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Mid-November, the closing arguments were held in a spectacular process: The oil multinational Exxon has been sued by the US state of New York, because he is said to have deceived investors about climate change. As SPIEGEL also reported, Exxon scientists had already prepared in 1982 in an internal document a forecast of the expected CO2 increase and consequent global warming, which has almost exactly arrived to date.
On the other hand, Exxon has told the general public a completely different story, as Harvard researchers around the historian of science Naomi Oreskes have documented in detail: In numerous "advertorials" - comments by Exxon in leading daily newspapers - the group has doubts about the climate research and the role of sown fossil fuels in global warming. To date, the AfD and other "climate skeptics" argue with Exxon's misleading claims. However, Exxon lawyer Theodore Wells did not stop to denigrate the process as a "cruel joke."
The case of James Black has hardly been discussed publicly until now. The senior Exxon scientist had predicted much earlier - as early as July 1977 - a "super-interglacial" that could be caused by high CO2 emissions. Interglacials are warm periods that occur between the ice ages. The Exxon leadership has informed the scientist that the company's internal documents contain a briefing paper warning that we will exceed the temperature level of the Eem Interglacial this century - making our home planet hotter than at least 150,000 years ago will be.
How close Black is to reality with his 42-year-old insights is amazing. This becomes visible when one compares the old graphics with the modern knowledge of paleoclimate research.
In the meantime, our Earth system model is able to correctly reproduce the ice ages from the cycles of the earth's orbit (Milankovic cycles): in computer simulations large ice masses build up on the continents at the right times, CO2 is absorbed by the oceans, the temperatures fall further and further - until a change in the earth's orbit stops the frost again, the ice melts in large part and raises the sea level. This simulation is compared in the graph with the data on which Exxon researchers founded their bleak prediction in 1977.
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Already in 1977, Exxon researcher James Black predicted a "super-interglacial" by CO2 that would be even hotter than the warmest phase of the last 150,000 years of Earth history. Black assumed in his scenario (black curve) that CO2 emissions would increase until around 2025 and then decrease again in the same proportion. A modern computer simulation with an earth system model of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (based on Ganopolski and Brovkin 2017 ) has been laid over his original graphic in red . The inscriptions in the graphic also come from Black - today it is no longer assumed that it would have come to a natural cooling without fossil emissions, but that the stable Holocene climate would have lasted about 50,000 years.
Right, Black had concluded that CO2 warming would surpass the highest temperatures of the Holocene - which she probably already did. It is thus warmer today than in the entire civilization history of humanity. And he should also be right that we will soon exceed the higher temperatures of the Eem interglacial 120,000 years ago. Incidentally, the sea level in the Eem was six to nine meters higher than it is today.
However, Black underestimated the duration of the warming. What he did not know at the time, since this detail was only understood since the beginning of the 2000s: the increased levels of CO2 in the air will continue for tens of thousands of years, and not decline within a few millennia of the end of emissions.
He also had wrong with his dashed future scenario, according to which, without CO2, the earth would gradually fall back into an ice age in the coming millennia. Most likely, we have already released so much CO2 into the atmosphere that the next ice age will fail, even if all emissions are stopped immediately. Man has finally become a geological force, and today's age is rightly considered the Anthropocene - human time.
Exxon ignored James Black's warnings. As its daughter complained in 2016, the management decided, to their father's horror, instead of working on a solution, spending millions of dollars on public relations campaigns to sow climate science concerns. For these deceptions, Exxon is now in court. They have contributed significantly to the fact that today we are in a global climate crisis that is now manageable only by drastic cuts in emissions.
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Whether one can legally approach this maneuver through company law is another question. But even if Exxon were to win this process, further adversity threatens. California has sued Exxon for climate damage, and a number of US cities are trying to court to get Exxon, BP, Chevron and Shell to pay for the cost of coastal protection from rising sea levels. According to a recent analysis, only 20 companies are responsible for one third of the CO2 increase in the Earth's atmosphere, including the four mentioned. It is not unlikely that these companies will be the same as once the tobacco companies, who had to pay a high price in the US for downplaying the dangers of their products.