You've probably heard that in the 1970s and 1980s, scientists working for the major

fossil fuel companies, such as Exxon, knew all about their product being the primary culprit

behind anthropogenic global warming.

Their scientists warned their executives, and yet the executives did nothing.

But this is Skeptoid, so you can be assured that whatever you hear here is going to be different

than whatever you've heard before.

And that's coming up right now on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid.

I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

What the oil companies really knew, part one.

By now most people have heard of the apparent scandal of internal documents having been discovered

at major oil companies, mainly Exxon, showing that they knew all about how their product

was resulting in global warming with the potential for catastrophic, economic, and environmental

harm.

You can search the web for what the oil companies knew, and you'll get dozens of articles,

mainly saying the same things, mainly quoting the same snippets from the same internal memos.

These articles paint a grim picture, a picture in which the oil company executives were

unambiguously acting in a way that they knew would cause great harm.

And even went so far as to launch Gargantuan public disinformation campaigns to cover up what

they were doing.

Massive lawsuits have been filed on this basis, and continue to be filed.

But there is more here than is being presented in these articles, which tend to paint an oversimplified

...