The academic literature giveth and the academic literature taketh away. That, at least, is what the supporters of New York State’s Martin Act investigation into Exxon Mobil (XOM) must be thinking in the wake of some recent high-profile publications in the academic literature. Last month saw the publication of an op-ed in The New York Times by two Harvard researchers that highlighted what they concluded to be “explicit factual misrepresentation” by the company in the 1990s on the state of climate change research.

Now comes a study published in Nature Geoscience by researchers at Oxford University finding that, in the words of The Economist, “climate researchers have been underestimating the carbon ‘budget’ compatible with the ambitions expressed in [The Paris Climate Agreement].” While both studies have generated headlines around the world, the latter is the one that Exxon Mobil’s investors will want to pay attention to because of its Martin Act investigation implications.

Read more at Seeking Alpha, h/t to Cliff Hilton

From the University of Oxford PR website:

The paper concludes that limiting the increase in global average temperatures above pre-industrial levels to 1.5°C, the goal of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, is not yet geophysically impossible, but likely requires more ambitious emission reductions than those pledged so far.

Three approaches were used to evaluate the outstanding ‘carbon budget’ (the total amount of CO2 emissions compatible with a given global average warming) for 1.5°C: re-assessing the evidence provided by complex Earth System Models, new experiments with an intermediate-complexity model, and evaluating the implications of current ranges of uncertainty in climate system properties using a simple model. In all cases the level of emissions and warming to date were taken into account.

Dr Richard Millar, lead author and post-doctoral research fellow at the Oxford Martin Net Zero Carbon Investment Initiative at Oxford University, said: ‘Limiting total CO2 emissions from the start of 2015 to beneath 240 billion tonnes of carbon (880 billion tonnes of CO2), or about 20 years’ of current emissions, would likely achieve the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.’

The full paper citation “Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C”