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==Terminology== ==Terminology==
"Climate change skepticism" and "climate change denial" refer to denial or dismissal of the ] on the rate and extent of ], its significance, or its connection to human behavior, in whole or in part.<ref>{{harvnb|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."</ref> "Climate change skepticism" and "climate change denial" refer to denial or dismissal of the ] on the rate and extent of ], its significance, or its connection to human behavior, in whole or in part.<ref>{{harvnb|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."</ref>
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The terminology emerged in the 1990s, appearing in a January 1995 editorial on the '']'' titled "In Denial About Global Warming".<ref name="Karliner 1997">{{cite book|author=Joshua Karliner|title=The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=2CHLmPx2PJ0C&pg=PA229|year=1997|publisher=University of California Press|isbn=978-0-87156-434-4|page=229}}</ref> In his December 1995 article ''The Heat is On: The warming of the world's climate sparks a blaze of denial '', ] said industry had engaged "a small band of skeptics" to confuse public opinion in a "persistent and well-funded campaign of denial".<ref name="Gelbspan" /> His 1997 book ''The Heat is On'' may have been the first to concentrate specifically on the topic.<ref>{{harvnb|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."</ref> In it, Gelbspan discussed "climate skeptics" and "self-proclaimed skeptics" or "greenhouse skeptics," and described a campaign of suppression and denial that had hidden "the immediacy and extent of the climate threat" from the public.{{sfn | Gelbspan | 1998 | pp=3, 35, 46, 197}} The terminology emerged in the 1990s, appearing in a January 1995 editorial on the '']'' titled "In Denial About Global Warming".<ref name="Karliner 1997">{{cite book|author=Joshua Karliner|title=The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=2CHLmPx2PJ0C&pg=PA229|year=1997|publisher=University of California Press|isbn=978-0-87156-434-4|page=229}}</ref> In his December 1995 article ''The Heat is On: The warming of the world's climate sparks a blaze of denial '', ] said industry had engaged "a small band of skeptics" to confuse public opinion in a "persistent and well-funded campaign of denial".<ref name="Gelbspan" /> His 1997 book ''The Heat is On'' may have been the first to concentrate specifically on the topic.<ref>{{harvnb|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."</ref> In it, Gelbspan discussed "climate skeptics" and "self-proclaimed skeptics" or "greenhouse skeptics," and described a campaign of suppression and denial that had hidden "the immediacy and extent of the climate threat" from the public.{{sfn | Gelbspan | 1998 | pp=3, 35, 46, 197}}

Revision as of 21:51, 4 July 2015

This article is about campaigns to undermine public confidence in scientific opinion on climate change. For the public debate over scientific conclusions, see global warming controversy.

Climate change denial involves denial or dismissal of the scientific consensus on the rate and extent of global warming, its significance, or its connection to human behavior, especially for commercial or ideological reasons. Climate change denial forms an overlapping range of views with climate change skepticism and commonly has the same characteristics; both reject to a greater or lesser extent current scientific opinion on climate change. Several social science studies have analyzed these positions as a form of denialism. The labels are contested: in the global warming controversy, those actively challenging climate science commonly describe themselves as "skeptics", but many do not comply with scientific skepticism and, regardless of evidence, continue to deny the validity of human caused global warming.

Although there is a scientific consensus that humans activity is the primary driver of climate change, the politics of global warming has been impacted by climate change denial, hindering efforts to prevent climate change and adapt to the warming climate. Typically, public debate on climate change denial may have the appearance of legitimate scientific discourse, but does not conform to scientific principles. Much of this debate focuses on the economics of global warming.

Organised campaigning to undermine public trust in climate science is associated with conservative economics policies and backed by industrial interests opposed to the regulation of CO2 emissions. 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.

Between 2002 and 2010, nearly $120 million (£77 million) was anonymously donated, some by conservative billionaires via the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, to more than 100 organizations seeking to undermine the public perception of the science on climate change. 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.

Terminology

"Climate change skepticism" and "climate change denial" refer to denial or dismissal 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.

The terminology emerged in the 1990s, appearing in a January 1995 editorial on the Washington Post titled "In Denial About Global Warming". 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". His 1997 book The Heat is On may have been the first to concentrate specifically on the topic. In it, Gelbspan discussed "climate skeptics" and "self-proclaimed skeptics" or "greenhouse skeptics," and described a campaign of suppression and denial that had hidden "the immediacy and extent of the climate threat" from the public.

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. 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.

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, but the word skepticism is incorrectly used, as scientific skepticism is an intrinsic part of scientific methodology. The term contrarian is more specific, and not generally applicable. In academic literature and journalism, the terms climate change denial and climate change deniers have well established usage as descriptive terms for those casting unwarranted doubt or denying the scientific consensus, 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".

Terms related to denialism have been criticised for introducing a moralistic tone, and potentially implying a link with Holocaust denial. There have been claims that this link is intentional, which academics have strongly disputed. 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.

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." The letter was taken up by the advocacy group Face the Facts as the basis for an online petition to news media. 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."

History

The scientific community reached a broad consensus on climate change around 1988, indicating 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. These facts encouraged discussion about new laws concerning environmental regulation, which was opposed by the fossil fuel industry. 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. 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. 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. 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.

In the 1970s U.S. conservative think tanks had been organised as an intellectual counter-movement opposed primarily to social movements and socialism. With the 1989 fall of communism and the environmental movement's international reach at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, their attention 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.

Clive Hamilton describes the campaign to attack climate change science as originating with the astroturfing campaigns initiated by the tobacco industry in the 1990s. He documents the establishment of the Advancement of Sound Science Center (TASSC) as a front group which attempted to cast doubt on the science behind both tobacco use and climate change, in order to turn public opinion against calls for government intervention.

As one tobacco company memo noted: "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." As the 1990s progressed ... TASSC began receiving donations from Exxon (among other oil companies) and its "junk science" website began to carry material attacking climate change science.

— Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change

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. 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.

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

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," 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. 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'".

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. 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.

These efforts by climate change denial groups were recognized as an organized campaign beginning in the 2000s. 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.

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. In its August 2007 cover story "The Truth About Denial", Newsweek reported that "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."

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. Today, climate change skepticism is most prominently seen in the United States, where the media disproportionately features views of the climate change denial community.

Arguments and positions on global warming

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:

  1. Trend sceptics (who deny there is global warming), 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), 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 additional CO2 does not lead to discernible warming that there must be other – natural – causes for warming.
  3. Impact sceptics (who think global warming is harmless or even beneficial). — 

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

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. James L. Powell provides a more extended list, as does climatologist Michael E. Mann in "six stages of denial", a ladder in which deniers concede acceptance of points, while retreating to a position which still rejects the mainstream consensus:

  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.— 

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:

  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.
  4. Unworkable demands of research, claiming that any uncertainty invalidates the field or exaggerating uncertainty while rejecting probabilities and mathematical models.
  5. Logical fallacies, such as claiming that findings supporting environmental controls are a threat to the democratic way of life.

Pseudoscience

Various groups, including the National Center for Science Education, have described climate change denial as be a form of pseudoscience.

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.

Journalists and newspaper columnists including George Monbiot and Ellen Goodman, among others, have described climate change denial as a form of denialism.

Public opinion

Main article: Public opinion on climate change

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.

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. In some cases, news outlets have allowed climate change skeptics to explain the science of climate change instead of experts in climatology. US and UK media coverage differ from that presented in other countries, where reporting is more consistent with the scientific literature. 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. 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.

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%.

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.

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. These efforts have undermined public confidence in climate science, and impacted climate change lobbying.

According to Iris Borowy

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.

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.

Efforts to downplay the significance of climate change resemble the determined efforts of 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." 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.

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, 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.

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.

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 than any other body."

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.

Private sector

See also: Business action on climate change

Several large corporations within the fossil fuel industry provide significant funding to the climate change denial movement.

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, which had received more than $US 1.6 million from Exxon and whose vice-chairman of trustees was former head of Exxon Lee Raymond, sent letters that The Guardian said "attack the UN's panel as 'resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work' and ask for essays that 'thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs'." More than 20 AEI employees worked as consultants to the George W. Bush administration. 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."

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". In 2006, the Royal Society issued a demand that ExxonMobil withdraw funding for climate change denial. The letter, which was leaked to the media, drew criticism, notably from Timothy Ball and others who argued the society attempted to "politicize the private funding of science and to censor scientific debate."

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. Gantt said, "The recycling of this type of discredited conspiracy theory diverts attention from the real challenge at hand: how to provide the energy needed to improve global living standards while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions."

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 , its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted." In the year 2000, the coalition became the target of a national divestiture campaign run by John Passacantando and Phil Radford with the organization Ozone Action, resulting in several companies leaving the group. According to the New York Times, when Ford Motor Company was the first company to leave the coalition, it was "the latest sign of divisions within heavy industry over how to respond to global warming." Daimler-Chrysler, Texaco, the Southern Company and General Motors subsequently left to GCC. The organization closed in 2002.

In early 2015, several media reports emerged saying that Willie Soon had failed to disclose conflicts of interest in at least 11 scientific papers published since 2008. 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. 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. Soon is described as a popular and oft-cited scientist in climate change denialist circles. He says that the Sun is the main cause of climate change and that fossil fuels play only a minimal role. Climate scientists have repeatedly dismissed his views, which are at odds with those of science academies around the world. Soon has stated that funding from the fossil fuel industry does not influence his scientific work.

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." In 2006, Luntz stated that he still believes "back '97, '98, the science was uncertain", but he now agrees with the scientific consensus.

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." 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." Cooney announced his resignation two days after the story of his tampering with scientific reports broke, but a few days later it was announced that Cooney would take up a position with ExxonMobil.

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.

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. An Angus Reid poll released in 2010 indicates that global warming skepticism in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom has been rising. 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. 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, while other polls show 54% of U.S. voters believe that "the news media make global warming appear worse than it really is." 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".

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." This approach has been propogated by the US media, presenting a false balance between climate science and climate skeptics. 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." 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. 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."

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. 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.

Characterized as a conspiracy theory

Main article: Global warming conspiracy theory

One argument made in climate change denial literature is that climate change is a hoax or conspiracy perpetrated with the intention of securing grants for climate scientists or to promote a left-wing agenda. Another claim is that the scientific consensus on climate change is only due to climate scientists refusing to publish research which opposes their view. Such claims entail the existence of an implausibly widespread conspiracy, involving the vast majority of practicing scientists and scientific journals around the world.

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.

See also

References

  1. ^ Dunlap 2013, pp. 691–698: "There is debate over which term is most appropriate... Those involved in challenging climate science label themselves "skeptics"... Yet skepticisim 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"
  2. "Skeptics, deniers, and contrarians: The climate science label game". Ars Technica.
  3. ^ "Timeline, Climate Change and its Naysayers". Newsweek. 13 August 2007.
  4. ^ Christoff, Peter (July 9, 2007). "Climate change is another grim tale to be treated with respect - Opinion". Melbourne: Theage.com.au. Retrieved 2010-03-19.
  5. ^ Connelly, Joel (2007-07-10). "Deniers of global warming harm us". Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Retrieved 2009-12-25. Cite error: The named reference "ConnellyHarm" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  6. 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. (eds.). Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren. The MIT Press. pp. 65–66. ISBN 978-0-262-54193-0.
  7. "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
  8. 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."
  9. ^ 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.'"
  10. ^ 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."
  11. Hoofnagle, Mark (April 30, 2007). "Hello Science blogs (Welcome to Denialism blog)".
  12. ^ Pascal Diethelm & Martin McKee (2009). "Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?" (PDF). European Journal of Public Health. 19 (1): 2–4. doi:10.1093/eurpub/ckn139. PMID 19158101. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  13. Klein, Naomi (November 9, 2011). "Capitalism vs. the Climate". The Nation. Retrieved 2 January 2012.
  14. 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."
  15. Adams, David (2005-01-27). "Oil firms fund climate change 'denial'". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-08-03.
  16. ^ Adams, David (2006-09-20). "Royal Society tells Exxon: stop funding climate change denial". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-08-02.
  17. ^ Gelbspan 1995
  18. David Michaels (2008) Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.
  19. Hoggan, James; Littlemore, Richard (2009). Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. Vancouver: Greystone Books. ISBN 978-1-55365-485-8. Retrieved 2010-03-19. 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.
  20. Monbiot, George (2009-03-09). "Monbiot's royal flush: Top 10 climate change deniers". London: Guardian. Retrieved 2013-07-03.
  21. Goldenberg, Suzanne (14 February 2013). "Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 1 March 2013.
  22. Pilkington, Ed (14 November 2013). "Facebook and Microsoft help fund rightwing lobby network, report finds". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 November 2013.
  23. 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."
  24. Joshua Karliner (1997). The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization. University of California Press. p. 229. ISBN 978-0-87156-434-4.
  25. 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."
  26. ^ Gelbspan 1998, pp. 3, 35, 46, 197. sfn error: no target: CITEREFGelbspan1998 (help)
  27. NCSE 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."
  28. 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.
  29. NCSE 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."
  30. ^ O’Neill, Saffron J.; sjoneill@unimelb.edu.au; Boykoff, Max (28 Sep 2010). "Climate denier, skeptic, or contrarian?". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107 (39): E151 – E151. doi:10.1073/pnas.1010507107. ISSN 0027-8424. PMID 20807754. Retrieved 2 Jun 2015.
  31. NCSE 2015 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFNCSE2015 (help): "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”"
  32. Weart 2015: "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."
  33. Anderegg, William R. L.; anderegg@stanford.edu; Prall, James W.; Harold, Jacob (19 Jul 2010). "Reply to O'Neill and Boykoff: Objective classification of climate experts". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107 (39): E152 – E152. doi:10.1073/pnas.1010824107. ISSN 0027-8424. PMID 20807739. Retrieved 2 Jun 2015.
  34. ^ Gillis, Justin (12 February 2015). "Verbal Warming: Labels in the Climate Debate". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 June 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) Cite error: The named reference "Gillis 20150212" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  35. Timmer, John (16 December 2014). "Skeptics, deniers, and contrarians: The climate science label game". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2 July 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  36. "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.
  37. Weart 2015: "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.
  38. 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."
  39. ^ Begley 2007 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBegley2007 (help): "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.'"
  40. 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."
  41. 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"
  42. 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"
  43. ^ Clive Hamilton (2010). Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change. Allen & Unwin. pp. 103–105. ISBN 1-74237-210-4.
  44. "Original "Doubt is our product..." memo". University of California, San Francisco. 21 August 1969. Retrieved 19 March 2010.
  45. ConwayOreskes 2010
  46. Weart 2015: "Public support for environmental concerns in general seems to have waned after 1988."
  47. 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."
  48. Wald, Matthew L. (1991-07-08). "Pro-Coal Ad Campaign Disputes Warming Idea". New York Times. Retrieved 1 March 2013.
  49. Begley 2007 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBegley2007 (help): "Individual companies and industry associations—representing petroleum, steel, autos and utilities, for instance—formed lobbying groups... 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."
  50. 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
  51. Cushman, John, "Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty", The New York Times, April 25, 1998. Retrieved March 10, 2010.
  52. 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.
  53. 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."
  54. 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."
  55. Gelbspan, Ross (22 Jul 2004). "An excerpt from Boiling Point by Ross Gelbspan". Grist. Retrieved 1 Jun 2015.
  56. ^ Begley 2007 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBegley2007 (help)
  57. 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.
  58. 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."
  59. ^ Rahmstorf, S., 2004, The climate sceptics: Weather Catastrophes and Climate Change—Is There Still Hope For Us? (Munich: PG Verlag) pp 76–83
  60. 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. "
  61. Dunlap & Jacques 2013, pp. 699–731
  62. "Climate change is good science". NCSE. 4 June 2010. Retrieved 21 June 2015.
  63. James Lawrence Powell (1 December 2012). The Inquisition of Climate Science. Columbia University Press. pp. 172–3. ISBN 978-0-231-15719-3.
  64. ^ 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.
  65. Liu, D. W. C. (2012). "Science Denial and the Science Classroom". CBE- Life Sciences Education. 11 (2). American Society for Cell Biology: 129–134. doi:10.1187/cbe.12-03-0029. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
  66. Hoofnagle, Mark (11 March 2009). "Climate change deniers: failsafe tips on how to spot them". the Guardian. Retrieved 30 June 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  67. ^ NCSE Tackles Climate Change Denial, National Center for Science Education, January 13th, 2012
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  70. ^ 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. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  71. Brown, Michael. Adversaries, zombies and NIPCC climate pseudoscience, ‘’Phys.org’’, Sep 26, 2013
  72. Plait, Phil. Debunking the Denial: "16 Years of No Global Warming", ‘’Slate.com’’, Jan. 14, 2013
  73. 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.
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  76. George Monbiot (2009-02-27). "Climate change: The semantics of denial". The Guardian. Retrieved 2015-05-27.
  77. ^ 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."
  78. Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2003.10.001, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2003.10.001 instead.
  79. 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."
  80. 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."
  81. 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"
  82. Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1108/01443330310790327, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1108/01443330310790327 instead.
  83. 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. "
  84. David, Adam (20 Sep 2006). "Royal Society tells Exxon: stop funding climate change denial". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 12 January 2009.
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  86. 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."
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  89. 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."
  90. Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future: A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) Iris Borowy, Routledge, 2014, p.44
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  93. Hertsgaard, Mark (May 2006). "While Washington Slept". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 2007-08-02.
  94. 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"
  95. Brulle, Robert J. (December 21, 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.
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  122. White, Rob (2012). Climate Change from a Criminological Perspective. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 1461436400. 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.
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  126. Begley 2007 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBegley2007 (help): "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"
  127. Begley 2007 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBegley2007 (help): "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."
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  129. ^ Cook, John; et al. (15 May 2013). "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature". Environmental Research Letters. 8 (2). 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.
  130. White, Rob (2012). Climate Change from a Criminological Perspective. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 49. ISBN 1461436400. 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 "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."
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  136. Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1177/0956797612457686, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1177/0956797612457686 instead.

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