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Climate change denial

denial, dismissal, or unwarranted doubt about the scientific consensus on the rate and extent of global warming

Climate change denial, or global warming denial, involves denial, dismissal, or doubt about the "scientific consensus" on the rate and extent of global warming, the extent to which it is caused by humans, its impacts on nature and human society, or the potential for human actions to reduce these impacts.

The deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.
~ Paul Krugman
The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right. ~ Michael Crichton
And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market. ~ Naomi Klein
Documents released during tobacco litigation demonstrate ... the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt about the links between smoking and health risks. ... The same strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain, and the ozone hole. ~ Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
The global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers. ~ Ted Cruz
Yale researchers... [found that] people with strong ‘egalitarian’ and ‘communitarian’ worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change....Those with strong ‘hierarchical’ and ‘individualistic’ worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry...) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.… they are protecting powerful political and economic interests… ~ Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

Quotes

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  • Beyond the danger that a totalitarian takeover in the USA would present to other democracies, an America in the firm grip of authoritarians would threaten every human being, nay most living things, on the planet. Earth’s biosphere deteriorates more and more with each passing day, and one of the first things Donald Trump did in 2017 was cancel almost every effort the federal government was making to slow climate change and protect the environment. It was all a hoax, he repeatedly said, dismissing a mountain of consensus-forming research with a brainless quip. The concerned nations on the planet are in a sinking canoe baling hard at last to avert disaster, but for four years the United States government sat in the stern scooping water into the boat. Give Trump, or anyone else who does not understand the gravity of the planet’s situation, another four years to put their own selfish needs and profound ignorance ahead of everything else, and the damage may be irreversible.
  • Global warming — at least the modern nightmare vision — is a myth. I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy makers are not.
  • We’re in an emergency situation that requires radical responses. For 70 years the world has ignored the warnings of scientists, and now we are paying the price. The climate is changing must faster than we are. We are losing a football field size of the Amazon rainforest every minute. We have years, not decades, to create net-zero societies, a short window of time for the formidable task of forging political alliances, international treaties, and mass resistance movements. This is no time for moderation or tepid reform measures.
    • Steven Best, “Failed species”, in Romanian Journal of Artistic Creativity, volume 9, number 2, 2021.
  • In the time of the Wakhan ancient ancestors [Alexander the Great era, 4th century BC], the climate here was very different. Scientists suggest that it was as much as 5 degrees warmer. In these [high Afghanistan] ranges, ancient terraced fields and irrigation canals have been found. Judged to be thousands of years old, it’s evidence of sustained cultivation.
    • Alexander's Lost World, six-part documentary series, David Adams, Episode 6 “Source of Civilization” (2013).
  • The problem we are faced with is that the meteorological establishment and the global warming lobby research bodies which receive large funding are now apparently so corrupted by the largesse they receive that the scientists in them have sold their integrity.
  • Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
    There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
  • To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: “These results are derived with the help of a computer model.” But now, large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world—increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward.
  • This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right.
  • What is clear, however, is that on this issue [global warming], science and policy have become inextricably mixed to the point where it will be difficult, if not impossible, to separate them out.
  • The problem of complexity is at the heart of mankind’s inability to predict future events with any accuracy. Complexity science has demonstrated that the more factors found within a complex system, the more chances of unpredictable behavior. And without predictability, any meaningful control is nearly impossible. Obviously, this means that you cannot control what you cannot predict. The ability ever to predict long-term events is a pipedream. Mankind has little to do with changing climate; complexity does.
    • L.K. Samuels, "The Real Science Behind Changing Climate" by L.K. Samuels, LewRockwell.com, August 1, 2014 [1]
  • My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
    • Freeman Dyson, “Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society” in Edge, posted 8 August 8, 2007.
  • If present climate-change trends continue, the “global carbon budget” associated with a 2°C increase in average global temperature will be broken in sixteen years (while a 1.5°C increase in global average temperature—staying beneath which is the key to long-term stabilization of the climate—will be reached in a decade). Earth System scientists warn that the world is now perilously close to a Hothouse Earth, in which catastrophic climate change will be locked in and irreversible. The ecological, social, and economic costs to humanity of continuing to increase carbon emissions by 2.0 percent a year as in recent decades (rising in 2018 by 2.7 percent—3.4 percent in the United States), and failing to meet the minimal 3.0 percent annual reductions in emissions currently needed to avoid a catastrophic destabilization of the earth’s energy balance, are simply incalculable.
    Nevertheless, major energy corporations continue to lie about climate change, promoting and bankrolling climate denialism—while admitting the truth in their internal documents. These corporations are working to accelerate the extraction and production of fossil fuels, including the dirtiest, most greenhouse gas-generating varieties, reaping enormous profits in the process. The melting of the Arctic ice from global warming is seen by capital as a new El Dorado, opening up massive additional oil and gas reserves to be exploited without regard to the consequences for the earth’s climate. In response to scientific reports on climate change, Exxon Mobil declared that it intends to extract and sell all of the fossil-fuel reserves at its disposal. Energy corporations continue to intervene in climate negotiations to ensure that any agreements to limit carbon emissions are defanged. Capitalist countries across the board are putting the accumulation of wealth for a few above combatting climate destabilization, threatening the very future of humanity.
  • The US Air Force (USAF) is the single largest consumer of jet fuel in the world... the F-4 Phantom Fighter burns more than 1,600 gallons of jet fuel per hour and peaks at 14,400 gallons per hour at supersonic speeds. The B-52 Stratocruiser, with eight jet engines, guzzles 55 gallons per minute... A quarter of the world’s jet fuel feeds the USAF fleet of flying killing machines... The (US) military reports no climate change emissions to any national or international body, thanks to US arm-twisting during the 1997 negotiations of the first international accord to limit global warming emissions... George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol... alleging it would straitjacket the US economy with too costly greenhouse emissions controls. Next, the White House began a neo-Luddite campaign against the science of climate change. In researching “The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism,”... getting war casualty statistics out of the Department of Defense (DoD) is easier than getting fuel usage data.
  • All this concern with the effects of global warming is another manifestation of being politically correct.
  • Global warming is indeed a scam, perpetrated by scientists with vested interests, but in need of crash courses in geology, logic and the philosophy of science.
    • Dr. Martin Keeley, Visiting Professor in Petroleum Geology, University College London, 2004-12-06. BBC.
  • The Yale researchers [of Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project] explain that people with strong ‘egalitarian’ and ‘communitarian’ worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change.
    ...Those with strong ‘hierarchical’ and ‘individualistic’ worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.… they are protecting powerful political and economic interests…
  • ...Exxon Mobil is a worse environmental villain than other big oil companies...Exxon, headed by Mr. Raymond, chose a different course of action: it decided to fight the science....And that's just what Exxon Mobil has done: lavish grants have supported a sort of alternative intellectual universe of global warming skeptics....the fact is that whatever small chance there was of action to limit global warming became even smaller because ExxonMobil chose to protect its profits by trashing good science.
  • Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual? Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable ... Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real. Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.
  • As far as I can tell, every one of the handful of well-known scientists who have expressed climate skepticism has received large sums of money from these companies or from dark money conduits like DonorsTrust — the same conduit, as it happens, that supported Matthew Whitaker, the new acting attorney general, before he joined the Trump administration... Climate denial is rooted in greed, opportunism, and ego.... it’s depravity... isn’t just killing people; it may well kill civilization... Don’t some of these people have children?
  • Prediction of the sufficiently distant future is impossible by any method, unless the present conditions are known exactly. In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise, very-long-range weather forecasting would seem to be non-existent.
    • Edward Lorenz, “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Vol. 20, Issue 2, March 1963, pp. 130-141. Father of Chaos Theory.
  • Sea levels have been rising steadily since the peak of the last Ice Age about 18,000 years ago. The total rise since then has been four hundred feet...For the last 5,000 years or so, the rate of rise has been about seven inches per century.
    The Medieval and Roman warmings, with their intervening cold periods, present a huge problem for the advocates of man-made global warming. If the Medieval and Roman occurred warmer than today - without greenhouse gases, what would be so unusual about modern times being warm as well?
    The temperatures at the North and South Poles are lower now than they were in 1930. The Antarctic Peninsula, the finger of land pointing north towards Argentina (and the equator) has been getting warmer...The other 97 percent of Antarctic has been cooling since the mid-1960s.
  • "Global Warming" represents the last gasp of so-called "scientific progressivism", a mass of pitifully transparent falsehoods being employed to justify reducing mankind under the absolute despotism of "experts", the obvious implication being that we can’t even breathe responsibly. Environmentalism, Gaianism, is a religion on the basis of which — illegally under the First Amendment — public policy is being generated. Exhaling carbon dioxide is Original Sin, a reliable source of unlimited power and wealth to a Parasitic Class of politicians, bureaucrats, and cops with which our civilization now finds itself infested.
  • There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!

See also

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