One of the world’s largest oil companies accurately predicted in the 1970s how climate change would cause global temperatures to rise, according to a new study published in the journal Science.
Private research ExxonMobil commissioned five decades ago predicted how burning fossil fuels would warm the planet, though the company publicly denied this link, experts say.
The academics analyzed the data they found in internal company documents.
ExxonMobil denied are accusations.
“This issue has come up several times in recent years, and in each case, our response is the same: those who talk about ‘Exxon knowing something’ are wrong in their conclusions,” the company told the BBC.
Big oil companies like ExxonMobil have made billions of dollars in recent decades from selling fossil fuels that release emissions that scientists, governments and the UN say cause global warming.
“Hypocrisy”
Findings by scientists about what ExxonMobil supposedly knew in the 1970s suggest that the company’s predictions were often more accurate than those of NASA scientists.
“Really underscores stark hypocrisy of ExxonMobil leadershipwho knew that their own scientists were doing this very high-quality modeling work and had access to that inside information while telling us that climate models were nonsense,” Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of climate, told the BBC. science at Harvard University.
According to research co-author Geoffrey Supran, an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, these findings are compelling evidence.
“Our analysis allows us for the first time to put a real number to what Exxon knew, which is that burning its products was going to warm the planet by about 0.2°C every decade,” he said.
Investigators had never before quantified the scientific evidence in the ExxonMobil documents.
In response, an ExxonMobil spokesperson said that the company “is committed to being part of the solution to climate change and the risks it poses.”
Professor Oreskes said the findings show that ExxonMobil “knowingly misled” the public and governments. “They had all this information at their disposal, but they said very, very different things in public,” he explained.
Previous investigations have unearthed Exxon documents suggesting that the company sought to cast doubt on the science of climate change. An internal document laid out the “Exxon position” to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions” about the greenhouse effect.
The research also suggests that ExxonMobil had reasonable estimates for how emissions would need to be reduced to avoid the worst effects of climate change in a world warming by 2°C or more.
Its scientists also correctly rejected the theory of a looming ice age at a time when other researchers were still debating that prospect.
Professors Oreskes and Supran plotted scientific data across more than 100 Exxon and ExxonMobil publications dated between 1977 and 2014 to calculate the company’s predictions for global temperature rise.
In May, a US Massachusetts court ruled that ExxonMobil must stand trial over allegations that it lied about climate change.
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