Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago (2015)

scientificamerican.com

36 pointselorant31 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...

>In the 1960s, the evidence for the warming effect of carbon dioxide gas became increasingly convincing. Some scientists also pointed out that human activities that generated atmospheric aerosols (e.g., "pollution") could have cooling effects as well.

>During the 1970s, scientific opinion increasingly favored the warming viewpoint. By the 1990s, as the result of improving the fidelity of computer models and observational work confirming the Milankovitch theory of the ice ages, a consensus position formed: greenhouse gases were deeply involved in most climate changes and human-caused emissions were bringing discernible global warming.

It's a good Wikipedia article. Exxon scientists predicted climate change, but they were also in communication with other scientists including Edward Teller, one of the key inventors of thermonuclear weapons, who was a significant public figure at the time. They didn't emphatically denounce their own technology, but they weren't radically ahead of the knowledge of other scientists at the time.

People were counting carbon dioxide in PPM in the atmosphere since the early 1900s. We knew it wasn't good. Oh well. Your kids are gonna see some fucked up shit. 420(ish) and climbing baby!!!! Ribbit.

Considering how much knowledge and outside interaction is siloed in large organizations the specific individuals behind these specific actions should also be named and shamed. Don't let them hide behind limited liability by only naming and shaming the company.

This article seems best summarised by a quote from the article:

> "The thing that shocks me the most is that we’ve been saying this for years, that we have been involved in climate research. These guys go down and pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials."

Also exemplified in an XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/2500/

An interesting point missing from that XKCD is the 1990 IPCC report that says the following[0]:

> Thus the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability: alternatively this variability and other human factors could have offset a still larger human-induced greenhouse warming. The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for a decade or more.

In 1990, the IPCC was saying it wasn't yet discernable that humans were particularly influencing the wider natural change of climate.

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_a... (section 1.0.5)

only ten years ago, daily posts to a large California metropolitan area newspaper site in comments, claimed "no such thing" and "what about cooling" and "sun cycles" and whatever.. constantly..

§1.0.1 Emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, chloro fluorocarbons (CFCs) and nitrous oxide. These increases will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth's surface. The main greenhouse gas, water vapour, will increase in response to global warming and further enhance it.

§1.0.3 A n average rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about 0.3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2—0.5°C per decade) assuming the IPCC Scenario A (Business-as- Usual) emissions of greenhouse gases; this is a more rapid increase than seen over the past 10,000 years. This will result in a likely increase in the global mean temperature of about 1°C above the present value by 2025 (about 2°C above that in the pre-industrial period), and 3°C above today's value before the end of the next century (about 4°C above pre-industrial).The rise will not be steady because of other factors.

§3.0.2 The IPCC recommends a programme for the development and implementation of global, comprehensive and phased action for the resolution of the global warming problem under a flexible and progressive approach.

* Ibid

It's an interesting defense. It looks like the coming election combined with the weather and effects (fire, flood, etc.) this year, these questions of blame and who knew what when, and what they did about it, will be a large vector of its own. Possibly one that will drive us to a survivalism (formerly humanism) orientation rather than one of personal benefit / protection.

If you think through where we would be now if Exxon took the lead and drove the change to other energy systems, reshaping government and international power, who is to say they wouldn't have been in an even more powerful and profitable position now - and that would be saying something given their profits and access to power today.

Same way we knew smoking would kill decades before it became commonly understood.

By the 80s, the oil industry had begun giving us unleaded gas (the "filtered cigarettes" of your analogy) after many decades of "convincing."

So oil companies all had our best interests at heart and we were all behaving healthier, less bad, right?

Blaming the oil companies is misplaced. They provided what we wanted.

We "want" what is marketed to us.

You're a victim of advertisements, helplessly buying things you don't want?

it's not a want it's a forced need. There's a history of oil companies buying patents to inventions that could increase gas mileage etc. We're forced by society to get a job to live, most of the time at least in earlier times that required transportation. It wasn't a want, it was a need. Travel or die. there's many food deserts where the same applies to just grocery shopping. No vehicle, no food.

So it has nothing to do with advertising, but very much has to do with culture, society, and oil industry always doing what's best for the oil industry.

> There's a history of oil companies buying patents to inventions that could increase gas mileage etc.

Oh, that one. That theory was all the rage in the 1970s. Oil companies buying patents for 100 mpg carburetors and then quashing them. I asked my dad (23 years in Air Force) about that. He had a big belly laugh. He said one of the biggest logistical problems the military had was fuel consumption. Destroying the Axis fuel supply was a major component of the Allied victory.

There's no way in hell that the military would not use a suppressed patent that doubled mpg. (The military bulldozed aside the airplane patents in WW1.)

> food deserts

are caused by locations where it is simply unprofitable to run a store, which can happen for many reasons, such as being a high crime neighborhood. Nothing to do with oil companies conspiracies.

My comment is just as black/white as yours was. And yes, people are easily manipulated. That is just a fact of life.

I'm in my late 30s, and I've been hearing about climate change my whole life. It hasn't exactly been a secret.

(2015)

...or should I say (1977)?

or 1856

https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicte...

Another "conspiracy theories are ok when they match my politics" story. Greenhouse effect is well known, the world runs on oil, none of us gave it up, some people with misplaced guilt (and no desire to do anything themselves) want to blame evil corporations.

> none of us gave it up

huh? "electric cars" etc

> match my politics

climate transcend political parties.

Does the same logic apply with Purdue Pharma and the opioid epidemic? Sometimes corporations are responsible for using massive budgets to push or displace narratives. The labeling of calls for corporate accountability away as conspiracy theory is probably the biggest conspiracy of our time.

If I give up oil and no one else does, the planet's still screwed and I don't get any of the benefits that everyone else sees while it happens.

Climate change is not an issue of individual bad choices and the only misplaced guilt is individual guilt, feeling as if one is responsible for the whole problem.

Like it or not, group behaviors are best changed by collective action.

Kind of hard to expect individuals to make this change when such companies lobby for gasoline dependency and destruction of public transportation.

The problem is what you do with that information. They actively funded a misinformation campaign for decades, putting billions on it, to prevent enough action about it.

The fact that climate science was evolving 40 years ago is used to discount all the articles from the 70s that said we were entering a new ice age, so it seems unfair to target Exxon by saying they perfectly understood the science when the New York Times et al gets off the hook by saying they didn’t.

• “The Earth’s Cooling Climate,” Science News, November 15, 1969.• “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age,” Washington Post, January 11, 1970.• “Science: Another Ice Age?” Time Magazine, June 24, 1974.• “The Ice Age Cometh!” Science News, March 1, 1975.• “The Cooling World,” Newsweek, April 28, 1975.• “Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead,” New York Times, May 21, 1975.• “In the Grip of a New Ice Age?” International Wildlife July-August, 1975.• “A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable,” New York Times, September 14, 1975.• “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit, Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” Science magazine, December 10, 1976.

The "new ice age" thing was never anywhere close to a mainstream thing in climate science. The idea that CO2 caused warming was already well-established, and the decade-scale cooling was correctly seen as just a temporary reversion.

A lot of that coverage was astroturfed by Exxon et al, precisely to muddy the waters. The media of course was happy to play along.

You literally cut and pasted a bibliography from the first hit on global climate change denial from an organization long associated with corporate propaganda.

https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/today-i...

Nice.

Funny thing: I can't seem to find any of those articles, only references to them on other climate denial pages.

Typical dismissing of facts based on the messenger. "Oh they are bad so the point you are making is wrong...." You literally did nothing but superficial search. Obviously google and other search engines want to hide those. That's real corporate propaganda/censorship.

Here are the links starting from the beginning: https://www.sciencenews.org/archive/earths-cooling-climate https://web.archive.org/web/20060812025725/http:/time-proxy.... https://www.sciencenews.org/sn-magazine/march-1-1975 (cover only) http://www.denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf etc...

The fact that so many of the articles have been moved from the original location or de-prioritized from search should give you pause if you thought about it a bit....

> The fact that climate science was evolving 40 years ago is used to discount all the articles from the 70s that said we were entering a new ice age.

The cooling predictions were that if levels of particulate pollution, which causes cooling, continued rising they way they were their cooling effect would be larger than the warming effect of greenhouse gases.

We responded to the particulate pollution problem by massively reducing particulate emissions. With particulates no longer a significant factor the models of those that had predicted ice ages predicted warming.

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