“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.
This historical correction has been documented in many posts here at MasterResource, including:
Big Oil, Exxon Not Guilty as Charged: Six-part Rebuttal (September 22, 2022)
‘ExxonKnew’: More Correction (September 18, 2023)
Shell Knew? No (July 19, 2023)
Climate Alarmist as ExxonMobil Whistleblower (March 27, 2024)
In Search of the “Greenhouse Signal” in the 1990s (June 21, 2023)
Unsettled Science, IPCC-style (February 18, 2020)
It became my turn when I encountered this argument by Mark Burger on social media, He stated:
As opposed to fossil fuel industries war on hiding their impacts for decades? One example: “Exxon scientists predicted global warming with ‘shocking skill and accuracy,’ Harvard researchers say“
My Rebuttal
To which I respond (expanded from my reply on social media):
To say that Exxon knew the truth back in the early 80s is a laughable fallacy. Effectively they built a primitive model that is characteristically similar to the erroneous modern climate models of today.
Fundamentally their work is based on the poorly understood climate sensitivity (ECS) derived from radiative convective models and GCM models. To their credit, they actually acknowledged the high degree of uncertainty in these estimations. Today, even Hausfather (2022 vs 2019) is beginning to understand the climate sensitivity (ECS) is too high. CMIP6 is running still even hotter than CMIP5 and using ECS of 3 to 5° C rather than ~ 1.2° C as highlighted in Nick Lewis’s 2022 study.CMIP6 should have been better because it incorporated solar particle forcing (Matthes et. al.) and as they incorporate more elements of natural forcing (an active area of research as we still do not have a predictive theory for climate), the effect is highlighting more underlying problems with the models.
However, Exxon investigators fell into the same trap that climate modelers of today where they build the models to history match temperatures and then wow, because they can create a model that appears to history match temperatures, they assume it is telling them something. Truth? Anyone can create a model to do this, but it would never mean the model is correct. While the models today are much more complex, they are based on a complex set of non-linear equations, and the understanding of the various sources of nonlineararity is poor. This opens up wide degrees of uncertainty yet wide opportunity for tuning. Furthermore, natural forcing is undercharacterized and deemed inconsequential.
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. Current climate models, much more sophisticated, face the same problem of unknown, false causality.
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Randall Utech, former Advisor Geoscientist at Schlumberger, has researched climate science for nearly 30 years with emphasis on geology, paleoclimate, and the glacial cycles. An interview with him by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists can be found here. Utech is author of On the Benefits of CO2 (April 11, 2023).
Thank you, Mr. Utech.
This is a very useful piece in the continuing struggle against the extortionist, ambulance-chasing tort bar and the innumerate, scientific and economic illiterates who are the climate nutjobs.
Randal, it’s a good rebuttal that focuses on the weak and unreliable models. Your points on sensitivity to CO2 and inclusion of natural climate factors are also well taken, In fact the models hide preindustrial natural warming in order to emphasize human causation. A recent study highlights this problem and notes the bias against natural factors prevents progress in gaining predictive models. The paper by Philippe de Larminat is:
https://www.opastpublishers.com/open-access-articles/from-behavioral-climate-models-and-millennial-data-to-agw-reassessment.pdf
My synopsis is:
https://rclutz.com/2024/01/04/climate-models-hide-the-paleo-incline/
A key Image from de Larminat:
https://rclutz.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/larminat-fig-1a.png
Ron Clutz, thank you for your comments and links to the interesting piece by Philippe de Larminat. I also like your review of his work on the Science Matters site.
John, thanks for your comment. Yes it pains me to encounter so often people spouting nonsense about Exxon ‘knowing’ and worse. that the company suppressed internal workings from the public.