Investigation Finds Exxon Ignored Its Own Early Climate Change Warnings

[David_42]

Surprise? Not for me.
Investigation Finds Exxon Ignored Its Own Early Climate Change Warnings – Environment - FRONTLINE

Despite its efforts for nearly two decades to raise doubts about the science of climate change, newly discovered company documents show that as early as 1977, Exxon research scientists warned company executives that carbon dioxide was increasing in the atmosphere and that the burning of fossil fuels was to blame.

The internal records are detailed in a new investigation published Wednesday by InsideClimate News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization covering energy and the environment.

The investigation found that long before global warming emerged as an issue on the national agenda, Exxon formed an internal brain trust that spent more than a decade trying to understand the impact of rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere — even launching a supertanker with custom-made instruments to sample and understand whether the oceans could absorb the rising atmospheric CO2 levels. Today, Exxon says the study had nothing to do with CO2 emissions, but an Exxon researcher involved in the project remembered it differently in the below video, which was produced by FRONTLINE in association with the InsideClimate News report.





In 1978, the Exxon researchers warned that a doubling of CO2 levels in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius and would have a major impact on the company’s core business. “Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical,” one scientist wrote in an internal document.

The warnings would later grow more urgent. In a 1982 document marked “not to be distributed externally,” the company’s environmental affairs office wrote that preventing global warming would require sharp cuts in fossil fuel use. Failure to do so, the document said, could result in “some potentially catastrophic events” that “might not be reversible.”

 

[jc456]

 

[flacaltenn]

I originally took a pass on this hysteria. Because Exxon has the right idea to allow INTERNAL debate on the topic.

But what's hysterical about this revelation -- that David would NEVER appreciate --- Is that the internal EXXON scientists got the predictions MORE CORRECTLY in 1988 -- than the IPCC did until just recently.

That's right boys and girls. Back in 1988 -- the EXXON scientists NAILED the margins on temperature rise and emissions that until VERY RECENTLY -- were hysterically OVER estimated by the IPCC and the "climate community"..

It is only NOW --- that the "climate consensus" has backed down to the level of the calls by EXXON back about 30 years ago.. Shove that in your pipe and don't smoke it...

 

[flacaltenn]

And thanks to David -- for "leaking" this news he thinks is so damaging..