Our Understanding of Climate Change: A Weird History

Today, most of the literate world is aware of the challenge that our civilization faces with respect to “AGW” (anthropogenic global warming, aka climate change, aka climate disruption).  For most of us, however, this realization has come fairly recently; public recognition of the issue has come a very long way in just the last 10 years.  The science underlying all this, however, has been a long time in the making.

The concept of CO2 as a greenhouse gas goes back to the 19th Century.  Then, per this article (other citations here and here, but the best one is here):  

In the 1950s, research suggested increasing temperatures, and a 1952 newspaper reported “climate change”. This phrase next appeared in a November 1957 report in The Hammond Times which described Roger Revelle‘s research into the effects of increasing human-caused CO₂ emissions on the greenhouse effect, “a large scale global warming, with radical climate changes may result”. Both phrases were only used occasionally until 1975, when Wallace Smith Broecker published a scientific paper on the topic; “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” 

Interestingly, ExxonMobil has its own timeline with respect to this subject.  Apparently, they ordered a team of internal scientists to conduct extensive research on global warming in the 1970s.  From the article linked above:

“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.

It was July 1977 when Exxon’s leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.

A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon’s Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.  Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.

“Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed,” Black said, in the written summary of his 1978 talk.

His presentations reflected uncertainty running through scientific circles about the details of climate change, such as the role the oceans played in absorbing emissions. Still, Black estimated quick action was needed. “Present thinking,” he wrote in the 1978 summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

Exxon responded swiftly. Within months the company launched its own extraordinary research into carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and its impact on the earth. Exxon’s ambitious program included both empirical CO2 sampling and rigorous climate modeling. It assembled a brain trust that would spend more than a decade deepening the company’s understanding of an environmental problem that posed an existential threat to the oil business.

Then, toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon curtailed its carbon dioxide research. In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront of climate denial. It put its muscle behind efforts to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming its own scientists had once confirmed. It lobbied to block federal and international action to control greenhouse gas emissions. It helped to erect a vast edifice of misinformation that stands to this day.

This is a narrative that we see too often in our world: criminality occurring as the result of a painful decision that was forced upon an individual or group who, at the time, was calmly and honestly going through life minding his own business.  Bank robbers and Ponzi schemers didn’t decide in kindergarten that a life of crime would be fun and rewarding; life circumstances took them in that direction, and one day they made a very bad decision.

At the corporate level we see the same playing out.  The tobacco companies would have been happier if smoking did not cause cancer, but the scientific evidence that accumulated in the 1950s and 1960s brought them to a watershed decision: tell the truth and suffer the financial consequences, or cover it up, provide agonizing deaths to countless millions of people, and get rich.  Unfortunately, they chose the latter, and the consequences were terrible for everyone concerned.  Brought in the last year of the Clinton Administration, criminal proceedings found the Tobacco Companies had for decades engaged in “a pattern of racketeering activity” geared to “deceive the American public about the health effects and addictiveness of smoking cigarettes.”  In 2006, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 92-page per curiam opinion upholding the judgment issued by D.C. District Court.

We now learn that ExxonMobil faced the same dilemma, and, unfortunately for them and all of us, made the decision to go in the same direction.  It’s a modern-day drama/tragedy that we see playing out in front of us–though one that seems to be moving along far faster than was the case with Big Tobacco, which took almost half a century to unravel.  Here are some people calling for the immediate prosecution of Exxon’s deliberate deception under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, to be launched by the US Department of Justice.  Obviously, Exxon has the wealth to fight its opponents for a very long time to come, yet dragging this out only postpones the inevitable outcome, as the damage becomes more profound with each passing day.