Climate projections by the fossil fuel industry have never been assessed. On the basis of company records, we quantitatively evaluated all available global warming projections documented by—and in many cases modeled by—Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists between 1977 and 2003. We find that most of their projections accurately forecast warming that is consistent with subsequent observations. Their projections were also consistent with, and at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models. Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp also correctly rejected the prospect of a coming ice age, accurately predicted when human-caused global warming would first be detected, and reasonably estimated the “carbon budget” for holding warming below 2°C. On each of these points, however, the company’s public statements about climate science contradicted its own scientific data. , Insider knowledge For decades, some members of the fossil fuel industry tried to convince the public that a causative link between fossil fuel use and climate warming could not be made because the models used to project warming were too uncertain. Supran et al . show that one of those fossil fuel companies, ExxonMobil, had their own internal models that projected warming trajectories consistent with those forecast by the independent academic and government models. What they understood about climate models thus contradicted what they led the public to believe. —HJS , ExxonMobil’s own climate models showed that fossil fuel use would cause climate warming. , BACKGROUND 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 trade association had likewise known since at least the 1950s, as had the coal industry since at least the 1960s, and electric utilities, Total oil company, and GM and Ford motor companies since at least the 1970s. Scholars and journalists have analyzed the texts contained in these documents, providing qualitative accounts of fossil fuel interests’ knowledge of climate science and its implications. In 2017, for instance, we demonstrated that 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, the majority of Mobil and ExxonMobil Corp’s public communications promoted doubt on the matter. ADVANCES Many of the uncovered fossil fuel industry documents include explicit projections of the amount of warming expected to occur over time in response to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Yet, these numerical and graphical data have received little attention. Indeed, no one has systematically reviewed climate modeling projections by any fossil fuel interest. What exactly did oil and gas companies know, and how accurate did their knowledge prove to be? Here, we address these questions by reporting and analyzing all known global warming projections documented by—and in many cases modeled by—Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists between 1977 and 2003. Our results show that in private and academic circles since the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil predicted global warming correctly and skillfully. Using established statistical techniques, we find that 63 to 83% of the climate projections reported by ExxonMobil scientists were accurate in predicting subsequent global warming. ExxonMobil’s average projected warming was 0.20° ± 0.04°C per decade, which is, within uncertainty, the same as that of independent academic and government projections published between 1970 and 2007. The average “skill score” and level of uncertainty of ExxonMobil’s climate models (67 to 75% and ±21%, respectively) were also similar to those of the independent models. Moreover, we show that ExxonMobil scientists correctly dismissed the possibility of a coming ice age in favor of a “carbon dioxide induced ‘super-interglacial’”; accurately predicted that human-caused global warming would first be detectable in the year 2000 ± 5; and reasonably estimated how much CO 2 would lead to dangerous warming. OUTLOOK Today, dozens of cities, counties, and states are suing oil and gas companies for their “longstanding internal scientific knowledge of the causes and consequences of climate change and public deception campaigns.” The European Parliament and the US Congress have held hearings, US President Joe Biden has committed to holding fossil fuel companies accountable, and a grassroots social movement has arisen under the moniker #ExxonKnew. Our findings demonstrate that ExxonMobil didn’t just know “something” about global warming decades ago—they knew as much as academic and government scientists knew. But whereas those scientists worked to communicate what they knew, ExxonMobil worked to deny it—including overemphasizing uncertainties, denigrating climate models, mythologizing global cooling, feigning ignorance about the discernibility of human-caused warming, and staying silent about the possibility of stranded fossil fuel assets in a carbon-constrained world. Historically observed temperature change (red) and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (blue) over time, compared against global warming projections reported by ExxonMobil scientists. ( A ) “Proprietary” 1982 Exxon-modeled projections. ( B ) Summary of projections in seven internal company memos and five peer-reviewed publications between 1977 and 2003 (gray lines). ( C ) A 1977 internally reported graph of the global warming “effect of CO 2 on an interglacial scale.” (A) and (B) display averaged historical temperature observations, whereas the historical temperature record in (C) is a smoothed Earth system model simulation of the last 150,000 years.
Best of times, worst of times: record fossil-fuel profits, inflation and inequality
The 2022 oil and gas crisis resulted in record fossil-fuel profits globally that rehabilitated the oil and gas industry, obstructed the energy transition and contributed to inflation, but their magnitude and beneficiaries have been insufficiently understood. Here we show the size of profits across countries and their distribution across socio-economic groups within the United States, using company income statements, comprehensive ownership data and a network model for propagating profits via shareholdings. We estimate that globally, net income in publicly listed oil and gas companies alone reached US$916 billion in 2022, with the United States the biggest beneficiary with claims on US$301 billion, more than U.S. investments of US$267 billion in the low carbon economy that year. In a network of U.S. shareholdings with 252,433 nodes including privately held U.S. companies, 50 % of profits went to the wealthiest 1 % of individuals, predominantly through direct shareholdings and private company ownership. In contrast the bottom 50 % only received 1 %. The incremental U.S. fossil-fuel profits in 2022 relative to 2021 were enough to increase the disposable income of the wealthiest Americans by several percent and compensate a substantial part of their purchasing power loss from inflation that year, thereby exacerbating inflation inequality. These profits also reinforced existing racial and ethnic inequalities and inequalities between groups with different educational attainments. We discuss how an excess profit tax could be used to both lower inequality and accelerate the energy transition as increasing geopolitical tensions and climate impacts threaten continued volatility in oil and gas markets.
Correcting climate ‘misperceptions’ may not boost climate action - Carbon Brief
Most people "underestimate" general support for climate change and "overestimate" actual, real-world climate action.
Ex Oil-Engineer Turned Climate Whistleblower: We Face COLLAPSE | Aaron Bastani Meets Kevin Anderson
Knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene
The technosphere metabolizes not only energy and materials, but information and knowledge as well. This article first examines the history of knowledge about large-scale, long-term, anthropogenic environmental change. In the 19th and 20th centuries, major systems were built for monitoring both the environment and human activity of all kinds, for modeling geophysical processes such as climate change, and for preserving and refining scientific memory, i.e. data about the planetary past. Despite many failures, these knowledge infrastructures also helped achieve notable successes such as the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the ozone depletion accords of the 1980s, and the Paris Agreement on climate change of 2015. The article’s second part proposes that knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene might not only monitor and model the technosphere’s metabolism of energy, materials and information, but also integrate those techniques with new accounting practices aimed at sustainability. Scientific examples include remarkable recent work on long-term socio-ecological research, and the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In terms of practical knowledge, one key to effective accounting may be ‘recycling’ of the vast amounts of ‘waste’ data created by virtually all online systems today. Examples include dramatic environmental efficiency gains by Ikea and United Parcel Service, through improved logistics, self-provision of renewable energy, and feedback from close monitoring of delivery trucks. Blending social ‘data exhaust’ with physical and environmental information, an environmentally focused logistics might trim away excess energy and materials in production, find new ways to re-use or recycle waste, and generate new ideas for eliminating toxic byproducts, greenhouse gas emissions and other metabolites.
Knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene
The technosphere metabolizes not only energy and materials, but information and knowledge as well. This article first examines the history of knowledge about large-scale, long-term, anthropogenic environmental change. In the 19th and 20th centuries, major systems were built for monitoring both the environment and human activity of all kinds, for modeling geophysical processes such as climate change, and for preserving and refining scientific memory, i.e. data about the planetary past. Despite many failures, these knowledge infrastructures also helped achieve notable successes such as the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the ozone depletion accords of the 1980s, and the Paris Agreement on climate change of 2015. The article’s second part proposes that knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene might not only monitor and model the technosphere’s metabolism of energy, materials and information, but also integrate those techniques with new accounting practices aimed at sustainability. Scientific examples include remarkable recent work on long-term socio-ecological research, and the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In terms of practical knowledge, one key to effective accounting may be ‘recycling’ of the vast amounts of ‘waste’ data created by virtually all online systems today. Examples include dramatic environmental efficiency gains by Ikea and United Parcel Service, through improved logistics, self-provision of renewable energy, and feedback from close monitoring of delivery trucks. Blending social ‘data exhaust’ with physical and environmental information, an environmentally focused logistics might trim away excess energy and materials in production, find new ways to re-use or recycle waste, and generate new ideas for eliminating toxic byproducts, greenhouse gas emissions and other metabolites.
Climate doom may discourage climate action, but there’s a way to counter it
One way to guard against misinformation is to empower people to identify climate doom in the first place.
Gas-Lit
If it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between fossil-fuel lobbyists and the billionaire press, that’s because there isn’t one.
Majority of US voters link extreme weather to climate crisis, study finds
Top Democrat says findings show public ‘way ahead of the politicians’ as Trump dismisses global heating as ‘hoax’
RETRACTED ARTICLE: The economic commitment of climate change
Global projections of macroeconomic climate-change damages typically consider impacts from average annual and national temperatures over long time horizons1–6. Here we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes7,8. Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity. Committed losses are projected for all regions except those at very high latitudes, at which reductions in temperature variability bring benefits. The largest losses are committed at lower latitudes in regions with lower cumulative historical emissions and lower present-day income.
🏺 Total et le changement climatique : Falsetés s'y conchient !
How the “Wedges” Climate Change Paper Became a Big Oil Marketing Tool — ProPublica
BP sponsored an elite Princeton research center to address the climate problem without getting off fossil fuels. Its key work, a paper known as “Wedges,” guided climate discourse for a generation.
‘The damage is done’: global oil crisis has changed fossil fuel industry for ever, IEA chief says
Exclusive: International Energy Agency’s Fatih Birol, the world’s leading energy economist, also says UK should largely forgo North Sea expansion
Liberals Are The New Climate Deniers
AIA Forecaster: Technical Report
Forecasting is a universal problem. Any system that makes informed judgments about what may happen in the future relies on at least some degree of forecasting. In agriculture, this takes the form of predicting future crop yields and food system resilience (5; 44; 33). In biotechnology and medicine, clinical trials are carefully designed to help researchers predict the impact of newly developed treatments (37; 7). Elsewhere in biology, AlphaFold can be viewed as a form of forecasting protein folding structure under uncertainty (19). In academia, grant funding is a form of forecasting which scientific discoveries will be made conditional on funding (48). Climate and environmental science models local and long-term weather trends, which are of universal importance (42; 35; 12). In political science, forecasting election outcomes and the impact of policy decisions are an essential component of political calculus (17; 53; 10). Militaries make use of forecasting for threat assessment and conflict predictions (58; 36). Forecasting is the very heartbeat of financial firms, which use it to estimate future economic conditions in an uncertain world (49). Wherever there is uncertainty about the future, there is forecasting.
The Climate Movement Isn’t in Retreat, It’s Under Attack…and It’s Time to Fight Back | Newsletter
In 2020, a source shared a presentation with me from an internal branding workshop they’d been asked to attend for bp. It was fascinating for a number of reasons, not least because it indicated that the oil major felt genuinely threatened by a surprising new enemy: young people. There have always been ebbs and flows […]
Carbon Captured
How the fossil fuel industry turned the plan to solve climate change into a plan to save itself
