The Cato Institute, a Koch-founded and fossil fuel-funded think tank, has shut down its climate science-denying ‘Center for the Study of Science.’ The Center was led by Patrick Michaels, who has a long history of grossly misrepresenting climate science research, most notably in 1998 Congressional testimony during consideration of the Kyoto Protocol international climate agreement (which US Congress never ratified). In that testimony, Michaels showed a version of James Hansen’s 1988 global temperature projections, but deleted the two scenarios in that study that most accurately represented real-world greenhouse gas emissions in order to create the misperception that Hansen had dramatically overestimated global warming. That testimony could certainly be considered perjury, and yet Cato continued to employ Michaels for another 20 years.
ExxonMobil is on the list of Cato’s fossil fuel funders, but as Inside Climate News discovered, the company’s own scientists conducted serious climate research in the 1980s. There was a stark contrast between Exxon’s own internal climate science research and the climate misinformation produced by the think tanks that the company subsequently funded. To summarize,
Exxon’s scientists reported their findings to company management, including in a 1982 technical review of the greenhouse effect by Exxon’s Environmental Affairs Programs manager M.B. Glaser. The document included a chart showing Exxon’s predictions about how much atmospheric carbon dioxide and average global temperatures would increase in the subsequent decades. It predicted that by 2019, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would rise by about 80 parts per million (ppm) to reach 418 ppm; within about 10 percent of the actual increase based on current measurements (410 ppm globally and 415 ppm at Mauna Loa, Hawaii).
Exxon’s document predicted that this increase in carbon dioxide would cause global surface temperatures to rise by 0.85 degrees Celsius (°C), or 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (°F) from 1982 to 2019. In reality, temperatures have risen by about 0.7°C (1.3°F) over that period – only about 20 percent less warming than Exxon’s remarkably accurate prediction.
Throughout the 1980s, all of Exxon’s internal science was consistent with the expert consensus on human-caused global warming.
However, Exxon began to make deep cuts to its climate research budget in the 1980s. Toward the end of that decade, the company ramped up its public relations campaign to sow uncertainty about the expert climate consensus, increasingly funding think tanks like the Cato Institute. Cato’s scientists, including Patrick Michaels and Richard Lindzen, have a long history of making very wrong climate claims and predictions that conflicted the Exxon’s internal science.
For example, Michaels said in January 1999 that there was “absolutely no warming trend whatsoever from when the satellite measurements began (January 1979) through the end of 1997 … Starting with 1998, there will almost certainly be a statistically significant cooling trend in the decade ending in 2007.” He later claimed in 2013 that “it's a pretty good bet that we are going to go nearly a quarter of a century [1996 to 2020] without warming.” And in 2018 Michaels said that global temperatures will warm about 1.5°C (2.7°F) in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which “would put total human warming to 2100 right around the top goal of the Paris Accord, or 2.0°C” if we continue with business as usual. Anticipating that so little warming would result from so much fossil fuel consumption is an exceptionally rosy outlook.
Yet Richard Lindzen’s predictions have been even rosier. In a 1989 talk, Lindzen argued that “I personally feel that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability [a few tenths of a degree Celsius] seems small.” And in 1995 he claimed with remarkably high certainty that global temperatures will only warm 0.3°C (0.54°F) in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. That’s about one-tenth as much warming as both contemporaneous and current climate models have predicted the increased greenhouse effect will cause. When confronted with the fact that global temperatures have already risen 1°C (1.8°F), rather than reconsidering his beliefs, Lindzen rejects the data, much like his 1989 comment that “the data as we have it does not support a warming [from 1880 to 1989].”
While Michaels and Lindzen have never made quantitative global temperature predictions, we can use their past comments to piece together what their predictions would have looked like. Unlike Exxon’s internal scientists, they have both cast doubt on past warming and predicted minimal future warming. While Exxon’s internal scientists’ predictions were quite accurate, those who they have quietly funded to sow doubt in the public mind were not.
Global average surface temperature measurements from NASA (blue) compared to predictions in Exxon’s 1982 technical review and as reconstructed based on comments made by Richard Lindzen in 1989 and Patrick Michaels in 1999 and 2013. Dashed lines represent reconstructions; Lindzen and Michaels are not known to ever have made quantitative global temperature predictions.
Mainstream climate scientists have made numerous global temperature projections similar those in Exxon’s 1982 document. For example, some global warming predictions by mainstream climate scientists include Broecker (1975), Hansen et al. in 1981 and 1988, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change in 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007. Easterbrook (2008) and Akasofu (2010) are two of the few climate contrarians who have made quantitative temperature predictions. Details about each of these are documented in my book Climatology versus Pseudoscience and at Skeptical Science.
In general, the temperature projections by mainstream climate scientists have been similar to those made by Exxon scientists in 1982, predicting between 0.4°C and 1°C (0.7–1.8°F) warming from 1980 to 2018 as compared to the observed 0.5°C (0.9°F). The contrarians, on the other hand, predicted anywhere from 0.3°C (0.55°F) cooling to a minimal 0.07°C (0.13°F) warming during that period.
The accuracy of Exxon’s 1982 prediction – and in fact its overestimation of the subsequent warming – yet again illustrate that the company knew about the dangers its product posed to public health via climate change. The accuracy of mainstream climate scientists’ predictions – especially in comparison to the failed predictions made by climate contrarians – suggests that we ought to start heeding the warnings of the former group and ignoring the climate denial advanced by the latter using funding from culpable donors like Exxon.
Posted by dana1981 on Wednesday, 19 June, 2019
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