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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."
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?
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."
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.
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
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/
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
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
Ah yes, the old "had to do it for the money" claim. If we accept that everyone is an idiot robot that will play Russian Roulette for a dollar, sure. But the fact is that a person or organization has the power to make a decision with short-term or long-term thinking in mind, or a decision with self-interest or social awareness in mind. Yet somehow we've got to the point where we'll excuse absolutely anything as being reasonable if there was money at stake. Personally, I'd prefer we hold ourselves to a slightly higher standard, but I realize I'm shouting into the wind.