Climate change denial

Climate change denial (also global warming denial or climate denial) is the pseudoscientific[6] 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.[7][8][9]

Campaigns by climate change deniers portray scientists as disagreeing about global warming,[1] but datasets from various scientific organizations show pairwise correlations of 1850+/1880+ datasets exceeding 99.1%.

Academic studies of scientific agreement on human-caused global warming among climate experts reflect that the level of consensus correlates with expertise in climate science.[2][3][4][5]

Part of a series on
Climate change
Attribution Effects Mitigation Adaptation
Background Climate system Climate variability and change Scientific consensus Discovery Scenarios
Causes Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse effect Greenhouse gas emissions Deforestation
Impacts Sea level rise Glacial retreat Tipping points in the climate system Extreme weather Tropical cyclones Ecosystems Invasive species Species extinction Water cycle Oceans Ocean acidification Economic impacts Agriculture Fisheries Human health Security Psychology
Mitigation Sustainable energy Carbon dioxide removal Carbon sequestration Nature-based solutions Climate finance Economics Low-carbon economy Climate action Individual actions
Adaptation Resilience Vulnerability Disaster risk reduction
Society Politics Business Economics Children Gender Indigenous people Communication Education Litigation Denial Controversy Poverty Migration Climate movement Climate justice Public opinion Media coverage Popular culture UNFCCC UN conferences Kyoto Protocol Paris Agreement
By location Africa Americas Antarctica Arctic Asia Australia Caribbean Cities Europe Middle East and North Africa Small island countries South Asia
Portal Glossary Index
v t e

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.[10][11][12] 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.[13] Several social science studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism,[14][15] pseudoscience,[16] or propaganda.[17]

The conspiracy to undermine public trust in climate science is organized by industrial, political and ideological interests.[18][19][20] Climate change denial has been associated with the fossil fuels lobby, the Koch brothers, industry advocates, ultraconservative think tanks and ultraconservative alternative media, often in the United States.[17][21][22][23] More than 90% of papers that are skeptical on climate change originate from right-wing think tanks.[24] 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.[25][26]

In the 1970s, oil companies published research which broadly concurred with the scientific community's view on global warming. Since then, for several decades, oil companies have been 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.[27][28][29]