Big Oil Sued for Studying Uncertainty

There are lawsuits against Big Oil for supposedly deceiving us about climage change.

The London Guardian reports:

xxonMobil executives privately sought to undermine climate science even after the oil and gas giant publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change, according to previously unreported documents revealed by the Wall Street Journal.

The new revelations are based on previously unreported documents subpoenaed by New York’s attorney general as part of an investigation into the company announced in 2015. They add to a slew of documents that record a decades-long misinformation campaign waged by Exxon, which are cited in a growing number of state and municipal lawsuits against big oil. ...

In 2008, Exxon pledged to stop funding climate-denier groups. But that very same year, company leadership said it would support the company in directing a scientist to help the nation’s top oil and gas lobbying group write a paper about the “uncertainty” of measuring greenhouse gas emissions.

The company’s preoccupation with climate uncertainty continued. Before one meeting with company scientists in 2012, one researcher expressed an interest in finding “‘skeptic’ arguments that we consider to be not yet disproven”.

Wow, there is some confusion here on what science is all about.

There cannot be anything wrong with an oil company hiring a scientist to write a paper on the uncertainty of measurements. Every science paper should estimate the uncertainty of whatever is being measured. And they should all examine skeptic arguments.

Of course industry-sponsored research may not agree with environmentalist-sponsored research. It should all be published anyway.