ExxonMobil leaks show the climate crisis was predicted over 50 years ago

ExxonMobil "predicted global warming correctly and skillfully," in a study that analyzed hundreds of research papers and internal documents concluded.

The company's researchers built projection models very similar to those of independent academics and Governments while denying the influence of fossil fuels on global warming.

The investigation, published in Science, follows previews of 2015 journalistic revelations of similar documents and could fuel several ongoing lawsuits against the company.

The previous leak showed that the oil giant built research teams with top scientists that associated burning fossil fuels with global warming but chose to ignore the result of their investigation.

The new research shows that ExxonMobil successfully rejected the possibility of the Earth reaching a new ice age, an idea mooted in the 1970s.

ExxonMobil also predicted global warming of about 0.2 °C (32.36 °F) a decade due to the emissions of planet-heating gases from burning oil, coal, and other fossil fuels.

Geoffrey Supran, who led the research, told The Guardian that it was "breathtaking" to see ExxonMobil's prediction be so close to what happened. "

We now have the smoking gun showing that they accurately predicted warming years before they started attacking the science. These graphs confirm the complicity of what Exxon knew and how they misled," Supran added.

In 2015, a journalistic investigation by Inside Climate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists, and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of documents.

Exxon discovered that the company's management understood the science that modeled the consequences of burning fossil fuels and engaged with it by financing several groundbreaking climate studies.

The company went as far as investing one million dollars on a project to understand how much CO2 the oceans absorb. They also hired top-tier scientists to look into the issue during the 1970 and 1980.

However, in 2013, Rex Tillerson, then chief executive of the oil company, said that "there are uncertainties" over the impact of burning fossil fuels.

The Inside Climate News investigation also revealed that James Black, ExxonMobil's senior scientist, told management in 1977 and 1978 that there was consensus on the human influence on global warming through CO2 emissions, that doubling those emissions would increase the temperature by around two or three degrees, and that they had a five to ten-year window to act.

But ExxonMobile did not respond. Not only that, they disregarded the importance of the 2015 leaks saying those documents were public. They accused the news outlet of using "loaded language" and "selective materials" to portray their conclusions differently.

However, the new leak shows that the material was not inconclusive but accurate and aligned with other research that scientists outside the company were conducting. The models are unquestionably correct.

Experts agree that Exxon contributed to campaigns of confusion to undermine the science that showed how burning fossil fuels was warming the planet and causing climate change.

In 1989, the company helped create the Global Climate Coalition, an enterprise organization dedicated to that purpose. The company also had a role in the US decision not to sign the Kyoto Protocol in 1998.

The Union of Concerned Scientists released a complementary investigation called 'The climate deception dossiers.' "We included a memo of a coalition of fossil-fuel companies where they pledge to launch a big communications effort to sow doubt," president Kenneth Kimmel told Scientific American.

Kimmel told Scientific America that, by 2015, half of the emissions in the atmosphere were released after 1988. "We lost a lot of ground," he said.

Much worse than that, as of 2022, millions of lives are lost every year to climate change, according to the World Health Organization. Regional Director for Europe, Dr. Hans Henri P. Kluge, said in a statement last year: "climate change and air pollution kill an estimated 550.000 people in our Region each year, out of a global estimated total of 7 million."

The United Nations believes this number can severely increase as emissions do. In a data report from November 2022, the UNPD concluded that the impact of climate change on health, if carbon emissions remain high, could be up to twice as deadly as cancer in some parts of the world by 2100.

A study from 2022 also warned that the climate crisis has already pushed the planet to catastrophic tipping points. According to The Guardian, these include the collapse of Greenland's ice cap, of a key current in the north Atlantic, and an abrupt melting of carbon-rich permafrost.

The consequences of crossing those tipping points can have a cascade effect over other crucial tipping points. The destruction of Greenland's ice cap will raise sea levels. The collapse of a critical current in the north Atlantic will result in droughts. Finally, melting the permafrost will release more carbon into the atmosphere, worsening the situation.

Despite this terrible scenario, ExxonMobil's response to the new leaks published in Science is similar to 2015. A spokesperson told The Guardian: "This issue has come up several times in recent years and, in each case, our answer is the same. Those who talk about how "Exxon Knew" are wrong in their conclusions."

However, some experts behind the 2015 investigation compared the company's actions to those of the Tobacco industry when it covered the truth about the adverse effects of smoking. Only the future will tell if they will have the same fate.