ExxonMobil had accurate predictions of global warming 40 years ago

Back in the 1980s, oil giant ExxonMobil had remarkably accurate predictions of global warming made by its scientists that turned out to be exactly what happened decades later, a researcher confirmed in a new study published Thursday.

Despite this, the company has publicly questioned for years the state of scientific knowledge on the matter, and this study, published in the prestigious journal Science, confirmed it. It owns ExxonMobil, one of the largest oil groups in the world “Modeling and predicting global warming with uncanny accuracy, only to end up spending the next decades denying the same climate science”The co-author of this work, Geoffrey Soprane, told AFP.

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For several years now, ExxonMobil has been accused of conducting a double narrative on climate change, which is caused by the massive amounts of greenhouse gases that humanity releases into the atmosphere, particularly through the combustion of coal or oil to produce energy. Several legal actions have even been initiated against the company in the United States, some of which are still ongoing. Held hearings in the European Parliament and the US Congress.

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But this is the first time that the projections made by the group’s scientists have been systematically analyzed and compared with those of other researchers at the time, as well as with the warming already observed later. The starting point is documents—public records and scientific publications—unearthed by journalists from Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times in 2015, which show that the company had long known that climate change was real and caused by human activities.

A first scientific study, conducted by the same researchers in 2017 as published Thursday, expanded this journalistic investigation by carefully analyzing the language the company uses first in these documents, and then publicly. “But although in the past we had focused on the language and discourse involved in these documents, we suddenly realized that there were… all these charts and tables that nobody knew about.Jeffrey Soprane explained.

Internal documents between 1977 and 2002

This question has come up several times in recent yearsA company spokesman told AFP. “Each time, our answer is the same: Those who invoke what Exxon knew are wrong in their conclusions.” ExxonMobil has never denied the authenticity of the documents in question. In total, the researchers analyzed 32 internal documents produced by ExxonMobil scientists between 1977 and 2002, and 72 co-authored scientific publications between 1982 and 2014. These documents contain 16 temperature projections. Ten of them agree with the notes. Carried out later, the study notes. Of the other six, two expected temperatures to rise more.

On average, they expected a warming of about 0.2°C per decade, which is already in line with the current rate. The predictions made by other researchers at the time were somewhat similar. Exxon Mobil “I didn’t know a mysterious thing about climate change in decades”Jeffrey Soprane, who is currently a professor at the University of Miami, confirmed, but carried out this work at Harvard. “They knew the fate of independent and government scientists, and presumably they knew enough to take action and alert the public.”

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However, the group’s leaders have done just the opposite, penning the study, which quotes the words of former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond in 2000: “We do not have enough scientific understanding of climate change to make reasonable predictions.” In 2013, then-CEO Rex Tillerson said there “uncertainty” about the “The main drivers of climate change”.

Some of the company’s researchers testified before the US Congress. One of them, Martin Hoffert, was questioned in 2019 by Democrat-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who confirmed how accurate his predictions were, then simply replied: “We were excellent scientists.” On Thursday, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that the past eight years have been the hottest on record.

During a news conference about the annual temperature reports (for which the study was not mentioned), NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt estimated that “expose and expose” for individual companies “didn’t help much” To find appropriate solutions to dispense with fossil fuels. “It’s not like we can say, ‘ExxonMobil, stop making fossil fuels, and we’ve fixed the problem.'”pointed out. “People use all of these products.”