The fossil fuel industry, political lobbyists, media moguls, and individuals have spent the past 30 years sowing doubt about the reality of climate change – where none exists.
The latest estimate is that the world’s five largest publicly-owned oil and gas companies spend about US$200 million a year on lobbying to control, delay or block binding climate policy. Their hold on the public seems to be waning.
School climate strikes, Extinction Rebellion protests, national governments declaring a climate emergency, improved media coverage of climate change, and an increasing number of extreme weather events have all contributed to this shift. There also seems to be a renewed optimism that we can deal with the crisis.
But this means lobbying has changed, now employing more subtle and more vicious approaches – what has been termed as “climate sadism”. It is used to mock young people going on climate protests and to ridicule Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old young woman with Asperger’s, who is simply telling the scientific truth.
Deniers suggest climate change is just part of the natural cycle. That climate models are unreliable and too sensitive to carbon dioxide. Some even suggest that COâ‚‚ is such a small part of the atmosphere, it cannot have a large heating effect. All these arguments are false and there is a clear consensus among scientists about the causes of climate change. The climate models that predict global temperature rises have remained very similar over the last 30 years despite the huge increase in complexity, showing it is a robust outcome of the science. So climate change deniers are switching to new tactics.
The idea that climate change is too expensive to fix is a more subtle form of climate denial. Economists, however, suggest we could fix climate change now by spending 1 percent of world GDP.
What the climate change deniers also forget to tell you is that they are protecting a fossil fuel industry that receives US$5.2 trillion in annual subsidies – which includes subsidized supply costs, tax breaks, and environmental costs. Climate change deniers also argue that climate change is good for us. They suggest longer, warmer summers in the temperate zone will make farming more productive.
These gains, however, are often offset by the drier summers and increased frequency of heatwaves in those same areas.
Why does climate change denial persists?
