Oil and gas giant Exxon predicted extent of global warming — with striking precision — decades ago, study finds
The year was 1985. Brian Mulroney was prime minister of Canada, and President Ronald Reagan sat in the White House. Madonna's Like a Virgin" was tearing up the charts. Prince Harry celebrated his first birthday.
And at Exxon, the multinational gas and oil giant, two in-house scientists published a model showing that carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels - their company's primary business - would raise the planet's global mean temperature by 0.8 degrees by the year 2020.
Their projections nailed with remarkable precision the climate change we are experiencing today, and were among a dozen models that scientists at what is now ExxonMobil either circulated internally or published in academic journals between 1977 and 2003.
In the first rigorous assessment of those models, published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers have concluded that not only did ExxonMobil know about climate change for decades, the company predicted the impacts as skillfully as academic and government scientists - even while top executives stoked uncertainty in public statements.
The findings could become evidence in a raft of recently launched or proposed class-action lawsuits attempting to wrest damages from major oil and gas companies for the harms associated with climate change, including one potential suit in Vancouver.
These graphs don't just communicate a looming crisis. They confirm complicity," said Geoffrey Supran, who led the study while a researcher at Harvard University and who is now a professor at the University of Miami.
I think both in court and in the court of public opinion, this kind of evidence may be compelling."
A representative from ExxonMobil disputed those claims. This issue has come up several times in recent years and, in each case, our answer is the same: those who talk about how Exxon Knew' are wrong in their conclusions," said Todd Spitler, a senior adviser in corporate media relations at ExxonMobil.
Spitler cited a 2019 judgement in New York that ruled in favour of the company in a case that hinged on whether it hid its knowledge of the costs of climate change from investors.
Investigative journalists revealed in 2015 that ExxonMobil knew about climate change and its consequences as far back as the late 1970s. Supran said he and his co-authors wanted to apply some statistical precision" to exactly what the company knew and when.
The researchers collected more than 100 documents, some of which were internal memos uncovered by reporters and some that were published in peer-reviewed journals.
The documents included a dozen climate projections created over a quarter century, from 1977 to 2003. All of those reported the effects of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations on global temperature averages. The researchers used a tool called a skill score" to analyze the performance of those models: a score of 100 per cent indicates perfect agreement with what actually occurred in the world.
The skill score of ExxonMobil's 1985 model was 99 per cent. Another projection from 1994 scored 97 per cent. The average skill score of all the ExxonMobil models that projected global temperature over time was 67 per cent, slightly better than the best-performing model that famed NASA scientist James Hansen presented to U.S. Congress in 1988.
On average, Exxon's models predicted 0.2 degrees Celsius of warming per decade. Academic scientists predicted 0.19 degrees per decade. The actual rate is 0.18 degrees per decade.
We were obviously broadly aware of their involvement in climate science research, but I have to say that it kind of took my breath away when you first plot the global warming prediction lines, and you see them fall so closely around that red line of reality," Supran said.
They knew as much as independent academic scientists did, and, arguably, they knew all they needed to know to start to take action and warn the public."
The gap between what companies knew and their public statements on climate change could help buttress a raft of lawsuits against them, experts contend.
In 2014, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson claimed there were still uncertainties around the climate" and what the principal drivers of climate change are." The company's website in 2007 specifically attacked climate projections, stating that gaps in the scientific basis for theoretical climate models and the interplay of significant natural variability make it very difficult to determine objectively the extent to which recent climate changes might be the result of human actions."
The company was not alone. In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute, the trade association for the U.S. oil and gas industry, created a global communications plan" whose first page states that victory will be achieved" when average citizens and media understand' (recognize) uncertainties in climate science." The document was co-created with representatives from Exxon, Chevron, Southern Company and a host of conservative and libertarian organizations.
A spate of lawsuits have been launched in recent years to hold major oil and gas companies accountable for their role in contributing to global warming and for allegedly misleading the public about climate science. They rest on varying legal arguments, and few have yet gone to trial. One so far has been successful: in 2021, a Dutch court ordered Shell to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by almost half.
Spitler, the Exxon Mobil media relations adviser, quoted the judge in the New York suit that the company won in 2019, who wrote that executives and employees were uniformly committed to rigorously discharging their duties in the most comprehensive and meticulous manner possible" and that ExxonMobil has a culture of disciplined analysis, planning, accounting, and reporting."
But the judge, Barry Ostrager of the New York state Supreme Court, also prefaced his decision by noting that nothing in this opinion is intended to absolve ExxonMobil from responsibility for contributing to climate change" noting that this is a securities fraud case, not a climate change case."
The City of Vancouver voted narrowly last summer to set aside a dollar per resident, about $660,000, in the draft 2023 budget for a fund that would be used in a future lawsuit. Whether that fund will become a reality will become clear in the coming months as new members of council debate the actual budget. If the class-action lawsuit materializes, it will be the first of its kind in Canada.
Cities can't cope with the costs to both mitigate and adapt to or become more resilient to climate change. These are big-ticket items," said Vancouver Coun. Adriane Carr, who has championed the initiative. She noted the city pays about $50 million a year in repair costs associated with climate change.
These cases share some legal DNA with the Big Tobacco lawsuits, which found cigarette companies liable for billions in damages related to the health harms of smoking, says Andrew Gage, staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law.
West Coast Environmental Law launched a Sue Big Oil" campaign to encourage municipalities in British Columbia to launch lawsuits against major oil and gas companies, which prompted Vancouver's potential fund.
Knowing that they actually knew that their product was causing harm, and when they knew, and what they knew about what harms would be caused is really critical," Gage said.
But cases would also hinge on the actions companies took in response to that knowledge.
You know, when you find out that your product is literally baking the planet, what is your responsibility and how do you act on that?
If Exxon or others had lobbied for a transition decades ago and put in good-faith efforts to transition the world to low carbon alternatives, we'd be in a very different world."
Kate Allen is a Toronto-based reporter covering climate change for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @katecallen