By Archie O’Shaughnessy and Steve Matthews

In his book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Global Warming, climate journalist David Wallace-Wells describes the scope of change needed to avoid catastrophe as “intensive infrastructure projects at every level and in every corner of human activity, from new plane fleets to new land use and right down to a new way of making concrete.” This transformation, he says, “dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history.”

He reminds us that we have the means to reduce emissions, suggesting a carbon tax to help phase out dirty energy, a shift away from a meat- and dairy-heavy diet and public investment into green energy and carbon capture. “We just haven’t yet discovered the political will, economic might, and cultural flexibility to install and activate them, because doing so requires something a lot bigger, and more concrete, than imagination—it means nothing short of a complete overhaul of the world’s energy systems, transportation, infrastructure and industry and agriculture.”

So, what prevents us from garnering that political will and pushing back against the forces that encourage our tendency toward complacency and inaction? Why haven’t we elected and demanded the leadership needed to bring about the transformation upon which the survival of our future generations, civilization, and perhaps our species, depends?

Science Denialism

Science denialism has long been an issue that the entire scientific community has faced, be it claims that the Earth is flat, HIV does not cause AIDS, smoking does not cause cancer, humans were “created” just 10,000 years ago, or vaccines cause autism. And, notably, that global warming is not happening/not human caused/not a serious problem.

Many would view these statements as obvious contradictions to established facts, yet many people believe (or once believed) them. A 2017 Gallup poll showed that less than half of Americans (44% overall) could name a news source they believe was unbiased, suggesting that they would have difficulty distinguishing a true claim from a false one and highlighted by the recently coined term “alternative fact.”

Ongoing scientific discoveries are regular but when science denial dictates public policy, the results can be deadly. When South African president Thabo Mbeki denied that HIV causes AIDS, thousands of HIV-positive mothers did not receive anti-retrovirals, transmitting the disease to their children, resulting in an estimated 300,000 deaths. The tobacco industry’s efforts to promote the “uncertainty” of the science connecting smoking to disease resulted (and continues to result) in the deaths of untold millions. Continued denial of climate science is likely to result in consequences on a global scale.

It might be easy to overlook the views of “fringe groups,” but in the US, their denialist stance is influencing key policies. Analysis from the Center for American Progress Action Fund found that 123 Republican members of the 118th Congress reject the scientific consensus on human-driven climate change. This denialist perspective hinders public agreement on the need for decisive action and even attempts to influence how climate science is taught in schools, similar to past efforts to equate “creationism” with evolution.

Denialism is the opposite of healthy skepticism that drives scientific advances and a search for truth. In their 2007 essay “What is Denialism?”, lawyer/physiologist brothers Chris and Mark Hoofnagle define denialism as “the employment of rhetorical arguments to give the appearance of legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none,” with the ultimate goal of rejecting a proposition on which a scientific consensus exists. They identify five general tactics used by denialists to sow confusion:

1. Conspiracy: “Almost every denialist argument will eventually devolve into a conspiracy. This is because denialist theories that oppose well-established science eventually need to assert deception on the part of their opponents to explain things like why every reputable scientist, journal, and opponent seems to be able to operate from the same page.” There are theories claiming that climate scientists purposely fake data to receive research funding, that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by leftist radicals to undermine local sovereignty, or as President Trump posted on X/Twitter: “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
2. Electivity (cherry-picking): Denialists often use selective evidence, such as single papers, flawed research or statements out of context, to suggest their claims are supported by science. They emphasize disagreements or identified flaws to undermine entire fields, creating the impression that the science is weak. Examples include the controversy over Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph and the miscalibration of satellite data in the 1990s that falsely suggested global cooling. They may also cite isolated weather events, like the 2019 polar vortex, to distract from the broader consensus on climate trends.
3. Fake experts: This tactic involves finding individuals with impressive credentials rather than relevant experience—individuals who will promote arguments that are inconsistent with the literature, not accepted by experts in the field and/or inconsistent with established requirements for scientific inquiry. An example of the fake expert tactic is the Global Warming Petition Project, or Oregon Petition. The petition includes over 31,000 scientists claiming that humans aren’t disrupting our climate. How can there be 97% consensus when 31,000 scientists disagree? It turns out 99.9% of the petition’s signatories aren’t climate scientists. In fact, some of the names are fictional. The petition and supporting documents were fabricated to look like official papers from the National Academy of Sciences—which they were not—prompting them to release this response: “The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences … The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.”
4. Impossible expectations and moving goalposts: An unrealistic demand for “complete and absolute knowledge of a subject to prevent implementation of sound policies, or acceptance of an idea or a theory” is propagated.Denialists use this tactic to set impossible standards of proof, ensuring scientists can never provide evidence that satisfies them. In climate denialism, this is evident in repeated claims about the unreliability of climate models. “True, models are hard, anything designed to prognosticate such a large set of variables as those involved in climate is going to be highly complex,” writes Mark Hoofnagle, but “that doesn’t change the fact that actual measurement of global mean temperature is possible, and is showing an alarmingly steep increase post-industrialization… Similarly, we don’t need to have a perfect model of the earth’s climate to understand that all the current data and simulations suggest decreasing carbon output is of critical importance right now, and not when humans have obtained some impossible level of scientific knowledge.”
5. Common fallacies of logic: Ad hominem (dismissing an argument by insulting the person), straw man and red herring arguments are all part of the denialism toolkit. The ad hominem tactic was taken to new heights against Michael Mann, with what he termed the “Serengeti Strategy”: the right-wing bombards a single climate advocate with Freedom of Information demands, smears, and even death threats, as Mann described in his book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. 

In 2009, a server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit was hacked, with thousands of emails stolen. A right-wing columnist claimed the emails exposed a global warming conspiracy, which he termed “Climategate.” Though six independent investigations debunked the conspiracy theory, it spread rapidly on social media and received significant mainstream media coverage, including an op-ed by Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor.

Denialism is fueled by right-wing media and social media, which spread propaganda, lies or alternative facts, while mainstream media often unintentionally gives legitimacy to denialist views under the guise of balance.

Of course, denialism is not the sole reason for the lack of political will and slow pace of meaningful action. A 2023 report conducted jointly by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that Americans who think global warming is happening outnumber those who think it is not by a ratio of nearly 5 to 1 (72% versus 15%). In spite of this, only 37% of registered voters cited climate change as a “very important” issue to their vote prior to the 2024 US election. How can we explain that passivity in the face of the horrific consequences of doing nothing?