The oil company ExxonMobile was aware of the climate crisis as a researcher – and kept silent about a change of strategy: According to the report, Apple also wants to offer touchscreen laptops from 2025

Climate researchers from Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research (PIK) are making serious accusations against oil company ExxonMobile. The American company has been accurately predicting global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions since the late 1970s, the researchers write in an article in the journal Science. At the same time, the company, which is one of the largest air polluters in the world, has been systematically downplaying this connection for decades.

Exxon’s longstanding awareness of the threat of global warming was already known. The climate researchers now evaluated the company’s internal data and forecasts based on it from 1977 to 2003 – they called the result “amazing”.

The Exxon experts were apparently way ahead of climate research: “We find most of their projections predict warming consistent with subsequent observations,” the report says. “Their predictions were also consistent with, and at least as good as, those of independent academic and government models.”

Better than NASA

So the predictions were significantly better than those made by NASA scientist James Hansen in 1988 to the US Congress. Hansen is considered a pioneer of modern climate research and was one of the first to warn of the dangers of global warming in the 1980s.

“Even as far back as 1977, an Exxon projection correctly predicted that fossil fuel use would cause a ‘carbon dioxide-induced superinterglacial,'” explained Stefan Rahmstorf of PIK, co-author of the study. “This is an interglacial period that is not only much warmer than anything in the history of human civilization, but even warmer than the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago.”

Exxon’s analyzes also “accurately predicted when human-induced global warming would first be detected in measured data.” They even calculated quite accurately a “carbon budget” to limit global warming to two degrees.

Exxon “feigned ignorance”

However, in public statements, the company has systematically contradicted “its own scientific data”, the researchers criticize. ExxonMobile exaggerated uncertainties, criticized climate models, propagated the myth of global cooling and feigned ignorance about when — and if — human-induced global warming would be measurable,” said lead author Geoffrey Supran of Harvard University.

Today, the climate crisis has progressed to such an extent that researchers clearly see the Earth heading towards the aforementioned interglacial record period – with all the catastrophic consequences that entails. ExxonMobil can therefore rightfully be accused of “intentional climate crimes,” Supran concluded. (t-online/afp)