Same old story
A brief history of climate change reveals a long history of scepticism, finds Alice Bell
It was the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius who, about 125 years ago, kicked off the first wave of climate scepticism. Discussing the causes of ice ages with the Stockholm Physics Society, he revived an old idea from the 1850s linking the climate to the level of carbon in the atmosphere. Initially more fearful of the potential for deadly cold, he began by running the maths for a scenario involving depleting carbon levels. It was only after a colleague pointed out volcanoes emit carbon that his attention turned to warming. When another colleague noted carbon emissions from coal smoke, he accounted for these too. By 1908, in Worlds in the Making, Arrhenius was arguing that if the steam age continued apace, the weather might warm up – in a century or two.
At the time, there were plenty of reasons to be sceptical of his claim. Arrhenius’ calculations were based on a simplified climate system and rather limited data. There were convincing arguments that oceans soaked up enough carbon and that clouds would reflect back sunlight. The notion that humans could compete with natural forces felt ridiculous – even irreligious. It did not help that Arrhenius was known for a host of unusual ideas: Worlds in the Making was mainly famous for a theory of interstellar life. Scientists initially excited by Arrhenius’ climate work started to distance themselves from it.
Fast forward to the 1930s and Met Office data, alongside records many countries had kept since the mid-19th century, showed a clear trend: the earth was getting warmer. Glacier researchers were also noting discernible ice shrinkage. In 1938, the mathematician Guy Callendar presented a paper to the Royal Meteorological Society linking carbon emissions to about a third of a degree of warming. It was a side project for Callendar – his day job, perhaps fittingly, was in steam power – and the meteorological establishment were not exactly enamoured by this outsider’s ideas. They published his paper, but also more or less laughed him out of the room.
Callendar, like many in this period, thought that any warming was beneficial. In fact, Swedish glaciologist Hans Ahlmann, who had been tracking the retreat of glaciers in polar regions around the same time, talked about ‘climate embetterment’. A 1912 edition of Popular Mechanics even imagined future generations thanking the fossil fuel industries for the ‘mild breezes and sunnier skies’.
After the end of the second world war, oceanographer Roger Revelle was one of a number of scientists who returned to the idea. He had been chasing carbon isotopes through bodies of water; in the process, he realised that everyone had been dramatically overestimating the ability of oceans to absorb carbon. Invited to share his work with Congress, he described the modern burning of coal, oil and gas as ‘perhaps the greatest geophysical experiment in history.’ He also secured funds for research to understand the phenomenon properly – everything up until that point had been someone’s side project – notably, a carbon monitoring project in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, which still runs today.
Journalists soon picked up the story, and the idea that fossil fuel emissions were warming the planet quickly embedded itself in the public imagination, albeit largely in the background. It is worth searching out The Restless Sphere – a 1957 BBC science special fronted by Prince Philip – and Frank Capra’s 1958 animation The Unchained Goddess. In both, you can see climate change discourse start to take shape. Unsurprisingly, even at this early stage, commercial interests played a role: the October 1959 edition of New Scientist includes a three-page feature authored by a scientist from Shell at pains to let us know that carbon dioxide constitutes only 0.03 per cent of the atmosphere. The same edition carries a news story on the tobacco industry’s increasing investment in science – a glimpse of how public debate on climate would later develop.
As the science of climate change grew, so did the disciplines and techniques, notably in computing and satellite technologies – though British meteorologists had to borrow the Lyons teashops’ computer while they waited for funding for one of their own. While often overshadowed by more obvious environmental issues like litter or air pollution, the topic was given a presidential mention in a statement on the preservation of nature made by Lyndon B Johnson in 1965.
A White House report later that year included a warning that, if fossil fuel emissions continued to grow, we would see a marked change in climate by the year 2000.
Not everyone was convinced. The same scepticism thrown at Guy Callendar by the meteorological establishment in 1938 still hung around. If anything, it hardened as meteorologists found themselves fending off conspiracy theorists convinced that secret weapons testing was changing the weather; many saw the whole business as somewhat cranky. Even the head of the UK Met Office, John Mason, saw climate change as American alarmism in need of debunking. By the late 1970s, however, all the core arguments were put to bed. The science was clear: the planet was warming and human activities were the cause.
When, in 1980, Thatcher was first briefed on what by then was starting to be known as global warming, she replied: ‘Are you telling me I should worry about the weather?’ She quickly came round, though, bringing climate scientists into Downing Street to brief her cabinet and, by 1989, calling on the UN to take action with a binding international treaty. She was not alone. During the 1988 US election, climate change made the front page of several newspapers and even Sports Illustrated. Climate action had been born as a mainstream political force.
At this point, a new era of climate scepticism began to mobilise. Plans for a climate treaty, including establishing an intergovernmental panel of scientists to brief policymakers, were well underway, inspired by the success of the Montreal protocol on the ozone layer. Several industry players felt they had not done enough to push back on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and so, in 1989, the Global Climate Coalition was established to represent their voice in any debate curtailing fossil fuel use. Other, similar sounding bodies soon followed, including the Information Council on the Environment, the Cooler Heads Coalition, and the Global Climate Information Project.
The playbook was old: one the tobacco industry had mastered in the 1960s and the oil industry had been running for decades before on air pollution. The idea was not to create fake science, but to fund solid research on topics that would muddy the message. This might mean distraction (for the tobacco industry, the dangers of asbestos offered opportunities) or exploiting the scepticism at the heart of the scientific method, and journalism’s commitment to balance, to sow the seeds of doubt – hijacking the Enlightenment values of systematism and free speech. There was an old guard of meteorologists, still slightly sceptical of climate change, who could be amplified, and political divides within science – especially in terms of relationships with the military – that could be exploited.
This new, industrially rendered scepticism would set the tone for much of American climate politics in the 1990s, limiting the space Clinton and Gore could take at the 1997 Kyoto talks and laying the ground for the growth of more confident climate scepticism in the 2000s. In the background, temperatures kept rising. After the deadly European heatwave of 2003, the softly-softly approach started to look not only passé but crass. BP started rebranding as ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and left the Global Climate Coalition, publicly embarrassed by the association.
In recent years, we have seen the emergence of a different type of scepticism, targeted less at climate change itself and more at our responses to it. As a 2024 report from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate stressed, “new denial” presents climate policies as ineffectual or harmful and focusing on the supposed unreliability of pro-climate action voices.
Whereas people keen to halt climate action in the 1990s exploited vulnerabilities in science, today their key resource is public distrust in political institutions. The defence cannot simply be good science, but a more accessible type of climate politics, one which actively engages with the public. Policymakers cannot work over people’s heads; they need to ensure communities have a stake in the changes needed to tackle climate change – which, at this late hour, are extensive. Everyone should be able to see that the difficult decisions required are being made fairly, and climate action is a project we can all be part of.
