Exxon Thought Deep Dive on Climate Research Would Protect Its Business

"Outfitting its biggest supertanker to measure the ocean's absorption of carbon dioxide was a crown jewel in Exxon's research program."

"In 1981, 12-year-old Laura Shaw won her seventh-grade science fair at the Solomon Schechter Day School in Cranford, N.J. with a project on the greenhouse effect.

For her experiment, Laura used two souvenir miniatures of the Washington Monument, each with a thermometer attached to one side. She placed them in glass bowls and covered one with plastic wrap – her model of how a blanket of carbon dioxide traps the reflected heat of the sun and warms the Earth. When she turned a lamp on them, the thermometer in the plastic-covered bowl showed a higher temperature than the one in the uncovered bowl.

If Laura and her two younger siblings were unusually well-versed in the emerging science of the greenhouse effect, as global warming was known, it was because their father, Henry Shaw, had been busily tracking it for Exxon Corporation."

Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song, and David Hasemyer report for InsideClimate News September 17, 2015, in the second installment of a multipart series, "Exxon: The Road Not Taken."

SEE ALSO:

"A Deep Dive into What Exxon Knew About Global Warming and When (1978) it Knew It" (Dot Earth/NYT)