Science/Environment Shell and Exxon's secret 1980s climate change warnings

(Log in to remove this ad.)

CheapCharlie

Premiership Player
Joined
Jun 12, 2015
Posts
4,396
Likes
4,639
AFL Club
Sydney
#53
Newly found documents from the 1980s show that fossil fuel companies privately predicted the global damage that would be caused by their products.

Benjamin Franta

Wed 19 Sep 2018 20.00 AEST

One day in 1961, an American economist named Daniel Ellsberg stumbled across a piece of paper with apocalyptic implications. Ellsberg, who was advising the US government on its secret nuclear war plans, had discovered a document that contained an official estimate of the death toll in a preemptive “first strike” on China and the Soviet Union: 300 million in those countries, and double that globally.

Ellsberg was troubled that such a plan existed; years later, he tried to leak the details of nuclear annihilation to the public. Although his attempt failed, Ellsberg would become famous instead for leaking what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers – the US government’s secret history of its military intervention in Vietnam.

America’s amoral military planning during the Cold War echoes the hubris exhibited by another cast of characters gambling with the fate of humanity. Recently, secret documents have been unearthed detailing what the energy industry knew about the links between their products and global warming. But, unlike the government’s nuclear plans, what the industry detailed was put into action.

In the 1980s, oil companies like Exxon and Shell carried out internal assessments of the carbon dioxide released by fossil fuels, and forecast the planetary consequences of these emissions. In 1982, for example, Exxon predicted that by about 2060, CO2 levels would reach around 560 parts per million – double the preindustrial level – and that this would push the planet’s average temperatures up by about 2°C over then-current levels (and even more compared to pre-industrial levels).



Read more:https://www.theguardian.com/environ...ns-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings#img-2
Astounding

I must have been asleep around this month to miss news of this
 
Top Bottom