Climate Change Denial

Global warming has been one of the more highly debated topics among scientists and politicians alike for the past two decades. In the early 1990s when a group of scientists started to focus on global climate and weather change almost immediately another more political and commercial based group began counter argued that the evidence wasn’t concrete. Today, over twenty years later we have mounds of data proving that global warming is in fact true, and it was caused by human activity. A typical denial argument may be, “climate change isn’t real”, well are scientific facts real? Another being, “climate change is natural”, sure it fluctuates over decades but not nearly to the extent it has since the early 1990s. Or one of my favorites, “there was nothing we could do to stop climate change.”

“Climate change denial” is a more specific, group organized conspiracy of sorts to counteract the legitimate scientific evidence by speaking out against global warning, saying that it isn’t caused by humans and that it is a natural cycle of the earth. The idea of “climate change denial” is apparent within large energy corporations. Due to the fact that global warning is directly linked to the amount of fossil fuels we burn you can see why BP for example would not want to convey the hard facts if it will hurt their company, and even more importantly to them it will slow down the income and cash flow of the company.

You can see how easily incorrect information can make it’s way into popular culture (news, TV, radio) simply by taking a look at what happened in the late 1990s when a certain group consisting of industry leaders and conservative politicians got together with the American Petroleum Institute. The API wrote an article of sorts trying to gather up conservative scientists who may, or may not have had previous relations with energy companies. The idea was that these scientists would be willing to argue, as much as they could against global warning. If we take a step back and first realize what’s going on we will find misleading information is a given outcome. Simply put, scientists were hired for the wrong reasons to prove a factual concept (global warming) wrong.

To take it a step further global warming has recently began to show the effects directly on US land. The small town of Kivalina, Alaska began to see flooding linked to global warming. In 2008 the town filed a lawsuit against ExonMobile and over ten other petroleum companies stating that their activities would force the town to relocate as soon as 2016. Unfortunately the case was dismissed in 2009, as one might presume it’s not so easy to prove that a slew of companies directly lead to global warming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial

http://climatedenial.org/

http://grist.org/series/skeptics/