Dr. Robert Yeats, Professor at Oregon State University, won the AAPG Michael T. Halbouty Memorial Human Needs Award in 1998 .... But now fast-forward to 2015, he opines that oil & gas geologists are now faced with a different kind of problem ... climate change. But many members of AAPG reject the research on climate change being man-made, even though most climate geoscientists accept varying forms of global warming based on analysis of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, melting of Arctic sea ice and a steady increase in CO2 in our atmosphere. Students graduating from major universities take courses in climate science as well as structural geology, geophysics, etc.... But, rejection by many AAPG members of the evidence for climate change leads to geologists even disagreeing. As a result, and as pointed out in Edith Allison column in the July 2015 EXPLORER, the argument has become political.
The U.S. House, she reminds us, has passed a bill that reduces research funding to geoscience programs by 12%, which will cut back on research in fields of great interest in oil and gas exploration and earthquake research, etc. Allison quotes Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, as saying that funding is cut for lower priority areas, including redundant climate research. As written, the Smith bill treats all the geosciences as lower priority. This debate leads to proposals by some academic colleagues to have university foundations divest themselves of fossil fuel stocks. He fought that off at Oregon State, as did Harvard and other universities, but the public outcry against huge political expenditures by billionaires like the Koch brothers makes targets of all O&G companies. If climate change is left to politicians, society will be unable to present a common front against the warming of our planet. Dr. Yeats proposes an international conference on climate change, inviting those both for and against whether humans activities are changing the climate of the Earth.
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