Uber-Ironic 1962 ad Touts Oil's Ability to Melt Glaciers!

Joe Romm

Courtesy of Climate Progress:

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):

oil melts glaciers

 

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.

This was originally posted on the Climate Progress website.

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  • Posted on Nov. 21, 2009. Listed in:


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