Exxon’s Own Models Predicted Global Warming. It Ignored Them.

by Chelsea Harvey, Lesley Clark, Benjamin Storrow (E&E News) It’s been seven years since journalists first revealed Exxon Mobil Corp.’s decadeslong efforts to undermine the scientific certainty around climate change, despite knowing how serious a problem it was.

Now, a new analysis demonstrates exactly how much the company knew — and how its public disinformation campaigns sabotaged the warnings of its own scientists.

Exxon wasn’t just aware of the greenhouse effect. It had its own teams of scientists developing models to project the effects of carbon emissions on the global climate. And those models, it turns out, were highly accurate.

The analysis, published Thursday in the journal Science, captures that sentiment. Exxon’s models matched state-of-the-art simulations being used by academic scientists at the same time period. And the company’s predictions accurately foresaw the warming that’s actually occurred since the 1970s, according to the study written by researchers Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf and Naomi Oreskes.

The findings deepen Exxon’s reputation for climate disinformation. And they may carry legal consequences as well, by becoming evidence in litigation that could cost the fossil fuel industry hundreds of billions of dollars. Two dozen U.S. cities, counties and states are suing Exxon and other energy companies in an attempt to show that they misled the public about their contributions to climate change.

The company says its critics are wrong and that the findings show only that its scientists were keeping pace with evolving climate research.

Spokesperson Todd Spitler said Exxon’s climate research led to nearly 150 papers, including more than 50 peer-reviewed publications that the company made available to the public.

But attorneys for the parties suing fossil fuel companies suggested the study would help make the case that Exxon knew its products were contributing to global warming and sought to blur the facts.

“It moves the conversation from ‘Exxon knew that global warming was real’ to ‘Exxon was internally generating the same predictions about global warming as the climate science it was publicly disparaging,’“ said Niskanen Center chief legal counsel David Bookbinder, who represents several Colorado communities that are suing the industry.

The litigation has been compared to legal battles waged against the tobacco industry, which culminated in 1998 in a $206 billion settlement (Climatewire, March 10, 2021).

She (Alyssa Johl, vice president for legal at the Center for Climate Integrity) added that if “the next time Exxon’s lawyers falsely claim the company didn’t have this knowledge, or was unaware of the damage their products would cause, they’ll have to contend with a peer-reviewed study showing those statements to be lies.”

The analysis demonstrates, quantifiably, that Exxon’s research was at odds with its public communications on climate change.

Exxon for years publicly touted uncertainties in climate science, including the question of whether human-caused warming was occurring at all. But its own models indicated that warming from greenhouse gases was beyond question. The company has also challenged the reliability of climate models, when its own projections were turning out to be highly accurate.

In his 2012 book “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power,” journalist Steve Coll documents the efforts of Lee Raymond, the legendary Exxon CEO who led the company from 1993 to 2005, to fight climate science.

In 1997, as the Clinton administration entered final negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement to slash greenhouse gases, Raymond flew to China to give a speech questioning the need to cut emissions.

“It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now,” Coll quotes Raymond as saying.

A quarter-century later, Exxon executives now acknowledge the science of a warming planet. The company released a plan last year to achieve net-zero emissions from all the assets it owns and operates. But the pledge does not include emissions from oil and gas burned by Exxon’s customers, which accounts for the vast majority of greenhouse gases associated with the company (Greenwire, Jan. 18, 2022). READ MORE