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Investigation Finds Exxon Ignored Its Own Early Climate Change Warnings
New submitter jrmcferren writes: PBS Reports the Exxon ignored their own internal climate change warnings. Newly discovered documents show that the corporation's own research scientists warned top executives that atmospheric CO2 was increasing and that the burning of fossil fuels was to blame as early as 1977. The report goes on to say: "In 1978, the Exxon researchers warned that a doubling of CO2 levels in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius and would have a major impact on the company’s core business. 'Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical,' one scientist wrote in an internal document."
Another similarity; both oil and tobacco industry have huge PR and lobby efforts to continue misleading and confuse the topic and as much as possible avoid that anything is done about it.
The fact that one guy at one company
BULLSHIT
A survey of peer reviewed scientific papers from 1965 to 1979 show that few papers predicted global cooling (7 in total). Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming (Peterson 2008). The large majority of climate research in the 1970s predicted the Earth would warm as a consequence of CO2. Rather than 1970s scientists predicting cooling, the opposite is the case.
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf
What were they supposed to do to not be accused of "ignoring" warnings? Can you describe the decision-making process you wish they'd followed?
They are an energy company, not an oil company. Just imagine if they had invested heavily in solar technology. All that money we are paying to the Chinese for solar panels, we could be paying it to them instead. BUT NO.
No, people filling up their tanks made the decision for them.
Exxon could have stopped refining oil and nothing in the world would have changed.
yeah, if they had gone into the solar panel business, we could be selling solar panels to china, but no.
In 2008, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a review of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1979. They found seven papers that pointed to global cooling and forty-four that indicated global warming.
You'll find a quick, 7-min summary in this video by Peter Hadfield (aka: Potholer54):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU_AtHkB4Ms&index=3
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Inside the article are links to the scans of the actual reports done by Exxon.
* 1977 report, from James Black: http://insideclimatenews.org/s...
* 1982 report from M. B. Glaser: http://insideclimatenews.org/s...
They did state that there is no unambiguous evidence yet (as of 1982), but the 1982 report said: "If the earth is on a warming trend, we're not likely to detect it before 1995. This is about the earliest projection of when the temperature might rise the 0.5 needed to get beyond the range of normal temperature fluctuations."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Exxon didn't "Ignore Its Own Early Climate Change Warnings". It, knowing that AGW was real, defunded the research that proved it and paid professional science deniers to spread FUD claiming that AGW didn't exist.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
So it looks like scientists have been wrong about their global warming predictions going on four decades. Or did I miss the great, impactful Exxon global warming crash of 1988?
I'm not sure what prediction you're saying is wrong. The Exxon 1982 report) being discussed said:
"If the earth is on a warming trend, we're not likely to detect it before 1995. This is about the earliest projection of when the temperature might rise the 0.5 needed to get beyond the range of normal temperature fluctuations."
Since they said the signal doesn't exceed the noise until 1995, they didn't even make a prediction for 1988.
The report did have a statement that the greenhouse effect would produce 1C warming "above present levels" by "the second to third quarter of the next century" (page 2 of the pdf.)
Here's the graph of actual measured data:
data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A.gif
Fitting a line through that data starting with "present levels" of 1980, I see a rise of about 0.8 between 1980 and 2014. So looks like their prediction was very close to the data.
If anytjhing, their prediction was slightly low, but since in the same report they list an uncertainty of over 50% on model predictions, their prediction matches the measured data to well within their quoted error bars.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I think the issue is that internally they knew that their product would cause global warming, but at the same time were funding think tanks to push the message that their product would not cause global warming.
Instead of the biased article, read what the report actually concludes:
http://insideclimatenews.org/s...
The report also points out that temperature increases would not be uniform, with strong increase at the polar caps and little increase near the equator.
The interesting thing is that little has changed about these conclusions in the last 30 years; science has produced a lot of new data, but the conclusions have changed little.
I'm a great fan of back-of-the-envelope calculations... but these aren't calculations; they are merely assertions. And worse, not merely assertions, but assertions that seem to be based on random pseudo-facts not really understood.
Europe has the longest history of solar panel installation, and has good data for energy payback time. Energy payback time for silicon panels is between 0.5 and 1.4 years. Depending on location, it can be as high as 3 years in northern Europe.
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/...
plus the whole poisoning China thing with harvesting rare earths
Do you even know what rare earth elements are? Almost all solar panels manufactured today are crystalline silicon. Silicon isn't a rare earth element.
In the end, I have faith in the species to adapt or to invent technologies that actually will be helpful. We're not there yet. Band-aid solutions in the short term are meaningless..
I agree with you there. I'm a technological optimist; if we can identify problems, we can solve them. However, ignoring and belittling the existence of problems isn't going to help, and dismissing possible solutions with slogans and sound-bites is counterproductive.
So are gotcha-type articles about Exxon.
The point of this article was that Exxon was a major funder of the campaigns to discredit the science of global warming in the '90s and early 2000s, even though a decade earlier their own scientists were telling them that this was significant. They spent about $30 million dollars funding climate denial.
On the other hand, they did stop most of their funding to the climate-change deniers in 2007, so it does seem to me to be mostly an article about a company that isn't really the problem any more.
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/17...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This article AND summary are perfect examples. They say Exxon this, Exxon that, but there are no names.
You obviously didn't read any further than the first few paragraphs if you think that they didn't name any names. It was littered with direct quotes and even linked documents. Here are the names that I have found (either in the article or the linked source documents):
There is also a link at the end to a summary of the cast of characters. To try and claim that this was some vague puff piece is itself an attempt to spread FUD about the article.
MOST oil companies tried to go the solar route. At one point BP was the largest solar panel manufacturer in the world.
Also you fail at history. Exxon bankrolled Solar Power Corporation back in the 70s. Eventually that was sold to Royal Dutch Shell, and then divested out of the oil industry in 2006.
Most of the western oil companies had some stake in renewable energies. Solar particularly they all got their asses handed to them and divested in the last 10 years.
As a side note, I think you have an ignorant solar fanboy modding up all your posts.