LA Times Excerpt: What is clear to Pfeffer and his colleagues, he said in an email, “is that, one way or another, ultimately climate change is the cause of Columbia’s retreat.” ... O’Neel said, noting most tidewater glaciers are in retreat. “So climate change has to be a factor.”
...
A number of factors, including an inebriated captain who had retired to his stateroom, an overworked crew and lax regulatory oversight, led to the accident. But it was the icebergs from the deteriorating glacier that created the treacherous conditions that forced the ship to veer off course. ... EXXON Knew?! For the two decades following the Exxon Valdez disaster, the company worked quietly to safeguard its operations and infrastructure against steadily rising sea levels and thawing permafrost. Yet in public, it vociferously fought regulations and policies that would have limited fossil fuel emissions while publicly questioning the science behind climate change...
Jeffers, the Exxon Mobil spokesman, noted that the USGS’s website on the glacier still says that climate fluctuations “perhaps” triggered the glacier’s retreat. He also pointed to a paper, published two years before the accident, in which Post and Meier questioned the significance of climate change in the movement of tidewater glaciers, suggesting its influence was “dubious at best.”
#
George Soros funded article! Note: At the end of the article is a note about who funded the LA Times reporting team. "The Energy and Environmental Reporting Project is supported by the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund, Energy Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund, Lorana Sullivan Foundation and the Tellus Mater Foundation. The funders have no involvement in or influence over the articles produced by project fellows in collaboration with the Los Angeles Times."
#
Fake News: #ExxonKnew Campaign Claims ‘Global Warming’ Caused 1989 Exxon Valdez Spill – Point By Point debunking
The article – fit more for The Onion than the LA Times – claims that ExxonMobil had evidence that the Columbia Glacier was calving due to climate change, but allowed one of its tankers to put itself in the way of the icebergs anyway. Anyone who has ever followed the story knows that the only ice responsible for the Exxon Valdez spill would be the ice cooling the captain’s many cocktails that night. But for anti-Exxon campaigners, no alternate theories (or should we say alternative facts?) are too outrageous to publish…
The Columbia School of Journalism students claim Exxon should have known climate change would cause glaciers to calve, but they deliberately omit how the documents say calving has other causes.
Exxon Valdez is the most studied industrial incident to date. Yet not a single credible study has ever stated that climate change was the culprit.
The Iceberg Monitoring Project report notes that calving rates from the Columbia Glacier cannot be predicted and that climate change isn’t even among the most significant contributors to glacial calving. Here are some key passages from the source document to which the Columbia team refused to link: “Changes in the climate probably have only a minor effect on iceberg production once a drastic retreat is underway as calving rates are more controlled by water depth and ice flow rates than by meteorological factors.”