Scientists Link Hundreds of Severe Heat Waves To Fossil Fuel Producers' Pollution
- Reference: 0179171798
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/11/2242238/scientists-link-hundreds-of-severe-heat-waves-to-fossil-fuel-producers-pollution
- Source link:
> The new study, [2]published Wednesday in the journal Nature , found that 213 heat waves were substantially more likely and intense because of the activity of major fossil fuel producers, also called carbon majors. They include oil, coal and cement companies, as well as some countries. The scientists found as much as a quarter of the heat waves would be "virtually impossible" without the climate pollution from major fossil fuel producers. Some individual fossil fuel companies, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, had emissions high enough to cause some of the more extreme heat waves, the research found.
>
> For the new study, the scientists looked at something called the [3]disaster database , a global list of disasters maintained by university researchers, to identify heat waves "with significant casualties, economic losses and calls for international assistance. The scientists then used historical reconstructions and statistical models to see how human-caused global warming made each heat wave more likely and more intense. Then, to examine the link to major fossil fuel producers, the researchers relied on the [4]Carbon Majors Database to understand the emissions of major oil, gas, coal and cement producers.
>
> "We ran a climate model to reconstruct the historical period, and then we ran it again but without the emissions of a specific carbon major, thus deducing its contribution to global warming," Yann Quilcaille, climate scientist at ETH Zurich and lead author of the study, says in an email. While some of the contributions to heat waves came from larger well-known fossil fuel companies, the study found that some smaller, lesser-known fossil fuel companies are producing enough greenhouse gas emissions to cause heat waves too, Quilcaille says.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/09/11/nx-s1-5534484/oil-companies-heat-waves-climate
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09450-9
[3] https://www.emdat.be/
[4] https://influencemap.org/briefing/The-Carbon-Majors-Database-26913
First No Shit Sherlock post (Score:5, Informative)
Next up: the measles epidemic might be linked to the anti-vax HHS.
Re: It's us (Score:4, Informative)
Fossil fuel production involves significant CO2 and CH4 release, inter alia. Natgas extraction and transport involves significant leakage. Petroleum refining almost always involves flaring off unwanted hydrocarbons.
Re: (Score:1)
So what? These companies don't produce these products for the sake of it - there's demand for it ultimately from all of us.
Re: It's us (Score:2)
My point is strictly technical. Fossil fuel _production_, even if the product is never used, releases greenhouse gases. Yes, production is driven by demand. But that's not what I was talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
You're technically correct - the best kind of correct.
Re: (Score:2)
That was _EXACTLY_ the vibe I was channeling there. Or in other words: [1]https://www.mikeleake.net/2023... [mikeleake.net]
[1] https://www.mikeleake.net/2023/01/a-brief-history-of-akshually.html
Re: (Score:1)
If it wasn't used it wouldn't be produced so no production gas releases.
Re: (Score:2)
The distinction between emissions from the production of fossil fuels and from the use of fossil fuels doesn't seem to be clearly made in the paper, so there's no way to gauge the relative contribution of each.
Re: (Score:2)
> Fossil fuel production involves significant CO2 and CH4 release, inter alia. Natgas extraction and transport involves significant leakage. Petroleum refining almost always involves flaring off unwanted hydrocarbons.
That could be, but the report is based on the "Carbon Majors database" [1]https://influencemap.org/brief... [influencemap.org] and that says "This data is used to quantify the direct production-linked operational emissions and emissions from the combustion of marketed products that can be attributed to these entities." So it's not about the production, it is the consumption
[1] https://influencemap.org/briefing/The-Carbon-Majors-Database-26913
This (Score:1)
Its much easier for people to make themselves feel righteous by blaming the "evil" fossil fuel companies than look in the mirror and ask themselves if they really need to drive somewhere instead of taking the bus/train and whether they really need to order more plastic shit from Amazon.
Re: (Score:2)
The terminology is confusing, which might be intentional. They refer to producers of fossil fuels (and cement) as "carbon majors", but then "It has been proven unambiguously that anthropogenic activities are largely responsible for climate change, and that combustion of fossil fuels is the main contributor." Combustion of fossil fuels is mainly done by fuel consumers, not producers.
Re:I'm scared (Score:4, Interesting)
> Tax me harder, daddy.
Awwww ... aren't Orange Daddy's tariffs hurting you enough?
Well yeah (Score:3)
We knew this. Exxon's [1]own climate models [harvard.edu] produced in the 1970s showed this. As far back as the 1800s, people were showing [2]the increasing temperature effects [homeadminr...-eunicepdf] of CO2 and methane.
Then there was the [3]1912 newspaper article [snopes.com] which stated essentially the same thing: The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
Not sure what the issue is.
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-finds-exxonmobil-internal-research-accurately-predicted-climate-change/
[2] file:homeadminrDesktop2021-07-physics-climate-1800s-scientist-eunicepdf
[3] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/1912-article-global-warming/
Re: (Score:1)
Thanks to the link to your filesystem. Anyway, the 1800s were also when the world was emerging from the Little Ice Age, an abnormally cold time.
Re: (Score:2)
> the 1800s were also when the world was emerging from the Little Ice Age
North Atlantic != world.
Re: (Score:1)
> industrial revolution != world
FTFY. Many studies say that it was largely global. At the time, most of the world lacked thermometers so there is little accurate data to go on, it's just attempts at intelligent guesses. Regardless, with your perspective, CO2 was generated by way of the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution hadn't spread beyond the northern latitudes, so CO2 densities would have stayed at the higher latitudes. The jet streams probably locked out the CO2 from lower latitudes. Human math creates perfect outcomes.
Re: (Score:2)
>> North Atlantic != world.
> That sounds to me like there could be parts of the world that could benefit from global warming.
That is because you have no understanding what is happening. The speed of the change makes this catastrophic for anybody and anything affected, no exceptions. If it were a regular natural change over 10'000 ... 100'000 years or even longer, then sure, some parts of the world would benefit, nature would adapt, etc. But it is a change over 200 years or so and nothing can handle that.
Re: (Score:2)
Your 1800's link leads to a file on your local file system.
I assume that the paper was referring to [1]Svante Arrhenius' work from 1896 [wikipedia.org].
1896 !!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect
the spiral has begun (Score:1)
and nobody in the halls of american power right now could care less and certainly the developing world cant really afford to care less atleast china is pushing electric cars and solar but if they cant cut coal it doesnt really matter shipping has made some meaningful improvements too from what ive seen and india seems unbearably choked; so much that if they did manage to cleanup emissions significantly it would wildly change their climate and lead to massive flooding and rains; or i think i remember see
Re: (Score:2)
> im saying that as a mostly ai-positive person
Try being carriage return-positive.
Re: (Score:2)
>> im saying that as a mostly ai-positive person
> Try being carriage return-positive.
Found the ancient Mac user.
Re: the spiral has begun (Score:2)
I got better!
just asking (Score:1, Troll)
... Are these the same scientists asserting that global warming will drive more frequent and more severe weather such as hurricanes?
(He said ironically, at the peak of the 2025 hurricane when there isn't any activity in the Atlantic at all.)
Re: (Score:2)
The predicted trend is increasing warning which is proven to be true. Predicting weather is another matter. You might as well say that there's no evidence that water is getting hotter if you heat it just because you can't predict the exact time and location of various bubbles as it starts to boil.
Re: (Score:2)
First we are just hitting peak season
Second there has been 6 named storms (I believe 1 was a cat5) and NHC is tracking the possible 13th depression.
They just haven't made landfall here yet. That's called luck.
Re: (Score:2)
The scientists attribution of anything and everything to climate change based on models specifically tweaked to give them the results they want - and the complete failure of such assertions in another climate-change-related context - is 100% a salient point regarding the believability of these new claims.
And yes, at the same time it's 100% troll because /. has more or less ideologically become Reddit.
Um (Score:1)
Not seeing how it's the companies that matter.
So if the energy business had been run by the government during that period, the CO2 would have magically disappeared then?
This is news? (Score:2)
Another waste of time and funds on a study from the department of the fucking obvious and nothing done about it.
Once again another reason not to refute the fact that theres only a 5% chance of us getting off this trajectory
to catastrophic climate collapse that will lead to the extinction of much of life, except perhaps a few lucky
extremophiles within decades.
Perhaps if we were to fund action,instead of reports that tell us what we already know we might stand a better chance,
but i dont think thats looking li
With Charlie Kirk died truth (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not praising him or his hateful ignorant rhetoric. I'm merely forecasting what comes next.
The MAGA party is hard at work canonizing him. They will absolutely make political hay from this for some time to come. We will see a call to arms - both physical and metaphorical - as the MAGA party rallies ever harder around Saint Donald. This will become a push for more persecution of "the left" as MAGA folks claim they are themselves being hunted. This will also become a push to discard the 22nd amendment - which the SCOTUS will not prevent - to keep Donald as god-king for all eternity.
Very convenient that this came up for the MAGA party while they were desperately trying to find a way to distract America from the Epstein files. Notice how far down in the news feeds anything relating to that has fallen since. The front page of CNN no longer mentions Epstein at all; MSNBC barely mentions it in referencing a congressman asking for the files to be released and NPR buries it far down discussing the UK firing an ambassador to the US over Epstein ties.
In other words, mission accomplished for the MAGA party. The longer the manhunt continues for the shooter the longer we're distracted from matters of real consequence and the stronger the MAGA party gets against the rest of America.
Go ahead, mod me down. I know this is a little off topic but it warrants being said. Matters of climate change will soon be forbidden discussion topics in the MAGA world.
Re: (Score:1)
God's perfect law says gay people should be stoned to death
-Charlie Kirk
Re: (Score:2)
See my comment about boys in the girls room. Stoning is definitely crazy, but going to a therapist who helps unravel insecurities in manhood and womanhood helps a lot with this kind of shit. Having SJW parents preaching, "I'm not going to teach my children about gender and gender roles" goes down to one of the root causes. Another in parents not understanding this themselves and passing that ignorance down to the next generation. Now guess why their kids end up confused about gender and gender roles? I know
Re: (Score:2)
You're so far past the point it's over the horizon.
Kirk wasn't making a measured response about a complicated issue, he was turning up the temperature by being as inflammatory as possible and dehumanizing a demographic for political advantage.
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't directly state his name, but the first thing I did was acknowledge that he was crazy to think such:
> Stoning is definitely crazy
Re: (Score:2)
And still, is this still something so important that you want to start a civil war over? Do you really want some kind of gestapo coming around and enforcing the idea that people's sons are daughters? That's no better than all of the anti-Jew stuff out there that Kirk spouted. Even the libertarian perspective of "I can do whatever I want so long as it doesn't hurt somebody else" plays into this. Women not having their space because men are in there hurts them. Regardless, the correct perspective is, "I can d
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing is or was being forced on you. You want to change genders? Cool, I support whatever works for you. It has zero effect on my life. As for the gestapo we have a modern day rendition going around asking for papers and snatching people into camps.
Re: (Score:1)
Could we have some context on that? That is out of character for Kirk.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It was merely fake news and crisis actors just like Sandy Hook.
Re: (Score:1)
> In other words, mission accomplished for the MAGA party. The longer the manhunt continues for the shooter the longer we're distracted from matters of real consequence and the stronger the MAGA party gets against the rest of America.
I heard that a suspect is in custody, the manhunt is likely over. I find the suggestion that anyone would let an assassin run free for political ends quite reprehensible. Could you at least suggest the continued manhunt to be a ruse and the suspect being captured was kept from the public? That's still evil, but not incompetent. If the manhunt is still actually in progress then we can excuse this as incompetence than being evil. Don't attribute anything to malice when incompetence will suffice.
> Go ahead, mod me down. I know this is a little off topic but it warrants being said. Matters of climate change will soon be forbidden discussion topics in the MAGA world.
I could t
The article mischaracterizes the data (Score:4, Interesting)
This article attributes it to the producers. The data the report is based on "used to quantify the direct production-linked operational emissions and emissions from the combustion of marketed products that can be attributed to these entities."
So this is about the consumers of these products, not the producers.
Re:The article mischaracterizes the data (Score:5, Informative)
> So this is about the consumers of these products, not the producers.
The producers lobby against alternatives. Your assignment of blame is facile and weak.
Re: (Score:2)
>> So this is about the consumers of these products, not the producers.
> The producers lobby against alternatives. Your assignment of blame is facile and weak.
I didn't assign the blame, the data used in the report explicitly did. The study and the article lie about what the data says.
Re: The article mischaracterizes the data (Score:2)
"this is about the consumers of these products,"
Didn't assign blame? Learn to English, bro.
Re: (Score:2)
Producers have power, but they are not omnipotent. Individuals still have a lot of choice in their energy use. You can drive an EV or not at all. In many places you can choose to buy 100% renewable or install rooftop solar and make your own electricity. You can use a heat pump instead of gas/oil heating. Fossil fuel producers won't emit if people don't buy their products.
Re: (Score:2)
> Your assignment of blame is facile and weak.
Like pretty much all the deniers claim. Because they are not living in actual reality.
And it continues... (Score:1)
"We ran a climate model to reconstruct the historical period, and then we ran it again but without the emissions of a specific carbon major,"
In other words, you took an educated, or at least informed, guess at the past, Then tried it again with some other assumptions.
Really. Guessing?
The fossil fuel producers response (Score:2)
Use their immense wealth to buy politicians
Use every dirty trick in the book to destroy science
I can imagine a future where publishing an article like this will be illegal
Oil Companies Don't release CO2 (Score:2)
Oil companies don't release CO2, it's consumers and businesses doing it when they burn the fuel.
Re: (Score:2)
Soo, is this the next lie you people use after "climate change is not real" only makes the ones claiming it look abysmally stupid?
Donâ(TM)t Forget Us! (Score:1)
We, of course, all contribute to this. Some of us are just looking for a scapegoat.
Re:Donâ(TM)t Forget Us! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a quantification fallacy.
You: Hi there, I have a penny, what can I buy?
Grocer: Not much.
You: But one can buy a lot from a lot of pennies.
Grocer: Show me the lot.
You: I don't understand.
Re: (Score:2)
They did so via a fancy PR campaign and introduced a slick new green and yellow sunburst logo, named after Helios, the Greek sun god, to reinforce this image.
This was to be a short-lived affair as it did not take long before it was labelled as a greenwashing stunt due to BP’s minimal investments in clean energy compared to its oil and gas operations.
Re: (Score:3)
>> ....these heat waves would have been virtually impossible without emissions from oil, coal, and cement companies
> The one thing that is deliberately left out of all these discussions is the inconvenient truth -- it is impossible to make a meaningful reduction in the use of fossil fuels without destroying our economy.
It is possible, China and several European countries are doing it as we speak by transitioning to BEVs and retiring obsolete ICE vehicles. The only place where eliminating fossil fuels is a physical impossibility is by the laws of physics in whatever parallel Lala universe you are posting from
Re: (Score:2)
> It is possible, China and several European countries are doing it as we speak by transitioning to BEVs and retiring obsolete ICE vehicles. The only place where eliminating fossil fuels is a physical impossibility is by the laws of physics in whatever parallel Lala universe you are posting from
It is possible, but we aren't doing it. Emissions are increasing.
No one is "retiring obsolete ICE vehicles", they are just junking cars that no longer work. Its not even clear that BEV sales have actually reduced sales of new ICE vehicles. We can hope eventually they will, but is there any real evidence for that? Or are BEV sales just expanding the fleet of vehicles allowing more people to drive more miles?
The problem is that you can blame the companies who pump the oil out of the ground. You can blame the
Re:Donâ(TM)t Forget Us! (Score:5, Insightful)
> The one thing that is deliberately left out of all these discussions is the inconvenient truth -- it is impossible to make a meaningful reduction in the use of fossil fuels without destroying our economy.
No, you've mixed it up. The inconvenient truth is that we can't meaningfully reduce fossil fuels without incentivizing the change economically. And that is such a hard thing to do that politicians don't even discuss how to get started.
Re: (Score:2)
> The inconvenient truth is that we can't meaningfully reduce fossil fuels without incentivizing the change economically. And that is such a hard thing to do that politicians don't even discuss how to get started.
You mean by making people's lives more expensive? Yeah obviously nobody is going to vote for that.
Re: (Score:2)
> The one thing that is deliberately left out of all these discussions is the inconvenient truth -- it is impossible to make a meaningful reduction in the use of fossil fuels without destroying our economy.
Not at all clear. Reducing fossil fuels without destroying our economy will require implementation of better technologies. Turns out, improving technologies is something engineers are good at.
Maybe talk about it on news site, say, that has the motto "news for nerds"?
Re: (Score:1)
> Maybe talk about it on news site, say, that has the motto "news for nerds"?
Won't help. /. is full of techno-pessimists shouting that we can never solve problems, that if the technology we have now doesn't solve the problem right now this very minute it can't ever work, because tech can't be improved.
Re: (Score:2)
Green energy is cheaper than fossil energy in all cases.
Transitioning to green energy will take investment (I.e. corporate profits... just not fossil fuel companies) and benefit the economy by decreasing the cost of energy for everyone.
The only people harmed are the fossil fuel companies who of course spread disinformation and buy politicians to keep their profits up.
Re: (Score:2)
> We, of course, all contribute to this. Some of us are just looking for a scapegoat.
The key decisions about this are made at government level. Subsidies for fossil fuels are large but become huge once you include the wars and military support needed to keep them going (e.g. recent military action around Yemen is very much around keeping the Gulf area safe for the transport of oil). Fossil fuels also get indirect subsidies by being able to bypass normal planning procedures by simply having parliament / congress grant licenses which allow them to do things other industries would never be all
Re: (Score:1)
We, of course, all contribute to this. Some of us are just looking for a scapegoat.
Yep. Well hidden in the study is the statement "...we assign to each carbon major the emissions associated with the full value chain of their products...". That's an obfuscated way of saying that they're not counting the direct emissions of the producers, but also of the consumers (that's us) who use their products. But it's basically a zero sum game, if consumers don't buy from one producer, they'll buy from another.
Re: (Score:1)
It seems implausible that the oil companies are generating all the emissions. To do so would mean burning the products that they could sell for profit.
Re: (Score:2)
> We, of course, all contribute to this.
Yeah, my thought exactly: why is the article and summary highlighting the oil companies? Yes, they produce oil but they wouldn't if we didn't buy it from them. And technically, Shell wasn't the one who burned the gasoline and produced the CO2, that was you and me.
I quickly read parts of the paper. Being a science paper, it's a bit dense. If I'm reading it right, they have a database of 200+ heat waves since 2000 (which they admit is an incomplete list). Of these, they conclude that in all cases for which th
Re: (Score:2)
> Shell wasn't the one who burned the gasoline and produced the CO2, that was you and me
Yes and no. It's true that "we" are burning all of the oil and gas, and are responsible for the demand. But oil companies themselves emit around 15% of all greenhouse gases in the process of producing, transporting and refining oil, before they sell it to us. That's not an insignificant amount, and perhaps there's a lot of room for further improvement. They already stopped practices like flaring off that pesky natural gas that is produced along with oil.
The same goes for the manufacturers of concrete