What is the real story behind climate scepticism and denial?
Invited “Hero of Science Lecture” at the Max Planck Institute for Human Delevopment, Berlin, 20 June 2023
[Applause] yeah good morning everyone it’s a a pleasure to be here and quite flattering for me to be invited as as a for a hero of science lecture at the max plank Institute uh on my title slide you can already see my background in astrophysics and um it also is like a
Journey uh that is laid out here with the topics Journey Across The Flat Earth I want to start with some Basics uh including basic information about climate change to just to know what the background scientific background of all this is and I want to start with
Alexander Fon Hol who was uh one of the first maybe the first uh to write in 1843 that humans are changing the climate quote by cutting down forests and by releasing large amounts of steam and gas at the centers of Industry recently I gave a talk together with an
Alexander F humal expert and he said yes humal did know about the greenhouse effect which was first described by uh Fier in 1824 and uh we don’t quite know what humal meant with steam whether at that time he was like we do today uh taking
It uh to be a water vapor or not but basically this quote uh is uh very correct and humal like in many subjects was ahead of his time there now make a big jump forward to 1896 when the Swedish uh later Nobel laurat Swant arinos was the first one to
Try and calculate the climate sensitivity that is how much global warming do you expect from a doubling of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere uh he redid this calculation about about 10 years later uh in an improved way and then he arrived at a climate sensitive sensitivity of 4° celsus for a CO2
Doubling this value is um a little bit high today we think it’s around 3° but we still have an uncertainty range between 2 and 4 degrees for this critical parameter which basically tells us how strongly the Earth will respond to an increase in carbon dioxide or more
Gen generally in radiative forcing as we call it of course we all know that the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing dramatically this is 100% due to human activities the most important of these gases is carbon dioxide in terms of the radiative forcing so the change in the earth’s
Radiation balance and just the increase in CO2 concentration by 50% which we have already C C increases the amount of heat available to heat the climate system by two watts per square meter of Earth surface day and night around the clock so uh that is the reason why it’s
Getting warmer because we’re adding energy to the system that is Elementary physics basically the earth that is something that furi recognized in in 1824 by the way when he looked at the heat budget of planets the planets heat up to the Point uh where they radiate enough longwave radiation back into
Space to balance what is coming in from the Sun the warmer a physical body is the more long wave it radiates and this balance simply arises um um and sets the temperature of any Planet including planet Earth we can see this uh concentration of greenhouse gases in our Atmos
Atmosphere uh back to nearly a million years now from the ice course and Antarctica uh where you have ice that is so old the the deeper you drill the older it is and it contains air bubbles where we have samples of the ancient air which can be analyzed for greenhouse gas
Content and uh from that we know that the CO2 concentration now is uh much higher than at least in 1 million years probably you have to go back more than 15 million years to find similarly high CO2 levels as we have today the consequence of those additional 2 watts per square meter
Heating from the CO2 alone are seen here this is the famous warming Stripes one way to show the global average temperature every stripe is one year it starts in 1880 on the left and goes up to last year the conventional way to show the same data is as a data curve
Like this which now also has an advantage that it has a scale on the left where you see that we’re now at 1.2 de above the late 19th century temperature and that is highly relevant if you consider that in the Paris agreement All Nations agreed to pursue
Efforts to limit that warming to 1.5 so we are actually now already at uh 1.2 heading for 1.3 we have a very very small margin still to stop global warming I will come back to this at the end of my talk now this warming was actually predicted before it was observed uh and
The first official government report about global warming resulting from fossil fuel use was uh published in 1965 uh ordered by the then US president Lyndon B Johnson it’s a famous Revel report which basically already contains the key information that fossil fuel use will increase uh the global temperature
It will start melting Continental ice sheets it will increase the sea level and so on now a couple of decades later in 1988 the famous NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen was the first to Proclaim in a in a senate Hearing in the US that global warming is here now the global warming
That we have long predicted can now be seen in the observational data they are outside the natural range of variability and this made the the cover of the New York Times and I can remember this day quite well because I was a PhD student at the time uh in New Zealand
And of course this was debated in the community that Jim Hansen had said that and there were some more conservative professors saying well maybe it’s a little bit early maybe it could still be within natural variability now of course nobody believe that anymore because it’s clear that the temperature increase has
Been proceeding for decades now exactly as predicted by climate scientists already in the 70s and 80s um I’ll get back to that point uh later on as well and U yeah in 1990 the first ipcc report appeared in 1992 there was the Rio Earth Summit where the framework convention on
Climate change uh was agreed to by all nations with the goal to prevent a dangerous global warming and um yeah that was 92 we know how successful uh or not this has been this pledge uh if you look at the further uh evolution of global temperature I mentioned the fact that
The Earth energy balance determines the global temperature and this energy energy balance is uh very well understood because uh it’s not a theory we have a global radiation measurement Network we have a SAT we have satellite missions which measure the incoming and outgoing radiation at the top of the
Atmosphere and so we know for example that uh the bottom left there about 160 watts per square meter are absorbed solar radiation are AB absorbed at the Earth’s surface um the Earth then as I mentioned tries to riate that back into space in order to get rid of that energy
That’s coming in every day uh if we didn’t get rid of it we would overheat within hours basically just think how quickly it gets warmer when the sunrises in the morning so we have to constantly get rid of these 160 Watts but we are actually radiating here at almost 400
Watts per square meter in Long wave because only a tiny fraction gets through directly most of it comes back in terms of this uh back radiation which is the Greenhouse Effect and if you look at this 342 watts per square meter absorbed back radiation this is uh more
Than twice the solar radiation we absorb at the surface so this greenhouse effect is no small thing it’s uh if you try to change the global temperature it’s the biggest knob you can turn basically and we have turned up that knob so sometimes I give talks where the
Organizers uh like to have polls from the audience with their mobile phones you can answer the quiz questions or so and if you ask people what they think how much of the modern global warming is caused by human activities a majority still reliably gets this wrong um only a
Minority knows that it’s actually 100% uh probably even slightly more because of course there are these uncertainty ranges So within uncertainty The observed warming agrees to the computed anthropogenic warming that we can calculate from that uh energy balance um but you can also look at the natural factors that could potentially
Cause warming like solar activity or orbital Cycles or volcanism and because solar activity has been declining in the last 70 years or so uh it has slightly counteracted human caus warming and there are no other reasons why the planet should warm and so we can say that probably humans have caused
Slightly more than 100% of The observed warming and it would have been slightly more if solar activity hadn’t declined I’ll come back to solar activity also uh in a few minutes um final Point here if we look at the Earth history we can also now con reconstruct global average temperature
Going back to the last ice age from the Decades of paleoclimate research done with the sediment cores and Ice cores taken around the globe in many places and uh this clearly shows first of all the transition here from the last ice age which is down here about 7° warming
Into the hollene then we have at the beginning of the hollene Homo sapiens invented Agriculture and started to settle down and build cities and since then we have benefited from a very stable climate uh which we have now left behind uh we are already now outside the range of hallene climate variability and
You have to go back about 120,000 years to the Eman interglacial before the last ice age to encounter climates that are similarly warm or even slightly warmer so with we are catapulting ourselves out of the hallene at a pretty great speed because the warming out of the Ice Age
Was about one degree per thousand years and now we’ve seen more than one degree in the last 100 years and we are now at about 0. degrees per decade so 20 times faster than the transition from the last ice age which hopefully you all know is
Due to orbital Cycles I learned that in school in the 1970s because actually was already um clarified by milanovich in the 1920s what the cause of the Ice Age cycles is if we zoom into that for the last uh 2,000 years since the birth of Christ
It’s again just illustrates how uh at a break neck speed this uh modern warming is which uh of course creates a problem in itself we’re not only outside the hallene climate where all our uh the nature we have around us and the agriculture as adapted to but we’re also
Changing at uh such a huge speed that adapting is becoming very very difficult with that curve I’m coming to the public debate and I want to start with uh the so-called hockey stick War uh this revolves around a publication by a young postto Michael man with two senior colleagues together senior paleo climate
Scientists in geophysical research letters in 1999 uh which was the first reconstruction of the northern hemisphere temperature for the last Millennium and it shows that you know how unusual that modern temperature rise is and at first it went unnoticed for a couple of years but it uh turned up then
In the third ipcc uh report few years later in I think it was 2001 and it was then um because the curve then became prominent it became a major focus of attacks on The credibility of the scientists uh the a massive campaign against this started uh court cases threats at the
Height of the anthrax scare an envelope with a white powder was sent to Michael man which made uh uh the police Evacuate the university building for example where he worked and uh unfortunately quite a few media uh took up that climate skeptic narrative uh from the fossil fuel Lobby and declared
This this curve as wrong or even fraudulent I was I just give you one example I have a couple of examples also from the German media because that’s where I live and work this is one from a conservative newspaper devel which basically uh said that um the hockey stick has been corrected
It it was wrong and uh it said that a demolished hockey stick keeps climate researchers on their toes U but um yeah there are a few problems with uh that narrative this this is a supposed correction of the hogey stick curve which claims that in the 14th 15th century it was already
Once as warm as in the modern time but the problem is that this supposed correction didn’t come from any paleoclimatologists but it came from Steve McIntyre who has been uh working until then for 30 years in the mining industry and Ross mckitrick he he was a neoliberal economist at a think tank
And uh it was this curve was never published in the reputable scientific literature uh a particular kind of deceptive aspect of this article is that it it kind of presents the case as if this correction supposed correction of the hockey stick curve resulted from a correction that men and colleagues
Published in nature magazine uh even though this corrigendum that they published explicitly stated that it changes absolutely nothing about the curve it was just correcting the supplementary information with all the list of uh data series that had gone into constructing this curve um that journalist Axel banovski has gone on to
This day to lift climate Skeptics narratives into mainstream German media and thereby given giving them some kind of credibility which in the scientific Community they simply do not have but there were even in the scientific literature some baseless attacks on the man at Al hockey stick curve for example
Uh this was probably the most prominent example by vly sunun and Sally balunas in climate research uh it actually LED then to Stepping the whole editors of that journal stepping down because they had published uh this dubious uh article um it was a review no original research but the scientists that had
Conducted and published the original research protested against kind of distortion of their results in this paper the paper was funded with 53,000 by the American petroleum Institute and uh it later was also found that vly soon had received over a million uh dollars in funding from fossil fuel companies
Including Exxon uh and he had uh kept this secret he didn’t disclose his conflict of interest with with with papers that he published in journals where you have to disclose such a conflict of interest now just uh two decades later with big paleoclimate projects collecting data from around the world
Um we know a lot more about the evolution we now have a kind of o stick curve which I showed in a different color version uh earlier on for the last 2,000 years so the hockey stick has now been extended from 1,000 to 2,000 and it
Uh covers the globe and not just the Northern Hemisphere as the original 1999 study and uh The observed temperature has gone even higher and the uncertainty range around that uh curve is now also smaller than in the original man atal curve but if you put the man atal curve
From from 1999 on top of this it basically sits exactly on top of the modern knowledge so uh the authors of this study have received numerous prizes are highly regarded in the scientific Community but basically for decades it has been almost like a membership card of the climate Skeptics Community to
Claim that there’s something wrong with Mike man’s hockey stick uh Michael Man actually wrote a great book about this the called the hockey stick and the climate Wars and for those who read German I also on my blog have a kind of short summary of this whole debate with further
References so let’s go on to some other examples concrete examples uh because I I’ve been working in paleoclimate myself since the 1990s so that’s why I like showing paleoclimate examples but also uh it simply is one of the most common climate skeptic arguments to say but climate has always changed you know
You’ve probably all heard this argument and uh a lot of fake curves circulate in the social media about this that particular one you know I saw it again last week it’s been been there for decades it’s actually originally from a German colleague uh di sh who whom I know well who published
This um in a textbook uh nearly 30 years ago when there wasn’t much in terms of paleoclimate data and uh it’s a handdrawn curve but it’s based on the the the fact uh it’s it’s based on the cam Century ice core in Greenland that was the the first one
Drilled from 1963 to 1966 and this curve only tells you of course about the local temperature in Northern Greenland at the site of this ice core and uh the data end before global warming really took off so um the claim here on the left here it says average Northern Hemisphere
Temperature and goes from whatever 11 to 17° Celsius that’s complete the real data they they are of course subzero temperatures because we’re in Northern Greenland this this is a fake Legend there uh put on the y axis and also this this thing here at the end that this is supposedly the antropogenic
Global warming his ior um that is also complete um also this predicted mini ice AG is also it’s it’s not in the original sh Visa curve there there are many versions in German in English and other languages and it comes up again and again on Twitter for
Example it’s just one of these examples of a kind of um denial narrative which I I always tend to say that this kind of uh lie just illustrate that the denial Community has no honest argument they simply don’t so they come up with uh complete nonsense like this now here’s another example this
Actually is from this year um also seen on Twitter Steve miloy this this is a fossil fuel lobbyist who here claims that global cooling you know the last 8 years global cooling despite massive CO2 two emissions uh and you know the disturbing thing is down here 13.4
Million people have seen this tweet I have never achieved even above 1 million even though I’m one of the five uh Twitter climate scientist with the most followers there uh the the deniers the fossil fuel uh Lobby gets much more bandwidth basically with this kind of there’s a very nice uh um
Animation of the Global temperature since the 1970s and it basically consists of of a lot of global cooling episodes right so basically after every big El Nino event you get uh seven eight or even 10 years of global cooling Etc um so we have known this you know people
Who have been in this business for a few decades you know we have repeatedly seen this global cooling claims after every new record in the global temperature a few years where that it takes until the next record is being broken because there’s natural variability superimposed on the global
Temperature so skeptical science I will recommend them again later on they they do a very good job at systematically debunking this kind of nonsense but it still has huge bandwidth it’s a typical example of cherry picking another example in in my own research field uh
Of sea level rise where I also have done quite a bit of work is bjn lomor he’s a very uh successful uh climate skeptic has been for decades writing bestsellers on this uh lots of editorials by him published around the world in the media and he one
Of them was in the guardian in 2008 uh where he wrote that over the past two years really long period um 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 I like that wording because it’s a typical
Insinuation that climate scientists are telling you lies you know they’re not telling you that sea level is really dropping and it’s much better than expected uh what I also really liked about this article is the title it said let the data speak for itself and he
Didn’t show the data so I I published a comment in the guardian showing the data and um yeah when he published his article this brief pause in sea level rise was already over anyway if he had taken the most current data anyone could have seen that already
But if you just look at the the background you know that there is natural variability like in all geophysical time series now he’s earning a lot of money uh with this kind of climate denial who want who wouldn’t want an annual s salary of $775,000
And that is just from his work for one Think Tank and uh not just uh even the income of his best sellers and so on um I wrote a commentary on ban lomor on our real climate blog which um yeah if you want to read more on him yeah I I
Asked the question is he just a scientist with a different opinion uh spoiler no he has never published anything of substance in the scientific literature so in fact the sea level rise is not only continuing it is accelerating and now if you look at the really longterm curve you see that
Little blip that lomor used to claim that sea level is dropping it’s it’s hardly visible really in the data it’s just a tiny one of these tiny fluctuations now actually the denial of sea level rise is a whole subcategory of climate denial and um there’s a nice
Article uh one by some American sea level uh expert colleagues about denying sea level rise uh that was especially about debates in North Carolina uh I Was Myself uh in North Carolina uh doing some fieldwork there drilling a settlement course on the on the coast of
North Carolina um and we also did a stakeholder dialogue you actually see me in this comic here this this is supposed to me be me um um so this is a comic actually put out by the uh German advisory Council on global change which is a government uh appointed body that I
Was a member of for eight years and we published uh published serious reports uh of course but uh one of them about the great transformation to a sustainable uh Global Society also came out in the form of a comic book so if you’re thinking about science communication that’s also one option and
Uh yeah we held this uh while we were doing the field work there uh on on the Sandy coast of North Carolina we also held a stakeholder workshop and it was was very interesting to me to see that there the big stakeholders that deny sea level rise it’s not actually the fossil
Fuel lobby but it it it was um uh the real estate Lobby because of course the the real estate there are really expensive uh houses there right on the coastline it’s beautiful Coastline um but they are kind of gradually eroding away and falling into the ocean and of
Course uh it really devalues the real estate at the waterfront and the the real estate Lobby didn’t want to hear that this actually went even as far as in in neighboring Virginia uh lawmaker uh said that sea level rises is a leftwing term and uh can’t be used in
Official government reports so this this is the most uh uh bizarre thing that just a factual thing like sea level rise is considered politically charged and a leftwing term yeah um I don’t believe in global warming um uh this is by what’s this what’s this uh sprayer artist just can’t remember
Remember the name now bangy bangy exactly bangi this this is a bangy piece of art here um yeah with with that I I come to a kind of next little sub chapter the kind of common characteristics of climate s science denial and there is this nice uh flick
Model developed by John Cook and others uh fake experts is the first point here we often see these fake experts on television that in reality are fossil fuel lobbyists posing as climate experts and uh I just this morning going through Twitter it’s it’s a bad habit to look at
Twitter when I wake up first thing in the morning I have to say um I saw my NASA colleague Gavin Schmidt he has a whole thread about debating these fake experts contrarian on television uh the conclusion basically that he draws is that uh it’s not worth
It and uh I have for decades uh not debated climate deniers uh on TV or radio so you know I would in writing because that’s it’s a different matter but uh in a live debate basically uh it just promotes the idea the People Come Away with the idea that the experts
Disagree you know that’s that there are two sides to this and uh people can’t decide who’s right which completely confuses them about the fact that there actually is a consensus and so my Approach is when I get asked by some radio show or so to debate a climate uh
Denier I say okay I’m ready to debate everyone as long as they have a reasonable publication record on this topic in the peer-reviewed literature and then these radio TV people go and look and realize oops oh this guy has never done any climate research and I have several times had the success that
They dropped this whole approach of having a debate with a den in the first place and just invited me to for an interview or so because they realize um that you know the other person was a fake expert and not a real expert uh as a counter example uh that’s
Already quite a few years ago maybe 15 or so there was a once a famous wellknown German TV talk show and they invited our director then John shelen Huer and then a few days before the show they rang up our press department and asked don’t you know anyone who denies
All this we don’t find anyone and so they really wanted to to get somebody um just to have a controversial debate about whether there is anthropogenic climate change or not and in the end there was some somebody in this program who had uh never published anything in the international peer-reviewed
Literature but was claiming climate change is due to solar activity uh actually somebody from Berlin um second Point here logical fallacies uh a classic one is uh say climate has always changed so humans can’t be the cause of this climate change this is obviously not uh logical impossible expectations is uh
People demanding an experimental proof that the observed global warming is really due to human activities um that’s obviously not something that science can deliver some kind of mathematical proof we can only deliver overwhelming evidence in favor for this um cherry picking I already showed you one example
Or two examples actually with miloy and lomborg and then uh there are conspiracy theories because of course if you are trying to say that uh all climate scientists are wrong um and there are you know many thousands of climate scientists around the world if you add
Them all up uh you have to come up with some explanation why why the why would they do this uh you know some conspiracy theory you know just just think of what a fantastic movie plot this would be you know thousands of climate scientists conspire to deceive the whole world but
Only a few fossil fuel bosses see through this plot you know this is a fantastic movie idea um so you know without some kind of conspiracy you can’t explain what’s going on um there is a very nice poster this is by skeptical science with led by John
Cook and also a German sister website CLA Fon uh they have put this nice poster explaining these five methods of scientific denialism you have a question yeah so people on the climate denial sides will level some of these same allegations at thetic climate chug camp that us guys start the like baselines
Act the very end of the last I agage or just a lot people are funded by Big Oil big coal a lot of those people also say well there’s tons of money in like the green movement in the environmental Lobby uh when thinking about how to like counter
That perspective do you actually go like Point by points because otherwise it seems like you’re giving credence like the false cency between the two sides but there are some like legitimate well people think there are legitimate criticisms they got climate science are also be some Charing so how
Do you think about combating those narratives well I mean they these um I I can say the website skeptical science.com has a kind of encyclopedic collection of all the denier arguments and you will find the counterarguments to these points there to be very brief I
Mean ending of the little ice age is not a physical mechanism that will cause unprecedented warming and we show the data as far as we have and uh I showed you them going back way before the last little Ice Age namely more than 20,000 years back and um the big you know the
Fossil fuel industry is one of the biggest industries on the planet and they make huge profits compared to uh which the entire climate science effort is pocket money and there is not big funding in promoting uh a false climate change narrative the big money is always
In the industries of the past the status quo uh which are trying to suppress the fledgling uh new things uh the the renewable industry is now getting bigger obviously but uh it uh for the last decades has been very very tiny in comparison anyway I I won’t want
To get into this I I want to continue with a a nice well not nice example of conspiracy theories maybe the most egregious example of conspiracy theory is that climate scientists are planning a global genocide um yeah that’s true some people promote this and uh for a while this
This uh uh larou movement was pretty big on this uh they were out there uh with banners protesting um quite a few of my talks that I have given and here is one at the Nobel laurate meeting in Stockholm that we were actually from The poam Institute involved in
Organizing uh and uh I I talked to these guys that were standing outside here shenas our director from the potam institute at the time um these guys kind of handed out leaflets saying we’re planning the global genocide and I talked to them and they were actually flown in from Berlin by that larouche
Movement to come to Stockholm and stand there and protest uh totally bizarre so useful resources to counter misinformation this is just a very short list because this debate has been going on for quite a few decades now there are a lot of really good resources I already mentioned the skeptical science.com and
Clima da which kind of systematically uh uh devoted to countering misinformation blogs like our own real climate blog which was um ranked by Nature magazine as one of the top science blogs of the world then there’s a debunking handbook and uncertainty handbook um by Steve Lewandowski who is
Sitting back there I Steve so um then um there’s a handbook in German to how to talk about climate because yeah if you have relatives or so uh for example or colleagues uh this is a difficult issue how to talk to those that are really uh stuck with these climate denial
Narratives and in case you get into legal trouble uh there is a climate science legal defense Fund in the United States because uh some colleagues there have been the subject of court cases I have been myself actually here in Germany uh for a Blog article that I wrote and um so it’s
Good to have some support in some cases I want to move on to who is actually funding all this climate denial and uh uh here’s one example the uh company Exxon Mobile has been publishing for many many years so-called advertorials uh these are things that look you know in major US newspapers
Like New York Times They they look like editorials but in the small print you can see that they’re actually paid for by Exxon I don’t actually think this kind of thing exists in Germany it’s it’s quite I mean an editorial is I don’t know how it how it’s not somehow
Corruption actually um it’s it’s weird and and it’s totally fake arguments this this one is just an example that I picked out um because this argument has been used by the our right-wing German uh afd party in the election campaign uh saying that only 3 to 4% of the CO2
Emissions come from human activities and the rest is coming from nature uh that of course is a total deception because it basically um Compares a closed cycle with added carbon dioxide you know what nature does is in in a summer there’s a lot of photosynthesis taking up CO2 and then in
The winter when there’s little photosynthesis and um biomass rots Etc it gets released again it’s a closed cycle I mean the the release of CO2 in nature from rotting biomass is can only release CO2 that was taken up out of the atmosphere beforehand so it can never actually
Increase uh the the CO2 unless you have a mass die off of forests of course and that’s also the reason why you know in the uh throughout the Holocene the CO2 concentration was practically constant because the natural cycles are Cycles but what we are doing now is adding CO2
To to the atmosphere and even if that’s only at a rate of 3 to 4% if you compare it to that that turnover in the cycle uh it’s still 100% of the reason why CO2 is increasing so we have actually increased CO2 by 50% over what it was until about
150 years ago and that’s 100% human activity so this is this is just simply a deception um basically any um person in a company should recognize it that uh it kind of Compares turnover to a net profit and that’s uh not very reasonable now there’s a lot of money
Behind this not only by Exxon there was a relatively recent um article in Forbes showing that just in a single year these five big oil companies had uh spent more than $200 million on anti climate science lobbying and lobbying against climate mitigation measures this is
Really a big amount of money and then a lot of that uh goes into uh foundations where you can’t even really uh sometimes track where the money is coming from uh for example the this network of think tanks like the frontiers of Freedom Foundation or the Heartland Institute global warming policy foundation in
Great Britain um basically the same people that drove the brexit campaign and the Heartland Institute even had a billboard campaign next to motorways with these Billboards um showing the uh convicted terrorist Ted kachinski saying I still believe in global warming do you I mean that was so
Over the top that they actually lost funding from uh quite a few donors from industry over that because that kind of was too embarrassing uh even for them now getting back to Exxon the fossil industry knew exactly what it was doing um this is an Exxon projection of
Climate change due to CO2 rise a climate change and CO2 rise actually from 1982 from internal Exxon documents that were uh turned up by a journalistic uh research and uh made public and you can see uh here on the left it’s a CO2 curve and the right is a temperature curve with a
Scale on the right and the red lines show what then what really has happened until now it is pretty much exactly what Exxon predicted in 1982 um they even predicted slightly faster CO2 rise and slightly more warming than actually happened and um also really interesting in 1977 uh an Exxon scientist James black
Presented this to its uh the the company CEOs uh this is a temperature curve over the last full glacial cycle so here you have this this last interglacial the Eman that I mentioned 120,000 years ago maybe slightly warmer than the hollene the hollene here is the end here that’s
Our Holocene and you go slowly into the Ice Age with these cycles that come from the procession cycle of the Earth orbit a 23,000 years cycle superimposed on that that’s these waves and um the red line is when we force our climate model in my department with the these
Milanovich cycles that miltin milanovich uh um discovered in the 1920s if you drive the climate models with that we basically reproduce the uh the Ice Age cycles even going back three million years we reproduce all the ice ages with the climate model and uh it it pretty
Well agrees with what EXO knew at the time time and the interesting point here is that um this Exxon scientist predicted a carbon dioxide induced super interglacial so warmer than normal interglacials like this last interglacial here uh that’s and the black curve went up to here um this is
Actually a two degree warming scenario that we added there for androgenic warming in our model simulation added to the milanovich cycles and U this scientist was only wrong on one count namely that he thought that uh you know the black curve goes back down again there so after about 5,000 years global
Warming would be over and uh only later he couldn’t know better at the time only later it was understood that the CO2 remains in the atmosphere much longer it remains elevated for hundreds of thousands of years um that’s the kind of long tale of global warming that we are
Causing because of the very long residence time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and actually we are um in in my department we have uh research projects funded by both the Swiss and the German nuclear power authorities uh to predict the coming ice ages up to a million years ahead of time
Because uh of course you can calculate these orbital Cycles with astronomic Precision millions of years back and into the future um milanovich did this on with pencil and paper when he was in prison at the time nowadays we can do that uh he was in prison not because he
Had committed a crime but uh because he had the wrong politics and um yeah you need to know when the earth will be dug up by big ice sheets again if you build a nuclear waste storage site and that’s why we get the funding to predict the the next ice ages with
The climate model and it turns out that we already have elevated this CO2 enough now to prevent the next ice age which would have started in 50,000 years and if we continue emitting uh we will cancel more and more ice ages up to uh a million years into the
Future now back to Exxon um we recently this year published a paper in science looking systematically at the projections quantitative uh projection curves found in these internal Exxon documents uh This was done together with Jeffrey supran and Naomi oreski from Harvard University they are science historians and
Um all these uh black lines and gray lines uh are projections from Exxon mostly done by Exxon scientists themselves in some cases uh ones that they took from the academic community and put into internal reports and uh the the lighter the gray the earlier this projection starts so the the the black
Ones are the the last ones you see the the very earliest from the 1970s um that that goes up here that overestimated the global warming from the 1980s onwards they were all in the right magnitudes here compared to what then actually happened in terms of global warming and if you compute a
Skill score uh of these Exxon projections they’re actually just SL slightly better than those coming out of the academic research community and of course not a single one projects much less global warming or even no global warming um but of course that the letter is exactly what the
Exxon decided to tell the general public in all these editorials that the science was really uncertain and we didn’t know whether it would cause any global warming um they really knew better even quantitatively they knew EX exactly what was coming and uh our UN General Secretary gutterz uh uh was in the world
Economic Forum in Davos uh that was about a week after our paper appeared in science and he said that we learned last week that certain fossil fuel producers were fully aware in the 1970s that their core product was baking our planet just like the tobacco industry they rode
Rough shot over their own science Big Oil pedal the big line and like the tobacco industry those responsible must be held to account I fully agree with that and there is quite a few court cases ongoing now uh against Exxon and other fossil fuel companies um you know different different approaches trying to
Get uh them to fund climate protection me measures like flood protection trying to force them like a case against VW in Germany to actually in the future reduce their emissions and um I think also so court cases for deceiving uh the shareholders for example by not uh openly communicating
The risks to uh their industry so there is a whole doubt industry and I always like this Guardian uh headline doubt over climate science is a product with an industry behind it that really sums it up and uh it has been very effective this product actually there is a famous also internal
Uh Memo from a PR advisor which says doubt is our product and so the whole uh attempt by the fossil fuel industry has just been to sell doubt to the public and uh they have really delayed the climate protection measures and they have brought us into this conundrum uh
That we’re basically stuck in now so it’s a very very tough decision here prior prioritize profits of Big Oil CEOs or back the green New Deal is a nice cartoon uh well tough what shall we do one one reason why this is such a
Debate is also I see a big role of the media there false balance Rich owners is uh what I call this and here’s a nice cartoon by John Cook um this this scenario of course we have all seen over and over again on television um you know already Steven Schneider
Decades ago one of the real pioneers of climate communication used to say that this climate denial uh is in on TV is like uh when if every time there was a report on television about a satellite launch they would invite someone from the Flat Earth Society to give a different
Perspective and of course there’s also academic literature about this this balance as bias idea the false balance and this study for example concludes that the US Prestige press and this is not Fox News this is the prestige press coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 has contributed to significant
Divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse that also really sums it up nicely what we debate at scientific conferences has basically nothing to do with the the popular debate about climate science and that’s why the people out there they don’t know that there has been a scientific
Consensus on human CA global warming for decades now uh there are some old studies this Starts Here 2009 the top left which found that there’s a 97% consensus amongst climate scientists there are more recent studies in the lower panel here going up to 2021 you know it just it’s always more
Than 97% I I would say from my personal experience going to conferences it’s definitely more than 99% of climate scientists that agree with a consensus on human CA global warming I for for at least 10 15 years I have not seen somebody at a scientific uh climate conference claim there is some doubt
About this being caused by human activities but the doesn’t know that um you know in the past or in the US the public typically thinks that there’s kind of half and half split amongst climate scientists on this topic even in Europe even recently as recently as last
Year uh the people still think that maybe 30 35% of climate scientists disagree on human cause global warming which is just completely wrong so there’s a completely false uh perception that’s why it’s called balance as bias the the public is completely wrong about this because the media are constantly uh showing fake
Debates on this topic um here’s another prime example I’m just looking at the clock I have to speed up a little bit but um prime example very successful television film The Great global warming s Swindle um it had one of these fake paleo climate curves it said now where it actually
Ends before global warming started it showed this uh correlation between solar activity and temperature now temperature in Blue now if you actually extended the data to the time where this TV program appeared oops um they have really since the 1980s they have they have really separated you know
Solar activity has gone down temperature has has gone up uh the filmmaker said this is a controver controversial or I think it was the the the television uh Channel who said that um it’s a controversial film but we feel that it is important that all sides of the
Debate are aired it’s again this idea give equal time to the flat earthers and um the filmmaker he was confronted on Australian TV live about why he left out these data and um he just said oh well you you know I wanted to show the state
Of knowledge at the time you know in the past total nonsense in Germany we also have this fake uh debate even covers of big news magazines uh forer stride means debate among scientists and so when you read the actual article whether there is no climate disaster because uh there will
Perhaps be a cold time because of uh the the declining solar activity the sources of that uh so-called controversy uh was uh some Siberian scientists that nobody in our science Community has ever heard of then the science organization that’s what I said friends of science now if you hear an
Organization with the name friends of science you should be immediately very suspicious and in fact it is an Astros turfing group funded by the Canadian fossil fuel industry and then they cited the European Institute for climate and energy as if this was a European Institute for climate and energy and not
A group of pensioners with a climate denialist website which I think is the role of the media to disclose you know what what is this group that calls itself European Institute for climate and energy but in an interview one said we don’t need climate scientists so um we also have a very prominent
CEO of rwe which is the largest CO2 emitter in Europe German power company mainly coal um who claimed it’s the sun stupid it’s a quote from him um he wrote a whole book called nicely actually it’s a nice title the cold Sun then you scratch your head and you have a problem
How do you put this together that there’s a cold Sun but global warming and the answer is of course global warming is a global cooling is just ahead it’s just around the corner and he even published a a quantitative prediction curve in this book it’s a the climate projection that is uh been
Falsified the fastest from all the ones I’ve ever seen but he’s still popular in the media and gives a lot of talks okay uh still on the media topic IC uh Wall Street Journal there was a nice analysis of how many editorials and how many columns uh over a long time
Stretch here more than 10 years have mentioned the fact that uh climate change has actually something to do with fossil fuels uh almost none as you can see uh why is that so it’s because uh Wall Street Journal belongs to Rupert Murdoch’s media Empire which is probably uh the biggest perpetrator of climate
Misinformation over the last decades around the world uh they own Fox News uh in Britain the Tabloid the Sun the times the British TV satellite channel B Sky B most of the Australian media are in the hands of uh Rupert Murdoch’s media Empire and that’s why after these horrendous fires in Australia they
Published this article warming is good for us which complains about climate activists uh instrumentalizing the horrible Fires for for their cause this is also quite typical that whenever as a climate scientist or activist after an extreme weather event or so you say uh we need to do something about global
Warming you’re instrumentalizing the horrible victims of these uh uh extreme event for your political purposes uh just recently you know another one from the Sun in Britain uh claims that there’s a break neck race to Net Zero I mean whose fault is it that we have to reduce emissions really fast
To Net Zero now it’s the fault of those uh media themselves and the fossil fuel industry who have Delayed Action if we had started reducing emissions after the Rio Summit with the United framework convention on climate change in 1992 we could have reduced emissions at
A very leisurely Pace but uh now we have to hit the breaks full on now in the meantime that’s my my last Point almost last Point um the debate has shifted as was predicted uh more than a decade ago in in this old cartoon um we’re actually now at 400 whatever 15
Parts per million or so uh already and the debate has now actually shifted away at least in Europe Maybe not in the US from denying climate change uh to um this causes of delay basically uh trying to delay you know acknowledging we have to protect the climate but
Trying to delay it and in Germany certainly and also in Britain I know there’s a lot of fake news about Solutions about wind solar electric cars that are supposedly worse than than uh combustion engine cars for the environment about batteries about heat pumps who have a huge heat pump debate
In Germany with Incredible amounts of fake news about uh heat pumps and um a huge campaign of the Tabloid built um against our climate and economics Minister from the green party Harbeck you know these are just some examples of uh it it’s the heating Hammer by Harbeck where he supposedly
Goes into your seller and rips out your oil heater even though the proposed legislation just said that any new heating systems installed from next year should be at least uh getting 65% of their heating energy from renewable sources uh it doesn’t require you to use a heat pump for
That um now the boss of that uh publisher who publishes build tabloid has in in um leaked internal communication said he really likes global warming actually he’s he doesn’t think one should do anything against it it’s nice to have a warmer climate and uh 48% 48.5% of that publisher
Springer um is owned by the US private Equity Firm KKR which is heavily invested in fossil fuel so it’s not surprising that they do this there’s a very nice uh also cartoon site which summarizes all these discourses of delay that just try to delay uh the necessary climate action uh
I just give a couple of examples here this is the whataboutism you know what about China you’ve all heard this individualism so it’s you as individual consumers with your CO2 footprint you are to blame you have to change not politics and industry or no sticks just carrots this is the favorite argument
Also in German politics uh there shouldn’t be a law requiring 65% Renewables we should just incentivize with money you know but then the Finance Minister says oh well sorry we don’t have the money and then these appeals to Social Justice by people that have never cared about social justice but when it
Is uh uh convenient to delay climate action by saying well that poor uh nurse having to get by car to her job she has to have uh her combustion engine with cheap petrol Etc uh these are all standard tactics which probably you have all seen so finally what should we do we
Have the Paris Accord that is great I want to just highlight the point that all countries have bindingly agreed to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degree for good reasons even Saudi Arabia Russia have all agreed to this for very good reasons what does it
Mean uh you have to know that cumul that CO2 accumulates because of the long lifetime in the atmosphere which I’ve already mentioned so it the cumulative emissions uh is what counts and if you want to keep the cumulative emissions low it it doesn’t really matter when your climate
Neutral but the area under these curves matters this is from the latest ipcc report we have to go onto this blue path with uh having the global emissions by 2030 that’s in 7 years time if we want to have a good chance to limit the warming to
1.5 and so this very steep uh immediate decline is critical here and uh then you have kind of a longer tail where you have some way to deal with emissions that are very hard to get rid of like those from agriculture uh but the big you know fossil electricity generation and fossil
Transport we have to get rid of uh really as fast as we can due to the guys who have delayed all this uh we have the next climate Summit coming up again in in November the cop is a conference of the parties this is the 28th one there annual annual
Conferences of the parties of the United Nations framework convention on climate change uh the one that was agreed in Rio 92 and this one is headed by an oil industry CEO Sultan Al Jabba from United Arab Emirates and they have already launched a major astroturfing campaign on Twitter for example with all these
Fake accounts these are artificial intelligence generated faces they are not real people praising the environmental record of United Arab Emirates there so to conclude the ipcc says there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all this statement with very high confidence and
The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years a statement with high confidence because we know about the long lifetime of CO2 now what I’ve uh tried to tell you is that yeah global warming has been document documented for decades it threatens the continuation of
Civilization peaceful living together as we know it and politicians and Society at large are still delaying the solutions to these problems even though to this threat even though we have the solutions the technological ones we just need to roll them out really fast and a massive lobbying campaign and
Astonishing media failure are not the least contributing factors to that and uh with that I thank you very much if you want to read more and um now I I’m here for discussion and sorry for running over time a little bit thank [Applause] you