Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Cigarette companies, Dupont, oil companies. They all knew.

Yep, Dark Waters is spellbinding. Worse is the problem still exists to degree. And though the film's story
took place in W Virginia guess which state is foremost in some interested individuals' minds here.
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Research shows that company modeled and predicted global warming with ‘shocking skill and accuracy’ starting in the 1970s

Projections created internally by ExxonMobil starting in the late 1970s on the impact of fossil fuels on climate change were very accurate, even surpassing those of some academic and governmental scientists, according to an analysis published Thursday in Science by a team of Harvard-led researchers. Despite those forecasts, team leaders say, the multinational energy giant continued to sow doubt about the gathering crisis.

In “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections,” researchers from Harvard and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research show for the first time the accuracy of previously unreported forecasts created by company scientists from 1977 through 2003. The Harvard team discovered that Exxon researchers created a series of remarkably reliable models and analyses projecting global warming from carbon dioxide emissions over the coming decades. Specifically, Exxon projected that fossil fuel emissions would lead to 0.20 degrees Celsius of global warming per decade, with a margin of error of 0.04 degrees — a trend that has been proven largely accurate.

“This paper is the first ever systematic assessment of a fossil fuel company’s climate projections, the first time we’ve been able to put a number on what they knew,” said Geoffrey Supran, lead author and former research fellow in the History of Science at Harvard. “What we found is that between 1977 and 2003, excellent scientists within Exxon modeled and predicted global warming with, frankly, shocking skill and accuracy only for the company to then spend the next couple of decades denying that very climate science.”


“This paper is the first ever systematic assessment of a fossil fuel company’s climate projections, the first time we’ve been able to put a number on what they knew,” said Geoffrey Supran, lead author. File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

“We thought this was a unique opportunity to understand what Exxon knew about this issue and what level of scientific understanding they had at the time,” added co-author Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science whose work looks at the causes and effects of climate change denial. “We found that not only were their forecasts extremely skillful, but they were also often more skillful than forecasts made by independent academic and government scientists at the exact same time.”

Allegations that oil company executives sought to mislead the public about the industry’s role in climate change have drawn increasing scrutiny in recent years, including lawsuits by several states and cities and a recent high profile U.S. House committee investigation.

Harvard’s scientists used established Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) statistical techniques to test the performance of Exxon’s models. They found that, depending on the metric used, 63-83 percent of the global warming projections reported by Exxon scientists were consistent with actual temperatures over time. Moreover, the corporation’s own projections had an average “skill score” of 72 percent, plus or minus 6 percent, with the highest scoring 99 percent. A skill score relates to how well a forecast compares to what happens in real life. For comparison, NASA scientist James Hansen’s global warming predictions presented to the U.S. Congress in 1988 had scores from 38 to 66 percent.

More: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-finds-exxonmobil-internal-research-accurately-predicted-climate-change/