On Global Warming and Ice Ages

From Robertscribbler:

Colorado Bob posted:

By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black was, according to his own notes, able to tell the company’s management committee that there was “general scientific agreement” that what was then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO2; a year later, speaking to an even wider audience inside the company, he said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius. That’s just about where the scientific consensus lies to this day. “Present thinking,” Black wrote in summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-exxon-knew-about-climate-change

And I responded: "And back then the news media were telling us that we were falling headlong into a new ice age. And it was not hard to believe them, in fact hard not to believe them, because they interviewed the minority of scientists who hypothesized that, and because Boston and New York Harbors had ice floes in them.

"Can we convict ExxonMobil — and the corporate media — of Crimes against Humanity, and Crimes against Nature, and sentence them to corporate death?"

Indeed. The time for decision according to Mr. Black was 1982-1987, that is, 33 to 28 years ago. Now we have blown through that and as a result, Earth's atmosphere has 405 ppm CO₂ and 480 ppm CO₂e.