12 • A 1982 internal Exxon primer, which says, “Mitigation of the ‘greenhouse effect’ would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion” [29]. • An internal 1979 Exxon study found that “should it be deemed necessary to maintain atmospheric CO2 levels to prevent significant climatic changes…coal and possibly other fossil fuel resources could not be utilized to an appreciable extent” [27]. Examples of (ii) include: • Five ExxonMobil studies – one internal, three peer-reviewed, and one non-peerreviewed – include data that indicate 2015–2100 CO2 budgets consistent with limiting warming to 2°C and/or stabilizing CO2 concentrations below 550 ppm in the range of 251–716 GtC [25,35–37]. These budgets are within a factor of two of contemporary estimates of roughly 442–651 GtC. Finding: We found an imbalance in impact of different document categories: ExxonMobil contributed to and acknowledged climate science in private and in academic journals read only by a small number of academics; whereas ExxonMobil raised doubts about that science in advertorials in The New York Times read by millions of people. Examples: • On the one hand, most of ExxonMobil’s research was highly technical, hidden behind the walls of ExxonMobil offices, or reported in academic publications with access only through a paywall. ExxonMobil’s peer-reviewed and nonpeer-reviewed publications have been cited an average (median (mean)) of 21(60) and 2(9) times, respectively, suggesting an average readership of tens to hundreds. ExxonMobil’s principal (and only consistent) academic author was scientist Haroon Khesghi, who co-authored 72% (52/72) of all analyzed peerreviewed work (79% since his hiring). Indeed, the metadata title of the ‘Exxon Mobil Contributed Publications’ file is ‘Haroon’s CV’ [12]. • In contrast, the company bought climate change advertorials in The New York Times specifically to allow “the public to know where we stand” [38]. Readerships were in the millions. They paid a discounted price of roughly $31,000 (2016 USD) per advertorial and bought one-quarter of all advertorials on the Op-Ed page, “towering over the other sponsors” according to reviews of Mobil’s advertorials by Brown, Waltzer, and Waltzer [39,40]. “After [experimentally] examining the effects of an actual ExxonMobil advertorial that appeared on the pages of The New York Times,” Cooper and Nownes observed “that advertorials substantially affect levels of individual issue salience…” [41]. Finding: We found ExxonMobil’s advertorials (and other more public communications) to include several instances of explicit factual misrepresentation. Examples: • The 2000 ExxonMobil advertorial entitled “Unsettled Science,” introduced above, attempts to emphasize natural variability by including a figure taken