Big Oil knew monster storms were coming. We have the receipts.
Internal documents over the last 45 years reveal the fossil fuel industry has long known their products would supercharge extreme weather.
For the second time in as many weeks, Florida residents are picking up the pieces from a major hurricane supercharged by the climate crisis. While not as severe as meteorologists feared, Milton has killed at least 11 people, left 3 million without electricity, flooded coastal towns, spawned tornadoes, and caused what will likely be billions in damage.
But even as forecasters were left speechless as Milton became one of the fastest-growing hurricanes in history, there was one group of people that shouldn’t have been surprised—fossil fuel executives.
For at least 45 years, oil company scientists have been privately warning executives that burning fossil fuels would lead to catastrophic storms. Their startlingly accurate warnings are detailed in internal documents and publicly-released films obtained by the Center for Climate Integrity and Dutch news site De Correspondent.
Here’s some of what Big Oil knew about the connection between fossil fuels and catastrophic weather, and when they knew it:
1979: Exxon scientists warn managers that fossil fuels will cause “major shifts in weather patterns." An internal memo distributed to Exxon managers summarized an Exxon scientific study that found that “present trends of fossil fuel combustion with a coal emphasis will lead to dramatic world climate changes within the next 75 years.” Those predicted climate shifts included drought, violent storms, hurricanes, sea level rise, and reduced snowpack—all of which are now startlingly accurate. To avoid these changes, one Exxon executive concluded, “dramatic changes in patterns of energy use would be required.”
September 1982: Exxon scientist tells top executives there is “unanimous agreement” about weather shifts. A memo from one of Exxon’s top scientists to Exxon management read: “There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere.” The scientist concluded that despite the connection between “Exxon’s major business” and “the increase of atmospheric CO2,” it is Exxon’s “ethical responsibility” to publish its research (the results were later published in scientific journals).
Source: Center for Climate Integrity November 1982: Exxon manager warns that rising CO2 will lead to potential global catastrophes. In a second memo, sent only a few months later, the head of Exxon’s environmental affairs division warned management that global warming could lead to “potentially catastrophic effects” including sea level rise, melting polar ice caps, drought, and flooding. The Exxon manager summarized an outside scientific study, saying that carbon emissions from fossil fuels could eventually cause “great irreversible harm to our planet.”
1988: Shell scientists predict that fossil fuels will lead to extreme storms. In a confidential report on “The Greenhouse Effect” that summarized five years of internal climate studies, Shell scientists predicted that “increases in CO2 and other greenhouse gases would most likely cause a 2 degree warming by 2040 and a 5 increase by 2100,” which would lead to “dramatic changes in precipitation and storm patterns and a rise in global average sea level.” The report also estimated that there would be an increase in “the frequency of tropical storms, which is again a temperature dependent phenomenon.”
1989: Shell experts project that violent weather could lead to conflicts. A confidential planning document includes projections of the consequences of climate change, including the statement that “there would be more violent weather – more storms, more droughts, more deluges.” The authors warned that people could not escape these extreme weather patterns because “there is no place to go.” The report concluded that the climate crisis could spark multiple conflicts, and that “civilization could prove a fragile thing.”
1991: Shell film projects that abnormal weather will become commonplace. In the film “Climate of Concern”, which was made for public viewing but unseen for years, Shell admitted that global warming would likely lead to intense weather events. “What is now considered abnormal weather could become a new norm,” the film said. “It is thought that warmer seas could make destructive [storm] surges more frequent and even more ferocious.”
1991: BP makes a film about the climate crisis’ impact on extreme weather. In another film produced that year, called “This Earth—What Makes Weather?”, BP presciently predicted the exact warming mechanism that made hurricanes like Helene and Milton so powerful. “From warmer seas, more water would evaporate, making storms and the havoc they cause more frequent,” the film said. “Catastrophic floods could become commonplace.” BP added that “the threat of such climatic change is now one of our most urgent concerns. Never has it been more important to understand climate and the seemingly chaotic mechanisms of weather.”
1998: Shell researchers predict that they’ll be blamed for violent storms. In an astonishing series of internal planning scenarios—nicknamed TINA for “There Is No Alternative”—Shell researchers predicted not only that violent hurricanes would become more likely, but that people would blame fossil fuel companies for them. The report said that by 2010, a “series of violent storms [will cause] extensive damage to the eastern coast of the U.S.”
Shell also predicted that in reaction to more destructive storms, “a coalition of environmental NGOs [will bring] a class-action suit against the US government and fossil-fuel companies on the grounds of neglecting what scientists (including their own) have been saying for years: that something must be done.” Shell’s predictions were so eerily accurate that the Climate Investigations Center called them “seemingly clairvoyant.”
At the same time these internal memos were being circulated, fossil fuel executives from the same companies were publicly downplaying their industry’s role in the climate crisis, and its connection to extreme weather.
In 1988, after a particularly hot summer, oil corporations began to plan their public relations strategy for climate change. In an internal memo in August of that year, an Exxon spokesperson advised leadership to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions” and work with key government agencies, including the United Nations, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency.
In the following decades, fossil fuel companies would run advertising campaigns, write policy, and influence scientific reports to hide the link between fossil fuels and extreme weather. That climate denial is still happening today, as oil giants spend billions delaying any action that will phase out fossil fuels while greenwashing their polluting projects.
As recently as 2015, internal emails obtained by The Wall Street Journal revealed that Exxon executives were still asking scientists to cast doubt on climate science and its connection to natural disasters. Last year, fossil fuel companies sent a record 2,456 lobbyists to the United Nations annual climate summit to influence negotiations. And most recently, the U.S. Senate Budget Committee found that the fossil fuel industry is still misleading the public about its efforts to mitigate the climate crisis, while privately admitting it can’t meet its net zero emissions goals.
These tactics successfully blocked policy over the past 50 years that could have helped prevent climate catastrophes like Milton. Half of U.S. states, including Florida, recently passed laws prohibiting methane gas restrictions, even though it’s a highly-polluting fossil fuel. Fossil fuel lobbyists have also prevented a global resolution ending fossil fuel use, which experts say is necessary to preserve a livable climate.
Further reading:
Hurricane Milton Made a Terrible Prediction Come True. The Atlantic, October 9, 2024.
Hurricane experts are still trying to understand why the current season is so scrambled. The extreme storm in July, the sudden lull during the traditional hurricane peak in late August and early September, and the explosion of cyclones in October together suggest that “the climatological rules of the past no longer apply,” Ryan Truchelut, a meteorologist in Florida who runs the consulting firm WeatherTiger, told me. For Truchelut, who has been in the business for 20 years, “there is a dreamlike unreality to living through this time,” as if he’s no longer living on the same planet he grew up on.
Why vilify the oil and gas industry? HEATED, August 2024.
Today, the fossil fuel industry and its allies paint climate activists as villains for demanding a “rapid” transition away from fossil fuels—as if they aren’t the reason the transition needs to be “rapid” in the first place. Indeed, the transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewables could have started 50 years ago, when fossil fuel companies first found out about catastrophic climate change.
Democrats accuse Big Oil of climate change ‘denial and doublespeak’. Financial Times, May 2024.
It also reports the industry pushed gas, made mainly from methane, as a clean fuel while “internally acknowledging that there is significant scientific evidence that the lifecycle emissions from gas are as bad as coal.” Companies also made public pledges to support the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement and reach net zero emissions targets, while internally recognising they could not achieve those goals, the investigation finds.
New files shed light on ExxonMobil’s efforts to undermine climate science. The Guardian, September 2023..
After a climate science presentation to Exxon’s board of directors in April 2015, Tillerson called the 2C goal “something magical”, according to a summary of the meeting. “Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough?” he said, noting that meeting such targets would be “very expensive”.
America Is Lying to Itself About the Cost of Disasters. The Atlantic, October 5, 2024.
This mismatch, between catastrophes the government has budgeted for and the actual toll of overlapping or supersize disasters, keeps happening—after Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Florence. Almost every year now, FEMA is hitting the same limits, Carlos Martín, who studies disaster mitigation and recovery for the Brookings Institution, told me. Disaster budgets are calculated to past events, but “that’s just not going to be adequate” as events grow more frequent and intense.
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Love this great journalism!! This will be very useful when it's time to the class action lawsuit.
Profit over life. It's beyond despicable.