ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies two epistemic errors, which are made by a lot of climate change sceptics. These errors are hard to correct because they have acquired the status of conventional wisdom in intellectual culture. Climate change is of course, to a great extent a political issue, and the obsessive fear of false beliefs and of overconfidence that is such a striking feature of intellectual culture, has political implications. At present, almost all philosophical work on the issue of climate change has come from the field of ethics. This chapter shows that epistemology, the study of knowledge and justified belief, has much to contribute as well. It explores how two common epistemic errors have made climate change scepticism more intellectually respectable than it deserves to be. Many influential climate sceptics have an ideal of science as the province of individual geniuses working in isolation from one another.
