More than 150 years ago, scientists discovered what they termed a “greenhouse effect,” demonstrating for the first time that water vapour and carbon dioxide trapped heat. Theoretical concerns were soon raised that we might, through the practice of burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon, have inadvertently been altering our climate since the start of the industrial revolution.
In 1938 a British scientist published the first observational study suggesting that human carbon emissions were, indeed, heating the planet.
By the late 1950s, the science about global warming was so well established that legendary Hollywood filmmaker Frank Capra was hired to make a documentary, The Unchained Goddess, intended to educate the public about what then seemed a relatively far-off threat.
The film explained that the release by factories and vehicles of some six billion tonnestonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year—a paltry sum by today’s standards—was “unwittingly changing the world’s climate.”
In the 1970s scientists working for the oil companies privately confirmed to their employers that their research showed continued fossil fuel burning would dangerously raise global temperatures. The oil companies kept the information tightly under wraps for decades.
By 1982 an Exxon team had produced a chart predicting—though again confidentially—the increases in CO₂ levels in the atmosphere over time. When the chart came to light in 2019, scientists realised that the team had, in fact, correctly plotted contemporary CO₂ levels—at 415 parts per million—in what was then 37 years into the future. The Exxon team had also correctly predicted what effect this would have on global temperatures: a disastrous rise of just below 1ºC.
In 1988 NASA scientist James Hansen testified to the US Senate that he was 99 per cent certain global warming was already under way. His sounding of the alarm sparked for the first time headlines in mainstream media.
In response, the fossil fuel industry began aggressively funding “independent” think tanks to spread disinformation and create doubt about the established science.
In 2026, after more than a century of evidence-based warnings, all those predictions have been fully and catastrophically borne out—with heat records being toppled almost daily across western Europe. Drought and wild fires are the result.
And this isn’t even the worst of it. Things are going to get a whole lot hotter and a lot scarier in the years and decades ahead.
Yet here we are, a century on, still hearing variations of the same arguments of denial promoted in the mainstream from the terminally dim-witted and serially dishonest.
When I was in my early twenties, in the late 1980s, it was common to hear climate change being dismissed as a “theory” and a hoax, one supposedly cooked up by a mix of socialists hoping to bring down capitalism and a group of rapidly emerging new specialists—climate scientists—eager for funding and prestige.
We now know that the strongest evidence for climate change was actually proposed not by socialists, or even by the new breed of climate scientists, but by research conducted by the fossil fuel industries themselves. Industry executives accepted the evidence presented to them as scientifically sound decades ago, and they then worked night and day to keep the public ignorant of their findings.
The Global Climate Coalition was formed in 1989—secretly backed by Exxon, Texaco, and BP—and served as a powerful “independent” lobby group. When its own technical advisers concluded in 1995 that the science of global warming could not be denied, the coalition aggressively suppressed the report.
Another group, Informed Citizens for the Environment, set up by coal and utility companies, used advertising blitzes targeted at economically precarious groups to persuade them climate action would be harmful to their household finances.
A leaked 1998 internal memo from the American Petroleum Institute mapped out another multi-million dollar strategy, funding independent-seeming scientists to inject scepticism into mainstream debate in the media.
The goal of promoting these scientists would be to make “average citizens” and the media “understand (recognise) uncertainties in climate science.” “Victory” would be achieved, according to the memo, when climate doubt became “the conventional wisdom.”
These fake think tanks helped organise letter-writing campaigns, inundating politicians, to make it appear that there was a groundswell of opposition to any action on the climate crisis.
Remember, the oil industry launched these campaigns to deceive the public and journalists even though its own scientists had demonstrated many years earlier that continued fossil fuel burning would have catastrophic consequences.
“Maverick Science”
The promotion of climate change as a “hoax” is among the weirdest in history. Which is why only the most foolish deniers still cling to it. Nowadays most have switched scripts. “Yes, climate change is happening,” they agree, “but the climate has always changed—and that change has nothing to do with human activity.”
Except mainstream science predicted decades ago precisely the outcomes we are experiencing now and on exactly the timeline we see unfolding. That is one very astounding, and very improbable, coincidence.
Indeed, climate does change. But it does so on a planetary timescale across centuries and aeons, set by the ebbs and flows of natural phenomena, not a timescale of decades. Such rapid shifts alone are evidence of human meddling in the climate.
Scientist James Lovelock’s expertise was developed through his early work for NASA, predicting the climate on Mars through relatively primitive telescopes to help in the development of the first probes to reach our neighbouring planet. NASA’s first Mars missions were a success largely because his predictions were so accurate.
By the early 2000s, Lovelock had become a major pessimist on the consequences for life on Earth of our inaction to curb carbon emissions. In an interview with the Guardian 18 years ago, he warned that “in 20 years global warming will hit the fan.” In fact, like other climate scientists, Lovelock turned out to be a little too optimistic—the shit had hit the fan a couple of years earlier than he expected.
Let us note, the Guardian—historically considered the corporate outlet most open to the climate “debate”—dismissed him then as a “maverick,” a polite way of calling him a “crank.”
Meanwhile, “respected” veteran pundits—like BBC favourite Andrew Neil—are still peddling threadbare climate-denial conspiracies from the 1980s. The current spate of heatwaves, Neil predicted back in May, were just normal variations in weather, even though neither he nor I have ever experienced a British summer like this one. (If you think 1976 was like this, you either weren’t there or your memory is faulty.)
Here’s another perennial from the denier community: more CO₂ will apparently be beneficial to plants.
That particular prediction will prove equally short-lived. Wait for next year’s drought-fuelled food price hikes. Even the ”climate denier, TV personality turned farmer Jeremy Clarkson, has been embittered by a record fifth UK heatwave finishing off his crops. (I’m doing my best to stifle a smirk.)
It doesn’t really matter what the content of the deniers“ claims is. Any old nonsense will do if it keeps their audiences” heads buried deep in the sand.
Note that the very media pundits who for decades promoted disinformation cooked up by the fossil fuel-funded think tanks, deflating any political pressure for the radical policies needed to forestall climate chaos, are still in place. They are still being given prominent platforms to deny the climate emergency or throw up their hands as if nothing can be done.
The Telegraph newspaper recently opined that we would just have to adapt to a hotter climate—a climate for which, science has long understood, larger mammals are not suited. There is a reason the only mammals scurrying around at the time of the dinosaurs were small rodent-like creatures that spent much of the day underground, out of the heat. They are our very distant ancestors.
Amidst all of this, it is largely beside the point what our governments actually know or say. We must judge them strictly by the urgency of their actions. And on that score, it is business—big business—as usual.
Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, has been pressured by public concern into very belatedly holding an emergency COBRA meeting this week on the mounting climate crisis. His reticence till now is easily explained. Any meaningful attempt to address the climate emergency will bring him into a direct and damaging confrontation not only with the fossil fuel industries but also with almost the entire corporate sector.
After all, it is not just fossil fuel companies growing fat on our continuing burning of their products. Many other corporations profit from maintaining the status quo, including, among others, those engaged in transport, supply chains, the agribusinesses, pharmaceuticals and the war industries. All depend on the riches generated by the continued flow of petrochemicals.
Yes, renewables are being promoted too, but only as an add-on—a new way to generate corporate profits—not as an alternative to the corporations” main business: profiteering from fossil fuels.
None of this is lost on the political class.
US President Lyndon Johnson was warned in 1965 about the dangers of global warming by an advisory panel who had researched the issue. He and all of his successors did nothing.
British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the ultimate champion of “free markets” and slayer of socialists, spoke eloquently in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in 1989 about the threat of man-made climate change to humanity. She and all of her successors similarly did nothing.
The problem has never been that our leaders do not understand the terrible dangers posed by climate change or that they do not believe the scientific evidence. Each government has been fully aware of what lies ahead. They did not act because the political costs of acting against the corporate sector were far too grave.
Those costs have only risen since, as giant corporations, the largest in human history, have grown so powerful they now effectively own our politicians—and our “democracies.”
The truth is that for decades the political and media classes have sat on their hands rather than address the impending climate emergency. Few politicians have dared to take on the corporations for fear, rightly, that they would end up sharing the fate of former Labour leader and soft-focus democratic socialist Jeremy Corbyn.
Watch this space as Green Party leader Zack Polanski—the only British political leader currently trying to shift the dial on the climate crisis—is progressively stitched up by the media.
That is why Burnham will likely bow to the pressure fomented by the media corporations—and their so-called “advertisers,” the other corporations dependent on fossil fuels—to open up drilling for more oil in the North Sea.
Meanwhile, contrary to the claims of the deniers, the vast majority of climate scientists have been nowhere near as alarmist as they needed to be, given the stakes. As scientists, their natural inclination has been to be exceptionally cautious. That tendency was only reinforced by the pressure to appear credible faced with a political and media landscape that has consistently painted them as zealots and partisans.
The fact that most of these scientists now appear to be vacillating between depression and pure fear is warning enough. They know it is now already too late to stop catastrophic warming.
But worse, most have now learnt that the system is so rigged in the interests of the super-rich that, like lemmings, we are going to continue charging towards the cliff edge, even as the climate data they have been researching and studying for decades plays out into ever-more dramatic changes in our everyday lives.
“a hotter climate—a climate for which, science has long understood, larger mammals are not suited.“
Although Africa is full of large mammals and even humans…