Harry Saunders

In the past decade I have seen the media rewriting history by declaring that: (a) the fossil fuel industry "knew" of climate change already in the 1970s and yet those bad people kept the secret from us and that (b) climate scientists have said all along along that carbon dioxide emissions will cause global warming This rewriting of history is bad because it prevents us from correctly identifying our mistake. First, note that those two narratives (a) and (b) don't agree with each other. If climate scientists knew a century ago what carbon dioxide emissions would do, how come that the fossil fuel industry could keep that secret from us? Answer: Everyone who was paying attention knew the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but there was no evidence to back up the idea that fossil fuel emissions were causing temperature changes. I repeat: THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE. NO ONE HAD ANY EVIDENCE. Neither the scientists in academia nor those in the fossil fuel industry. No one could have known in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s that the models were correct. If you think they could have "known" just from model projections -- at which point did we stop asking for evidence to back up models? Second thing to notice is that the fact that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere was so widely known that I learned of it in middle school in the 1980s. So much about it being a big secret or something. The reality is much more complicated: Scientists -- both in academia and in the fossil fuel industry -- developed a set of increasingly good models for the climate. However, few scientists had confidence in these models -- that goes both for those in the industry as well as in academia. As a physicist I would say of course the models were correct because it's just physics and physics trumps. But fact is that most scientists back then didn't have high confidence in their own models. You don't need to take my word for this, you can just look at the published literature. Or maybe you are old enough to remember. This is why there was for decades so much talk about natural variability and so on. This is why the IPCC in its first report did very carefully state that "The observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability". This is why Michael Mann in his book explains why his PhD adviser Barry Salzman "was unconvinced in the early 1990s that we could establish the human impact on our climate" and that "this was a tenable position then". The fossil fuel industry did its best to pretend the evidence took longer to come in than it actually did. Around the mid 1990s they started spreading the idea of "unsettled science" and so on. But that didn't work well, and they soon switched to claiming that while climate change is real it's actually beneficial. To make a long story short: Blaming the fossil fuel industry for supposedly "knowing" that their product causes climate change and not telling us is nonsense. They knew as much or as little as the scientists, and that knowledge was long in the public record anyway. I am not a fan of the fossil fuel industry but that scientists in the fossil fuel industry reproduced what those in academia said was not the main problem. The problem was that no one listened to the scientists! If you are one of those people who like to blame the supposedly evil fossil fuel industry, you have fallen for a myth that the media has created probably to excuse why they themselves weren't covering climate change as much as they should have. The reason this matters is that by rewriting history we are misattributing the mistake. So please stop repeating this stupid idea that the fossil fuel industry "knew" something that the rest of the world didn't. It's not what happened. Oh, and also stop the idiotic accusation that I am being paid by fossil fuel industry. I have no sympathy for the fossil fuel industry and it's obvious that they tried to obfuscate the science. (If not very successfully.) I am just not willing to accept a false narrative even if that aids a party I dislike.