 I'm Bob Ward, I'm the Policy and Communications Director at the Gruntham Research Institute on Climate Change and Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science. Tell us a story about how you first became interested in Exxon and then how that story unfolded. In 2005 climate change moved up the political agenda in the UK, when the UK as hosts of the G7 summit decided to make climate change one of the major issues and at that time the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government, David King, was very active in talking not just in the UK but around the world, including in the United States, about the about the risks of climate change and when he was in the US he was being pursued by some campaign organizations who are ideologically opposed to action on climate change, very aggressive tactics and he pointed out that some of these organizations are funded by ExxonMobil. Now I was working at the Royal Society at that time, the UK National Academy of Sciences and I was preparing a memo about the way in which campaign groups on both sides were misrepresenting science for their own purposes, for their own agenda and I pointed out that some green NGOs had been exaggerating the immanence of some impacts and on the other side there were groups funded by ExxonMobil that had been denying the science, misrepresenting the scientific evidence for the risks. That memo I eventually shared with the newspaper and after it was published I was contacted by both Greenpeace who I had cited as an NGO that had misrepresented the evidence and ExxonMobil and the way in which those two organizations responded was very telling. Greenpeace asked me where they had misrepresented the science and I gave them the examples and they went away and they corrected it. ExxonMobil on the other hand said they were misunderstood and they wanted to come and see me and explain why they were misunderstood. So I met with a couple of their representatives early in 2006 and they told me that they were no longer planning to fund these campaign organizations and that they have not need to misrepresent the science in their publications which tended to overstress the uncertainties in our knowledge and underplay the risks of climate change and I said that fine but later on in 2006 I saw that they had produced a new publication which had made exactly the same claims and misrepresented the science, had played up the uncertainties and downplayed the risks and so I wrote to them and complained that they had not taken any notice of the conversation we had had and I asked them about progress in reducing their funding or removing their funding for these campaign grounds. I didn't get an answer from them and at that stage I was moving on to a new job working for a company that builds risk models for the computer industry. The letter I wrote to ExxonMobil I shared with a newspaper which they made public and at that point ExxonMobil decided to respond. They responded by complaining about my behavior and one of their representatives contacted prominent MP Chris Hume who was a spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats at that time to try and imply that my departure from the Royal Society was in some way the result of having written about ExxonMobil and it was completely untrue. So Chris Hume contacted me and I didn't know him he contacted me while I was on holiday visiting my parents and asked me whether this was true and I told them it was not true. He went into Parliament the next day and during the speech we counted this series of events that ExxonMobil had been trying to imply that somehow I'd been sacked for blowing the whistle on them and it was untrue. And to me it's just a sign of the desperate attempts ExxonMobil have been making over the years to deny the science of climate change and in a way that is very surprising for a company that relies very much on science for its business. I'm a geologist by training. Many of my colleagues who I did my degree with have gone on to work in the oil industry and many of them are honestly doing a job that they believe in. ExxonMobil were engaged in a degree of subterfuge of misrepresenting the science and have been involved in a number of very very unpleasant activities including in the early days of the presidency of George W. Bush a memo was sent by one of their representatives Randy Randall their chief lobbyist in Washington DC and I wrote to the president's council environmental quality demanding that the United States try to remove the then current chairman of the intergovernmental panel on climate change Bob Watson and they wanted him removed because they considered him to be too vocal in talking about the risks of climate change and that's a completely unacceptable behavior and lo and behold later on a few within a few months of that memo haven't been been sent the United States failed to back Bob Watson's candidacy to remain as chairman and he and he left and that's an example of an oil company being involved in a degree of subterfuge that I think most reasonable people will regard as completely unreasonable. Since your call to reduce or to have excellent stop funding climate science denial organizations have they continued to fund denial? They started to reduce funding for these lobby groups in late 2005 when they saw a shift in the US Congress with more Democrats getting the Congress and they recognized that at that time as there is now there was a clear division between the Democrats that accepted the science and the Republican Party many of whom did not accept the science and they recognized that they were going to face political difficulties and they have reduced but they have continued funding for some organizations that continue to deny the risk of climate change organizations like the Heritage Foundation and I would have said that that's simply bad business to be funding an organization that is in denial of science and this is science remember that we've now built up over a couple a hundred years it's been a couple a hundred years really since we first had the observations of the earth is warmer than otherwise would be by Joseph Fourier and he observed that it was likely to be the atmosphere around the earth that is responsible for keeping it essentially 33 degrees warmer than otherwise would be. It was 150 years ago that John Tindall did experiments in the lab to show the carbon dioxide, water vapor and other gases, our greenhouse gases and are responsible for trapping the heat and it was a hundred years ago that Arrhenius did the first calculations of how the earth would warm if you burned a lot of the coal and released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is well established science that we've known for 200 years has withstood tests for 200 years and for anybody to be denying that is simply in my view engaging in flat earth politics.