NNadir
NNadir's JournalImproved Dissolution of Plutonium Bearing Fuels Using Biodegradable Solvents.
The paper I'll briefly discuss in this post is this one: Biodegradable Methane Sulfonic Acid-Based Nonaqueous Dissolution, Estimation, and Recovery: Toward Development of a Simplified Scheme for Plutonium-Bearing Fuel Matrices Shiny S. Kumar, Ashutosh Srivastava, and Ankita Rao Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2023 62 (1), 660-669
Plutonium dioxide, like the compound often utilized to model it, cerium dioxide, is an extremely insoluble compound, owing to its tendency to form polymeric species. During reprocessing, which up to this time has involved the PUREX process - a process I personally think is probably outdated as better reprocessing chemistries clearly exist - the formation of plutonium oxide polymers can be and often is problematic.
The Purex process involves nitric acid dissolution of chopped fuel rods, and then partition of fission products and actinides via solvent extraction, generally into kerosene using complexing agents, historically tributyl phosphate. Many other complexing agents have been studied and or utilized, and a variety of modifications of the Purex process have been developed with a number of names such as UREX, Talspeak, Diamex, Ganex, and Truex. The particular details do not matter; they are all largely solvent extraction procedures.
Whether I, and many others believe, that solvent extraction should go away, the reality is that the recovery of plutonium is an essential factor in saving the world and like it or not, most of it has accumulated in used nuclear fuels the overwhelming majority of which are oxide fuels. It is thus with interest that I came across the cited paper which to my knowledge is quite novel. I'm not going to spend a tremendous time discussing it, because I don't have the time and it's in any case, very esoteric, but I thought that the opening paragraphs about the Indian nuclear program, which is in my view, quite innovative in the sense that it involves the best thermal reactor there is, the Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor, the only thermal reactor currently available that is a breeder, albeit using thorium.
The opening paragraphs:
U and Pu assay methods based on neutron activation analysis, X-ray fluorescence, spectrophotometry, radiometry, and mass spectrometry are used at different stages of fuel fabrication and reprocessing. (4?7) However, stringent specifications for the fuel materials at all fabrication stages are ensured by chemical quality control (CQC). (8) Electrometric methods are preferred for bulk assay of U and Pu as a part of the CQC exercise owing to high accuracy and precision offered as well as fast throughput and simple instrumentation requirement. (8) The first step of this method involves matrix-dependent dissolution process employing mineral acids (hydrofluoric acid–nitric acid or sulfuric acid–nitric acid) along with heat treatment [infrared (IR) lamp/reflux]. This is followed by the second step of redox titrimetric determination of U and Pu which mandates addition of different reagents. U and Pu are determined separately by Ti(III) reduction method and AgO oxidation method, respectively. (8?11) Large volume of analytical solution is thus generated which comprises of U and Pu along with several other metal ions (Ti, Ag, Fe, Cr, etc.) in mineral acid medium and requires multiple cumbersome steps for the recovery and purification of Pu. Several “green” approaches for dissolution and recovery of actinide matrices based on supercritical carbon dioxide extraction, room-temperature ionic liquids (RTILs), and deep eutectic solvents (DESs) have been reported. (12?18) Separate studies on reagent-free voltammetric determination of U and Pu on modified electrodes have been carried out. (19?21) However, there is no report addressing the challenge of simplification of the entire scheme, comprising dissolution, determination, and recovery, for the bulk assay of Pu-bearing fuel matrices.
The aim of the present study is to explore a universal, matrix-independent, and non-aqueous method for dissolution and reagent-free determination followed by the simplified route for recovery of Pu. Methane sulfonic acid (MSA) is a biodegradable organic acid that is part of the natural “sulfur cycle.” It is, therefore, considered as a green solvent. (22) It is a well-known solvent for the electroplating industry. However, neat MSA has been explored for the first time in the present study for the dissolution of plutonium-bearing solid matrices. Hence, conditions were optimized for quantitative dissolution of the solid matrices, viz., PuO2, (U,Pu)O2, and (U,Pu)C in MSA, with simple IR heating. Redox speciation of Pu and U in MSA, being a novel system, was studied by UV–visible spectrophotometry and electrometry. Attempts were made to understand the mechanism of MSA–U complexation by IR spectroscopy and water content determination. Subsequently, feasibility was established for reagent-free differential pulse voltammetry-based method for simultaneous determination of U and Pu on a commercially available glassy carbon (GC) electrode. After determination, Pu can be precipitated from MSA medium as oxalate with a Pu removal of >98%. It is noteworthy that the present study also unlocks the prospect of application of MSA in the back-end of the fuel cycle for spent nuclear fuel dissolution and selective actinide separation owing to its strong dissolution power and stabilization of specific oxidation state of metal ions.
India's fast breeder reactor will utilize carbide fuels; the proposed process is flexible enough to incorporate these.
(I'm a nitride and metallic fuel kind of guy, more metallic than nitride, since I think we should exploit modern materials science to exploit some of plutonium metal's less appreciated remarkable properties, but I don't really have a big problem with carbides with the caveat that they tend to moderate neutrons, something less than desirable for breeding purposes, as it reduces neutron economy.)
The authors have a nice table of data from their experiments:
The authors also discuss a lot of wonderful analytical chemistry; regrettably I won't have time to go into it.
It is a lab scale process for now, but probably worth consideration for scale up and piloting. A photograph of some dissolved plutonium:
The caption:
A sort of stripped down process diagram concludes the paper, showing as many process flow diagrams do not the PAT, process analytical technology:
The caption:
Interesting, I think.
If we are going to save what is left to be saved, and restore what can be restored, we are going to need to utilize plutonium intelligently, continuously working to improve processing. It's nice to see this work along those lines.
Another Orwellian "Green is Black" Day in Germany.
Today, as yesterday, Germany has the second worst CO2 intensity for its power grid in Europe.
(I remarked on this yesterday for both the 30 day trend and the daily trend: 30 Day German Carbon Intensity Is 709 g CO2/kWh, Second Highest in Europe After Poland.)
Today's color coded Electricity Map for Europe:
Apparently the wind isn't blowing in Germany (again) and the sun isn't shining brightly at 8:45 in the morning (again).
Whenever the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, the Germans apparently feel it's their "right" to burn coal and dump the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere driving climate change and killing people.
Fuckers.
Germany is run by a coalition including members of the ignorance purveying antinuke cult "Greenpeace." For truth in advertising purposes perhaps that long lived cult should change its name to "CoalPiece."
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Omics Analysis of an Organism That Metabolizes Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH).
The paper that I'll briefly discuss is this one: Multi-Omic Profiling of a Newly Isolated Oxy-PAH Degrading Specialist from PAH-Contaminated Soil Reveals Bacterial Mechanisms to Mitigate the Risk Posed by Polar Transformation Products, Sara N. Jiménez-Volkerink, Joaquim Vila, Maria Jordán, Cristina Minguillón, Hauke Smidt, and Magdalena Grifoll Environmental Science & Technology 2023 57 (1), 139-149.
PAH's are components of dangerous fossil fuel waste that are found in air, water, and land both from combustion and spills, leaks and mining (including drilling) residues. The mechanism by which they work as carcinogens includes the fact that they are planar molecules which can insert into the major and minor grooves of DNA. If partially oxidized they can form adducts with nucleosides, inducing a metabolic cascade leading to uncontrolled cell division. There are many pathways by which PAHs can oxidize, and the problem is to further break down these molecules before they can reach carcinogenic concentrations.
I generally think of them as being recalcitrant to bioremediation, as they are toxic, and so I was pleased to see this "Omics" paper showing the metabolic pathway by which an organism, Sphingobium sp. AntQ-1, that is found in soils oxidizes PAH's in order to generate cellular energy. "Omics" includes proteomics, the structure and function of proteins, lipidomics, the structure and function of lipids, genomics, the structure and function of DNA, RNA and related compounds, and finally glycomics, the structure and function of sugars.
The paper is a detailed analysis of the proteome and the coding genes, as well as the pathway of degradation.
From the introduction to the paper:
Bioremediation is the most sustainable technology for the clean-up of hydrocarbon contaminated sites due to its cost-effectiveness, low environmental footprint, and capability to restore key natural soil functions. (7) Nevertheless, some studies have reported an eventual increase in genotoxicity in bioremediated PAH-polluted soils that has been associated to polar fractions enriched in oxy-PAHs resulting from PAH biotransformations. (8,9) A recent study has identified 2H-naphtho[2,1,8-def]chromen-2-one, a bacterial metabolite of pyrene, as a main contributor of the genotoxicity observed in PAH-polluted soil after treatment in an aerobic bioreactor. (9) Due to their physicochemical properties, oxy-PAHs have greater bioavailability and environmental mobility than PAHs, (10,11) and a number of them have been demonstrated to present higher (geno)toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic activities than their unsubstituted counterparts. (12,13) Several bacterial isolates are known to produce oxy-PAHs as dead-end products during aerobic metabolism of PAHs. (14,15) Further biodegradation of such oxy-PAHs has been reported after stimulation of the microbial activity in soils; (3,4) however, little is known about the microorganisms and mechanisms underlying their fate in the environment.
9,10-Anthraquinone (ANTQ), the ready oxidation product from anthracene (ANT), is one of the most commonly found oxy-PAHs in PAH-contaminated soils (1,10) and has been classified as possibly carcinogenic to humans (group 2B) by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. (16) ANTQ has been reported as a dead-end transformation product of anthracene by pyrene-degrading mycobacteria, (14,17) and its formation and eventual removal during biological treatment of contaminated soils has been reported. (3,18,19) In a PAH-contaminated soil from a former manufactured-gas plant, ANTQ biodegradation was associated to uncultured Sphingomonas and Phenylobacterium species (20) detected by DNA stable-isotope probing, but the specific metabolic mechanisms involved remain to be elucidated.
In this study, we report the isolation of a bacterial strain (AntQ-1) able to utilize 9,10-anthraquinone as a sole carbon source from PAH-contaminated soil from a historical wood-treating facility in the south of Spain. This isolate is used as a model to shed light on the microbial mechanisms driving oxy-PAH biodegradation in contaminated soils...
Regrettably I won't have much time to go into the paper's details, but a few graphics can evoke the general nature.
The first evokes the genome and translational proteome:
The caption:
The metabolic pathway leading to the complete breakdown of the oxidized PAHs.
The caption:
In deliberately contaminated test soils in the laboratory, the organism was shown to thrive and the concentration of the dangerous pollutants declined significantly.
Very cool, I think.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
30 Day German Carbon Intensity Is 709 g CO2/kWh, Second Highest in Europe After Poland.
Coal dependent Poland is at 934 g CO2/kwh. To address this terrible record, Poland is planning to go nuclear against climate change. They at least have a real plan to get better.
Electricity map, Germany (Accessed 1/25/23, 3:45 EST US)
As of this writing, 9:35 Berlin time, 01/25/23, German carbon intensity is 734 g CO2/kwh, again the second worst in Europe.
Their much heralded wind capacity of 66.6 GW is actually producing 3.62 GW of power, for a capacity utilization of 5.49%. It is, in effect, nearly useless, and there is nothing that Germans can do to make the wind blow when their demand is rising.
In Germany "Green" is black.
In case you ever thought antinukes give a rat's ass about climate change, they don't.
Recovery of indium, yttrium, neodymium, and lanthanum by urban mining via pseudoprotic ionic...
...liquids.
The paper to which I'll briefly refer to in this post is this one: Pseudo-Protic Ionic Liquids for the Extraction of Metals Relevant for Urban Mining, Claudia Castillo-Ramírez and Camiel H. C. Janssen, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2023 62 (1), 627-636.
In my generation we were trained to believe that recycling was a kind of magic. Many of us dutifully separated our plastic, our glass, and our aluminum for the purpose or recycling or, more realistically, for the purpose of letting ourselves believe we were green. Before the rise of diesel powered garbage trucks for municipal recycling, I personally used to load all this crap up into the trunk of my car and drive it to a recycling center, whereupon I would be offered a nominal sum for my efforts.
In the case of plastic, the results of our efforts are in. There are almost no living things, including humans, that do not contain micro or nano plastics in their flesh; there seems to be no upper limit to how much. It is now understood that not only are all of the oceans and lakes laced with plastics, but apparently we are breathing nano plastics suspended in air.
Here's a nice paper on the topic: Bioeffects of Inhaled Nanoplastics on Neurons and Alteration of Animal Behaviors through Deposition in the Brain Xiaoyan Liu, Yingcan Zhao, Jiabin Dou, Qinghong Hou, Jinxiong Cheng, and Xingyu Jiang Nano Letters 2022 22 (3), 1091-1099
Um...brains...you don't say? I wonder if inhaling too much plastic accounts for Republicans and anti-nukes.
Speaking of anti-nukes, there's a fun one around here who likes to call up a link to the USGS reference on indium in hopes of embarrassing me for my contention that the supply of indium is limited, and that there probably isn't plenty of indium to make billions and billions of CIGS type solar cells. This is the sort of moron who believes that we should drive the nuclear industry out of business by mining the shit out of the Earth, roasting zinc sulfide ores from which indium is obtained (presumably with forests as a fuel source), copiously releasing sulfur oxides in the process, this because dumb people are terrified of traces of radiation even as they don't give a rat's ass about the millions of people who die each year from air pollution while we all wait increasingly breathlessly for the grand solar and wind nirvana that did not come, is not here, and won't come.
After nearly 3/4 of a century of cheering the solar industry, at an expense of trillions of dollars, in 2021 the solar industry produced just 5 Exajoules of the 624 Exajoules humanity consumed that year:
Source: 2022 IEA World Energy Outlook Table A 1a, page 435.
Don't worry. Be happy. I'm sure we'll be able to increase the solar industry's supply of indium even if we need to tear the shit out of the ocean floor to do so, and increase the solar output to 624/5 * 100 = 12,480%. And we'll make lots of batteries too, because the supply of cobalt slaves to dig cobalt for our Powerwalls® in our "green" (albeit deforested) nirvana.
Perhaps the person with access to the USGS Indium link should write the authors of the paper cited at the outset. They seem to have not gotten the message that "solar will save us" antinuke wants to offer us, that indium is "no problem." Apparently people dying from extreme heat while we wait for the solar nirvana are no problem either.
One hears these sorts of things and one doesn't want to believe it.
The authors of the paper writes about indium, thus:
By the way, the existence of an "energy transition," which shows up all over the place, even in scientific papers, is a nonsense statement given the data from the IEA World Energy Outlook produced above. The use of coal, oil and gas is increasing faster than the solar and wind energy that has become an object of religious worship. Apollo and Aeolus are back, but almost certainly as meaningful in practical terms as they were to citizens of classical Greece, people whose civilization vanished.
The other elements discussed are yttrium, neodymium and lanthanum.
The authors write of lanthanum, neodymium, and yttrium:
Neodymium is widely used in (strong, permanent) magnets. (1) These neodymium magnets are popular for their use in electronic equipment such as microphones and headphones. (1,36) Neodymium can also be found in the magnets used in electric motors. (1,5) The current transition to electric cars, particularly in Europe will only increase future demand. Research has shown that neodymium can be recycled for use in new magnets. (3)
Yttrium saw extensive use in the manufacturing of cathode ray tube (CRT) TVs. (1) Yttrium can be used in superconductors because it becomes superconducting at a temperature superior to the boiling point of nitrogen. Yttrium is considered to be one of the materials with serious shortage in the near future...
The ionic liquids the authors propose as an extraction agent for urban mining (based on dissolution of waste electronics in nitric acid) have the following structure:
The caption:
The extraction of indium from nitric acid solutions is nearly quantitative:
The caption:
However getting the indium out of the extractant is more difficult than getting it in:
(These last two graphics are representative of the general trends for all the PPIL (Pseudoprotic ionic liquids) discussed in the paper. I have arbitrarily chosen two of these graphics.)
The problem of the baby boomer generation's - my demographic - belief that recycling, currently referred to as "closed cycles" in the literature, will solve things is fantastic, where here the word "fantastic" refers to fantasy and not fabulousness. The issue is tied to transport, and the driver of transport, energy, as well as heat energy. No, you will not be able to get this heat by bullshitting endlessly about the wonders of solar and wind power.
(I find my generation embarrassing.)
No mass cycle can be entirely closed; there will always be process losses, and the word for these losses is "pollution," because the losses are rejected to the environment.
This said, being a baby boomer, I do believe that closed cycles are a worthy aspiration, to the extent possible. However this can only be accomplished with low environmental impact with continuous flow processes, and driving cans and glass and plastic to a recycling center is counter-productive. Further the more dilute a source is, for example indium from a touch screen or CIGS cell, the more energy is required to recover it and the greater the environmental impact. The entropy of mixing is a big, big, big, big deal to overcome, hardly trivial. Thus we need clean and sustainable energy, of which there is only one kind, nuclear energy.
You can imagine that all these solar cells that will become electronic waste just as today's toddlers are graduating from college will be magically recycled, or you can get serious.
It's a choice.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
I'd like to propose another headline for a Harper's article posted on the cover.
It's not like I read the article. I really don't need to see what Francis Fukuyama (one of the authors) thinks about anything any more than I need to understand the plot of the latest Disney movie, whatever it might be.
However, I'll suggest replacing the headline, "Is liberalism worth saving?" with "Is insanity worth embracing?"
The cover:
Hydrogen industry shifting to low-emissions technologies - study.
Let's title this one under "misleading headlines."
Hydrogen industry shifting to low-emissions technologies – study
I've spent most of my career involved, albeit somewhat indirectly, with patents and patent literature.
Many patents require "reduced to practice," but that can mean demonstrating something on a bench top. The patent literature tends to be as vague as possible while still being as broad as possible. One of my very best and oldest friends is a patent examiner. Recently he told me that some of the stuff he reads is incredibly dangerous, but the policy of the patent office is not to rule on danger but merely on originality.
If one spends a lot of time reading patents, and in some cases even works to reproduce the claims, one can easily recognize why there is a huge, incredibly huge, gargantuan, difference between the number of patents issued and the number which actually make it to an industrial process. It is extremely rare for a patent to make it to industrial scale, particularly a scale that matters.
But here, in this badly written and very misleading article we have the claim that filing a patent is the same as changing an industry.
I have heard, but not confirmed, that a requirement for a perpetual motion machine to be patented is to produce a working model.
The hydrogen fantasy is just that when viewed seriously in the extreme, a perpetual motion machine. Hydrogen is not a primary source of energy on this planet, although many decades have been spent trying to develop a fusion device that can recover exergy, an effort still underway, but still in no way practical. (In stars, hydrogen is not a primary source of energy via combustion, but as almost everyone knows, nuclear fusion.)
Making hydrogen wastes primary energy. This is the consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, the one that rules out perpetual motion machines.
The article does include a bit of reality, which I will put in bold:
An aspiration, even a silly and in many cases, stupid - to the point of being dangerous - aspiration, is not the same as a practice, in particular, industrial practice.
It is notable that an electrolysis patent of any kind relies on, um, electricity, which is a badly thermodynamically degraded form of energy. Worldwide, the energy efficiency of generating electricity is well below 40%. The share of electricity generated by dangerous fossil fuels is not decreasing; if anything, it's getting worse, particularly in the case where dangerous fossil fuels back up unreliable energy systems that are often out of phase with demand, to wit, the solar industry. Starting and stopping dangerous fossil fuel plants arbitrarily wastes energy, just as the production of electricity itself wastes energy. Degrading electricity further with the production of hydrogen, and even worse, compressing hydrogen and/or cooling it to extreme temperatures is an environmentally dangerous idea, one that will make things worse, not better. That's my opinion, and I'm inflexible on the point.
We are going to see carbon dioxide concentrations in the planetary atmosphere this year of over 423 ppm, less than ten years after we first saw concentrations of over 400 ppm.
No one now living will ever again see concentrations of less than 400 ppm. We owe it to the future of humanity to get serious.
Even on Mars, there's a huge difference in reliability.
From my Nature Briefing: What’s happened to China’s first Mars rover?
Subtitle:
Nature News by Smriti Mallapaty, January 20, 2023.
“It wouldn’t be surprising for the rover to fail to come out of hibernation because it is solar-powered, and there’s a long history of solar-powered landers and rovers on Mars running out of power,” says David Flannery, an astrobiologist at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is part of the team working on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, which runs on nuclear power. Last month, researchers said goodbye to NASA’s solar-powered InSight lander, which succumbed to a dust storm...
...Dust storm
Last May, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced that it had powered Zhurong down because a major dust storm was heading its way. Dust swirling around the atmosphere reduces the amount of solar radiation that reaches the surface of Mars. And dust that settles on the rover’s solar panels can also reduce the amount of sunlight it receives, affecting its power generation, says Chide...
...In May, the CNSA said that temperatures would drop to –20 °C during the day and –100 °C at night, and were expected to fall further. Cold temperatures mean that Zhurong needs more energy to keep its battery warm and prevent it from failing...
I added the bold where it appears.
Dust and dirt on solar cells on Earth is also a problem, albeit one rarely discussed, since the praise of solar energy has become a sort of international religion, albeit one that has had zero effect on climate change, climate change having never been the main driver for the solar fantasy in any case. At least in its beginning, the "solar will save us" fantasy was all about irrational, and frankly, deadly opposition to nuclear power.
Other problems with solar power on Earth not found on Mars with solar cells are weather, clouds, rain, and especially snow, and in the higher latitudes, the existence of winter solstices.
Of course, on Earth, people fire up redundant dangerous fossil fuel plants when the unreliability of solar panels is observed. This represents the mechanism by which the so called "renewable energy" game kills people, indirectly, owing to its reliance on dangerous fossil fuels, since fossil fuel plants kill people whenever they operate normally or otherwise.
Oh. Oh. Neutrinos can't be sterile. A new thing to worry about...
Nuclear reaction rules out sterile-neutrino hypothesisJun Cao, Nature, News and Views Jan. 11, 2023.
Subtitle:
What they're saying about them neutrinos:
In 1989, experiments1 on the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, determined precisely that there were three types (or ‘flavours’, in particle-physics terms) of neutrino. The three confirmed flavours are the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino. Neutrinos are generated when cosmic rays interact with Earth’s atmosphere, and also through nuclear fusion occurring in the Sun’s core. Experiments designed to detect these atmospheric5 and solar6 neutrinos established the curious fact that neutrinos oscillate — they change spontaneously from one flavour to another as they travel.
Neutrino oscillation can occur only if neutrinos have mass, and their mass is difficult to measure. An electron neutrino (or any other flavour) is a quantum mixture of three states that have different masses. When this neutrino moves through space, quantum interference between the three states leads to the periodic flavour transformations that constitute neutrino oscillation.
Although scientists do not know the exact values of the neutrino masses, they can measure the differences between them; these are called ‘mass splittings’ and are proportional to the oscillation frequencies...
Let me say this, I don't want no damn pervert neutrinos from other planets oscillatin' and propagatin' in my town. We have small children in this neighborhood!
One possible explanation8 for this reactor antineutrino anomaly is that some neutrinos morph into sterile neutrinos after they leave the reactor core. Dedicated experiments were designed to investigate this possibility by installing detectors close to the reactor, usually at a distance of around 10 metres, where an oscillation into sterile neutrinos might show up in the observed energy spectrum. However, these experiments made the picture only messier: some reported that such a signature was observed9,10, and others reported a negative result11,12...
They're damned lucky that they're hard to detect, cause if I was to detect one oscillatin' on my property I'd smash 'em so hard they'd really find out what subatomic means:
And I don't want no "bumping" in my town either.
Damn perverts, them neutrinos. I'll sterilize 'em for sure if they'n come near my family.
Assessing ExxonMobil's global warming projections
The fun article I'll discuss appears in the current issue of Science: G. Supran, S. Rahmstorf, N. Oreskes Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections Science 379, 6628 eabk0063 (2023)
Two of the authors are from the History of Science at Harvard; one is from the Potsdam Institute for Climate.
(I'm surprised that they have this kind of institute in Germany, where the official government policy is to shut climate change gas free energy and substitute it with coal, but, well, glass houses and all of that...)
I'm not sure if the paper is open sourced, so I'll excerpt its finding that Exxon, while spending advertising and other dollars in climate denial, actually knew, probably better than most other organizations, how bad climate change would be. (Shades of Phillip Morris!)
The abstracts should be open, some excerpts from the text:
This corpus of fossil fuel documents has attracted widespread scholarly, journalistic, political, and legal attention, leading to the conclusion that the fossil fuel industry has known for decades that their products could cause dangerous global warming. In 2017, we used content analysis to demonstrate that Exxon’s internal documents, as well as peer-reviewed studies authored or coauthored by Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists, overwhelmingly acknowledged that global warming is real and human-caused (10). By contrast, we found that the majority of Mobil and ExxonMobil Corp’s public communications promoted doubt on the matter. Cities, counties, and states have accordingly filed dozens of lawsuits variously accusing ExxonMobil Corp and other companies of deceit and responsibility for climate damages (11). The attorney general of Massachusetts, for instance, alleges that ExxonMobil has had a “long-standing internal scientific knowledge of the causes and consequences of climate change” and waged “public deception campaigns” that misrepresented that knowledge (12). Civil society campaigns seeking to hold fossil fuel interests accountable for allegedly misleading shareholders, customers, and the public about climate science have emerged under monikers such as #ExxonKnew, #ShellKnew, and #TotalKnew (13–15) (see Box 1 for more examples).
But what exactly did the fossil fuel industry understand about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming, and how accurate did their understanding prove to be? Several of the documents in question include explicit projections of the amount of warming that could be expected to occur over time in response to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Yet, whereas the text of these documents has been interrogated in detail, the numerical and graphical data in them have not. Indeed, no one has systematically reported climate modeling projections by any fossil fuel interest, let alone assessed their accuracy and skill. This contrasts with academic climate models, whose performance has been extensively scrutinized (16–24).
In this Review, we report and analyze all known projections of global mean surface temperature (hereafter “temperature”) change reported by company scientists working for Exxon and/or for ExxonMobil Corp after Exxon’s merger with Mobil Oil Corp in 1999. (Hereafter, we collectively refer to Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp as “ExxonMobil” or the “company.”) Some projections resulted from models built or run in-house by ExxonMobil scientists, sometimes in collaboration with independent researchers. Others were produced by third parties and then discussed by ExxonMobil scientists in internal reports. Where relevant, we distinguish these provenances, but otherwise we collectively refer to these projections as “reported” by ExxonMobil scientists...
Regrettably I'm not going to have time, especially because I'm ill and trying to keep up with other stuff in my life, to go into a lot of detail on this paper, so I'll cut to the chase:
Using manual content analysis, we identify all documents that reported climate model outputs of (i) a time series of projected future temperature, and (ii) future external radiative forcings...
...This yields 12 documents published between 1977 and 2003, which contain 16 distinct temperature projections presented in the form of 12 unique graphs and one table (summarized in SM section S2.2). The 12 documents comprise seven internal memos (1977 to 1985) and five peer-reviewed papers (1985 to 2003). Twelve of the 16 temperature projections came from models built or run in-house by ExxonMobil scientists, typically in collaboration with independent researchers. Once identified, all original temperature and forcing projections are converted for analysis by digitizing graphs and extracting tables...
...Our findings about the company’s early understanding of climate science contradict many of the claims that the company and its allies have made in public.
Emphasizing uncertainties
It has been established that, for many years, Exxon’s public affairs strategy was—as a 1988 internal memo put it—to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions regarding the potential enhanced greenhouse effect” (10, 44, 50). However, our analysis shows that in their reports and briefings to management, ExxonMobil’s own scientists did not particularly emphasize uncertainty; on the contrary, the level of uncertainty indicated by their global warming projections (bootstrapped 2? standard error of the mean = ±21%) was commensurate with that reported by independent academics (±16%). Crucially, it excluded the possibility of no anthropogenic global warming; at no point did company scientists suggest that human-caused global warming would not occur. Nor did they conclude that the uncertainties were too great to permit differentiation of human and natural drivers. Yet publicly, ExxonMobil Corp made these claims until at least the early 2010s (see Box 2)...
Denigrating climate models
ExxonMobil has often specifically claimed or suggested in public that climate models are “unreliable” (51). In 1999, for example, ExxonMobil Corp’s chief executive officer (CEO) Lee Raymond said future climate “projections are based on completely unproven climate models, or, more often, sheer speculation.” (2) In 2013, his successor, Rex Tillerson, called climate models “not competent” (52). In 2015, he stated: “We do not really know what the climate effects of 600 ppm versus 450 ppm will be because the models simply are not that good” (53). The company’s own modeling contradicts such statements. Exxon’s 1982 projection shown in Fig. 1 (panel 3), for example, suggests that 600 ppm of atmospheric CO2 would lead to 1.3°C more global warming than 450 ppm...
...Mythologizing global cooling
...overlaying the original graph with the temperatures simulated by a modern Earth system model (in red) shows that Exxon scientists were accurate in warning their superiors of the prospect of a “carbon dioxide induced ‘super-interglacial,’” as Mitchell Jr. termed it, that would render Earth hotter than at any time in at least 150,000 years (56). This shows that Exxon scientists correctly sided with the majority of the peer-reviewed literature in the 1970s that foresaw human-caused global warming overwhelming any possibility of global cooling and a (natural) ice age...
...Quantifying climate knowledge
...Yet bringing quantitative techniques from the physical sciences to bear on a discipline traditionally dominated by qualitative journalistic and historical approaches offers one path to remedying this blind spot. Here, it has enabled us to conclude with precision that, decades ago, ExxonMobil understood as much about climate change as did academic and government scientists. Our analysis shows that, in private and academic circles since the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil scientists (i) accurately projected and skillfully modeled global warming due to fossil fuel burning; (ii) correctly dismissed the possibility of a coming ice age; (iii) accurately predicted when human-caused global warming would first be detected; and (iv) reasonably estimated how much CO2 would lead to dangerous warming. Yet, whereas academic and government scientists worked to communicate what they knew to the public, ExxonMobil worked to deny it.
I know clearly that Phillip Morris knew they would kill people like my father, lots of fathers, lots of mothers, lots of people who were neither.
This is another scale however, killing the planet.
Have a nice afternoon and evening.
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