The sordid whack-a-mole nature of climate change denial

It’s all about doubt when it comes to climate change, no matter what the science is telling us. The playbook is tried and true as illustrated in the 2014 film, Merchants of Doubt—if you can create enough doubt about the science and the harmful effects of tobacco, asbestos or fossil fuels, basically you’re home free. Instead of solving an obvious problem, companies in those industries can obscure and obstruct, and continue to make truckloads of money.

And it’s still happening. In a report from the Desmog Blog this month, “Study Finds The ‘Era of Climate Science Denial Is Not Over,'”  Graham Readfearn writes: “Conservative think tanks in the United States are a sort of ‘ground zero’ for the production of doubt about the links between fossil fuel burning and dangerous climate change.

“These think tanks produce reports, hold conferences, write books, go on television, produce columns and blogs and generally and liberally splatter the public discourse with talking points.

“You’ll have heard their manufactured doubt everywhere. ‘CO2 is great for the planet… fossil fuels are good… climate scientists are wrong… the world has been hotter in the past… cutting emissions will kill the economy.’ That sort of thing.”

He points to a new study published in the journal Global Environmental Change that says, “the era of climate science denial is not over.”

Dr. Travis Coan, of the University of Exeter, and Dr Constantine Boussalis, of Trinity College Dublin, analyzed 16,000 articles, reports, transcripts, letters, reviews and press releases from the websites of 19 conservative think tanks, mainly based in the U.S, who work on climate change.

In the study, Boussalis and Coan discuss how commentators had been speculating about an end of climate science denial for more than a decade. But analyzing documents from 1998 until mid-2013, Boussalis and Coan found that think tanks had in recent years been focusing less on policy and more on attacking the science.

Why change the playbook if it works so well?

Republican Bob Inglis a conservative former South Carolina congressman, lost a bid for re-election in 2010 after telling a radio host that he believed humans were contributing to climate change. “The most enduring heresy that I committed was saying the climate change is real,” he told PBS’ FRONTLINE.

Inglis saw through the thick fog machines of doubt and denial, to his cost. He closed the Merchants of Doubt, with moving and spot analysis of why it so hard to embrace the reality of climate change:

He’s a hero.