Report: ExxonMobil Predicted Climate Change While Downplaying Risk

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

ExxonMobil publicly sowed doubt about climate change despite the oil giant’s own scientists accurately predicting global warming as far back as the 1970s, a new study reported by Al-Jazeera, has indicated.

While ExxonMobil publicly claimed models used to predict climate change were too uncertain to draw conclusions, the company’s own experts made projections consistent with those of academics and governments, according to the paper published in the journal Science.

“What they understood about climate models thus contradicted what they led the public to believe,” the authors of the study wrote.

ExxonMobil scientists’ average projected warming was 0.2° Celsius per decade – the same as independent academic and government projections published between 1970 and 2007 – while 63-83 percent of their estimates proved to be accurate, the authors said.

The Exxon-funded science was “actually astonishing” in its precision and accuracy, said study co-author Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard science history professor.

 But she added that so was the “hypocrisy because so much of the ExxonMobil disinformation for so many years … was the claim that climate models weren’t reliable”.

ExxonMobil scientists also accurately dismissed the possibility of a coming ice age, correctly projected that global warming would be detectable sometime between 1995 and 2005, and reasonably estimated how much carbon dioxide (CO2) would lead to dangerous warming, according to the study.

“They modelled and predicted global warming with shocking accuracy and skill, only for the company to spend the next couple of decades denying that very climate science,” said Geoffrey Supran, a co-author of the study.

“In 1999, for example, ExxonMobil Corp’s chief executive officer Lee Raymond said future climate ‘projections are based on completely unproven climate models or, more often, sheer speculation,’” the authors added.

According to the report, in 2013, his successor, Rex Tillerson, called climate models ‘not competent’ while in 2015, he stated that: ‘We do not really know what the climate effects of 600 ppm versus 450 ppm will be because the models simply are not that good’.”

The study, authored by researchers at Harvard University, the University of Miami, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, based its findings on company documents obtained by journalists and researchers, including internal files warning of “potentially catastrophic” climate change first published in 2015 by the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News.