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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."
cold hard cash
Why should it be surprising that a vested interest ignored the evidence at the time, when we see the same denial today when faced with overwhelming evidence?
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.
As Tom Toro put it...
"Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
So it looks like scientists have been wrong about their global warming predictions going on four decades.
Except that their criteria for a 2-3 C increase hasn't passed yet. The IPCC apparently thinks the "first doubling of atmospheric CO2" will happen by about 2050. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies thinks that global temps. have so far risen by 0.8 C since 1880. This means that the Exxon researcher's warning that "a doubling of CO2 levels in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius" could still come to pass. Several of the projections in the IPCC's figures suggest a 2C rise by ~2050 is possible, so they could still be proven right.
OTOH, they certainly were not going to back down and hand things over to nuclear. Their propaganda machine was already in full gear, and these finding would undermine their efforts;
Nuclear power’s main energy competitor is of course Big Oil, which had no problem with nuclear weapons, but was not happy to lose its grip on the world’s major source of energy. Nuclear energy was not under their control, requiring by definition major government involvement and regulation of the industry. Its widespread use would leave Big Oil with falling profits, and would mean the end of Big Oil’s economic hegemony.
This led to a bizarre situation where oil companies both founded and funded ecology-related organisations, including the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, Sierra Club and others to protest the peaceful use of nuclear power. These groups have all received backing from the oil industry, notably Atlantic Richfield Oil and BP
http://www.globalresearch.ca/b...
Of course, many still choose to believe and support big oil's agenda to the day.
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?
It's the same for the rest of us as it is for Exxon -- just less existential. We've been "warned". Yet we go on with our lives. The warnings get louder and more shrill and catastrophic and angry. And we still go on with our lives. Eventually this should stop being a big surprise.
they have a vested interest in ignoring it
that's what you need *regulations* for
you know, evil, evil job destroying regulations. because a guy having a job on an oil field is more important than his grandkid able to grow food crops
what's that? companies write their own regulations through congresscritters?
yes, that's called *regulatory capture*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
in which case you clean up your government, remove the corruption. which is unfortunately legal in the usa. so you vote for the guys who are actually going to do something about that rather than the professional prostitutes who talk about tax cuts for "job creators" (aka, their rich friends who park their money in an offshore banking accounts, rather than a tax cut for the middle class and poor, who immediately spend their cash, actually growing the economy)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
To be fair, there was great uncertainty about those findings at the time. We have struggled to build good models to the day.
Their research into where to drill for oil also had great uncertainty, but that didn't stop them.
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
Yeah, bad Exxon and others (like Union Carbide, because of Bhopal) have caused so many problems that one wonders how such things didn't get a more adequate treatment by society.
In these, and in other cases (like BP's oil spill), we are forced to the conclusion that we are not able to implement proper controls on any organization activity.
There's nothing wrong with the political system, be it capitalism or anything else. The problem is akin to accident prevention: we know it's important to have safety inspections to prevent the loss of a few lives, but we fail to have businesses cooperate in adequate disaster prevention -- which too often means loss of many lives.
And yet, even after those catastrophes, schemes are prepared for cleansing of the aftermath, like:
- hiring trolls to discredit everyone trying to call for a saner view on facts;
- ideological contamination, either calling people names ("capitalists" or "socialists", used as derogatory qualifiers);
- suggesting doubt on issues that are quite obvious, creating a feeling on people that we are weak of mind and fate was inevitable;
- procrastinating until a favorable setting allows the culprits to "lose" their case without really being punished;
- or manipulating punishments in ways to render them ineffective or even change them into new business opportunities.
So, it's not really just Exxon, or Union Carbide (now Dow's) or BP.
it's us, humans. We allow that.
We allow that when we have a nuclear reactor explode because it's old, when we choose dangerous technologies like nuclear reactors in a place subject to earthquakes and tsunamis, when we accept innovations that involve a certain risk of deaths (as if progress makes these acceptable).
It's great that we have Liberty; but as everything in this life, that, too, must be used with responsibility to help mankind -- not to harm some of us so that others gain advantages.
I wonder why those who still claim global warming is not our responsibility, that we cannot do anything, that throw mud on respectable scientists (not to mention other even more heinous methods) do not gain the same treatment as all other trolls (e.g. here).
Even now as I write these words, other humans are writing about how it's always the same (citing other examples) and we cannot do anything about it; or that companies do that because the general public wants the products at any cost etc. etc.
The way things go, we going to rationalize that deaths are unavoidable and protection equipment actually hurts profits, so we'd better just have a percentage die.
I think we fail -- even at being human.
Life is not binary.
The bods in white coats said: burning oil (etc) may be bad news and furthermore it may be bad if you don't change your business strategy in the light of that soon.
It seems evident that the first part was true.
It is clear also that Exxon also chose not to alter its business model but instead to try to spread FUD.
The second is poor long-term business and poor ethics, and may well bite us all in the rear.
So as it happens the bods in white coats were right then and the trust of the summary is right now.
You seem to be trying to skip the caveats in the statement and ignore tha Exxon clearly failed to change direction when given the (basically correct) warning.
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Aaah - now I get it. You are scientifically illiterate, hence your confusion.
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
That's odd - I was working with scientists back in the day, and they thought exactly that thing. They also were 100% certain the "population bomb" would see us in a post apocalyptic, cannibalistic society living a roving mad max style existence. The problem with claiming nobody I know believed it is that you didn't know anybody. It's called the the argumentum ad populum logical fallacy.
they price that into their product.
just think how much more sales they would have today if they had heeded their own research and put some profits into solar panels. The long term outlook for solar panels is better than the long term outlook for oil. Don't believe me? Ask the saudis, with all the oil in the world they are still investing heavily in solar. Watch the world bypass the USA as it adapts solar and leaves us in the dust.
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
Similarly, no one has a fission engine on their car.
people are using energy from nuclear fission to power their cars, whether or not the reactor is attached to the car is irrelevant.
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
So you're seriously going with "some scientist in 1978 warned Exxon that sometime in the upcoming CENTURY there will be an increase in CO2 that'll have a major impact on core business"? OK then...
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.
Here is a link to the political cartoon parent is quoting.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
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
Let's say that coffee and tea cause global warming (climate change). In other words, let's make the "evil" bit more personal. Are you ready to give up coffee and tea?
Sometimes we have a better understanding of things when we make it a bit more personal...
Now... do you need coffee and tea more than you need electricity? more than you need manufactured goods? If you believe the answer to be "no", then this just became even more personal.
Sure, we could force all countries to have military rule and force all fossil and nuclear fuels to "end" business and switch to very very expensive alternatives. We could do that I suppose. But I think it would have to be done by force. The general populace won't give up tea and coffee easily.
With that said, a lot of these "evil" companies hedge their bets and spend a lot of money researching alternative sources just in case they are forced to change.
Now... the pain of switching, if done over a very long period of time... it's quite possible we would be ok with regards to our personal lifestyles (indeed, not talking about readers here, but the truth is, there has been some change already, just maybe not enough at a fast enough pace). However, since the "evil" potential is still out there, then the truly evil (not the current oil, gas, coal and nuclear companies) could exploit those technologies and possibly cause problems.... just saying...
With that said, if we can turn an alternative into a viable cheap and reliable solution that is economically better than oil, gas, coal and nuclear, then those big companies will change very very quickly. No sense being stuck in the past doing something more expensive.
Best solution happens at the consumer/people level. If "we" stop using "evil" energy. If "we" stop using the "evil". If we stop drinking coffee and tea... they (the evil companies) are forced to change. Are you ready? Currently the answer is a very clear "no".
Stuff to ponder...
people are using energy from nuclear fission to power their cars, whether or not the reactor is attached to the car is irrelevant.
It's pretty damn relevant to the guy driving around with the nuclear reactor in his car.
just think how much more sales they would have today if they had heeded their own research and put some profits into solar panels.
You mean like BP who started the solar business in the 80s and closed it in 2011?
Or like Royal Dutch Shell who started in 2002 and got out of it only about 6 years later?
Yes but where did it get them? Those poor deluded people at at Exxon only made more profit than the world's top 20 solar providers combined. They really made the wrong choice didn't they? /sarcasm
they price that into their product.
just think how much more sales they would have today if they had heeded their own research and put some profits into solar panels. The long term outlook for solar panels is better than the long term outlook for oil. Don't believe me? Ask the saudis, with all the oil in the world they are still investing heavily in solar. Watch the world bypass the USA as it adapts solar and leaves us in the dust.
Why should we buy heavily into solar now? By continuing to pump oil even though the price is very low, the Saudi's are once again giving us a period of very cheap oil. Every few years they do this to slap the competition around. In addition to attempting to make US and Canadian high-cost competition go out of business, they are also slapping down the competition from renewables. The economics for an electric car don't look so great at current car and fuel prices.
They are investing in renewables because they have big piles of money and would prefer to export oil rather than burn it in their inefficient oil-powered power plants. Nobody else in the world burns so much oil for electricity. Oil is an expensive way to make electricity and it is better to sell the oil and make electricity some other way.
If and when solar takes over, it will be cheaper than it is now. That's pretty much a given if you look at any graph of price over time. In addition, we will have the time value of money on our side if we wait to invest in Solar. Until the economics work out in solar's favor, waiting and "being left in the dust" is the smart play. It is exactly the same as buying a hard drive. Waiting as long as possible is the right move. The future buyer will be better off than a buyer today, in almost all cases.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.