Another Perspective on Climate Change Denial

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No small number of American citizens, when exposed to the concept of climate change and the proposed solutions to it, smell a rat. They are right that there is a rat, but wrong about where it is hiding. Their reasoning appears to be "follow the money". That necessarily, if there are unscrupulous people trying to profit off of something, it must be wholly fraudulent.

But consider this: If you were such a person, wouldn't you be wiser to base your scheme around a factual phenomenon? Positioning your money making scheme as the only possible solution to it? The good, honest people who detect that you are up to no good would then be fooled into directing all of their energies at trying to disprove the phenomenon itself, rather than questioning your proposed solution.

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Tilting at windmills! Making fools of themselves, and a laughingstock of all opposition to your scheme. Your armor is very thick in one spot and very thin in another. You have bamboozled your enemies into attacking the thick spot rather than the thin one, waging a hopeless battle against unassailable facts.

This can be compared to Christian efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools. Their concern was that acceptance of evolution necessarily vindicates atheism. This isn't the case, as a variety of conceptions of God are not only perfectly compatible with evolution but rely upon it being true.

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However because they came at it from the wrong angle, they have been spinning their wheels for decades. Fact is a brick wall. You can bang your head against it all you like but it is your head that will give way, not the wall. Another basis for comparison are the historical legal battles between whistleblowers in the scientific community and the oil and gas industry over their use of lead.

Most are already aware of this but for those who aren't, as recently as the 1920s it was known that lead is a potent neurotoxin, one which we were carelessly saturating our population centers with by including it in gasoline. When this came to light, there was a coordinated industry effort to conceal, deny and sow confusion in the public about the health effects of lead.

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More recently, the damage to the ozone caused by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) was likewise deliberately concealed and denied by industries which profited from products reliant on CFCs. What's really interesting is that many of the same shills hired by these industries to obfuscate the issue of CFCs and the ozone hole have been re-hired in order to sow new confusion over the role greenhouse gases play in exacerbating climate change.

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From DeSmogBlog:

Tim Ball

Tim Ball on CFCs’ and ozone: “CFC’s were never a problem… it’s only because the sun is changing.” And, “fluctuation of ozone in the stratosphere is likely a natural phenomenon because solar radiation is a fluctuating event.” (Western Standard, June, 1993)

Tim Ball on global warming: “The climate is changing all the time, and what’s going on right now is well within natural variability.”(Saskatchewan Leader Post, July, 2006)

Fred Singer

Singer on CFCs and ozone : “The hypothesis that CFCs deplete ozone is still just that: a hypothesis. The theory did not predict the Antarctic ozone hole and cannot predict what will happen globally. There is no firm evidence as yet for a long-term depletion of global ozone. Much of data is contaminated; the ozone record is dominated by large, natural fluctuations on many time scales…”

Singer on global warming : “Greenhouse warming will be barely detectable and within the “noise” of natural, year-to-year temperature changes.” And, “there has been no warming observed as yet as a result of the ongoing human-caused CO2 increase.”

Hugh Ellsaesser

Ellsaesser on CFCs and ozone : “The public has been misled to an even great in that the possible beneficial consequences of increased UV have been consistently ignored.” (sic.) And, “There has indeed been a slight decline in global ozone levels, probably due to sunspot activity and natural dynamics in the atmosphere.”

Ellsaesser on global warming : “Natural variability in the Earth’s climate easily exceeds recent global temperature trends.”

National Centre for Public Policy Research

On CFCs and ozone: “The impact of CFCs on the ozone layer is not fully known. Changes in weather patterns, the eruption of volcanos, changes in ultraviolet output of the sun linked to the 10-11 year solar cycle and other natural phenomena can, like CFCs, inhibit the production of ozone.”

On global warming: “A careful examination of the Earth’s climate history, however, shows that this warming is the result of a natural fluctuation in temperature and poses no threat to humanity.”

A pattern seems to be emerging, no? It's the same song and dance any time science discovers that some profitable industrial activity poses a serious threat to public health, the environment, etc. Because of the inconvenience and cost associated with restructuring their businesses in response to the information, they instead seek to discredit that information in the minds of the voting public.

Thankfully in the case of leaded gasoline and the ozone hole, science prevailed. The damage is now in the process of being slowly undone, though it remains to be seen whether the same will be true for the climate.