The Daily Background

For the second year in a row, ExxonMobil announced today that they had their best year ever. And, for the second year in a row, that best year ever was also the best year for any company in history.

The record haul? 39.5 billion dollars. With zeroes, that’s $39,500,000,000, or a profit of more than $338,000 every minute (or more than $5,000 every second of every day).

Also today, a major international conference of climate scientists at the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change passed a resolution that said humans were “very likely” causing climate change and that this change is cause for concern. The wording “very likely” means 90% according to officials attending the conference (a resolution containing only the word “likely” was last passed in 2001 by the same group).

Further, the same group of international scientists also passed a resolution concluding that global warming was “more likely than not” at fault for stronger hurricanes. The 2001 conference had tried to draw the same conclusion but was unable to due to lack of evidence available at that time. The full IPCC report, issued only about twice a decade, will be released Friday.

Former Vice President Al Gore was nominated for a 2007 Nobel Prize recently for his work bringing attention to the issue of global climate change.

Filed under: Environment Related, Z-TDB Blog