Yesterday’s post, “‘Exxon Knew’ as Historical Fallacy“, provided historical context to weaken the claim that an internal Exxon study was demonstrative as to the future dangers of CO2-led global warming. Today’s post evaluates the rudimentary finding that (third bullet of the Exxon memo):

The present trend of fossil fuel consumption will cause dramatic envrionmental effects before the year 2050.

Nine years after the internal Exxon memo (1979), reporting on the James Hansen testimony that launched the climate debate, environmental reporter Philip Shabecoff provided specific forecasts of anthropogenic activity: 3–9°F and 1–4 feet by 2025–2050.

Mathematical models have predicted for some years now that a buildup of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil and other gases emitted by human activities into the atmosphere would cause the earth’s surface to warm….

The following memorandum within the vast bowels of Exxon Corporation from 1979 has led to several fallacies that the memo represented company policy and was definitive at the time.

False and false. This memo from certain employees never made it to a company position for cause. Global cooling was the bigger concern back then, and the above memo did not investigate the SO₂ offset, much less the benefits from CO₂ fertilization and incremental warming. Peak Oil and Peak Gas was the intellectual/practical concern of this era.

Background Posts

MasterResource has opined on this subject is a series of posts, summarized here.

• A rebuttal to an op-ed by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, “The Forgotten Oil Ads that Told Us Climate Change was Nothing.”
• A critical review of Inside Climate News’s “Exxon: The Road Not Taken” (here and here)
• A three-part rejoinder of Big Oil vs The World by the BBC (Episode I; Episode II; Episode III)
• A rejoinder to Shell Knew (here)
• ‘ExxonKnew’: More Correction (Sept.

“The contrived sense of accomplishment in history matching is spurious correlation for an infinitesimally small period of time. Using Exxon’s internal analysis of CO2 climate forcing is little more than a propaganda tool.”

“Exxon Knew” is a political-lawyer campaign focusing on certain internal company documents to make a case that the oil major knew that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were a future threat to human betterment.

Smoking gun? Hardly.

A half century later, the IPCC is still trying to update and figure out physical climate science. Exxon did not do a study on the benefits of CO2 or the offset of sulfur dioxide emissions. The concern way back then was Global Cooling, Peak Oil, and Peak Gas. And as the company knew, fossil fuels had no viable substitute, as in wind and solar.…

“There is a strong intellectual case against the view that ExxonMobil ‘knew’ that CO2 was a threat to human betterment versus the continuous growth of consumer-desired, taxpayer-neutral oil and natural gas. In fact, Enron, not Exxon, was the bigger culprit in the climate-change-and-business saga.”

Geoscientist Lindsey Gulden speaks for the Climate Industrial Complex, not the average person who depends on oil and gas every minute of every day, when she portrays herself as a martyr for the cause of climate alarmism/forced energy transformation.

It is not easy to get fired by ExxonMobil, but there are underperformers and just bad apples in every batch. Lindsey Gulden appears to be one. On social media, she tells of just this experience, invoking climate alarmism.

But she does note one thing of interest: the company’s overhyped political play of carbon capture and storage, which is correct.…