ExxonMobil has predicted global warming since 1977 and failed to act, study finds

Energy giant ExxonMobil, a company comprising the Esso, Exxon, Mobil and ExxonMobil brands, produced a series of internal scientific papers between 1977 and 2003 that predicted global temperature rise from greenhouse gas emissions since the 1970s and failed to act. to prevent.

According to the data, the projections of global temperature change by the company’s scientists estimated an increase of 0.2°C (with a margin of 0.04°C up and down) every decade, which is very close to the forecast by leading climate researchers—of 0.19°C (with 0.03°C variance).

Furthermore, internal projections conducted in 1982 estimated that emissions in the order of 600 parts per million (ppm) of CO_two (carbon dioxide) —much higher than the 450 ppm considered high emission– would lead to an increase in temperature of another 1.3°C by 2080. Since the industrial era, the global average temperature has already risen by 1.1°C.

The internal documents produced by the company’s scientists were analyzed for the first time and disclosed in an article in this Thursday’s edition (12) of the scientific journal Science. Geoffrey Supran, a physicist and professor at the Department of Science and Environment Policy at the University of Miami, and oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf, from the University of Potsdam (Germany), and historian Naomi Oreskes, from Harvard University, signed the survey.

The report reached out to ExxonMobil for comment on the study, but there was no response by the time of publication.

To assess how much the oil company knew about the possible consequences of global warming, caused by the emission of gases into the atmosphere, the scientists analyzed 32 documents produced by ExxonMobil from 1977 to 2002 and another 72 articles published in scientific journals authored or with the collaboration of employees of the company from 1982 to 2014.

With these papers, ExxonMobil scientists designed 16 distinct global temperature rise scenarios, which were synthesized into a single graph in the Science paper (see below).

From 63% to 83% of projections estimated by ExxonMobil for global temperature increase were consistent with the observed scenario, higher than the accurate projections of leading climate experts, who had a success rate of 28% to 81%.

Also considering a scale of 0% to 100% to measure who predicted the global climate scenario, the surveys produced by Exxon have a score of more than 70%, with one of the studies reaching 99% accuracy. The top scientist at the American space agency, NASA, had a score of 38% to 66%.

For Geoffrey Supran, as one of the main global companies and with resources to finance cutting-edge research, ExxonMobil produced internal documents and data with high efficiency, but whose objective was to accumulate scientific knowledge and predict the company’s economic future, and not act in a socially ethical way to combat global warming.

“The company was as silent as they could during the 1980s and it wasn’t until late 1988 and 1989, when global warming made headlines around the world, that they realized it was a critical moment and had to say something. thing. Unfortunately, they chose to attack scientists instead of contributing to clean energy,” he said.

In addition, data that became public in the following years proved the company’s action through lobbying and advertising to continue to encourage the burning of fossil fuels.

A similar situation occurred in the 1960s, when many doctors hired by the tobacco industry produced scientific studies that said that there were no harmful effects from smoking, while the medical community was already aware of the association between smoking and lung cancer.

Perhaps the most startling data is an internal document (called “CO ‘Greenhouse’ Effect_two“), published by the Exxon Engineering and Research Company, in which the company correctly estimated an “increase in global average temperature” within the “company growth scenario in the 21st century by CO2 emissions_two“, says the article. The document was released in 1982 as “classified” content and for “company use only”.

On the other hand, the company’s public statements since the late 20th and early 21st centuries have been contradictory to the scope of information produced by the scientists themselves.

According to the study in Science, in 1997 the executive director of Mobil (before its merger with Exxon, in 1999), Lee Raymond, questioned whether “the Earth is really warming” stating that “in the 1970s some of the doomsday prophets said that a new Ice Age was approaching”.

Another contradictory press statement was made in 2001, when ExxonMobil stated that “there is no consensus on the long-term effects of climate change and what causes them”.

Supran also claims that the company’s memos confirm that there was a strategy in this communication. “For 30 years they could have acted to reduce emissions so that today we have a much smaller challenge of changing global warming, but instead they chose to push us towards a true climate crisis. Today, to reduce emissions, we are facing a very high precipice”, he evaluates.

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}