Climate Change Deniers, The Merchants Of Doubt

Denial of the scientific evidence for Anthropogenic Global Warming was the running theme during the 24 hour broadcast of the Climate Reality Project.

And one of the shorts that was broadcast, called “Doubt,” is wel worth a watch. It’s about how the fossil fuel industry took the tobacco industry’s playbook to confuse the public on the science of climate change. Not by disproving the facts, but just by creating enough doubt to make the public dismiss it.

The following quote from the short sums it up quite nicely:

How did the tobacco companies manage to lie to the public in face of all the scientific evidence?

They realized that the science didn’t need to be disproven. It was enough to create doubt in the minds of the public to keep them from recognizing the truth.

This misinformation and doubt peddling is something I often talk about. Like for example when Chris Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute said a potential new maunder minimum would cause a new little ice age, so we don’t need to do anything. Or the confusion Watts Up With That tries to create every time there is some sort of cold spell.

And the short DOUBT shows how eerily similar the tactics of the tobacco industry are to what we are seeing with climate change:

A New Little Ice Age

Apparently people have found something new and interesting to use as evidence against global warming, albeit a bit different than a cold winter. This time it’s a potential drop in solar activity that will counteract all the warming we have seen. And will very likely, according to them, put us in a new little ice age.

It is true that during a meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society an announcement was made that the sun might enter an extended period of low activity. A period similar to the Maunder minimum, which is also known as the Little Ice Age.

During the maunder minimum temperatures were lower than normal, predominantly in the northern hemisphere and most noticeable lower during the winter. And the lower solar-activity at the time has long been suspected as one of the major causes of this. Although other factors, like strong volcanic eruptions, played a role in lowering temperatures.