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Exxon disputed climate findings for years. its scientists knew better..

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Alice McCarthy

Harvard Correspondent

Research shows that company modeled and predicted global warming with ‘shocking skill and accuracy’ starting in the 1970s

Projections created internally by ExxonMobil starting in the late 1970s on the impact of fossil fuels on climate change were very accurate, even surpassing those of some academic and governmental scientists, according to an analysis published Thursday in Science by a team of Harvard-led researchers. Despite those forecasts, team leaders say, the multinational energy giant continued to sow doubt about the gathering crisis.

In “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections,” researchers from Harvard and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research show for the first time the accuracy of previously unreported forecasts created by company scientists from 1977 through 2003. The Harvard team discovered that Exxon researchers created a series of remarkably reliable models and analyses projecting global warming from carbon dioxide emissions over the coming decades. Specifically, Exxon projected that fossil fuel emissions would lead to 0.20 degrees Celsius of global warming per decade, with a margin of error of 0.04 degrees — a trend that has been proven largely accurate.

“This paper is the first ever systematic assessment of a fossil fuel company’s climate projections, the first time we’ve been able to put a number on what they knew,” said Geoffrey Supran, lead author and former research fellow in the History of Science at Harvard. “What we found is that between 1977 and 2003, excellent scientists within Exxon modeled and predicted global warming with, frankly, shocking skill and accuracy only for the company to then spend the next couple of decades denying that very climate science.”

“This paper is the first ever systematic assessment of a fossil fuel company’s climate projections, the first time we’ve been able to put a number on what they knew,” said Geoffrey Supran, lead author.

File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

“We thought this was a unique opportunity to understand what Exxon knew about this issue and what level of scientific understanding they had at the time,” added co-author Naomi Oreskes , Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science whose work looks at the causes and effects of climate change denial. “We found that not only were their forecasts extremely skillful, but they were also often more skillful than forecasts made by independent academic and government scientists at the exact same time.”

Allegations that oil company executives sought to mislead the public about the industry’s role in climate change have drawn increasing scrutiny in recent years, including lawsuits by several states and cities and a recent high profile U.S. House committee investigation.

Harvard’s scientists used established Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) statistical techniques to test the performance of Exxon’s models. They found that, depending on the metric used, 63-83 percent of the global warming projections reported by Exxon scientists were consistent with actual temperatures over time. Moreover, the corporation’s own projections had an average “skill score” of 72 percent, plus or minus 6 percent, with the highest scoring 99 percent. A skill score relates to how well a forecast compares to what happens in real life. For comparison, NASA scientist James Hansen’s global warming predictions presented to the U.S. Congress in 1988 had scores from 38 to 66 percent.

The researchers report that Exxon scientists correctly dismissed the possibility of a coming ice age, accurately predicted that human-caused global warming would first be detectable in the year 2000, plus or minus five years, and reasonably estimated how much CO 2 would lead to dangerous warming.

The current debate about when Exxon knew about the impact on climate change carbon emissions began in 2015 following news reports of internal company documents describing the multinational’s early knowledge of climate science.  Exxon disagreed with the reports, even providing a link to internal studies and memos from their own scientists and suggesting that interested parties should read them and make up their own minds.

“That’s exactly what we did,” said Supran, who is now at the University of Miami. Together, he and Oreskes spent a year researching those documents and in 2017 published a series of three papers analyzing Exxon’s 40-year history of climate communications . They were able to show there was a systematic discrepancy between what Exxon was saying internally and in academic circles versus what they were telling the public. “That led us to conclude that they had quantifiably misled the public, by essentially contributing quietly to climate science and yet loudly promoting doubt about that science,” said Supran.

“I think this new study is the smoking gun, the proof, because it shows the degree of understanding … this really deep, really sophisticated, really skillful understanding that was obscured by what came next,” said Harvard Professor Naomi Oreskes.

Harvard file photo

In 2021, the team published a new study in One Earth using algorithmic techniques to identify ways in which ExxonMobil used increasingly subtle but systematic language to shape the way the public talks and thinks about climate change — often in misleading ways.

These findings were hardly a surprise to Oreskes, given her long history of studying climate communications from fossil fuel companies, work that drew national attention with her 2010 bestseller, “Merchants of Doubt.” In it she and co-author, Caltech researcher Erik Conway, argued that Exxon was aware of the threat of carbon emissions on climate change yet waged a disinformation campaign about the problem.  Despite the book’s popularity and the peer-reviewed papers with Supran, however, some continued to wonder whether she could prove the effect these campaigns had, if they indeed made a difference.

“I think this new study is the smoking gun, the proof, because it shows the degree of understanding … this really deep, really sophisticated, really skillful understanding that was obscured by what came next,” Oreskes said. “It proves a point I’ve argued for years that ExxonMobil scientists knew about this problem to a shockingly fine degree as far back as the 1980s, but company spokesmen denied, challenged, and obscured this science, starting in the late 1980s/early 1990s.”

Added Supran: “Our analysis here I think seals the deal on that matter. We now have totally unimpeachable evidence that Exxon accurately predicted global warming years before it turned around and publicly attacked climate science and scientists.”

The authors of this research were supported by a Rockefeller Family Fund grant and Harvard University Faculty Development funds.

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October 26, 2015

Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago

A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation

By Shannon Hall

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.  

Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research. 

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical." In other words, Exxon needed to act.

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But ExxonMobil disagrees that any of its early statements were so stark, let alone conclusive at all. “We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest,” ExxonMobil spokesperson Allan Jeffers tells Scientific American . “The thing that shocks me the most is that we’ve been saying this for years, that we have been involved in climate research. These guys go down and pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.”    One thing is certain: in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional hearing that the planet was already warming, Exxon remained publicly convinced that the science was still controversial. Furthermore, experts agree that Exxon became a leader in campaigns of confusion. By 1989 the company had helped create the Global Climate Coalition (disbanded in 2002) to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change. It also helped to prevent the U.S. from signing the international treaty on climate known as the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 to control greenhouse gases. Exxon’s tactic not only worked on the U.S. but also stopped other countries, such as China and India, from signing the treaty. At that point, “a lot of things unraveled,” Oreskes says.

But experts are still piecing together Exxon’s misconception puzzle. Last summer the Union of Concerned Scientists released a complementary investigation to the one by InsideClimate News, known as the Climate Deception Dossiers (pdf). “We included a memo of a coalition of fossil-fuel companies where they pledge basically to launch a big communications effort to sow doubt,” says union president Kenneth Kimmel. “There’s even a quote in it that says something like ‘Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science.’ So it’s pretty stark.”

Since then, Exxon has spent more than $30 million on think tanks that promote climate denial, according to Greenpeace . Although experts will never be able to quantify the damage Exxon’s misinformation has caused, “one thing for certain is we’ve lost a lot of ground,” Kimmell says. Half of the greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere were released after 1988. “I have to think if the fossil-fuel companies had been upfront about this and had been part of the solution instead of the problem, we would have made a lot of progress [today] instead of doubling our greenhouse gas emissions.”

Experts agree that the damage is huge, which is why they are likening Exxon’s deception to the lies spread by the tobacco industry. “I think there are a lot of parallels,” Kimmell says. Both sowed doubt about the science for their own means, and both worked with the same consultants to help develop a communications strategy. He notes, however, that the two diverge in the type of harm done. Tobacco companies threatened human health, but the oil companies threatened the planet’s health. “It’s a harm that is global in its reach,” Kimmel says.

To prove this, Bob Ward—who on behalf of the U.K.’s Royal Academy sent a letter to Exxon in 2006 claiming its science was “inaccurate and misleading”—thinks a thorough investigation is necessary. “Because frankly the episode with tobacco was probably the most disgraceful episode one could ever imagine,” Ward says. Kimmell agrees. These reasons “really highlight the responsibility that these companies have to come clean, acknowledge this, and work with everyone else to cut out emissions and pay for some of the cost we're going to bear as soon as possible,” Kimmell says.

It doesn’t appear, however, that Kimmell will get his retribution. Jeffers claims the investigation’s finds are “just patently untrue, misleading, and we reject them completely”—words that match Ward’s claims against them nearly a decade ago.

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ExxonMobil wants you to feel responsible for climate change so it doesn’t have to

A new study reveals how the oil company used “cutting-edge propaganda” to focus on fossil fuel consumption.

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To understand why ExxonMobil has been so effective at shaping the US narrative about climate change in the US for some 40 years, look no further than the words of one of the company’s communications strategists, Mobil Vice President of Public Affairs Herbert Schmertz: ”Your objective is to wrap yourself in the good phrases while sticking your opponents with the bad ones,” he wrote in 1986.

From the 1970s through the 1990s, most of the company’s PR efforts focused on casting doubt on the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels was warming the planet. But by the mid-2000s, it was taking a more sophisticated, nuanced approach.

“Energy-saving consumers can make a real difference,” it said in 2007, listing ways consumers can “Be smart about electricity use,” “Heat and cool your home efficiently,” and “Improve your gas mileage” to address climate change. Another ad in 2008 looks to the auto industry: “It is important we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, too. Improving the efficiency of the vehicles people drive is one way to do so.”

There are many examples in ExxonMobil’s advertising materials and other documents right up to 2019, all doing the same thing: Deflecting attention away from the oil company’s role in fueling climate change by supplying fossil fuels and turning attention toward consumer demand for, and dependency on, its products.

We now have a comprehensive view of this strategy, thanks to a new peer-reviewed study by Harvard research associate Geoffrey Supran and Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes in the journal One Earth . In a painstaking analysis, they show how hard the oil giant has worked to keep the conversation about climate solutions focused on the consumer, effectively individualizing responsibility for the problem.

“Never before has it been proven that fossil fuel propaganda is demonstrably one source of where this [consumer- and demand-focused] mindset has originated from,” Supran told Vox.

Blaming the individual user, rather than the producers, is a well-worn tactic of other industries with dangerous products, including tobacco and firearms. In the case of fossil fuel products, individualizing the responsibility for climate change obfuscates the responsibility of companies like Exxon — one of 20 companies responsible for one-third of energy-related global carbon emissions since 1965 — to extract fewer fossil fuels and shift to cleaner technologies. And according to Oreskes and Supran, not only has this messaging strategy allowed Exxon to “downplay its role in the climate crisis,” it also continues to be used “to undermine climate litigation, regulation, and activism.”

A first-of-its-kind analysis of Exxon’s public messaging

Supran and Oreskes use a trove of documents that they have combed through in past research, namely a 2017 paper that found ExxonMobil internally acknowledging its products’ role in climate change, while publicly casting doubt on the science.

Starting in the late 1970s, the company ran regular advertisements in the New York Times. The researchers looked at those ads as well as more recent reports aimed at investors through 2019 for a total of 212 documents that provide a solid chronology of how the oil company has communicated with the public on climate science.

The early ads took a skeptical stance on climate science, but in the 2000s they started to emphasize the uncertainty of risks, rather than the consensus of manmade warming. When ExxonMobil did acknowledge the need to reduce pollution, it disproportionately talked about how much it was doing to address the demand-side of the equation, rather than addressing the obvious other half: the increasing supply.

When Supran ran his algorithm to pick up the most frequently used terms and topics in the papers, he was surprised at what they found: The company’s messaging was largely consistent in the advertisements up to 2009 and in reports up to 2019, statistically overusing certain language, like “risk” and “demand,” to hammer home these themes.

In 1997, the company touted helping “customers scale back their emissions of carbon dioxide,” while the next year it encouraged the public to “show a little voluntary ‘can do.’” A decade later, in 2008, an ad suggested the ‘‘cars and trucks we drive aren’t just vehicles, they’re opportunities to solve the world’s energy and environmental challenges.’’

Throughout this time, ExxonMobil discussed growing fossil fuel demand as an inevitability, saying things like, “Oil and gas will be essential to meeting demand through 2030” and “fossil fuels must be relied upon to meet society’s immediate and near-term needs.”

The company only acknowledges its own culpability in obscure academic journals and internal memos. One 1982 internal memo writes what the company never admits publicly, that “the connection between Exxon’s major businesses and the role of fossil fuel combustion in contributing to the increase of atmospheric CO2.”

The other trend the Harvard researchers note is how the company shifted to a “Fossil Fuel Savior” frame in the mid-2000s. A 2007 company ad notes the “increasing prosperity in the developing world [will be] the main driver of greater energy demand (and consequently rising CO2 emissions),” which positions the company as another passive bystander in global warming.

Asked for comment on the study, Exxon spokesperson Casey Norton called it a conflict of interest, alleging that Oreskes is on retainer for Sher Edling, one of the law firms that has sued Exxon, and that the research was partially funded by the Rockefeller Family Fund, which is also involved in litigation against oil companies.

“This research is clearly part of a litigation strategy against ExxonMobil and other energy companies,” Norton said. “ExxonMobil supports the Paris climate agreement, and is working to reduce company emissions and helping customers reduce their emissions while working on new lower-emission technologies and advocating for effective policies.” (Supran and Oreskes, in response, said Sher Edling “played no role in the paper we published today, nor in any other academic work we have done,” charging that ExxonMobil’s statement was purposely misleading.)

The problem with climate shame

Shaming individuals has pretty much always been a part of the climate discourse. Political leaders focus on recycling and consumption of plastics, rather than banning production, and now “ flight shame ” has taken off as a way to discourage plane travel to tackle the rising footprint of transportation emissions.

But shame has a dark side: It can be a distraction that lets key perpetrators of climate change off the hook.

Supran and Oreskes don’t have a precise measure of the impact ExxonMobil’s marketing has had on the public discourse — their methodology doesn’t go that far — but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that policymakers and the media overemphasize personal responsibility instead of systemic political and economic change.

“At the grassroots level, people get accused of being hypocrites all the time,” for flying, driving, or using plastics, also derived from fossil fuels, Supran said. And research from Georgia State University shows how shame messaging can backfire: In a 2020 paper, they showed that in some cases, being told to drive less or change your diet can make people less willing to want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

ExxonMobil wasn’t the first oil company to push these narratives. “The very notion of a personal ‘carbon footprint,’ for example, was first popularized in 2004-2006 by oil firm BP as part of its $100+ million per year ‘beyond petroleum’ US media campaign,” Supran and Oreskes write. But ultimately these narratives “hamstring us, and they put blinders on us, to the systemic nature of the climate crisis and the importance of taking collective action to address the problem,” Supran said.

The real-world implications of the Exxon docs

It’s useful to have some statistical rigor backing up the observations of many academics, activists, and journalists, that by emphasizing demand, oil companies can play the part of innocent bystanders feeding a global hunger for their products.

But the more consequential implications for this research may be in the courts. Major oil companies like ExxonMobil are currently facing an onslaught of lawsuits around the world charging that they have broken the law by pushing misinformation and thwarting climate action. The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School counted 884 climate cases in 2017 had doubled to 1,550 cases by 2020 in 38 countries (Exxon is not the only subject of all these lawsuits).

Just recently, New York City filed a new lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute for violating the city’s consumer protection laws, another sign the wave of litigation is not slowing down.

Supran and Oreskes’s study may be relevant to these lawsuits for a couple of reasons.

First, the researchers note that ExxonMobil may be mounting a clever defense against these lawsuits with its greenwashing. One of its defenses actually cited the same logic that appears again and again in its advertising, that climate risks are common knowledge and the company bears no control over how people choose to live. Supran and Oreskes note the example:

In 2018, arguing in defense of five oil companies (including ExxonMobil Corp) against a lawsuit brought by California cities seeking climate damages, Chevron lawyer Theodore Boutrous Jr. offered his interpretation of the IPCC’s latest report: ‘‘I think the IPCC does not say it’s the production and extraction of oil that is driving these emissions. It’s the energy use. It’s economic activity that creates demand for energy.’’ ‘‘It’s the way people are living their lives.’’ The judge’s dismissal of the case accepted this framing: ‘‘[W]ould it really be fair to now ignore our own responsibility in the use of fossil fuels and place the blame for global warming on those who supplied what we demanded?’’ Even if plaintiffs prove their case, fossil fuel companies can invoke ‘‘affirmative defenses’’—as tobacco companies often have—such as ‘‘common knowledge’’ and ‘‘assumption of the risk.’’ These respectively argue (1) ‘‘that the plaintiff had engaged in an activity [such as smoking] that involved obvious or widely known risks,’’ and (2) ‘‘that the plaintiff knew about and voluntarily undertook the risk.’’ As Brandt explains it, ‘‘If there was a risk, even though ‘unproven,’ it nonetheless must be the smoker’s risk, since the smoker had been fully informed of the ‘controversy.’ The industry had secured the best of both worlds.’’

The second implication is how their research can become a useful tool for climate activists and policymakers looking to hold ExxonMobil responsible. What Supran and Oreskes do in their paper, according to Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, is “prove quantitatively what has been qualitatively evident for years. ... Oil and gas companies insulated themselves from public scrutiny and regulatory action even as the climate crisis accelerated.”

And any proof that oil companies were insulating themselves from climate policies while misleading the public is likely to become useful fodder in the courtroom. “This evidence will matter not only in the court of public opinion, but in courts of justice around the world faced with questions of industry accountability, culpability, and potential liability for mounting climate impacts,” Muffett said.

The message Supran hopes people take from his work isn’t that your actions don’t matter. But governments need to take responsibility and hold the major polluters accountable — and those policies include a broader mix of solutions that limit the fuels Exxon can extract, axing pipeline projects for transportation, limiting its opportunity to export around the world, and even make companies pay for the damages caused to vulnerable communities.

“This is cutting-edge propaganda coming from an industry with 100 years of experience in pioneering the art of public relations,” he said. “And people should be aware of what they’re subject to, because otherwise it gets into our bones without us even knowing where it came from.”

Update, May 13, 5:54 pm: The story has been updated to include comment from ExxonMobil spokesperson Casey Norton, and Supran’s response to it.

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ExxonMobil Wants You to Take Responsibility for Climate Change, Study Says

E xxonMobil is one of the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas companies—and it wants you to take responsibility for climate change.

A new analysis from researchers at Harvard University released Thursday found that the company’s public-facing messaging on climate change since the mid-2000s consistently emphasizes “consumers,” “energy demand” and individual “needs” as the cause of climate change, as well as the avenue for potentially addressing it. Outwardly focusing on consumers’ personal responsibility is one part of the company’s nuanced messaging to deflect the blame for climate change without denying the science behind it, the researchers say.

At the same time, in internal documents, the company pays personal responsibility little credence, focusing instead on the roots of the issue: “fossil fuel use,” “fossil fuel combustion” and the “source” of emissions.

“Fossil fuel industry discourse has encouraged this dangerous acceleration in individualization of responsibility,” says Geoffrey Supran, a researcher at the department of the history of science at Harvard University. “It grooms us to see ourselves as consumers first and citizens second.”

For decades, Exxon devised strategies to question the science of climate change and in turn slow progress on policy initiatives that sought to reduce carbon emissions and threatened to reduce demand for their core products. A series of in-depth journalistic investigations have documented how in the 1980s and 1990s Exxon, which had not yet merged with Mobil, conducted groundbreaking research on climate change but continued in public to question the scientific basis of the phenomenon. In the mid-2000s, the researchers’ new analysis shows, the company shifted tactics, moving away “from explicit doubt to implicit acknowledgment.”

At the same time, Supran and his co-author Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes found that the company has used several rhetorical strategies to deflect blame from the industry in recent years. The results, published in the journal One Earth, come from an evaluation of more than 200 internal and external ExxonMobil documents that researchers used in a statistical analysis to determine which words and phrases were overrepresented externally and which were overrepresented internally.

In a statement, ExxonMobil said it “is working to reduce company emissions and helping customers reduce their emissions while working on new lower-emission technologies and advocating for effective policies.”

In addition to shifting the responsibility individuals, one of the firm’s recent key strategies has been to emphasize what researchers call “climate risk” framing. Instead of using the term “climate change” in public communications, the company often refers to “climate risk,” along with related phrases like “potential risks” and “long-term risk.” The risk phrasing suggests there is uncertainty about if and how climate change will play out, without explicitly questioning the science. Researchers found this framing prevalent externally but not internally.

“By shifting the conversation from the semantics of reality to the semantics of risk,” the researchers say in the study, the company injects “uncertainty into the climate narrative, even while superficially appearing not to.”

All of these language choices may seem small, but they can have significant implications for how the public understands the causes of climate change and the potential solutions. Scientists say that tackling emissions and limiting temperature rise will require systemic changes from government and big economic players—including oil companies and other major corporations. Yet the notion that the burden of tackling climate change rests with individuals has become a pervasive belief in the U.S., as some corporations have worked to deflect responsibility for climate change and other social ills. “The word that I would probably use—in addition to subtle—is insidious,” says Supran. “That’s how I would characterize this shifting form of propaganda.”

The new research comes as ExxonMobil and other oil giants are under increased scrutiny for both their emissions and their climate messaging. Activists have taken to the street in protest while cities and states have sued the industry’s largest players with a range of allegations. Just a few weeks ago, New York City sued ExxonMobil, BP and Shell, alleging that the companies “systematically and intentionally misled consumers” into thinking their product is cleaner than it is .

ExxonMobil is far from the only major energy company rethinking the way it talks about climate change. As the science of climate change has become impossible to deny—both in courtrooms and in the court of public opinion—oil giants have cautiously indicated that they accept the science. From there, practices have diverged. Many of the European oil majors , such as Shell and BP, have promised to be part of the solution by spending billions to shift their portfolios toward clean energy. And while analysts agree that the European firms are leagues ahead of their American counterparts in grappling with the realities of climate change, much rides on if and how they follow through on those commitments.

In the U.S., many oil giants, including ExxonMobil and Chevron, have told investors they plan to stay the course with oil and gas even as they nuance their messaging around it. Critics see these U.S. firms’ public embrace of climate science and flexible measures like the Paris Agreement as a strategic shift to avoid stringent regulation, rather than anything that will lead to a significant reduction in emissions. “We have the same story,” says Dylan Tanner, the executive director of InfluenceMap, a think tank that tracks how businesses are engaging on climate. “Just replace substantive climate denial with climate delay.”

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Exxon climate predictions were accurate decades ago. Still it sowed doubt

Climate activists protest on the first day of the ExxonMobil trial outside the New York State Supreme Court building on Oct. 22, 2019, in New York City. ExxonMobil was found not guilty of misleading investors about how climate change would affect its finances. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Climate activists protest on the first day of the ExxonMobil trial outside the New York State Supreme Court building on Oct. 22, 2019, in New York City. ExxonMobil was found not guilty of misleading investors about how climate change would affect its finances.

Decades of research by scientists at Exxon accurately predicted how much global warming would occur from burning fossil fuels, according to a new study in the journal Science.

The findings clash with an enormously successful campaign that Exxon spearheaded and funded for more than 30 years that cast doubt on human-driven climate change and the science underpinning it. That narrative helped delay federal and international action on climate change, even as the impacts of climate change worsened.

Over the last few years, journalists and researchers revealed that Exxon did in-house research that showed it knew that human-caused climate change is real. The new study looked at Exxon's research and compared it to the warming that has actually happened.

Researchers at Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research analyzed Exxon's climate studies from 1977 to 2003. The researchers show the company, now called ExxonMobil, produced climate research that was at least as accurate as work by independent academics and governments — and occasionally surpassed it.

That's important because ExxonMobil and the broader fossil fuel industry face lawsuits nationwide claiming they misled the public on the harmful effects of their products.

"The bottom line is we found that they were modeling and predicting global warming with, frankly, shocking levels of skill and accuracy, especially for a company that then spent the next couple of decades denying that very climate science," says lead author Geoffrey Supran, who now is an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami.

The Earth already has warmed a little more than 1 degree Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial times of the late 1800s. That warming has led to extreme weather in recent years, including heat waves, droughts and floods. The researchers found, for example, that Exxon's own modeling charted this kind of temperature increase.

"Specifically, what we've done is to actually put a number for the first time on what Exxon knew, which is that the burning of their fossil fuel products would heat the planet by something like 0.2 [degrees] Celsius every single decade," Supran says.

ExxonMobil's response

While ExxonMobil has not addressed the specifics in this paper, the company did respond before the research was published.

"This issue has come up several times in recent years and, in each case, our answer is the same: those who talk about how 'Exxon Knew' are wrong in their conclusions," wrote ExxonMobil spokesman Todd Spitler in a statement.

The campaign to reveal what ExxonMobil knew and when has coalesced on social media under the hashtag #ExxonKnew.

"ExxonMobil's understanding of climate science has developed along with that of the broader scientific community," said Spitler. He said "well intended, internal policy debates" have been recast by some "as an attempted company disinformation campaign."

Spitler pointed to a related 2019 case ExxonMobil won in New York and specifically highlighted a section on Page 37 of the 55-page ruling , in which Justice Barry Ostrager of the New York State Supreme Court wrote:

"What the evidence at trial revealed is that ExxonMobil executives and employees were uniformly committed to rigorously discharging their duties in the most comprehensive and meticulous manner possible. ... The testimony of these witnesses demonstrated that ExxonMobil has a culture of disciplined analysis, planning, accounting, and reporting."

In that case, the New York Attorney General's Office failed to show that the company broke state law and deceived investors by allegedly downplaying the effects climate change would have on ExxonMobil's finances.

As NPR reported at the time, Ostrager also wrote, "Nothing in this opinion is intended to absolve ExxonMobil from responsibility for contributing to climate change through the emission of greenhouse gasses in the production of its fossil fuel products." And Ostranger added, "this is a securities fraud case, not a climate change case."

Research could aid climate lawsuits

ExxonMobil has a lot at stake in arguing that it did not mislead investors or the public about what it knew about the climate-warming effects of fossil fuels, and when.

The company faces more than 20 lawsuits brought by states and local governments for damages caused by climate change. Baltimore was among the first . And last year, cities in Puerto Rico filed a racketeering lawsuit against fossil fuel companies, industry groups and others claiming they conspired to mislead the public about climate change.

This new research could provide more evidence for those cases as they progress through the courts, says Karen Sokol, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

"What Exxon scientists found and what they communicated to company executives was nothing short of horrifying," says Sokol. Given how science works, she says that should have prompted the company to raise an alarm to the public and policymakers.

"Imagine that world and the different trajectory that consumers, investors and policymakers would have taken when we still had time, versus now when we're entrenched in a fossil fuel-based economy that's getting increasingly expensive and difficult to exit," says Sokol.

She says that provides "significant evidence" of the kind of deception and law-breaking that many of the lawsuits are based on.

ExxonMobil and the broader fossil fuel industry have sought to stop lawsuits by getting states to pass laws to block municipalities from suing, according to the watchdog group Center for Climate Integrity.

The industry also has tried to move the cases to potentially friendlier federal courts, arguing they're of national significance. In August the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia declined to do that for a 2020 case brought by the state of Delaware and city of Hoboken, N.J. Delaware sought compensation for lost property value because of climate-induced sea level rise and flooding. Hoboken wants money to pay for current and future costs.

As the largest U.S. oil company, ExxonMobil often faces more scrutiny from activists. The company now says it's "committed to being part of the solution to climate change and the risks it poses." Climate activists are skeptical, but one thing is clear: Questions over the company's history of stalling climate action will be the subject of legal battles for years.

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Study: Exxon Mobil accurately predicted warming since 1970s

FILE - Exxon Mobil Billings Refinery sits in Billings, Mont. Exxon Mobil’s scientists were remarkably accurate in their predictions about global warming, even as the company made public statements that contradicted its own scientists’ conclusions, a new study says. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown, File)

The Exxon Mobil Baton Rouge Refinery complex is visible with the Louisiana State Capitol, bottom right, in Baton Rouge, La., Monday, April 11, 2022. Exxon Mobil’s scientists were remarkably accurate in their predictions about global warming, even as the company made public statements that contradicted its own scientists’ conclusions, a new study says. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

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DENVER (AP) — Exxon Mobil’s scientists were remarkably accurate in their predictions about global warming , even as the company made public statements that contradicted its own scientists’ conclusions, a new study says.

The study in the journal Science Thursday looked at research that Exxon funded that didn’t just confirm what climate scientists were saying, but used more than a dozen different computer models that forecast the coming warming with precision equal to or better than government and academic scientists.

This was during the same time that the oil giant publicly doubted that warming was real and dismissed climate models’ accuracy. Exxon said its understanding of climate change evolved over the years and that critics are misunderstanding its earlier research.

Scientists, governments, activists and news sites, including Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times , several years ago reported that “Exxon knew” about the science of climate change since about 1977 all while publicly casting doubt. What the new study does is detail how accurate Exxon funded research was. From 63% to 83% of those projections fit strict standards for accuracy and generally predicted correctly that the globe would warm about .36 degrees (.2 degrees Celsius) a decade.

The Exxon-funded science was “actually astonishing” in its precision and accuracy, said study co-author Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard science history professor. But she added so was the “hypocrisy because so much of the Exxon Mobil disinformation for so many years ... was the claim that climate models weren’t reliable.”

Study lead author Geoffrey Supran, who started the work at Harvard and now is a environmental science professor at the University of Miami, said this is different than what was previously found in documents about the oil company.

“We’ve dug into not just to the language, the rhetoric in these documents, but also the data. And I’d say in that sense, our analysis really seals the deal on ‘Exxon knew’,” Supran said. It “gives us airtight evidence that Exxon Mobil accurately predicted global warming years before, then turned around and attacked the science underlying it.”

The paper quoted then-Exxon CEO Lee Raymond in 1999 as saying future climate “projections are based on completely unproven climate models, or more often, sheer speculation,” while his successor in 2013 called models “not competent.”

Exxon’s understanding of climate science developed along with the broader scientific community, and its four decades of research in climate science resulted in more than 150 papers, including 50 peer-reviewed publications, said company spokesman Todd Spitler.

“This issue has come up several times in recent years and, in each case, our answer is the same: those who talk about how ‘Exxon Knew’ are wrong in their conclusions,” Spitler said in an emailed statement. “Some have sought to misrepresent facts and Exxon Mobil’s position on climate science, and its support for effective policy solutions, by recasting well intended, internal policy debates as an attempted company disinformation campaign.”

Exxon, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, has been the target of numerous lawsuits that claim the company knew about the damage its oil and gas would cause to the climate, but misled the public by sowing doubt about climate change. In the latest such lawsuit, New Jersey accused five oil and gas companies including Exxon of deceiving the public for decades while knowing about the harmful toll fossil fuels take on the climate.

Similar lawsuits from New York to California have claimed that Exxon and other oil and gas companies launched public relations campaigns to stir doubts about climate change. In one, then-Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said Exxon’s public relations efforts were “ reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s long denial campaign about the dangerous effects of cigarettes.”

Oreskes acknowledged in the study that she has been a paid consultant in the past for a law firm suing Exxon, while Supran has gotten a grant from the Rockefeller Family Foundation, which has also helped fund groups that were suing Exxon. The Associated Press receives some foundation support from Rockefeller and maintains full control of editorial content.

Oil giants including Exxon and Shell were accused in congressional hearings in 2021 of spreading misinformation about climate, but executives from the companies denied the accusations.

University of Illinois atmospheric scientist professor emeritus Donald Wuebbles told The Associated Press that in the 1980s he worked with Exxon-funded scientists and wasn’t surprised by what the company knew or the models. It’s what science and people who examined the issue knew.

“It was clear that Exxon Mobil knew what was going on,’’ Wuebbles said. “The problem is at the same time they were paying people to put out misinformation. That’s the big issue.”

There’s a difference between the “hype and spin” that companies do to get you to buy a product or politicians do to get your vote and an “outright lie ... misrepresenting factual information and that’s what Exxon did,” Oreskes said.

Several outside scientists and activists said what the study showed about Exxon actions is serious.

“The harm caused by Exxon has been huge,” said University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck. “They knew that fossil fuels, including oil and natural gas, would greatly alter the planet’s climate in ways that would be costly in terms of lives, human suffering and economic impacts. And yet, despite this understanding they choose to publicly downplay the problem of climate change and the dangers it poses to people and the planet.”

Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald asked: “How many thousands (or more) of lives have been lost or adversely impacted by Exxon Mobil’s deliberate campaign to obscure the science?”

Critics say Exxon’s past actions on climate change undermine its claims that it’s committed to reducing emissions.

After tracking Exxon’s and hundreds of other companies’ corporate lobbying on climate change policies, InfluenceMap, a firm that analyzes data on how companies are impacting the climate crisis, concluded that Exxon is lobbying overall in opposition to the goals of the Paris Agreement and that it’s currently among the most negative and influential corporations holding back climate policy.

“All the research we have suggests that effort to thwart climate action continues to this day, prioritizing the oil and gas industry value chain from the “potentially existential” threat of climate change, rather than the other way around,” said Faye Holder, program manager for InfluenceMap.

“The messages of denial and delay may look different, but the intention is the same.”

Bussewitz reported from New York.

Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears and Cathy Bussewitz at @cbussewitz

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Exxon Scientists Predicted Global Warming, Even as Company Cast Doubts, Study Finds

Starting in the 1970s, scientists working for the oil giant made remarkably accurate projections of just how much burning fossil fuels would warm the planet.

By Hiroko Tabuchi

In the late 1970s, scientists at Exxon fitted one of the company’s supertankers with state-of-the-art equipment to measure carbon dioxide in the ocean and in the air, an early example of substantial research the oil giant conducted into the science of climate change.

A new study published Thursday in the journal Science found that over the next decades, Exxon’s scientists made remarkably accurate projections of just how much burning fossil fuels would warm the planet. Their projections were as accurate, and sometimes even more so, as those of independent academic and government models.

Exxon’s Projections

Global warming projections made or recorded by ExxonMobil scientists between 1977 and 2003 closely tracked with observed temperature increases.

+3°C increase in global temperatures since 1900

Warming projections

by Exxon scientists

+1.17°C

Historically observed

temperature change

Yet for years, the oil giant publicly cast doubt on climate science, and cautioned against any drastic move away from burning fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change. Exxon also ran a public relations program — including ads that ran in The New York Times — emphasizing uncertainties in the scientific research on global warming.

Global warming projections “are based on completely unproven climate models, or, more often, on sheer speculation,” Lee Raymond, chief executive of the newly-merged ExxonMobil Corp, said at a company annual meeting in 1999. “We do not now have a sufficient scientific understanding of climate change to make reasonable predictions and/or justify drastic measures,” he wrote in a company brochure the following year.

In a statement Exxon did not address the new study directly but said “those who talk about how ‘Exxon Knew’ are wrong in their conclusions,” referring to a slogan by environmental activists who have accused the company of misleading the public about climate science.

“ExxonMobil has a culture of disciplined analysis, planning, accounting, and reporting,” the company added, quoting a judge in a favorable verdict in New York three years ago, albeit for a case that addressed the company’s accounting practices, not climate science.

The new study, from researchers at Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, builds on reporting showing that for decades, Exxon scientists had warned their executives of “potentially catastrophic” human-caused climate change.

The burning of oil, gas and coal is raising Earth’s temperature and sea levels with devastating consequences worldwide, including intensifying storms, worsening drought and deadlier wildfires.

Other fossil fuel companies , electric utilities, and automakers have come under fire for downplaying the threat of climate change, even as their own scientists warned of its dangers. In recent years, cities, counties and states have filed dozens of lawsuits accusing Exxon and other companies of public deception, and demanding billions of dollars in climate damages.

Last year, a House committee grilled oil chiefs , including current Exxon chief executive Darren Woods, on whether companies misled the public about the climate. Mr. Woods said the positions were “entirely consistent” with the scientific consensus of the time.

In the new study, Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes of Harvard, and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute, carried out a quantitative analysis of global warming projections made or recorded by Exxon scientists between 1977 and 2003.

Those records, which include internal memos and peer-reviewed papers published with outside academic researchers, make up the largest public collection of global warming projections recorded by a single company, the authors said.

Overall, Exxon’s global warming projections closely tracked subsequent temperature increases of around 0.2 degrees Celsius of global warming per decade, the study found.

The company’s scientists, in fact, excluded the possibility that human-caused global warming was not occurring, the researchers found.

Exxon’s scientists also correctly rejected the possibility of a coming ice age, even as the company continued to refer to it in its public communications; accurately predicted when human-caused global warming would be first detected; and estimated how much carbon dioxide could be added to the atmosphere before warming hit a dangerous threshold, the study found. Some of the Exxon studies predicted an even sharper rise in temperatures than what the planet has experienced.

“We now have airtight, unimpeachable evidence that ExxonMobil accurately predicted global warming years before it turned around and publicly attacked climate science and scientists,” said Dr. Supran. “Our findings show that ExxonMobil’s public denial of climate science contradicted its own scientists’ data.”

William D. Collins, who leads the Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and who was not involved with the new study, called its analysis “very sound.”

“This is first article that I’ve seen that is a clear and quantitative comparison of ExxonMobil’s projections against the state of the science in the public domain,” said Dr. Collins, a lead author of a chapter on climate projections in a 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations.

The new research showed that Exxon’s projections “were very consistent over time,” he said. “They knew all of that. They’ve known it for decades.”

Edward Garvey, who was hired by Exxon in 1979 to help senior scientists at the time work on its supertanker project, said he was “not surprised that the science was spot on.”

Dr. Garvey and his colleagues set up a dedicated monitoring system on the 500,000-ton Esso Atlantic supertanker to log carbon dioxide measurements in surface water and the air as it traveled from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf — an ambitious and novel research effort, he said.

The wealth of data the scientists collected, Dr. Garvey said, pointed to significant increases in carbon dioxide levels in the ocean near the Equator, and was later critical to understanding the role the ocean was playing in limiting warming. At around the same time, Exxon also expanded its research into climate modeling, hiring prominent scientists from academic institutions. But in 1982, as oil markets slumped from a glut in oil production, Exxon terminated its supertanker project.

“What I am surprised about is that despite all of this knowledge within the company,” Dr. Garvey said, “they continued down the path that they did.”

Hiroko Tabuchi is an investigative reporter on the Climate desk, reporting widely on money, influence and misinformation in climate policy. More about Hiroko Tabuchi

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• Environment /

ExxonMobil accurately predicted climate change while publicly dismissing it

New research looks back on exxonmobil’s undercover climate predictions over the decades — and finds that the company’s dire projections largely came true..

By Justine Calma , a senior science reporter covering climate change, clean energy, and environmental justice with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.

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ExxonMobil predicted rising global temperatures with remarkable accuracy even as it attempted to downplay the existence of climate change, new research shows. It comes with damning data visualizations that put hard numbers on just how much ExxonMobil knew about the climate crisis it was creating.

There’s been a litany of evidence about how ExxonMobil rejected mainstream climate science, even though the company’s own research and internal communications acknowledged that burning fossil fuels would cause global warming. Now, a paper published today in the journal Science gives us the first comprehensive review of decades of ExxonMobil climate models. And the company’s projections for how much global temperatures would rise over the years were pretty much on the dot.

“What’s pretty shocking is the accuracy and skill of their insights.”

“What’s pretty shocking is the accuracy and skill of their insights. They didn’t just vaguely know something about global warming ... They knew as much as academic researchers,” says Geoffrey Supran, a research associate at Harvard University and lead author of the new paper. “Arguably, they knew all they needed to know to begin to take action and warn the public. But of course they didn’t.”

Looking back on predictions ExxonMobil has made since the 1970s, its estimates for future global temperature increases line up pretty closely with what actually took place. To show just how good the company has been at predicting global warming, The Verge recreated one of the figures from the new research paper below.

The red line shows how much global average temperatures have actually changed over time, a result of greenhouse gas emissions trapping heat. The gray lines represent ExxonMobil’s global warming projections. The colors of the lines range from light gray to dark gray, with lighter colors representing the company’s early research starting in the late 1970s to darker gray representing the company’s more recent estimates in the early 2000s. Solid lines indicate predictions that ExxonMobil scientists arrived at using their own models, while dashed lines represent third-party research that ExxonMobil scientists reproduced in company documents.

The key takeaway is that ExxonMobil could foresee just how much the petroleum products it sold would heat up the planet. The globe has already warmed by about 1.2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial era. That might seem like a small change, but it has triggered more severe heatwaves, droughts, storms, and flooding that we’re forced to live with today.

“When I first plotted this graph and all these prediction lines just fall right around this red line of reality, it’s pretty startling that they were equipped with this knowledge years before I was even born,” Supran says. You can check out his team’s newly published research to see more real-world observations overlaid on top of surprisingly accurate company documents.

On average, Supran and his colleagues give ExxonMobil’s climate models a pretty high “skill score” (a metric also used in meteorology to rate weather forecasts) of about 72 percent. For comparison, that’s even more accurate than global warming projections that noted NASA scientist James Hansen presented to Congress in 1988. Hansen is legendary in the climate world for being one of the first people to sound the alarm on climate change.

• Inside an investigation into Exxon Mobil’s climate change misinformation

Now, ExxonMobil is notorious for denying the very climate science that it was actually moving forward. The company sought to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions regarding the potential enhanced greenhouse effect,” according to a 1988 internal memo and continued to characterize climate models as “ unreliable ” into the early 2000s.

By 2015, landmark investigations by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times had unearthed many of the documents showing that the company had spent decades studying climate change but nevertheless sowed doubt about climate science. That reporting sparked the #ExxonKnew scandal, plus dozens of lawsuits that ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies have faced from cities, counties, and states, including Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia. The suits allege that the oil giants intentionally misled people on climate change to protect their own interests.

“This issue has come up several times in recent years and, in each case, our answer is the same: those who talk about how ‘Exxon Knew’ are wrong in their conclusions,” Todd Spitler, a senior advisor of corporate media relations for ExxonMobil, wrote to The Verge in an email. Spitler references a 2019 decision by a New York State Supreme Court judge who ruled in ExxonMobil’s favor , finding that the state didn’t have enough evidence to show that the company misled investors.

ExxonMobil is still staring down other lawsuits

Nevertheless, ExxonMobil is still staring down other lawsuits . The new research published today could potentially become more ammo for those suits targeting the company. The paper analyzes all of the company’s now publicly available climate projections between 1977 and 2003 (many of which came out of the journalistic investigations). So far, much of the focus of #ExxonKnew has been on the discrepancy between the company’s internal and external messaging on climate change. But Supran and his colleagues wanted to do a full assessment of what the company’s climate data actually showed.

“This kind of evidence that succinctly and statistically captures everything they knew in one number and one graph probably could be compelling... complementary to more qualitative forms of evidence that lawyers typically rely on,” Supran says. “And then, of course, there’s also the court of public opinion where I suspect that simple visuals proving that Exxon knew and misled on climate may prove powerful.”

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Fossil Fuels

From denial to ambiguity: a new study charts the trajectory of exxonmobil’s climate messaging, the researchers analyzed language in public and internal documents and found that the oil giant used “the subtle micro-politics of language to downplay its role in the climate crisis.”.

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Fossil fuel companies’ messaging on climate change has revolved around some common refrains: Energy demand must grow to alleviate global poverty, so fossil fuels are critical to economic growth. Technological innovation is key to limiting emissions, and consumers can do their part by using energy efficiently.

New research shows that these arguments were carefully cultivated over the course of decades by ExxonMobil, which beginning in the early 2000s shifted away from outright obfuscation of climate science and turned instead to more nuanced language that nevertheless, the research argues, still served to muddy public debate.

In an article published Thursday in the journal One Earth , Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, who are, respectively, a research fellow and professor of the history of science at Harvard University, wrote that Exxon’s change in rhetoric drew on tactics deployed by the tobacco industry to use “the subtle micro-politics of language to downplay its role in the climate crisis and to continue to undermine climate litigation, regulation, and activism.”

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By using key words and terms, they found, Exxon’s public messaging tried to shift responsibility for climate change away from the company and onto consumers, minimize the seriousness of climate change and try to establish as inevitable fossil fuels’ dominance in the energy mix.

While it may come as no surprise that Exxon and other fossil fuel companies have framed climate change in these terms—the words are all over their advertisements and public presentations—Supran said the research provided the first quantitative assessment of how systematic the oil giant’s framing of the issues has been.

“Actually demonstrating a quantifiable discrepancy is powerful,” he said. “Because the company often accuses its critics of cherry-picking arguments, cherry-picking data. And our approach with all of this work is to look at the whole cherry tree. And when you do, the trends you observe are profound and systematic.”

Exxon spokesman Casey Norton said, “This research is clearly part of a litigation strategy against ExxonMobil and other energy companies.”

He said that Oreskes had financial ties to Sher Edling, a law firm behind several lawsuits filed by cities and states against Exxon and other energy companies, and that she “did not disclose this blatant conflict of interest.”

Norton also noted that the researchers received funding from the Rockefeller Family Fund, which he said “is helping finance climate change litigation against energy companies.”

Norton added that Exxon supports the Paris Agreement and is working to reduce its own emissions, and he pointed to a new low-carbon business that it launched this year.

In a statement, Oreskes and Supran said they “have both served as experts in a number of capacities to groups and organizations involved in fighting climate change, including a number of attorneys working in various capacities,” and have helped write amicus briefs in several cases, but that all that work was provided pro bono. “These efforts present no conflict of interest,” they said, “they are a logical application of our knowledge and expertise.”

The researchers said Oreskes did consult for Sher Edling in 2017 by reviewing materials in a brief for historical accuracy. She billed the firm for 3.5 hours of work, they said, and has had no further work for the firm since then.

The Rockefeller Family Fund has provided funding to EarthRights International and the Niskanen Center, according to state filings , two nonprofits that are representing two Colorado counties and the City of Boulder in a lawsuit against Exxon and another oil company. It has also funded the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit that supports the lawsuits.

Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, said, “I am proud that RFF is supporting nonprofit organizations who are attempting to hold oil companies accountable.”

Supran and Oreskes have spent years studying the words of ExxonMobil and its predecessors—Exxon and Mobil merged in 1999—drawing in part on internal documents published by Inside Climate News and other organizations. 

In 2017, Supran and Oreskes published peer-reviewed research confirming that the company had misled the public about climate change compared to what it knew internally. Exxon disputed the work, and has tried to discredit the researchers, including by publishing a comment last year in Environmental Research Letters, the journal that published the 2017 study.

Justin Farrell, an associate professor of sociology at the Yale School of the Environment, called the new study “an excellent contribution to a growing body of text-based research on the tactics and frames used by the fossil-fuel industry to shirk corporate responsibility, gaslight the public, and undermine regulation.”

Supran said there is nothing unique about the way Exxon has framed its messaging about climate change. It was BP, for example, that popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the mid-2000s , shifting responsibility for emissions from corporations to the consumer. But the researchers have not been able to obtain the same set of documents from other companies that would allow them to compare public statements with internal discussions.

In the new work, Supran said they shifted their focus from Exxon’s earlier climate denial to what he called its “discourse of climate delay.” The paper largely draws on the same documents as their earlier work.

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By using algorithms to analyze language contained in public and internal documents dating from 1972 through 2014, the researchers identified words and terms that the company used repeatedly to discuss climate change. While internal documents and peer-reviewed research funded by the company dealt directly with the science, using terms like “global temperature increase,” “models” and “melting” of polar ice caps, the public-facing documents instead repeated terms including “challenge,” “energy efficiency,” “consumers,” “conservation” and, above all, “risks.”

In 2009, for example, the company wrote an editorial-style advertisement in The New York Times about the “dual challenge”— a term it still uses today —of meeting growing energy demand while protecting the environment. This framing pitted the immediate and concrete needs of generating electricity and producing fuels against the uncertain and more far-off “risks” posed by climate change. Real economic benefits of energy use were also presented in contrast to these “risks,” the study said.

Fossil fuel executives regularly hold up the shield of “consumer demand” to deflect charges that they must shift away from oil and gas. But this we’re-only-doing-our-job-framing, the study said,  ignores the role companies have played in perpetuating and increasing demand for their products and stifling the growth of competitors like electric vehicles and renewable energy, through marketing, lobbying and prodigious campaign contributions to supportive politicians. 

David Michaels, a professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University and the author of the book “The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception,” said the results of the new study “are not surprising but are still very useful, demonstrating that ExxonMobil’s public communications on climate change followed the model of big tobacco’s denial playbook.”

Supran said Exxon’s use of “risk,” in particular, mirrored a similar shift in rhetoric deployed by the tobacco industry in the 1990s, when companies faced lawsuits and began speaking about the “risks” associated with smoking, a framing that Supran and Oreskes said allowed for a “legal having-it-both-ways.” It provided just enough acknowledgment of the science to evade accusations of denial, without outright admitting that the industry had marketed deadly products.

This squishy defense ultimately failed, at least in the legal arena, when tobacco companies entered into a multi-billion dollar settlement with dozens of states. That is a fate Exxon and other oil companies want to avoid, now that they are facing their own wave of litigation.

In April, New York City filed a lawsuit against Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and the American Petroleum Institute, accusing them of false advertising and deceptive trade practices in their messaging about climate change. It was the second attempt by the city to sue the industry and one of more than a dozen lawsuits filed by cities, counties and states accusing fossil fuel companies of fraudulently misleading the public about climate change and seeking damages and compensation.

The new study said industry lawyers have used in their defense some of the same framing that the researchers identified Exxon deploying. Supran said he hopes their research can serve as evidence in those cases, to help establish Exxon’s deceptive practices.

Exxon is following in the tradition of many other corporate actors with damaging products, Supran said, including plastics producers, gun makers and the manufacturers of sugary drinks, who have, in the words of a former Mobil public affairs officer, used “semantic infiltration” to shape public narratives and political outcomes.

Nicholas Kusnetz

Reporter, new york city.

Nicholas Kusnetz is a reporter for Inside Climate News. Before joining ICN, he worked at the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica. His work has won numerous awards, including from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and has appeared in more than a dozen publications, including The Washington Post, Businessweek, The Nation, Fast Company and The New York Times.

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Exxon Mobil predicted global warming with 'astonishing accuracy' while publicly denying climate change, report finds

Scientists working for oil giant Exxon Mobil accurately predicted global warming even as the company publicly contradicted them, according to a new report.

Key points:

• Exxon Mobil scientists predicted correctly the world would warm about 0.2C per decade 
• The oil giant has been the subject of numerous lawsuits over its climate change statements
• A spokesman said critics "misrepresent" facts and the company's position 

The study, published in the journal Science, looked at research funded by Exxon that confirmed what climate scientists were saying by using more than a dozen different computer models to forecast the coming warming with precision equal to or better than government and academic scientists.

At the same time, the multinational oil and gas corporation publicly cast doubt that global warming was real and dismissed climate models' accuracy.

Exxon has said its understanding of climate change has evolved over the years, claiming critics were misunderstanding its earlier research.

Scientists, governments, activists and news sites, including Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times, several years ago reported "Exxon knew" about the science of climate change since about 1977 all while publicly casting doubt.

The new study has detailed how accurate the Exxon-funded research was.

Sixty-three per cent to 83 per cent of those projections fit strict standards for accuracy, and generally predicted correctly that the globe would warm about 0.2 degrees Celsius a decade.

The Exxon-funded science was "actually astonishing" in its precision and accuracy, said study co-author Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard science history professor.

But she added so was the "hypocrisy because so much of the Exxon Mobil disinformation for so many years … was the claim that climate models weren't reliable".

Study lead author Geoffrey Supran, formerly of Harvard and now environmental science professor at the University of Miami, said it was different than what was previously found in documents about the oil company.

"We've dug into not just the language, the rhetoric in these documents, but also the data," Professor Supran said.

"And I'd say in that sense, our analysis really seals the deal on 'Exxon knew'.

"It gives us airtight evidence that Exxon Mobil accurately predicted global warming years before, then turned around and attacked the science underlying it."

The paper quoted then-Exxon CEO Lee Raymond in 1999 as saying future climate "projections are based on completely unproven climate models, or more often, sheer speculation," while his successor in 2013 called models "not competent".

Exxon's understanding of climate science developed along with the broader scientific community, and its four decades of research in climate science resulted in more than 150 papers, including 50 peer-reviewed publications, company spokesman Todd Spitler said.

"This issue has come up several times in recent years and, in each case, our answer is the same: those who talk about how 'Exxon Knew' are wrong in their conclusions," Mr Spitler said in an emailed statement.

"Some have sought to misrepresent facts and Exxon Mobil's position on climate science, and its support for effective policy solutions, by recasting well intended, internal policy debates as an attempted company disinformation campaign."

Lawsuits target Exxon over climate damage

Exxon, one of the world's largest oil and gas companies, has been the target of numerous lawsuits that claim the company knew about the damage its oil and gas would cause to the climate, but misled the public by sowing doubt about climate change.

In the latest such lawsuit, New Jersey accused five oil and gas companies, including Exxon, of deceiving the public for decades while knowing about the harmful toll fossil fuels took on the climate.

Similar lawsuits from New York to California have claimed that Exxon and other oil and gas companies launched public relations campaigns to stir doubts about climate change.

In one, then-Massachusetts attorney-general Maura Healey said Exxon's public relations efforts were "reminiscent of the tobacco industry's long denial campaign about the dangerous effects of cigarettes".

Ms Oreskes acknowledged in the study she had been a paid consultant in the past for a law firm suing Exxon, while Mr Supran has gotten a grant from the Rockefeller Family Foundation, which has also helped fund groups that were suing Exxon.

The Associated Press receives some foundation support from Rockefeller and maintains full control of editorial content.

Oil giants including Exxon and Shell were accused in congressional hearings in 2021 of spreading misinformation about climate, but executives from the companies denied the accusations.

'It was clear Exxon knew what was going on'

University of Illinois atmospheric scientist professor emeritus Donald Wuebbles told The Associated Press in the 1980s he worked with Exxon-funded scientists and was not surprised by what the company knew or the models.

"It was clear that Exxon Mobil knew what was going on,'' Mr Wuebbles said.

"The problem is at the same time they were paying people to put out misinformation. That's the big issue."

He added there was a difference between the "hype and spin" of companies selling a product and an "outright lie …misrepresenting factual information".

"That's what Exxon did," he said.

Several outside scientists and activists said what the study showed about Exxon's actions was serious.

"The harm caused by Exxon has been huge," University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck said.

"They knew that fossil fuels, including oil and natural gas, would greatly alter the planet's climate in ways that would be costly in terms of lives, human suffering and economic impacts.

"And yet, despite this understanding, they choose to publicly downplay the problem of climate change and the dangers it poses to people and the planet."

Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald asked: "How many thousands of lives have been lost or adversely impacted by Exxon Mobil's deliberate campaign to obscure the science?"

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Exxon must go to trial over alleged climate crimes, court rules

The ruling, and another crucial court decision this week, will force the company to face charges it lied about global heating

The Massachusetts high court on Tuesday ruled that the US’s largest oil company, ExxonMobil, must face a trial over accusations that it lied about the climate crisis and covered up the fossil fuel industry’s role in worsening environmental devastation.

Exxon claimed the case brought by the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, was politically motivated and amounted to an attempt to prevent the company from exercising its free speech rights. But the state’s supreme judicial court unanimously dismissed the claim in the latest blow to the oil industry’s attempts to head off a wave of lawsuits across the country over its part in causing global heating.

Healey’s lawsuit accuses Exxon of breaking the state’s consumer protection laws with a decades-long cover-up of what it knew about the impact on the climate of burning fossil fuels. The state also says the company deceived investors about the risks to its business posed by global heating.

Exxon claimed the lawsuit was in breach of legislation against what are known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or Slapps, used by wealthy individuals and corporations to silence critics. The Massachusetts court ruled that anti-Slapp laws do not apply to government cases.

Healey, who is running for governor, hailed the ruling as “a resounding victory in our work to stop Exxon from lying to investors and consumers in our state”.

In March, a federal court also refused to put a block on the state’s legal action and ruled that Exxon was obliged to turn over documents to investigators.

The oil industry suffered another defeat on Monday when a federal appeals court ruled that a lawsuit by Rhode Island against 21 fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, BP and Shell, can go ahead in state court. Fossil fuel companies are attempting to move cases into what they regard as the more friendly forum of federal courts.

Among other things, state systems often permit a much broader discovery process, which could force Exxon and other companies to hand over highly embarrassing documents revealing what they knew about the climate crisis and when, and how they responded.

At least 10 other federal courts across the country have rejected the industry’s attempts to get similar cases out of the state systems.

Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, welcomes the latest ruling to keep the process in state courts.

“The ruling is a major victory for Rhode Island, which is now one step closer to putting oil and gas corporations on trial for fuelling the climate crisis, lying about it, and then sticking the state’s taxpayers with the bill for the damages,” he said. “Four circuit courts in a row have now handed major defeats to big oil companies in these cases, rejecting the industry’s efforts to escape accountability.”

So far this year, federal appeals courts made similar rulings in Colorado, Maryland and California.

In March, a Hawaii state court gave the go-ahead for a case to remain within its jurisdiction. Honolulu’s lawsuit alleges that the oil giants “engaged in a coordinated, multi-front effort” to deny the threat posed by global heating, to discredit the science of climate change, and to deceive the public “about the reality and consequences of the impacts of their fossil fuel pollution”.

The chair of Honolulu city council, Tommy Waters, called it a “big and important win”.

“We are facing incredible costs to move critical infrastructure away from our coasts and out of flood zones, and the oil companies that deceived the public for decades should be the ones helping pick up the tab for those costs, not our taxpayers,” he said. “The reason these companies are fighting so hard to block this case is they don’t want even more evidence to come out. This is just like big tobacco, when they tried to take advantage of the public.”

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Feel like fixing the climate crisis is your personal responsibility? ExxonMobil has been telling you that for 20 years, a study found.

• ExxonMobil advertisements blame climate change on "demand" and consumer "needs," a new study found.
• Internal documents, however, say "fossil fuels" and "carbon dioxide" cause the climate crisis.
• Two Harvard researchers say ExxonMobil is intentionally deflecting climate responsibility.

When Naomi Oreskes lectures about climate change, she gets the same question over and over again.

"A member of the audience will say: 'Well, what can I personally do? What can I do as an individual to fix this problem?'" Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University, told Insider. "Much less frequently do they say: 'What can we do about the way the fossil fuel industry is blocking policy action?'"

It's a common idea: That the best way to fight climate change is by making changes in your own life — using less energy, eating less meat, driving less, flying less. But according to Oreskes and her colleague, Geoffrey Supran, a key source of this sentiment is a set of communications campaigns from ExxonMobil.

The researchers' latest analysis indicates that the oil giant started blaming the climate crisis on consumers two decades ago. In a study published last week, Supran and Oreskes analyzed 180 ExxonMobil documents discussing climate change from 1977 to 2014. The set includes internal communications, peer-reviewed publications, and "advertorials" — advertisements fashioned to look like editorials and published in The New York Times op-ed section.

Around the year 2000, the researchers found, a new trend emerged in the company's public-facing communications. The advertisements began to focus on how consumers use energy.

"Be smart about electricity use," one 2007 advertorial suggested, continuing: "Heat and cool your home efficiently." "Improve your gas mileage." "Check your home's greenhouse gas emissions."

Focusing on how consumers power their homes and cars, Oreskes and Supran argue, helps ExxonMobil "downplay" its role in extracting and burning the fossil fuels that are filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and raising global temperatures. It places both the blame and the responsibility for solving the problem onto individuals.

Oreskes thinks that these kinds of marketing campaigns from fossil-fuel companies in general helped fuel people's fixation on reducing their carbon footprints. In fact, BP coined the term "carbon footprint" in 2004.

"They talk about energy demand, they talk about need, they talk about use, and they use the term 'consumers.' And this is basically a way of shifting responsibility away from the producers — that is to say them, ExxonMobil — and onto the consumer," Oreskes said.

A 1997 ad even encourages policy-makers to adopt this energy-saving mindset: "Governments should encourage and promote voluntary actions by industry and citizens that reduce emissions and use energy wisely. Governments can do much to raise public awareness of the importance of energy conservation," it says.

A discrepancy between how ExxonMobil talks privately and publicly

In its internal communications, ExxonMobil didn't talk about consumer demand and energy efficiency very much, the new study found.

Related stories

"In the private correspondence, they still recognize that climate change is caused by fossil-fuel use. It's caused by the burning and combustion of their product, the thing that they have built their corporation on, which is fossil fuels," Oreskes said. "But in the public language, they use language that seems to shift the responsibility to the consumer."

Oreskes and Supran ran their collection of ExxonMobil documents through a program that analyzed them for language. Advertorials often used the terms "emissions," "risk," "energy," "energy efficient," "meet," "demand," "use," and "need."

The internal documents, on the other hand, mentioned carbon dioxide more than 1,000 times. Other terms that appeared the most were "atmosphere" or "atmospheric," "fossil fuel," "ppm" (which stands for parts per million, the metric by which scientists measure atmospheric carbon dioxide), "fossil fuel combustion," and "source."

Oreskes said her findings point to "a systemic discrepancy between the way ExxonMobil has talked about this problem in private, versus the way they've presented it to the public."

In a statement to Insider, however, ExxonMobil alleged that Oreskes has a conflict of interest and pointed to her expert testimony in a climate-related lawsuit last year.

"This research is clearly part of a litigation strategy against ExxonMobil and other energy companies," the statement said.

Oreskes and Supran responded that they have both "served as experts in a number of capacities to groups and organizations involved in fighting climate change."

"These efforts present no conflict of interest," the researchers said. "They are a logical application of our knowledge and expertise."

ExxonMobil added in its statement that the company "is working to reduce company emissions and helping customers reduce their emissions while working on new lower-emission technologies and advocating for effective policies."

To make a difference, 'join forces with other people'

Oreskes and Supran don't think ExxonMobil invented the idea that consumers are responsible for curbing climate change. But they say the company's language has influenced public discourse.

"I do think that the fossil-fuel industry rhetoric is probably part of the reason why so many people think of [climate change] in personal and individualistic terms," Oreskes said. "This is what we've been reading and hearing for an awfully long time."

This isn't to say, though, that individual people can't do anything. If a significant portion of the population powered their homes and cars with renewable energy from solar panels or wind turbines, that would reduce the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere each year. Oreskes has solar panels on her roof and uses halogen lightbulbs in her home. But she recommends against letting lifestyle changes — like "be smart about electricity use" or "improve your gas mileage" — overshadow the bigger picture. About 70% of all industrial carbon emissions come from 100 fossil-fuel companies, according to a 2017 analysis by the charity CDP.

"I can change my lightbulbs as an individual. But I can't change my electricity grid. I can't change the policies that make it harder for renewable energy to compete. For that I have to join forces with other people," Oreskes said.

Watch: Some experts believe climate change may increase the emergence of new animal-to-human transmitted diseases like COVID-19

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Harvard Study Finds ExxonMobil Scientists Accurately Predicted Climate Change, Despite Denial

A Harvard-led team of researchers found in a study published earlier this month that internal ExxonMobil projections accurately predicted human-caused climate change even as the company downplayed its risks in public statements.

The study, published in Science Magazine on Jan. 13, found that 63 to 83 percent of ExxonMobil scientists’ climate models accurately projected subsequent global warming, including estimated levels of carbon dioxide that would cause “dangerous warming” and detectable human-caused climate change by approximately 2000.

Researchers analyzed internal global warming projections by ExxonMobil scientists between 1977 and 2003 as well as peer-reviewed published studies by the company’s scientists from 1982 to 2014, testing the company’s predictions against climate observations as well as independent academic and government models.

History of Science professor Naomi Oreskes, the study’s co-author, said in an interview that the researchers found the ExxonMobil climate projections were “extremely skillful,” with accuracy that often matched or exceeded models by independent academics and government scientists.

The researchers wrote that despite the accuracy of climate change projections by ExxonMobil scientists, the company denied climate science in its public communications by “overemphasizing uncertainties” about climate change and “feigning ignorance about the discernibility of human-caused warming.”

“We’re able to show that there were massive discrepancies between how ExxonMobil presented the issue in private versus how they presented it in public,” Oreskes said.

In an emailed statement, ExxonMobil spokesperson Todd M. Spitler wrote that the Harvard-led study and other reports claiming the company’s early awareness of climate change “are inaccurate and deliberately misleading.”

“This issue has come up several times in recent years and, in each case, our answer is the same: those who talk about how ‘Exxon Knew’ are wrong in their conclusions,” Spitler said. “For more than 40 years, we have supported development of climate science in partnership with governments and academic institutions. That work continues today in an open and transparent way.”

Former History of Science research associate Geoffrey J. S. Supran, the study’s lead author, said in an interview that he believes the study is the “smoking gun” that proves ExxonMobil knew about climate change early on despite its public communications downplaying the phenomenon. He added that it was important to “put a number” on the accuracy of the company’s internal reports.

“They say a picture paints 1000 words, and this one shows how Exxon knew and misled on climate,” Supran said. “This basically seals the deal or closes the case on what Exxon knew and when.”

Oreskes said the study suggests disinformation from fossil fuel companies is to blame for climate inaction, rather than a lack of public scientific literacy.

“What was really going on was a massive, well-organized, and highly professional, very well-funded propaganda campaign,” Oreskes said. “Climate change is one of the easiest scientific concepts to explain, but we were facing a massive disinformation campaign.”

The study serves as a warning for public belief in industry-led research, Oreskes added.

“They say that they are committed to being part of the solution, but we don’t think that’s true,” Oreskes said. “We think if you look at the evidence, what you see is that disinformation continues, and so that’s why we’re motivated to continue to study it.”

—Staff writer Sabrina R. Hu can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @sxbrinahhu .

— Staff writer Jeffrey Q. Yang can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @jeffreyqyang

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Melting glaciers in a warmer climate provide new ground for invasive species

A case study on the island of south georgia.

Invasive species have rapidly colonised new ground exposed by melting glaciers in the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, according to new research.

Invasive species brought to new territories through human activities are one of the main causes of the ongoing biodiversity crisis. Even on South Georgia, a remote island located in the very south of the Atlantic Ocean, exotic species are present.

In a new study published in the open access journal Neobiota and funded by Darwin Plus, the researchers Pierre Tichit (Durham University, now Swedish Agricultural University), Paul Brickle (South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute), Rosemary Newton (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), Peter Convey (British Antarctic Survey) and Wayne Dawson (Durham University, now University of Liverpool) look at how living organisms colonise new ground provided by melting glaciers on the British overseas territory.

Many were inadvertently introduced by whalers and sealers in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Like other cold regions of the world, South Georgia has another problem: many of its glaciers are melting at a fast pace because of climate change, leaving behind large areas of newly uncovered bare ground.

The authors surveyed the forelands biodiversity of six glaciers by counting plants, turning rocks, laying traps and using sweep nets, enabling an inventory of the flora and fauna that colonises forelands at different stages of their retreat.

Their results indicate that invasive species will likely spread on South Georgia as fast as glaciers are retreating. Whether this has or will have negative consequences on local species needs to be investigated to help protect this unique ecosystem.

Just a few years after bare ground is exposed by glacier melting, pioneer plants arrive, progressively covering more ground with time and followed by an increasing number of species. The study discovered that not only native, but also exotic plants and invertebrates, are taking advantage of this opportunity. Even more surprising, two temperate plant species from the Northern Hemisphere, annual meadow grass and mouse-ear chickweed, colonised sites faster than any other species.

Scientific expeditions to such an isolated and inhospitable island are challenging. The crossing from the Falkland Islands to reach South Georgia takes several days on a notoriously temperamental ocean. Once on the island, most glaciers are only accessible with small boats followed by hikes through difficult terrain.

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Materials provided by Pensoft Publishers . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Pierre Tichit, Paul Brickle, Rosemary J. Newton, Peter Convey, Wayne Dawson. Introduced species infiltrate recent stages of succession after glacial retreat on sub-Antarctic South Georgia . NeoBiota , 2024; 92: 85 DOI: 10.3897/neobiota.92.117226

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Climate change impacts on agricultural trade and food security in emerging economies: case of Southern Africa

• Open access
• Published: 02 April 2024
• Volume 2 , article number  12 , ( 2024 )

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You have full access to this open access article

• Gift Andrew Sabola 1  

Climate change has been a significant threat to sustainable agriculture impacting trade and food security. This research investigates the impacts of climate change on agricultural trade and food security in emerging economies focusing on Southern Africa. The research employed the dynamic panel Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) using panel data for the period 2012 to 2021 obtained from a sample of 12 Southern African countries selected based on data availability. The main independent variables to the research were climate change variables (temperature and precipitation). Other control variables included were population growth, food inflation and agricultural growth. The study found significant negative effects of climate change on agriculture trade. Whilst temperature changes were found to have insignificant effects, precipitation changes were found to have significant positive effects. The research recommends concerted efforts towards climate change adaptation and mitigation for sustainable agriculture. Based on the Findings, sustainable food security and agricultural trade Southern African emerging economies may be attained through effective climate change mitigation and adaptation approaches particularly promoting climate-smart agriculture (CSA).

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

More recently, climate change has emerged as a persistent global issue with far-reaching effects including food insecurity especially in emerging economies. The Southern African region has been among the most impacted region by climate change particularly the agricultural value chain. In this regard, climate change has become one of the most pressing issues affecting attainment of sustainable agriculture and food security [ 1 ]. One area where it is particularly concerning is in emerging economies, where agriculture plays a significant role in their economy and food security [ 2 ]. Climate change has led to unpredictable weather patterns, droughts, floods, and extreme temperatures that have affected crop yields and livestock production [ 3 ]. According to Mahofa [ 4 ], climate change impacts on agricultural trade and food security are significant in emerging economies. The changing climatic patterns have led to substantial declines in crop yields, affecting availability and affordability of food thereby resulting in increased food prices in most emerging economies [ 5 ]. Addressing climate change has become crucial for ensuring sustainable agricultural trade and food security in emerging economies [ 5 ]. Hence, there have been collaborative efforts among governments and private sector players to climate change [ 4 ].

The impacts of climate change on agricultural trade and food security have also been largely felt in the Southern African region [ 6 ]. The region has been vulnerable to recurring climatic shocks such that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) labelled it as a climate change “hotspot” [ 7 ]. According to the IPCC [ 8 ], by the year 2050, average temperatures in Southern Africa are expected to increase by about 1.6 ℃ and average precipitation is expected to decline by 10%. This trend has been a regional issue even as it has also been noted that if no actions are made, most Southern African countries will be net-importers of food by 2050 [ 8 ]. This climate change trend will cause significant decline in agricultural productivity and trade as changes in agricultural productivity affect agricultural trade through changes in agricultural comparative advantage [ 9 , 10 ].

In Southern Africa, climate change has caused significant decline in agricultural production. According to FAO [ 5 ], due to global warming, cereal production in Southern Africa has significantly declined for the past decade and is projected to further decline by over 20% by 2030. This decline in agricultural production in Southern Africa has been linked to food insecurity and increased food import bills threatening the fiscus of most nations in the region [ 11 ]. For the past two decades, Southern Africa has witnessed spiralling food import bills which increased from US$35 billion to US$43 billion between 2019 and 2022 [ 5 ]. According to the African Development Bank’s [ 12 ] projections, food imports for Southern Africa will reach US$90 billion by 2025. In support, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) [ 13 ] reported that food prices in Southern Africa surged by an average of 23.9% between 2020 and 2022 which is the highest since the 2007/8 global financial crisis. This increasing food import bill for Southern Africa has attracted mounting attention and has been considered a worrisome trend for a region that was once an agricultural export powerhouse but now food import dependant [ 14 ]. This has contributed to agricultural trade deficits facing the region over the past decade [ 5 ].

Climate change has been cited as one of the driving factors for agricultural trade deficits and food insecurities [ 13 ]. To revise these trends, Southern African countries need to fight climate change so as to improve agricultural productivity and boost agricultural exports [ 14 ]. Previous empirical studies have cited negative effects of climate change on agricultural trade flows [ 10 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. However, compared to the available literature, there are few empirical studies on climate change impacts on agricultural trade and food security. Precisely, there is lack of empirical evidence in Southern Africa which is considered the climate change “hotspot” and net food importer. The findings of previous studies done in other regions may not therefore be applicable to Southern Africa’s context as Mahofa [ 4 ] argue that climate changes vary by location such that climate change impacts on agricultural productivity and trade also vary. Hence, there are significant gaps in existing literature which this research intents to fill.

This study reports the impacts of climate change on agricultural trade in Southern Africa. Understanding climate change impacts on agricultural trade and food security in Southern African region through empirical analysis is of importance for several reasons. One of the major reasons is that the results will aid in effective policy-making towards addressing climate change and improved agricultural trade flows. According to Nhundu et al. [ 18 ], employing agricultural policies without empirical understanding result in inappropriate policies. More so, agricultural trade flows are important in promoting and strengthening resilience of agricultural supply chains from climate change shocks [ 19 , 20 ]. Hence, there is really need for this research to understand the climate change impacts on agricultural trade and food security in the context of Southern Africa. In doing so, this research will make significant contributions to theory, policy and practice. In line with the research aim, the following hypotheses were developed:

H 1 : Climate change has significant negative impacts on agricultural trade.

H 2 : Climate change has significant negative impacts on food security.

2 Material and methods

The research is a secondary based using panel data for the period 2012 to 2021. The time period was selected based on availability of data. Secondary annual panel data for the Southern African countries were collected and the sample was based on data availability. Of the 15 Southern African countries, 12 countries (Angola, Eswatini, Botswana, Lesotho, Mauritius, Mozambique, Malawi, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia, South Africa and Zimbabwe) were included in the sample whilst three countries (Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo and Seychelles) were excluded due to data unavailability.

Data was obtained from FAOSTAT and World Bank databases (Table  1 ). Data collected was analysed using the dynamic panel regression analysis making use of the Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) technique. The dynamic panel GMM regression model was estimated to address endogeneity and homogeneity which lead to unbiased estimates according to Hsiao [ 21 ]. The other motivation for employing the GMM technique is that Ullah, Akhtar and Zaefarian [ 22 ] cited that the most popular econometric approach for estimating dynamic panel regression models is the GMM technique that banks on lagged variables as instruments. The research aimed to estimate the following dynamic panel econometric models developed basing on specifications of Tekce and Deniz [ 15 ], Mahrous [ 23 ] and Affoh et al. [ 24 ]. The logarithmic function was employed so that the estimates can be interpreted as elasticities and to reduce problems of non-normality [ 21 ].

where; ln- natural logarithm; AGTRADE- agricultural trade balance as a percent of gross domestic product (GDP); \({\beta }_{0}\) and \({\mathrm{\alpha }}_{0}\) —regression coefficients; \(({\beta }_{1}-{\beta }_{6})\) and \(({\alpha }_{1}-{\alpha }_{6})\) —regression-coefficients; TEMP annual mean temperatures (°C) as proxy for climate change; PREC- annual mean precipitation as proxy for climate change, FI food inflation measured by food consumer price index (CPI), AGDP agricultural GDP growth rate (%); FPI food production index as a proxy for food security, PG population growth rate (%); \({\upmu }_{t}-\) error term, \({\uplambda }_{t}\) country fixed effects and \({\updelta }_{t}-\) time fixed effects. The stated models are estimated using Eviews version 13 software. Inclusion of food inflation, population growth and agricultural GDP as control variables was justified following the recommendations of Adesete et al. [ 25 ] and Affoh et al. [ 24 ].

The panel GMM regression model was estimated to address endogeneity and homogeneity which lead to unbiased estimates [ 21 ]. Pre-and post-estimation tests such as unit root, Hausman, normality, multicollinearity and autocorrelation were carried out. Panel unit root tests were carried out using the Levin, Lin and Chu (LLC) test. Normality of residuals was tested using the Jarque–Bera (JB) test. More so, the pair-wise correlation matrix was employed to check for the problem of multicollinearity. Autocorrelation was checked using the Durbin-Watson (DW) statistic. Lastly, the Hausman test was done to check for the most appropriate panel model between the fixed-effects (FE) and random effects (RE) models.

3 Results and discussion

This section presents and discusses empirical results of the study. Table 2 presents the summary of the descriptive statistics for the variables as per each country over the ten-year period (2012–2021).

From Table  2 , AGTRADE had mean statistics for the 12 countries ranging from 0.83 to 7.26 showing that for the period 2012 to 2021, agriculture trade balance in the Southern African region averaged between approximately 0.8% and 7.3% of GDP. More so, for TEMP , the mean statistics ranged from of 12.26 to 24.53 showing that on average mean annual temperatures in the Southern African region for the 10 years averaged between 12.26 and 24.33 ℃. The mean statistics for PREC also imply that mean annual precipitation in Southern Africa was approximately between 0.01 and 3061.67 mm. The mean statistics for AGDP show that on average, the value of agricultural GDP has been between − 21.18% and 5.86% of national GDP in Southern Africa. Additionally, the mean of 15.02 for food inflation ( FI ) indicate food inflation in the Southern African region averaged between − 3.34% and 601.02% during the same period. Lastly, the mean statistics for PG indicate the on average, the population in Southern African countries averaged approximately between 0.01% and 3.76% on an annual basis. Table 3 shows the results of the panel unit root tests.

The results presented in Table  3 show that three variables ( AGDP, FI and PG ) were found to contain no unit root tests at level whilst the remaining four variables ( AGTRADE, TEMP, PREC and FPI ) were found to unit root tests at level. However, the series for the four variables became stationary after first differencing. In this regard, robust and unbiased estimates were obtained. Table 4 presents the collinearity matrix.

From Table  4 , the correlations for paired independent variables were significantly less than 0.8 implying that there were no serious problems of collinearity among the independent variables. According to Gujarati [ 26 ], the rule of thumb is for pair-wise correlations between two regressors is 0.8 where correlation coefficients in excess of 0.8 imply high multicollinearity. More so, baseline panel GMM regression estimations were done. From these, the Hausman test was undertaken, and the results are presented in Table  5 .

From Table  5 , for model (1), a Hausman statistic of 0.001 was estimated with a p-value of 1.00 (P > 0.05) indicating that the RE GMM model was the most appropriate. On the other hand, for model (2), a Hausman statistic of 337.32 with a p-value of 0.000 (P < 0.001) implying that FE GMM model was the most appropriate. Besides, the JB test was undertaken to test for normality of residuals and the results are presented in Table  6 .

The results shown in Table  6 show that for model (1) (RE model) and model (2) (FE model), the Jarque–Bera statistics were 1.30 ( P  = 0.52 > 0.05) and 0.89 ( P  = 0.64 > 0.05). These show that the residuals followed a normal distribution. More so, the Kurtosis and Skewness statistics are close to the values three and zero respectively showing normal distribution [ 21 ]. The results of the robust panel GMM regressions are presented in Table  7 . For each of the two models, three models (pooled ordinal least square, RE GMM and FE GMM models) were estimated. However, basing on the results of the Hausman tests, results for the RE model and FE model were interpreted for models (1) and (2) respectively. As indicated in Table  7 , model (1) and model (2) had coefficients of determination (R-squared) of 0.86 and 0.52 respectively. These results show goodness of fit. More so, models (1) and (2) estimated DW statistics of 2.31 and 1.66 respectively (Table  7 ). These DW statistics fell in the range 1.5 to 2.5 showing that the models did not suffer from autocorrelation [ 21 ].

As shown in Table  7 , the RE GMM model (1) estimated the impacts of climate change on agricultural trade whilst the FE GMM model (2) estimated the impacts of climate change on food security in the Southern African region. For the RE model (1), the one-period lagged variables for the climate change variables ( TEMP and PREC ) were found to have statistically significant negative coefficients. For TEMP , the coefficient of − 0.25 ( P  ≤ 0.01) show that a percent increase in mean temperatures in 1 year can result in about a 0.25% decline in agricultural trade flows in the succeeding season. This is because, increase in temperatures may significantly reduce agricultural productivity leading to low output supplied to the market. On the other hand, for PREC , the coefficient of − 0.06 ( P  < 0.01) show that changes in precipitation negatively impacts agricultural trade. This suggests that a percentage change in the amount of precipitation can cause agricultural trade to fall be approximately 0.06%. These results show that climate change has significant impacts on agricultural trade in the Southern African region. Basing on these results, the hypothesis that climate change has significant negative impacts on agricultural trade is not being rejected but upheld. In other words, the results have proven that climate change is threating agricultural trade flows in the region such that the region may continue to be a net-food importer. The results corroborate those of Tekce and Deniz [ 15 ], Khan et al. [ 17 ], Adesete et al. [ 25 ], Fusco [ 27 ], Baptista et al. [ 11 ], Affoh et al. [ 24 ], Brenton et al. [ 2 ] and Dumortier et al. [ 1 ] who in their respective studies also found negative impacts of climate change on agricultural trade.

Besides the negative climate change effects, other factors negatively impacting agricultural trade in Southern Africa have been found to include food prices proxied by food inflation ( FI ) ( β  = − 0.001; P  < 0.001) and PG (β = − 0.04; P  < 0.001). These have further implications in food security. Similar findings were also reported by Mahrous [ 23 ], Wiebe et al. [ 3 ], Smith and Glauber [ 20 ], Adesete et al. [ 25 ] and Affoh et al. [ 24 ].

More so, from the FE GMM model (2), temperature ( TEMP ) was found to have insignificant effects on food security in the Southern African region ( α  = 0.09; P  > 0.05). This could be a pointer of adoption of adaptation strategies to temperature changes in the Southern African region. On the other side, changes in precipitation ( PREC ) have significant positive effects on food security ( α  = 0.17; P  < 0.05) using model (2). These results show that a percentage increase in precipitation may cause an increase in agricultural trade flows by approximately 0.17%. The results show inconclusive effects of climate change on food security but suggests the possibility of upholding the research hypothesis that climate change negatively impacts food security. The findings of this study align towards that of Mahrous [ 23 ] and Brenton et al. [ 2 ] who found significant negative impacts of climate change on food security.

4 Conclusion

The results of the random effects GMM model revealed significant negative climate change impacts on agricultural trade. However, the fixed effects GMM model provided inconclusive results regarding the impacts of climate change on Southern Africa’s food security. Besides, the results have significant implications for policy, theory and practice. The negative climate change impacts on agricultural trade may aid policymakers in formulating effective policies to promote agricultural trade such as the Southern Africa Development Committee (SADC) Regional Agricultural Policy and trade facilitation policies. Also, the study will inform policies to mitigate climate change in the Southern African region such as the SADC Climate Change Policy. Furthermore, the study will inform policies and strategies for promoting food security including the SADC Food and Nutrition Security Strategy (2015–2025). Precisely, the findings of the study will provide insights to policymakers towards formulating policies to ensure sustainable food security through climate change mitigation and adaption and agricultural trade facilitation.

The research has also made significant contributions to the existing climate change literature. Basing on the results, there is need for concerted efforts towards climate change adaptation and mitigation for sustainable agriculture. However, the research was not exhaustive. The use of only precipitation and temperature as indicators could be considered as a limitation to this study other important indicators such as carbon dioxide emissions were excluded. Hence, the subject may be further explored by future researchers using different methodologies and indicators. Another limitation is that the study was carried out in a panel of Southern African countries with different climatic conditions such that the findings are unlikely to be consistent across the countries. Hence, such a research could be done limited to country-specific settings for each of the Southern African countries.

Data availability

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].

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Title: beacon: bayesian experimental design acceleration with conditional normalizing flows $-$ a case study in optimal monitor well placement for co$_2$ sequestration.

Abstract: CO$_2$ sequestration is a crucial engineering solution for mitigating climate change. However, the uncertain nature of reservoir properties, necessitates rigorous monitoring of CO$_2$ plumes to prevent risks such as leakage, induced seismicity, or breaching licensed boundaries. To address this, project managers use borehole wells for direct CO$_2$ and pressure monitoring at specific locations. Given the high costs associated with drilling, it is crucial to strategically place a limited number of wells to ensure maximally effective monitoring within budgetary constraints. Our approach for selecting well locations integrates fluid-flow solvers for forecasting plume trajectories with generative neural networks for plume inference uncertainty. Our methodology is extensible to three-dimensional domains and is developed within a Bayesian framework for optimal experimental design, ensuring scalability and mathematical optimality. We use a realistic case study to verify these claims by demonstrating our method's application in a large scale domain and optimal performance as compared to baseline well placement.

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NASA is a world leader in climate studies and Earth science. While its role is not to set climate policy or prescribe particular responses or solutions to climate change, its purview does include providing the robust scientific data needed to understand climate change. NASA then makes this information available to the global community – the public, policy- and decision-makers and scientific and planning agencies around the world.

Climate change is one of the most complex issues facing us today. It involves many dimensions – science, economics, society, politics, and moral and ethical questions – and is a global problem, felt on local scales, that will be around for thousands of years. Carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas that is the primary driver of recent global warming, lingers in the atmosphere for many thousands of years, and the planet (especially the ocean) takes a while to respond to warming. So even if we stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today, global warming and climate change will continue to affect future generations. In this way, humanity is “committed” to some level of climate change.

How much climate change? That will be determined by how our emissions continue and exactly how our climate responds to those emissions. Despite increasing awareness of climate change, our emissions of greenhouse gases continue on a relentless rise . In 2013, the daily level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time in human history . The last time levels were that high was about three to five million years ago, during the Pliocene Epoch.

Because we are already committed to some level of climate change, responding to climate change involves a two-pronged approach:

• Reducing emissions of and stabilizing the levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (“mitigation”) ;
• Adapting to the climate change already in the pipeline (“adaptation”) .

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Mitigation – reducing climate change – involves reducing the flow of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere , either by reducing sources of these gases (for example, the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat, or transport) or enhancing the “sinks” that accumulate and store these gases (such as the oceans, forests, and soil). The goal of mitigation is to avoid significant human interference with Earth's climate , “stabilize greenhouse gas levels in a timeframe sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, ensure that food production is not threatened, and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner” (from the 2014 report on Mitigation of Climate Change from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, page 4).

Adaptation – adapting to life in a changing climate – involves adjusting to actual or expected future climate. The goal is to reduce our risks from the harmful effects of climate change (like sea-level rise, more intense extreme weather events, or food insecurity). It also includes making the most of any potential beneficial opportunities associated with climate change (for example, longer growing seasons or increased yields in some regions).

Throughout history, people and societies have adjusted to and coped with changes in climate and extremes with varying degrees of success. Climate change (drought in particular) has been at least partly responsible for the rise and fall of civilizations . Earth’s climate has been relatively stable for the past 10,000 years, and this stability has allowed for the development of our modern civilization and agriculture. Our modern life is tailored to that stable climate and not the much warmer climate of the next thousand-plus years. As our climate changes, we will need to adapt. The faster the climate changes, the more difficult it will be.

While climate change is a global issue, it is felt on a local scale. Local governments are therefore at the frontline of adaptation. Cities and local communities around the world have been focusing on solving their own climate problems . They are working to build flood defenses, plan for heat waves and higher temperatures, install better-draining pavements to deal with floods and stormwater, and improve water storage and use.

According to the 2014 report on Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (page 8) from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, governments at various levels are also getting better at adaptation. Climate change is being included into development plans: how to manage the increasingly extreme disasters we are seeing, how to protect coastlines and deal with sea-level rise, how to best manage land and forests, how to deal with and plan for drought, how to develop new crop varieties, and how to protect energy and public infrastructure.

How NASA Is Involved

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Although NASA’s main focus is not on energy-technology research and development, work is being done around the agency and by/with various partners and collaborators to find other sources of energy to power our needs.

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GOP state AGs press Supreme Court to take up Hawaii climate change case they say is 'grave threat'

FIRST ON FOX — A group of nearly two-dozen Republican attorneys general is asking the Supreme Court to intervene in a climate change liability case out of Hawaii they say could have "grave" consequences for American energy production.

In February, a coalition of major oil companies asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the city of Honolulu’s lawsuit that accused the companies of deceiving the public about their role in causing global warming, which could in turn cost the companies billions in damages.

Led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, 20 states on Monday filed an amicus brief asking the high court to review the case, arguing that the lawsuit, and several others like it percolating in the lower courts, is "an affront to the equal sovereignty" of their states and an attempt by one state to use its own laws to impose its energy policies nationwide.

"The grave threat these suits pose to equal sovereignty and our Nation’s energy infrastructure are reason enough for this Court to grant review," the filing states.

CONSUMER GROUP REVEALS LEFT-WING GROUPS INCREASINGLY USING COURTS TO PUSH GREEN NEW DEAL

In 2020, the city of Honolulu sued several major fossil fuel companies, including Exxon and Chevron, claiming the companies’ products cause greenhouse gas emissions and global warming without warning consumers about the risks.

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The city employed a series of state laws like public nuisance and trespass measures and said the companies should pay billions to the state to abate the effects of climate change like weather events, sea level rise, heat waves, flooding, and global warming generally.

The energy companies appealed to the  Hawaii Supreme Court,  arguing that federal law prevents individual states from effectively shaping energy policies for all states, but that court disagreed.

"The time for this Court’s intervention is now," the AGs wrote in their brief, adding that "reducing the sale and use of traditional energy everywhere is not among a State’s constitutional powers."

They say the case presents a "unique opportunity" because Hawaii courts granted a rare appeal option and stayed most of the discovery in the case while parties went through the appeals process.

"The Court should act before state courts issue preliminary relief that could trigger a national emergency or fashion a patchwork of new taxes on the Nation’s energy system that would make life harder for every American," the AGs wrote.

In an interview with Fox News Digital, Marshall said the lawsuit is "an effort by environmentalists to control energy policy in this country."

"They're attempting to do it through friendly forums, in this case, state court in Hawaii. And the people of Alabama absolutely object to a state court judge in Hawaii ultimately determining how it is that we deal with the fossil fuel industry here in this country," he said.

BILLIONAIRE-FUELED ROCKEFELLER FUND COORDINATED CLIMATE LAWSUITS WITH DEM STATE AG: INTERNAL DOCUMENTS

"What we see here is the use of a damages verdict to either change the behavior of fossil fuel companies or exponentially increase the cost of energy to the citizens of the United States," Marshall said.

The attorneys general argue – and cite America’s rich state-sovereignty precedent – that federal common law already says disputes relating to cross-border pollution ought to be decided by federal courts, not states.

They also cite the Clean Air Act, which they argue still lets states have certain powers to regulate emissions notwithstanding federal intervention.

The Clean Air Act recognizes "the primary responsibility" of states to prevent and control "air pollution … at its source."

"The statutory scheme exemplifies cooperative federalism, permitting States to implement their own regulations consistent with a federal baseline," the AGs write in their brief.

"As a result, our federal system allows States to pursue divergent policies with respect to energy production and environmental protection."

"You don't want to allow states like Hawaii or California to define energy policy for the entire country. But they're using the threat of a massive jury verdict to be able to bankrupt the fossil fuel industry," Marshall told Fox News Digital.

"And that's not good for the citizens of Alabama. It's not good for providing affordable energy and available energy to the people of this country," he said.

DARK MONEY-FUELED LAW FIRM JOINS MASSACHUSETTS CLIMATE SUIT AGAINST BIG OIL

"Although a case nestled in the state of Hawaii, a long way from us here in Alabama, it's critically important for us to be engaged. And in fact, critically important for the Supreme Court, ultimately to help decide this issue," he said.

The AGs said in the brief that the "theory used against energy companies can be expanded to allow targeting of any cross-border activity that purportedly ‘exacerbate[s] the impacts of climate change.’"

One example they point to happened just a few weeks ago, when the state of New York sued "the world’s largest producer of beef products, for misleading the public about its environmental impact."

The beef producer’s stated commitment to reach "Net Zero by 2040" is allegedly misleading because the company "plans to grow global demand for its product" rather than "reduce production of and demand for" it. The company’s emissions "of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and … supply chain practices" purportedly "contribut[e] to climate change harms."

"New York’s complaint alleges that ‘the world’s top five meat and dairy corporations combined are responsible for more annual greenhouse gas emissions than ExxonMobil, Shell, or BP, individually.’ Surely in some State’s view, those companies too (and countless others) have ‘exacerbated the impacts of climate change,’" the AG’s brief states.

"But the States, upon entering the Union, gave up the right to use their laws for this sort of interstate conflict. The Court should grant review here before any further damage is done to our national economy and our federal scheme," it concludes.

Honolulu is expected to file its response on May 1, with a final brief scheduled on May 15. A decision from the Supreme Court on whether it will review the case could come in June.

Fox News Digital reached out to the city and county of Honolulu for a response to the amicus brief.

Original article source: GOP state AGs press Supreme Court to take up Hawaii climate change case they say is 'grave threat'

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Opinion article, is climate change modifying the behavior of sea turtles the particular case of the loggerhead turtle in the alboran sea.

• 1 Instituto Español de Oceanografía (CSIC), Centro Oceanográfico de Málaga, Fuengirola, Spain
• 2 Instituto Iberoamericano de Desarrollo Sostenible (IIDS), Universidad Autónoma de Chile, Temuco, Región de la Araucanía, Chile

Sporadic sea turtle nesting within the western Mediterranean Sea

The loggerhead turtle, a predominant species in the Mediterranean Sea ( DiMatteo et al., 2022 ), exhibits a diverse migratory behavior throughout its life history, with females showing a strong tendency toward philopatry during the nesting period ( Omeyer et al., 2021 ); returning to the same locations where they were born. There is thus a convergence of individuals from eastern Mediterranean and Atlantic nesting areas in the western Mediterranean ( Camiñas and de la Serna, 1995 ; Monzón-Argüello et al., 2010 ; Carreras et al., 2011 ; Camiñas et al., 2021 ).

In recent years there has been an unprecedented surge in nesting activities outside the traditional eastern Mediterranean nesting grounds. This unexpected occurrence of sporadic nesting events in the western Mediterranean has prompted hypotheses that it might signify an early stage of colonization ( Carreras et al., 2018 ; Hochscheid et al., 2022 ). Despite the surge in nesting outside established areas, albeit one not extensively documented currently, recent genetic studies have revealed past instances of colonization ( Santidrián Tomillo et al., 2023 ). Present climatic conditions in the western Mediterranean basin, though comparatively cooler than their eastern counterparts, have proven conducive for nesting ( Santidrián Tomillo et al., 2023 ). In fact, medium and long-term forecasting models suggest the suitability of the western Mediterranean as a climatic refuge for loggerhead sea turtles ( Witt et al., 2010 ; Pike, 2014 ). The empirical evidence suggests that sea turtle individuals nesting along the Spanish coast originate from distant populations in the Atlantic and eastern Mediterranean regions ( Carreras et al., 2018 ; Luna-Ortiz et al., 2024 ), underscoring the occurrence of a long-range colonization process. Furthermore, the absence of remigrant individuals implies that nesting females are likely colonizers rather than residents ( Luna-Ortiz et al., 2024 ). These findings have important implications for the conservation of loggerhead turtles, highlighting a notable expansion of nesting range from east to west within the Mediterranean basin ( Mancino et al., 2022 ). Additionally, there has been a shift from a nesting window previously viable only in exceptional years to one now viable annually ( Cardona et al., 2023 ). In this context, several authors have postulated that the observed behavioral alterations reflected in the heightened occurrence of sporadic sea turtle nesting within the western Mediterranean Sea might be attributed to climate change ( Carreras et al., 2018 ; Hochscheid et al., 2022 ; Santidrián Tomillo et al., 2023 ).

The increase in sporadic loggerhead sea turtle nests could also be attributed to the rising density of loggerhead turtles in the Mediterranean. Despite the global threatened status of loggerhead turtles, conservation policies in the Mediterranean have led to its designation as a species of least concern on the IUCN Red List since 2015. Due to mounting pressures from tourism and rising temperatures, an increase in loggerhead sea turtles in the Mediterranean could lead turtles in the region to seek new nesting beaches.

The particular case of Alboran Sea

The Alboran Sea is a marine bridge that connects the Mediterranean and the Atlantic sea turtle populations. According to many studies based on stranding and by-catch data, loggerhead sea turtles from Atlantic nesting beaches migrate to the Mediterranean Sea through the Alboran Sea during the spring and summer seasons, while returning to the Atlantic Ocean during the winter season ( Camiñas and de la Serna, 1995 ; Báez et al., 2011 , Báez et al., 2017 ; Bellido et al., 2018 ). Moreover, Revelles et al. (2007) propose the presence of a permeable barrier within the Strait of Gibraltar which influences the dispersal patterns of juvenile loggerhead sea turtles. Consequently, juveniles originating from the Atlantic are unable to traverse the inward surface current, compelling them to reside in the Mediterranean until they attain a minimum size to overcome the flow of Atlantic waters. The delineation of the Alboran Sea is contingent upon the presence of distinct geographical boundaries flanking its longitudinal expanse, principally embodied by the Strait of Gibraltar and the hydrographic interface spanning from Oran to Cape Gata. These demarcations not only serve as geographical confines but also exert a discernible influence on species distribution, effectively demarcating the confines of a biogeographical domain. The easternmost sector is characterized by the Alboran Sea Frontal System. Under optimal conditions, the easternmost extension of this frontal system spans from Cape Gata to Oran, Algeria. However, this barrier may experience attenuation, permitting a restricted flux of species. Consequently, the Alboran Sea’s boundary exhibits permeability, with the eastern expanse of the province of Almería being attributable to the Alboran Sea in function to oceanography context at a moment ( Vargas-Yáñez et al., 2002 ; Real et al., 2021 ; Vargas-Yáñez et al., 2021 ).

It is of interest that although the first loggerhead turtle nesting site detected in the Iberian Peninsula was found on the Andalusian coast ( Tomás et al., 2002 ; Báez et al., 2021a ), located proximate to the Alboran Sea border (in a broader biogeographical context, it might be considered part of the Alboran Sea), and despite the rise of sporadic nesting phenomena across the western Mediterranean, only four instances of loggerhead turtle nestings have been documented in or in close proximity to the Alboran Sea: Vera (Almería) on July 27, 2001; Pulpi (Almería) on July 17, 2015; Fuengirola (Málaga) on August 4, 2020; and Marbella (Málaga) on July 8 and Mojacar (Almería) on 29 August 2023 ( Figure 1 ). There are no records of such nesting sites on the coast of Morocco ( Báez et al., 2021a ).

Figure 1 Location of the four sporadic nesting sites from the Alboran Sea and nearby areas. Key: V, Vera (Almería) on July 27, 2001; P, Pulpi (Almería) on July 17, 2015; F, Fuengirola (Málaga) on August 4, 2020; M, Marbella (Málaga) on July 8, and Mo, Mojacar (Almería) on 29 August, 2023. *Loggerhead sea turtle nesting activity location.

The Alboran Sea represents the viable threshold for loggerhead turtle nesting, with conducive climatic conditions being essential for nesting occurrences. To validate this proposition, it becomes imperative to establish a correlation between sporadic nestings and short-term climatic indices. Such an association would provide crucial insights into the potential impact of immediate climatic variables on the irregular nesting events observed, thereby strengthening the hypothesis of climate change’s influence on sea turtle nesting behavior within the Alboran Sea.

North Atlantic oscillation a short-term climate index affecting on sea turtles

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) stands as the preeminent large-scale climatic fluctuation, exerting influence over the North Atlantic region in short-term periods. Its variability significantly impacts diverse meteorological parameters encompassing wind speed, direction, disparities in air temperature, and precipitation, notably during the boreal winter. Beyond its atmospheric effects, the NAO extends its influence to the ocean, instigating alterations in heat distribution, sea surface temperature, gyre circulation, mixed layer depth, salinity levels, high-latitude deep water formation, and sea ice coverage (reviewed in Báez et al., 2021b ). Consequently, the NAO has garnered extensive attention in the analysis of marine ecosystems’ variability. Various studies have established a teleconnection between NAO fluctuations and migration of sea turtles through the Alboran Sea ( Báez et al., 2011 ; Báez et al., 2017 ; Bellido et al., 2018 ).

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) assumes positive and negative values, each eliciting distinct meteorological repercussions. The positive phase of the NAO induces above-average westerly winds across the northern mid-latitudes and fosters arid climatic conditions in the Mediterranean region whereas the negative phase leads to substantial precipitation in southern Europe. Beyond the directional implications of the NAO on storms and the qualitative meteorological conditions within the North Atlantic, the quantitative magnitude of this oscillation holds significant importance (reviewed in Báez et al., 2021b ). Employing a binary logistic regression (using the software SPSS 17.0) to correlate the presence by year (i.e. 2001, 2015, 2020 and 2023 corresponding to the nests of Vera, Pulpí, Fuengirola and Marbella/Mojacar, respectively) or absence (i.e. 19 years without nests detected in or around the Alboran Sea) of nests with the observed mean July NAO for each year yields a statistically significant function (Omnibus Test= 5.252; df= 1; P= 0.022; Nagelkerk R2 = 0.338; AUC= 0.803). Therefore, despite the limited number of nests within the Alboran Sea region, evidence supports a causal relationship between loggerhead sea turtle nestings in the Alboran Sea and the state of the North Atlantic Oscillation.

Over the nesting of 23 years, ranging from the initial recorded turtle nest in Vera 2001 to the most recent one in 2023, there is a prevalence of 14 years characterized by a mean negative North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) during the month of July, while 9 years exhibit a mean positive July NAO. Notably, all four instances of turtle nestings occurred during years featuring a mean negative July NAO. Three specific occurrences, the Pulpi nesting in 2015 and the most recent in Marbella and Mojacar in 2023, align precisely with the years showcasing the most extreme negative July NAO values. NAO in negative phase favours the sporadic laying of loggerhead turtles in the Alboran Sea. Báez et al. (2013) found that the negative NAO could help to increase sea surface temperature from Alboran Sea.

Sea turtle are threat rising sea levels drive by climate change and severe storms under climate change, potentially diminishing available nesting beaches crucial for egg laying by sea turtles ( Maneja et al., 2021 ). In addition, sea turtles exhibit temperature-dependent sex determination raising the possibility that climate-induced temperature increases could influence sex ratios in these populations ( Tezak et al., 2020 ). Therefore, climate change may impact the ecology of sea turtles, as elucidated above, where the extremely negative North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) in July could directly influence this process. Climate change is a global phenomenon on a broad scale, yet there is limited evidence of cases akin to the rise in sporadic nesting outside the western Mediterranean. A citizen science project indicated that despite Peru not being considered to have nesting beaches, at least two species were observed nesting and on the rise ( Zavala and Kelez, 2015 ). However, this instance might stem from inadequate beach surveys rather than a shift in sea turtle behavior. Consequently, the absence of similar occurrences outside the Mediterranean might suggest the involvement of additional factors beyond climate change. However, the NAO is very sensitive to climate change, with periods of predominantly negative NAO, and more extreme oscillations ( Báez et al., 2013 ). Therefore, the phenomenon of sporadic nesting on the beaches of the Alboran Sea will increase over time.

Author contributions

JB: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This study has been funded by the subproject ALMA within project “Design, validation and implementation of a monitoring network for the implementation of a network for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem services in ecosystem services in anthropised environments in Andalusia”, in the framework of the complementary plan on biodiversity, financed by the recovery and resilience mechanism UE, and coordinated under the agreement between the “Concejería de Universidad, Investigación e Innovación de la Junta de Andalucía” and University of Pablo De Olavide on behalf of a group of participants entities.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords: climate change, NAO, Mediterranean Sea, sea turtle, nesting activities

Citation: Báez JC (2024) Is climate change modifying the behavior of sea turtles? The particular case of the loggerhead turtle in the Alboran Sea. Front. Mar. Sci. 11:1379303. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2024.1379303

Received: 30 January 2024; Accepted: 25 March 2024; Published: 03 April 2024.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2024 Báez. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: José Carlos Báez, [email protected]