NEW YORK - In the late 1970s, scientists at Exxon fitted one of the company’s supertankers with state-of-the-art equipment to measure carbon dioxide in the ocean and in the air, an early example of substantial research the oil giant conducted into the science of climate change.
A new study published Thursday in the journal Science found that over the next decades, Exxon’s scientists made remarkably accurate projections of just how much burning fossil fuels would warm the planet. Their projections were as accurate, and sometimes even more so, as those of independent academic and government models.
Yet for years, the oil giant publicly cast doubt on climate science, and cautioned against any drastic move away from burning fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change. Exxon also ran a public relations programme emphasising uncertainties in the scientific research on global warming.
Global warming projections “are based on completely unproven climate models, or, more often, on sheer speculation”, Mr Lee Raymond, chief executive of the newly merged ExxonMobil Corp, said at a company meeting in 1999.
“We do not now have a sufficient scientific understanding of climate change to make reasonable predictions and/or justify drastic measures,” he wrote in a company brochure the following year.
In a statement, Exxon did not address the new study directly but said that “those who talk about how ‘Exxon Knew’ are wrong in their conclusions”, referring to a slogan by environmental activists who have accused the company of misleading the public about climate science.
“ExxonMobil has a culture of disciplined analysis, planning, accounting and reporting,” the company added, quoting a judge in a favorable verdict in New York three years ago, albeit for a case that addressed the company’s accounting practices, not climate science.
The new study, from researchers at Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, builds on reporting showing that for decades, Exxon scientists had warned their executives of “potentially catastrophic” human-caused climate change.
In the new study, Dr Geoffrey Supran and Dr Naomi Oreskes of Harvard, and Dr Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute, carried out a quantitative analysis of global warming projections made or recorded by Exxon scientists between 1977 and 2003.
Those records, which include internal memos and peer-reviewed papers published with outside academic researchers, make up the largest public collection of global warming projections recorded by a single company, the authors said.
“We now have airtight, unimpeachable evidence that ExxonMobil accurately predicted global warming years before it turned around and publicly attacked climate science and scientists,” Dr Supran said. “Our findings show that ExxonMobil’s public denial of climate science contradicted its own scientists’ data.” NYTIMES
