Climate researchers are making serious allegations against the oil company Exxon Mobil. The US company has been accurately predicting global warming as a result of greenhouse gas emissions since the late 1970s, write researchers from Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research (PIK) in an article in the journal Science. At the same time, the company has systematically downplayed this connection for decades.
That Exxon has long known about the threat of global warming was already well known. The climate researchers now evaluated the company's internal data and the forecasts based on it from 1977 to 2003 - they called the result "amazing".
The Exxon experts were apparently well ahead of climate research: "We find that most of their projections predict warming consistent with later observations," the report says. "Their predictions were also consistent with, and at least as good as, those of independent academic and government models."
The forecasts were even significantly better than those presented to the US Congress by NASA scientist James Hansen in 1988. Hansen is considered a pioneer of modern climate research and was one of the first to warn of the dangers of global warming in the 1980s.
"Even as early as 1977, an Exxon projection correctly predicted that fossil fuel use would cause a 'carbon dioxide-induced superinterglacial'," explained Stefan Rahmstorf of PIK, co-author of the study. "This is a warm period that is not only much warmer than anything in the history of human civilization, but even warmer than the last warm period 125,000 years ago."
Exxon's analyzes also "precisely predicted when human-caused global warming would first appear in measured data." They even calculated a "carbon budget" quite precisely for limiting global warming to two degrees.
The researchers criticize that the company has systematically contradicted "its own scientific data" in public statements. ExxonMobile exaggerated uncertainties, criticized climate models, propagated the myth of global cooling and feigned ignorance about when or if human-caused global warming would be measurable," said study lead author Geoffrey Supran of Harvard University.
Today, climate change has progressed so far that researchers see the earth clearly on the way to the previously mentioned record interglacial period - with all its catastrophic consequences. ExxonMobil can therefore rightly be accused of "deliberate climate crimes," Supran concluded.
