Opinion: It’s time to get angry with so-called climate ‘sceptics’

by David Robert Grimes

The conclusions of the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) – the world’s foremost authority on climate-change – delivered late last month were seering and stark: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.”

The findings are bleak, but not unexpected; climate change has been scientifically beyond doubt for a long time. Yet despite virtually all climatologists and researchers confirming this with vast swathes of supporting evidence, there are still loud voices doing their utmost to persuade us that the issue is still somehow open for debate.

In the US roughly half of media reports on climate change have doubted its existence. Publications like the Daily Mail, the Wall Street Journal and numerous Murdoch press give editorial support to these views.

Cynical and insulting

Such contrarian writers and broadcasters paint themselves as climate “sceptics”, but this is a calculated misnomer. Scepticism is an essential part of scientific endeavour. It demands all claims are treated as unproven until evidence and experience either confirm or falsify them. Denialism, by contrast, is the stubborn and persistent refusal to acknowledge what the evidence shows beyond all reasonable doubt.

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