New research demonstrates that ExxonMobil accurately forecasted rising global temperatures despite its efforts to deny the existence of climate change. It also includes damning data visualisations that provide concrete evidence of ExxonMobil’s knowledge of the climate calamity it was causing.
ExxonMobil’s denial of mainstream climate science is supported by an abundance of data, despite the fact that the company’s internal communications and internal research both understood that burning fossil fuels will result in global warming. Now, a study that was just released in the journal Science provides the first thorough analysis of years’ worth of climate models developed by ExxonMobil. Additionally, the company’s predictions of the rate of increase in global temperatures over time were remarkably accurate.
The precision and skill of their ideas “is pretty surprising.”
“Their insights are accurate and skillful, which is pretty astonishing. They had more than a passing familiarity with global warming. According to Geoffrey Supran, a research associate at Harvard University and the paper’s lead author, they were as knowledgeable as academic scholars. They presumably have all the information necessary to start acting and alert the public. Of course they didn’t, though.
ExxonMobil has been making predictions about future global temperature increases since the 1970s, and those predictions have mostly been accurate. The Verge replicated one of the latest research paper’s graphs below to demonstrate how accurate the corporation has been in its predictions of global warming.
On a graph, numerous lines are plotted. ExxonMobil’s climate projections are displayed as a series of grey lines over time. The observed variations in the global temperature are depicted by a single red line that closely follows the grey lines.
The graph above shows a red line representing actual global temperature increases overlaid on a grey line representing all of ExxonMobil scientists’ global warming predictions between 1977 and 2003.
The red line depicts how much the average global temperature has actually changed over time as a result of the heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gas emissions. ExxonMobil’s predictions for global warming are shown as grey lines. The lines’ colours span from light grey to dark grey, with lighter colours denoting the company’s early research from the late 1970s to early 2000s and darker grey denoting more recent estimations. While dashed lines represent third-party research that ExxonMobil scientists reproduced in company documents, solid lines denote predictions that ExxonMobil scientists arrived at using their own models.
The most important conclusion is that ExxonMobil could have predicted how much the petroleum products it marketed would increase global temperatures. Compared to the preindustrial age, the world has already warmed by around 1.2 degrees Celsius. Although it may appear to be a minor alteration, it has led to the more extreme heatwaves, droughts, storms, and flooding that we now have to deal with.
The fact that they had this knowledge years before I was even born, according to Supran, “is very stunning,” when he initially created this graph and noticed that all the prediction lines “simply fell perfectly around this red line of reality.” You can view additional real-world observations superimposed on top of astonishingly accurate company documentation in his team’s recently released research.
ExxonMobil’s climate models receive an average “skill score” of roughly 72 percent from Supran and his associates, which is a criteria also used in meteorology to grade weather forecasts. That’s even more precise than the global warming predictions that renowned NASA scientist James Hansen gave to Congress in 1988, for comparison. One of the first to raise the alarm about climate change, Hansen is renowned in the climatology community.
Related Inside a probe into Exxon Mobil’s erroneous claims about climate change
ExxonMobil is now well-known for rejecting the climate research that it was actually advancing. In a 1988 internal document, the business stated that it wanted to “highlight the uncertainty in scientific conclusions on the potential heightened greenhouse effect” and continued to refer to climate models as “unreliable” up until the early 2000s.
Many of the records demonstrating that the firm had spent decades researching climate change but still fostered scepticism about climate science had been uncovered by 2015 thanks to groundbreaking investigations by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times. Due to this revelation, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies have been the target of numerous lawsuits from cities, counties, and states, including Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia, as well as the #ExxonKnew controversy. According to the lawsuits, the oil monopolies purposefully deceived the public about climate change in order to further their own interests.
ExxonMobil’s Todd Spitler, a senior advisor of corporate media relations, emailed The Verge with the following statement: “This subject has come up multiple times in recent years and, in each case, our position is the same: those who talk about how ‘Exxon Knew’ are mistaken in their findings. Spitler cites a 2019 ruling by the New York State Supreme Court judge who sided with ExxonMobil and determined that the state lacked sufficient proof to demonstrate that the business misled investors.
ExxonMobil is still defending against further cases.
ExxonMobil is still dealing with other litigation, though. The new study that was released today might provide those who are suing the firm more ammunition. The study examines all of the business’s climate estimates from 1977 to 2003 that are now accessible to the public (many of which came out of the journalistic investigations). The disparity between the company’s internal and external messaging on climate change has received a lot of attention so far during the #ExxonKnew campaign. However, Supran and his associates sought to do a thorough analysis of what the company’s climate data actually revealed.
According to Supran, “This kind of evidence that concisely and quantitatively reflects what they knew in one number and one graph definitely may be appealing… supplementary to more qualitative forms of evidence that lawyers typically depend on. Of course, there is also the court of public opinion, where I believe that straightforward visual evidence that Exxon knew about climate change but misled investors may be effective.
