Tag Archives: climate-denial

22 November 2025 · 13:44

Climate Shaming 3.0

If people are confused about what to do about climate change in their everyday lives, they have every right to be.

Fossil fuel companies have for decades funded disinformation through a network of ‘think tanks’, and commentators, planting stories in the media. This was all helped by PR and Advertising agencies who know how to play with people’s emotions; to create fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Many have explored this issue more deeply than I ever can or will. Notably, Oreskes and Conway showed, in their book Merchants Of Doubt [1], how the same tactics used to promote smoking and deny its harms, were used by tobacco companies.

We might imagine we can now see through their tactics. I’m not so sure. I feel there is a tendency amongst some progressives to almost fall into the trap of amplifying the messages.

I am thinking of how some who claim that heat pumps are for the comfortably well off and it’s not fair to push them for those in energy poverty. The alternative – to stick with the comfort zone of insulating homes – came to be the default. This is not fair to anyone.

Before we get on to that, let’s start with the birth of ‘climate shaming’.

Climate Shaming 1.0: It’s your demand that’s the problem!

It is well established that fossil fuel companies like Exxon and their network decided to make you, the consumer, the problem [2].

The message:

It’s you driving your car and running your gas boiler. We are just meeting your demand, so don’t blame us.

Intended result:

Guilt, denial and inaction.

It is even alleged that BP and their communication agency Ogilvy cooked up the idea of ‘carbon footprint’ [3]. We could all then measure our level of guilt. No wonder people often resorted to tiny actions to salve that guilt, when they felt powerless to do more.

Yet, there is a counter argument that while this was and remains a key plank in the strategy to delay action, measuring things can be useful. What is needed is to shake off the guilt and find ways to act.

Climate Shaming 2.0: It’s all your fault!

Shaming has metastasised into everything we do that we can feel guilty about, where fossil fuels are often out of sight.

There are many voices at work here, but in the background, fossil fuel interests are keen to keep the heat on you, dear citizen, rather than them.

They will claim to be doing their bit, with greenwashing PR and advertising … now over to you people!

While they don’t control every part of this conversation we have amongst themselves, they have the wherewithal to influence it in a myriad of ways. The message we receive is, “don’t do this bad thing” (but we, fossil fuel interests, won’t help you):

Don’t fly to Europe (but we won’t divert fossil fuel investments into trains)

Don’t eat meat (but we’re happy to reinforce your guilt, when the Amazon burns; for cattle feed)

Don’t eat Ultra Processed Foods (but like this behemoth, we work hard to ensure law makers give our fossil fuel interests a free pass)

Feeling guilty? Feeling helpless?

(laughing emoji from fossil fuel boardrooms)

Recognising our agency

We are told by some progressive politicians and commentators that it’s all about system change, and that we should reject the idea that it is our fault. We can’t take an EV Bus if there is a bad bus service (and they are still run on diesel), we need to invest in rural public transport not just in the cities.

There is a lot of truth in this, but it isn’t quite that simple.

We are not separate from the system, and it is hardly ‘systems thinking’ to imagine such a separation. The system includes Government, business, civic society and the natural environment, interacting in numerous ways.

Citizen-consumers have a lot of identities (community members, consumers, voters, parents, volunteers, etc). These identities each have their own form of agency, which we can choose to use. We need the spirit of positive change in the choices we make:

To choose who to vote for.

To chose where we spend our money.

To choose where to go on holiday and how to get there (and if/how often to fly).

To modify our diet (reducing meat if not eliminating it).

To decide to buy quality clothing that is repairable (looking and feeling better).

To decide where we bank and where we invest through our pensions.

Even when an action one would like to take (like getting an EV) is not yet in reach, one can keep exploring options and set a goal for when it does come within reach.

Setting goals too is an achievement.

The shaming tactic of the fossil fuel interests is aimed at breaking our sense of agency. We have to organise and support each other and reclaim our agency, as individuals and as communities.

The Take The Jump initiative [4] espouses practical steps we can take, while recognising we also need system change.

Electrification of energy end-use is a key threat to fossil fuel interests

There are a range of solutions available now to make a serious dent in our carbon emissions. The most significant and relatively easy thing to achieve is to electrify our primary energy and energy consumption. These solutions are so brilliant they have become a threat to fossil fuel interests, notably:

Electric Vehicles (EVs) of all kinds will not only clean up our towns and cities but are so much more efficient than their fossil fuel alternatives. They require only a third of the energy of a petrol/ diesel car to run them.

Heat Pumps are so much more efficient than their fossil fuel alternatives. They require between a third and a fifth of the energy needed to run a gas boiler.

Both EVs and Heat Pumps are powered by electricity. When generated by solar and wind, it is both free and unlimited, because it is derived from the Sun (which deposits 10,000 times as much energy on Earth as humanity is ever likely to need).

There has been an incessant effort by the network of fossil fuel interests to plant stories and create memes aimed at trying to undermine this transition to clean, electrified energy use.

They know they will eventually lose, because the science of thermodynamics and economic reality mean it’s inevitable. Yet they will try to delay the transition for as long as possible. They can then extract as much fossil fuels as they can, and avoid ‘stranded assets’. Whereas, if they truly cared about climate change they would be working to leave it in the ground.

This essay is not the place to enumerate every myth and piece of disinformation that relentlessly circulates on social media about EVs and Heat Pumps. Carbon Brief have done the myth busting for you [5].

Climate Shaming 3.0: It’s ok for you woke well-to-do!

In order to counter this threat a new form of shaming emerged, particularly in relation to personal choice. I’m calling it Climate Shaming 3.0.

If one believed the framing so often evident in right-wing papers like the Mail and Telegraph titles, EVs and Heat Pumps are (paraphrasing)

… for the woke well-to-do – something they can afford but is not any good for most people …

If it was only these usual suspects one might try to shrug off this chatter.

Unfortunately, there has emerged an unholy alliance amongst those who would regard themselves as green progressives (in a non political sense), who are in a way doing exactly what the fossil fuel messaging is intended to promote.

We have politicians of all kinds who have been cowed by toxic reporting on heat pumps who – wanting to show they are addressing fuel poverty – will talk endlessly about the need to insulate homes. Yet they dare not use the words ‘heat pump’ for fear of being accused of elitism (even though a heat pump is a far more cost-effective route to decarbonising heating than deep retrofit [6]).

They must be laughing their heads off in the boardrooms of fossil fuel companies.

Is it really ‘climate justice’ to promote the poorly designed ECO (Energy Company Obligation) scheme that the NAO (National Audit Office) declared [7] has been a total failure? NAO found that external wall insulation, for example, has led to bad and often exceptionally bad outcomes 98% of the time. This has required very expensive re-work in many cases, compounding the injustice.

This is to be contrasted with the BUS (Boiler Upgrade Scheme) that – despite all the claims about a lack of skills in the sector – has helped to really pump prime the heat pump sector and can be regarded as a success.

Communities like Heat Geek are really shaking things up too, to lower installation costs and improve the quality of installations (to the level already practiced by many small businesses with great track records).

The unholy alliance extends to plumbers, retrofit organisations, council officers, architects and politicians who claim you cannot heat an old building without deep retrofit. A disproven and false claim, but repeated as many times as the story about British pilots seeing better in WWII thanks to eating carrots.

Some untruths live on through repetition.

The idea that we can insulate our way out of energy poverty, without also pushing at least as hard on rolling out heat pumps (individually or using shared heat networks) is an illusion, that would mean we’d be stuck with burning gas for much longer than necessary.

More laughter from those boardrooms.

Insulation, replacing windows and other fabric measures are important but you can easily blow so much money on these that you leave nothing in the pot for a heat pump [6].

Here is a diagram from Nesta that was based on one I originally produced and here I have added some further annotations (see [6] for Nesta version):

That is not climate justice, or fair on anyone.

It is not climate justice for those in energy poverty to have to pay for gas that will inevitably go through repeated market crises and cost spikes in its dying decades.

Climate justice is future proofing our electricity supply, the grid, our homes and our streets.

These will then be not only cleaner and more efficient but future proofed. As the late Professor Mackay observed, once you have electrified end use of energy, the electricity can come from anywhere: from your roof, from a community energy project, or from a wind farm in the north sea.

It’s time that those that claim to be progressives stopped falling for the tactics of fossil fuel interests, that time and again are slowing our transition to a clean energy future, and action on climate change.

It started with shaming people for their consumption. Let’s not fall for the new tactic of shaming those who actually care enough to adopt effective solutions.

References

[1] Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, 2010, Bloomberg Press.

[2] Exxon Mobil’s Messaging Shifted Blame for Warming to Consumers, Maxine Joselow & E&E News, Scientific American, 15th May 2021.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-mobils-messaging-shifted-blame-for-warming-to-consumers

[3] Can fossil fuel companies really support a carbon tax?, Alain Naef, SUERF Policy Brief, No 724, November 2023.

Click to access f_58a1fea84b28483ad90beb50a9457959_78435_suerf.pdf

[4] Take The Jump, https://takethejump.org/

[5] Carbon Brief

18 Misleading Myths about Heat Pumps, https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/factcheck/heatpumps/index.html

21 Misleading Myths about EVs, https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/factcheck/electric-vehicles/index.html

[6] ‘Insulation impact: how much do UK houses really need?, NESTA, 8th January 2024, https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/insulation-impact-how-much-do-uk-houses-really-need

[7] Energy efficiency installations under the Energy Company Obligation, 14th October 2025, National Audit Office https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/energy-efficiency-installations-under-the-energy-company-obligation/

Is climate inaction the new denial?

I respect those wishing to protect nature who are worried about unrestrained infrastructure projects, but the ‘unrestrained’ bit was never part of the plan, and strawman arguments now abound, such as the claim we will be building solar farms on prime arable farmland.

An astonishing 30% of UK land is devoted to grazing, and raised solar arrays can co-exist with grazing, even providing shade during heatwaves. It may even pay back some of the carbon impact of those methane burping ruminants. Solar grazing (or agrivoltaics) is now a thing in some countries so why is it not supported by organisations like the CPRE in the UK?

I have concerns about the impact of progressive weakening of the Government’s new infrastructure policies that may continue the blocking or delaying of essential on-shore renewable energy projects.

In his seminal book over 15 years ago, Professor David Mackay wrote¹:

If the British are good at one thing, it’s saying “no.”

No to this solar farm; no to that wind turbine on that hill; no to that wind farm off my coastline; etc.

This, despite the fact that the Government’s most recent public opinion survey² shows 80% are in favour of renewables; although when it comes to on-shore wind and solar farms in one’s locality, this drops to 37% and 47%, respectively.

Is this because the public are not aware of the benefits of local energy production? Or because not enough of it is community owned? Is it that people do not understand the nature of the emergency we face and the imperative to act?

We’ve seen over the sequence of three heatwaves³ recently (heatwaves that have been made much more likely due to man-made global warming⁴) that our beloved commons around Stroud now look more like the Serengeti than our green and pleasant land. This will be the new norm by 2050 if we don’t urgently address our emissions.

At this stage in the climate emergency, climate inaction is tantamount to climate denial.

The Climate Change Committee has made it abundantly clear that we need to electrify most of our economy to get to net zero expeditiously and affordably⁵: This applies to both generation and consumption:

“In many key areas, the best way forward is now clear. Electrification and low-carbon electricity supply make up the largest share of emissions reductions in our pathway, 60% by 2040. Once the market has locked into a decarbonisation solution, it needs to be delivered. The roll-out rates required for the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs), heat pumps, and renewables are similar to those previously achieved for mass-market roll-outs of mobile phones, refrigerators, and internet connections.”

and really at a much lower costs than many have claimed:

“We estimate that the net costs of Net Zero will be around 0.2% of UK GDP per year on average in our pathway, with investment upfront leading to net savings during the Seventh Carbon Budget period. Much of this investment is expected to come from the private sector.”

Much has changed since David Mackay wrote his book. The costs of renewables has dropped, so they are now the cheapest form of energy (and onshore cheaper still).. Yet I believe another kind of “No” has developed in the dialogue around renewables infrastructure.

There has emerged a false dichotomy between green energy infrastructure and nature. The case often presented is that to protect nature we have to limit infrastructure to only those places which no one cares about, like brownfield sites, which of course would completely undermine any attempt to reach the levels of onshore wind and solar that are needed to supplement off shore development. Whereas there are many things harming nature which are much worse including farming systems, tidy gardens, and climate change itself.

Take the rewiring of our electricity grid that is needed for an electrified economy. The case is made for burying cables as opposed to pylons because it is assumed they are environmentally less harmful, and despite the enormous increase in capital costs (and hence delays) that would result. In fact, burying the quite different ultra expensive cables needed in wide trenches can have impacts on flora and fauna, such as harm to tree roots and subsoil ecology, that can exceed those arising from pylons.

Isn’t the honest truth that people simply don’t like their view being changed by the addition of renewables to the landscape and some use the nature card to avoid being labelled NIMBYs? I fear so.

Rodborough Common 19th Juky 2025 by Richard Erskine

Conversely, we can fail to act and our grandchildren will see a landscape changed forever by our inaction. The MetOffice’s most recent State of The Climate report⁶ states that under the intermediate pathway scenario (RCP4.5) “years 2022, 2023, and 2024 would likely be considered average by the 2050s and cool by around 2100”. Is that preferable to some wind turbines today offering local energy security and resilience, helping the local community do its part in decarbonising our economy?

The good news is that because of the enormous efficiencies of electrification and the end of burning fossil fuels, the primary energy required from renewables – about 800 TWh per year – would be about one third of the primary energy hitherto required from fossil fuels. Even if we almost double this – to allow for new demands like synthetic meats, AI, minerals recycling, etc – to about 1500 TWh, an Oxford University study⁷ shows wind and solar can power the UK. As Hannah Ritchie summarises the findings⁸:

“They think there is a large potential for offshore wind. This would be spread over 10% of the UK’s exclusive economic zone. Onshore wind could be used on 5% of British lands, and combined with farmland. 2% of British land would be used for solar PV, and could also be combined with farmland using a technique called ‘agrivoltaics’. Rooftop solar doesn’t add much – the output is quite small, even if 8% of British rooftops are covered. Definitely still a good option for individuals, but maybe not for the nation as a whole.”

For those that say let others do it, because we are special, don’t be surprised if everyone claims the same. It is analogous to a parent who says let other children take the vaccine (while their child benefits from community immunity so they can avoid the very small risk of side effects of inoculation). If everyone made that choice, everyone is at risk.

Have we, in short, become too selfish to take the steps to act with the urgency needed to actually take declarations of a climate emergency seriously; to go beyond laudable actions like recycling to really substantive endeavours?

We need to make the difficult decisions needed but work hard to take people with us, rather than stoke fears as some political parties choose to. The political debate has created some surprising bedfellows amongst those opposing onshore renewables projects.

Are we Brits just still too good at saying “no”?

References

David Mackay, Sustainable Energy without the hot air, 2008, https://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_108.shtml
DESNZ Public Attitudes Tracker: Headline findings, Spring 2025, UK, Published 3 July 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-spring-2025/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-headline-findings-spring-2025-uk
Heat health alerts come into force as third UK summer heatwave builds, Ben Rich, 9th July 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/c9w1xpz841no
Explainer: Extreme Weather, Royal Statistical Society, https://rss.org.uk/policy-campaigns/policy/climate-change-resources/explainer-extreme-weather/
The Seventh Carbon Budget, The Climate Change Committee, 26th February 2025, https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/the-seventh-carbon-budget/
State of the UK Climate in 2024, Mike Hendon et al, International Journal of Climatology, Vol. 45, No. S1, July 2025. https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.70010
Could Britain’s energy demand be met entirely by wind and solar?, Brian O’Callaghan et al, University of Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Working Paper No.23-02, September 2023, https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-09-26-wind-and-solar-power-could-significantly-exceed-britain-s-energy-needs
Can solar and wind power Britain? An update of David MacKay’s numbers, Hannah Ritchie, Sustainabilitybynumbers, 30th October 2023. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/can-solar-and-wind-power-britain

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Tagged as climate change, climate-denial, energy, environment, renewable-energy, sustainability

05 June 2024 · 19:41

Apologists for Climate Greenwashing

Today, World Environment Day, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres made a special address on climate action “A Moment of Truth” in New York. In a speech that covered the impacts already being felt from the delays in taking action, and the injustices this gives rise to, he turned his ire on fossil fuel companies and their enablers (my emphasis):

“Fourth and finally, we must directly confront those in the fossil fuel industry who have shown relentless zeal for obstructing progress – over decades. Billions of dollars have been thrown at distorting the truth, deceiving the public, and sowing doubt. I thank the academics and the activists, the journalists and the whistleblowers, who have exposed those tactics – often at great personal and professional risk. I call on leaders in the fossil fuel industry to understand that if you are not in the fast lane to clean energy transformation, you are driving your business into a dead end – and taking us all with you. Last year, the oil and gas industry invested a measly 2.5 percent of its total capital spending on clean energy.”

He then went on to say:

“Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they have sought to delay climate action – with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns. They have been aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies – Mad Men – remember the TV series – fuelling the madness. I call on these companies to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil fuel clients, from today, and set out plans to drop your existing ones. Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet – they’re toxic for your brand. Your sector is full of creative minds who are already mobilising around this cause. They are gravitating towards companies that are fighting for our planet – not trashing it. I also call on countries to act. Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health – like tobacco. Some are now doing the same with fossil fuels. I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies. And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising.”

The active disinformation has gone on for decades, as we well documented in the book, Merchants of Doubt, by historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (first published in 2010 https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org), and for which companies like Shell were active participants in climate science denial.

The on-going activities of organisations, individuals and PR companies funded by fossil fuel interests did not end in the mid 1990s (even <shocked emoji> in the UK), and has continued in many ways unabated, as Desmog has documented on an almost daily basis https://www.desmog.com. However, now the emphasis is on trying to undermine climate solutions, so as to justify carrying on using fossil fuels, either in electricity generation, or in end-use such as transport and heating. But as the alternatives are now so good, the PR and greenwashing has to be world-class to try to undermine them.

So it was astounding to hear Nick Butler – a Visiting Professor at King’s College – being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s PM today (5th June 2024) by Evan Davis, being highly critical of the Secretary General’s speech. When asked about fossil fuel companies obstructing public discourse with their lobbying, public affairs, and so on, he said:

“… I think that was the case in the past but from the middle of the 1990s that has changed, certainly for the European companies, certainly BP and Shell, are going in a different direction …” <my jaw drops emoji>

Well being an ex-BP employee he would say that wouldn’t he. He is just one example of what might be called an apologist for climate greenwashing.

And it is incredibly disingenuous to say that adverts for oil and gas don’t appear on TV anymore in the UK. No, but adverts and PR for petrol powered SUVs, or Hydrogen Boilers, or … the list goes on. And to say that its all our fault for making the wrong choices, as Nick Butler suggested, is really the equivalent of victim blaming. I can’t take an EV Bus if there are no EV Buses (or indeed no bus service worth talking about), because car manufacturers and fossil fuel interests have been in cohoots to promote gas guzzlers (and are now whining because the China actually invested in an EV supply chain and market).

The truth is that between 2010 and 2018, Shell dedicated just 1% of its long terms investments to renewable energy, and paying creative agencies to target influencers to improve the brand’s image, etc, as Client Earth’s expose ‘The Greenwashing Files’ reveals. BP and the rest are no different.

You see they have moved on from the mid-1990s. Then the focus was on full front climate science denial, through a myriad of think tanks, influencers writing for the Daily Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, and wherever. Now they are more subtle, more devious. “Oh yes we love renewables”, they will say, but “when the wind doesn’t blow or it doesn’t shine our gas will be needed to generate your electricity”. Gas, I should stress, which they want to grow as a proportion of their business, not phase it out at all. It’s almost as if they are trying to gaslight renewables.

We have an example in the UK of fossil fuel interests – the gas network – producing hit pieces on heat pumps, and claiming that green hydrogen is better, even though all the science shows this is not the case (and in any case, its a ruse by them to carry on extracting natural gas to turn into hydrogen, which will never be green, because they will never be able to afford to bury the carbon dioxide produced in the process). Yet even the Bosch executive vice-president Stefan Thiel now accepts that hydrogen is a lost cause for heating homes. The delays caused by the industry’s disinformation campaign on just this one attack line has come at a cost – being delays in decarbonising UK home heating.

And the greenwashing has been getting worse as the fossil fuel companies try desperately not to be in possession of stranded fossil fuel assets. But they, and their PR / Advertising agencies, are now feeling the heat as one Desmog story Litigation Over Misleading Climate Claims Has ‘Exploded’ Over the Past Few Years reveals:

“Companies are increasingly facing legal action over their false or misleading climate communications, according to a new report examining trends in global climate litigation. That report, released late last week, highlighted a surge in litigation around climate-related greenwashing — what researchers have termed “climate-washing” — over the past few years.”

And to take Shell as an exemplar again, far from “going in a different direction”, as Nick Butler claimed, they are actually reducing investments in renewables because it does not “align” with their strategy to maximise extraction of methane (aka “natural” gas, see what they did there, long ago). They have been pulled up several times for misleading greenwashing advertisements.

As recently as 2022 Shell has had some of its adverts banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for misleading claims about how clean its overall energy production is, as the BBC reported here.

One can forgive Evan Davis for not being as well briefed as he could be on the history and on-going tactics of the fossil fuel companies to delay the green transition through well funded PR, advertising and influencer campaigns, but it would not be a bad idea for BBC PM to do a follow-up with someone who is well informed.

For example, how about inviting Joana Setzer (Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment), and co-author of the report Global trends in climate change litigation: 2023 snapshot, as we know how much the BBC loves a bit of balance.

Richard W. Erskine, 2023

Not In His Time

I love the BBC series ‘In Our Time’ (IOT), conceived by Melvyn Bragg (MB) and hosted by him for over 25 years. The more than 1000 episodes have covered innumerable topics in the arts, history, science, philosophy, politics and much more. Typically three Professors, leading experts in a field, are invited to explore the knowledge and scholarship on the topic of the week. Delightful surprises has been its hallmark covering topics as diverse as ‘Tea’, ‘The Neutron’, ‘The Illiad’ and so much more.

The life and work of scientists have been covered many times: Robert Hooke, Dorothy Hodgkin and Paul Dirac being a few examples. You might think that the most pressing topic of our age – man-made climate change – might get quite a bit of attention, but it doesn’t. It’s not as if its too contemporary for IOT’s tastes; unsuitable for the historical lens that IOT likes to employ. The science of climate change dates back at least 200 years.

The lives of five scientists come to mind which could help explore the huge subject of climate change: John Tyndall, Svant Arrhenius, Guy Callendar, Wally Broecker and Michael Mann are just a small sample of ones that come to mind. None of these has been covered by IOT. Here’s why each of these would be great candidates for an episode:

John Tyndall is regarded as one of the greatest experimentalists of the 19th century, and a great populariser of science. His apparatus – that in the years 1859-1861 demonstrated that carbon dioxide and other gases were heat trapping, but that oxygen and nitrogen were not – can still be seen at The Royal Institution, where he did his experiments. An episode could cover Tyndall or simply be on ‘Greenhouse Gases’ and include a survey of work up to Manabe & Wetheralds seminal 1967 paper.
Svante Arrhenius, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, published the first calculation on how much the world would warm if the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere doubled – in 1896. Again an episode could cover Arrhenius exclusively or deal with the question of ‘Earth Climate Sensitivity’.
Guy Callendar published a paper in 1938 that was the first to demonstrate empirically the correlation between rising levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere (attributable to human activities) and rising global mean surface temperature. Some have even suggested that instead of referring to ‘The Greenhouse Effect’ we should use the term ‘The Callendar Effect’.
Wally Broecker was a famous oceanographer who coined the term ‘The Great Ocean Conveyor’, which moves heat around the oceans of the world, and whose understanding is crucial to climate science. He also coined the term ‘Global Warming’. Broecker said that following the publication of Manabe and Wetheralds seminal 1967 paper, man-made climate change stopped being a cocktail conversation amongst scientists, and something that was increasingly concerning.
Michael Mann et al published the famous ‘Hockey Stick’ paper in 1999 which gathered all the disparate data to demonstrate unequivocally that the world was warming. So powerful in fact that the fossil-fuel funded forces of denial started a vicious campaign to try to discredit Mann. They failed, as the findings have been supported by independent research since.

Needless to say, there are a wealth of women scientists whose work might be considered too recent for IOT, but is often of crucial importance. For example, Friederike Otto’s work on extreme weather attribution has been revolutionary, because now we have the ability to put a number on how much more likely a specific extreme weather event has become as a result of man-made global warming. This can be done in a matter of days rather than the year or more that used to be required for this kind of attribution study (see the World Weather Attribution site for more details). The topic of ‘Extreme weather events’ is assuredly in our time, and increasingly so!

Despite this wealth of knowledge, Climate Change has just once been a topic on the programme, on 6th January 2000 with guests Professor Houghton, who had been a chair of the IPCC, and environmentalist George Monbiot. So no problem, then, it has been covered!

Well, no, because this episode was exceptional in more ways than its rarity.

In every other episode of In Our Time, MB approaches the conversation much like you’d expect of a curious student, trying to learn from the expert professors who he robustly challenges, but respects. The debated points would be ones where experts have engaged in debating a point in the published literature, so disagreements are possible; say, to what extent Rosalind Franklin’s work was key to discovering the structure of DNA. What is not generally entertained on IOT are outlier comments from those who are not experts in the field.

So, the IOT Climate Change episode in 2000 was quite different. Outrageously different. MB approached the conversation not as a curious student, but sounding more like an opinionated journalist with an angle doing an interview, and boy, did he have an angle!

He had a completely different tone to normal, not of respectful enquiry. He reprised talking points that are rife within climate science denial circles, and even cited Matt Ridley (“no slouch”) a well known propagandist – a free-market fundamentalist like his father – who engages in constant attacks on climate science, and the climate solutions he wishes to undermine.

Leo Hickman noted on Twitter (3-1-2015) “Little known fact: Bragg witnessed GWPF’s Companies House docs for Lord Lawson”, so one is bound to speculate whether it was no accident that MB was channeling the GWPF (Global Warming Policy Foundation) non-science.

It’s easier to see what I mean about the episode by listening to the episode but I will use some snippets from the transcript here to illustrate what I mean (MB quotes in italics):

“With me to discuss what could be called “The new climate of fear” at the beginning of a new century is …”, from the off, it was clear that MB was not interested in obvious questions like “how have we come to an understanding of man-made global warming?”. He clearly wanted to frame it in a way that minimised any discussion of the underlying science. He wanted it to be a ‘both sides’ apparent exchange of newspaper comment pages opinion.

After George Monbiot’s first contributions, MB chips in “Now this is very much a received view, and you’ve been one of the people that have made it received by banging on, very effectively in the Guardian and in other places, I’m going to challenge this in a minute or two, but I just want to emphasise to the listeners, how apocalyptic your views are, …” – trying to undermine his guest with a charge of alarmism shocked me 24 years ago and shocks me still. The reason it is ‘received’ Melvyn is because of decades of research, thousands of scientific papers, and resulting IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports, not Monbiot’s writings, however lucid they may be.

MB later pushes harder “Right now, you two have spent….devoted your lives to this subject and I haven’t, but nevertheless, I’ve looked at…tried to find some evidence which contradicts this block view, which seems you’ve got your evidence, but there’s other points of view , and ….’cause I’m worried about the evidence that you can know so much about what’s going to happen in 100 years time, and I’m worried about the lack of robustness …”, but never asks the question ‘please help me understand the evidence’, no he shares what he has read who knows where – in The Spectator perhaps. This might seem normal on a social media comments thread but is pretty unedifying on the normally rather good In Our Time.

MB says something that is straight from the climate science denial factory at GWPF: “Mmmm, but you…well er…I’m still worried about the evidence for this, the evidence that you….what evidence can you tell us Professor Houghton, that in the next century….’cause all this is to do with man-made pollution isn’t it? That the worry is that this is the Greenhouse Effect, it’s all to do with us emitting too much CO₂, and that sort of thing, can you give us your evidence, for the…why the accumulation of this is going to have such a devastating effect? Because people use extra CO₂ as fertiliser don’t they? To bring crops on?”

The framing, the tone, the references to denialist talking points (such as: ‘carbon dioxide being good for plants therefore must be good to have more of it’, would fail Philosophy 101, let alone the scientific demolition of it).

All of the talking points he raised have been answered innumerable times, if he bothered to do genuine background reading from experts on the subject.

There have been other episodes of IOT that have touched on climate since then, such as the ones on ‘Corals’, ‘Ice Ages’ and others, but clearly both Melvyn Bragg and the production team are staying well clear of man-made climate change after their last diabolical attempt.

What motivates MB’s climate denialism is unclear. It is certainly not independent scholarship. The history of our understanding of climate change has been set out clearly many times, such as in Weart’s book (see Notes). Yet, being a Labour Peer, the free market fundamentalism that drove Lord Lawson and continues to drive much of the funding for climate denial, is unlikely to be the reason. Maybe in some perverse way, it’s his faith that took him there – who knows? The fact is he was very poorly read and badly briefed. It has left a large black hole in an otherwise great series, In Our Time, that is surely crying out to be filled.

No doubt an episode entitled ‘Man-Made Climate Change’, or one based on the life and work of the many scientists that have done so much to reveal our understanding of it, will come back as a topic in due course. There are no shortage of topics linked to it that could also be covered (Fossil fuels, Energy transitions, Extreme weather events, Rossby waves, and many others).

Though I suspect it will not be in Melvyn Bragg’s time.

We’ll have to wait for the sad day when the great man moves on.

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Notes

I have not made the essay longer still by including the rebuttals to all the talking points raised by MB, but I don’t need to as others have done a great job addressing commonly shared myths. A good place to go for short non-technical responses is Katharine Hayhoe’s ‘Global Weirding’ series of short videos.

For a slightly longer response to the many myths raised, the site Skeptical Science provides answers in shorter form and longer form. And, specifically, on the argument that more carbon dioxide is good for plants, there is a great rebuttal on the site.

The book by Spencer Weart I mentioned is a great historical survey – starting with scientists like Fourier in the early 19th Century – and is available online: The Discovery of Global Warming.

Of course, the most up to date and rigorous evidence on the causes and impacts of climate change, and on the possible scenarios we may face in the future, is contained in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports. The latest full assessment being the 6th Assessment Report.

Getting a reliable sense of what the science is telling us can be hard for non-experts, particularly on shouty social media. I always feel we should go back to the established experts. Some summaries can be useful if they do not try to selectively spin the science in a direction to support a particular framing.

CarbonBrief do a great job summarising the science such as here: In-depth Q&A: The IPCC’s sixth assessment report on climate science, Carbon Brief, 9th August 2021 https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-qa-the-ipccs-sixth-assessment-report-on-climate-science/

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an international body whose work is the product of an international team of scientists from over 60 countries who give their time voluntarily to produce in depth reports. The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) is the latest full assessment, and covers different aspects: causes, impacts, adaptation and mitigation, both globally but also from a regional perspective. One of the reasons people go to secondary sources is because of the huge size of the IPCC reports. But the IPCC provides summaries. The AR6 report comes in three parts, with summaries as follows:

Part I: Physical Science Basis Report assesses the causes, and possible future scenarios.An accessible summary is available as a short video: https://youtu.be/e7xW1MfXjLA A written Summary for Policymakers is available here https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf
Part II: Impacts, Adaptation & Vulnerability Report assesses ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities at global and regional levels. It also reviews vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of the natural world and human societies to adapt to climate change.An accessible summary is available as a short video: https://youtu.be/SDRxfuEvqGg A written Summary for Policymakers is available here https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf
Part III: Mitigation of Climate Change Report assesses ways to reduce carbon emissions.An accessible summary is available as a short video: https://youtu.be/7yHcXQoR1zA A written Summary for Policymakers is available here https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_SPM.pdf

If IOT do decide to do a new episode on Climate Change – or more accurately, man-made climate change – they might do well to first re-read Professor Steve Jones’s 2011 report on coverage of climate change at the BBC, and its tendency of using false balance. The report recommended that the BBC coverage “takes into account the non‐contentious nature of some material and the need to avoid giving undue attention to marginal opinion” (download the document then skip to page 14 to get to the report, avoiding the self-justification by BBC senior management prefixing the report itself.)

We can live in hope!

Someone asked about the Ice Ages episode (which I did mention).

This was my response.

Yes, but it only dealt with man-made climate change in the dying few minutes. Richard Corfield, when not talking over the two women scientists with him, was dismissive of the risks. He used an argument that fails Critical Thinking 101, along with Ethics 101, and more.

His gobsmacking words:

“a ‘Greenhouse Climate’ is the natural condition for the Earth. 85% of Earth history has been ‘Greenhouse’ Ummm, 70 million years ago carbon dioxide levels were 8 times what they are at the moment, which made them 2,400 parts per million. Before that they were 12 times higher. The only certainty is that climate change is a natural part of the Earth and as a species we may have been the result of climate change. We may now be altering it but anyhow we’d have to deal with it, so I think we are going to have to geo-engineer our own climate to deal with it. Nothing wrong with that.”

A logically incoherent argument. And it’s not ‘we may now be altering’, we are altering, please read the IPCC reports Richard.

To conflate tens of millions of years with Homo Sapien’s quarter of a million years of existence; or the 12,000 years where civilisation has emerged, in the stable climate we have enjoyed alongside nature since the end of the last ice age; or indeed the 200 years where man-made carbon emissions have increased CO2 levels at an unprecedently fast rate in geological terms, is crass.

The way to stop additional warming is simply to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible.

To simply shrug and say that the climate always changes so we’d have to have done something anyway at some point is asinine, and fails to mention that we’d have had 10s of thousands of years to deal with it, not the few decades we now have left to do something, precisely because of naysayers like Melvyn Bragg and Richard Corfield.

No wonder this disaster climate advocate Richard Corfield has been on IOT 8 times.