http://insideclimatenews.org/news/04022016/oil-industry-report-shows-early-knowledge-climate-change-impact-api-american-petroleum-institute
[links in on-line article]
Oil Industry Group's Own Report Shows Early Knowledge of Climate Impacts
A report the American Petroleum Institute commissioned in 1982 revealed
its knowledge of global warming, predated its campaign to sow doubt.
By Neela Banerjee, InsideClimate News
Feb 5, 2016
A Columbia University report commissioned by the American Petroleum
Institute in 1982 cautioned that global warming "can have serious
consequences for man's comfort and survival." It is the latest
indication that the oil industry learned of the possible threat it posed
to the climate far earlier than previously known.
The report, "Climate Models and CO2 Warming, A Selective Review and
Summary," was written by Alan Oppenheim and William L. Donn of
Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory for API's Climate and
Energy task force, said James J. Nelson, the task force's former
director. From 1979 to 1983, API and the nation's largest oil companies
convened the task force to monitor and share climate research, including
their in-house efforts. Exxon ran the most ambitious of the corporate
programs, but other oil companies had their own projects, smaller than
Exxon's and focused largely on climate modeling.
The task force commissioned the report to better understand the models
being produced in the nascent field of climate science, Nelson said.
"There was discussion in the committee about all the noise and
information" around carbon dioxide, Nelson said. "There were all sorts
of numbers being thrown around. We were not trying to find a model to
hang our hats on. It was more, 'If you see this model, this is how it’s
built and these are its strengths and weaknesses.'"
Obtained from a university library by the Union of Concerned Scientists
and made available to InsideClimate News, the report described in detail
five models used at the time by climate scientists. They ranged from
simple to complex: the radiation balance model, energy balance,
radiative-convective, thermodynamic and general circulation model. A
table showed the predictions each model generated of the average
increase in global temperature if atmospheric concentrations of CO2
doubled compared to pre-industrial times, from .6 degrees C per
hemisphere under the thermodynamic model to 2 to 3.5 degrees C globally
under the general circulation model. The poles were expected to undergo
even greater jumps in temperature.
The report did not focus on the forces behind the increase in CO2
concentrations, but it linked the phenomenon plainly to fossil fuel use.
Atmospheric CO2, it said, "is expected to double some time in the next
century. Just when depends on the particular estimate of the level of
increasing energy use per year and the mix of carbon based fuels."
Like many studies at the time, the report stressed the models' inherent
uncertainties. "All models are still sufficiently unrealistic that a
definitive evaluation of the problem requires continued effort," the
authors wrote in the summary.
Still, the report concluded that the models pointed to hikes in global
average temperatures as CO2 concentrations rose. "They all predict some
kind of increase in temperature within a global mean range of 4 degrees
C," the report stated. "The consensus is that high latitudes will be
heated more than the equator and the land areas more than the oceans."
The consensus turned out to accurately predict how global warming has
proceeded since then and matches what current models are still
predicting for the future.
The consequences for humanity were serious, the authors wrote, "since
patterns of aridity and rainfall can change, the height of the sea level
can increase considerably and the world food supply can be affected."
The authors concluded that "optimum forecasting of climate changes is a
necessity for any realistic long term planning by government and industry."
When it commissioned the report, Nelson said, the API task force did not
provide any guidance on which models to use and did not meddle with the
assessment. Committee members received periodic updates about the
report's progress, he said. The final document "was well received by the
committee," Nelson recalled. "We didn't change it at all. Copies were
sent to all the member companies since they paid for it."
Nelson said the general feeling of the task force members about climate
models echoed the report's findings that models were not yet realistic
enough to evaluate global warming definitively.
Nelson said he suggested the Columbia study in part because of his own
skepticism of atmospheric modeling. A former Air Force pilot, he had
sometimes found himself in hairy situations because of inaccurate
weather forecasting based on modeling.
"Everybody kept talking about the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, and
we wanted to know where the numbers came from, what kind of assumptions
were in the models as definitely as possible," he said, "because I had
the experience from a long time before that if you put garbage in, you
get garbage out."
Task force members also wanted to understand the modeling because they
worried that the predictions could lead to what they believed were
unnecessary regulations. "Where we were also coming from, we felt we
didn't want the EPA throwing a lot of new rules at this until we knew
more precisely what would be the most effective methods of solving the
problem," Nelson said.
The report accurately described climate physics and the models used in
the early 1980s, said Anthony Del Genio, a NASA atmospheric scientist
and expert on the general circulation model and climate feedbacks, who
recently read the Columbia document.
But it also reflected "biases prevalent in the academic community at the
time" that simpler models were better than the general circulation one,
Del Genio said in an email. Further, the report's "failure to critically
evaluate the models, some of it justified by the limited knowledge at
that time but some of it a failure to think critically about the simple
models, is its greatest weakness."
Del Genio also questioned why API commissioned such a paper when the
National Academy of Sciences had issued a definitive assessment of
climate models in 1979, known as the Charney report.
More telling is what API did with the information once they read their
own report. "API could have used that knowledge to invest in developing
solutions to climate change," said Peter Frumhoff, director of science
and policy for UCS.
Instead, a year after the task force circulated the report to API's
members, the organization disbanded the committee and shifted its work
on climate change from the environment directorate to its lobbying arm.
The industry's lobbying effort over the years sought to emphasize the
uncertainties surrounding global warming, even as the models improved
and the scientific consensus around man-made climate change grew
stronger. Throughout the 1990s, for instance, it joined Exxon and other
fossil fuel interests in the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), whose
objective was to derail international efforts to curb greenhouse
emissions by questioning climate science. In 1998, API coordinated a
multi-million dollar campaign to convince the public and policymakers
that the Kyoto Protocol was based on tenuous science.
The groups declared victory when President George W. Bush pulled the
U.S. out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001.
A June 2001 briefing memorandum records a top State Department official
thanking the GCC because Bush "rejected the Kyoto Protocol in part,
based on input from you."
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