The point is that the oil industry has long stated to the public and shareholders something along the lines of the 1997 advertorial: “Let’s face it: The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil.”
However, documentary evidence shows again and again that they had plenty of warning, and plenty of chance to investigate the possible effects. And the petroleum industry actually did research on the topic, which agreed with the general scientific conclusion.
It's not some single or small number of "brilliant people" who pointed it out, but something investigated by their own researchers, who came to similar conclusions.
The link to the NYT op ed links to http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f saying:
> We conclude that ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science—by way of its scientists' academic publications—but promoted doubt about it in advertorials. Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public.
> ... We stress that the question is not whether ExxonMobil 'suppressed climate change research,' but rather how they communicated about it [11].
as well as
> A third example is a table (see https://perma.cc/9DGQ-4TBW) presented by Exxon scientist Henry Shaw at a 1984 Exxon/Esso environmental conference, which showed that Exxon's expected 'average temperature rise' of 1.3 °C–3.1 °C was comparable to projections by leading research institutions (1.5 °C–4.5 °C) .
That is, their own researchers knew that there was sufficiently strong evidence of global warming that it could justify changing large-scale change in economic policy. It just didn't make it out to Exxon general communications.
This Guardian article is "merely" an extension of the document trail backwards by a few more decades.
As this piece points out:
> Dunlop went on to describe progress in controlling carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and hydrocarbon emissions from automobiles. Absent from his list? The pollutant he had been warned of years before: carbon dioxide.
If your argument is "if we were to take any scientific hypothesis as fact and start acting before the science was in .. we .. would have made the wrong choice", then in 1967 what was the argument for controlling CO, NOx, and hydrocarbon emissions, and why was it stronger than the argument for controlling CO2 emissions?
This isn't rhetorical. I don't have an answer to that. SRI a year later pointed out to the API that CO2 pollution was important, so it's not like this was an obscure topic even then, only promoted by a couple of influential individuals.
One easy interpretation is that there were ways to handle those pollutants, and they had obvious local effects like smog, but no way to handle CO2 pollution or pressing need, so they shoved it under the rug in discussions with the public and with shareholders.
