Exxon accurately predicted 2019's climate change and CO2 emission in 1982
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https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier/status/11877355477600419...
From above thread.
I'm slightly surprised it is legal, aren't there restrictions on prejudicing the trial?
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.
It’s truly a liquid with magical properties that doesn’t have a green equivalent.
Now the ask is to make people’s lives uncomfortable? I doubt that’s going to fly.
My bet is whoever figures out a carbon capture -> green oil solution is in for big wins.
Energy makes our lives great.
Before airplanes, before tanks, the oil-fired battleship was a vast improvement over coal-fired battleships.
Also "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power" by Daniel Yergin is essential for understanding the history of oil.
Otherwise known as a tree
Electroil is an imaginary liquid that is as energy dense as oil but can be converted to electricity at almost a 100% efficiency
We know most of the oil is used to power engines. It’s not a very efficient chemical to kinetic energy conversion.
It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Almost word for word.
1) that’s weird. 2) we make trade off choices all of the time, it’s what society does. However, when one side argues that the trade offs don’t exist, or lie about them, that’s deeply immoral, especially when it is such a pervasive, existential threat.
“If you work this job I have for you in my mine, I know for a fact you’ll get mesothelioma, I won’t tell you, and in fact fight tooth and nail to convince you and everyone else that it’s perfectly safe. But now that you have mesothelioma, why don’t you think about the salary we paid you? How it supported your whole life? Maybe have a bit of perspective, huh?”
There's a big difference between refusing to burn massive amounts of oil and refusing to participate in any aspect of society. If burning oil like this is immoral for everyone, it is immoral for you; if it is not immoral for you, it is not immoral for anyone with your resources.
> Otherwise their arguments are invalid because of hypocrisy!
Yes, their arguments are silly because of hypocrisy; pricing the poor out of energy is a hypocritical way for the world's rich to purport to make change.
Unless you are living naked in a forest, foraging for food, and shivering for warmth, and have done so since birth, you’re as hypocritical as those you would accuse.
I'm not going around judging people for ordinary oil use, I fully accept the costs of my actions, and I know that convenience is more important to me than reducing my carbon footprint, at some threshold. The hypocrisy comes from putting on an air of caring without putting in the work, as though it is somehow a moral accomplishment to impose the costs of your own lifestyle on others.
I also think it's pretty rich that this thread is nothing but name-calling, antagonism, and flamebait, and dang is nowhere to be seen; but I avoid all of this behaviour and somehow still get reprimanded because HNers can't help but be nasty to eachother in my threads.
We need structural change mandating a low carbon economy, regulatory enforcement, and energy sources factored in throughout the supply chain to achieve this. This kind of effort is already working with RoHS and REACH - the technical infrastructure exists - but the political will isn’t quite there yet.
I fly, but I am working with the European Commission to make this kind of regulatory accountability a reality - similar to substance restrictions, it’ll start as an audibility measure, and will then grow to encompass enforcement and public transparency. Several of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers are on board. The automotive and aerospace sectors are trying to do their own things, as ever, but are making noises towards harmonisation.
So. Living in the forest isn’t the solution (although I do, and produce 100% of our energy and water, and 90% of our food, here), rather pushing for structural change through whatever means are available for you. I’m a techie. I’m helping define XML standards that might just save the world.
But I do fly.
What could an activist possibly do to convince you?
Plenty of climate activists have obstructed pipelines with direct action, have blockaded roads and blocked oil derricks; they have sacrificed time, money and in some cases their freedom when arrested. Meanwhile, you and others of your ilk sniff about "antagonism" and go about your day feeling smug that you're not a hypocrite because you "fully accept the costs of [your] actions" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean).
You say you "accept" the cost of your actions, but you leave it up to the rest of us to make sure you pay those costs.
I'm sure that future generations (well, the fraction that don't die from climate-aggrivated famines, wars or diseases) will be pleased to know that wealthy software devs from the Era of 24/7 Electricity didn't ever have to feel uncomfortable about their choices.
Are you interested in the Science? Here's some test questions: how do you explain the lack of warming signal for the past 15 years in the gold standard temperature dataset from the USCRN? What percentage of change in global cloud cover would account for 2C of warming and how does it compare to the accuracy of the IPCC model ensemble in predicting changes in global cloud cover?
I'm not denying a warming climate, but I do think there are significant error bars surrounding calculations of Climate Sensitivity. Until someone can provide me with better answers than "what does it hurt to err on the side of caution" I'm going to be a skeptic of predictions of catastrophic warming.
Now are you going to ignore Science, or are you going to ask for hard evidence of extraordinary claims?
That's not really a correct categorization. In fact the oil shock also drove serious interest (i.e. among "serious thinkers") in efficiency of consumption and distribution. The CAFE standards et. al. date from this period too.
It wasn't until the mid 90's, long after climate change became a public meme, that most of our government turned away from the idea.
The regulations should have limited grams of pollutant per ton-kilometer in order to require both less pollutants and better efficiency.
https://climateinvestigations.org/drilled-climate-change-den...
Are they doing it this very morning on popular forums?
During two separate oil crises in the 1970s, Americans from coast to coast faced persistent gas shortages as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, flexed its muscles and disrupted oil supplies.
In 1973 and again in 1979, drivers frequently faced around-the-block lines when they tried to fill up.
Drivers would go to stations before dawn or late at night, hoping to avoid the lines.
Odd-even rationing was introduced — meaning that if the last digit on your license plate was odd, you could get gas only on odd-numbered days. New Jersey and New York have just reintroduced the system.
Back in the '70s, some gas stations took to posting flags — green if they had gas, yellow if rationing was in effect and red if they were out of gas.
-NPR https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2012/11/10/16479229...
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.
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.
Pretty scary for a supposedly educated crowd.
If you could replace a coal guzzling, smoke spilling power plant with a silent solar panel field, why wouldn't you?
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.
We could call it rock power, but the bad association will persist and get boosted by alarmists anyway.
The harder part of the pie would be agriculture and industry.
Hundreds of millions of human lifetimes of effort? Extreme social unrest? See what's going on in France, Holland, and Chile for a taste.
https://www.llnl.gov/news/us-energy-use-rises-highest-level-...
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.
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!”
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.
1.5 - 2C depending on how hard (if at all) we cut emissions going forward.
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.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24102019/massachusetts-su...
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.
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.
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.
That is by no means "just" what it does.
Note, that 'care' in in quotes. It is because corporations are not humans, or even alive. They are not greedy, good, bad, evil etc. Do not anthropomorphize entity created to maximize profits, led by top people hired to do just that.
The unexploited oil reserves in the world are at least twice as big as we think.
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.
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_Cli...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...
https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/sites/jrcsh/files/fossil_emissions_...
I'll wait.
* 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-greenhous...
This is the key point. The global economy grows at its own rate, and so we would have produced roughly the same amount of carbon even without China, the distribution would have just been different because similar amounts of manufacturing would have just happened elsewhere.
So even without being able to predict the rise of China, the scientists could have roughly predicted the carbon concentration.
I don't see how this relates to anything.
>Thanks for admitting the submission title is an outrageous lie though.
You seem to be immune to logic, so I can imagine how you arrived at that conclusion.
>"you seem to be immune to logic"
The jokes write themselves.
Arguably, if India, which is currently the world's fastest develop major economy, goes the way of China, we are all screwed. Doubtful they will however, because they are at the ground zero of climate change and other pollution problems due to the fragility of the himalayan glaciers (which cause the monsoons), low latitude climate, and a large portion of the eastern side of country being at/near sea level, particularly at the delta of the Ganges River (not to mention neighboring extremely low lying Bangladesh, which may be the source of one of the largest sources of displaced people in human history since it's basically one big river delta).
1. The industrial/economic/demographic collapse in the (former) USSR and Eastern Europe 2. Huge per capita emissions reductions in Western Europe and the USA 3. Stagnation in Japan 3. Slower global population growth than predicted
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?
There’s also the possibility that their predictions gave a wide range and we’re simply within that band today.
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.
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...
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-m...
Also note it's impossible for models in the 80's to have been accurate because the temperature data for the past itself has been continuously adjusted by climatologists since then, so any models calculated back then would be using temperatures now considered wrong (and not by a small amount!). Either the old models are wrong or the old temperature records are wrong, but they can't both be true simultaneously.
Do you have a good source for this assertion? I mean, there are still people claiming that there is no warming at all, so "all" models seems like too strong a claim.
Yes, scientists have been busy trying to refine their models and understanding of temperatures. But my understanding is that, quantitatively, the inaccuracies in the old temperature data was pretty small compared year to year variation. No prediction is ever perfect, even in QED you have one part in a trillion error, but instead you look at whether the result is in the error bars and whether the error bars are narrow enough to be useful.
If I remember correctly, the lag was likely caused by not correctly accounting for deep ocean heating. That's a huge missing piece of the simulation, so how could the models from back then possibly have been accurate?
But honestly it's the inaccuracy of current climate models that make me so concerned about global warming.
Or the lag was a minor factor that only briefly overrode the primary drivers of climate change, which have since reasserted themselves. I think we both know what the smart bet is.
The oceans are now significantly warmer than earlier models predicted. There's no way that doesn't impact the outcome.
Instead what happened is they decided the temperature records that showed a pause were wrong, went back and adjusted them so there's no longer any real pause if you look at the latest temperature datasets. The entire thing was written off as a giant measurement error.
> That is to say that the current alignment is just coincidental.
Sort of. The model is (heatIn - heatOut - seaAbsorption) = surface weather. They got the seaAbsorption wrong, something they later figured out with the Argo network as you noted. But that means they got the primary driver of global warming, heatOut dropping as CO2 increases, right. Which sadly means if you wait long enough, their predictions were always going be right because in the end heatIn - heatOut is all that matters.
Source? Although all of this depends on what you mean by "more", as in what you assume the error bars on the models are.
> temperature data for the past itself has been continuously adjusted
Source?
> Also note it's impossible for models in the 80's to have been accurate
It's not actually. Models don't depend on the temperature. The models could have been (and in fact, were) accurate despite the alleged wrong inputs.
> Either the old models are wrong or the old temperature records are wrong, but they can't both be true simultaneously.
It doesn't really matter in the context of the legal argument about what Exxon thought to be true in 1982.
The Exxon scientists' predictions were proprietary company information at the time. Exxon didn't publish this information, they used it to their advantage.