s used when polite discourse fails. I appreciate Aaron’s 3 undergraduate courses. I had 20 years of real world study. I have debated against and also worked with the EPA and many environmental groups for 20 years. I helped to successfully negotiate the elimination of lead from gasoline, and also at that time helped develop the “Cap and Trade” regulatory concept. I helped develop the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments and the regulations that went with them. I represented my company and the oil industry on a year long commission chaired by Al Gore and populated with every interest group one could imagine to determine the methods and cost to meet the Kyoto Treaty. The US cost to meet Kyoto was estimated at nearly 10% of our GNP. The Senate in a 95-0 vote advised Al Gore that if he signed the Kyoto Treaty, the Senate would not ratify it. Gore signed, but recognizing the Senate’s vote, Clinton never sent the treaty for ratification.
Just to set the record straight on a few popular misconceptions: 1) There were about 10,000 polar bears in 1980 when satellite measurement first became good enough to count the bears. Today there are about 25,000. They are not disappearing. 2) Severe storms, hurricanes and tornadoes are not getting any more extreme, only the news reporting of the storms continues to get more extreme. The National Hurricane Center of NASA/NOAA report data going back about 150 years. It shows no discernible pattern in storm severity. 3) The US, at least, has about as much forest land now as we did when Columbus landed. The developing world, however, is clearing forest land as part of their economic development to bring their citizens out of poverty. I believe in economic development. However, many leading global warming alarmists say we all must abandon the concept of economic development and retrench our lifestyles to something like 80-100 years ago, something like the Great Depression or an Amish lifestyle. 4) When sea ice (like the Antarctic ice shelf) melts, the sea level does not change. The Titanic unfortunately found out that 90% of floating ice is below the waterline. The density of ice is 0.9 gm/cc. Water, of course, is 1.0 gm/cc. When ice melts, its density increases. Since its mass doesn’t change, its volume decreases to fill the same space as the water it displaced. I learned that in high school–avoiding 3 maybe no so informative undergraduate courses. Also, I understand that the Western Ice Shelf melted was due to underwater volcanic activity. The total ice on Antarctica has been growing for the past several decades. 5) The cost to eliminate 90% of the world’s CO2 emissions (the desired amount of reductions to meet the 1.5C limit) is in the trillions of dollars per year. William Nordhaus, recently won the Nobel prize in economics for his work on climate change. The Norwegian Parliament didn’t delve deeply into his work, because if they did, they wouldn’t have awarded the prize to him, but that’s politics, not science. Actually, if one delves into his work, one finds the cost of a policy to limit warming to 1.5C costs trillions of dollars more than the cost of doing nothing after accounting for the damage done by the carbon emissions. I don’t advocate doing nothing, but we should only adopt programs that have make common sense and have a positive cost/benefit. I certainly don’t advocate relegating a vast portion of mankind to grinding poverty! 6) The Paris Climate Agreement is called an Agreement so President Obama could sign it for the US without Senate ratification. If it were a treaty, he would need Senate approval, which he would not have received. Obama learned that lesson from the Kyoto Treaty. 7) Also, as far as costs, The Paris Climate Agreement requires a number of developed nations to pay to lesser developed nations $100 billion/year. The US share of the total is 25%. Up until now, only the US has put in a meager $1 billion, and no one else has contributed anything. The hypocrisy is rampant. 8) Finally, fortunately, in not very many years we will get to the point where the IR absorbency of CO2 has become saturated and no further temperature change, as minuscule as it is, occurs. Then we can hopefully learn how to get along!
We all know the ice cubes in a glass of water trick but we’re talking about glacial ice melt, not floating ice melting. Glaciers sit atop land, so their volume isn’t reflected in current ocean levels. Larsen C ice shelf is holding back this flow and when the crack eventually reaches the other end and it falls into the ocean like B and A before it, the flow of glacial ice will greatly increase. Global warming is more intense in polar regions, further exacerbating ice melt. I can’t compete against a lobbyist who’s job is to dupe elected officials. So this is my last message, I should have known better than to get started with this. Man has brought this upon himself and no jargon or rhetoric will change that.
Well Aaron – we know the earth has been steadily warming for the last 400 years – the question is why you think Co2 has anything but a potential miniscule influence on this? .
Polar Ice is floating so the melting there can’t influence see levels and Antarctic ice levels were at new record levels recently so no problem there .
So whilst Polar regions have historically been more erratic that the rest of the globe I suggest you read up a bit and it will help you relax – knowing there really is no problem
Fact – The planet has been getting warmer over the past 50 years
Fact – CO2 levels have been rising over the last 50 years
Fact – During the Cretaceous period the planet was warmer and had higher CO2 levels than it does now
Unknown – How much influence man has on the warming and CO2 levels
My best guess – The current climate change we are seeing is mostly caused by variations in solar energy due to factors outside our control such as sun energy emittance variation or earth orbiting cycle variations.
stop confusing everyone with facts!
Why do we pump CO2 into greenhouses?
Plants like it, grow faster and give off more oxygen.
So EXACTLY what is the correct parts per million of CO2 we should strive for?