As of: 01/12/2023 8:01 p.m
The oil company Exxon Mobil has been conducting its own climate impact research since the 1970s. According to a research group, the results were clear, but were deliberately concealed by management.
Apparently, the bosses of the US oil giant Exxon Mobil had no scruples: In the 1970s, the view was still being propagated that an upcoming ice age was a “scientific consensus”. In 1999, CEO Lee Raymond claimed that science’s climate projections were based on “completely unproven models” and were “pure speculation.”
His successor Rex Tillerson, who later became Secretary of State under US President Donald Trump, was not above speaking of “unreliable climate models” at a shareholders’ meeting in 2013. And the “Washington Post” quoted him in 2016 as saying that climate change was a purely “engineering problem”.
Precise predictions by Exxon researchers
But the Exxon managers should have known better: scientists from Harvard University in Cambridge/Massachusetts and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) evaluated 104 documents that were created between 1977 and 2014. In addition to 32 Exxon internal documents, this also includes 72 scientific studies in which the company’s own researchers were involved.
These studies were checked according to scientific standards at the time. This also applies to the Harvard PIK study now presented, which has been published in the scientific journal “Science”. The result: Exxon scientists were convinced that burning fossil fuels indefinitely would lead to massive global warming with drastic consequences for life on earth.
In some cases, the Exxon researchers’ forecasts were even better than those of their independent colleagues, for example from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or NASA. The Exxon management was also informed about these research results.
In 1999, Exxon CEO Lee Raymond claimed that science’s climate projections were based on “completely unproven models” and were “pure speculation.”
Image: picture alliance / dpa
Climate change questioned for decades
Nevertheless, the oil company has pursued a communication strategy that is completely different from these findings. The managers were not alone in this. Professor Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University has also written that other oil and automobile managers have questioned man-made climate change for decades.
It is fair to say that “all fossil fuel companies were aware of the climate change threat posed by greenhouse gases emitted from the normal use of their products as early as the 1970s and even 1960s. ” However, only Exxon Mobil seems to have done quality science on the subject of climate change.
Successor Rex Tillerson was not above speaking of “unreliable climate models” at a shareholders’ meeting in 2013.
Image: picture alliance/AP Photo
“Coffin nail” for false climate claims
The PR strategy of publicly questioning these findings had already been uncovered by journalists, lawyers, politicians and climate activists in recent years. That’s why Exxon had to answer in court in New York in 2019 for misleading investors. The judge acquitted the group at the time – for lack of evidence.
If the study that has now been published had already been available at the time, the process might have turned out differently. “This is the nail in the coffin for Exxon Mobil’s claims that the company has been wrongly accused of deliberate climate crimes,” said Geoffrey Supran, lead author of the Harvard University study.
Prediction quality was evaluated
The Harvard-PIK investigation is now the first scientific study to analyze in detail the Exxon climate science papers and to confirm the findings of the Exxon critics. “What’s new,” explains Professor Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is that the company’s own future projections “were examined with quantitative climate models from Exxon and were also quantitatively evaluated for the quality of the predictions.”
Rahmstorf initially analyzed some of the publicly known Exxon data just out of curiosity. Harvard science historians became aware of his Twitter publication of these observations. This is how a scientific cooperation between Cambridge and Potsdam came into being, the result of which is the present “Science” study.
Exxon had an extensive research program
The study was able to prove that the oil multinational knew very well the importance of its products for global warming and also understood their role. Because Exxon actually had an extensive and very well-documented climate research program. The Group’s scientists themselves described their findings as sophisticated and “state of the art”.
Their early findings have now also been confirmed by reality, i.e. the global rise in temperature. The other projections largely correspond to those of their independent colleagues. However, the scientific Exxon papers were often marked as confidential and handled accordingly. In any case, there is no real mention of scientific uncertainties with regard to climate change, according to the “Science” article.
Blind flick lit
The history of the fossil industry’s climate lobbyism has so far been a blind spot, the Harvard-PIK authors write in “Science”. Now you understand the principle better: While science and governments tried to bring their findings to the public, Exxon Mobil worked to conceal or deny them entirely.