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Ever sat on a beach and wondered what's across the ocean? It may not be what you think.  

Have you ever sat on a beach on wondered what's across the ocean?

If you think you can answer this question just by looking at a map, read on. You may be surprised.

To ask the question more concretely, what's across the ocean from New York? It doesn't really matter what beach in New York you choose, but just to be specific, let's go with Montauk, NY. It is at the tip of Long Island and has a clear, unobstructed view of the Atlantic ocean.

To figure out what's across from New York, the first thing you might do is take out a map, follow a straight line eastward, and conclude that the answer is Europe, or more precisely Portugal.

Of course there is not just one answer. When looking out across the ocean, there are any many directions you could choose, each of which would lead you to a different location. But in this case, surprisingly, Portugal is not one of them.

Europe is not across the ocean from New York... but Australia is

When you stare across the ocean from a beach in Montauk, or anywhere in New York, this map shows what's on the other side (excluding some smaller countries that unfortunately did not fit).

No matter which direction you look, you're not facing Europe.

That's partly because the coast of Long Island is angled southward. But there is also something else going on.

If you stand on the beach and turn your head all the way to the left, the direction you're facing is north east. Common sense would seem to dictate if you sail in that direction (north east), you should end up somewhere north east of where you began. Namely, you should end up in Europe.

In reality, if you were to point your ship north east from New York and sail straight ahead without turning, you would land in Morocco, which is to the south of New York.

Stranger still, when you stand on a beach in New York, one of the countries directly across from you is Australia.

If you were to sail through the orange Australia section in the map above, without ever turning the ship, you would eventually hit Australia's southwestern coast. And as you land, you would be approaching from the south.

Sailing from New York to Australia in a straight line

Because we're used to looking at the world on a flat surface, our perception of Earth's geography is distorted in many ways. In this case, it is the concept of straight lines that throws us off.

Technically, there are no straight lines on a globe, since the surface itself is curved. The shortest distance between any two points, the closest thing to a straight line, is known as a great circle arc.

Over short distances, straight lines on a 2-dimensional map are the same as great circle arcs on a 3-dimensional globe. But over long distances, the relationship breaks down as the Earth's curvature comes into play.

If you've ever followed the path of a long international flight, you already know the shortest distance between two points on the Earth's surface looks curved. The same effect applies here.

Though the lines in the map above appear curved, all of them are actually straight lines (great circles) on the 3D globe.

Looking at it from a different perspective

I spent a good while looking at this on Google Earth convincing myself it was correct.

If you have any doubt whether it's possible to sail from New York to Australia along a straight line, the video below shows what it looks like in 3 dimensions.

There is also a 2-dimensional way of looking at these lines that clears up what's really going on. The image below shows the Earth from a top-down perspective, using an azimuthal map projection, with New York in the center.

From this view, you can see the lines do appear straight.

You can also see clearly that the U.S. East Coast as a whole does not face toward Europe at all.

What's really across across the Atlantic ocean?

If you were to stand on a beach on the U.S. East Coast and look directly east, here's what's really across the ocean.

 

Credit

• 
  
• Inspired by this map from the Washington Post, which shows what's across the ocean based on lines of constant latitude. For an even more precise look at what's across from every individual beach, see these maps by Andy Woodruff.
• 
  
• All 2D maps were made with QGIS using imagery from Natural Earth. The 3D globe is from Google Earth
• 
  

This post originally appeared on Metrocosm

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Artist Kindra Crick Remembers Her Grandfather, Nobel Prize Winner Francis Crick  


Francis Crick, shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discerning the structure of DNA. It was perhaps the most important biological discovery of the past century. But then Crick became fascinated with the nature of consciousness, an imprecise and controversial field at the time, and moved from England to La Jolla, CA, to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. His granddaughter Kindra Crick, a cell biologist and artist who created the DNA sculpture called "What Mad Pursuit" for the billion dollar Crick Institute in London, recalls those heady times of early science on La Jolla's Mesa, "The Miracle Coast."

Intellectual Capital: How did you come to the Salk?

Kindra Crick: The summer after my freshman year at Princeton University I was trying to decide my major so my granddad, Francis Crick, arranged for me to be an intern in a neuroscience lab where he worked. This was so I could to learn the nitty gritty of research. In Dr. Martyn Goulding's lab, I helped perform experiments running DNA gels and watching neural tube development (cells that ultimately form the brain and spinal cord) under the microscope.

Intellectual Capital: What was the Salk like then?

Coming from Seattle the Salk was bathed in sunshine. The labs seemed busy even during the summer and there were a number of stimulating lectures. One was on a computer-learning program that could determine the gender of both chimps and humans from a photograph. After training it would even rate a face on how masculine or feminine it was. There was good camaraderie and the labs surrounding mine would get together on Fridays for drinks and barbecues on the weekends. I played on the lab's softball team.

My granddad had made the move to the Salk in 1976. With this came a shift in the focus of his own research from work in molecular biology in England at the Medical Research Council to the brain and consciousness at the Salk in California. Then 60 years old, he wanted to tackle a problem that had been a lifelong interest, the brain. He wanted to move the field that treated the brain like a black box, where one only gained insight from resulting actions, to a field that would uncover the mechanism and functions that lead to how humans perceive the world, what happens during sleep and the elusive actions inside our skull that constitute our conscious world upon waking.

Intellectual Capital: Which scientists impressed you?

I vividly remember a long lunch with Dr. V.S. Ramachandran who spoke enthusiastically about his work with patients with phantom limbs who sometimes experienced excruciating pain in a hand or arm that was no longer present. He had discovered that with the use of a simple mirror he could instruct amputees to look at the mirror image of their working hand, which appeared to take the place of the missing one, and unclench it to relieve their phantom pain. My granddad was an attentive listener and would occasionally probe with a targeted question, but I realized a few years later when reading Dr. Ramachandran's book 'Phantoms in the Brain' that we had discussed many of the central themes and imaginative experiments in that book.

Another scientist that made a lasting impression was my granddad's long-time collaborator, Christof Koch. He would come by the house often while I was there, and they would discuss and debate the way the visual system worked in the brain. A conversation that stood out was how one perceived the blueness of blue. At first, I didn't understand the question, although it seemed like such a simple one. We walked through the basics of wavelength and the mechanisms of the eye with its cones and rods. And then we jumped into the visual cortex and the more abstract part of the question which was why at a particular wavelength our perception changes and we have a name for this color and there is a quality to that color that is a sensation separate from its name and the objects that we perceive to be blue. A quality missing, for example, from something outside our realm of seeing, like ultraviolet. One can describe everything about ultraviolet, but with our naked eye it does not possess a sensation of color like blue does, in our mind.

Intellectual Capital: What was it like living with Francis and your grandmother Odile Crick?

My grandparents lived in a quiet cul-de-sac near the top of Mount Soledad in La Jolla. I stayed in a large guest room which had its own entrance with French doors opening onto the deck and pool. People came over for dinner and lunch, but there were no large parties at the house that summer, as my granddad had been having slight heart problems. We did attend a few parties that summer, the most memorable being the one to celebrate the 85th birthday of Bradley Smith, the noted Life magazine photographer. Intellectual musings tended to be at smaller gatherings and over leisurely lunches by the pool, and most of the guests my grandparents entertained were photographers, painters or scientists.

Intellectual Capital: Do you visit the Salk now? How have things changed?

Not only did Francis end up tackling the problem of consciousness himself, collaborating with Koch, but he was slowly and deliberately recruiting some of the best and brightest to unlock the black box of the mind. For example, my granddad gathered with a small group of scientists who called themselves the Helmholtz Club. This group brought together scientists from various research fields as neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, psychophysics, computer science and engineering. All had an interest in the study of the visual system and of higher cognitive functions relying on visual perception such as visual consciousness. I believe one of the reasons San Diego and The Salk have become a hub of neuroscience research today is based partly on the work and vision of the scientists who attended those monthly meetings. The study of the brain is a burgeoning field and we are right in the middle of it. I have been told by many of my granddad's peers, that he was a tremendous inspiration and influence.

Intellectual Capital: And talk of your own art, its roots or themes--

At Princeton, I embraced the study of molecular biology but balanced it with my passion for drawing and painting by developing visuals and materials for campus theater. Biology itself is a visual subject, rich with a tradition in observation and communication through art. I still enjoy research, but I feel most driven when I am making art. My early experiments with the marriage of art and science came while at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In my paintings, I incorporated imagery from my observations under the microscope in the lab where I had worked on [breast cancer genes] BRCAI and BRCA2. Cancerous fibroblasts would envelop my canvas in layers. The birth of my daughter and my obsession with the new research on the biological basis of love fully crystalized my passion for merging science and visual expression. A series of prints and paintings questioning the science and symbolism of one of our most basic drives, love, soon followed. Now I create work that gives visual expression to the wonder and process of scientific inquiry.



Intellectual Capital: And your approach to your new sculpture--

I was invited to paint 'What's in My DNA?' on a seven-foot double helix-inspired sculpture.
This sculpture was part of Cancer Research UK's campaign to raise awareness for the soon-to-be-finished Francis Crick Institute in London. Twenty-one sculptures were created by world-leading artists and designers, including Ai Weiwei, Zaha Hadid, and Benjamin Shine, based on what's in their DNA.
My sculpture, What Mad Pursuit, explores the creative possibilities achievable through the intermingling of art, science and imagination in the quest for knowledge. The piece is inspired by my grandparent's contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA. My grandmother, Odile Crick, was the artist who first drew the iconic image of the double helix molecule.
Half of my double helix sculpture is a chalkboard layered with the patina of science. I christened the chalkboard by writing, erasing and rubbing in the dust the words from some of my favorite scientists, including Oliver Sacks. What I left visible for the viewer to discover are handwritten notations from my granddad's letters and his many chalkboards. The complementary helix strand is a flourish of vibrant blue bordered by a golden helix. The abstracted growing forms that spread and mutate up the sculpture can be seen as cellular life or as a metaphor for infectious ideas.

Intellectual Capital: Why "Mad Pursuit?"

I took the title 'What Mad Pursuit' from the title of my granddad's 1988 memoir and essays on scientific discovery. My granddad chose that title from a line in the Keats poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn." It is a nice banter between art and science and speaks to the mad pursuit of both, and sold earlier this year at Christie's London, at an auction that raised $500,000 for the Francis Crick Institute, a leading center of biomedical research and innovation due to open in 2016.

Cold Spring Harbor,100th Anniversary of Francis Crick's Birth. Clockwise from bott. left, Mike Crick, Anne Churchland, Kindra Crick, Bob Olby, Jim Watson (original Nobel,) friend, Liz Watson, Ludmilla Pollock, Yours Truly. I had the salmon.

TO VIEW THE MAKING OF KINDRA CRICK'S SCULPTURE, "WHAT MAD PURSUIT," PLEASE CLICK: http://www.kindracrick.com/dna/

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Food Waste on the Farm  
Food waste doesn't just come from your plate or the back corners of your refrigerator. Food waste starts at the farm- whether that farm covers hundreds of acres or some space on your terrace. Growing and harvesting food is not a 100% efficient process. The fate of excess lettuce is one classic example. Lettuce is one of the first things you plant in the spring. It comes in lovely shapes and colors and you plant it at a time when the whole notion of gardening is fresh and full of promise. That often means that you plant too much. Round about July that excess lettuce starts thinking that perhaps the reason you haven't harvested it is that it was destined for greater things than simple salads. The lettuce starts to bolt- meaning a center stalk grows tall and the leaves get bitter. The lettuce is attempting to turn into a tree. Maybe the lettuce has heard about Christmas in July. This happens to commercial farmers as well as to amateurs. Some examples from friends and the neighborhood are below.





At the farm these 'trees' are typically just plowed back into the soil. That can happen in your garden as well. Adding organic matter back to the soil is a good thing. But it isn't the best thing to do with food that could be eaten. Realize that it takes a lot of energy and effort to produce food. The New York Times made this clear with a pictorial showing how much water is used to grow various crops in California:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/21/us/your-contribution-to-the-california-drought.html?_r=0. Lettuce trees do not grow by water alone. All plants also require nutrients- the big three being nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K). Those are the three numbers that you see on a bag of fertilizer.



Nitrogen is typically applied at between 100 and 200 pounds per acre. While gaseous nitrogen is plentiful in our air (atmosphere is 77% N2 gas) it takes a lot of energy to turn the gas into a form that plants can use. Most of our fertilizer N is produced using the Haber - Bosch process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process) at a cost of about 4 pounds of CO2 for each pound of nitrogen. About half as much energy is used to produce the P and K. Phosphorus fertilizer comes from calcium phosphate rocks. We used to have large reserves in the US in Idaho and Florida. Now the biggest world reserves are in and around Morocco and China (http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/Pnadw835.PDF) with Saudi Arabia also having significant quantities (http://www.mining-technology.com/features/featurea-kingdom-of-riches-saudi-arabia-looks-to-strike-it-rich-with-mining-sector-4382267/). Wasting the food means that you are also wasting the water and the nutrient it took to grow.

Soils are not so picky about the type of organic matter that they are fed. They are just as happy getting plant roots as edible leaves. They don't mind slime. The same can't be said for people. But even if you have excess romaine your neighbor may not. Feeding others with your bounty is one way to put the excess to optimal use and expand your social circle. On a commercial level this is much more difficult but can still be done. Excess from farmer's markets and fields can be donated to food banks or left for gleaning projects. Gleaning means going into a field after harvest and getting what the farmer did not. It was the subject of an 18th century painting by Jean Francois Millet and has been making a comeback in the US http://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/133059889/gleaning-a-harvest-for-the-needy-by-fighting-waste.



While you can give your extra lettuce to friends and neighbors before it bolts, this type of generosity is harder to justify for a farmer who needs to make a living from selling his/ her produce. Gleaning and donations are good for the world but not as good for the bottom line. Tax incentives to encourage gleaning and other rules that limit liability for farmers who allow gleaners on their land are ways to do that: http://modernfarmer.com/2015/12/gleaning/. So share your lettuce before it can think of turning into a tree. New rules and incentives will hopefully let farmers do so too.

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Cocaine and HIV Infection  


By Drs. David Niesel and Norbert Herzog

Cocaine and HIV Infection

It is well known that cocaine use increases the chance of acquiring HIV, the virus infection that if left untreated leads to AIDS. It was assumed that needle sharing and increased risky behaviors were the reason for more infections. Some data now argues that cocaine use fundamentally changes cells of the immune system making them more susceptible to HIV infection.

HIV is a retrovirus that infects cells of the immune system that carry the receptors to which HIV binds on their surfaces. The cells are a type of white blood cells called a T lymphocyte or T cell. T cells are important in identifying and hunting down virus infected cells and some of them are critical in orchestrating the immune response. For HIV to successfully infect the T cells, they must be capable of dividing into daughter cells. A large population of T cells in the body are not dividing and hence dormant and HIV cannot infect them.

Anything that activates these dormant cells would increase the cells HIV could infect. Scientists exposed dormant T cells to cocaine and then to HIV. They measured the amount of HIV produced to determine if cocaine influenced the susceptibility of these dormant cells to HIV infection. Exposure to cocaine increases the susceptibility of dormant T cells to HIV infection. These experiments were done in a petri dish, but if this occurs in the body, this would greatly increase the number of cells available for HIV to productively infect in cocaine users. This would increase the likelihood of establishing an HIV infection, likely making the infection more severe and potentially affecting the disease progression.

More recently, the investigators did similar experiments but this time in a very special type of mouse called a humanized mouse. In these mice, their immune system was eliminated and replaced with a human one. This was done by transplanting stem cells that become the full range of human immune cells, making in effect a mouse with a human immune system. These mice are a good model for studying HIV infections and their impact on the immune system. They had two groups of mice, one was injected with cocaine, and a control group that just received injections of saline before half the mice in each group were infected with HIV. Then the mice continued to receive either cocaine or saline for two more weeks after which blood and tissue samples were analyzed. HIV infected mice that received cocaine were found to have higher levels of virus than their counterparts which received only saline. So cocaine exposure enhances HIV infection and makes the infection worse, exactly as predicted by the petri dish experiments. They also discovered that cocaine reduced the immune response to HIV infection by affecting the activities of the very cells that usually protect us from viral infections. So cocaine not only changes people's behaviors, but also changes the cells of the immune system increasing the chances of HIV infection and potentially the severity of it. Cocaine is a tremendously addictive drug that ruins lives and now we know another important way it can compromise your health. Stay away!

Medical Discovery News is hosted by professors Norbert Herzog at Quinnipiac University, and David Niesel of the University of Texas Medical Branch. Learn more at www.medicaldiscoverynews.com.

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Could we generate useful energy from earthquakes?  
Elliott Spender calculates the amount of useful energy we could generate during a quake  
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Can Science Help You to Become Wise?  
By Jenara Nerenberg

Krista Tippett explores the scientific inquiry into what makes us wise.

Krista Tippett is the creator and host of the award-winning radio program and podcast On Being, which features a combination of scientists and spiritual leaders taking on today's biggest and most pressing questions.



Tippett was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the BBC in Berlin in the 80's before studying divinity at Yale and launching On Being for NPR. In 2014, the White House awarded her a National Humanities Medal for "thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence."

Her new book is called Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living:

The question of what it means to be human is now inextricable from the question of who we are to each other. We have riches of knowledge and insight, of tools both tangible and spiritual, to rise to this calling. We watch our technologies becoming more intelligent, and speculate imaginatively about their potential to become conscious. All the while, we have it in us to become wise. Wisdom leavens intelligence, and ennobled consciousness, and advances evolution itself.

We talked with Tippett about her book and how scientific research can help us all understand the ancient roots of wisdom in an age of information.

Jenara Nerenberg: There are clearly boundaries and things scientists can't always touch. But do you see progress in the scientific understanding of wisdom?

Krista Tippett: It's a great advancement to simply take a concept like wisdom into the laboratory and study qualities that are in the ecosystem of wisdom, like empathy, mindful attention, implicit bias, generosity, gratitude, and forgiveness. And to me the big picture, the good news, is that we're interrogating ourselves in our fullness, the fullness of our humanity.

So much of this is a young frontier. We're just learning things about our brains and about our bodies that we never guessed before and the interaction between our physicality and emotions and what we could call spirit and consciousness, and so I really feel that the great advance is just that we got to this place.

JN: How is talking with a theologian different from talking with a scientist?

KT: This is a kind of demoralized moment for theology, I'd say. It's a confusing moment of flux for the established traditions where, until now, our investigation of things like awe and mystery and compassion have resided. I think of these traditions as these containers that have carried forward conversation and rituals across time and space.

In fact, compassion is now, I think, an urgent practical necessity in the 21st century globalized world. So, ironically, in this very moment the fruits of these traditions seem reasonable in a way--while the traditions themselves are struggling, just like every big institution, because the forms don't work anymore. They don't make sense. There is an evolution underway and it's not clear where we're headed.

But at the very same time, I think the scientific enterprise is in a renaissance. When I first started interviewing scientists 10 years ago for my program, many would at some point make this impassioned plea for seeing science as a human discipline, and they longed for the larger culture to see the value of the scientific enterprise and to celebrate it and enjoy it, in the way we enjoy music and literature. What many of them said is that people are able to enjoy music even if they couldn't have written it and wouldn't be able to read it.

In the last 5-10 years, I've seen this incredible cultural shift. Things like the Human Genome Project and the Hubble telescope, which brought amazing images of the galaxy into our living rooms, have contributed to our sense of awe. We're morphing to this place where science and scientists and scientific ideas are much more celebrated at the heart of our lives together and everyone's intrigued by them.

So there's this exuberance and this delight that scientists have and this great hope and this real excitement at being heard and a real adventurousness in this discussion and in these studies--so in fact they are the really robust voices. And I feel like the theological voice is much more muted, culturally, which is very interesting to observe.



JN: Sounds like there's been a lot of great work you're excited about related to meaning and wisdom. Is there an area where you'd like to see more scientific exploration?

KT: I'm not sure the question of wisdom is really being taken head on. We come close to it, we move in the direction of it. But we know more--and explore more--about becoming intelligent and mindful.

To me the definition of wisdom is it's not merely a possession or an action like intelligence or compassion. It is measured and experienced in terms of the effect a life has on the world.
It's not just about intelligence and it's not just about being smart. It's about being discerning, it's about figuring out what's good for us, it's about caring about what's good for others, and those are all on the path of becoming wise.

I wrote a line in my book --"Wisdom leavens intelligence, and ennobles consciousness, and advances evolution itself"--but I didn't know if it made sense from a scientific perspective. I called up an evolutionary biologist, David Sloan Wilson, and asked him, "Is it true?" He said, "Yes, wisdom advances evolution--but we have to make it true. It doesn't automatically happen."

So I think all these amazing research projects and all these scientists are moving in the direction of that question. But they're not quite putting their arms around that question. They're not quite using this knowledge that is a form of power--all these things we're learning about ourselves--to in fact find new ways to flourish and to be invested in the flourishing of others. The optimal move in a human life is to not merely grow old, but also to grow wiser.

Beyond that, I'm so interested to see how the inquiry unfolds about what consciousness is. I think that field will potentially open up a whole new complicated and interestingly uncomfortable conversation between spiritual life and science.

JN: How do you think significant hardship is related to wisdom?

KT: You know, we have this weird American thing where we somehow decided that life wasn't supposed to be hard. People in other places and at other times haven't had that luxury.

Of course, it's not all Americans, but the cultural narrative we've all assented to says that life is not supposed to be hard. The American dream is about everything always going up and up and up collectively--and that was never rooted in reality. It is still a devastating thing for a dream to die, and I think, collectively, in our generation that's what's happening and that human dynamic is behind a lot of the most disturbing things that are happening now.

Wisdom emerges through the raw materials of our lives--and a great puzzle about human life is this fact that things will go wrong. It is a promise. The things that we worry about are not the things that will go wrong. And when those things go wrong, we will suffer. At any given moment all kinds of people are suffering.

People who become wise are shaped by how they walk through that suffering. What happens to them, what goes wrong for them, and the growth that comes out of it--it becomes part of their wholeness on the other side. They take it in, they don't deny it, they don't avoid it; they let it be and they let it be part of their wholeness--and that's something like compassion, a gentleness, a tenderness. As they go through the ordinary and profound suffering of human life, they let that be a bond, part of their gift to the world. They are present to the suffering of others in a new way--because of the way they have inhabited their own suffering.

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A Mouse Watches Film Noir And Offers Clues To Human Consciousness  

Researchers in Seattle have created a public observatory for studying the visual circuitry in a mouse's brain. Among the attractions: watching 18,000 neurons respond to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil.

 
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Hyperloop One lynched in hangman lawsuit  

Co-founder warns project is 'being strangled' literally by sugardaddy chairman

Tensions at the tube-traveling startup Hyperloop One have burst into the open with a lawsuit alleging physical threats, financial mismanagement and a sugardaddy chairman leaving a hangman's noose on a cofounder's chair.…

 
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Don't call it a comeback: has Jonah Lehrer plagiarised again?  

He was the neuroscience whiz-kid who fell from grace in a plagiarism scandal. Now he's back with a new book and his writing is being questioned anew

The most vilified writer of modern times is back, and people are lining up to give him another kicking. Jonah Lehrer's 2012 book Imagine: How Creativity Works was pulled from shelves after it was demonstrated to contain fabricated quotes purportedly from Bob Dylan and WH Auden. He subsequently admitted to plagiarising the work of others in his blogposts, while critics noted apparent plagiarism and disregard for facts throughout his published work. The pop-neuroscience whiz-kid had, it appeared, simply stolen or made a lot of it up.

We are living in an era of post-truth politics, so why not post-truth nonfiction?

Related: Jonah Lehrer and the trouble with facts

Related: So You've Been Publicly Shamed and Is Shame Necessary? review think before you tweet

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ExxonMobil Is Still Funding Climate Science Denier Groups  


ExxonMobil officials may hem and haw when reporters ask them if the company still funds climate science denier organizations, but the numbers don't lie.

The company says it acknowledges the reality of global warming and claims it supports a carbon tax, but its recently disclosed list of 2015 "public information and policy research" grantees shows it spent nearly $2 million last year on more than a dozen think tanks, advocacy groups and associations that dispute climate science and disparage renewable energy.

That's significant from both a legal and political perspective.

There are legal implications because ExxonMobil is currently under investigation for allegedly misleading investors and the general public about climate risks. Its scientists, who were conducting cutting-edge climate research as far back as the 1970s, cautioned top management that continuing to burn vast quantities of fossil fuels could be catastrophic. Instead of heeding those warnings, the company stressed scientific uncertainty to protect its long-term profitability and bankrolled denier groups to spread disinformation.

Likewise, it is politically significant because, by sowing doubt about climate science and the potential of carbon-free energy sources, denier groups provide cover for elected officials to stand in the way of progress.

Two Decades of Duplicity

Shortly after the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol international climate treaty, Exxon went on a spending spree to block federal efforts to address global warming. The company, which was outed by a 2007 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), spent $18.62 million from 1998 -- a year before it merged with Mobil -- through 2005 on a network of more than 40 groups. From 2006 through last year, it spent another $14.35 million, for a total of $33 million.

That's just what can be gleaned from the company's tax filings and statements, however. Corporations are not required to disclose all of their political spending, and there is reason to suspect ExxonMobil has spent quite a bit more on its climate disinformation campaign. A former ExxonMobil executive who wishes to remain anonymous told UCS that the company secretly allocated as much as $10 million annually for what insiders called climate "black ops" from 1998 through 2005.

In any case, according to its own figures posted last week, ExxonMobil spent $1.96 million on 16 denier and obstructionist groups last year. Ten of them, including the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Federalist Society and Hoover Institution, were among those listed in the 2007 UCS report.

So what is ExxonMobil getting for its money? Let's take a look at a handful of last year's grantees to find out.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Half of ExxonMobil's 2015 denier donations -- $1 million -- went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the same amount it gave the Chamber in 2014.

The Chamber acknowledges that climate change is happening, but discounts the prevailing scientific consensus that it is largely due to human activity, mainly burning fossil fuels. When pressed about the Chamber's position during a March 2014 Senate hearing, Karen Harbert, head of the Chamber's Institute for 21st Century Energy, replied that there is a "robust debate" over what is causing climate change. "It is caused by a lot of things," she insisted.

Harbert's scientifically indefensible comment was not surprising. The Chamber has a long history of disputing climate science, and that has alienated some of its members. In 2009, Apple, Exelon, Nike, PNM Resources and PG&E, for example, cancelled their memberships after Chamber Vice President William Kovacs demanded that the EPA convene a "Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" on climate science with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge ruling on the reality of global warming. "It would be evolution versus creationism," Kovacs explained. "It will be climate change science on trial."

Those high-profile defections apparently had little impact on the Chamber's position. In May 2014, just days before the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its draft Clean Power Plan to reduce power plant carbon pollution, the Chamber released a grossly misleading report attacking the proposed rule. The report, which was also sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, was denounced not only by the EPA, but also by PolitiFact.com and the Washington Post. Among its many faults, the report wildly inflated the cost of the rule and failed to consider the benefits of cutting carbon emissions.

Last October, the Chamber and 14 other business associations filed a lawsuit against the EPA, arguing that the Clean Power Plan exceeds the agency's authority to regulate the energy sector, and the Chamber's priorities for 2016 include opposing EPA efforts to curb carbon emissions as well as the agency's science-based finding that global warming endangers public health and the environment.

Manhattan Institute: ExxonMobil gave the Manhattan Institute $200,000 in 2015, boosting the company's total donations to the self-described free-market think tank to $1 million since 1998. In turn, the institute has been cranking out papers and articles denouncing efforts to cut carbon and maligning renewable energy technologies.

Last summer, for example, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Oren Cass dismissed the idea of a carbon tax -- ExxonMobil's supposed preferred policy -- as a "shell game" in an article he wrote for National Affairs. He followed up that essay in October with a white paper calling the impending U.N. climate negotiations in Paris a "farce." What did Cass propose as a better solution? He urged policymakers to "abandon fruitless negotiations and focus instead on the realistic option of promoting innovation and preparing for any future adaptation that may be necessary."

The institute's longtime point man on energy, Robert Bryce -- who previously worked for the ExxonMobil-funded Institute for Energy Research -- says he's "agnostic" about climate change. Over the years he has written numerous columns for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other publications praising oil, natural gas and coal and disparaging wind and solar. A recent Bryce column in the National Review, for instance, denounced tax breaks and subsidies for the wind industry but ignored the fact that, since 1918, federal oil and gas industry subsidies have averaged $4.85 billion a year in today's dollars.

American Legislative Exchange Council: ALEC, a secretive lobby group that drafts sample corporate-friendly legislation for state lawmakers, has received $1.79 million from ExxonMobil since 1998, and that investment is still paying dividends. At ALEC's annual meeting last July, for example, corporate and legislator members collaborated on bills and resolutions that would inhibit state implementation of the Clean Power Plan, hamper the solar industry from selling electricity directly to homes and businesses, and undermine state renewable energy standards by restricting investment in wind and solar.

One of the keynote speakers at that meeting, Stephen Moore -- founder of the Club for Growth and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation -- declared at a plenary session that the "biggest scam of the last 100 years is global warming." ALEC's official position on climate change is only slightly more nuanced, leaving open the question of the role human activity plays. "Climate change is a historical phenomenon," its website states, "and the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions."

With that scientifically challenged position, it's no wonder ALEC invites speakers for its conferences from such notorious climate science denier groups as the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the Heartland Institute and, of course, the Heritage Foundation -- all former ExxonMobil grantees.

While ExxonMobil and other major carbon producers Chevron and Peabody Energy remain steadfast ALEC members, more than 100 corporations have severed ties with the organization for a variety of reasons, including its stance on climate change. Those companies include a number of heavy hitters in the energy sector, including American Electric Power, BP, ConocoPhillips and Shell.

National Black Chamber of Commerce: From 2002 through last year, the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) received $1.1 million from ExxonMobil, and the organization's president, Harry C. Alford, is unapologetic about taking fossil fuel industry money. "Of course we do and it is only natural," Alford states on the NBCC website. "The legacy of Blacks in this nation has been tied to the miraculous history of fossil fuel.... [F]ossil fuels have been our economic friend."

Last summer, NBCC published a report that falsely claimed the Clean Power Plan would pose "economic hardship" on poor and minority Americans. A UCS analysis found that the report was based on fraudulent claims from previously published studies, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's anti-Clean Power Plan report from 2014. In fact, unchecked climate change would likely hurt poor and minority communities most.

More recently, Alford wrote an opinion piece attacking the Clean Power Plan for The Hill, a Washington political trade publication. Like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's bogus 2014 report, Alford's June 29 column vastly exaggerated the cost of the proposed rule and did not factor in the billions of dollars in health and economic benefits that would result from cutting carbon pollution.

ExxonMobil's Pretzel Logic

Last fall, UCS and reporters at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that Exxon's own scientists had warned the company decades ago about the potential for climate catastrophe. The new revelations also showed that the company responded to that bad news by downplaying climate risks and helping establish the climate science denial network.

A number of journalists did follow-up stories, pressing ExxonMobil officials about the company's longtime support for denier groups. They didn't always get the same answer.

During an interview last September with Richard Keil, ExxonMobil's senior media relations advisor, WNYC's On the Media host Bob Garfield pushed Keil for an explanation. "Please clarify this for me: Are not funding, or did not fund them?" Garfield asked. Keil's response was unequivocal. "We are not funding," he said.

When asked the same question by the New York Times in early November, then-Vice President of Public and Government Affairs Kenneth Cohen likewise said no. "We stopped funding them in the middle part of the last decade because a handful of them were making the uncertainty of the science their focal point," he said. "Frankly, we made the call that we needed to back away from supporting the groups that were undercutting the actual risk" of global warming.

Cohen's response wasn't a surprise. He made the same disingenuous claim back in February 2007, a few weeks after UCS disclosed that ExxonMobil had been spending millions of dollars on climate science denier groups. Greenwire, a trade news organization, reported that Cohen said the company "has stopped funding them."

The surprise came on November 9, three days after the New York Times story ran, when PBS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff asked Cohen if ExxonMobil has been funding denier groups. This time he took a different tack.

"Well, the answer is yes," replied Cohen, who retired from the company in January. "And I will let those organizations respond for themselves."

But before anyone declares a victory for corporate transparency, it turns out that Cohen's moment of candor was, well, momentary.

On December 1, a Washington Post story quoted yet another ExxonMobil spokesperson who qualified Cohen's remark. Alan Jeffers, a media relations manager, said the company "rejects the premise" that it has been funding climate science denial.

"We were engaged with funding public policy groups on policy issues, not on science," Jeffers explained. "We made our position known on some climate policies that made us unpopular with environmental activists, and they tried to position that as us funding climate denial. And that's just not accurate."

Not accurate? As Jeffers, Keil and their former boss, Cohen, surely know, the think tanks, advocacy groups and associations ExxonMobil has been sponsoring all these years lie about the science to strengthen the argument against doing anything to address climate change. After all, if people believe climate science is a fraud -- or at least "far from settled" -- they will see no reason to support a carbon tax, cap-and-trade system, or any other climate policy. And that line of reasoning, which protects the status quo, seems to suit ExxonMobil just fine.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS staff members Dave Anderson and Jayne Piepenburg provided research for this article.

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