ExxonMobil predicted rising global temperatures with remarkable accuracy, even as it tried to downplay the existence of climate change, new research shows. It comes with damning data visualizations that put hard numbers on how much ExxonMobil knew about the climate crisis it was creating.
There has been a litany of evidence about how ExxonMobil rejected conventional climate science, despite the company’s own research and internal communications acknowledging that burning fossil fuels would cause global warming. Now a paper published today in the magazine Science gives us the first comprehensive review in decades of ExxonMobil climate models. And the company’s projections of how much global temperatures would rise over the years were pretty spot on.
“What is quite impressive is the precision and skill of his ideas.”
“What is quite impressive is the precision and skill of their perceptions. They didn’t just vaguely know something about global warming…they knew as much as academic researchers,” says Geoffrey Supran, a research associate at Harvard University and lead author of the new paper. “Arguably they knew everything they needed to know to start taking action and warning the public. But of course they didn’t.”
Looking back at the predictions that ExxonMobil has made since the 1970s, their estimates for future increases in global temperatures are pretty much in line with what actually happened. To show how good the company has been at predicting global warming, the edge recreated one of the figures from the new research paper below.
The red line shows how much global mean temperatures have actually changed over time, as a result of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. The gray lines represent ExxonMobil’s global warming projections. Line colors range from light gray to dark gray, with lighter colors representing the company’s early research beginning in the late 1970s and a darker gray representing the company’s most recent estimates in the early 1970s. from the 2000s. Solid lines indicate predictions that ExxonMobil scientists arrived at using their own models, while dashed lines represent third-party research that ExxonMobil scientists reproduced in company documents.
The key takeaway is that ExxonMobil could predict how much the petroleum products it sold would warm the planet. The globe has already warmed around 1.2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era. That may seem like a small change, but it has led to more severe heat waves, droughts, storms, and floods that we are forced to live with today.
“When I first plotted this graph and all these prediction lines just fall around this red line of reality, it’s pretty amazing that they were equipped with this knowledge years before I was born,” says Supran. You can check the news published by his team research to see more real-world observations overlaid on surprisingly accurate company documents.
On average, Supran and his colleagues give ExxonMobil’s climate models a fairly high “skill score” (a metric also used in meteorology to rate weather forecasts) of about 72 percent. By comparison, that’s even more accurate than the projections of global warming that NASA scientist James Hansen presented to Congress in 1988. Hansen is legendary in the climate world for being one of the first people to sound the alarm about global warming. climate change.
Now, ExxonMobil is known for denying the very climate science that it was actually advancing. The company sought to “emphasize the uncertainty in the scientific conclusions regarding the potential enhanced greenhouse effect,” according to a 1988 internal memo and went on to characterize climate models as “unreliable” in the early 2000s.
By 2015, historical research conducted by Internal Weather News and the The angels Times I had unearthed many of the documents showing the company had spent decades studying climate change but nonetheless cast doubt on climate science. That report sparked the #ExxonKnew scandal, in addition to dozens of lawsuits that ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies have faced in cities, counties and states, including Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Minnesota and the District of Columbia. The lawsuits allege that the oil giants intentionally misled people about climate change to protect their own interests.
“This topic has come up several times in recent years, and in each case, our response is the same: Those who talk about how ‘Exxon knew’ are wrong in their conclusions,” said Todd Spitler, senior corporate relations adviser with the ExxonMobil media, wrote to the edge in an email. Spitler references a 2019 decision by a New York State Supreme Court judge who ruled in favor of ExxonMobildiscovering that the state did not have enough evidence to prove that the company misled investors.
ExxonMobil still faces other lawsuits
Yet ExxonMobil keeps looking down other demands. The new research published today could potentially become more ammunition for those suits targeting the company. The document reviews all of the company’s climate projections now publicly available between 1977 and 2003 (many of which emerged from journalistic investigations). Until now, much of the #ExxonKnew focus has been on the discrepancy between the company’s internal and external messaging on climate change. But Supran and his colleagues wanted to do a full assessment of what the company’s climate data really showed.
“This kind of evidence that succinctly and statistically captures everything they knew in one number and one graph could probably be compelling…complementary to the more qualitative forms of evidence lawyers typically rely on,” says Supran. “And then, of course, there’s also the court of public opinion where I suspect that simple images that prove Exxon knew and misled about the weather can be powerful.”
