In seinem Vortrag beschäftigt sich der renommierte Klimaforscher Stefan Rahmstorf mit der öffentlichen Klimadebatte und wie sie systematisch unterwandert wird.
Im Rahmen der Auftaktveranstaltung des Forschungsverbunds Umwelt und Klima (ECH) der Universität Wien am 8. März 2024, spricht Stefan Rahmstorf vom Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung (PIK) in seiner Keynote über wissenschaftliche Fakten zum Klimawandel und wie diese von Querdenkern, Populisten und fossilen Lobbyisten mit Hilfe von gezielter medialer Desinformation unterlaufen werden.
Mehr Informationen zum Forschungsverbund unter: https://ech.univie.ac.at
Populism should not be part of political debates, not even of environmental and climate policy where we currently have public debates on the climate crisis. This is what we are going to hear from renowned climate researcher Stefan Rahmstorf, head of the
Earth System Analysis research department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He is also Professor of Physics of the Oceans at the University of Potsdam. Stefan Rahmstorf, the floor is yours. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honour for me to be invited to the kick-off event
Of this important research hub on, possibly, the vital questions of this century. I want to start my presentation with science and then focus on the public debate. I start with Alexander von Humboldt who has already written
About human-induced climate change in 1843, I quote, “by felling the forests and by developing huge masses of steam and gas at the centre of the industry”. He was thus ahead of his time, just as in many other aspects. It is proven that he knew about
The greenhouse effect that had already been described in 1824 by Joseph Fourier as a factor determining the temperature of the planet. Let us take a leap forward to 1896 when Svante Arrhenius the Swedish Nobel Prize winner, calculated for the first time how sensitively global temperatures
React to disturbances of the radiation balance of the planet, which is the so-called climate sensitivity. He calculated the effect of double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and came up with four degrees.
Originally, he was actually interested in halving the amount of CO2, since in the 19th century the explanation of the ice ages was at the forefront. I will talk about the ice ages later.
Then he got inspired to calculate the effect of a doubling of CO2. The result was his starting point to propose the lighting of coal seams to accelerate this warming. I suppose this is because he was Swedish.
Today, all of what Svante Arrhenius wished for has been going on for a long time. We see a dramatic increase in CO2 concentration that is entirely due to human emissions. We see the corresponding increase in temperature and therefore
The climate has already left the holocene. I will show that again in a minute. For centuries, global warming has been developing just as it had been predicted before. If we take a closer look at the time since 1880, and zoom into the instrumental data, then the coloured line
Here is the moving 12-month average. We can see here that we are currently again at an absolute record high. The black curve is the smoothed long-term value, which is practically what is relevant at the moment when we have really exceeded the goal of the Paris Agreement, the 1.5-degree target.
This is when this average temperature, the 1.5-degree line that you can see here, is exceeded, in individual months, even in other data apart from here. This is the data by NASA but according to the Berkeley data, we have already exceeded the 1.5 degrees in 2023.
The Berkeley data have the biggest data base so they are probably the best data that we have got. Let us talk a bit more about the history. In 1965 there was the famous Revelle report, which was the first official government report on the coming global warming commissioned
By the former US president Lyndon B. Johnson, and it already said that we have to expect global warming with serious consequences. Then, in 1988, the NASA climate researcher Jim Hansen was the first to prominently state in a US Senate hearing
That the long-predicted global warming had now arrived, that it was visible in the climate data and the data curve was not only published in the New York Times, but also
In many other media. At that time, I was a PhD candidate in marine research in New Zealand, by the way, and I remember that day. It was discussed and there was also a conservative professor who said that maybe Hansen might have gone a little bit too far, after all,
It could still be within natural fluctuation. Today no researcher thinks like that anymore but it is a clearly predicted and expected effect of the increase in the amount of greenhouse gas in our atmosphere. The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has
Said in its first report in 1990, in the very beginning of its summary for decision-makers that it is certain that greenhouse gas emissions lead to global warming. So this has been a proven scientific finding for around 35 years
Now. As a consequence, there was the Earth summit of Rio de Janeiro where the Framework Convention on Climate Change was unanimously adopted by all states with the goal to prevent dangerous climate change. I am omitting a lot of interim steps but in 2015, after a number of
Annual climate summits, we have finally reached a substantial agreement: The framework convention of the Paris Climate Protection Agreement with its goal to keep global warming clearly under 2 degrees. All states committed to making efforts to limit global warming
To 1.5 degrees. Yes, unfortunately, all this has not been successful so far, because the corresponding efforts have not really been made. We are running from record to record, I am showing just the February temperatures in Austria in this timeline here. The February that has just passed
Has not only been the warmest since the beginning of measurements in Austria, but it has also exceeded the previous record month by a huge amount and that is not only special in Austria but it applies to February in Europe overall. The anomaly is also visible here and
You can see that large parts of Europe have reached these insanely high temperatures in February. The reason – and we still have to explain this to many people, because the media very rarely explain this – the reason why we certainly know what the cause of global warming
Is and that it is not somehow a correlation of CO2 and temperature or the like, is that we simply understand the energy balance of our planet and we measure it permanently using a global radiation measurement network at the Earth’s surface, with satellite missions that
Measure incoming solar radiation on the upper edge of the atmosphere and heat leaving Earth in the form of heat radiation. I cannot discuss the chart in detail now, I just want to mention that this reflection that we see here at the bottom right is the greenhouse effect.
324 watts per square meter and sun-absorbed solar radiation on the Earth’s surface is only half as much. The greenhouse effect is not a small effect. It is really twice as much as the solar radiation and we are just turning this screw. The increase
Of this reflection due to the increase in greenhouse gases is a measurement fact too. When temperatures rise, the energy for it has to come from somewhere. Huge amounts of energy are involved and we know directly from observational data where this energy comes from, leading to
The temperatures continuing to rise. Also surprisingly few people know, if you ask the audience, to what extent human activities contribute to modern global warming. It is about 100 per cent. We have known this not only since the recent report of the IPCC from which I have taken this illustration.
Also the previous report of 2014 contained a similar chart. There is no notable natural contribution to modern global warming, but rather the opposite. The solar activity has decreased slightly since the middle of the 20th century, there is a a slight counter
Effect due to a weakening of solar activity, but this effect is very small. In the meantime, we are able to use paleoclimatic proxy data to reconstruct the worldwide global temperature trend since the peak
Of the last ice age 20,000 years ago. You see this here on the left in the graph, with pretty high margins of uncertainty. We can say that we have already left behind the Holocene, that is the Holocene at the beginning of which our ancestors Homo sapiens
Discovered agriculture, settled down, started building cities and benefited from 10,000 years of stable climate. We have already left this stable climate and we are moving into uncharted waters with unforeseeable consequences and also at great
Speed. When we look at the pace of global warming at the end of the ice age, at the transition to the Holocene, the pace of global warming was about 1 degree per 1,000 years. And now we have accomplished more than 1 degree in 100 years.
We can now trace this back even further in Earth’s history, 66 million years back. This curve represents CO2, the coloured stripes represent temperatures. You can see very clearly again that the close correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration in our atmosphere
Has been prevalent for many millions of years and here in this case, these changes have to do with plate tectonics. I forgot to mention that the ice age cycles – if anyone does not know this, I learned this in geography classes in the 70s –
These orbit cycles, the Milankovitch cycles cause the ice ages. That has been known for a long time. Milankovitch clarified this in the 1920s and at my department we can use the climate model to correctly display all the ice ages of the last 3 million years, if we
Use these orbit cycles, which can be calculated with astronomical precision, as a driver. And today we are at 420 ppm, which is 50 % higher than before the beginning of industrialisation. So we have already increased the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere by half
And thus have higher levels than ever in the last 15 million years. If we continue like this, the consequence – and this is just one of many consequences – is for examplethat significant parts of the Earth will become too hot
For longer and longer periods of the year to stay outdoors simply because Homo sapiens have a physical limit regarding the amount of heat we can withstand until our body temperature can no longer be stabilised and, yes, already at 3 degrees of warming, for example,
Large parts of Asia and Africa where hundreds of millions of people live will just get too hot for us, and it will no longer be an ecological niche of Homo sapiens. You cannot entirely avoid to stay outdoors if you want to cultivate fields, when you work on a construction site,
And so on. You cannot just disappear inside houses with air conditioning, but probably these people will move to cooler regions. I would now like to move on to the debate on these scientific findings. One of the most prominent examples is certainly this so-called hockey stick.
I talk so much about the palaeoclimate because I have done a lot of research in palaeoclimatology and have published a lot in the field. Therefore, I am just quite familiar with these topics. This well-known study by Mike Mann and his colleagues from 1999 was the first
Reconstruction of temperatures in the last 1,000 years. At the time only for the northern hemisphere because there were not enough data from the southern hemisphere yet. When this was published in the journal, it hardly caused a sensation, so in the discipline
It was not sensationally new or a big fuss, but when this study was prominently featured in the subsequent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it became the target of significant or, I would even say, a massive campaign to discredit it.
You could say a lot about this, I just show an example of an article in the German Welt am Sonntag newspaper of 2004, which basically said that “the researchers need to rethink. A demolished hockey stick keeps the climate researchers in suspense”. Based on one
Corrigendum that Mann and his colleagues had published, the article suggested that the climate had developed entirely differently and it showed a corrected curve, corrected in quotation marks. This curve showed that it was supposedly warmer already during the last ice age,
The so-called little ice age, than it currently is. The problem: this alleged correction has never been published in the specialist literature. It came from a person who had worked in the resources industry for a long time and from an economist from a neoliberal
Think tank and it had nothing at all to do with the corrigendum of Mann et al in the journal. Mann merely had to correct the list of data used and it was specified explicitly that
This correction did not change anything at all in the curve. This was a typical article of many around the world. It was practically an attack on the credibility of the hockey stick graph without any substantial reason really. But even in
Specialist literature, articles were published that sowed doubts. For example, this work here by Soon and Baliunas in Climate Research, which had passed the peer review process and then also led to the resignation of editors of this journal who did not agree with it. It was not original research
But a review and the researchers who had published the original work and were reviewed in this article fought against the incorrect use and reinterpretation of their data. It was funded by the American Petroleum Institute and it later turned out that the first author, Willie Soon,
Had received more than a million dollars from oil companies, including from ExxonMobil. Let us take a look at the hockey stick now, after two decades of research. The PAGES 2K project has been running for many years, involving 78 researchers and 24 countries.
They have collected and gathered the proxy data from all over the world. The result looks exactly like Mike Mann’s original curve. That is the state of research, with the only difference that it now goes back not 1,000 years but 2,000 years
And that it is a global reconstruction and is not only focused on the northern hemisphere. So, the work of Mann and his colleagues from the 1990s is one of the best independently verified work at all. A lot of research has proven that Mann’s findings were correct.
Incidentally, the error limits are now much smaller than those in the original reconstruction by Mann and his colleagues because we now have a much better database. Mike Mann has written a book about these attacks on the hockey stick. He received threats, an envelope containing white powder
Was sent to his university at the time when there were those scares in US and the police had to evacuate the university premises. So, Mike really experienced a lot there. If you do not want to read the whole book, on the klimalounge blog of Spektrum
I published a shorter summary of this hockey stick debate some years ago. I am still talking about the palaeoclimate. If you go on Twitter, X or other social media today, you constantly see curves like this one. Actually, everyday I go there, I see
Charts that supposedly prove that there have been much greater climate fluctuations already in the past. Now, here we see the last 11,000 years, so the Holocene and just the second half of the transition from the ice age. And here at the very end, you can see it says
“anthropogenic global warming hysteria”. So this tiny bit is supposed to represent the hysteria Surrounding global warming, but there were much more significant temperature changes. This is an interesting temperature scale: 12 degrees, 13 degrees, 14, 15, 16. Here it says ‘mean temperature of the northern hemisphere’. That is
All a big lie. This is an ice core from the Camp Century ice core, which was drilled during 1963-1966. It shows only the local temperature in Greenland, so no talk of “not plus 15 but minus 30 degrees” and the chart ends before the start of global warming. Meanwhile it is
Warmer also in Greenland than it has ever been in the Holocene. There are many versions of that by the way. The trick is usually the same: it is concealed that the curve does not represent the current
Warming, it is concealed that it does not use global data or data from the northern hemisphere, but that it uses data from a local point and local fluctuations are known to be an order of magnitude greater than the global fluctuations, because in the global mean, most weather events naturally
Average out. So there is probably hardly a place less representative of the global temperatures than Greenland, which is very much affected by variations in the North Atlantic Current . Nevertheless, this fake matter also appears in expert opinions
On draft legislation on climate protection in Germany, submitted by experts of the AFD in this case. I sometimes also write op-eds for the newspaper Der Spiegel. I once wrote a piece about what we can really learn from the ice age, from Earth’s history and that
Is definitely not what these people distributing fake news want to tell us. There are also global warming slowdowns, this is very interesting. Here we see a tweet by Steve Milloy, which he posted around a year ago. In January last year, he tweeted, “In the last 8 years,
There has been a global cooling despite billions of tons of CO2 emissions, so CO2 warming is a hoax”. One might be willing to forget about it if some idiot posts about it, but he is a seasoned lobbyist
Of the fossil fuel industry, who has 13.4 million views for this post on Twitter. Although I am one of the climate researchers with the highest number of followers on Twitter, I have never even got approximately
The same number of views on a tweet as this piece of disinformation. This is of course what it looks like in reality. You have a noisy data series and you can put it together from all the parts
With no warming. If you want you can always pick out something like this. That is called ‘cherry picking’. Climate researchers look at the red curve. A few days ago, I saw Steve Milloy posting another tweet. This time he basically predicted that
We are at the beginning of a longer global warming slowdown. Of course right now we are on an absolute record high, usually followed by five to seven years without further warming. There are people who just believe this stuff, because they want to.
Björn Lomborg delivered another example of cherry picking, published in the Guardian: “Over the past two years, sea levels have not increased at all – actually, they show a slight drop. Should we not be told that this is much better than expected?” There is this constant insinuation that climate researchers are alarmists,
Telling you lies. Why are they not telling you that the sea levels are sinking? The most interesting part was that he titled the article “Let the data speak for itself” without showing the data. In my reply I showed the data
And it illustrates that this little blip in the sea levels had long passed when the data was published. Björn Lomborg also earns a fortune that way. He wrote best-selling books, like “Skeptical Environmentalist”. For this lobbying job alone, for the climate change-sceptic think-tank Copenhagen Consensus Center, he
Received an annual salary of 775,000 dollars. Who would not want that? I also wrote an article about Björn Lomborg, in this case in the English Real climate blog, if you want to dive deeper into the topic. Besides, he also wrote about one of my research topics, the
Rise of the sea level, especially about a worst-case-scenario, in which 400 million people are flooded: “Is it really a worst-case scenario?” It is about the melting of the Antarctic ice, and he wrote “That is less than 6 % of the world’s population, meaning that 94 % will not be
Flooded. That’s not too bad, isn’t it.” That is how the sea level curve really looks like in a long-term view. For the last 60 years we have been witnessing a permanent acceleration of the rise of the sea level, which is quite logical and has been expected and predicted.
The warmer it gets, the faster the sea levels rise, because the ice is melting faster when it gets warmer. The little blip that Lomburg wrote his commentary about is visible here on this curve. That is what we call extreme cherry picking. There are Republican states in the US
Where the term ‘rising sea level’ is even banned from government documents, because it is a ’left-wing term’ as one Republican politician once said. The company Exxon is one of the main sources of such disinformation, which is then shared in social media by climate change sceptics,
Like the myth that only 3 to 4 per cent of CO2 emissions are human-induced. This is taken from a so-called advertorial by Exxon. It looks like an editorial, an opinion piece. They published these regularly for many years in the major American newspapers, like the New York Times. It is a paid
Article by Exxon, which looks like an editorial but in reality it is basically an advertisement, comparing the turnover of the biosphere, including rotting leaves and other factors setting free CO2, but only that which was previously photo-synthesized from the atmosphere, so there is no net effect on
The rise in CO2 levels. This cycle is then compared to one-way net emissions from natural gas and petroleum in the Earth’s crust into the atmosphere. I already mentioned that the rise in CO2 levels is 100 % human-induced.
In fact, if the Earth’s natural system did not absorb around half of the CO2 we emit, because forests and oceans absorb it, the increase in the atmosphere would be twice as high. So, the Earth’s natural system is not a source of CO2 but causes CO2
Levels to sink. I also wrote a blog article about this topic, pointing out how the AFD party in Germany is using the exact Exxon argument, not only during their election campaigns but on a regular basis. In this case it originates in
The propaganda of the company Exxon and this is not an isolated case. There is one example published by Statista, showing how five big oil companies invested more than 200 million dollars in lobbying to prevent climate protection measures, in only one year.
So, if you add up all those years and all those fossil energy companies we are talking about billions that went into lobbying against climate protection measures and they were successful. This is one of the main reasons why
The resolutions to avoid the dangers of climate change adopted in Rio in 1992 were not executed. Exxon also carried out their own climate research and also made predictions. This was publicised from internal documents, which were discovered through journalistic investigation. Here we have an example of one of these internal documents, which
The Exxon scientists presented to the management of Exxon. The left curve shows the rise in CO2 and the right curve outlines the rise in temperatures from 1960 to 2100. If we compare these with the observational data, it becomes visible that Exxon
Expected an even higher rise in CO2 and also temperatures than what actually happened. What is even more interesting to me as a palaeoclimatologist is this diagram by Exxon Researcher James Black from 1977, also from internal Exxon documents. The black part is the original curve, and I put the red
Modern curve over it, symbolising the last glacial cycle, the last 150,000 years. The black curve shows what Exxon researcher James Black said. Today we are in the Holocene, here at the end of the graph, and the black curve rises up to a ’carbon dioxide induced super interglacial’, meaning a super-interglacial.
Interglacials are interglacial periods. Here is the Eemian, 120,000 years ago, there is the Holocene, and he showed that the rise in temperatures will be higher than ever before in the last 150,000 years shown in this chart, due to fossil carbon dioxide emissions. The red one is a model simulation
Powered by these orbit cycles and an emission scenario leading to a 2-degree warming. What the Exxon researcher could not have known in the 1970s, he thought that the warming period would end after five to ten thousand years. Today we know that the life cycle of CO2 in
The atmosphere is way longer. That is the so-called ’long tail of carbon dioxide’. It will take hundreds of thousands of years until the CO the atmospheric rise, will be degraded through natural processes. It will finally end up in the deep-sea sediments, but this is
Just a very, very slow process. But Exxon made a lot of these climate projections. My colleagues at Harvard, historians of science Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes analysed those Exxon papers and, together with me as a co-author, conducted a quantitative analysis of all the Exxon projections in their internal research documents. All
The grey and black curves are Exxon climate projections from different periods, starting in the 70s. In the beginning, the first curve that goes up so steeply shows them clearly overestimating the level of warming. From the second curve onwards, the predictions are quite precise and in no case did the Exxon researchers
Say that there may not be any warming or just a little bit, but what they expected was essentially quite correct. They knew exactly what consequences the use of fossil energy would have, and yet they made the public believe something completely different. That is a point worth mentioning specifically here.
These advertorials systematically sowed doubts concerning climate research. Last year, UN Secretary General Guterres, after seeing our Science publication regarding the Exxon projections, stated that “Big Oil peddled the big lie and like the tobacco industry
Those responsible must be held to account”. Luckily, we also have legal experts in our beautiful research hub, who will now investigate this question. This shows how interdisciplinary this question is today, because the disinformation issue becomes more and more of a legal issue,
With hundreds of law suits around the world right now. Overall we can say that the doubt regarding climate research is a product of an industry, as once beautifully put in a Guardian headline and it has also extensively been written about in books how this lobbying works.
Naomi Orakses, historian of science at Harvard University wrote a good book about that topic several years ago, ‘Merchants of Doubt’, which was also turned into a film. Susanne Götze and Annika Jöeres wrote the German book ’Die Klimaschmutzlobby’, which hit the markets a few years ago. Next week Christian Stöcker’s book
‘Männer, die die Welt verbrennen‘ will be published. The title fits the International Women’s Day, because these lobbyists, who unscrupulously mislead the public to make even more money with fossil fuels, are usually men, it has to be said. They have also developed structures, these so-called denier think tanks.
It is documented that billionaires with huge amounts of money finance these think tanks with anonymous donations. These think tanks then throw such pseudo-scientific expertise on the market to sow doubts about climate research according to the well-known
Motto ’doubt is our product’. A highlight of this campaign, one of these denial think tanks is the Heartland Institute in the US, which has put up these large billboards on major American arterial roads. This man in the picture is Ted Kaczynski, a terrorist,
The Unabomber, who is quoted here saying “I still believe in global warming, do you?”. This poster campaign went too far even for some of the sponsors from the oil industry and some of them have withdrawn their funding but it reaches
Really extreme forms. The media also play an important role in this. In my view there are now two main keywords: false balance and rich owners. False balance is very well depicted here in this beautiful cartoon by John Cook from skepticalscience.com.
“Today we are talking to a scientist about the solar system, but to ensure that she is not so alone with her opinion, we have invited a member of the Flat Earth Society as a counterpart.”
Incidentally, this goes back to a quote from my now sadly late friend and colleague Steve Schneider who once said that what the climate sceptics do on television is just like inviting a representative of the Flat Earth Society to every satellite launch
For a counterposition. And there is also social science literature that proves this and that is where the technical term ’balance as bias’ or ’false balance’ comes from. It refers to this striving of the media to always present two different opinions on a topic, even in cases where the science is actually
Clear and this approach leads to an error by simply misinforming people. And we see the result in the fact that the scientific consensus on human-induced climate change, which for many years, for decades actually has been
Well over 95 %, we can discuss if it is 97, 98, 99 or even more. Seven studies have been conducted on this consensus from 2009 to 2021. Anyone who has ever been to a climate research conference knows that there are no scientists who say it is not
Caused by humans. It is simply proven beyond all doubt, but people do not know. A current question from 2022 in various European countries: if you ask people how big the consensus among climate researchers is about global warming,
People only say between 60 and 70 %, so due to this media coverage they believe that 30 to 40 % of climate researchers do not believe in human-induced global warming and it is just completely false information that has spread.
Let us now focus on the example of the TV film The Great Global Warming Swindle. So this film also shows this curve that you see here, showing the medieval warm period and the little
Ice age, this is an ancient curve that only represents data from central England and it has nothing at all to do with the development of global temperatures. And the label back there is just as wrong as the Greenland ice core curve, it also stopped in the middle of the 20th century
Before the warming had even really started. Or this beautiful correlation between temperature and solar activity shown here. Red represents the solar activity. I already mentioned that it has been decreasing
Since the middle of the 20th century as we see in the right picture, but the right picture was not shown in the film, the left-hand version was shown, so what did not fit the narrative was simply left out.
And the boss of the Channel 4 station in Britain, which was the first to broadcast the film then said that “This is a controversial film but we feel that it is important that all sides
Of the debate are aired”, which is like saying, “When it comes to evolution, we always have to consider both sides, the people who believe in creationism and the scientists who believe in evolution”, which, by the way, is still really controversial in the US when it comes to
What may be taught in schools. Then there is the popular researcher controversy. So you always invite someone who says something other than the established academic consensus. This was once a cover story in the German Focus news magazine. There were no
Reasonable arguments in favour of this claim that “solar activity could trigger a new cold period”. This thesis was just on the cover but there is no evidence at all. There was some Siberian researcher no one had ever heard of in the international community. Then the
Focus article presented the science organisation Friends of Science. When an organisation calls itself Friends of Science all alarm bells should go off immediately. This is an astroturfing organisation, i.e. a lobby group founded by the fossil fuel industry and then,
Of course, the European Institute for Climate and Energy, EIKE, who knows it? Yet so many! I assume that those who know it also know that it is not a European institute but a small group of retirees, who simply run a website for people
Denying climate change. The thesis, that the sun is to blame for global warming was spread for quite some time by Fritz Vahrenholt, at the time one of the top managers at RWE. He later wrote a book
Titled “Die kalte Sonne” (The cold sun). Now, how can a cold sun, meaning decreasing solar activity, explain global warming? In this case you have a bit of a problem now, but what do you do? You predict that we are on the verge of cooling because solar activity is decreasing, so
The cooling begins and he even has depicted this blue curve that I have added here in his book, in the global temperature curve so he has specifically predicted this cooling. This is the climate prediction
Most quickly corrected by measurement data I have seen here. When things did not go together as hoped, Vahrenholt stated on a website for people denying climate change that NASA is manipulating data and that the data therefore do not fit his cooling prognosis.
Another thing regarding the media: there is more than just this false balance. Some media specifically deny climate change. For example, the Wall Street Journal, which belongs to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which was also investigated once. This graphic is also a bit older, but it shows
How many editorials on climate change, out of over 200, explicitly admit that climate change is caused by fossil fuels: zero. It is a similar picture when we look at columns. And here we are with Rupert Murdoch, who was once described by my colleague Mike Mann as the man most to blame
For the fact that we have done nothing about the climate crisis, of all the individuals on the planet. He owns a huge media empire that includes Fox News. Without Fox News Trump would probably never have become president. Wall Street Journal, The Sun, The Times in the UK, TV stations in
Britain, almost all Australian media are in the hands of Rupert Murdoch and he employs, for example, this columnist Andrew Bolt, who in January 2020, when these devastating bushfires were raging in Australia, wrote “warming is good for us”. Yes, that is just Rupert Murdoch and when you are constantly watching
Fox News, you are constantly bombarded with this nonsense, and you just start to believe it at some point. I am almost at the end of my talk now. This disinformation has now shifted in the current debate. Global warming is hardly denied anymore
Nor that humans are causing it, almost nobody listens to people anymore, I would say. It is even more important in the US, because Donald Trump famously claims that. But now most politicians or business leaders say: yes, climate change is a
Serious problem, we are doing something, but we are actually not doing enough but are procrastinating. They admit that there is a problem, without working on a solution. The solutions are systematically disavowed, like wind and solar energy, electromobility, heat pumps.
Think of “Habecks Heizhammer” in Germany, a massive campaign in the Bild newspaper, showing senior citizens on the verge of bankruptcy, not able to pay 100, 000 euros for the renovation of their house to install a heat pump. That was not true at all, of course.
It became known, trough leaked internal chats, that Matthias Döpfner, boss of the Springer group, is in favour of global warming. 48.5 % of the Springer shares belong to the American investor KKR, which is massively invested in fossil energies. These discourses of delay are illustrated here in a nice cartoon.
Just a few examples: The first one on the left is whataboutism. “What about China” – what can we even do? China produces much more emissions. Or individualism – the individual is to blame, we are all to blame because we drive cars,
So it cannot be the fault of the industry or politics. Or just the carrot not the stick, so please just no ban policy. Ban parties like the Greens are not an option at all. Everything has to be voluntary through incentives. And finally social justice.
In the wake of the climate crisis, people are suddenly discovering their sense of social justice. They never cared before and are suddenly hugely concerned. How is the nurse in the countryside supposed to get to work in her car if petrol becomes more expensive?
I really must come to an end now. My 45 minutes are basically up. We have good news at the end – the climate treaty of Paris, which contains very good targets.
It is also having an effect. An important fact that we need to know when it comes to the question “Can we do it?” is that with CO2, due to its long lifespan, hundreds of thousands of years
In the atmosphere, it depends on the cumulative emissions, i.e. the total amount emitted, until we reach net zero. That determines the extent of global warming and that is the reason why all scenarios in which we still maintain 1.5 or 2 degrees, such as the blue and green scenarios here
Now have to reduce emissions very quickly because the cumulative emissions are the areas under these curves and in order to keep this area – the emission budget – small, emissions have to be reduced very quickly now. If we had more time,
I would be quite optimistic but it has become a race against time. To maintain the 1.5 degrees we have to halve global CO2 emissions by 2030 and that is why the IPCC report also says that “the window of opportunity in which a liveable and sustainable future for all
Can be secured is closing rapidly” and also that “the decisions and actions taken in this decade will have an impact for thousands of years to come”, because of the long lifespan of CO2, the long response time of large continental ice masses and so on.
In conclusion: Global warming due to fossil energy use and deforestation has been proven for decades. There is no scientific doubt and in my opinion it jeopardises the continued existence of civilisation as we know it.
Perhaps we can go into more detail in the discussion why I believe this. Politics and society are actually aware of the problem but are delaying the solutions. But it is a race against time where procrastination simply means delaying, delaying simply means that the targets
Can no longer be met. And ultimately, massive lobbying campaigns by the industry and an, in my view, astonishing failure of the media with regard to this subject contribute to it. Thank you very much for listening. If you want to read more, there are a few more of my books here
And you can also find me on Mastodon, also on Bluesky in the meantime, if you do not want to go to Twitter/X because the atmosphere there has actually been somewhat poisoned by Elon Musk. Thank you very much and we still have the opportunity to discuss this further. [Applause]