ExxonMobil, formerly known as Exxon, is one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, but a recent review of internal documents that the company had kept secret for nearly 50 years showed it had climate change figures as far back as 1977. I found out.
In 2015, investigative journalists for the Los Angeles Times and Guardian made a shocking discovery. They uncovered dozens of internal documents by Exxon and ExxonMobil scientists that showed how fossil fuel products could contribute to the global climate crisis, a crisis that could have “dramatic environmental impacts before 2050.” It clearly detailed what contributed to
Since the report first leaked, researchers have painstakingly researched and analyzed it, pointing out the hypocrisy of ExxonMobil’s decades-long campaign to deny the science of climate change.
However, the exact numbers and graphs predicted by industry scientists have not been subject to the same level of scrutiny, even though they appear to be closely related to today’s fossil fuel emissions and global warming. Absent.
Researchers at Harvard University have now evaluated for the first time how the results of ExxonMobil’s internal climate model align with the current scientific literature and our climate reality.
In the end, 63% to 93% of the company’s hidden predictions made between 1977 and 2003 turned out to be correct.
The bottom graph shows the agreement between predicted values and historically observed temperature changes.
Our findings show that ExxonMobil not only knew ‘something’ about global warming decades ago, but as much as scientists in academia and government,” the authors say. writing.
“These findings suggest that ExxonMobil accurately foresaw the threat of man-made global warming before, or in parallel with, organizing pressure and propaganda campaigns to delay action on climate change. , corroborate the claims of journalists, lawyers, politicians and others, adding quantitative accuracy,” they add.
The analysis is based on 32 internal documents produced by Exxon and ExxonMobil scientists between 1977 and 2002 (Exxon merged with Mobil Oil Corp to form ExxonMobil in 1999).
Comparing these data to 72 independent, peer-reviewed scientific papers produced by Exxon and ExxonMobil scientists between 1982 and 2013, Exxon and ExxonMobil scientists I was reading.
The rate of warming predicted by ExxonMobil averaged about 0.20°C per decade. This is about the same estimate proposed by independent scientists and governments in their own models.
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