Exxon scientists predicted current climate change 40 years ago: study

Scientists at oil giant ExxonMobil accurately forecast present-day climate change going back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new study has found.

The findings by Harvard and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research are “the nail-in-the-coffin of ExxonMobil’s claims that it has been falsely accused of climate malfeasance,” lead author Geoffrey Supran, a research associate at Harvard, asserted in a statement.

The majority of the company’s internal climate predictions prepared during that period — between 63 and 83 percent of Exxon’s files — have closely matched actual global warming, according to the paper set to be published on Thursday in Environmental Research Letters. 

“We find that most of their projections accurately forecast warming consistent with subsequent observations,” the report states. “Their projections were also consistent with, and at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models.”

The research assesses 32 internal documents produced by ExxonMobil scientists between 1977 and 2002, as well as 72 peer-reviewed scientific publications authored or co-authored by ExxonMobil scientists between 1982 and 2014.

In some cases, that research was better quality than far more influential studies by government scientists, according to the Harvard and Potsdam researchers’ analyses of Exxon’s predictive “skill scores,” or how their predictions matched what actually happened.

For example, when NASA scientist James Hansen presented his global warming predictions to Congress in 1988 — helping launch the modern climate movement — his studies matched subsequent warming by up to 66 percent, according to the Harvard and Potsdam researchers. 

At the same time, Exxon scientists were producing climate research with an average skill score of 75 percent, the study found.

In the 1990s, the oil giant turned away from funding climate science and pivoted to a campaign raising broad-based doubt over the quality of those findings.

“Let’s face it: The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil,” stated one Exxon ad, addressing proposals in the late 1990s for the U.S. to join the Kyoto Protocols, a climate accord the country nearly joined more than 15 years before the pivotal 2015 Paris climate agreement.

“Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase, by how much and where changes will occur,” Exxon copywriters claimed.

In a statement to The Hill, Exxon spokesperson Todd Spitler sought to cast the report as part of a broader ginned-up campaign by the companies’ critics to portray “well intended, internal policy debates as an attempted company disinformation campaign.” 

“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,” Spitler said. “ExxonMobil is committed to being part of the solution to climate change and the risks it poses.”

“Exxon Knew” is an activist campaign that accuses the company of spending millions to cast doubt on scientific findings that its principal products — oil and gas — would lead to potentially dangerous levels of warming. 

“Just as Big Tobacco lied about the risks of addiction and cancer, Exxon orchestrated a campaign of doubt and deception, making hundreds of billions at the cost of people’s lives,” the campaigners wrote.

Exxon has repeatedly pushed back on the efforts, calling it “an orchestrated campaign” from activist organizations “that seeks to delegitimize ExxonMobil by misrepresenting our position on climate change and related research to the public.”

Exxon spokespeople now charge that allegations the company misled the public are ignoring that there was scientific dispute within the company — even if a broad majority of company scientists turned out data supporting the role of fossil fuel burning in climate change.

“Currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate,” Then-Exxon CEO Lee Raymond told the Economic Club of Detroit in 1996, according to Inside Climate News.

The following year, he said in a speech that “many people, politicians and the public alike, believe that global warming is a rock-solid certainty. But it’s not.”

In 1998 Exxon highlighted those uncertainties as part of a campaign that helped keep the U.S. out of the Kyoto Protocols, which would have committed the country to reduce carbon emissions, as PBS reported.

The Harvard study comes as part of a larger debate over Exxon’s role in contributing to historical climate change, which is itself a subset of an ever more significant dispute over the role of planet-heating fossil fuels in a rapidly warming world.

The U.S. oil industry currently faces at least 20 lawsuits by U.S. cities and towns that say it should help pay for ongoing climate damage and adaptation, PBS reported.

Exxon has sought to cast itself as an enthusiastic partner in the campaign to keep global temperatures from rising below dangerous levels. The company “is committed to being part of the solution to climate change and the risks it poses,” Spitler told The Hill.

As such, the company has announced a wide range of policies that it says are helping it to “support a net zero future.” 

The company recently touted its plans to spend $17 billion on “lower-emission initiatives” through 2027, and highlighted cuts to its methane emissions of 40 percent and nearly 10 percent cuts in the carbon intensity of its operations.

It hopes to carve out a future for the fossil fuel industry through carbon capture technology, which it claims will drop the carbon cost of the industry, as CNBC reported.

But while the company is cutting the carbon cost of each barrel of oil it produces, it is also fighting Securities and Exchange Commission climate reporting rules that could see it forced to account for the carbon released when customers burn its oil and gas — rather than just when the company produces it.

Critics maintain that these investments do not change the fact that the company’s primary products remain centered around fossil fuel.

“ExxonMobil accurately foresaw the threat of human-caused global warming, both prior and parallel to orchestrating lobbying and propaganda campaigns to delay climate action,” the Harvard authors wrote.