David Roberts at Grist has the winner of the irony-can-be-so-ironic award:
From a sharp-eyed reader comes this ad for Humble Oil (which later merged with Standard to become, yes, Exxon). It may win the All Time Millenial Award for Maximal Irony. It’s from a 1962 edition of Life Magazine, available on Google Books (click for larger version):
Hmm, in December 2008, I blogged on an AP story about data presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union:
More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.
[Note to AP — “what scientists say is global warming??? I missed that uber-lame construction the first time around.]
And remember that over its lifetime, “the burning of organic carbon warms the Earth about 100,000 times more from climate effects than it does through the release of chemical energy in combustion,” as climatologist Ken Caldeira and NYU’s Martin Hoffert calculate in an analysis first published on Climate Progress! Yes, not all the cumulative warming from CO2 occurs right away nor does it all go into melting ice, but the point is we’re just at the very beginning of the mega-melting to come.
I’m filing this under greenwashing because I don’t have a category for unintentional anti-greenwashing — see “Shell’s ironic vision of carbon capture.”
Related Posts:
- Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.”
- World’s Glaciers Shrink for 18th Year
- De-Icer: USGS report details “recent dramatic shrinkage” in U.S. glaciers, matching global decline
- Stabilize at 350 ppm or risk ice-free planet, warn NASA, Yale, Sheffield, Versailles, Boston et al
