The news is making it's way through a lot of different outlets now, due to two different independent investigations into Exxon.

Exxon's awareness of man made global warming dates back to 1977, and their own confirmation of fossil fuel burning having an impact came by 1982. By 1989, they formed a group to begin spreading misinformation about the topic, eerily similar to the misinformation campaign the tobacco industry ran trying to cover up the lung cancer link.

Further in depth reading is here: http://insideclimatenews.org/news/150920...-global-warming

Or here: http://graphics.latimes.com/exxon-arctic/

Or by searching for Exxon Knew to see the still expanding coverage.

I ended up spending some time this weekend looking back at some older threads here, where it was clear we had a number of skeptics in the crowd. Sadly it illustrated how effective Exxon's misinformation campaign was. By injecting some of the misinformation into the political system, it gained widespread acceptance thanks to the polarization of politics in the US.

Even earlier than that: Prior to 1977, as a kid, I was a big fan of Jacques Cousteau and was a member of the Cousteau society. I remember receiving a letter from them, describing the problem with global warming and calling for action, even back then. Though it wasn't called that at the time.

What's stunning to me is that Exxon management knew by 1977 that CO2 was the likely reason for it, chose to fund great resources for studying it, then flipped to the misinformation campaign after confirming the link. This is quite possibly the most immoral decision made by a business. (VW and Phillip Morris execs are probably happy they are off the hook here )

There was knowledge of global warming before 1977, but it seems the direct tie to CO2 was still being researched and consensus hadn't been reached. Exxon for a time did help to bring more of the scientific community to agreement on the issue while they were studying it in the early 80s.

With the knowledge they had from their research, they could have easily pivoted to still be the most valuable company this planet has while also working to keep it habitable by humanity. Instead they used that knowledge only for their own future extraction efforts.

The effectiveness of the misinformation, including the link to it being caused by human activity can be seen in the 2008 world wide polling. Even though at the time 97% of Americans were aware of global warming, 51% didn't believe humans had anything to do with it. Exxon had it within their power to swing that to levels seen in South Korea, where only 8% denied the link.

They need to make a sequel to Thank You for Smoking.

Attempts to read the tea leaves, err, the Exxon response to gauge the situation:

http://qz.com/531899/exxonmobil-facing-u...king-the-media/

I recall my father, who was a marine biologist and biochemist, talking about climatic shifts caused by greenhouse gasses such as CO2 being a future problem when I was only about ten or eleven, so it was certainly a suspected problem even back in the early seventies. He followed the literature on it quite closely for a long time.

There are also SF stories based on the concept going back to the sixties at least.

Global warming via manmade CO2 emissions certainly isn't a new idea. I can well believe that people in the industries that tended to contribute to such emissions were well aware of the problems for a very long time. As always, though, the profit motive tends to push common sense and cautious approaches out of the way fairly easily

Momentum growing for a legal investigation. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34750196