How Accurate Were Exxon's Climate Projections?

Oil companies have understood climate change for decades, and many documents on this have been released recently. How accurate were the climate projections that Exxon was using?

To test it out, I used this document from Exxon. In particular, I used the following image:



I compared this with NASA's annual temperature values. I simply took the difference between the 5-year average centered at 2016 (2014 to 2018) and the one at 1960 from the NASA data as the 'observed value' and read the low and high estimates off the plot in the picture above for Exxon's estimates. The results are below:



The observed values lie between the upper and lower estimates, and lean slightly towards the lower side. Exxon's projections were pretty accurate.


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