Climate Deniers’ Strategy of Confusion

from Consortium News:


Climate Deniers’ Strategy of Confusion
October 27, 2013



By Dan Becker and James Gerstenzang


Half a century ago, the tobacco industry tried to preserve its market by misleading Americans about the scientific validity of research demonstrating that smoking causes cancer. To weaken efforts to fight global warming, the “climate change denial machine,” in the words of the Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, has been using that same strategy. For more than 20 years it has sought to cast doubt on the science that demonstrates that the climate is changing and pollution is to blame.

The Los Angeles Times has announced that it will no longer print letters to the editor that state “there’s no sign humans have caused climate change,” because they are factually inaccurate. Now, it is time for reporters and editors across the country to follow suit. To avoid misleading readers with a false “balance,” they should also stop paying attention to the deniers.

The denial lobby is using pseudo-science and cherry-picked data to present the fringe view that global warming is nothing more than what Sen. James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, famously called “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

Just last month it reprised its tired — and false — arguments to debunk the premier scientific assessment of global warming, produced by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. On Sept. 27, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization declared with near certainty that human activity is causing the climate to change. The panel’s previous assessment, issued in 2007, was only slightly less certain — 90 percent versus the 95 percent in the new report. An overwhelming majority of climate scientists endorsed it. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/10/27/climate-deniers-strategy-of-confusion/