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Early oil industry knowledge of CO2 and global warming

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 1024–1025 (2018)Cite this article

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To the Editor — In a seminal 1960 article in the journal Tellus, Charles Keeling reported that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 at the South Pole was rising at a rate “nearly that to be expected from the [global] combustion of fossil fuel”1. His measurements, begun in 1957, allowed him to start constructing the famous Keeling curve — the continuous, direct record of rising CO2 levels around the globe caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. Yet archival documents show that even before Keeling published his measurements, oil industry leaders were aware that their products were causing CO2 pollution to accumulate in the planet’s atmosphere in a potentially dangerous fashion. And when US President Lyndon Johnson's Science Advisory Committee warned of global warming in 1965, the petroleum industry’s main trade association, the American Petroleum Institute (API), relayed the warning to its members.

In 1954, the geochemist Harrison Brown and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology submitted a research proposal to the API entitled “The determination of the variations and causes of variations of the isotopic composition of carbon in nature.” The scientists proposed the use of new mass spectrometers to investigate the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 in terrestrial, marine and mineral systems to understand geological and biological carbon cycling.

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Fig. 1: Excerpt of research proposal to the API from Harrison Brown and colleagues in 1954.
Fig. 2: Excerpt of address given by API President Frank Ikard at the organization's annual meeting in 1965.

References

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Center for Climate Integrity and the Stanford University Department of History. T. Boughton of the University of Wyoming is thanked for providing the image for Fig. 2.

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  1. Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Benjamin Franta

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Franta, B. Early oil industry knowledge of CO2 and global warming. Nature Clim Change 8, 1024–1025 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0349-9

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