Day: January 12, 2023

Exxon Mobil’s scientists were remarkably accurate in their predictions about global warming, even as the company made public statements that contradicted its own scientists’ conclusions, a study says.

The study published Thursday in the journal Science looked at research that Exxon funded that didn’t just confirm what climate scientists were saying but used more than a dozen different computer models that forecast the coming warming with precision equal to or better than government and academic scientists.

This was during the same time that the oil giant publicly doubted that warming was real and dismissed climate models’ accuracy. Exxon said its understanding of climate change evolved over the years and that critics are misunderstanding its earlier research.

Scientists, governments, activists and news sites, including Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times, several years ago reported that “Exxon knew” about the science of climate change since about 1977, all while publicly casting doubt. What the new study does is detail how accurate Exxon-funded research was. From 63% to 83% of those projections fit strict standards for accuracy and generally predicted correctly that the globe would warm about .36 degree (.2 degree Celsius) a decade.

‘Astonishing’ hypocrisy

The Exxon-funded science was “actually astonishing” in its precision and accuracy, said study co-author Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard science history professor. But, she added, so was the “hypocrisy, because so much of the Exxon Mobil disinformation for so many years … was the claim that climate models weren’t reliable.”

Study lead author Geoffrey Supran, who started the work at Harvard and now is an environmental science professor at the University of Miami, said this is different than what was previously found in documents about the oil company.

“We’ve dug into not just the language, the rhetoric in these documents, but also the data. And I’d say in that sense, our analysis really seals the deal on ‘Exxon knew,’ ” Supran said. It “gives us airtight evidence that Exxon Mobil accurately predicted global warming years before, then turned around and attacked the science underlying it.”

The paper quoted then-Exxon CEO Lee Raymond in 1999 as saying future climate “projections are based on completely unproven climate models, or more often, sheer speculation,” while his successor in 2013 called models “not competent.”

Exxon’s understanding of climate science developed along with that of the broader scientific community, and its four decades of research in climate science resulted in more than 150 papers, including 50 peer-reviewed publications, said company spokesman Todd Spitler.

Misrepresentation alleged

“This issue has come up several times in recent years, and in each case, our answer is the same: Those who talk about how ‘Exxon knew’ are wrong in their conclusions,” Spitler said in an emailed statement. “Some have sought to misrepresent facts and Exxon Mobil’s position on climate science, and its support for effective policy solutions, by recasting well-intended, internal policy debates as an attempted company disinformation campaign.”

Exxon, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, has been the target of numerous lawsuits that claim the company knew about the damage its oil and gas would cause to the climate, but misled the public by sowing doubt about climate change. In the latest such lawsuit, New Jersey accused five oil and gas companies including Exxon of deceiving the public for decades while knowing about the harmful toll fossil fuels take on the climate.

Similar lawsuits from New York to California have claimed that Exxon and other oil and gas companies launched public relations campaigns to stir doubts about climate change. In one, then-Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said Exxon’s public relations efforts were ” reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s long denial campaign about the dangerous effects of cigarettes.”

Oreskes acknowledged in the study that she has been a paid consultant in the past for a law firm suing Exxon, while Supran has gotten a grant from the Rockefeller Family Foundation, which has also helped fund groups that were suing Exxon. The Associated Press receives some foundation support from Rockefeller and maintains full control of editorial content.

Oil giants including Exxon and Shell were accused in congressional hearings in 2021 of spreading misinformation about climate change, but executives from the companies denied the accusations.

University of Illinois atmospheric scientist professor emeritus Donald Wuebbles told The Associated Press that in the 1980s, he worked with Exxon-funded scientists and wasn’t surprised by what the company knew or the models. It’s what people who examined the issue knew.

“It was clear that Exxon Mobil knew what was going on,” Wuebbles said. “The problem is at the same time, they were paying people to put out misinformation. That’s the big issue.”

There’s a difference between the “hype and spin” that companies do to get you to buy a product, or politicians do to get your vote, and an “outright lie … misrepresenting factual information. And that’s what Exxon did,” Oreskes said.

‘Huge’ harm

Several outside scientists and activists said what the study showed about Exxon actions is serious.

“The harm caused by Exxon has been huge,” said University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck. “They knew that fossil fuels, including oil and natural gas, would greatly alter the planet’s climate in ways that would be costly in terms of lives, human suffering and economic impacts. And yet, despite this understanding, they chose to publicly downplay the problem of climate change and the dangers it poses to people and the planet.”

Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald asked: “How many thousands (or more) of lives have been lost or adversely impacted by Exxon Mobil’s deliberate campaign to obscure the science?”

Critics say Exxon’s past actions on climate change undermine its claims that it’s committed to reducing emissions.

After tracking Exxon’s and hundreds of other companies’ corporate lobbying on climate change policies, InfluenceMap, a firm that analyzes data on how companies are impacting the climate crisis, concluded that Exxon is lobbying overall in opposition to the goals of the Paris Agreement and that it is currently among the most negative and influential corporations holding back climate policy.

“All the research we have suggests that effort to thwart climate action continues to this day, prioritizing the oil and gas industry value chain from the ‘potentially existential’ threat of climate change, rather than the other way around,” said Faye Holder, program manager for InfluenceMap.

“The messages of denial and delay may look different, but the intention is the same.”

Source: Voice of America

Last year was one of the the warmest on record, according to data released Thursday by two U.S. government agencies, and was marked by numerous instances of severe weather around the globe, many of which are exacerbated by global warming.

The Earth’s average global surface temperature was 0.86 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average in 2022, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This made it the sixth-warmest year on record by NOAA’s reckoning, and the fifth-warmest by NASA’s. (The discrepancy between the two is the result of a measurement difference of a tiny fraction of a degree.)

The high temperatures in 2022 were particularly remarkable because of the presence of a major weather phenomenon over the Pacific Ocean called La Niña, which drove global temperatures down by approximately 0.06 degrees, Gavin A. Schmidt, chief of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a conference call with journalists.

Russell Vose, chief of the analysis and synthesis branch at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said the individual rankings of specific years are less important than the overall trend of a warming planet. Each of the past eight years has been among the eight hottest years on record.

“It’s clear that each of the past four decades has been warmer than the decade that preceded it,” said Vose. “There’s really been a steady rise in temperature since at least the 1960s.”

He added, “It’s certainly warmer now than at any time in at least the past 2,000 years, and probably much longer.”

Regional differences

Differences in global surface temperature were not evenly distributed, with some regions experiencing much higher-than-average temperatures, while others had lower temperatures. While Central Europe experienced significantly higher temperatures than normal, for example, the temperatures of the U.S. Midwest were lower than average. The Northern Hemisphere, for example, was 1.1 degrees Celsius above average last year, while the Southern Hemisphere was up only 0.61 degrees.

Asia experienced its second-hottest year on record, as did Europe. In Africa, though, 2022 was only the tenth-hottest year on record. It was the 12th-hottest year recorded in South America, the 15th-hottest in North America and in the top 20 for Oceania.

Much of the increased heat was focused on the polar regions, which led to significant loss of sea ice. In 2022, average sea ice cover in the Antarctic was near record lows, at 10.5 square kilometers. In the Arctic, sea ice covered 10.6 square kilometers, the 11th-lowest total on record.

In addition, average ocean surface temperatures, which are measured up to a depth of 2,000 meters, were the highest on record. The four highest average global ocean temperatures ever recorded have all occurred in the four years since 2019.

Major weather events

Last year also saw a large number of extreme weather events, including crippling droughts in the western U.S., East Africa and much of Europe, while Pakistan, China and Australia all battled devastating floods.

While major storm systems were not more common than average in 2022, North America suffered a series of extremely damaging hurricanes, while East Asia was battered by several destructive typhoons.

The scientists presenting the NOAA/NASA data declined to blame severe weather events specifically on climate change, but they noted that warmer temperatures create conditions that allow storms to become more damaging than they might otherwise be.

‘Flirting’ with 1.5 degrees Celsius

Countries around the world have reached a number of agreements meant to try to keep average global temperature increases limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (a different, lower baseline than the 20th century average cited above).

Vose said the Earth is already “flirting” with a 1.5-degree increase now, adding that it would not be surprising for a single year in the 2020s to top that number. That would not be the same as reaching a multiyear average increase of 1.5 degrees, though.

Schmidt said the Earth’s average temperature currently stands at between 1.1 and 1.2 degrees above the preindustrial average, and is climbing.

He said the current rate of warming is just over 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. If that rate remains unchanged, within 20 years, the global average will hit 1.5 degrees.

However, he added, continued increases are not inevitable.

“Future warming is a function of future emissions of carbon dioxide. So, we as a society, collectively, we still have agency,” Schmidt said. “So, what we are going to do in the future is going to determine what happens in the future. And so, if we continue to emit at the rate that we are emitting right now, then we are going to continue to warm, and we would be pretty much rushing past 1.5. If we collectively reduce emissions quite quickly, then we can avoid the higher temperatures.”

Climate activists frustrated

Climate activists saw Thursday’s report as further confirmation of the dire effects of global warming and the insufficiency of past efforts to slow it.

“It’s a lot of what we already know — just more confirmation,” said Cherelle Blazer, senior director of the International Climate and Policy Campaign at the Sierra Club. “We’re already at 1.1 degrees warming. All the world’s scientists say that we need to stick to 1.5 in order to not see the worst of the climate catastrophe happen. And no one seems to be willing to do what’s necessary to achieve that. I find it very disheartening.”

Blazer said she hopes the NOAA/NASA report will spur the new Congress into action, particularly in efforts to fully implement the many carbon-reduction efforts included in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, to finance the Green Climate Fund, and to take steps to compensate low-income countries for the disproportionate damage they face from global warming.

“I’m hoping that the Biden administration, our new Senate and our new House — our newly elected officials — are ready to roll up their sleeves and stop playing around with people’s lives,” she said.

Source: Voice of America