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Exxon accurately predicted 2019's climate change and CO2 emission in 1982
- lousken 7y agoold news? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986910
- aritmo 7y agoIt is back in the news. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24102019/massachusetts-sues-exxon-climate-change-investor-fraud-misleading-advertising-healey https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24102019/massachusetts-su...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- xurias 7y agoI mean, until somebody does something about it, there's value in repeating it over and over. Maybe at some point it'll sink in how criminal these companies are.
- VvR-Ox 7y agoIndeed! Let's just repeat it until nobody can forget it ever again and also drop tax avoidance by these huge companies in the mix. Maybe there is still hope for something we can call justice and probably the money they stole from exploiting the commons can be used for something more valuable than personal gains of some managers and stakeholders.
- makomk 7y agoDifferent document. I think this is probably referring to https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/1982%20Exxon%20Primer%20on%20CO2%20Greenhouse%20Effect.pdf https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/... since that's what the news articles making the same claim are based on. There's a few things worthy of note in there. Firstly, according to the document Exxon wasn't at all sure that their products actually were causing global warming. Secondly, they predicted if it did happen it would have much lower impacts than claimed by all the climate activists and press pointing to Exxon's "accurate" predictions as proof they knew their products were destroying the world. Highlights inclue 1.9 to 3.1 C warming by 2090, no potentially serious climate-caused problems until the end of this century, and rising sea levels maybe causing coastal flooding in several centuries but only at the upper end of possible warming. Thirdly, they argue any major shift from fossil fuels would have had to be based on nuclear rather than solar and wind - not exactly popular with environmentalists, to put it lightly.
- panny 7y agoThat's astounding, because the IPCC did not accurately predict 2019's climate change or CO2 in 1982. In fact, Exxon scientists must be time travelers to have foreseen the rise of China at a time when all of the USA was afraid of losing to the Japanese.
- luc4sdreyer 7y agoOne reason the IPCC might have missed that prediction in 1982 is that the organisation didn't exist. It was founded in 1988 [1]. If you meant the scientific community as a whole, a majority was predicting anthropogenic global warming since the 1970's, but consensus only started in the 1980's [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...
- panny 7y agoI meant, show me where Exxon scientists predicted this, https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/sites/jrcsh/files/fossil_emissions_co2_v2.jpg https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/sites/jrcsh/files/fossil_emissions_... I'll wait.
- luc4sdreyer 7y agoYou're implying that climate scientists had to have known the relative emissions per country into the far future. This is wrong for several reasons: * It doesn't matter where the CO2 is released, only that it's released. * Climate models don't predict human carbon emissions. They predict how the climate will respond. * The climate has a lot of momentum, so a sudden increase in carbon doesn't immediately cause a change in temperature. For example, if we completely stop releasing carbon, the climate will still warm another 0.6C [1] [1] https://theconversation.com/if-we-stopped-emitting-greenhouse-gases-right-now-would-we-stop-climate-change-78882 https://theconversation.com/if-we-stopped-emitting-greenhous...
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- Yuval_Halevi 7y agoloved this comment (saw it on twitter): Well, the scientists seemed not very grilled at all, they seemed eager to share their opinions. It's not the scientists fault executives tend to not listen to what the data says in favor of profits. Boeing is another company that comes to mind.
- cameronbrown 7y agoBoeing CEO is an engineer (rightfully so). There's probably a more systemic issue with that company than executives ignoring scientists.
- freen 7y agoIt’s like the “Aristocrats” joke, but instead the punchline is “capitalism!”
- neltnerb 7y agoYeah, shocked to see someone being questioned by Congress so willing to own up to what happened. I don't think business ethics courses back then covered "avoid the apocalypse" and it seems subsequent CEOs went to the same business school.
- beerandt 7y agoIt's not uncommon for factions of an organization to have different opinions, and for a higher-up to pick a side as a winner. You could look at any decision any large company has ever made and certainly find advocates arguing for the opposing side. That doesn't make every one of those decisions fraud.
- goatinaboat 7y agoThis seems very hard to believe - mainstream science struggles to predict accurately even 5 years out. In 1982 they were predicting the ice caps would be gone by 2000, acid rain, holes in the ozone layer etc. But this one guy is the Nostradamus of climate and everyone ignored him? Note: I am not saying that climate change isn’t real. I’m just sceptical that someone in 1982 made accurate predictions of 2019. And all points in between? Without anyone noticing?
- tozeur 7y agoI’m also curious about this. Exxon being the most valuable company back then was basically the ‘Google’ of its time: they employed the smartest people and developed breakthrough technologies. I wouldn’t be surprised if their heavily funded scientists were able to make accurate predictions. There’s also the possibility that their predictions gave a wide range and we’re simply within that band today.
- lucb1e 7y ago> this one guy is the Nostradamus of climate and everyone ignored him? I have no trouble believing that. Given a thousand predictions, with two thousand possible outcomes you'll have someone guess right 50% of the time. These are educated guesses and no one knows the odds of guessing right, but I'm not surprised we can find a random person that made a prediction that fits a certain part of what we're seeing today.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago> In 1982 they were predicting the ice caps would be gone by 2000 Citation please. No one was predicting that. Edit: Also I have little problem believing that internal scientists knew the problem, and the extent, long before the outside world recognised the urgency. That also applied to tobacco, asbestos, leaded fuel - they had research showing issues decades before the wider world had the weight of evidence, or even recognised there was a problem to investigate...
- luc4sdreyer 7y ago> This seems very hard to believe - mainstream science struggles to predict accurately even 5 years out In general, this might be true. Predicting the future is harder than it seems. But it depends completely on the type of system (chaotic or not), and how well we understand it. We can predict the position of the Earth thousands of years into the future. Regarding climate models, you might be underestimating how good they were in the early 80's. Here are old models' projections compared with the actual temperature records up to 2017 [1]. I'm not an expert so I don't know if they excluded early bad models, but they included all the IPCC models. The graph that AOC showed was pretty small and grainy. It's also compressed along the x-axis (140 years), and has a high aspect ratio. It's possible that she, or her aides, picked the best one for the presentation. But given the performance of the models at the time, it's not unreasonably good. It actually seems worse than the 1990 IPCC model, but that's just my opinion. [1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...
- kerng 7y ago"We were excellent scientists" - great quote!
- kerng 7y agoWhy is this downvoted? If you watch the video it's the outstanding quote from the entire clip. They predicted everything accurately!
- fnordfnordfnord 7y agoAnd precisely!
- myth_buster 7y agoImagine yourself in their shoes. You have been trying to bring to attention the adverse effects of fossil fuels to the planet. And you are doing this using scientific methods and getting them peer reviewed. And you have built models that, in hindsight, are as accurate as possible. And what reception you get for this? A large apparatus is deployed to label your work as pseudo-science. Your credibility is questioned. In that light, those 4 words, "We are excellent scientists!" is profound. It contains within it the struggle, suffering, pain, integrity and pride of the experience they have gone through for many decades. This reminded me of Clair Cameron Patterson [0] and his struggle to bring to light the effect of lead in gasoline. Cosmos' "The Clean Room" [1] is an accessible view on this subject. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson [1] https://imdb.com/title/tt3410940/ https://imdb.com/title/tt3410940/
- montalbano 7y agoExxon is currently pushing misleading ads embeded in @nytimes articles about #ExxonKnew: https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier/status/1187735547760041984 https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier/status/11877355477600419... From above thread.
- Brakenshire 7y agoThey're all over Twitter as well, the first thing that came up on opening Twitter on the morning their trial started. I'm slightly surprised it is legal, aren't there restrictions on prejudicing the trial?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Merrill 7y agoIn 1982 we had just emerged from the decade where the 1973 Yom Kippur War oil crisis and the 1979 Iranian Revolution oil shock has us waiting in line for gasoline and filling only on odd/even days depending on whether we had odd or even license plates. People were interested in producing more oil, not less. Even the Club of Rome could not get much traction with its "Limits to Growth" reports. It was also the middle of the Cold War and oil is a vital military supply - the Department of Defense is a huge consumer of refined oil products.
- mattacular 7y agoHope it was worth it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Sharlin 7y agoFor a few glorious moments we created a lot of value for the shareholders.
- crisdux 7y agoWe industrialized the world, lifted billions out of poverty, and increased living standards. Why do people ignore the human progress's we've made. Folks really need to have some perspective.
- posixplz 7y agoAnd all it cost was the inevitable total destruction of our climate and ecology! Yay!
- Sharlin 7y agoHad we acted on climate change in the 1980s, I doubt that would have made much difference on living standards in the end. And insofar as it would, it would have been worth it. Maybe we could have avoided the worst externalities of petrochem and consumerism-centered lifestyle.
- keymone 7y agowhat if in 1982 there were a million such studies with predictions all over the place and that one just happens to match what really happened? what if Exxon uses this as an explanation for why this result wasn’t taken into account? “It was not possible to predict which prediction would have turned out correct, you can’t fault us for that!”
- luc4sdreyer 7y agoI answered a similar question in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21369078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21369078 TLDR: That model was fairly in line with what the scientific community was saying at the time. That excuse might have carried some weight in the early 70s but it was marginalized by scientific consensus in the 80s.
- yostrovs 7y agoDidn't we get confirmation of global warming only in the 2000s with the IPCC and all? Who would have trusted Exxon then? Who would trust it now? Would you have changed your ways had you read that Exxon report? Have you really changed your ways by now?
- zer0tonin 7y agoThe first IPCC report was released in 1990 and I don't think it left many ambiguity about the existence of a greenhouse effect and its cause.
- yostrovs 7y agoMore of them followed to confirm the findings. Satellites were launched, degrees issued to thousands of new scientists to confirm this. Would you have trusted Exxon in the 1980s?
- saalweachter 7y agoYou don't think (one of) the largest oil companies in the world coming out and saying "we've got to stop using so much oil" would be convincing?
- carrozo 7y agoSo... maybe we should find out what they’re predicting for 2056?
- cagenut 7y agohttps://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1_figure-final.png https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1... 1.5 - 2C depending on how hard (if at all) we cut emissions going forward.
- novaleaf 7y agogreat link. Though it seems to estimate 1.5 - 2C ONLY IF CO2 emissions reach net zero by 2055. Take a look at graph (c) and guess how likely that would be. (Not likely at all). Sad times.
- baltbalt 7y agoHere is something else that oil company know and keep secret. The unexploited oil reserves in the world are at least twice as big as we think.
- beerandt 7y agoNot exactly- the term "provable reserves" has a technical meaning, and is usually used with a modifier like "economically recoverable". Because the public misunderstands that term to mean "absolute amount of supply ever to become available" doesn't make it misleading or even a secret.
- jdmoreira 7y agoWe can blame Exxon and greedy capitalists as much as we want but this is the textbook example of a system with perversive incentives. Human society, and I would even argue human nature in itself, presents us with the wrong system of incentives for self preservation at scale.
- danharaj 7y agoSo our incentive structure- capitalism- is to blame.
- logicchains 7y agoMaybe it reflects human nature. Most scientists agree that being overweight is harmful to our health, yet the majority of us can't even control how much food we consume, in spite of the strong motivation of self-preservation. If we can't even control ourselves to do that, how can we expect to control ourselves to reduce carbon-emitting activities? Humans aren't that far removed from animals. If you keep giving a cat food, it may keep eating until it's sick. Communism or capitalism can't change human nature.
- danharaj 7y agoAttributing something to human nature is about as much an argument as attributing it to God's plan.
- logicchains 7y agoThe point is that capitalism just allows people to realise their preferences, and peoples' preferences as revealed by ther actions clearly show they don't really care that much about preventing climate change. No economic system is going to change this, unless it prevents people from doing what they want (what they want is to enjoy a good standard of living, with pickup trucks, SUVs, regular flights, large beef hamburgers...).
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- orf 7y agoYou can see that they where successful in their mission to spread FUD about climate change in these very comments. Pretty scary for a supposedly educated crowd.
- puranjay 7y agoThe strange part is that even if all climate change scientists are completely wrong, what do we really stand to lose by switching to renewable sources and just polluting less? If you could replace a coal guzzling, smoke spilling power plant with a silent solar panel field, why wouldn't you?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago> what do we really stand to lose by switching to renewable sources and just polluting less? Except that if we really knew about climate change in the 1980’s we should have been building Nuclear Power Plants at a massive rate. However, a lot of environmental groups were against that, and actively were anti-nuclear. In fact, some countries and states are decommissioning active working nuclear power plants. There is no room for anti-nuclear sentiment if you really believe that climate change is the biggest threat to civilization.
- beerandt 7y agoOr should we hold environmental groups accountable for being anti-nuclear when surely they knew that nuclear would have resulted in less CO2, yet they openly opposed it.
- puranjay 7y agoAt this point, nuclear power needs to be rebranded to be viable. The tech is fantastic but 50 years of apolcalypse porn has ensured people see mushroom clouds as soon as they hear "nuclear". A name change should be the first priority.
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- zczc 7y ago[video]
- m0zg 7y agoSo she had a phrase there "you understood the consequences [of 1 degree of temperature rise]". Am I missing something? What _are_ the consequences? Record breaking prosperity worldwide? Best I can tell there's no tangible negative impact on the homo sapiens so far, but there _is_ very much a tangible positive impact. I'm not saying we're not on a dangerous trajectory, don't get me wrong, but if you're honest, you have to also consider the consequences of _not_ using all those fossil fuels, especially 20-30 years ago when tech to replace them simply wasn't available.
- gnosis89 7y agoFalse
- gersh 7y agoDo you want to do something about this? I suggest joining the Sunrise Movement. Go to https://www.sunrisemovement.org/ https://www.sunrisemovement.org/ to join.