from masterresource
By Randal Utech — September 19, 2024
“The artificial sense of achievement in historical matching is spurious correlation over an extremely short period of time. Using ExxonMobil's internal analysis of CO2 climate forcing is nothing more than a propaganda tool.
“Exxon Knows” is a campaign of political lawyers focusing on certain internal company documents to prove that the oil giant knew that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were a future threat to human progress.
Bong? Hardly.
Half a century later, the IPCC is still working to update and clarify physical climate science. ExxonMobil has not conducted research on the benefits of carbon dioxide or offsetting sulfur dioxide emissions. The concerns at the time were global cooling, peak oil and peak gas. As the company knows, there are no viable alternatives to fossil fuels, such as wind and solar energy.
Many posts on MasterResource document this historical correction, including:
Oil major, Exxon Mobil found not guilty: Six-part rebuttal (September 22, 2022)
“ExxonKnew”: More corrections (September 18, 2023)
Does Shell know? No (July 19, 2023)
ExxonMobil Whistleblower Calls Climate Alarmism (March 27, 2024)
Searching for the “greenhouse signal” of the 1990s (June 21, 2023)
Unresolved Science, IPCC Style (February 18, 2020)
It was my turn when I came across this argument from Mark Berg on social media, saying:
As opposed to the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long war to hide its impact? One example: “ExxonMobil scientists predicted global warming with 'astounding skill and accuracy,' Harvard researchers say”
My rebuttal
My response to this (expanding my response on social media):
It is a ridiculous fallacy to say that ExxonMobil knew the truth in the early 1980s. They actually built a primitive model with characteristics similar to today's faulty modern climate models.
Fundamentally, their work is based on poorly understood climate sensitivities (ECS) derived from radiative convection models and GCM models. To their credit, they actually acknowledge that these estimates are highly uncertain. Today, even Hausfather (2022 and 2019) is beginning to realize that climate sensitivity (ECS) is too high. CMIP6 still operates at a higher temperature than CMIP5 and uses 3 to 5°C ECS instead of ~1.2°C highlighted in Nick Lewis' 2022 study.CMIP6 should be better because it incorporates solar particle forcing (Mathes et al.), and because they incorporate more elements of natural forcing (this is an active area of research as we still don't have a theory for climate predictions), the effect is outstanding models more fundamental issues.
However, ExxonMobil researchers fell into the same trap as today's climate modellers, who build a model that matches historical temperatures, and then wow, because they can create a model that looks like it matches historical temperatures, They think it's telling them something. the truth? Anyone can create a model that does this, but that doesn't mean the model is correct. While today's models are much more sophisticated, they are based on a complex set of nonlinear equations and have a poor understanding of the various sources of nonlinearity. This creates a large degree of uncertainty, but also a large opportunity for adjustment. Furthermore, natural forcing is poorly characterized and considered irrelevant.
The artificial sense of achievement in historical matching is spurious correlation over a very short period of time. Using ExxonMobil’s internal analysis of CO2 climate forcing is nothing more than a propaganda tool. Current climate models are much more complex and suffer from the same problems of unknown, false cause and effect.
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Randall Utech is a former Schlumberger geoscientist consultant who has studied climate science for nearly 30 years, focusing on geology, paleoclimate and glacial cycles. An interview with him by the American Society of Petroleum Geologists can be found here. Utech is the author of “On the Benefits of Carbon Dioxide” (April 11, 2023).
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