Når det begås en forbrytelse mot menneskeheten, men man glemmer å brenne bevismaterialet.
Pressemelding har gått ut i kveld, til medier verden over, om hvordan Exxon kartla, stadfestet og deretter begravde sin klimaforskning, for så å motarbeide andre som kom frem til det samme.
But this new study—from Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran, and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research—actually looks at the specific results that Exxon’s scientists predicted back in those years, and sees how well they panned out. Remarkably well: their temperature projections had an average “skill score” of roughly 75%, which is higher than many government researchers.
“These findings corroborate and and add quantitative precision to assertions by scholars, journalists, lawyers, politicians and others that ExxonMobil accurately foresaw the threat of human-caused global warming, both prior to and parallel to orchestrating lobbying and propaganda campaigns to delay climate action action,” the authors write.
As lead author Geoffery Supran (who has just taken up a new post at the University of Miami) put it,
“This is the nail-in-the-coffin of Exxon Mobil’s claims that it has been fasely accused of climate malfeasance. Our analysis shows that ExxonMobil’s own data contradicted its public statements, which included exaggerating uncertainties, critizing climate models, mythologizing global cooling, and feigning ignorance about when—or if—human-caused global would be measurable.”
What Supran is referring to is the decades-long effort, organized by Exxon and others, to minimize and obfuscate the reality of climate change; its high point may have come when then CEO Lee Raymond went to the World Petroleum Congress in Beijing, just weeks before the Kyoto climate talks, and
insisted that the world was cooling, and that even if it wasn’t it would make no difference if people delayed action for a few decades. We now know in greater detail just how precisely Exxon’s scientists had been saying the opposite.
It makes me think, once more, of what may be the greatest climate counterfactual of all. What if, on the night in 1988 that NASA’s Jim Hansen had told Congress about global warming, Exxon’s CEO had gone on the nightly news (which was still a thing then) and said: “That’s what our scientists have been telling us too. It’s a real problem.” That seems the minimum any religious or ethical system would require, and it would have had enormous impact—no one was going to accuse Exxon of climate alarmism. We could have gotten down to work as a society.
They chose another course instead, and in certain ways it worked for them: in some of the years that followed, Exxon set the record for highest annual corporate profit. But that’s not what history is going to remember about them.
Mer her:
Documents show internal predictions were as good as contemporary science but executives publicly downplayed their significance
www.chemistryworld.com
Geoffrey Supran and
Naomi Oreskes from Harvard University, US, have been investigating ExxonMobil’s knowledge of climate change for more than decade. Their previous work showed that there was a
major discrepancy between what company spokespeople said publicly – and in advertising and marketing campaigns – and what they were saying internally. Internal documents disclosed in 2015 suggested that ExxonMobil scientists informed company executives about dangerous human-driven climate warming from at least 1977.
The researchers now show for the first time the
high degree of precision and accuracy of ExxonMobil’s scientific work. With
Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the team examined numerical and graphical data related to explicit projections of future warming. This involved analysing 32 internal documents produced by ExxonMobil scientists between 1977 and 2002 and 72 peer-reviewed scientific publications authored or co-authored by ExxonMobil scientists between 1982 and 2014. This dataset constitutes all publicly available internal documents and research publications disclosed by the company.
