Out of masterresource
By Randal Utech — September 19, 2024
“The artificial sense of achievement in historical agreement is a false correlation for an infinitesimal period of time. The use of Exxon's internal analysis of the CO2 climate impact is little more than a propaganda tool.”
“Exxon Knew” is a political-legal campaign that focuses on certain internal company documents and suggests that the oil company knew that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions posed a future threat to humanity.
Clear evidence? Hardly.
Half a century later, the IPCC is still trying to update and understand physical climate science. Exxon has not conducted a study on the benefits of CO2 or offsetting sulfur dioxide emissions. The concern then was global cooling and peak oil and peak gas. And as the company knew, there were no viable substitutes for fossil fuels, such as wind and solar power.
This historic correction has been documented in many posts here at MasterResource, including:
Big Oil and Exxon Not Guilty as Charged: Six-Part Rebuttal (September 22, 2022)
“ExxonKnew”: Further correction (September 18, 2023)
Did Shell know? No (July 19, 2023)
Climate alarmist as ExxonMobil whistleblower (March 27, 2024)
Searching for the “greenhouse signal” in the 1990s (June 21, 2023)
Unexplained science, IPCC style (February 18, 2020)
It was my turn when I came across this argument by Mark Burger on social media. He explained:
As opposed to the fossil fuel industry's efforts to cover up its impacts for decades? For example: “Exxon scientists predicted global warming with 'shocking accuracy and precision,' Harvard researchers say”
My refutation
To this I respond (expanded from my response on social media):
To claim that Exxon knew the truth in the early 1980s is a ridiculous fallacy. In fact, they developed a primitive model that is characteristically similar to today's flawed modern climate models.
Their work is essentially based on the poorly understood climate sensitivity (ECS) derived from radiative convection models and GCM models. To their credit, they actually acknowledged the high degree of uncertainty in these estimates. Today, even Hausfather (2022 vs. 2019) is beginning to understand that the climate sensitivity (ECS) is too high. CMIP6 still runs hotter than CMIP5, using an ECS of 3 to 5°C instead of ~1.2°C as highlighted in Nick Lewis' 2022 paper.
CMIP6 should have been better because it included the influence of solar particle radiation (Matthes et al.) and because it included more elements of natural radiative forcing (an active area of research since we still do not have a predictive theory for climate), the effect reveals further fundamental problems with the models.
However, Exxon researchers fell into the same trap as today's climate modelers: They construct their models to match historical temperatures, and then, wow, because they can create a model that appears to match historical temperatures, they assume it tells them something. Is that right? Anyone can create a model that does this, but that would never mean the model is correct. While today's models are much more complex, they are based on a complex set of nonlinear equations, and the understanding of the various sources of nonlinearity is poor. This opens up large uncertainties, but also large opportunities for fine-tuning. In addition, natural forcings are not well characterized and are considered inconsequential.
The contrived sense of achievement in historical agreement is a spurious correlation for an infinitesimal period of time. The use of Exxon's internal analysis of CO2 climate impact is little more than a propaganda tool. Current climate models, which are much more sophisticated, face the same problem of unknown, spurious causality.
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Randall Utech, former consulting geoscientist at Schlumberger, has been researching climate science for nearly 30 years, focusing on geology, paleoclimate, and ice age cycles. An interview with him by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists can be found here. Utech is the author of On the Benefits of CO2 (April 11, 2023).
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