Concept

Climate change denial

Summary
Climate change denial or global warming denial is dismissal or unwarranted doubt that contradicts the scientific consensus on climate change. Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where there is none. Climate change denial includes doubts to the extent of how much climate change is caused by humans, its effects on nature and human society, and the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions. To a lesser extent, climate change denial can also be implicit when people accept the science but fail to reconcile it with their belief or action. Several social science studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism, pseudoscience, or propaganda. The conspiracy to undermine public trust in climate science is organized by industrial, political and ideological interests. Climate change denial has been associated with the fossil fuels lobby, the Koch brothers, industry advocates, conservative think tanks and conservative alternative media, often in the United States. More than 90% of papers that are skeptical on climate change originate from right-wing think tanks. Climate change denial is undermining the efforts to act on or adapt to climate change, and exerts a powerful influence on politics of global warming and the manufactured global warming controversy. In the 1970s, oil companies published research which broadly concurred with the scientific community's view on global warming. Since then, for several decades, oil companies have been organizing a widespread and systematic climate change denial campaign to seed public disinformation, a strategy that has been compared to the organized denial of the hazards of tobacco smoking by the tobacco industry. Some of the campaigns are even carried out by the same individuals who previously spread the tobacco industry's denialist propaganda. "Climate change skepticism" and "climate change denial" refer to denial, dismissal or unwarranted doubt of the scientific consensus on the rate and extent of global warming, its significance, or its connection to human behavior, in whole or in part.
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