Our elected officials have known about climate change since the ‘60s » Yale Climate Connections

While doing other research, Harvard professor and historian of science Naomi Oreskes stumbled upon a surprising discovery: As early as the 1950s, scientists were already warning about the dangers of human-made climate change. Yet despite this early evidence, public understanding of climate science has long been obscured by a decades-long campaign of disinformation orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry.

In a conversation with Yale Climate Connections, Oreskes traces the roots of today’s climate debate and offers lessons drawn from past struggles with misinformation, including the fight against tobacco. She also emphasizes the importance of recognizing the settled nature of climate science and the growing momentum of legal action against the fossil fuel industry, which may be key in reversing the harmful narrative surrounding climate change.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Yale Climate Connections: What inspired you to investigate what scientists and politicians knew about the connections between burning fossil fuels and global warming back in the mid-20th century?

Naomi Oreskes: Well, I wouldn’t really say I was inspired to do it. I would say it was more like I tripped over something that I realized was important.

When I first started doing this work nearly 25 years ago, my goal was to investigate the relationship between scientific knowledge and funding. I was specifically looking at the impact of U.S. military funding on oceanography because oceanography went from being an extremely underfunded science in the early 20th century to being a very abundantly funded science when the U.S. Navy realized that better oceanographic information could help them do their job better.

In the process of doing that research, I stumbled across the story of a group of oceanographers talking about the threat of human-made climate change from burning fossil fuels. I learned that these scientists had a pretty good grasp of this problem. Even in 1958, they already understood that when we burn fossil fuels, we put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and those gases heat the atmosphere, and it was extremely likely that in the fullness of time, burning fossil fuels would lead to global climate change.

YCC: Why does it matter that this was well-established science so long ago?

Oreskes: If we’re asking people to support policy action, or asking people to make changes in their own lives, then I think they have a right to demand that the basis for that should be very solid in exchange. We shouldn’t be asking people to make big changes or spend money on solar panels or whatever it is if we aren’t sure what’s going on is well understood.

So I think it’s very important for the American people to understand that this really is settled science. We know that the Earth is warming because of human activities as well as we know that there’s gravity, as well as we know that DNA carries hereditary information. This is very well-established science.

[Another reason concerns] the legal context as we fight for policy actions. We’re seeing the EPA endangerment finding is now being endangered, and as we have to fight for action on this issue, one of the questions that comes up is, “What is the legal basis for action about climate change?” And my group has done some work on the history of the Clean Air Act. There have been debates both in Congress and in the courts about whether or not the Clean Air Act applies to carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.

Editor’s Note: The endangerment finding was issued by the EPA in 2009 in response to the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. The finding states that six greenhouse gases in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations. The EPA administrator at the time determined those risks were important enough to address the issue through the Clean Air Act. An executive order signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office requires the EPA to reconsider the legality and continuing applicability of the 2009 Endangerment Finding.

In the Massachusetts v. EPA decision – it was a landmark ruling in which the court ruled that, yes, the EPA does, in fact, need to regulate carbon dioxide – one of the issues that came up was whether or not the Clean Air Act applied to carbon dioxide. Some of the justices, including some of the liberal justices, expressed skepticism that could have been part of the congressional intent because nobody really knew about climate science in the 1960s. Well, that was just plain wrong, so we set out to correct the record on that.

We found more than 100 congressional hearings in the 1960s in which human-made climate change, the greenhouse effect, and carbon dioxide were being discussed – sometimes in the context of things like nuclear power, sometimes specifically in the context of the Clean Air Act. There was this extremely extensive discussion, and the members of Congress who wrote and passed the Clean Air Act were well aware of carbon dioxide, and they understood that it was a pollutant, and that’s why the words “weather” and “climate” are in the statute. That’s important from a legal standpoint as we try to use these statutes to apply to this problem.

YCC: If there was scientific consensus 50 to 60 years ago that human-made climate change was real, how did the debate become so impactful for politicians and in the policy space at that time?

Oreskes: If we look back at what happened in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, scientists actually did a good job in communicating to Congress and other policymakers and to the White House. We uncovered literally scores of reports, articles, and congressional testimony in which scientists are working really hard to explain to the White House, to Congress, to other international leaders what they understood about this problem and to neither exaggerate nor downplay the threat.

This culminates in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This is another piece of history that maybe some young people don’t know and older people maybe have forgotten, but the United States is a signatory, along with another 192 countries, to an international treaty – the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change – that commits the world to stopping dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system. We promised to do this in 1992. And the United States President who signed that was President George H.W. Bush, a Republican.

It’s like this whole history – that there was enough science and there was enough political will and momentum to lead to this treaty in 1992 – has been effaced. We’re talking more than 30 years ago. Then the question becomes, “What the heck happened?”

[Well,] that’s not how the media was presenting it at the time. The media at the time, including mainstream legacy media like The New York Times or the Washington Post, was presenting climate change as a big debate with two equal and opposite sides.

So we have to ask the question, “Why do so many of us think it’s not well understood? Why is there even confusion about this question?” And the answer is because we have been the victims of what’s now pushing three decades of disinformation campaigns organized and orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry to make us think that the science was unsettled. Because the industry understood that if the science was unsettled, then that would be a legitimate reason to say, “Let’s do more research. Let’s wait and see. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on something that might not even turn out to really be a problem.”

It’s a very clever strategy, and it’s based on market research that the tobacco industry did decades ago: If people think the science is unsettled, then they tend not to be motivated to act on the problem. That’s rational. That makes sense. I wouldn’t be motivated to act on a problem that I wasn’t really sure was a real thing.

But if people know that it is settled, if people understand that the science is clear, then they do feel motivated to act. The tobacco industry learned this decades ago about smoking: If smokers understood how dangerous smoking really was, many smokers would be highly motivated to try to quit. The tobacco industry deliberately set out to hide that science from people, to confuse people about the scientific evidence. Climate change deniers took that strategy developed by the tobacco industry and applied it to climate change.

YCC: Is there anything we can learn from the proliferation of misinformation around smoking decades ago about how to overcome the place we’re in now with climate disinformation?

Oreskes: Things changed with respect to tobacco because many people began to listen to the scientific evidence, and people began to fight back collectively. The Surgeon General’s report in the 1960s was very important, but there were many grassroots organizations that began to lobby for bans on smoking in public places. There were many public health organizations that became involved in educational efforts to explain to the American people and people around the globe just how dangerous tobacco use was. So even though it was hard to quit, many people did quit.

And things changed because of the use of the courts. Individuals and state attorneys and then ultimately the U.S. federal government brought suits against the tobacco industry for its activities. At first, many of those suits were not successful, but as we learned more, there were more legal wins, and then the legal wins led to disclosures of more information, so then there became a kind of virtuous or synergistic cycle: The more we knew, the more we were able to fight back against this industry.

For me personally, that’s always been a really important moral lesson. Part of what motivates me to do the work that I do is that I think when people understand what has happened, then they feel motivated to fight back, and they feel motivated to think hard about what kinds of strategies could be effective.

Right now, we are seeing, both in the United States and around the world, a huge number of legal cases that have been brought against the fossil fuel industry in diverse venues, including the International Court of Justice. There have been a few early losses, but there have also been a few big wins. So I think we’re beginning to see momentum to take legal action against these companies, this industry, because I think there’s clear evidence that they have done harm, that people have been hurt.

I think we also have clear evidence that at least some of these companies have engaged in misleading advertising and other practices that, depending upon the particular jurisdiction, there are good reasons to believe may, in fact, have violated the law.

Editor’s Note: Oreskes is a co-author of “The Big Myth,” a history of 100 years of business opposition to regulation. Oreskes said the new book, which she wrote with Erik Conway, “steps back from the specifics of climate change and looks at this larger story of business opposition to safety and environmental regulation. … It’s our next step in trying to put this whole story into a larger historical context so we can understand where these arguments came from, how the business world tried to make these arguments seem persuasive, and how they’ve managed to have such a big impact in American politics today.”