Climate change denial

For the book of the same name and topic, see Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand.

Peer-reviewed research rejecting man-made global warming is almost non-existent as of 2013–14. Over 99.99% of authors did not publish rejections.[1]

Climate change denial, or global warming denial, is part of the global warming controversy. It involves denial, dismissal, unwarranted doubt or contrarian views which depart from the scientific opinion on climate change, including the extent to which it is caused by humans, its impacts on nature and human society, or the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions.[2][3][4] In the global warming controversy, some deniers do endorse the term, but other often prefer the term climate change skepticism[3] whereas scientists think it "inappropriate to allow those who deny [anthropogenic global warming] to don the mantle of skeptics"; in effect, the two terms form a continuous, overlapping range of views, and generally have the same characteristics: both reject, to a greater or lesser extent, mainstream scientific opinion on climate change.[5][6] Climate change denial can also be implicit, when individuals or social groups accept the science but fail to come to terms with it or to translate their acceptance into action.[7] Several social science studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism.[5][6]

Campaigning to undermine public trust in climate science has been described as a "denial machine" of industrial, political and ideological interests, supported by conservative media and skeptical bloggers in manufacturing uncertainty about global warming.[8][9][10] In the public debate, phrases such as climate skepticism have frequently been used with the same meaning as climate denialism.[11] The labels are contested: those actively challenging climate science commonly describe themselves as "skeptics", but many do not comply with common standards of scientific skepticism and, regardless of evidence, persistently deny the validity of human caused global warming.[5]

Although scientific opinion on climate change is that human activity is extremely likely to be the primary driver of climate change,[12][13] the politics of global warming have been affected by climate change denial, hindering efforts to prevent climate change and adapt to the warming climate.[14][15][16] Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where there is none.[17][18]

The climate change denial industry is most widespread in the United States, where the official Senate Environmental Committee is chaired by Jim Inhofe, who famously called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and claimed to have debunked it in 2015 when he took a snowball with him and threw it on the Senate floor.[19] Organised campaigning to undermine public trust in climate science is associated with conservative economic policies and backed by industrial interests opposed to the regulation of CO2 emissions.[20] Climate change denial has been associated with the fossil fuels lobby, the Koch brothers, industry advocates and libertarian think tanks, often in the United States.[15][21][22][23] More than 90% of papers sceptical on climate change originate from right-wing think tanks.[24] The total annual income of these climate change counter-movement-organizations is roughly $900 million.[25] Between 2002 and 2010, nearly $120 million (£77 million) was anonymously donated via the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund to more than 100 organisations seeking to undermine the public perception of the science on climate change.[26] In 2013 the Center for Media and Democracy reported that the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella group of 64 U.S. think tanks, had been lobbying on behalf of major corporations and conservative donors to oppose climate change regulation.[27]

Since the late 1970s, oil companies have published research broadly in line with the standard views on global warming. Despite this, oil companies organized a climate change denial campaign to disseminate public disinformation for several decades, leading to comparisons of this strategy to the organized denial of the hazards of tobacco smoking by tobacco companies.[28][29]

Terminology

Amardeo Sarma lecturing about climate change denialism and the future world energy and environmental problems during the European Skeptics Congress 2015

"Climate change skepticism" and "climate change denial" refer to denial, dismissal or unwarranted doubt of the scientific consensus on the rate and extent of global warming, its significance, or its connection to human behavior, in whole or in part.[30][31] Though there is a distinction between skepticism which indicates doubting the truth of an assertion and outright denial of the truth of an assertion, in the public debate phrases such as "climate scepticism" have frequently been used with the same meaning as climate denialism or contrarianism.[11][32]

The terminology emerged in the 1990s. Even though all scientists adhere to scientific skepticism as an inherent part of the process, by mid November 1995 the word "skeptic" was being used specifically for the minority who publicised views contrary to the scientific consensus. This small group of scientists presented their views in public statements and the media, rather than to the scientific community.[33][34] This usage continued.[35] In his December 1995 article The Heat is On: The warming of the world's climate sparks a blaze of denial , Ross Gelbspan said industry had engaged "a small band of skeptics" to confuse public opinion in a "persistent and well-funded campaign of denial".[36] His 1997 book The Heat is On may have been the first to concentrate specifically on the topic.[37] In it, Gelbspan discussed a "pervasive denial of global warming" in a "persistent campaign of denial and suppression" involving "undisclosed funding of these 'greenhouse skeptics' " with "the climate skeptics" confusing the public and influencing decision makers.[38] A November 2006 CBC Television documentary on the campaign was titled "The Denial Machine".[39][40] In 2007 journalist Sharon Begley reported on the "denial machine",[41] a phrase subsequently used by academics.[9][40]

In addition to explicit denial, social groups have shown implicit denial by accepting the scientific consensus, but failing to come to terms with its implications or take action to reduce the problem.[7] This was exemplified in Kari Norgaard's study of a village in Norway affected by climate change, where residents diverted their attention to other issues.[42]

The terminology is debated: most of those actively rejecting the scientific consensus use the terms skeptic and climate change skepticism, and only a few have expressed preference for being described as deniers,[31][43] but the word "skepticism" is incorrectly used, as scientific skepticism is an intrinsic part of scientific methodology.[44][45][46] The term contrarian is more specific, but used less frequently. In academic literature and journalism, the terms climate change denial and climate change deniers have well established usage as descriptive terms without any pejorative intent. Both the National Center for Science Education and historian Spencer R. Weart recognise that either option is problematic, but have decided to use "climate change denial" rather than "skepticism".[47][48]

Terms related to denialism have been criticised for introducing a moralistic tone, and potentially implying a link with Holocaust denial.[44][49] There have been claims that this link is intentional, which academics have strongly disputed.[50] The usage of "denial" long predates the Holocaust, and is commonly applied in other areas such as HIV/AIDS denialism: the claim is described by John Timmer of Ars Technica as itself being a form of denial.[51]

In December 2014, an open letter from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry called on the media to stop using the term "skepticism" when referring to climate change denial. They contrasted scientific skepticism–which is "foundational to the scientific method"–with denial–"the a priori rejection of ideas without objective consideration", and the behavior of those involved in political attempts to undermine climate science. They said "Not all individuals who call themselves climate change skeptics are deniers. But virtually all deniers have falsely branded themselves as skeptics. By perpetrating this misnomer, journalists have granted undeserved credibility to those who reject science and scientific inquiry."[50][52] The letter was taken up by the advocacy group Face the Facts as the basis for an online petition to news media.[50][53] In June 2015 Media Matters for America were told by the New York Times Public Editor that the newspaper was increasingly tending to use "denier" when "someone is challenging established science", but assessing this on an individual basis with no fixed policy, and would not use the term when someone was "kind of wishy-washy on the subject or in the middle." The executive director of the Society of Environmental Journalists said that while there was reasonable skepticism about specific issues, she felt that denier was "the most accurate term when someone claims there is no such thing as global warming, or agrees that it exists but denies that it has any cause we could understand or any impact that could be measured."[54]

History

Joseph Fourier is credited with first discovering the greenhouse effect in 1824, beginning scientific research into the effects of increased greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.[55][56]

Research on the effect of CO2 on the climate began in the 19th century; Joseph Fourier discovered the atmospheric "greenhouse effect" in 1824, and in 1860 John Tyndall quantified the effect of each gas. This potential explanation of ice ages was investigated by Svante Arrhenius, who published research in 1896 showing that a geometric increase in CO2 would cause an arithmetical increase in temperatures. He suggested that coal burning could cause the effect, and in a 1938 article Guy Stewart Callendar presented evidence that it was already happening. Both viewed this as a benign possibility.[55][56]

Military services in the 1940s and 1950s supported scientific research into the environment. They were primarily interested in the operational data and potential for warfare, but were also open to the academic scientific discoveries as a result. For example, Gilbert Plass worked on radiation transmission through the atmosphere for weapons systems, and "in the evening" wrote papers giving new impetus to greenhouse effect theory. Oceanographer Roger Revelle played a key role; his 1957 paper co-authored with Hans Suess overturned the presumption that oceans would quickly absorb increased CO2, and has been described as "the opening shot in the global warming debates". Revelle was quick to inform both the public and government officials of the risks, spreading his theme that "In consuming our fossil fuels at a prodigious rate, our civilization is conducting a grandiose scientific experiment."[57][58] In the following decades, public and scientific concerns about this and other environmental issues increased. More research was needed, and was taken on by new agencies including NASA and NOAA, but funding became sporadic. The 1979 Charney Report reviewed the state of climate research, concluding that substantial warming was already on the way, and "the ocean, the great and ponderous flywheel of the global climate system, may be expected to slow the course of observable climatic change. A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late."[59]

A conservative reaction built up, denying environmental concerns which could lead to government regulation. With the 1981 Presidency of Ronald Reagan, global warming became a political issue, with immediate plans to cut spending on environmental research, particularly climate related, and stop funding for CO2 monitoring. Reagan appointed as Secretary of Energy James B. Edwards, who said that there was no real global warming problem. Congressman Al Gore had studied under Revelle and was aware of the developing science: he joined others in arranging congressional hearings from 1981 onwards, with testimony by scientists including Revelle, Stephen Schneider and Wallace Smith Broecker. The hearings gained enough public attention to reduce the cuts in atmospheric research.[60] A polarized party-political debate developed. In 1982 Sherwood B. Idso published his book Carbon Dioxide: Friend or Foe? which said increases in CO2 would not warm the planet, but would fertilize crops and were "something to be encouraged and not suppressed", while complaining that his theories had been rejected by the "scientific establishment". An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report in 1983 said global warming was "not a theoretical problem but a threat whose effects will be felt within a few years", with potentially "catastrophic" consequences.[61] The Reagan administration reacted by calling the report "alarmist", and the dispute got wide news coverage. Public attention turned to other issues, then the 1985 finding of a polar ozone hole brought a swift international response. To the public, this was related to climate change and the possibility of effective action, but news interest faded.[62]

Public attention was renewed amidst summer droughts and heat waves when James Hansen testified to a Congressional hearing on 23 June 1988,[63] stating with high confidence that long term warming was under way with severe warming likely within the next 50 years, and warning of likely storms and floods. There was increasing media attention: the scientific community had reached a broad consensus that the climate was warming, human activity was very likely the primary cause, and there would be significant consequences if the warming trend was not curbed.[64] These facts encouraged discussion about new laws concerning environmental regulation, which was opposed by the fossil fuel industry.[65]

From 1989 onwards industry funded organisations including the Global Climate Coalition and the George C. Marshall Institute sought to spread doubt among the public, in a strategy already developed by the tobacco industry.[66][67][68] A small group of scientists opposed to the consensus on global warming became politically involved, and with support from conservative political interests, began publishing in books and the press rather than in scientific journals.[69] Spencer Weart identifies this period as the point where legitimate skepticism about basic aspects of climate science was no longer justified, and those spreading mistrust about these issues became deniers.[70] As their arguments were increasingly refuted by the scientific community and new data, deniers turned to political arguments, making personal attacks on the reputation of scientists, and promoting ideas of a global warming conspiracy.[71]

With the 1989 fall of communism and the environmental movement's international reach at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the attention of U.S. conservative think tanks, which had been organised in the 1970s as an intellectual counter-movement to socialism, turned from the "red scare" to the "green scare" which they saw as a threat to their aims of private property, free trade market economies and global capitalism. As a counter-movement, they used environmental skepticism to promote denial of the reality of problems such as loss of biodiversity and climate change.[72]

In 1992, an EPA report linked second-hand smoke with lung cancer. The tobacco industry engaged the APCO Worldwide public relations company, which set out a strategy of astroturfing campaigns to cast doubt on the science by linking smoking anxieties with other issues, including global warming, in order to turn public opinion against calls for government intervention. The campaign depicted public concerns as "unfounded fears" supposedly based only on "junk science" in contrast to their "sound science", and operated through front groups, primarily the Advancement of Sound Science Center (TASSC) and its Junk Science website, run by Steven Milloy. A tobacco company memo commented "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." During the 1990s, the tobacco campaign died away, and TASSC began taking funding from oil companies including Exxon. Its website became central in distributing "almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the popular press."[73]

In the 1990s, the Marshall Institute began campaigning against increased regulations on environmental issues such as acid rain, ozone depletion, second-hand smoke, and the dangers of DDT.[67][73][74] In each case their argument was that the science was too uncertain to justify any government intervention, a strategy it borrowed from earlier efforts to downplay the health effects of tobacco in the 1980s.[66][68] This campaign would continue for the next two decades.[75]

These efforts succeeded in influencing public perception of climate science.[76] Between 1988 and the 1990s, public discourse shifted from the science and data of climate change to discussion of politics and surrounding controversy.[77]

The campaign to spread doubt continued into the 1990s, including an advertising campaign funded by coal industry advocates intended to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact,"[78][79] and a 1998 proposal written by the American Petroleum Institute intending to recruit scientists to convince politicians, the media and the public that climate science was too uncertain to warrant environmental regulation.[80] The proposal included a US$ 5,000,000 multi-point strategy to "maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours on Congress, the media and other key audiences", with a goal of "raising questions about and undercutting the 'prevailing scientific wisdom'".[81]

In 1998, Gelbspan noted that his fellow journalists accepted that global warming was occurring, but said they were in "'stage-two' denial of the climate crisis", unable to accept the feasibility of answers to the problem.[82] A subsequent book by Milburn and Conrad on The Politics of Denial described "economic and psychological forces" producing denial of the consensus on global warming issues.[83]

These efforts by climate change denial groups were recognized as an organized campaign beginning in the 2000s.[84] Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright played a significant role in this shift when they published an article in 2000 exploring the connection between conservative think tanks and climate change denial.[85]

Gelbspan's Boiling Point, published in 2004, detailed the fossil-fuel industry's campaign to deny climate change and undermine public confidence in climate science.[86] In Newsweek's August 2007 cover story "The Truth About Denial", Sharon Begley reported that "the denial machine is running at full throttle", and said that this "well-coordinated, well-funded campaign" by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks, and industry had "created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change."[41]

Referencing work of sociologists Robert Antonio and Robert Brulle, Wayne A. White has written that climate change denial has become the top priority in a broader agenda against environmental regulation being pursued by neoliberals.[87] Today, climate change skepticism is most prominently seen in the United States, where the media disproportionately features views of the climate change denial community.[88] In addition to the media, the contrarian movement has also been sustained by the growth of the internet, having gained some of its support from internet bloggers, talk radio hosts and newspaper columnists.[89]

The New York Times and others reported in 2015 that oil companies knew that burning oil and gas could cause climate change and global warming since the 1970s but nonetheless funded deniers for years.[28][29] Dana Nuccitelli wrote in The Guardian that a small fringe group of climate deniers were no longer taken seriously at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, in an agreement that "we need to stop delaying and start getting serious about preventing a climate crisis."[90] However the New York Times says any implementation is voluntary and will depend on any future world leaders—and every Republican candidate in 2016 has questioned or denied the science of climate change.[91]

Denial networks

A Pentagon report has pointed out how climate denial threatens national security.[92]

A study from 2015 identified 4,556 individuals with overlapping network ties to 164 organizations which are responsible for the most efforts to downplay the threat of climate change in the U.S.[93][94]

Arguments and positions on global warming

One argument is that global warming has recently stopped. However, temperature anomalies in an updated NOAA dataset show no evidence of a recent hiatus.[95]

Some climate change denial groups allege that CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere, and has little effect on the climate.[96] The scientific consensus, as summarized by the IPCC's fourth assessment report, the U.S. Geological Survey, and other reports, is that human activity is the leading cause of climate change. The burning of fossil fuels accounts for around 30 billion tons of CO2 each year, which is 130 times the amount produced by volcanoes.[97] Some groups allege that water vapor is a more significant greenhouse gas, and is left out of many climate models.[96] However, water vapor has been incorporated into these models since the inception of climatology in the 1800s, and while it is also a greenhouse gas, CO2 remains the primary driver of increasing temperatures.[98]

Climate denial groups may also argue that global warming stopped recently, a global warming hiatus, or that global temperatures are actually decreasing, leading to global cooling.[99]

These groups often point to natural variability, such as sunspots and cosmic rays, to explain the warming trend.[100] According to these groups, there is natural variability that will abate over time, and human influences have little to do with it. These factors are already taken into account when developing climate models, and the scientific consensus is that they cannot explain the recent warming trend.[101]

Global warming conspiracy theories have been posited which allege that the scientific consensus is illusory, or that climatologists are acting on their own financial interests by causing undue alarm about a changing climate.[102][103] Despite leaked emails during climategate, as well as multinational, independent research on the topic, no evidence of such a conspiracy has been presented, and strong consensus exists among scientists from a multitude of political, social, organizational and national backgrounds about the extent and cause of climate change.[104][105] Several researchers have concluded that around 97% of climate scientists agree with this consensus.[106] As well, much of the data used in climate science is publicly available to be viewed and interpreted by competing researchers as well as the public.[107]

In 2012, research by Stephan Lewandowsky (then of the University of Western Australia) concluded that belief in other conspiracy theories, such as that the FBI was responsible for the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., was associated with being more likely to endorse climate change denial.[108]

Climate change denial literature often features the suggestion that we should wait for better technologies before addressing climate change, when they will be more affordable and effective.[109]

Taxonomy of climate change denial

In 2004 Stefan Rahmstorf described how the media give the misleading impression that climate change was still disputed within the scientific community, attributing this impression to PR efforts of climate change skeptics. He identified different positions argued by climate skeptics, which he used as a taxonomy of climate change skepticism:[110]

  1. Trend sceptics (who deny there is global warming), [and] argue that no significant climate warming is taking place at all, claiming that the warming trend measured by weather stations is an artefact due to urbanisation around those stations ("urban heat island effect").
  2. Attribution sceptics (who accept the global warming trend but see natural causes for this), [and] doubt that human activities are responsible for the observed trends. A few of them even deny that the rise in the atmospheric CO2 content is anthropogenic [while others argue that] additional CO2 does not lead to discernible warming [and] that there must be other—natural—causes for warming.
  3. Impact sceptics (who think global warming is harmless or even beneficial).
    — [110][numbering added]

This taxonomy has been used in social science for analysis of publications, and to categorize climate change skepticism and climate change denial.[111][112]

The National Center for Science Education describes climate change denial as disputing differing points in the scientific consensus, a sequential range of arguments from denying the occurrence of climate change, accepting that but denying any significant human contribution, accepting these but denying scientific findings on how this would affect nature and human society, to accepting all these but denying that humans can mitigate or reduce the problems.[2] James L. Powell provides a more extended list,[4] as does climatologist Michael E. Mann in "six stages of denial", a ladder in which deniers have over time conceded acceptance of points, while retreating to a position which still rejects the mainstream consensus:[113]

  1. CO2 is not actually increasing.
  2. Even if it is, the increase has no impact on the climate since there is no convincing evidence of warming.
  3. Even if there is warming, it is due to natural causes.
  4. Even if the warming cannot be explained by natural causes, the human impact is small, and the impact of continued greenhouse gas emissions will be minor.
  5. Even if the current and future projected human effects on Earth's climate are not negligible, the changes are generally going to be good for us.
  6. Whether or not the changes are going to be good for us, humans are very adept at adapting to changes; besides, it’s too late to do anything about it, and/or a technological fix is bound to come along when we really need it.[113]

Journalists and newspaper columnists including George Monbiot[114][115][116] and Ellen Goodman,[115] among others,[117][118] have described climate change denial as a form of denialism.[119]

Denialism in this context has been defined by Chris and Mark Hoofnagle as the use of rhetorical devices "to give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none, an approach that has the ultimate goal of rejecting a proposition on which a scientific consensus exists." This process characteristically uses one or more of the following tactics:[18][120][121]

  1. Allegations that scientific consensus involves conspiring to fake data or suppress the truth: a global warming conspiracy theory.
  2. Fake experts, or individuals with views at odds with established knowledge, at the same time marginalising or denigrating published topic experts. Like the manufactured doubt over smoking and health, a few contrarian scientists oppose the climate consensus, some of them the same individuals.
  3. Selectivity, such as cherry picking atypical or even obsolete papers, in the same way that the MMR vaccine controversy was based on one paper: examples include discredited ideas of the medieval warm period.[121]
  4. Unworkable demands of research, claiming that any uncertainty invalidates the field or exaggerating uncertainty while rejecting probabilities and mathematical models.
  5. Logical fallacies.

Pseudoscience

Various groups, including the National Center for Science Education, have described climate change denial as a form of pseudoscience.[122][123][124] Climate change skepticism, while in some cases professing to do research on climate change, has focused instead on influencing the opinion of the public, legislators and the media, in contrast to legitimate science.[125]

In a review of the book The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe by Michael D. Gordin, David Morrison wrote:

In his final chapter, Gordin turns to the new phase of pseudoscience, practiced by a few rogue scientists themselves. Climate change denialism is the prime example, where a handful of scientists, allied with an effective PR machine, are publicly challenging the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is due primarily to human consumption of fossil fuels. Scientists have watched in disbelief that as the evidence for global warming has become ever more solid, the deniers have been increasingly successful in the public and political arena. … Today pseudoscience is still with us, and is as dangerous a challenge to science as it ever was in the past.[126]

Public opinion

Public opinion on climate change is significantly impacted by media coverage of climate change, and the effects of climate change denial campaigns. Campaigns to undermine public confidence in climate science have decreased public belief in climate change, which in turn have impacted legislative efforts to curb CO2 emissions.[127]

The popular media in the U.S. gives greater attention to climate change skeptics than the scientific community as a whole, and the level of agreement within the scientific community has not been accurately communicated.[128][129][130] In some cases, news outlets have allowed climate change skeptics to explain the science of climate change instead of experts in climatology.[131] US and UK media coverage differ from that presented in other countries, where reporting is more consistent with the scientific literature.[132][133] Some journalists attribute the difference to climate change denial being propagated, mainly in the US, by business-centered organizations employing tactics worked out previously by the US tobacco lobby.[66][134][135] In France, the US and the UK, the opinions of climate change skeptics appear much more frequently in conservative news outlets than other news, and in many cases those opinions are left uncontested.[136]

The efforts of Al Gore and other environmental campaigns have focused on the effects of global warming and have managed to increase awareness and concern, but despite these efforts, the number of Americans believing humans are the cause of global warming was holding steady at 61% in 2007, and those believing the popular media was understating the issue remained about 35%.[137] A recent poll from 2015 suggests that while Americans are growing more aware of the dangers and implications of climate change for future generations, the majority are not worried about it.[138]

A study assessed the public perception and actions to climate change, on grounds of belief systems, and identified seven psychological barriers affecting the behavior that otherwise would facilitate mitigation, adaptation, and environmental stewardship. The author found the following barriers: cognition, ideological world views, comparisons to key people, costs and momentum, discredence toward experts and authorities, perceived risks of change, and inadequate behavioral changes.[139]

Lobbying

Efforts to lobby against environmental regulation have included campaigns to manufacture doubt about the science behind climate change, and to obscure the scientific consensus and data.[140] These efforts have undermined public confidence in climate science, and impacted climate change lobbying.[15][127]

The political advocacy organizations FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, funded by brothers David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries, were important in supporting the Tea Party movement and in encouraging the movement to focus on climate change.[141] Other conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, Marshall Institute, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute were significant participants in these lobbying attempts, seeking to halt or eliminate environmental regulations.[142]

This approach to downplay the significance of climate change were copied from tobacco lobbyists; in the face of scientific evidence linking tobacco to lung cancer, to prevent or delay the introduction of regulation. Lobbyists attempted to discredit the scientific research by creating doubt and manipulating debate. They worked to discredit the scientists involved, to dispute their findings, and to create and maintain an apparent controversy by promoting claims that contradicted scientific research. ""Doubt is our product," boasted a now infamous 1969 industry memo. Doubt would shield the tobacco industry from litigation and regulation for decades to come."[143] In 2006, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian about similarities between the methods of groups funded by Exxon, and those of the tobacco giant Philip Morris, including direct attacks on peer-reviewed science, and attempts to create public controversy and doubt.[114]

Former National Academy of Sciences president Frederick Seitz, who, according to an article by Mark Hertsgaard in Vanity Fair, earned about US$585,000 in the 1970s and 1980s as a consultant to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company,[144] went on to chair groups such as the Science and Environmental Policy Project and the George C. Marshall Institute alleged to have made efforts to "downplay" global warming. Seitz stated in the 1980s that "Global warming is far more a matter of politics than of climate." Seitz authored the Oregon Petition, a document published jointly by the Marshall Institute and Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in opposition to the Kyoto protocol. The petition and accompanying "Research Review of Global Warming Evidence" claimed:

The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. … We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution.[114]

George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian that this petition, which he criticizes as misleading and tied to industry funding, "has been cited by almost every journalist who claims that climate change is a myth." Efforts by climate change denial groups played a significant role in the eventual rejection of the Kyoto protocol in the US.[145]

Monbiot has written about another group founded by the tobacco lobby, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), that now campaigns against measures to combat global warming. In again trying to manufacture the appearance of a grass-roots movement against "unfounded fear" and "over-regulation," Monbiot states that TASSC "has done more damage to the campaign to halt [climate change] than any other body."[114]

Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle analysed the funding of 91 organizations opposed to restrictions on carbon emissions, which he termed the "climate change counter-movement." Between 2003 and 2013, the donor-advised funds Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, combined, were the largest funders, accounting for about one quarter of the total funds, and the American Enterprise Institute was the largest recipient, 16% of the total funds. The study also found that the amount of money donated to these organizations by means of foundations whose funding sources cannot be traced had risen.[146][147][148][149][150]

Private sector

Several large corporations within the fossil fuel industry provide significant funding to the climate change denial movement.[151] ExxonMobil and the Koch family foundations have been identified as especially influential funders of climate change contrarianism.[152]

After the IPCC released its February 2007 report, the American Enterprise Institute offered British, American and other scientists $10,000, plus travel expenses to publish articles critical of the assessment. The institute had received more than $US 1.6 million from Exxon, and its vice-chairman of trustees was former head of Exxon Lee Raymond. Raymond sent letters that alleged the IPCC report was not "supported by the analytical work." More than 20 AEI employees worked as consultants to the George W. Bush administration.[153] Despite her initial conviction that climate change denial would abate with time, Senator Barbara Boxer said that when she learned of the AEI's offer, she "realized there was a movement behind this that just wasn't giving up."[154]

The Royal Society conducted a survey that found ExxonMobil had given US$ 2.9 million to American groups that "misinformed the public about climate change," 39 of which "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence".[155][156] In 2006, the Royal Society issued a demand that ExxonMobil withdraw funding for climate change denial. The letter drew criticism, notably from Timothy Ball who argued the society attempted to "politicize the private funding of science and to censor scientific debate."[157]

ExxonMobil denied that it has been trying to mislead the public about global warming. A spokesman, Gantt Walton, said that ExxonMobil's funding of research does not mean that it acts to influence the research, and that ExxonMobil supports taking action to curb the output of greenhouse gasses.[158] Research conducted at an Exxon archival collection at the University of Texas and interviews with former employees by journalists indicate the scientific opinion within the company and their public posture towards climate change was contradictory.[159]

Between 1989 and 2002 the Global Climate Coalition, a group of mainly United States businesses, used aggressive lobbying and public relations tactics to oppose action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fight the Kyoto Protocol. The coalition was financed by large corporations and trade groups from the oil, coal and auto industries. The New York Times reported that "even as the coalition worked to sway opinion [towards skepticism], its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted."[160] In 2000, Ford Motor Company was the first company to leave the coalition as a result of pressure from environmentalists,[161] followed by Daimler-Chrysler, Texaco, the Southern Company and General Motors subsequently left to GCC.[162] The organization closed in 2002.

In early 2015, several media reports emerged saying that Willie Soon, a popular scientist among climate change deniers, had failed to disclose conflicts of interest in at least 11 scientific papers published since 2008.[163] They reported that he received a total of $1.25m from ExxonMobil, Southern Company, the American Petroleum Institute and a foundation run by the Koch brothers.[164] Charles R. Alcock, director of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where Soon was based, said that allowing funders of Dr. Soon's work to prohibit disclosure of funding sources was a mistake, which will not be permitted in future grant agreements.[165]

Public sector

In 1994, according to a leaked memo, the Republican strategist Frank Luntz advised members of the Republican Party, with regard to climate change, that "you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue" and "challenge the science" by "recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view."[154] In 2006, Luntz stated that he still believes "back [in] '97, '98, the science was uncertain", but he now agrees with the scientific consensus.[166]

In 2005, the New York Times reported that Philip Cooney, former fossil fuel lobbyist and "climate team leader" at the American Petroleum Institute and President George W. Bush's chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality, had "repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents."[167] Sharon Begley reported in Newsweek that Cooney "edited a 2002 report on climate science by sprinkling it with phrases such as 'lack of understanding' and 'considerable uncertainty.'" Cooney reportedly removed an entire section on climate in one report, whereupon another lobbyist sent him a fax saying "You are doing a great job."[154] Cooney announced his resignation two days after the story of his tampering with scientific reports broke,[168] but a few days later it was announced that Cooney would take up a position with ExxonMobil.[169]

In 2015, environmentalist Bill McKibben accused President Obama of "Catastrophic Climate-Change Denial", for his approval of oil-drilling permits in offshore Alaska. According to McKibben, the President has also "opened huge swaths of the Powder River basin to new coal mining." McKibben calls this "climate denial of the status quo sort", where the President denies "the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground." [170]

Schools

According to documents leaked in February 2012, The Heartland Institute is developing a curriculum for use in schools which frames climate change as a scientific controversy.[171][172][173]

Effect

Manufactured uncertainty over climate change, the fundamental strategy of climate change denial, has been very effective, particularly in the US. It has contributed to low levels of public concern and to government inaction worldwide.[16][174] An Angus Reid poll released in 2010 indicates that global warming skepticism in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom has been rising.[175][176] There may be multiple causes of this trend, including a focus on economic rather than environmental issues, and a negative perception of the United Nations and its role in discussing climate change.[177] Another cause may be weariness from overexposure to the topic: secondary polls suggest that the public may have been discouraged by extremism when discussing the topic,[175] while other polls show 54% of U.S. voters believe that "the news media make global warming appear worse than it really is."[178] A poll in 2009 regarding the issue of whether "some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming" showed that 59% of Americans believed it "at least somewhat likely", with 35% believing it was "very likely".[177]

According to Tim Wirth, "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry. […] Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress."[66] This approach has been propagated by the US media, presenting a false balance between climate science and climate skeptics.[179] Newsweek reports that the majority of Europe and Japan accept the consensus on scientific climate change, but only one third of Americans considered human activity to play a major role in climate change in 2006; 64% believed that scientists disagreed about it "a lot."[180] A 2007 Newsweek poll found these numbers were declining, although majorities of Americans still believed that scientists were uncertain about climate change and its causes.[181] Rush Holt wrote a piece for Science, which appeared in Newsweek:

…for more than two decades scientists have been issuing warnings that the release of greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide (CO2), is probably altering Earth's climate in ways that will be expensive and even deadly. The American public yawned and bought bigger cars. Statements by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and others underscored the warnings and called for new government policies to deal with climate change. Politicians, presented with noisy statistics, shrugged, said there is too much doubt among scientists, and did nothing.[182]

Deliberate attempts by the Western Fuels Association "to confuse the public" have succeeded in their objectives. This has been "exacerbated by media treatment of the climate issue". According to a Pew poll in 2012, 57% of the US public are unaware of, or outright reject, the scientific consensus on climate change.[183] Some organizations promoting climate change denial have asserted that scientists are increasingly rejecting climate change, but this notion is contradicted by research showing that 97% of published papers endorse the scientific consensus, and that percentage is increasing with time.[183]

Global oil companies have begun to acknowledge climate change exists and is caused by human activities and the burning of fossil fuels.[184]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Powell, James Lawrence (1 October 2015). "Climate Scientists Virtually Unanimous Anthropogenic Global Warming Is True". Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. 35 (5-6): 121–124. doi:10.1177/0270467616634958. ISSN 0270-4676.
  2. 1 2 National Center for Science Education 2010: "The first pillar of climate change denial—that climate change is bad science—attacks various aspects of the scientific consensus about climate change … there are climate change deniers:
    • who deny that significant climate change is occurring
    • who … deny that human activity is significantly responsible
    • who … deny the scientific evidence about its significant effects on the world and our society …
    • who … deny that humans can take significant actions to reduce or mitigate its impact.
    Of these varieties of climate change denial, the most visible are the first and the second."
  3. 1 2 "Why Is It Called Denial?". National Center for Science Education. Retrieved 21 January 2016.
  4. 1 2 Powell 2012, pp. 170–173: "Anatomy of Denial—Global warming deniers…. throw up a succession of claims, and fall back from one line of defense to the next as scientists refute each one in turn. Then they start over:
    'The earth is not warming.'
    'All right, it is warming but the Sun is the cause.'
    'Well then, humans are the cause, but it doesn't matter, because it warming will do no harm. More carbon dioxide will actually be beneficial. More crops will grow.'
    'Admittedly, global warming could turn out to be harmful, but we can do nothing about it.'
    'Sure, we could do something about global warming, but the cost would be too great. We have more pressing problems here and now, like AIDS and poverty.'
    'We might be able to afford to do something to address global warming some-day, but we need to wait for sound science, new technologies, and geoengineering.'
    'The earth is not warming. Global warming ended in 1998; it was never a crisis.'
  5. 1 2 3 Dunlap 2013, pp. 691–698: "There is debate over which term is most appropriate… Those involved in challenging climate science label themselves "skeptics"… Yet skepticism is…a common characteristic of scientists, making it inappropriate to allow those who deny AGW to don the mantle of skeptics…It seems best to think of skepticism-denial as a continuum, with some individuals (and interest groups) holding a skeptical view of AGW…and others in complete denial"
  6. 1 2 Timmer 2014
  7. 1 2 National Center for Science Education 2012: "Climate change denial is most conspicuous when it is explicit, as it is in controversies over climate education. The idea of implicit (or "implicatory") denial, however, is increasingly discussed among those who study the controversies over climate change. Implicit denial occurs when people who accept the scientific community’s consensus on the answers to the central questions of climate change on the intellectual level fail to come to terms with it or to translate their acceptance into action. Such people are in denial, so to speak, about climate change."
  8. ↑ Vaidyanathan 2014.
  9. 1 2 Dunlap 2013, pp. 691–698: "From the outset, there has been an organized "disinformation" campaign… to "manufacture uncertainty" over AGW … especially by attacking climate science and scientists … waged by a loose coalition of industrial (especially fossil fuels) interests and conservative foundations and think tanks … often assisted by a small number of 'contrarian scientists. … greatly aided by conservative media and politicians … and more recently by a bevy of skeptical bloggers. This 'denial machine' has played a crucial role in generating skepticism toward AGW among laypeople and policy makers "
  10. ↑ Begley 2007: "ICE and the Global Climate Coalition lobbied hard against a global treaty to curb greenhouse gases, and were joined by a central cog in the denial machine: the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank. .... the denial machine—think tanks linking up with like-minded, contrarian researchers"
  11. 1 2 Nerlich 2010, pp. 419, 437: "Climate scepticism in the sense of climate denialism or contrarianism is not a new phenomenon, but it has recently been very much in the media spotlight. …. Such disagreements are not new but the emails provided climate sceptics, in the sense of deniers or contrarians, with a golden opportunity to mount a sustained effort aimed at demonstrating the legitimacy of their views. This allowed them to question climate science and climate policies based on it and to promote political inaction and inertia. …. footnote 1. I shall use 'climate sceptics' here in the sense of 'climate deniers', although there are obvious differences between scepticism and denial (see Shermer, 2010; Kemp, et al., 2010). However, 'climate sceptic' and 'climate scepticism' were commonly used during the 'climategate' debate as meaning 'climate denier'."
  12. ↑ Oreskes, Naomi (2007). "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We're Not Wrong?". In DiMento, Joseph F. C.; Doughman, Pamela M. Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren. The MIT Press. pp. 65–66. ISBN 978-0-262-54193-0.
  13. ↑ "CLIMATE CHANGE 2014: Synthesis Report. Summary for Policymakers" (PDF). IPCC. Retrieved 7 March 2015. The evidence for human influence on the climate system has grown since the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together
  14. ↑ Dunlap 2013: "Even though climate science has now firmly established that global warming is occurring, that human activities contribute to this warming… a significant portion of the American public remains ambivalent or unconcerned, and many policymakers (especially in the United States) deny the necessity of taking steps to reduce carbon emissions…From the outset, there has been an organized "disinformation" campaign… to generate skepticism and denial concerning AGW."
  15. 1 2 3 Jacques, Dunlap & Freeman 2008, p. 351: "Conservative think tanks…and their backers launched a full-scale counter-movement… We suggest that this counter-movement has been central to the reversal of US support for environmental protection, both domestically and internationally. Its major tactic has been disputing the seriousness of environmental problems and undermining environmental science by promoting what we term 'environmental scepticism.'"
  16. 1 2 Painter & Ashe 2012: "Despite a high degree of consensus amongst publishing climate researchers that global warming is occurring, and that it is anthropogenic, this discourse, promoted largely by non-scientists, has had a significant impact on public perceptions of the issue, fostering the impression that elite opinion is divided as to the nature and extent of the threat."
  17. ↑ Hoofnagle, Mark (30 April 2007). "Hello Science blogs (Welcome to Denialism blog)"."Denialism is the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none. These false arguments are used when one has few or no facts to support one’s viewpoint against a scientific consensus or against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They are effective in distracting from actual useful debate using emotionally appealing, but ultimately empty and illogical assertions. Examples of common topics in which denialists employ their tactics include: Creationism/Intelligent Design, Global Warming denialism …" and "5 general tactics are used by denialists to sow confusion. They are conspiracy, selectivity (cherry-picking), fake experts, impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts), and general fallacies of logic."
  18. 1 2 Diethelm & McKee 2009
  19. ↑ Republicans' leading climate denier tells the pope to butt out of climate debate, The Guardian
  20. ↑ Klein, Naomi (9 November 2011). "Capitalism vs. the Climate". The Nation. Retrieved 2 January 2012.
  21. ↑ Dunlap 2013: "The campaign has been waged by a loose coalition of industrial (especially fossil fuels) interests and conservative foundations and think tanks… These actors are greatly aided by conservative media and politicians, and more recently by a bevy of skeptical bloggers."
  22. ↑ David Michaels (2008) Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.
  23. ↑ Hoggan, James; Littlemore, Richard (2009). Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. Vancouver: Greystone Books. ISBN 978-1-55365-485-8. Retrieved 19 March 2010. See, e.g., p31 ff, describing industry-based advocacy strategies in the context of climate change denial, and p73 ff, describing involvement of free-market think tanks in climate-change denial.
  24. ↑ Jordi Xifra, Climate Change Deniers and Advocacy: A Situational Theory of Publics Approach. American Behavioral Scientist Vol. 60, (3), 2016, 276–287, doi:10.1177/0002764215613403.
  25. ↑ Robert Brulle: Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations. Climatic Change 122, 2014, 681–694 doi:10.1007/s10584-013-1018-7.
  26. ↑ Goldenberg, Suzanne (14 February 2013). "Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 1 March 2013.
  27. ↑ Pilkington, Ed (14 November 2013). "Facebook and Microsoft help fund rightwing lobby network, report finds". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 November 2013.
  28. 1 2 Egan, Timothy (5 November 2015). "Exxon Mobil and the G.O.P.: Fossil Fools". New York Times. Retrieved 9 November 2015.
  29. 1 2 Goldenberg, Suzanne (8 July 2015). "Exxon knew of climate change in 1981, email says – but it funded deniers for 27 more years". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 November 2015.
  30. ↑ Painter & Ashe 2012: "'Climate scepticism' and 'climate denial' are readily used concepts, referring to a discourse that has become important in public debate since climate change was first put firmly on the policy agenda in 1988. This discourse challenges the views of mainstream climate scientists and environmental policy advocates, contending that parts, or all, of the scientific treatment and political interpretation of climate change are unreliable."
  31. 1 2 National Center for Science Education 2012: "There is debate…about how to refer to the positions that reject, and to the people who doubt or deny, the scientific community's consensus on…climate change. Many such people prefer to call themselves skeptics and describe their position as climate change skepticism. Their opponents, however, often prefer to call such people climate change deniers and to describe their position as climate change denial… "Denial" is the term preferred even by many deniers."
  32. ↑ Rennie 2009: "Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists."
  33. ↑ Brown 1996, pp. 9, 11 "Indeed, the 'skeptic' scientists14 were perceived to be all the more credible precisely because their views were contrary to the consensus of peer-reviewed science.
    14. All scientists are skeptics because the scientific process demands continuing questioning. In this report, however, the scientists we refer to as 'skeptics' are those who have taken a highly visible public role in criticizing the scientific consensus on ozone depletion and climate change through publications and statements addressed more to the media and the public than to the scientific community."
  34. ↑ Gelbspan 1998, pp. 69–70, 246 At 16 November 1995 United States House Science Subcommittee on Energy hearing, Pat Michaels testified of "a small minority" opposing the IPCC assessment, and said "that the so-called skeptics were right".
  35. ↑ Antilla 2005, p. footnote 5
  36. ↑ Gelbspan 1995
  37. ↑ Painter & Ashe 2012: "The term 'climate scepticism' emerged in around 1995, the year journalist Ross Gelbspan authored perhaps the first book focusing directly on what would retrospectively be understood as climate scepticism."
  38. ↑ Gelbspan 1998 p. 3 "But some individuals do not want the public to know about the immediacy and extent of the climate threat. They have been waging a persistent campaign of denial and suppression that has been lamentably effective."
    pp. 33–34 "The campaign to keep the climate change off the public agenda involves more than the undisclosed funding of these 'greenhouse skeptics.' In their efforts to challenge the consensus scientific view….."
    p. 35 "If the climate skeptics have succeeded in confusing the general public, their influence on decision makers has been, if anything, even more effective
    p. 173 "pervasive denial of global warming"
  39. ↑ CBC News: the fifth estate 2007: "The Denial Machine investigates the roots of the campaign to negate the science and the threat of global warming. It tracks the activities of a group of scientists, some of whom previously consulted for Big Tobacco, and who are now receiving donations from major coal and oil companies. … The documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global warming was real and had potentially catastrophic consequences. … The Denial Machine also explores how the arguments supported by oil companies were adopted by policy makers in both Canada and the U.S. and helped form government policy."
  40. 1 2 Orlóci 2008, pp. 86, 97: "The ideological justification for this came from the sceptics (e.g., Lomborg 2001a,b) and from the industrial 'denial machine'. … CBC Television Fifth Estate, November 15, 2006, The Climate Denial Machine, Canada.
  41. 1 2 Begley 2007: "If you think those who have long challenged the mainstream scientific findings about global warming recognize that the game is over, think again. … outside Hollywood, Manhattan and other habitats of the chattering classes, the denial machine is running at full throttle—and continuing to shape both government policy and public opinion. Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. 'They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry,' says former senator Tim Wirth"
  42. ↑ Norgaard, Kari (2011). Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. pp. 1–4. ISBN 978-0-262-01544-8.
  43. ↑ Washington 2013, p. 2: "Many climate change deniers call themselves climate 'skeptics'…However, refusing to accept the overwhelming 'preponderance of evidence' is not skepticism, it is denial and should be called by its true name… The use of the term 'climate skeptic' is a distortion of reality…Skepticism is healthy in both science and society; denial is not."
  44. 1 2 O’Neill, Saffron J.; [email protected]; Boykoff, Max (28 September 2010). "Climate denier, skeptic, or contrarian?". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107 (39): E151–E151. Bibcode:2010PNAS..107E.151O. doi:10.1073/pnas.1010507107. ISSN 0027-8424. PMID 20807754. Retrieved 2 June 2015. Using the language of denialism brings a moralistic tone into the climate change debate that we would do well to avoid. Further, labeling views as denialist has the potential to inappropriately link such views with Holocaust denial… However, skepticism forms an integral part of the scientific method, and, thus, the term is frequently misapplied in such phrases as "climate change skeptic."
  45. ↑ Mann, Michael E. (2013). The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-52638-5. Skepticism plays an essential role in the progress of science… Yet…in the context of the climate change denial movement… the term skeptic has often been co-opted to describe those who simply deny, rather than appraise critically.
  46. ↑ Jenkins 2015, p. 229: "many who deny the consensus on climate change are not really skeptics but rather contrarians who practice "a kind of one-sided skepticism that entails simply rejecting evidence that challenges one's preconceptions" (Mann 2012:26)"
  47. ↑ National Center for Science Education 2012: "Recognizing that no terminological choice is entirely unproblematic, NCSE — in common with a number of scholarly and journalistic observers of the social controversies surrounding climate change — opts to use the terms "climate changer deniers" and "climate change denial""
  48. ↑ Weart 2015 footnote 136a: "I do not mean to use the term "denier" pejoratively—it has been accepted by some of the group as a self-description—but simply to designate those who deny any likelihood of future danger from anthropogenic global warming."
  49. ↑ Anderegg, William R. L.; [email protected]; Prall, James W.; Harold, Jacob (19 July 2010). "Reply to O'Neill and Boykoff: Objective classification of climate experts". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107 (39): E152–E152. Bibcode:2010PNAS..107E.152A. doi:10.1073/pnas.1010824107. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 2947900Freely accessible. Retrieved 2 June 2015.
  50. 1 2 3 Gillis, Justin (12 February 2015). "Verbal Warming: Labels in the Climate Debate". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
  51. ↑ Timmer 2014: "some of the people who deserve that label are offended by it, thinking it somehow lumps them in with holocaust deniers. But that in its own way is a form of denial; the word came into use before the holocaust, and… denialism has been used as a label for people who refuse to accept the evidence for all sorts of things: HIV causing AIDS, vaccines being safe, etc."
  52. ↑ Boslough 2014
  53. ↑ Face the Facts petition
  54. ↑ "NY Times Public Editor: We're "Moving In A Good Direction" On Properly Describing Climate Deniers". Media Matters for America. 22 June 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  55. 1 2 Conway & Oreskes 2010, p. 170: "The doubts and confusion of the American people are particularly peculiar when put into historical perspective"
  56. 1 2 Powell 2012, pp. 36–39
  57. ↑ Weart 2015a: "From the late 1940s into the 1960s, many of the papers cited in these essays carried a thought-provoking footnote: "This work was supported by the 'Office of Naval Research.' "
  58. ↑ Weart 2007
  59. ↑ Weart 2015a: Charney Report quote p. viii in the Foreword by Climate Research Board chair Verner E. Suomi.
  60. ↑ Weart 2015a: Global Warming Becomes a Political Issue (1980–1983); "In 1981, Ronald Reagan took the presidency with an administration that openly scorned their concerns. He brought with him a backlash that had been building against the environmental movement. Many conservatives denied nearly every environmental worry, global warming included. They lumped all such concerns together as the rants of business-hating liberals, a Trojan Horse for government regulation." For details, see Money for Keeling: Monitoring CO2
  61. ↑ Weart, Spencer R. (30 June 2009). The Discovery of Global Warming. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-04497-5.
  62. ↑ Weart 2015: Breaking into Politics (1980–1988), "Sherwood Idso, who published arguments that greenhouse gas emissions would not warm the Earth or bring any other harm to climate. Better still, by fertilizing crops, the increase of CO2 would bring tremendous benefits."
  63. ↑ Hansen, James (1988). "Statement of Dr. James Hansen, director, NASA Goddard Institute for space studies" (PDF). Climate Change ProCon.org. Retrieved 30 November 2015.
  64. ↑ Weart 2015 The Summer of 1988: "A new breed of interdisciplinary studies was showing that even a few degrees of warming might have harsh consequences, both for fragile natural ecosystems and for certain agricultural systems and other human endeavours…. The timing was right, and the media leaped on the story. Hansen's statements, especially that severe warming was likely within the next 50 years, got on the front pages of newspapers and were featured in television news and radio talk shows….. The story grew as the summer of 1988 wore on. Reporters descended unexpectedly upon an international conference of scientists held in Toronto at the end of June. Their stories prominently reported how the world's leading climate scientists declared that atmospheric changes were already causing harm, and might cause much more; the scientists called for vigorous government action to restrict greenhouse gases.
  65. ↑ Weart 2015: "Environmentalist organizations continued… lobbying and advertising efforts to argue for restrictions on emissions. The environmentalists were opposed, and greatly outspent, by industries that produced or relied on fossil fuels. Industry groups not only mounted a sustained and professional public relations effort, but also channeled considerable sums of money to individual scientists and small conservative organizations and publications that denied any need to act against global warming."
  66. 1 2 3 4 Begley 2007: "Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming… Then they claimed that any warming is natural… Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. 'They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry,' says former senator Tim Wirth… 'Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress.'"
  67. 1 2 Weart 2015: "The technical criticism most widely noted in the press came in several brief "reports" — not scientific papers in the usual sense — published between 1989 and 1992 by the conservative George C. Marshall Institute. The anonymously authored pamphlets… [claimed] that proposed government regulation would be "extraordinarily costly to the U.S. economy," they insisted it would be unwise to act on the basis of the existing global warming theories… In 1989 some of the biggest corporations in the petroleum, automotive, and other industries created a Global Climate Coalition, whose mission was to disparage every call for action against global warming."
  68. 1 2 Conway & Oreskes 2010: "Millions of pages of documents released during tobacco litigation…show the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt about the links between smoking and health risks. These documents…also show that the same strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain, and the ozone hole."
  69. ↑ Weart 2015: "Scientists noticed something that the public largely overlooked: the most outspoken scientific critiques of global warming predictions did not appear in the standard peer-reviewed scientific publications. The critiques tended to appear in venues funded by industrial groups, or in conservative media like the Wall Street Journal."
  70. ↑ Weart 2011, p. 46: "At some point they were no longer skeptics — people who would try to see every side of a case — but deniers, that is, people whose only interest was in casting doubt upon what other scientists agreed was true."
  71. ↑ Weart 2011, pp. 47: "As the deniers found ever less scientific ground to stand on, they turned to political arguments. Some of these policy arguments were straightforward, raising serious questions about the efficacy and expense of proposed carbon taxes and emission-regulation schemes. But leading deniers also resorted toad hominem tactics… On each side, some people were coming to believe that they faced a dishonest conspiracy, driven by ideological bias and naked self-interest"
  72. ↑ Jacques, Dunlap & Freeman 2008, pp. 349–385: "Environmental scepticism encompasses several themes, but denial of the authenticity of environmental problems, particularly problems such as biodiversity loss or climate change that threaten ecological sustainability, is its defining feature"
  73. 1 2 (Hamilton 2011, pp. 104–106): "the tactics, personnel and organisations mobilised to serve the interests of the tobacco lobby in the 1980s were seamlessly transferred to serve the interests of the fossil-fuel lobby in the 1990s. Frederick Seitz… the task of the climate sceptics in the think tanks and PR companies hired by fossil fuel companies was to engage in 'consciousness lowering activities', to 'de-problematise' global warming by describing it as a form of politically driven panicmongering." For the tobacco company memo, see "Original "Doubt is our product…" memo". University of California, San Francisco. 21 August 1969. Retrieved 19 March 2010.
  74. ↑ Conway & Oreskes 2010
  75. ↑ Conway & Oreskes 2010, p. 105: "As recently as 2007, the George Marshall Institute continued to insist that the damages associated with acid rain were always "largely hypothetical," and that "further scientific investigation revealed that most of them were not in fact occurring." The Institute cited no studies to support this extraordinary claim."
  76. ↑ Weart 2015: "Public support for environmental concerns in general seems to have waned after 1988."
  77. ↑ Weart 2015: "A study of American media found that in 1987 most items that mentioned the greenhouse effect had been feature stories about the science, whereas in 1988 the majority of the stories addressed the politics of the controversy. It was not that the number of science stories declined, but rather that as media coverage doubled and redoubled, the additional stories moved into social and political areas…Before 1988, the journalists had drawn chiefly on scientists for their information, but afterward they relied chiefly on sources who were identified with political positions or special interest groups."
  78. ↑ Wald, Matthew L. (8 July 1991). "Pro-Coal Ad Campaign Disputes Warming Idea". New York Times. Retrieved 1 March 2013.
  79. ↑ Begley 2007: "Individual companies and industry associations—representing petroleum, steel, autos and utilities, for instance—formed lobbying groups…[the Information Council on the Environment's] game plan called for enlisting greenhouse doubters to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact," and to sow doubt about climate research just as cigarette makers had about smoking research.... The coal industry's Western Fuels Association paid Michaels to produce a newsletter called World Climate Report, which has regularly trashed mainstream climate science."
  80. ↑ Cox, Robert (2009). Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. Sage. pp. 311–312. to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry's views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify controls on greenhouse gases
  81. ↑ Cushman, John, "Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty", The New York Times, 25 April 1998. Retrieved 10 March 2010.
  82. ↑ Gelbspan 1998, pp. 3, 35, 46, 197.
  83. ↑ Michael A. Milburn; Sheree D. Conrad (January 1998). The Politics of Denial. MIT Press. pp. 216–. ISBN 978-0-262-63184-6. Here again, as in the case of ozone depletion, economic and psychological forces are operating to produce a level of denial that threatens future generations.
  84. ↑ Painter & Ashe 2012: "Academics took note of the discourse when they began to analyse media representations of climate change knowledge and its effect on public perceptions and policy-making, but in the 1990s, they did not yet focus on it as a coherent and defined phenomenon. This changed in the 2000s, when McCright and Dunlap played an important role in deepening the concept of climate scepticism."
  85. ↑ Painter & Ashe 2012: "McCright and Dunlap played an important role in deepening the concept of climate scepticism. Examining what they termed a 'conservative countermovement' to undermine climate change policy…McCright and Dunlap went beyond the study of media representations of climate change knowledge to give a coherent picture of the movement behind climate scepticism in the US."
  86. ↑ Gelbspan, Ross (22 July 2004). "An excerpt from Boiling Point by Ross Gelbspan". Grist. Retrieved 1 June 2015.
  87. ↑ Wayne A. White (18 October 2012). Biosequestration and Ecological Diversity: Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change and Environmental Degradation. CRC Press. p. 206. ISBN 978-1-4398-5363-4. Climate change denial and discrediting climate science have become pivotal to the antiregulatory cause of neoliberals.
  88. ↑ Antilla 2005: "At the centre of this climate backlash is a group of dissident scientists. The number of these climate sceptics is greater in the US than in any other country. Although the peer-reviewed scientific literature agrees with the IPCC, within the media—wherefrom the majority of adults in the US are informed about science—claims that are dismissive of anthropogenic climate change are prominently featured."
  89. ↑ Jenkins 2015, p. 243: "the community of climate change contrarians also includes a host of amateurs, from talk radio hosts to newspaper columnists to bloggers. In particular, the tremendous growth of the Internet has given sustenance to the contrarian movement"
  90. ↑ "The Paris agreement signals that deniers have lost the climate wars". The Guardian. 2015.
  91. ↑ Davenport, Coral (12 December 2015). "Nations Approve Landmark Climate Accord in Paris". The New York Times.
  92. ↑ "The Pentagon & Climate Change: How Deniers Put National Security at Risk". Rolling Stone. 2015.
  93. ↑ BloombergBusiness (2015). "Unearthing America's Deep Network of Climate Change Deniers".
  94. ↑ Justin Farrell (2015). "Network structure and influence of the climate change counter-movement". Nature Climate Change. doi:10.1038/nclimate2875.
  95. ↑ Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ Challenged by NOAA Research, New York Times, 4 June 2015. Quote: Russell S. Vose, chief of the climate science division at NOAA’s Asheville center, pointed out in an interview that while the corrections do eliminate the recent warming slowdown, the overall effect of the agency’s adjustments has long been to raise the reported global temperatures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a substantial margin. That makes the temperature increase of the past century appear less severe than it does in the raw data. If you just wanted to release to the American public our uncorrected data set, it would say that the world has warmed up about 2.071 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880,” Dr. Vose said. “Our corrected data set says things have warmed up about 1.65 degrees Fahrenheit. Our corrections lower the rate of warming on a global scale.”
  96. 1 2 Rennie 2009: "Claim 1: Anthropogenic CO2 can't be changing climate, because CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources. Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, so changes in CO2 are irrelevant."
  97. ↑ Rennie 2009: " According to the U.S. Geological Survey, anthropogenic CO2 amounts to about 30 billion tons annually—more than 130 times as much as volcanoes produce."
  98. ↑ Rennie 2009: "from Arrhenius on, climatologists have incorporated water vapor into their models. In fact, water vapor is why rising CO2 has such a big effect on climate… Nevertheless, within this dynamic, the CO2 remains the main driver… of the greenhouse effect."
  99. ↑ Rennie 2009: "Claim 3: Global warming stopped a decade ago; Earth has been cooling since then."
  100. ↑ Rennie 2009: "Claim 4: The sun or cosmic rays are much more likely to be the real causes of global warming. After all, Mars is warming up, too."
  101. ↑ Rennie 2009: "But in defiance of the naysayers who want to chalk the recent warming up to natural cycles, there is insufficient evidence that enough extra solar energy is reaching our planet to account for the observed rise in global temperatures."
  102. ↑ Rennie 2009: "Claim 5: Climatologists conspire to hide the truth about global warming by locking away their data. Their so-called "consensus" on global warming is scientifically irrelevant because science isn't settled by popularity.... Claim 6: Climatologists have a vested interest in raising the alarm because it brings them money and prestige."
  103. ↑ White, Rob (2012). Climate Change from a Criminological Perspective. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 49. ISBN 1-4614-3640-0. many Americans, including many American politicians and decision-makers, are increasingly viewing climate change as a "left-wing plot"–part of the "one-world socialist agenda" or a "conspiracy to impose world government and a sweeping redistribution of wealth." Just as Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma proclaimed on the Senate floor that "[g]lobal warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people", many Americans believe that climate change is "a cynical hoax perpetrated by climate scientists… greedy for grants."
  104. ↑ Rennie 2009: "If there were a massive conspiracy to defraud the world on climate (and to what end?), surely the thousands of e-mails and other files stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and distributed by hackers on November 20 would bear proof of it. So far, however, none has emerged. Most of the few statements that critics claim as evidence of malfeasance seem to have more innocent explanations that make sense in the context of scientists conversing privately and informally."
  105. ↑ Eight major investigations on the leaked emails include: House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (UK); Independent Climate Change Review (UK); International Science Assessment Panel (UK); Pennsylvania State University first panel and second panel (US); United States Environmental Protection Agency (US); Department of Commerce (US); National Science Foundation (US)
  106. ↑ Anderegg, William R L; Prall, James W.; Harold, Jacob; Schneider, Stephen H. (2010). "Expert credibility in climate change" (PDF). Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107 (27): 12107–9. Bibcode:2010PNAS..10712107A. doi:10.1073/pnas.1003187107. PMC 2901439Freely accessible. PMID 20566872. (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
  107. ↑ Rennie 2009: "Climatologists are frequently frustrated by accusations that they are hiding their data or the details of their models because, as Gavin Schmidt points out, much of the relevant information is in public databases or otherwise accessible—a fact that contrarians conveniently ignore when insisting that scientists stonewall their requests."
  108. ↑ Lewandowsky, Stephan; Oberauer, Klaus (2013). "NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax". Psychological Science. Sage Publications. 24 (5): 622–633. doi:10.1177/0956797612457686.
  109. ↑ Rennie 2009: "Claim 7: Technological fixes, such as inventing energy sources that don't produce CO2 or geoengineering the climate, would be more affordable, prudent ways to address climate change than reducing our carbon footprint."
  110. 1 2 Rahmstorf, S., 2004, The climate sceptics: Weather Catastrophes and Climate Change—Is There Still Hope For Us? (Munich: PG Verlag) pp 76–83
  111. ↑ Painter & Ashe 2012: "We focused on the marked differences in what climate sceptics are sceptical about … (1) trend sceptics (who deny the global warming trend), (2) attribution sceptics (who accept the trend, but either question the anthropogenic contribution saying it is overstated, negligent or non-existent compared to other factors like natural variation, or say it is not known with sufficient certainty what the main causes are) and (3) impact sceptics (who accept human causation, but claim impacts may be benign or beneficial, or that the models are not robust enough) and/or question the need for strong regulatory policies or interventions. "
  112. ↑ Dunlap & Jacques 2013, p. 702: "These books reject evidence that global warming is occurring, that human actions are the predominant cause of global warming, and/or that global warming will have negative impacts on human and natural systems. These arguments have been labelled trend, attribution, and impact denial (Rahmstorf, 2004). … We located 108 books espousing one or more of these versions of climate change denial published through 2010"
  113. 1 2 Michael E. Mann (13 August 2013). The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Columbia University Press. p. 23. ISBN 978-0-231-52638-8.
  114. 1 2 3 4 Monbiot, George (19 September 2006). "The denial industry". The Guardian. London.
  115. 1 2 Ellen Goodman (9 February 2007). "No change in political climate". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 30 August 2008.
  116. ↑ George Monbiot (27 February 2009). "Climate change: The semantics of denial". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 May 2015.
  117. ↑ Christoff, Peter (9 July 2007). "Climate change is another grim tale to be treated with respect – Opinion". Theage.com.au. Melbourne. Retrieved 19 March 2010.
  118. ↑ Connelly, Joel (10 July 2007). "Deniers of global warming harm us". Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Retrieved 25 December 2009.
  119. ↑ "Timeline, Climate Change and its Naysayers". Newsweek. 13 August 2007.
  120. ↑ Liu, D. W. C. (2012). "Science Denial and the Science Classroom". CBE- Life Sciences Education. American Society for Cell Biology. 11 (2): 129–134. doi:10.1187/cbe.12-03-0029. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
  121. 1 2 Hoofnagle, Mark (11 March 2009). "Climate change deniers: failsafe tips on how to spot them". the Guardian. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
  122. ↑ "NCSE Tackles Climate Change Denial". National Center for Science Education. 13 January 2012. Retrieved July 2015. Science education is under attack… by climate change deniers, who ignore a mountain of evidence gathered over the last fifty years that the planet is warming and that humans are largely responsible. These deniers attempt to sabotage science education with fringe ideas, pseudoscience, and outright lies. Check date values in: |access-date= (help)
  123. ↑ Lahsen, Myanna (Winter 2005). "Technocracy, Democracy, and the U.S. Climate Politics: The Need for Demarcations". Science, Technology, & Human Values. 30: 137–169. doi:10.1177/0162243904270710. Numerous high-ranked officers in the Clinton-Gore administration sought to dismiss all critics of the climate paradigm as "pseudoscientists"
  124. ↑ Brown, Michael. Adversaries, zombies and NIPCC climate pseudoscience, ‘’Phys.org’’, 26 September 2013
  125. ↑ Brown 1996, p. 28: "As the scientific fringe has become institutionalized, professionalized, and lionized… One finds that a fundamental difference between the traditional scientific establishment and the emerging "skeptic" establishment relates to their ultimate scientific goals. The former has traditionally emphasized the generation of new knowledge as a measure of productivity. That is, the collection of original data, construction of new mathematical techniques, and generation and validation of testable hypotheses have been the hallmarks of the traditional scientific community… On the other hand, the emerging culture profiled in these hearings emphasizes the generation of new perspectives. Productivity is measured on the ability to alter public opinion – through opinion pieces aimed not at their fellow scientists but at policymakers, the media, and the general public – and funding flows accordingly."
  126. ↑ Morrison, David. The Parameters of Pseudoscience, Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 37.2, March/April 2013. Book review of The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, by Michael D. Gordin.
  127. 1 2 Dunlap 2013: "From the outset, there has been an organized "disinformation" campaign… to "manufacture uncertainty" over AGW, especially by attacking climate science and scientists. This appears an effective strategy given that confidence in climate science and trust in climate scientists are key factors influencing the public's views of AGW."
  128. ↑ Boykoff, M.; Boykoff, J. (July 2004). "Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press" (PDF). Global Environmental Change Part A. 14 (2): 125–136. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2003.10.001.
  129. ↑ Antilla 2005: "One problematic trend of the US media has been the suggestion that substantive disagreement exists within the international scientific community as to the reality of anthropogenic climate change; however, this concept is false…Although the science of climate change does not appear to be a prime news topic for most of the 255 newspapers included in this study…articles that framed climate change in terms of debate, controversy, or uncertainty were plentiful."
  130. ↑ Painter & Ashe 2012: "Media analysis of climate change reporting was always of interest to academics but from the mid-2000s, it became one of the key areas of research interest, highlighting a tendency to give undue weight to voices questioning the science of climate change."
  131. ↑ Antilla 2005: "Not only were there many examples of journalistic balance that led to bias, but some of the news outlets repeatedly used climate sceptics—with known fossil fuel industry ties—as primary definers"
  132. ↑ Dispensa, Jaclyn Marisa; Brulle, Robert J. "International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy". International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. 23 (10): 74–105. doi:10.1108/01443330310790327. ISSN 0144-333X.
  133. ↑ Painter & Ashe 2012: "news coverage of scepticism is mostly limited to the USA and the UK…the type of sceptics who question whether global temperatures are warming are almost exclusively found in the US and UK newspapers. Sceptics who challenge the need for robust action to combat climate change also have a much stronger presence in the media of the same two countries. "
  134. ↑ David, Adam (20 September 2006). "Royal Society tells Exxon: stop funding climate change denial". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 12 January 2009.
  135. ↑ Sandell, Clayton (3 January 2007). "Report: Big Money Confusing Public on Global Warming". ABC News. Retrieved 12 January 2009.
  136. ↑ Painter & Ashe 2012: "in the USA and the UK… sceptical voices generally appear in much higher numbers… in France, the UK and the USA… right-leaning newspapers are much more likely to include uncontested sceptical voices."
  137. ↑ Saad, Lydia (21 March 2007). "Did Hollywood's Glare Heat Up Public Concern About Global Warming?". Gallup. Retrieved 12 January 2010.
  138. ↑ Holthaus, Eric (6 April 2015). "Poll: Americans Don't Think Climate Change Will Affect Them Personally". Slate. ISSN 1091-2339. Retrieved 15 November 2015.
  139. ↑ Gifford R. (2011). "The dragons of inaction: psychological barriers that limit climate change mitigation and adaptation". Am Psychol. 66 (4): 290–302. doi:10.1037/a0023566. PMID 21553954.
  140. ↑ Jacques, Dunlap & Freeman 2008, p. 352: "While these CTTs sometimes joined corporate America in directly lobbying against environmental policies, their primary tactic in combating environmentalism has been to challenge the need for protective environmental policy by questioning the seriousness of environmental problems and the validity of environmental science."
  141. ↑ Dryzek, John S.; Norgaard, Richard B.; Schlosberg, David (2011). The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. Oxford University Press. p. 154. ISBN 978-0-19-968342-0.
  142. ↑ Borowy, Iris (2014). Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future: A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development. Routledge. p. 44. Corporations and conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, Marshall Institute], the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute waged campaigns to obscure scientific evidence about acid rain, ozone depletion and climate change and, thereby, to prevent or rollback environmental, health and safety regulations.
  143. ↑ Manjit, Kumar (18 October 2010). "Merchants of Doubt, By Naomi Oreskes & Erik M Conway". The Independent. London. Retrieved 17 February 2013.
  144. ↑ Hertsgaard, Mark (May 2006). "While Washington Slept". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 2 August 2007.
  145. ↑ Painter & Ashe 2012: "The work by McCright and Dunlap has highlighted the effectiveness of organized climate sceptic groups in influencing US policy making in the 1990s and early 2000s, including their central role in the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol by the US Congress"
  146. ↑ Brulle, Robert J. (21 December 2013). "Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations". Climatic Change. 122 (4): 681–694. doi:10.1007/s10584-013-1018-7.
  147. ↑ Goldenberg, Suzanne (20 December 2013). "Conservative groups spend up to $1bn a year to fight action on climate change". The Guardian. Retrieved 29 January 2015.
  148. ↑ Fischer, Douglas (23 December 2013). ""Dark Money" Funds Climate Change Denial Effort". Scientific American. Retrieved 29 January 2015.
  149. ↑ Goldenberg, Suzanne (14 February 2013). "Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 February 2015.
  150. ↑ "Robert Brulle: Inside the Climate Change "Countermovement"". Frontline. PBS. 23 October 2012. Retrieved 21 February 2015.
  151. ↑ Antilla 2005: "A number of large corporations that profit substantially from fossil fuel consumption, such as ExxonMobil, provide financial support to their political allies in an effort to undermine public trust in climate science."
  152. ↑ Justin Farrell, Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2015, doi:10.1073/pnas.1509433112.
  153. ↑ Sample, Ian (2 February 2007). "Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 16 August 2007. The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.
  154. 1 2 3 Begley 2007
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  156. ↑ Ward, Bob (4 September 2006). "Letter to Nick Thomas, Director, Corporate affairs, Esso UK Ltd. (ExxonMobil)" (PDF). London: Royal Society. Retrieved 6 August 2007.
  157. ↑ "Interfaith Stewardship Alliance Newsletter" (PDF). Moyers on America. 2006. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
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  162. ↑ "GCC Suffers Technical Knockout, Industry defections decimate Global Climate Coalition".
  163. ↑ Gillis, Justin; Schartz, John (21 February 2015). "Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 March 2015. newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests. He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work. The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as "deliverables" that he completed in exchange for their money.
  164. ↑ Goldenberg, Suzanne (21 February 2015). "Work of prominent climate change denier was funded by energy industry". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 March 2015. Over the last 14 years Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, received a total of $1.25m from Exxon Mobil, Southern Company, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and a foundation run by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers… the biggest single funder was Southern Company, one of the country’s biggest electricity providers that relies heavily on coal.
  165. ↑ Schwartz, John (25 February 2015). "Lawmakers Seek Information on Funding for Climate Change Critics". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 March 2015. Charles R. Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said last week that a contract provision with funders of Dr. Soon’s work that appeared to prohibit disclosure of funding sources "was a mistake." "We will not permit similar wording in future grant agreements"
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  169. ↑ Andrew Revkin (15 June 2005). "Ex-Bush Aide Who Edited Climate Reports to Join ExxonMobil". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 April 2008.
  170. ↑ "Obama’s Catastrophic Climate-Change Denial" by Bill McKibben, NY Times op-ed, 12 May 2015.
  171. ↑ Justin Gillis; Leslie Kaufman (15 February 2012). "Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science". The New York Times. Retrieved 16 February 2012. plans to promote a curriculum that would cast doubt on the scientific finding that fossil fuel emissions endanger the long-term welfare of the planet.
  172. ↑ Stephanie Pappas; LiveScience (15 February 2012). "Leaked: Conservative Group Plans Anti-Climate Education Program". Scientific American. Retrieved 15 February 2012.
  173. ↑ Suzanne Goldenberg (15 February 2012). "Heartland Institute claims fraud after leak of climate change documents". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  174. ↑ Lever-Tracy 2010, p. 255: "In sum, we see that manufacturing uncertainty over climate change is the fundamental strategy of the denial machine […] As we reflect on the evolution of climate science and policy-making over the past few decades, we believe the denial machine has achieved considerable success – especially in the US but internationally as well. Public concern over global warming and support for climate policy-making in the US is low relative to other nations (see Chapter 10, this volume), contributing to inaction by the US government.
  175. 1 2 Corcoran, Terence (6 January 2010). "The cool down in climate polls". Financial Post. Angus Reid surveyed people…before and after Copenhagen. The drop off in public support for the idea that global warming is a fact mostly caused by human activity looks most pronounced in Canada. In November, 63% of Canadians supported global warming as a man-made phenomenon. By Dec. 23, that support had fallen 52%… A similar trend has been noted in the United States, where confidence in global warming theory has dropped to 46%… down from 51% in July last year. In Britain, only 43% believe man-made global warming is a fact, down from… 55% in July. In all three countries, there are signs of growing skepticism.
  176. ↑ White, Rob (2012). Climate Change from a Criminological Perspective. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 1-4614-3640-0. belief that climate change is "real" and confidence in climate science has surprisingly decreased… Angus Reid polls conducted in December 2009 found declining support for climate change…in Britain, Canada, and the United States.
  177. 1 2 Rasmussen Reports (3 December 2009). Americans Skeptical of Science Behind Global Warming.
  178. ↑ Rasmussen Reports. (6 February 2009). 54% Say Media Hype Global Warming Dangers.
  179. ↑ Antilla 2005: "the popular press uses a number of methods to frame climate science as uncertain, including ‘through the practice of interjecting and emphasizing controversy or disagreement among scientists’… In order to provide balance while reporting on climate change, some journalists include rebuttals by experts who, often through think-tanks, are affiliated with the fossil fuel industry. Regrettably, this creates the impression that scientific opinion is evenly divided or completely unsettled"
  180. ↑ Begley 2007: "polls found that 64 percent of Americans thought there was "a lot" of scientific disagreement on climate change; only one third thought planetary warming was "mainly caused by things people do." In contrast, majorities in Europe and Japan recognize a broad consensus among climate experts"
  181. ↑ Begley 2007: "A new NEWSWEEK Poll finds that the influence of the denial machine remains strong. Although the figure is less than in earlier polls, 39 percent of those asked say there is "a lot of disagreement among climate scientists" on the basic question of whether the planet is warming; 42 percent say there is a lot of disagreement that human activities are a major cause of global warming. Only 46 percent say the greenhouse effect is being felt today."
  182. ↑ Holt, Rush (13 July 2007). "Trying to Get Us to Change Course" (film review.)". Science. 317 (5835): 198–9. doi:10.1126/science.1142810.
  183. 1 2 Cook, John; et al. (15 May 2013). "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature". Environmental Research Letters. 8 (2): 024024. Bibcode:2013ERL.....8b4024C. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024. there is a significant gap between public perception and reality, with 57% of the US public either disagreeing or unaware that scientists overwhelmingly agree that the earth is warming due to human activity (Pew 2012). Contributing to this 'consensus gap' are campaigns designed to confuse the public about the level of agreement among climate scientists....The narrative presented by some dissenters is that the scientific consensus is '…on the point of collapse' while '…the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year' A systematic, comprehensive review of the literature provides quantitative evidence countering this assertion. The number of papers rejecting AGW is a minuscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.
  184. ↑ "Oil Company Positions on the Reality and Risk of Climate Change". Environmental Studies. University of Oshkosh – Wisconsin. Retrieved 27 March 2016.

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