Comment by thelastgallon

8 hours ago

https://insideclimatenews.org/project/exxon-the-road-not-tak...

This nine-part history of Exxon’s engagement with the emerging science of climate change is the result of an eight months-long investigation conducted in 2015. The stories span four decades, and are based on primary sources, including internal company documents dating back to the late 1970s; interviews with former company employees; and other evidence published for the first time by ICN.

We found that decades ago, Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research and then worked at the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed.

This series was named a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and earned national recognition from many other quarters.

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thelastgallon

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sampo  7 hours ago

> Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research

I disagree.

This is where cutting edge academic research was already 10 years earlier:

[1] 1967: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...

The above paper even has its own Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_Equilibrium_of_the_Atm...

[2] 1969: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/8/3/1520-045...

[3] 1975: https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/warming_papers/manabe.19...

The reports in your link start from 1977 and they are just summaries of public research. They are well done, but lots of people with engineering and/or physics training would be able to read published research and write summary reports.

[4] Let's look at the first one: https://insideclimatenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Jam...

The actual, original science is properly referenced in the end in "Bibliography" (pdf page 15).

I really don't find any "cutting edge research" in those reports. Maybe "cutting edge reading", if we think that being able to follow, read, understand and summarize published research was cutting edge in the late 1970s.

The idea that [4] is "cutting edge research" and comparable in quality to [1,2,3] is just laughable.

  • gcanyon  5 hours ago

    Those are awesome cites, thanks! I swear I'm not sealioning -- I'm asking because it's obscure and I genuinely don't know, and if you know those cites, maybe you'll know this as well: it's insane to me that we had clear evidence like this in the '60s, but was it uncontested? Like, we know now that this paper was correct and by the science of today uncontroversial. Was it reasonable to have that same confidence when it was published? Or: when did consensus start to become achieved?