Climate change denial

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 is a denial or dismissal of the scientific consensus on the extent of global warming, its significance, or its connection to human behavior, especially for commercial or ideological reasons.[1][2] Typically, these attempts take the rhetorical form of legitimate scientific debate, while not adhering to the actual principles of that debate.[3][4] Climate change denial has been associated with the fossil fuels lobby, the Koch brothers, industry advocates and free market think tanks, often in the United States.[5][6][7][8][9] Some commentators describe climate change denial as a particular form of denialism.[10][11][12][13][14][15][16]

Although there is a scientific consensus that humans are warming the climate system,[17][18] the politics of global warming combined with some of the debate in popular media has slowed global efforts at preventing future global warming as well as preparing for warming "in the pipeline" due to past emissions. Much of this debate focuses on the economics of global warming.

Between 2002 and 2010, nearly $120 million (£77 million) was anonymously donated, some by conservative billionaires, via two trusts (Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund) to more than 100 organizations seeking to cast doubt on the science behind climate change.[19]

Meanings of the term

Peter Christoff, writing an opinion piece in The Age in 2007, said that climate change denial differs from scientific skepticism, which is essential for good science. He argues:

"Almost two decades after the issue became one of global concern, the 'big' debate over climate change is over. There are now no credible scientific skeptics challenging the underlying scientific theory, or the broad projections, of climate change."[14]

The relationship between industry-funded denial and public climate change skepticism has been compared to earlier efforts by the tobacco industry to undermine scientific evidence on the dangers of secondhand smoke, and linked as a direct continuation of these earlier financial relationships.[20] Aside from private industry groups, climate change denial has also been alleged regarding the statements of elected officials.[21]

In 1991 the New York Times reported that coal industry advocates were planning an advertising campaign which, according to their internal documents, was intended to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact".[22] More groups with similar goals formed, according to Newsweek magazine.[10] 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."[10] The article described one group's plan was to "sow doubt about climate research just as cigarette makers had about smoking research".[10] Newsweek subsequently published a piece by Robert J. Samuelson, who called the article "a vast oversimplification of a messy story" and "fundamentally misleading" because although global warming had already occurred, we "lack the technology" to unwind it, and the best we can hope to do is cut emissions. He argues that "journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale... in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed".[23]

Journalists and newspaper columnists including George Monbiot[12] and Ellen Goodman,[13] among others,[14][15] have described climate change denial as a form of denialism.[10][11] Several commentators, including Goodman, have also compared climate change denial with Holocaust denial,[13][14][15] though others, such as conservative radio talk show host Dennis Prager, have decried those comparisons as inappropriate and trivializing Holocaust denial.[24][25]

Institute of Economic Affairs member Richard D. North notes that outright denial by climate scientists of the major points of scientific consensus is rare, though scientists are known to dispute certain points. He says, "It is deeply pejorative to call someone a 'climate change denier'. This is because it is a phrase designedly reminiscent of the idea of Holocaust Denial ...". He acknowledges that "there are many varieties of climate change denial", but says that "[s]ome people labeled as 'deniers', aren't."[26] Peter Christoff also emphasizes the distinction between scepticism and denial, saying "Climate change deniers should be distinguished from climate sceptics. Scepticism is essential to good science."[14]

The environmentalist writer and activist George Monbiot stated in his Guardian opinion column that he reserves the term for those who attempt to undermine scientific opinion on climate change due to financial interests. Monbiot often refers to a "denial industry." However, he and other writers have described others as climate change "deniers," including politicians and writers not claimed to be funded by industry groups.[5][6][7][21][27][28][29]

This sort of denialism is different from the scientific skepticism that is widely employed in the application of the scientific method. Rather, as Mark Hoofnagle points out, denialism is the employment of rhetorical arguments 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.[4][30] In recent years the term has been associated with a series of views challenging the scientific consensus on issues including the health effects of smoking and the relationship between HIV and AIDS, along with climate change.

Climate change denial is a form of environmental skepticism.

"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". [31]

History

In one of the first attempts by industry to influence public opinion on climate change,[32] a 1998 proposal (later posted online by Greenpeace)[33] circulated among U.S. opponents of a treaty to fight global warming, including both industry and conservative political groups, in an effort to influence public perception of the extent of the problem. Written by a public-relations specialist for the American Petroleum Institute and then leaked to The New York Times, the memo described, in the article's words, a plan "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". Cushman quoted the document as proposing 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'".[34]

In Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (2010), Clive Hamilton describes a campaign to attack the science relating to climate change, originating with the astroturfing campaigns initiated by the tobacco industry in the 1990s. He documents the establishment of the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) as a 'fake front group' set up 'to link concerns about passive smoking with a range of other popular anxieties, including global warming'. The public-relations strategy involved casting doubt on the science, characterizing it as junk science, and therefore turning public opinion against any calls for government intervention based on the science.[35]

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."[36] 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

Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming,[20] describes how a small group of retired cold-war nuclear physicists, who through their weapons work had become well-connected, well-known and influential people, promoted the idea of "doubt" in several areas of US public debate. According to Oreskes, they did this, "not for money, but in defense of an ideology of laissez-faire governance and opposition to government regulation". In 1984, Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz and William Nierenberg were instrumental in founding the George C. Marshall Institute, initially to defend Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) against other scientists' boycott of it. Oreskes said that this first campaign of the Institute's, from 1984 to 1989, involved demanding equal air-time in the media when mainstream physicists and engineers were critical of the SDI, and producing militarily alarmist material such as the article America has five years left, published in 1987 by Jastrow in the National Review. At the same time, Seitz was employed as a consultant to R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. His principal strategy on their behalf, said Oreskes, was to defend their products by doubt-mongering, by insisting that the science was unsettled and therefore that it was always premature for the US government to act to control tobacco use.[37]

After the Cold War ended, they continued through the Marshall Institute to campaign against increased regulations on environmental issues such as acid rain, the ozone hole, second-hand smoke and the dangers of DDT on to a campaign against global warming. In each case their argument was the same: simply that the science was too uncertain to justify any government intervention in the market place. It is only recently, Oreskes said, that historians such as herself have been able to "join the dots": individual environmental scientists, finding opposition to their warnings about ozone layer depletion or DDT residues, were at the time unaware that the same institute was using the same arguments at the same time against other scientists who were warning about the dangers of smoking, of second-hand smoke, and about climate change itself.[37][38]

Public opinion

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.[39]

Lobbying

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."[40] 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.[12]

Former National Academy of Sciences president Dr. 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,[41] 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.[12]

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." 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."[12]

Private sector

The Guardian reported that 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.[42] Despite her initial conviction that with "the overwhelming science out there, the deniers' days were numbered," Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer said that when she learned of the AEI's offer, "I realized there was a movement behind this that just wasn't giving up."[10]

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".[6][43] 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."[44]

ExxonMobil denied the accusations 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."[45]

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."[46] In the year 2000, the rate of corporate members leaving accelerated when they became the target of a national divestiture campaign run by John Passacantando and Phil Radford with the organization Ozone Action. 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."[47][48] After that, between December, 1999 and early March, 2000, the GCC was deserted by Daimler-Chrysler, Texaco, the Southern Company and General Motors.[49] The organization closed in 2002, or in their own words, 'deactivated'.

Early in 2013, The Guardian reported that two "trusts", the 'Donors Trust' and the 'Donors Capital Fund' have donated to 102 think tanks and activist groups $118m between 2002 and 2010. The conservative donors to these trusts are said to represent a wide range of opinion on the American right who have found common ground in opposing cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. They ensure their anonymity by funnelling the funds through the organizations, and the money flowed into "Washington thinktanks embedded in Republican party politics, obscure policy forums in Alaska and Tennessee, contrarian scientists at Harvard and lesser institutions, even to buy up DVDs of a film attacking Al Gore," the report said. The Guardian stated that the donations were used to fund conservative opposition against Barack Obama's environmental initiatives and to stop Congress taking action on climate change. According to the Guardian, the money funded a network of thinktanks and activist groups working to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a 'wedge issue' that benefits the hardcore right. Robert Brulle, a Drexel University sociologist whose research the Guardian article was based upon, said, "Donors Trust is just the tip of a very big iceberg."[19][50]

Later in 2013, The Guardian reported that the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella group of 64 US thinktanks, had been accused of lobbying for major corporations and rightwing donors by the Center for Media and Democracy. The SPN denied the charges. SPN's member groups include those that oppose climate change regulation, as well as other many other unrelated causes. The report said that the SPN's funders for 2010 included AT&T and Microsoft, which each donated up to $99,000, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, the Koch brothers, the Walton family of Walmart, and Facebook.[51]

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.[52] 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.[53] 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.[54] 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.[55]

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."[10] In 2006, Luntz stated that he still believes "back [in] '97, '98, the science was uncertain", but he now agrees with the scientific consensus.[56]

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."[57] 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."[10] Cooney announced his resignation two days after the story of his tampering with scientific reports broke,[58] but a few days later it was announced that Cooney would take up a position with ExxonMobil.[59]

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.[60][61][62]

Effect

Manufactured uncertainty over climate change, the fundamental strategy of the "denial machine", has been very effective, particularly in the US. It has contributed to low levels of public concern and to government inaction worldwide.[63] An Angus Reid poll released in 2010 indicates that global warming skepticism in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom has been rising, apparently continuing a trend that has progressed for "months, even years"[64] There may be multiple causes of this trend, including a focus on economic rather than environmental issues, and a negative perception of the "role the United Nations has played in promoting the global warming issue."[65] Another cause may be weariness from overexposure to the topic: secondary polls suggest that "many people were turned off by extremists on both sides,"[64] while others show 54% of U.S. voters believe that "the news media make global warming appear worse than it really is."[66] 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".[65]

According to former U.S. senator Tim Wirth, the denial effort has affected both public perception and leadership in the United States. "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."[67] Newsweek reports that whereas "majorities in Europe and Japan recognize a broad consensus among climate experts that greenhouse gases —mostly from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas to power the world's economies— are altering climate," as recently as 2006 only one third of Americans considered human activity to play a major role in climate change; 64% believed that scientists disagreed about it "a lot." A 2007 Newsweek poll found these numbers were declining, although majorities of Americans still believed neither that scientists agree climate change is taking place, nor that scientists agree climate change is caused by human activity, nor that climate change has yet had noticeable effect.[67] Citing the following remarks in Science by physicist and U.S. Representative Rush Holt, the Newsweek report attributes American policymakers' failure to regulate greenhouse gas emissions to consistent undermining of science by the "denial machine":

"...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."[68]

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":

"The public perception of a scientific consensus on AGW is a necessary element in public support for climate policy (Ding et al 2011). However, 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' (Oddie 2012) while '...the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year' (Allègre et al 2012). 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."[69]

Characterized as pseudoscience

Numerous authors, including several scholars, say that various conservative think tanks, corporations and business groups have engaged in deliberate denial of the science of climate change since the 1990s,[8][9][20][35][70][71][72] and some, including the National Center for Science Education, consider climate change denial to be a form of pseudoscience.[73][74][75][76]

In the discussions surrounding the politics of global warming, assertions have been made by some commentators that global warming is either not occurring, or is not associated with the anthropogenic rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Such arguments are criticized for being pseudoscientific, since they deny facts contained in the scientific consensus on climate change.[73][74][75][76][77][78][79]

In a book review, 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.[80]

Some commentators have criticized the use of the phrase climate change denial as an attempt to de-legitimize skeptical views and portray them as immoral.[23][24][81]

Characterized as a conspiracy theory

Denial of man-made climate change necessitates explaining away the consensus that exists on the matter among scientific papers. Some have attempted to do this by claiming that "the consensus is simply a result of scientific journals refusing to publish papers that reject human-caused global warming."[82] Such claims entail the existence of an implausibly widespread conspiracy, and the vast majority of practising scientists and scientific journals around the world being in on it.[83][84][85][86]

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.[87]

See also

References

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  2. ↑ Klein, Naomi (November 9, 2011). "Capitalism vs. the Climate". The Nation. Retrieved 2 January 2012.
  3. ↑ Hoofnagle, Mark (April 30, 2007). "Hello Science blogs (Welcome to Denialism blog)".
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 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.
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  41. ↑ Hertsgaard, Mark (May 2006). "While Washington Slept". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 2007-08-02.
  42. ↑ Sample, Ian (2007-02-02). "Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-08-16.
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