The role a melting iceberg played in Exxon’s biggest disaster
By DINO GRANDONI, ASAF SHALEV, MICHAEL PHILLIS, SUSANNE RUST – APRIL 6, 2017
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.”
