This was how the quarrel about the climate issue was created

Exactly 30 years ago, Britain's then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the UN General Assembly, warning her of the risk of continuing to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. "A climate change created by humans can become self-reinforcing - and irreversible," she said, referring to a research group that studied the ice in Antarctica.

- At this time, politicians around the world took the climate issue very seriously, from Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan and Michail Gorbachev, and the issue was at the UN level. But then something happened that led to the polarized conflict about climate science that we see today, says Martin Hultman.

He is the research leader for the project “Why is not climate science taken seriously? Studies of climate denial ”, which are run at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg.

- A contributing reason was that oil companies began to fund think tanks to disseminate climate science results that have not been examined in academia, but only been prepared to plant doubts about the climate issue so that politicians and the general public should not act. Our colleagues in the US have shown this clearly. There are higher requirements for reporting financial flows, which makes it easier to do such studies, he says.

Another important factor, according to Martin Hultman, is what he calls "denial of response" in his research; that we act contrary to the knowledge that exists. Right now, together with a colleague, he is studying the early history of climate science in Sweden.

In the project, they have gained access to, among other things, climate researcher Bert Bolin's reports. He is one of the forerunners in climate science and became the first chairman of the UN Climate Panel IPCC.

- Already in the mid-1970s, he and the scientists he worked with warned that the earth would be up to four degrees warmer if greenhouse gas emissions continued as they did then. It is perfectly in line with today's climate models, if nothing is done.

The warnings were presented in reports to the then Energy Commission, which included representatives from all political parties.

- So everyone had this knowledge on their table, which we have seen in Birgitta Dahl's archive. Despite this, for example, coal was introduced in district heating plants in the early 1980s. A current parallel is the plant for liquefied natural gas planned in Gothenburg, says Martin Hultman.

Is it possible to learn something from history here?

- A lesson can be to stop repeating the same mistake. It is good to reflect on this type of knowledge and what actions it has led to, and not led to. I think we need to look more closely at the mechanisms that govern how decisions are made. Apparently, knowledge alone is not enough, says Martin Hultman.