AI-Based Study: 80% Of Decades Of Exxon Research Showed Warming; 80% Of Its PR Showed Lies & Denial

[hatrack]

Between 1977 and 2014, 80 percent of ExxonMobil’s internal research supported the idea that human activity was a contributor to climate change. But during that same period, 80 percent of the oil and gas provider’s public statements instead expressed doubt whether climate change was caused by humans—or even real in the first place.

To draw this conclusion, Harvard researchers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes used machine learning to review more than 200 internal documents, peer-reviewed research, and public statements from Exxon Mobil. The newly released paper, “Rhetoric and Frame Analysis of ExxonMobil's Climate Change Communications,” exposes a decades-long pattern of public statements that sanitize the company’s role in contributing to CO2 emissions.

Oreskes and Supran used machine-learning analysis to support two claims. First, ExxonMobil framed conversations on climate change in ways that minimized its own responsibility. Second, while the company publicly cast doubt on the imminent threat of climate change, it funded, then ignored, research finding that climate change is a direct result of human activity.

“It is very important for us to understand the significance of misrepresentation and misleading claims and how they operate,” Oreskes says. “Our purpose in writing this paper was to try to get a better handle on the kinds of language that ExxonMobil had used in order to build a picture that was highly misleading, even if they weren't lying outright.” Oreskes hopes the paper functions as a type of “translator,” revealing the underlying messages behind the public-facing rhetoric. She’s also the author of Merchants of Doubt, a book that inspired a 2014 documentary of the same name looking at the role scientists themselves play in spreading misinformation on climate change.

EDIT

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-shows-exxonmobil-downplayed-role-climate-change/

[jimfields33]

1. If everyone took warming seriously,

We never would have been forced to change from paper to plastic bags in the 1970’s. What was the country thinking? Biggest environmental failure in awhile.