For the most part, the article about Princeton’s investments in petroleum (“Princeton’s Slow Burn,” March issue) speaks for itself. Unfortunately, the article leaves ambiguous what was known about climate change and when. In 1978-82 it was very far from true that “only Exxon inside scientists” knew about the dangers of CO2 emissions, as former trustee E. Philip Cannon ’63 claims. Leaving aside decades of scientific papers, even public policy documents had been warning for years:
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee warned “an increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide could act, much like the glass in a greenhouse, to raise the temperature of the lower air.”
In a 1977 memorandum, Frank Press, President Jimmy Carter’s chief science adviser, warned that “the potential effect on the environment of a climatic fluctuation of such rapidity could be catastrophic.”
A 1979 National Research Council report concluded “the more realistic of the modeling efforts predict a global surface warming of between 2° C and 3.5° C.”
Exxon’s scientists never knew anything qualitatively different from the rest of the scientific community — and many other companies knew the same. Thanks to the efforts of Exxon and others, much of the public might not have understood the path we were on, but anyone at Princeton who wanted to understand the climate could have walked over to the geosciences department and gotten a full explanation.
For the most part, the article about Princeton’s investments in petroleum (“Princeton’s Slow Burn,” March issue) speaks for itself. Unfortunately, the article leaves ambiguous what was known about climate change and when. In 1978-82 it was very far from true that “only Exxon inside scientists” knew about the dangers of CO2 emissions, as former trustee E. Philip Cannon ’63 claims. Leaving aside decades of scientific papers, even public policy documents had been warning for years:
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee warned “an increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide could act, much like the glass in a greenhouse, to raise the temperature of the lower air.”
In a 1977 memorandum, Frank Press, President Jimmy Carter’s chief science adviser, warned that “the potential effect on the environment of a climatic fluctuation of such rapidity could be catastrophic.”
A 1979 National Research Council report concluded “the more realistic of the modeling efforts predict a global surface warming of between 2° C and 3.5° C.”
Exxon’s scientists never knew anything qualitatively different from the rest of the scientific community — and many other companies knew the same. Thanks to the efforts of Exxon and others, much of the public might not have understood the path we were on, but anyone at Princeton who wanted to understand the climate could have walked over to the geosciences department and gotten a full explanation.