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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."
In the mid 70's the big scare was climate cooling, not climate warming. There were even proposals to dump soot on the poles to reduce the reflectivity of all the ice to prevent a runaway "icehouse" effect of having too much heat reflected back into space. So somehow, at a time when no one was concerned about global warming, not only was this scientist bucking the cooling trend scare, but he also came up with the exact same 2-3 degrees Celsius warming that the scientists started throwing around 20 years later. And he did all this without the billions of dollars that we've spent on climate models.
Either this guy was twice as smart as Einstein or else some records have been fudged. Color me skeptical.
So then the article is effectively meaningless. It's about as damning of Exxon as if some scientist for them had predicted within 5 or 10 years pigs might sprout wings and fly to adapt to increases in atmospheric CO2.