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Here’s a worrying story, posted on Sunday on the BBC’s website. Over the last 40 years, oil companies have suppressed evidence of man-made climate change and deliberately spread doubt as to its existence. They have succeeded in delaying action to limit it with devastating consequences.

On BBC Sounds, there is a series of podcasts with the above title. The general theme is that the energy industry – with a focus on American oil – has cynically employed a strategy first introduced by tobacco companies in the 1950s. Pay experts who are willing to say in public that your product is not harmful, confuse the debate, and thus forestall any social and political response that might be bad for your business.

A plausible thesis

It is a plausible thesis. In both cases, authoritative-sounding and independent-seeming think tanks such as the George C Marshall Institute and the Information Council on the Environment (ICE) were set up to argue on behalf of vested interests. Some of the main sceptics were the same people in both cases: Frederick Seitz, Fred Singer, Bill Nierenberg, … respected scientists in other fields who for whatever reason were happy to oblige. The industrial players stumped up the cash and remained in the background as much as they could.

The media, loving a fierce debate and keen to present “two sides” to every argument, gave the sceptics plenty of airtime. The presenter of the podcast series, Peter Pomerantsev, makes the point well that a debate is not balanced by having “two sides” if only one side is trying to be objective.

Most worrying of all has been the successful politicisation of science. As evidence of anthropogenic global warming has increased, belief in it amongst U.S. Republican supporters has decreased. Apparently only around 15% of Trump supporters believe human activity is warming the planet. To many of them, a climate scientist is by definition a socialist – a term of abuse in their lexicon – not to be liked, let alone trusted.

Seduced by rhetoric

The BBC series does get a little carried away with its whistle-blower zeal; and consequently gets things out of proportion in relation to Public Enemy Number One, the oil companies. For instance, there are several references to the amount of money that ExxonMobil spent supporting think tanks to discredit climate science: $7m between 2003 and 2007 apparently. That certainly sounds like a lot, more than $1m per annum on average in that period.

But context is helpful. ExxonMobil’s annual revenue is around $280,000m; and while it fluctuates with the price of oil, we are talking 1 followed by eleven zeros, order of magnitude. So, on the basis of the podcast’s figure, ExxonMobil’s funding of dubious think tanks, at the height of its nefarious activity, was around 0.001% of its revenue. There is little doubt that ExxonMobil has spent tens or hundreds as much in the development of low carbon energy alternatives to oil.

That said, the small amount – relative to income – that ExxonMobil and others spent on biased think tanks masquerading as independent has arguably had a huge impact. Did they know they would be so successful? Not sure. And, were we to apportion blame, to what extent does society as a whole need to take a share for not asking the question: if there is a risk here, albeit a contested one, isn’t the wise course of action to change course?

The first podcast introduces Martin Hoffert, a computer geek who was working for Exxon in 1981 when he developed a model that predicted serious climate change in the coming decades. Looking back today, the series claims his predictions were “spot on” which means that the ExxonMobil team “saw the future clearly”. Alas, such a claim is as misleading as the disinformation campaign which the podcasts helpfully expose. Forecasters often make correct predictions without being sure of their subject matter, like one of Mark Lawrenson’s guest football pundits. With climate science, the devil is in the detail and in numerical quantification. In 1981, not even the well-funded research teams of oil majors “knew the facts” about climate change, whatever Greenpeace might say. Even in 2020, we don’t know how much the world is going to heat up, though we might now state with confidence we’re making it hotter.

There is plenty of naivety throughout the series. Jerry Taylor, a television sceptic in the 1990s, is eventually persuaded to actually read the work of one of his main targets, the climate scientist Jim Hansen. He is amazed to discover that Hansen produced more than one scenario, the one that he has been criticising in public as unrealistic doom-mongering. Jerry has a Damascene conversion, which is great but does leave you wondering why he didn’t check the basis of his feisty television performances earlier on.

Naivety extends to Pomerantsev himself, who has his “breath taken away” to discover that the oil (tobacco) industry could find scientists prepared to argue that burning fossil fuels does not cause dangerous climate change (smoking does not cause cancer). Is it not inevitable that businesses will spend money to present themselves in a good light, and be able to hire skilled external advocates, especially if the case is complex? (Indeed, is it wrong in principle, as long as the process is transparent? Doesn’t our legal system work like this?) Similarly, we as individuals might not want to believe that our Caribbean holiday, diet, or consumption habits, have anything to do with climate change. And we’ll find all sorts of ways to rationalise our behaviour (we’re too small to matter, only politicians can effect change, moving away from fossil fuels will cause more hardship than benefit, etc.), just as we do whenever we fail to heed unwelcome advice.

Acting despite doubt

The podcast series eventually recognises that doubt is at the very heart of scientific endeavour. A good hypothesis, by Popper’s definition, is one that can be readily disproved if conflicting evidence comes to light in the future. Scientific theories are rarely provable in a mathematical sense.

But of course we should not have to wait for certainty. Just as responsible science proceeds with the best hypothesis – as if it is true, until it is ever shown to be otherwise – so a responsible society should take action on the basis that climate change is very dangerous – and probably should have done so decades earlier.

Let’s avoid the language of vilification. We are all complicit and there is no point in casting blame. “They” are not the bad guys and “we” are not the good guys. We all need to work together – involving the expertise and resources of oil companies in the battle against climate change – and all doing what we can individually as well as corporately and indirectly via government.

Maybe, just maybe, it will be discovered in decades to come that climate change is not nearly as bad as it currently seems. But in the meantime let’s work with the best hypothesis we have: that man-made global warming endangers life on earth, requires urgent and significant changes in human activity, and we can all do something about it.

In my August post, I commented on the importance of gaining a ‘feel’ for one’s individual carbon footprint. This post is a case in point.

Recently, we had one of the coldest August Bank Holidays recorded in the UK. A friend commented that she had put on the heating in her home. Separately, during a call about sustainability practices at a local school, someone raised the suggestion that pupils should always be encouraged to turn the lights off when leaving schoolrooms.

Which is more significant in terms of carbon: leaving the lights on, or turning up the thermostat? Here’s a simple comparison.

Consider a modern kitchen lit by eight LED bulbs in the ceiling, each one with a power output of 5W. If the lights in this kitchen are left on for 24 hours, the electricity usage is about 1 kWh. The carbon intensity of electricity in Britain is now around 0.2 tCO2/MWh, or equivalently 200 gCO2/kWh, so the carbon emissions would be about 200 gCO2.

Now imagine turning up the thermostat by, say, 3 degrees Celsius. A typical home in the UK (three-bed semi-detached, built in the first half of the twentieth century) might require about 7 kWh of gas per day per degree Celsius of extra temperature. To a rough approximation, the required heat energy is proportional to the temperature differential between inside and outside, so turning the thermostat up 3 degrees might require around 21 kWh of extra gas per day. The carbon intensity of natural gas, by coincidence, is about the same as the current electricity coefficient, i.e. about 200 gCO2/kWh. So the carbon emissions would be about 4200 gCO2, over twenty times the figure for leaving the lights on.

Of course, I am comparing here the impact of switching on lights in one room, the kitchen, with turning up the heating for the whole house. But then we normally switch on lights one room at a time, but switch the (central) heating on for the whole property.

It was not always thus. Back in 1990, say, around three-quarters of our electricity was generated from coal-fired power stations; and incandescent light bulbs were normal. Combining these two effects, it is quite possible that the carbon footprint of lighting a kitchen would have been around ten to twenty times what it is now. Back then, the two actions in this comparison might have been similar in their carbon impact – and it is likely that switching off the lights in the house as a whole would have been more significant than moving the thermostat by 3 degrees, even allowing for a less efficient gas boiler back then.

But times change, and we need to keep up-to-date. What we decide to do with the updated information is another matter – but perhaps we could enable and educate school pupils to turn down the heating first, before turning off the lights, whenever they leave a classroom.