Koch brothers no relation right-wing alternative media
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. Many who are climate change denialers self-label themselves as "climate change skeptics", which is a misapplied description.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 has published bogus research which broadly concurred with the scientific community's view on global warming. Since then, for several decades, oil companies are 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.Gelbspan's Boiling Point, published in 2004, detailed the fossil-fuel industry's campaign to deny climate change and undermine public confidence in climate science. In Newsweek's August 2007 cover story "The Truth About Denial", Sharon Begley reported that "the denial machine is running at full throttle", and said that this "well-coordinated, well-funded campaign" by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks, and industry had "created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change."Referencing work of sociologists Robert Antonio and Robert Brulle, Wayne A. White has written that climate change denial has become the top priority in a broader anti-environmental regulation agenda being pursued by neoliberals. Today, climate change skepticism is most prominently seen in the United States, where the media disproportionately features views of the climate change denial community. In addition to the media, the contrarian movement has also been sustained by the growth of the internet, having gained some of its support from internet bloggers, talk radio hosts and newspaper columnists.The New York Times and others reported in 2015 that oil companies knew that burning oil and gas could cause climate change and global warming since the 1970s but nonetheless funded deniers for years. Dana Nuccitelli wrote in The Guardian that a small fringe group of climate deniers were no longer taken seriously at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, in an agreement that "we need to stop delaying and start getting serious about preventing a climate crisis." However, The New York Times says any implementation is voluntary and will depend on any future world leaders—and every Republican U.S. presidential candidate in 2016 questioned or denied the science of climate change.Ernesto Araújo, the new Minister of Foreign Affairs appointed by the newly elected president Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro has called global warming a plot by "cultural Marxists" and has eliminated the Climate Change Division of the ministry.Alexandre Lopez-Borrull, a lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences at the Open University of Catalonia, noted in 2023 increases in climate change denial, particularly among supporters of the far right. Climate change deniers threatened meteorologists, accusing them of causing a drought, falsifying thermometer readings, and cherry-picking warmer weather stations to misrepresent global warming. Also in 2023, CNN reported that meteorologists and climate communicators internationally were receiving increased harassment and false accusations that they are lying about or controlling the weather, inflating temperature records to make climate change seem worse, and changing color palettes of weather maps to make them look more dramatic. Jennie King, head of Climate Research and Policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said that growth of such conspiracy theories is "logical evolution of the broader trend around pushback on institutions" that supposedly are trying to "enact some insidious agenda". Meanwhile, after Elon Musk's 2022 takeover of Twitter, key figures in the company who ensured trusted content was prioritized were removed, and climate scientists received a large increase in hostile, threatening, harassing and personally abusive tweets from deniers.
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