Monday, July 25, 2016

Climate change denial

From:  Wiki 


 2013 finds that only 2 of 10885 reject man-made global warming.[1]
(James L. Powell)
Climate change denial, or global warming denial, is part of global warming controversy. It involves denial, dismissal, unwarranted doubt or contrarian views about facts and science about climate change, including the extent to which it is caused by humans, its impacts on nature and human society, or the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions.[2][3][4] In the global warming controversy, some deniers do endorse the term, but other often prefer the term climate change skepticism[3] whereas scientists think it "inappropriate to allow those who deny [anthropogenic global warming] to don the mantle of skeptics"; in effect, the two terms form a continuous, overlapping range of views, and generally have the same characteristics: both reject, to a greater or lesser extent, mainstream scientific opinion on climate change.[5][6] Climate change denial can also be implicit, when individuals or social groups accept the science but fail to come to terms with it or to translate their acceptance into action.[7] Several social science studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism.[5][6]
Campaigning to undermine public trust in climate science has been described as a "denial machine" of industrial, political and ideological interests, supported by conservative media and skeptical bloggers in manufacturing uncertainty about global warming.[8][9][10] In the public debate, phrases such as climate skepticism have frequently been used with the same meaning as climate denialism.[11] The labels are contested: those actively challenging climate science commonly describe themselves as "skeptics", but many do not comply with common standards of scientific skepticism and, regardless of evidence, persistently deny the validity of human caused global warming.[5]
Although scientific opinion on climate change is that human activity is extremely likely to be the primary driver of climate change,[12][13] the politics of global warming have been affected by climate change denial, hindering efforts to prevent climate change and adapt to the warming climate.[14][15][16] Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where there is none.[17][18]
The climate change denial industry is most widespread in the United States, where the official Senate Environmental Committee is chaired by James Inhofe, who famously called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and claimed to have debunked it in 2015 when he took a snowball with him and threw it on the Senate floor.[19] Organised campaigning to undermine public trust in climate science is associated with conservative economic policies and backed by industrial interests opposed to the regulation of CO2 emissions.[20] Climate change denial has been associated with the fossil fuels lobby, the Koch brothers, industry advocates and libertarian think tanks, often in the United States.[15][21][22][23] More than 90% of papers sceptical on climate change originate from right-wing think tanks.[24] The total annual income of these climate change counter-movement-organizations is roughly $900 million.[25] Between 2002 and 2010, nearly $120 million (£77 million) was anonymously donated via the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund to more than 100 organisations seeking to undermine the public perception of the science on climate change.[26] In 2013 the Center for Media and Democracy reported that the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella group of 64 U.S. think tanks, had been lobbying on behalf of major corporations and conservative donors to oppose climate change regulation.[27] Investigative journalists have revealed internal documents showing that since the late 1970s, oil companies were aware that burning oil and gas could cause climate change and global warming. Despite this evidence, oil companies organized a climate change denial campaign to disseminate public disinformation for several decades, leading to comparisons of this strategy to the organized denial of the hazards of tobacco smoking by tobacco companies.[28][29]  MORE

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