The potential link between fossil fuel combustion at atmospheric temperature increase has been widely discussed in scientific literature and academic texts relevant to the oil industry for more than a century. The earth receives a constant stream of radiant energy from the sun. This solar radiation is critical to maintaining planetary temperatures at a level which will support life. It has been equally critical to life and to a stable human civilization, however, that a significant portion of the radiation the earth receives from the sun is reflected back into space, thus ensuring that the planetary temperatures do not increase uncontrollably. Beginning with the work of John Tyndall in 1859, it has been widely recognized that certain “greenhouse gases”, such as carbon dioxide, make the earth’s atmosphere more opaque to that reflected radiation, trapping energy that would otherwise be released back into space.2 At the same time, scientists and industry experts alike have long recognized the simple and irrefutable fact that the combustion of fossil fuels—including coal, oil, and natural gas—releases tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere; and that, indeed, CO2 comprises the largest waste stream by far from fossil fuel combustion processes.3 The proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a strong positive correlation with planetary temperatures. For more than a century, this relationship between carbon dioxide and planetary temperatures has been routinely discussed in the scientific literature, including specialist journals and textbooks for the geology and minerology communities, in the general and popular scientific press, and even in newspaper reports.4 For decades, however, the relationship between fossil fuel combustion, 2 SPENCER WEART, THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING 3 (Revised ed., Cambridge, 2008). See, e.g., THOMAS C. CHAMBERLIN & ROLLIN S. SALISBURY, GEOLOGY, vol 3. 444-45 (NY, Holt & Co. 1907) (discussing the work of Arrhenius, Angstrom and others); JW Gregory, Climatic Variations: Their Extent and Causes, International Geological Congress 1906, reprinted in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution 33944, at 347-48 (Smithsonian Inst., Wash. D.C., 1908) (discussing with approval the work of Arrhenius and Chamberlin on the role of atmospheric CO2 in climate change); FRANK WIGGLESWORTH CLARK, THE DATA OF GEOCHEMISTRY (4th ed.) 48-49. (U.S. Dept. of Interior, Wash., D.C. 1920) (“At 3 parts in 10,000 the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere amounts to about 2,200,000,000,000 tons, equivalent to 600,000,000,000 tons of carbon. … The annual consumption of coal, estimated by A. Krogh at 700,000,000 tons in 1902, adds yearly to the atmosphere about onethousandth of its present content in carbon dioxide. In a thousand years, then, if the rate were constant and no disturbing factors interfered, the amount of CO, in the atmosphere would be doubled. If we take into account the combustion of fuels other than coal and the large additions to the atmosphere from the sources previously mentioned, the result becomes still more startling. Were there no counterbalancing of this increase in atmospheric carbon, animal life would soon become impossible upon our planet.”); Robert E. Swain, “Atmospheric Pollution by Industrial Wastes,” Ind. Eng. Chem., 15 (3), p. 296–301 (1923) (“The greatest single waste product in industry is a gas, carbon dioxide, which is usually discharged as it is produced directly into the air….If all the coal consumed annually in this country were completely burned, there would be produced approximately nine hundred thousand billion cubic meters, or one billion eight hundred million metric tons of this gas. The combustion of petroleum would add two hundred million metric tons, and of natural gas ninety million metric tons, while the burning or decay of wood, and of plant products and tissues, would add an indeterminable but enormous total to these figures. … But it is a remarkable fact that, rapidly disbursed as it is into the great ocean about us, this gas is present in the strikingly small and uniform amount of three parts by volume of carbon dioxide to ten thousand parts of air, or three hundred parts per million parts of air.”) 4 See, e.g., Charles JJ Fox, On The Coefficients of Absorpotion of nitrogen and Oxygen IX Distilled Water and Seawater, and of Atmospheric Carbonic Acid in Sea-Water 5, 68-86 (Trans. Faraday Soc., 1909), available at http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/1909/ tf/tf9090500068#!divAbstract (“The object of the present series of measurements was primarily the determination of the absorption coefficients of nitrogen, oxygen, and atmospheric carbonic acid in sea-water. These coefficients have of late years acquired some special significance, notably in connection with that group of physical problems of which Arrhenius’s work on the diatherinancy of the atmospheric gases, particularly carbonic acid, and its effect upon terrestrial temperatures, is typical, and again in 3 3