How the
Exxon Case Unraveled
It becomes clear that investigators
simply don’t know what a climate model is. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. 8/30/16
New York Attorney General Eric
Schneiderman’s investigation of Exxon
Mobil XOM -0.34 % for climate sins
has collapsed due to its own willful dishonesty. The posse of state AGs he
pretended to assemble never really materialized. Now his few allies are melting
away: Massachusetts has suspended its investigation. California apparently
never opened one. The U.S. Virgin Islands has withdrawn its sweeping, widely
criticized subpoena of research groups and think tanks. In an email exposed by
a private lawsuit, one staffer of the Iowa AG’s office tells another that Mr.
Schneiderman himself was “the wild card.” His initial claim, flounced to the
world by outside campaigners under the hashtag “exxon knew,” fell apart under
scrutiny. This was the idea that, through its own research in the 1970s, Exxon
knew one thing about climate science but told the public something else.
In an Aug. 19 interview with
the New York Times, NYT -0.08 % Mr.
Schneiderman now admits this approach has come a cropper. He reveals that he’s
no longer focusing on what Exxon knew/said but instead on how it goes about
valuing its current oil reserves. In essence, Mr. Schneiderman here is hiding
his retreat behind a recent passing fad in the blogosphere for discussing the
likelihood that such reserves will become “stranded assets” under some
imaginary future climate regime.
His crusade was always paradoxical.
The oil industry reliably ranks last in Gallup’s annual survey of public
credibility. The $16 million that Exxon spent between 1998 and 2005 to support
organizations that criticized speculative climate models is a minuscule
fraction of the propaganda budgets of the U.S. Energy Department, NASA, NOAA,
EPA, not to mention the United Nations’ climate panel, etc. etc.
The episode ends happily, though, if
Mr. Schneiderman’s hoped-for political career now goes into eclipse. But we
haven’t finished unless we also mention the press’s role.
The “Exxon knew” claim, recall,
began with investigative reports by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles
Times, both suffering from the characteristic flaw of American
journalism—diligently ascertaining and confirming the facts, then shoving them
into an off-the-shelf narrative they don’t support.
We have since learned that both the L.A. Times (via a collaboration with the
Columbia School of Journalism) and InsideClimate News efforts were partly
underwritten by a Rockefeller family charity while Rockefeller and other
nonprofit groups were simultaneously stoking Mr. Schneiderman’s investigation.
When caught with your hand in the
cookie jar in this way, there’s only one thing to do, and last week the
Columbia School of Journalism did it, awarding a prize to InsideClimate News.
For this columnist, however, the
deeper mystery was cleared up last year when I appeared on the NPR show “To
the Point” to discuss the subject “Did Exxon Cover Up Climate Change?” (Google
those phrases) with ICN’s “energy and climate” reporter Neela Banerjee.
Ms. Banerjee has been collecting
plaudits all year for her work. The work itself involved revisiting Exxon’s
climate modeling efforts of the 1970s. Yet, at 16:28, see how thoroughly she
bollixes up what a climate model is. She apparently believes the uncertainty in
such models stems from uncertainty about how much CO2 in the future will be
released.
“The uncertainties that people talk
about . . . are predicated on the policy choices we make,” namely the “inputs”
of future CO2.
No, they aren’t. The whole purpose
of a climate model is to estimate warming from a given input of CO2. In its most recent report, issued in 2013,
the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes a doubling of
atmospheric CO2 and predicts warming of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius—i.e., an
uncertainty of output, not input.
What’s more, this represents an increase in uncertainty over its 2007
report (when the range was 2.0 to 4.5 degrees). In fact, the IPCC’s new
estimate is now identical to Exxon’s 1977 estimate and the 1979 estimate of the
U.S. National Research Council.
In other words, on the crucial
question, the help we’re getting from climate models has not improved in 40
years and has been going backward of late.
For bonus insight, ask yourself why
we still rely on computer simulations at all, rather than empirical study of
climate—even though we’ve been burning fossil fuels for 200 years and recording
temperatures even longer.
OK, many climate reporters have
accepted a role as enforcers of orthodoxy, not questioners of it. But this
colossal error not only falsifies the work of the IPCC over the past 28 years,
it falsifies the entire climate modeling enterprise of the past half-century.
But it also explains the non
sequitur at the heart of the InsideClimate News and L.A. Times exposés as well
as Mr. Schneiderman’s unraveling investigation. There simply never was any
self-evident contradiction between Exxon’s private and public statements. In
emphasizing the uncertainty inherent in climate models, Exxon was telling a
truth whose only remarkable feature is that it continues to elude so many
climate reporters.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-exxon-case-unraveled-1472598472
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