Guest essay by Nick Pope Contributor

The state of California is suing ExxonMobil, alleging that the company deceived the public about how effective recycling plastic products is and facilitating pollution.

Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed the lawsuit against ExxonMobil in San Francisco County Superior Court, asserting that the company participated “in a decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis.” In addition to being one of the biggest American players in the oil and gas industry, ExxonMobil is also a top producer of the chemicals and other inputs used to create plastic products, according to The Washington Post.

Download the lawsuit as a PDF

“For decades, ExxonMobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn’t possible,” Bonta said of his lawsuit in a Monday statement. “ExxonMobil lied to further its [record]-breaking profits at the expense of our planet and possibly jeopardizing our health.”

California filed its lawsuit against ExxonMobil just one day after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law that will ban the provision of plastic bags at the point of sale in stores. The new lawsuit against the oil, gas and petrochemicals giant aligns with “climate nuisance” lawsuits that have been filed in Democrat-controlled jurisdictions in recent years, which generally allege that major companies like ExxonMobil misled the public about their products’ role in climate change and should be held accountable for doing so.

ExxonMobil slammed California’s lawsuit in a statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“For decades, California officials have known their recycling system isn’t effective. They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others. Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills,” an ExxonMobil spokesperson said. “The first step would be to acknowledge what their counterparts across the U.S. know: advanced recycling works. To date, we’ve processed more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into usable raw materials, keeping it out of landfills. We’re bringing real solutions, recycling plastic waste that couldn’t be recycled by traditional methods.”

Bonta is rumored to have interest in running for governor to replace the term-limited Newsom in 2026, though the attorney general recently told the San Francisco Chronicle that he will not announce a prospective run until after November’s elections. Eco-activist groups, including the Sierra Club and Baykeeper, will be joining a Monday virtual press conference held by Bonta’s office to discuss the new litigation, the attorney general’s office said.

Judith Enck, a former official for the Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who now runs an activist group called Beyond Plastics, commended Bonta for filing the lawsuit.

“This is the single most consequential lawsuit filed against the plastics industry for its persistent and continued lying about plastics recycling,” Enck said in a Monday statement. “Attorney General Bonta is leading the way to corporate accountability and a cleaner and healthier world. This lawsuit will set an invaluable precedent for others to follow.”

Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow at the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, slammed the lawsuit in a Monday post to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“The communist failure that is California is suing ExxonMobil because radical greens lied to everyone about the feasibility of recycling,” Milloy wrote in his post.

Bonta’s office did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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From the Climatic SkyNet department comes news of this upcoming climate-model-supercomputer hootenanny at the University of Illinois next week. What could go wrong if we let a supercomputer make decisions for us?

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International summit seeks to harness supercomputing power for climate decision-making

Hosted and organized by NCSA and led by Professor of Atmospheric Science Kelvin Droegemeier, the summit’s long-term goal is kilometer-scale global resolution in Earth system modeling and climate projection.

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Department of Climate, Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences (CliMAS) will bring together more than 100 leading experts in climate, Earth System Modeling (ESM), computing and other sectors for the International Climate Computer Summit at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from September 29 through October 2, 2024.

This summit will convene an international group of authorities from academia, government, industry and non-profit organizations to examine the practicability of co-designing a special computational system and modeling framework that supports frontier Earth system science research and climate projection using kilometer-scale global resolution. Additionally, it will address how output from global high-resolution climate projections can be used – especially locally and regionally – to make decisions in areas such as economic and personal risk, health, infrastructure, food production, biodiversity, global geopolitical stability and others.

“Numerous groups around the world are pioneering high-resolution ESMs, which when combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning are poised to transform our understanding of the global Earth system and vastly improve our ability to project future climate states. That is one side of the coin,” said Kelvin K. Droegemeier, Professor of Atmospheric Science and Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Science and Policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “The other side, which the summit is addressing, involves the computational environment required to achieve this transformation. It does not exist, even with AI, but we believe it can be created if the international climate research community joins forces in ways it never has before. Such an effort would not replace existing research strategies but rather add value to them, also opening new vistas of educational opportunity and providing practitioners and stakeholders with the information they need for making decisions across all sectors of society.”

The goal of the climate summit is to assemble the international community toward achieving a transformative milestone: to provide information about Earth’s climate system globally, with the detail of regional weather forecast models through the use of sophisticated ESMs at global resolutions of a few kilometers integrated with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Credible, detailed information at this scale can empower timely climate decision-making at local and regional scales. Achieving this important goal requires computational capabilities and software frameworks beyond those currently available commercially.

NCSA’s powerful supercomputing resources and expert team are well-equipped to tackle the challenge of climate change. For example, NCSA’s Blue Waters and iForge supercomputers hosted at the U. of I. helped researchers model volcanic activity with real-time data to provide daily forecasting, and data from the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), a powerful collection of integrated digital resources and services including supercomputers, visualization and storage systems, helped bring the Amazon’s “beating heart” weather patterns to life for researchers. NCSA is ready to be a powerful asset in the fight against climate change.

“NCSA and the University of Illinois have a long history of collaboration with climate researchers on solving the most challenging environmental questions,” NCSA Director Bill Gropp said. “Climate modeling of this scale will require innovative high-performance computing resources designed for these problems. With a tradition of deploying and helping scientists use the latest technologies, we are proud to sponsor this summit and demonstrate our commitment to helping decision-makers address and plan for climate uncertainty.”

The Summit will bring 100+ invited participants from around the world to Champaign-Urbana from sectors including government, climate research, higher education, computer science, technology and industry. The public is invited to attend the summit virtually at no charge, and all plenary sessions will be live-streamed globally during the summit. Registration for virtual attendance at the summit is available at this link.

The International Climate Computer Summit is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and organized by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Department of Climate, Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois, the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Maryland, Berkeley Lab, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, the University of Utah and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

By Jo Nova

The Censors are always the bad guys

The only way to fix misinformation is with better information.

Dear Australians, we only have until Monday to lodge a submission against the proposed  amended Misinformation bill.

It’s a bill so bad warnings are coming from the far side of the world

The Cato Institute warns that if Tech companies take the simple route and comply with the Australian proposal Americans using mostly American companies may be effectively subject to misinformation rules set by foreign governments (and that may be the point, eh?) The great leftist global machine gets “help” with every country conquered by censorship glue.

Why do the guys with galactic megaphones need to shut you up?

Suppose misinformation was harming Australians, what stops the government giving us the correct information? They have the billion-dollar ABC, the billion-dollar CSIRO, the entire tamed academic sector, every school in Australia (they’re all funded and controlled by the government) — and yet somehow against this, an unfunded mum or dad writing on Facebook or a blog might harm trust in government institutions and therefore must be shut down, before any harm even occurs?

Think about what this says about the Australian ABC? It must be pretty useless if it can’t save Australians from verified lies? Things could only be this absurd if it doesn’t have any truths to refute “the lies”, or it doesn’t have an audience because it’s an odious propaganda machine no one wants to watch. Or both.

The Labor government claims that they won’t be censoring content, which is a lie, the media “platforms” will be forced to do it for them. If the platforms don’t comply, the government will send men with guns to their door to take away 5% of their global income. Even if the fine is never issued, the instant this law comes into effect, the threat of being savagely fined will mean platforms will be censoring Australians.

How would we keep comments open on this blog? Ask everyone to write satirically?

Ban anything that may be contributing to harm that might happen, maybe

The legislative bomb is a multifunctional octopus. It pretends to prevent “serious harm” but the proposed legislation defines misinformation as  anything “reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm”. So there are three legalistic qualifiers there for any sympathetic judge to crush dissent. What’s “reasonable” — depends on whether you can afford a QC. What’s “likely” to cause harm (but hasn’t actually done it) is anyone’s guess or the work of seers and soothsayers. And a “contribution” to serious harm might be just about anything. Did you retweet that scientific study showing that Antarctica isn’t warming? You’re harming the planet, the government energy policy, killing the spotted quoll, and damaging financial prospects for solar manufacturers. Stop that now!

Thou shalt not harm the government, the economy, the bankers, or government health plans

It’s hard to believe they revealed their real intentions so obviously. This bill is not designed to protect the people, it’s designed to protect the government. What’s the worst kind of  “serious harm” you can do to an Australian — harm the government, or their referendums. (The Labor Party are so hurt they lost the “Voice” vote last year.) It’s the first thing they list.

Read their own words in Amendment 14:

For the purposes of this Schedule, serious harm is:
(a) harm to the operation or integrity of a Commonwealth, State, Territory or local government electoral or referendum process; or
(b) harm to public health in Australia, including to the efficacy of preventative health measures in Australia; or
(c) vilification of a group in Australian society distinguished by race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex status, disability, nationality or national or ethnic origin, or vilification of an individual because of a belief that the individual is a member of such a group; or
(d) intentionally inflicted physical injury to an individual in Australia; or
(e) imminent: (i) damage to critical infrastructure; or (ii) disruption of emergency services;
in Australia; or
(f) imminent harm to the Australian economy, including harm to public confidence in the banking system or financial markets;
that has:
(g) significant and far-reaching consequences for the Australian community or a segment of the Australian community; or
(h) severe consequences for an individual in Australia

The second thing on the list are words that harm “preventative health measures” which means vaccines — the biggest, worst and most expensive preventative measure the government ever forced on the people.

The third priority is to outlaw any harmful words against their favourite protected mascot groups. So if you think women in one religion are being mistreated or harmed, you can’t say that. If you think children are being hurt by anyone in a protected mascot class, you’re not allowed to say that either. The laws will hurt those they claim to “help”.

It’s revealing that the other protected class are the poor suffering bankers. You must not “harm public confidence” in banks or financial markets. Presumably pointing out that banks are technically insolvent might cause a bank run. Don’t mention that bankers make money from printing our national dollars from thin air, effectively profiting by loaning money they don’t have, which would be called counterfeiting if anyone else did it. Shh!

Lastly, if you think someone is doing criminal activity don’t say so, because it might have “severe consequences for an individual”. Is that what the Labor Party meant to say — let’s protect criminals?

Who decides “the truth”?

Apparently it’s not God, it’s ACMA — The Australian Communications and Media Authority.

Apparently, it’s the team with the most money. Only a billionaire, or a government, could afford to set up a “third party fact-checker”.

The number of people up in arms about these rules grows by the day: Nick Cater,  Phillip Altman. Roger Pielke Jnr.  Caldron Pool. Australian Citizens Party  and The Cato Institute.

Please copy your submission below to inspire others. Phillip Altman has a list of Senators emails to cut and paste.

REFERENCES:

The Bill: Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024

The 69 page proposed legislation PDF form and Word doc.

Submissions close on the 30 September 2024. (General advice on how to make a submission).

Submissions can be uploaded here (button on the right column) or emailed to the Committee Secretariat below.

Committee Secretariat contact:

Committee Secretary
Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications
PO Box 6100
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
Phone: +61 2 6277 3526
[email protected]

h/t to Andrew M, David Maddison, Stephen Neil, Nick Cater

 

We have in the past made fun of ideas to fertilize the ocean with iron dumped by ships to reduce carbon dioxide. The last experiment failed miserably. Meanwhile nature says, “hold my beer.” From Frontiers in Marine Science and Florida State University comes this press release.

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Oceanic life found to be thriving thanks to Saharan dust blown from thousands of kilometers away

The further dust-bound iron is blown from the Sahara, the more it becomes available for life through atmospheric reactions.

Iron is a micronutrient indispensable for life, enabling processes such as respiration, photosynthesis, and DNA synthesis. Iron availability is often a limiting resource in today’s oceans, which means that increasing the flow of iron into them can increase the amount of carbon fixed by phytoplankton, with consequences for the global climate.

Iron ends up in oceans and terrestrial ecosystems through rivers, melting glaciers, hydrothermal activity, and especially wind. But not all its chemical forms are ‘bioreactive’, that is, available for organisms to take up from their environment.

“Here we show that iron bound to dust from the Sahara blown westward over the Atlantic has properties that change with the distance traveled: the greater this distance, the more bioreactive the iron,” said Dr Jeremy Owens, an associate professor at Florida State University and a co-author on a new study in Frontiers in Marine Science.

“This relationship suggests that chemical processes in the atmosphere convert less bioreactive iron to more accessible forms.”

The core of the matter

Owens and colleagues measured the amounts of bioreactive and total iron in drill cores from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, collected by the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and its earlier versions. IODP aims to improve our understanding of changing climate and oceanic conditions, geological processes, and the origin of life. The researchers selected four cores, based on their distance from the so-called Sahara-Sahel Dust Corridor. The latter ranges from Mauritania to Chad and is known to be an important source of dust-bound iron for downwind areas.

The two cores closest to this corridor were collected approximately 200km and 500km west of northwestern Mauritania, a third in the mid-Atlantic, and the fourth approximately 500km to the east of Florida. The authors studied the upper 60 to 200 meters of these cores, reflecting deposits over to the last 120,000 years – the time since the previous interglacial.

They measured the total iron concentrations along these cores, as well as concentrations of iron isotopes with a plasma-mass spectrometer. These isotope data were consistent with dust from the Sahara.

They then used a suite of chemical reactions to reveal the fractions of total iron present in the sediments in the form of iron carbonate, goethite, hematite, magnetite, and pyrite. The iron in these minerals, while not bioreactive, likely formed from more bioreactive forms through geochemical processes on the seafloor.

“Rather than focusing on the total iron content as previous studies had done, we measured iron that can dissolve easily in the ocean, and which can be accessed by marine organisms for their metabolic pathways,” said Owens.

“Only a fraction of total iron in sediment is bioavailable, but that fraction could change during transport of the iron away from its original source. We aimed to explore those relationships.”

Blowing in the wind

The results showed that the proportion of bioreactive iron was lower in the westernmost cores than in the easternmost ones. This implied that a correspondingly greater proportion of bioreactive iron had been lost from the dust and presumably been used by organisms in the water column, so that it had never reached the sediments at the bottom.   

“Our results suggest that during long-distance atmospheric transport, the mineral properties of originally non-bioreactive dust-bound iron change, making it more bioreactive. This iron then gets taken up by phytoplankton, before it can reach the bottom,” said Dr Timothy Lyons, a professor at the University of California at Riverside and the study’s final author.

“We conclude that dust that reaches regions like the Amazonian basin and the Bahamas may contain iron that is particularly soluble and available to life, thanks to the great distance from North Africa, and thus a longer exposure to atmospheric chemical processes,” said Lyons.

“The transported iron seems to be stimulating biological processes much in the same way that iron fertilization can impact life in the oceans and on continents. This study is a proof of concept confirming that iron-bound dust can have a major impact on life at vast distances from its source.”