Denialists Article 2
Approximate Read Time:
3 Mins
Climate “contrarians” challenge key conclusions of “mainstream” climate science. Their primary motivation is to block necessary climate policy by “manufacturing doubt” about the reality or seriousness of anthropogenic climate change; they are commonly labelled “climate deniers”. Contrarians have played a key role in creating a number of controversies related to climate science.
The idea that humans could change the climate by emitting large quantities of carbon dioxide is not new. In the late 18th century Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius calculated that doubling the levels of carbon dioxide would warm Earth’s surface temperature by several degrees. For the environmental scientist Peter Stott (Book: Hot Air) it remains unclear whether the climate deniers will behave any differently in the future, no matter what the evidence.
It seems to be the case that every expression of uncertainty regarding the climate crisis is exploited relentlessly by merchants of doubt having no such qualms about questioning the work of the vast majority of climate scientists’ rigour and honesty about what is happening. For the safety of humanity and the Living Earth, we can’t afford to ignore those who promote the false belief of climate change denial. Climate-change deniers appear merely as a succession of obstacles to the truth, and not necessarily as a phenomenon that needs to be understood.
Satellites are a means of monitoring temperatures. Analyses in the 1990s, when much fewer satellite data was available, indicated a lack of warming in the troposphere. This became a key piece of evidence for contrarian dismissals of the threat of anthropogenic climate change. Over time, additional research uncovered numerous problems with the satellite data used to estimate tropospheric temperature trends. More recent observational estimates agree that the troposphere has indeed been warming.
Contrarian dissent has impacted the practice of climate science in various ways. Thus research is sometimes directed at rebutting contrarian claims of leading climate scientists’ at times to err on the side of caution in their predictions related to climate warming. Again, contrarian dissent has impeded scientific progress in forcing scientists to respond to a seemingly endless wave of unhelpful objections and demands, thus creating an atmosphere in which climate scientists fear to address hypotheses they believe is appropriate. They argue that, while dissent regarding science is often epistemically fruitful, the dissent expressed by climate contrarians has tended to be epistemically detrimental to climate science findings.
For the actor Emma Thompson: “Delay and deceive” is the new denial. Fossil fuel companies are pumping millions into greenwashing while making meaningless net zero promises and introducing false “solutions”, in order to gloss over their decades of destruction. They are falsely painting themselves as allies and extending the deadline of their obsolete business. Genuine climate scientists have had enough. Recently an Intergovernmental on report on Climate Change pointed out the disinformation strategy by saying: “Who dominates the debate on media, and how open the debate can be, varies significantly across countries based on participants’ material and technological power. Fossil fuel industries have unique access to mainstream media via advertisements, shaping narratives of media reports and exerting political influence in countries like Australia and the US etc.
More than 450 scientists have signed a letter calling on PR and advertising agencies to stop working with fossil fuel firms and stop spreading climate disinformation. This is the first time so many scientists have called out the role of PR and advertising in fuelling the climate crisis. Oil and gas companies buy prestige by sponsoring museums, influencing the sphere of knowledge by putting money into universities, and gaining popularity when their logos are associated with sport. They invest a lot in buying a social licence to continue with business as usual by creeping into our everyday lives and disguising the damage. We need to urgently to remove them out of our brains, hearts and communities.
In recent times, thanks to relentless grassroots work, Harvard University said it would phase out its fossil fuel holdings. In the UK, the National Portrait Gallery and Scottish Ballet confirmed they wouldn’t do further sponsorship deals with BP, and Tennis Australia has dropped gas firm Santos as a partner. At the beginning of this century the EU banned tobacco advertising and sponsorship after it was recognised they increased consumption and hid health warnings. Now, with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate breakdown and its indisputable link to fossil fuel companies, it is time to ban fossil fuel propaganda for being deadly and criminal, and driving us inexorably towards climate catastrophe. Activism works. Together we can tell those in power how we want to live, and what must change.
People don’t need to know anything at all about climate science to know that a profound injustice has occurred here that needs to be righted. It’s not a scientific story it’s a story of fairness: people with more power and resources than most, used ill-informed information about climate change to shore up their own prospects and told you not to worry about it. In the U.S.A. in particular, they spent a fortune sowing doubt about the science of climate change and punishing politicians who take the problem seriously.
Those who run the giant energy corporations knew perfectly well what is happening. They sent their agents and lobbyists into the political system in order to ensure that their plundering ways would not be interfered with. And in the meantime, they redoubled their efforts to get ever tougher and sometimes “dirtier” energy out of the ground in ever more destructive ways
Environmental scientists have long concluded that the use of fossil-fuels etc., was warming the world and that, if the average planetary temperature rose more than two degrees Celsius, all sorts of dangers could ensue, including seas rising high enough to drown cities, increasingly intense heat waves, droughts, floods, ever more extreme storm systems etc., that we have witnessed in recent times.
Oil and gas companies have even begun using the changing climate itself -- in the form of a melting Arctic-- to exploit enormous and previously unreachable energy supplies. Big Oil evidently has no qualms about making its next set of profits knowing that their extremely profitable acts are destroying the very habitat humanity depends on. Their prior knowledge of the damage they are doing to human well-being and to the natural environment is what should make this a criminal activity. And there are corporate precedents for this. Over 40 years ago an internal study by Exxon concluded that the on-going use of fossil fuels “will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050”. In 1982, as the Guardian’s Climate Crimes series recalls, an Exxon memo concluded that the science of climate change was “unanimous”. Then it poured millions of dollars into lobby groups casting doubt on it. They didn’t call themselves lobby groups, but “think-tanks” or “research institutes”. Across the world, the media in general took them at their word.
Soon climate scientists and environmental campaigners found themselves fighting the oil companies at one step removed, and with one hand tied behind their backs. When some of them were pitched against a “think-tank” in the media, if they tried to explain that it was not what it claimed to be, or asked it to reveal its funders, they were accused of being “conspiracy theorists”. The false claims against the climate science were given equal or greater weight being that they were often presented as represented respectable-sounding institutes with offices in Washington or Westminster and elsewhere.
It scarcely needs to be said that the billionaire press took the lead in attacking climate science. But far more dangerous were the public sector broadcasters – which tend to be taken more seriously, as they are widely seen as independent and unbiased. For some time Channel 4 winding up environmentalists became a blood sport, thankfully it no longer does so. In films such as Against Nature and The Great Global Warming Swindle mistakes and distortions came so thick and fast that it was hard to see them as anything but deliberate provocations.
The BBC’s role was more insidious. Its collaboration arose from a disastrous combination of gullibility, appeasement and scientific ignorance. It let the fossil fuel industry walk all over it. When some pointed out that failing to ask its contributors to reveal their sources of funding was a direct breach of its own editorial guidelines carried on breaking its rules for several years. It gave the oil and tobacco companies just what they wanted: in the words of the American Petroleum Institute: “victory will be achieved” when “recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”. Only in 2018 did the BBC decide that climate science is solid and there is no justification for both-siding it.