Exxon Did A GREAT Job Of Predicting Climate Change In 1977. But Of Course Favored Profit

 I was struck by recent reporting from the journal Science that showed scientists at the oil giant Exxon had a great handle on the future of climate change as far back as the 1970s.  

As the Associated Press reported: 

"The study in the journal Science.... looked at research that Exxon funded that didn't just confirm what climate scientists were saying, but used more than a dozen different computer models that forecast the coming warming with precision equal to or better than government and academic scientists." 

It has been known for awhile now that Exxon was aware of climate change decades ago, but publicly casted doubt about it. The Associated Press again: 

"What the new study does is detail how accurate Exxon funded research was. From 63 percent to 83 percent of those projections fit strict standards for accuracy and generally predicted correctly that the globe would warm about 0.36 degrees (0.2 Celsius) a decade."

The Exxon-funded science was 'actually astonishing; in its precision and accuracy, said study co-author Naomi Orestes, a Harvard science history professor. But she added so was the 'hypocrisy because so much of the Exxon Mobil disinformation for so many years...was the claim that climate models weren't reliable. "

This was during the same time that the oil giant publicly doubted that warming was real and dismissed climate models' accuracy.  

The Exxon studies in this piece were done in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Though scientists at the time already had an idea that fossil fuel emissions would raise global temperatures, there was a lot of what turned out to be false media narratives of a coming ice age. 

Fossil fuel research into climate change was really quite extensive in the second half of the 20th century, even as their spokespeople were telling us climate change was at best uncertain and at worst a hoax. 

Public statements from Exxon since the 1980s cast climate science as uncertain and unreliable. The company's public position was clearly to dismiss or diminish the evidence that human caused climate change was about to occur, or occurring. 

The journal Science published the review of Exxon scientists' accurate climate change studies published decades ago. 

As the journal Science notes:

"In 2015, investigative journalists discovered internal company memos indicating that Exxon oil company has known since the late 1970s that its fossil fuel products could lead to global warming with 'dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.' Additional documents then emerged showing that the US oil and gas industry's largest trad association had likewise known since at least the 1950s, as had the coal industry since at least the 1960s, and electric utilities."

The Exxon document said the effects of climate change would become detectable by around the year 2000, give or take five years.

Science continues:

".....Exxon's internal documents, as well as peer-reviewed studies published by Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists, overwhelmingly acknowledged that climate change is real and human-caused. By contrast, a majority of Mobil and ExxonMobil Corp's public communications promoted doubt on the matter."

As you can imagine, these revelations will probably become fodder for lawsuits, both current and existing. Numerous complicated, slow moving lawsuits against Exxon and other oil giants are slowly making their way through the legal system. 

For their part, Exxon says its understand of climate change developed along side that of the scientific community. They also said that critics are focusing on the company's internal policy debates and recasting them as a disinformation campaign, as NPR reports.  

It's been known for years that Exxon accurately knew about climate change and its effects, but the latest revelations just add more fuel to the fire, so to speak. 

In October, 2019, for instance, during House hearings, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed graphs from 1982 Exxon research that predicted with remarkable accuracy the rate of carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere and the corresponding warming it would cause. 

Exxon remains an insanely profitable company on its sales of fossil fuels. Exxon made an estimated $15.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022 and took in roughly $58 billion in all of 2022, its most profitable year on record.