Currently, major oil companies appear to be settling for awkward compromises with the realities of climate change. They generally acknowledge that their products are helping drive climate change, but plan to continue producing as many of them as possible. It reflects a major shift for those companies that minimized risk and often funded think tanks that directly denied the validity of science.
For ExxonMobil, that includes denying their own science. Thanks to documents obtained by the press, we now know that Exxon sponsored its own climate researchers, conducted internal research, collaborated with academic scientists, and reached much the same conclusions as the rest of the scientific community on carbon dioxide. rice field. made me aware.
But just how loose were the conclusions Exxon scientists drew to executives? This goes to the core of how misleading management was when it downplayed the risks. Exxon scientists have been as good (and sometimes even better) than the entire scientific community at predicting climate change caused by fossil fuel use.
Graph Legacy
Exxon’s scientific climate study was shut down long ago. However, the new paper relies on the work of two historians of science, Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes. They dug through old documents and a number of peer-reviewed papers to identify instances where Exxon scientists made predictions about how carbon emissions might change the future. climate. In some cases, the graphs they found were part of documents sent to Exxon executives.
Historians collaborated with a prominent climate scientist (Stefan Rahmstorf) to compare their predictions to actual climate behavior. This allows the team to determine whether the predictions made within Exxon are consistent with those made by academic climate scientists, and whether they were “tactful”, meaning that the actual climate will ultimately I was able to determine whether it was consistent with what I had done.
Altogether, historians have come up with 16 different climate predictions made by Exxon scientists between 1977 and 2003. For most of this era, computer power was not sufficient to run complete atmospheric climate models of the kind used today. Instead, the models they used were generally physics-based energy distribution models that track things like where and how much radiation is absorbed and how air circulation moves that energy. bottom.
Nonetheless, the predictions of future warming made by Exxon scientists were very good. Most of them (nearly two-thirds) had error bars that overlapped with errors in the temperature recordings. Also, some of the exceptions were simply due to the lack of error bars in the charts, which greatly narrowed the potential for overlap. Predict the remaining two of him as well. more Warming than actually happened.
The sophistication of a climate forecast is a measure of how well it matches the historical record. And once again, the Exxon scientists performed well. Their overall proficiency in internal climate models exceeds his 70%. In that respect they were superior to modern models in the scientific community.
internal contradiction
The paper points out that other aspects of Exxon’s research contradict statements by company executives. None of the internal investigations were consistent with global warming not occurring. All their modeling indicated that at least some degree of warming was inevitable. The Exxon researchers also concluded that human impacts on climate should be detectable by the year 2000, and it will take five years. His 1995 IPCC report was the first to show clear signs of human warming.
Finally, Exxon scientists estimated the carbon budget to keep future temperatures below 2°C. The error bars are larger than recent estimates, but they do overlap.
Again, part of this information is that Exxon executives have made statements suggesting that climate change may not be so much of an issue, and funded far more advanced groups to dismiss it. It was given to executives even though they had provided it, and we knew this was a problem when the internal Exxon documents were first leaked. What the new study reveals is that Exxon scientists were telling everyone almost exactly what the rest of the scientific community was. Unfortunately, their predictions were very accurate.
chemistry, 2023. DOI: 10.1126/science.abk0063 (About DOI).
