Exxon Climate Predictions Were Accurate Decades Ago. Still It Sowed Doubt

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Decades of research by scientists at Exxon accurately predicted how much global warming would occur from burning fossil fuels, according to a new study in the journal Science. The findings clash with an enormously successful campaign that Exxon spearheaded and funded for more than 30 years which cast doubt on human-driven climate change and the science underpinning it. That narrative helped delay federal and international action on climate change, even as the impacts of climate change worsened. Over the last few years, journalists and researchers revealed that Exxon did in-house research that showed it knew that human-caused climate change is real. The new study looked at Exxon's research and compared it to the warming that has actually happened. Researchers at Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research analyzed Exxon's climate studies from 1977 to 2003. The researchers show the company, now called ExxonMobil, produced climate research that was at least as accurate as work by independent academics and governments -- and occasionally surpassed it. That's important because ExxonMobil and the broader fossil fuel industry face lawsuits nationwide claiming they misled the public on the harmful effects of their products."The bottom line is we found that they were modeling and predicting global warming with, frankly, shocking levels of skill and accuracy, especially for a company that then spent the next couple of decades denying that very climate science," says lead author Geoffrey Supran, who now is an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami. "Specifically, what we've done is to actually put a number for the first time on what Exxon knew, which is that the burning of their fossil fuel products would heat the planet by something like 0.2 [degrees] Celsius every single decade," Supran says. The report notes that ExxonMobil "faces more than 20 lawsuits brought by states and local governments for damages caused by climate change." These new findings could provide more evidence for those cases as they progress through the courts, says Karen Sokol, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. "What Exxon scientists found and what they communicated to company executives was nothing short of horrifying," says Sokol. "Imagine that world and the different trajectory that consumers, investors and policymakers would have taken when we still had time, versus now when we're entrenched in a fossil fuel based economy that's getting increasingly expensive and difficult to exit," says Sokol.

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