BACKGROUND
In 2015, investigative journalists discovered internal company memos indicating that Exxon oil company has known since the late 1970s that its fossil fuel products could lead to global warming with “dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.” Additional documents then emerged showing that the US oil and gas industry’s largest trade association had likewise known since at least the 1950s, as had the coal industry since at least the 1960s, and electric utilities, Total oil company, and GM and Ford motor companies since at least the 1970s. Scholars and journalists have analyzed the texts contained in these documents, providing qualitative accounts of fossil fuel interests’ knowledge of climate science and its implications. In 2017, for instance, we demonstrated that Exxon’s internal documents, as well as peer-reviewed studies published by Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists, overwhelmingly acknowledged that climate change is real and human-caused. By contrast, the majority of Mobil and ExxonMobil Corp’s public communications promoted doubt on the matter.
1950s US oil and gas industry's largest trade association had knowledge that its fossil fuel products could lead to global warming with “dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.”
1960s the coal industry had the knowledge
1970s Exxon oil company had the knowledge (more data, knowledge and inference)
1970s electric utilities, Total oil company, and GM and Ford motor companies had the knowledge
(] Looking at emissions from countries from 1959 through 2020, the furthest Global carbon project goes back and beyond which some data gets less reliable,
the United States, not China, is the biggest carbon polluter and it isn't that close. Oct 26, 2022 [)
the knowledge is that the use of fossil fuel products could lead to global warming with “dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.”
“the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus” cultivated in public by Mobil in the 1990s and ExxonMobil Corp in the 2000s (see Box 3) was false and contradicted the conclusion of their own scientists that global cooling was unlikely (56).
Global cooling – Discredited 1970s hypothesis of imminent cooling of the Earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
source:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063
Mythologizing global cooling
Panel 1b of Fig. 1 is a graph of the global warming “effect of CO2 on an interglacial scale” originally published by climate scientist J. Murray Mitchell Jr. in March 1977 and reproduced by Exxon scientist James Black in a private briefing to the Exxon Corporation Management Committee 4 months later (54, 55). This dataset was not included in our preceding analysis because its long time scale does not permit accurate digitization of its projected post-industrial anthropogenic global warming. Nonetheless, overlaying the original graph with the temperatures simulated by a modern Earth system model (in red) shows that Exxon scientists were accurate in warning their superiors of the prospect of a “carbon dioxide induced ‘super-interglacial,’” as Mitchell Jr. termed it, that would render Earth hotter than at any time in at least 150,000 years (56). This shows that Exxon scientists correctly sided with the majority of the peer-reviewed literature in the 1970s that foresaw human-caused global warming overwhelming any possibility of global cooling and a (natural) ice age. [According to Peterson et al. (2008), only ~14% of the peer-reviewed literature between 1965 and 1977 anticipated global cooling (56).] It also shows that “the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus” cultivated in public by Mobil in the 1990s and ExxonMobil Corp in the 2000s (see Box 3) was false and contradicted the conclusion of their own scientists that global cooling was unlikely (56).
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Z. Hausfather (University of California, Berkeley) for technical guidance; P. Achakulwisut (Stockholm Environment Institute) for helpful discussions; and two anonymous peer reviewers.
Funding: The authors are supported by a Rockefeller Family Fund grant (G.S.) and Harvard University Faculty Development Funds (N.O.).
Author contributions: Conceptualization: G.S., S.R. Methodology: G.S., S.R.
Investigation: G.S. Writing – original draft: G.S. Writing – review & editing: G.S., S.R., N.O. Visualization: G.S. Supervision: G.S., N.O. Funding acquisition: G.S., N.O.
Competing interests: The three authors have received speaking and writing fees, and S.R. and N.O. have received book royalties for communicating their research, which sometimes includes but is not limited to the topics addressed in this paper. G.S. and N.O. have offered their expertise pro bono to groups and organizations combating climate change, including briefing attorneys and coauthoring amicus briefs in climate lawsuits. N.O. has in the past served as a paid consultant to Sher Edling law firm, which has filed complaints against ExxonMobil Corp and other fossil fuel companies. However, Sher Edling played no role in this or any other study by the authors (including but not limited to study conceptualization, execution, writing, or funding).
Data and materials availability: Raw data (original PDF internal documents and peer-reviewed publications) for this study cannot be reproduced in full owing to copyright restrictions. However, a catalog of all analyzed documents, and links to public archives containing these data, are provided in SM section S2.1. Raw data resulting from digitization of all analyzed original PDF datasets are deposited on Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/R4MOAE (87). The code used to generate the results of this study is provided in the same repository.
License information: Copyright © 2023 the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original US government works. https://www.science.org/about/science-licenses-journal-article-reuse
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ice age
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers.
a long period
reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere
the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers
Earth's climate alternates between ice ages and greenhouse periods, during which there are no glaciers on the planet.
In glaciology, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in both northern and southern hemispheres.[3]
The amount of anthropogenic greenhouse gases emitted into Earth's oceans and atmosphere is predicted to prevent the next glacial period for the next 500,000 years, which otherwise would begin in around 50,000 years, and likely more glacial cycles after.[4][5][6]
In Germany, Albrecht Reinhard Bernhardi (1797–1849), a geologist and professor of forestry at an academy in Dreissigacker
In a paper published in 1832, Bernhardi speculated about the polar ice caps once reaching as far as the temperate zones of the globe.[25]
In 1829, independently of these debates, the Swiss civil engineer Ignaz Venetz (1788–1859) explained the dispersal of erratic boulders in the Alps, the nearby Jura Mountains, and the North German Plain as being due to huge glaciers. When he read his paper before the Swiss Society for Natural Research, most scientists remained sceptical.[26]
In the meantime, the German botanist Karl Friedrich Schimper (1803–1867) was studying mosses which were growing on erratic boulders in the alpine upland of Bavaria. He began to wonder where such masses of stone had come from. During the summer of 1835 he made some excursions to the Bavarian Alps. Schimper came to the conclusion that ice must have been the means of transport for the boulders in the alpine upland.
At the beginning of 1837, Schimper coined the term "ice age" ("Eiszeit") for the period of the glaciers.[30] In July 1837 Agassiz presented their synthesis before the annual meeting of the Swiss Society for Natural Research at Neuchâtel. The audience was very critical, and some were opposed to the new theory because it contradicted the established opinions on climatic history.
Most contemporary scientists thought that Earth had been gradually cooling down since its birth as a molten globe.[31] (Krüger 2008, pp.177─78)
It took several decades before the ice age theory was fully accepted by scientists.
Evidence
There are three main types of evidence for ice ages: geological, chemical, and paleontological.
There have been at least five major ice ages in Earth's history (the Huronian, Cryogenian, Andean-Saharan, late Paleozoic, and the latest Quaternary Ice Age). Outside these ages, Earth seems to have been ice-free even in high latitudes;[38][39] such periods are known as greenhouse periods.[40]
Sediment records showing the fluctuating sequences of glacials and interglacials during the last several million years.
Earth is currently in an interglacial, and the last glacial period ended about 11,700 years ago. All that remains of the continental ice sheets are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and smaller glaciers such as on Baffin Island.
Feedback processes
Each glacial period is subject to positive feedback which makes it more severe, and negative feedback which mitigates and (in all cases so far) eventually ends it.
Positive
An important form of feedback is provided by Earth's albedo, which is how much of the sun's energy is reflected rather than absorbed by Earth. Ice and snow increase Earth's albedo, while forests reduce its albedo. When the air temperature decreases, ice and snow fields grow, and they reduce forest cover. This continues until competition with a negative feedback mechanism forces the system to an equilibrium.
Position of the continents
The geological record appears to show that ice ages start when the continents are in positions which block or reduce the flow of warm water from the equator to the poles and thus allow ice sheets to form. The ice sheets increase Earth's reflectivity and thus reduce the absorption of solar radiation. With less radiation absorbed the atmosphere cools; the cooling allows the ice sheets to grow, which further increases reflectivity in a positive feedback loop. The ice age continues until the reduction in weathering causes an increase in the greenhouse effect.
Some scientists believe that the Himalayas are a major factor in the current ice age, because these mountains have increased Earth's total rainfall and therefore the rate at which carbon dioxide is washed out of the atmosphere, decreasing the greenhouse effect.[60]
the Himalayas are still rising by about 5 mm per year because the Indo-Australian plate is still moving at 67 mm/year. The history of the Himalayas broadly fits the long-term decrease in Earth's average temperature since the mid-Eocene, 40 million years ago.
Volcanism
Volcanic eruptions may have contributed to the inception and/or the end of ice age periods. At times during the paleoclimate, carbon dioxide levels were two or three times greater than today.
Global cooling – Discredited 1970s hypothesis of imminent cooling of the Earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
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office of net assessment and the possibility of ice age
search terms:
ice age andrew marshall
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ice+age++andrew+marshall
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/features/day-yesterday-when-abrupt-climate-change-came-chesapeake-bay
IN OCTOBER 2003, A LITTLE-KNOWN THINK TANK in the Department of Defense quietly released a report warning that climate change could happen suddenly—so suddenly it could pose a major threat to our country's national security.
The title of the Pentagon report was a mouthful: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and its Implications for United States National Security. Those implications included rising seas, flooded coastal cities, at least one drowned country, droughts, food shortages, failed states, and fortress states. The report was never designed as a scientific prediction. It was a speculative effort by defense strategists to dramatize all the security threats the country would face if the climate suddenly shifted.
Why was the Pentagon suddenly worried about abrupt climate change? Because there was new evidence it had happened before.
... ... ...
The Pentagon report on “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario” was commissioned by Andrew Marshall, long-time director of a think tank called the Office of Net Assessment. Press reports usually called Marshall the “Yoda” of the Pentagon, and Foreign Policy magazine in 2012 called him one of the world’s top global thinkers. Now 92 years old, Marshall is still on the job, and a big part of his job is still the same: thinking about the unthinkable and reporting his thoughts directly to his boss, the Secretary of Defense. In 2003, one of his thoughts was that the country should now take seriously the possibility of abrupt climate change.
He had this thought because he knew that many scientists were finding new evidence it could happen. In 1997, Richard B. Alley, a Penn State geologist, had found evidence in Greenland ice cores that a sudden and mysterious cooling hit the Northern Hemisphere thousands of years ago during an era of global warming. In 2002, the National Research Council had released a study warning that climate change could occur quickly, within decades, especially if something happened to slow down or shut down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a branch of the ocean conveyor belt that, among other missions, carries heat from the tropics up into the North Atlantic. After Marshall read the scientific study, he commissioned his own study and hired Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, two self-described futurists, to work out a geopolitical scenario.
Hollywood producers were also skimming those science reports, skipping any inconvenient details about the speed of climate change. In 2004 they created their own vivid version of abrupt climate change by releasing a 125-million-dollar movie, The Day After Tomorrow. For geologists, abrupt change usually took several decades, for filmmakers it only took several days. Unleashing the power of digital special effects, they showed New York City succumbing to a new ice age in the space of three weeks, a climate change so abrupt and so devastating it sent the U.S. government decamping to Mexico.
What was the scientific evidence for “abrupt climate change” in the past? The Pentagon modeled its nightmare scenario on a specific episode that struck the planet some 8,200 years ago. The earth was well into our current interglacial era, an age of warming oceans and melting ice sheets, when a major cooldown suddenly arrived. It’s called the 8.2 kiloyear event–or the "8.2 ka" event in scientific shorthand. Evidence for the event came from those ice cores in Greenland: these early estimates suggested that temperatures dropped between 7 and 14 degrees Fahrenheit in less than 20 years. And that drop altered ocean currents, atmospheric circulation, and weather patterns around most of the planet. In geological time scales, that's abrupt.
The first evidence for the 8.2 kiloyear cooling was found in ice cores in Greenland, but on board the Marion DuFresne Tom Cronin and Debra Willard suspected there might also be evidence of the event buried in sediments below Chesapeake Bay.
... ... ...
The authors of the Pentagon report were, in effect, “first in the field” to consider the social and political impacts of sudden climate change. But they were offering informed speculation rather than scientific research. Their goal was to create a geopolitical scenario chock full of what-if speculations–all designed to spur new thinking about threats to American society and security.
The good news is that the latest NRC report downgraded the odds that the ocean conveyor belt would stop anytime soon. The worrisome news is that they elevated the chances of that other abrupt changes could be in the works. The Laurentide Ice Sheet may be gone, but the glaciers in Greenland and the ice sheets in Antarctica are still here, and they are huge, and they are melting.
They hold enough meltwater to unleash the greatest hiccup since the 8.2 kiloyear event suddenly cooled off a gradually warming world.
*The Pentagon report’s thought-provoking speculations were based in science, but were still just that: speculations. And some speculations are less plausible than others. According to paleoclimatologist Carrie Morrill, reviewer for this article, the temperature drops and chillier winters that occurred in parts of the Northern Hemisphere during the AMOC slowdown 8,200 years ago are unlikely to be repeated in a modern-day scenario. With global warming due to rising greenhouse gas concentrations, what’s more plausible is less warming in affected areas—but not actual cooling.
Links
An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and its Implications for United States National Security. 2003. Schwartz, P. & D. Randall. Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18373
Abrupt Climate Change. 2008. U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research.
http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12027/m2/1/high_res_d/sap3-4-final-report-all.pdf
Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises. 2013. Committee on Understanding and Monitoring Abrupt Climate Change and Its Impacts.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18373
The Bays Beneath the Bay. Chesapeake Quarterly issue on geology and the building of the Chesapeake Bay bridge.
http://www.chesapeakequarterly.net/V10N1/
... ... ...
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https://www.chesapeakequarterly.net/V12N4/main1/
The great ocean conveyor belt is driven by density differences created by temperature and salinity. Warm, salty waters flow out of the tropics along the surface, pumping heat into the atmosphere in northern latitudes. As the surface waters cool, density increases, and these waters sink into bottom currents that move south towards Antarctica. That conveyor belt seems to have slowed several times in the past, as North Atlantic waters were suddenly flooded with fresh, low-salt, low-density meltwater that was too buoyant to sink. The water came from great inland glacial lakes like Lake Agassiz that probably released meltwater through Hudson Bay, the Saint Lawrence River, the Mississippi River, and the MacKenzie Straits. Map illustrations: Global Ocean Conveyor Belt, Smithsonian Institution; Lake Agassiz, courtesy of Michael Lewis and John Shaw, Geological Survey of Canada Atlantic, Dartmouth NS, Canada.
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Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolution, 1962, 1970, 1996 [ ]
chemical atomic theory
pp.133-135
... Dalton was neither a chemist nor interested in chemistry. Instead he was a meteorologist investigating the, for him, physical problems of the absorption of gases by water and of water by the atmosphere. Partly because his training was in a different specialty and partly because of his own work in that specialty, he approached these problems with a paradigm different from that of contemporary chemists. In particular, he viewed the mixture of gases or the absorption of a gas in water as a physical process, one in which forces of affinity played no part. To him, therefore, the observed homogeneity of solutions was a problem, but one which he thought he could solve if he could determine the relative size and weights of the various atomic particles in his experimental mixtures. It was to determine these sizes and weights that Dalton finally turned to chemistry, supposing from the start that, in the restricted range of reactions that he took to be chemical, atoms could only combine one-to-one or in some other simple whole-number ratio. 24 That natural assumption did enable him to determine the sizes and weights of elementary particles, but it also made the law of constant proportion a tautology. For Dalton, any reaction in which the ingredients did not enter in fixed proportion was ipso fato not a purely chemical process. A law that experiment could not have established before Dalton's work, became, once that work was accepted, a constitutive principle that no single set of chemical measurements could have upset. As a result of what is perhaps our fullest example of a scientific revolution, the same chemical manipulation assumed a relationship to chemical generalization very different from the one they had had before.
24 L. K. Nash, "The Origin of Dalton's Chemical Atomic Theory," Isis, XLVII (1956), 101-16.
Needless to say, Dalton's conclusion were widely attacked when first announced. Berthollet, in particular, was never convinced. Considering the nature of the issue, he need not have been. But to most chemists Dalton's new paradigm proved convincing where Proust's had not been, for it had implications far wider and more important than a new criterion for distinguishing a mixture from a compound. If, for example, atoms could combine chemically only in simple whole-number ratios, then a re-examination of existing chemical data should disclose examples of multiple as well as fixed proportions. Chemists stopped writing that the two oxides of, say, carbon contained 56 per cent and 72 per cent of oxygen by weight; instead they wrote that one weight of carbon would combine either with 1.3 or with 2.6 weights of oxygen. When the results of old manipulations were recorded in his way, a 2:1 ratio leaped to the eye; and this occurred in the analysis of many well-known reactions and of new ones besides. In addition, Dalton's paradigm made it possible to assimilate Richter's work and to see its full generality. Also, it suggested new experiments, particularly those of Gay-Lussac on combining volumes, and these yielded still other regularities, ones that chemists had not previously dreamed of. What chemists took from Dalton was not new experimental laws but a new way of practicing chemistry (he himself called it the "new system of chemical philosophy"), and his proved so rapidly fruitful that only a few of the older chemists in France and Britain were able to resist it. 25 As a result, chemists came to live in a world where reactions behaved quite differently from the way they had before.
As all this went on, one other typical and very important change occurred. Here and there the very numerical data of chemistry began to shift. When Dalton first searched the chemical literature for data to support his physical theory, he found some records of reactions that fitted, but he can scarcely have avoided finding others that did not. Proust's own measurements on the two oxides of copper yielded, for example, an oxygen weight-ratio of 1.47:1 rather than the 2:1 demanded by the atomic theory; and Proust is just the man who might have been expected to achieve the Daltonian ratio. 26 He was, that is, a fine experimentalists, and his view of the relation between mixtures and compound was very close to Dalton's. But it is hard to make nature fit a paradigm. That is why the puzzles of normal science are so challenging and also why measurements undertaken without a paradigm so seldom lead to any conclusions at all. Chemists could not, therefore, simply accept Dalton's theory on the evidence, for much of that was still negative. Instead, even after accepting the theory, they had still to beat nature into line, a process which, in the event, took almost another generation. When it was done, even the percentage composition of well-known compounds was different. The data themselves had changed. That is the last of the senses in which we may want to say that after a revolution scientists work in a different world.
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. --3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science--philosophy, 2. science--history, pp.133-135)
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