ABSTRACT
While both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science use the word “consensus” when describing the views of climate science on the existence and human cause of climate change, some (primarily) non-climate scientists dispute this. This chapter delves into arguments expressing so-called climate “scepticism” and points out that one of its key tactics is cherry-picking small pieces of evidence while rejecting any data that do not fit the desired picture. Ultimately, this is not really skepticism, it is ignoring inconvenient facts. All of the arguments of global warming deniers, including those made by politicians, media commentators, and conservative policy groups, many of which have strong ties to the corporate energy industry, have been thoroughly debunked by multiple climate scientists, and yet they persist because they are useful as tools of obfuscation by power elites. The origins, functioning, and goals of climate change obfuscation as a mechanism for sustaining the unjust status quo are examined in this chapter.
