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February 2, 2024

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Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected results

by University of Bonn

Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves surprised by the results. Whether they are good or bad news for the fight against global heating remains to be seen. The study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change .

A surprisingly large number of people still downplay the impact of climate change or deny that it is primarily a product of human activity. But why? One hypothesis is that these misconceptions are rooted in a specific form of self-deception, namely that people simply find it easier to live with their own climate failings if they do not believe that things will actually get all that bad.

"We call this thought process 'motivated reasoning,'" says Professor Florian Zimmermann, an economist at the University of Bonn and Research Director at IZA.

Motivated reasoning helps us to justify our behavior. For instance, someone who flies off on holiday several times a year can give themselves the excuse that the plane would still be taking off without them, or that just one flight will not make any difference, or—more to the point—that nobody has proven the existence of human-made climate change anyway. All these patterns of argument are examples of motivated reasoning. Bending the facts until it allows us to maintain a positive image of ourselves while maintaining our harmful behavior.

Self-deception to preserve a positive self-image

But what role does this form of self-deception play in how people think about climate change? Previously, there had been little scientific evidence produced to answer the question. The latest study has now closed this knowledge gap—and has thrown up some unexpected results. Zimmermann and his colleague Lasse Stötzer ran a series of online experiments, using a representative sample of 4,000 US adults.

At the center of the experiments was a donation worth $20. Participants were allocated at random to one of two groups. The members of the first group were able to split the $20 between two organizations, both of which were committed to combating climate change. By contrast, those in the second group could decide to keep the $20 for themselves instead of giving it away and would then actually receive the money at the end.

"Anyone keeping hold of the donation needs to justify it to themselves," says Zimmermann, who is also a member of the ECONtribute Cluster of Excellence, the Collaborative Research Center Transregio 224 and the Transdisciplinary Research Area Individuals & Societies at the University of Bonn. "One way to do that is to deny the existence of climate change."

As it happened, nearly half of those in the second group decided to hold on to the money. The researchers now wanted to know whether these individuals would justify their decision retrospectively by repudiating climate change. The two groups had been put together at random. Without "motivated reasoning," therefore, they should essentially share a similar attitude to human-made global heating. If those who kept the money for themselves justified their actions through self-deception, however, then their group should exhibit greater doubt over climate change.

"Yet we didn't see any sign of that effect," Zimmermann reveals.

Climate change denial: A hallmark of one's identity?

This finding was also borne out in two further experiments.

"In other words, our study didn't give us any indications that the widespread misconceptions regarding climate change are due to this kind of self-deception," says Zimmermann, summing up his work. On the face of it, this is good news for policymakers, because the results could mean that it is indeed possible to correct climate change misconceptions, simply by providing comprehensive information. If people are bending reality, by contrast, then this approach is very much a non-starter.

Zimmermann advises caution, however, stating, "Our data does reveal some indications of a variant of motivated reasoning, specifically that denying the existence of human-made global heating forms part of the political identity of certain groups of people."

Put another way, some people may to an extent define themselves by the very fact that they do not believe in climate change. As far as they are concerned, this way of thinking is an important trait that sets them apart from other political groups , and thus they are likely to simply not care what researchers have to say on the topic.

Journal information: Nature Climate Change

Provided by University of Bonn

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Pathways to changing the minds of climate deniers

By reviewing the psychology behind climate change rejection, a Stanford researcher suggests four approaches that can sway climate deniers and help overcome obstacles to implementing solutions.

Want to sway the opinion of climate deniers? Start by acknowledging and respecting people’s beliefs. That’s one of four suggestions a Stanford researcher unearthed in a review of the psychology behind why some people reject climate change despite knowledge or access to the facts.

Denying the effects of climate change serves as a barrier to taking the actions needed to mitigate the worst effects, including rising seas, more intense hurricanes and increased droughts and heatwaves. However, the researchers found that those who deny human causes for climate change can be swayed through conversations that appeal to their different identities, reframe solutions – or even embrace their climate views.

“I think in the climate change sphere there’s this thinking of, ‘there’s the deniers over there, let’s just not even engage with them – it’s not worth it,’” said behavioral scientist Gabrielle Wong-Parodi , lead author of the paper published in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability Jan. 8. “A lot of the tactics and strategies start from the point that something is wrong with the climate deniers, rather than trying to acknowledge that they have a belief and opinion and it matters. But I think there is an opportunity to keep trying to understand one another, especially now.”

The researchers focused on what is referred to as “motivated denial” – knowing or having access to the facts, but nevertheless denying them. For some people, accepting that humans cause climate change questions self-worth, threatens financial institutions and is accompanied by an overwhelming sense of responsibility.

I think we often forget that people can have many identities – there might be a political identity, but there is also an identity as a mother, or an identity as a friend or an identity as a student. ” Gabrielle Wong-Parodi Assistant Professor of Earth System Science

Although efforts to sway climate deniers may seem futile, the researchers found four approaches in peer-reviewed studies from the past two years that could be most effective:

• Reframing solutions to climate change as ways to uphold the social system and work toward its stability and longevity
• Reducing the ideological divide by incorporating the purity of the Earth, rather than how we harm or care for it
• Having conversations about the scientific consensus around climate change with trusted individuals
• Encouraging people to explicitly discuss their values and stance on climate change prior to engaging with climate information

Wong-Parodi said she found the fourth approach to be the most intriguing because less research has been done in that area than the other three – and it seems to have a lot of potential for behavior change. Self-affirmation is challenged when people face climate change because it requires them to consider their contribution to the problem, which can threaten their sense of integrity and trigger self-defense.

“A good portion of people who deny climate change recognize that there is some change, but the change is so threatening because it basically could affect your quality of life. It could affect your income. It could affect a number of different things that you care about,” said Wong-Parodi, an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

Some preliminary studies suggest that rather than trying to get around people’s identities and denial of climate change, conversations should instead embrace their views. We should not try to ignore who people are, but rather acknowledge their views so that they can be dealt with and the conversation can move on to behavioral changes – such as finding solutions that match their values and do not threaten a person’s sense of identity or quality of life, according to Wong-Parodi.

“I think we often forget that people can have many identities – there might be a political identity, but there is also an identity as a mother, or an identity as a friend or an identity as a student,” said Wong-Parodi, who is also a fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment . “You can elicit other identities when you’re talking about climate change that may be more effective.”

How can citizens become agents of environmental change?

Some programs work better than others when it comes to involving citizens in preserving the environment. After reviewing those that worked, Stanford researchers propose a blueprint for how others can educate people to maximize their impact.

Additional co-authors include Irina Feygina, an independent practitioner in Brooklyn, NY.

This work was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Media Contacts

Danielle T. Tucker School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences [email protected] , 650-497-9541

Gabrielle Wong-Parodi School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences [email protected] , 650-725-6457

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Climate denial in Canada and the United States

Shelley boulianne.

1 Department of Sociology, MacEwan University, Edmonton Alberta, Canada

Stephanie Belland

2 Department of Psychology, MacEwan University, Edmonton Alberta, Canada

One type of climate change denial is the belief that climate change is naturally occurring instead of human caused; this form of denial is known as attribution skepticism or soft denial. While considerable research has addressed outright climate change denial, little research has focused specifically on soft denial and its complex and politicized relationship with science. We examine this form of denial using original survey data collected in 2017 in the United States ( n = 1510) and in 2019 in Canada ( n = 1545). Contrary to expectations about the United States being more divided by political ideology on the topic of climate change, we find that – after accounting for trust in political leaders – Canadians’ views are driven more by ideological position than those of Americans. In the United States, climate denial is related to trust in President Trump as a source of information about climate change. The study of soft denial is important as it undermines the rationale for climate change solutions.

RÉSUMÉ

Parmi les types de dénis portant sur les changements climatiques on retrouve la conviction que le changement climatique se produit naturellement au lieu d’être causé par les humains; cette forme de déni est connue comme le scepticisme d'attribution ou le déni doux. Malgré la recherche abondante qui documente le déni sur le changement climatique, peu de recherches se sont concentrées sur le déni doux et encore moins spécifiquement sur sa relation complexe et politique avec la science. Cette étude se penche sur ce type de déni en utilisant les données d'une recherche par sondages dont les données ont été collectées en 2017 aux États‐Unis ( n = 1510) et en 2019 au Canada ( n = 1545). Malgré le fait que les États‐Unis soient plus divisés dans leurs idéologies politiques par rapport aux changements climatiques, cette étude démontre que — après avoir tenu compte de la confiance envers les dirigeants politiques — le point de vue des Canadiens est motivé davantage par leurs idéologies politiques que ceux des Américains. Aux États‐Unis, le déni envers le changement climatique est, quant à lui, lié à la confiance envers le Président Trump en tant que source d'information sur les changements climatiques. Cette recherche portant sur le déni doux est importante, car ce déni affaiblit les arguments visant à trouver des solutions visant pour contrer les changements climatiques.

INTRODUCTION

Climate change has been a major policy issue in the past few decades, with high profile international agreements and multi‐year climate strikes aimed at encouraging further action to halt its progression. Despite this momentum, many high‐profile politicians and news outlets are claiming that it is a natural occurrence; in other words, they do not think humans play a role in the earth's changing climate. This soft climate change denial poses a challenge when trying to encourage both international cooperation on climate change and action by individuals to reduce their own contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, this form of denial places science and scientific information at the center of climate change debates by manipulating scientific information. In particular, scientific data have documented a changing climate since the Quaternary ice age, but climate change science has focused on the human causes of climate change in the past 100–150 years. Soft climate change denial focuses on and exploits specific scientific facts for political reasons.

Hornsey et al. ( 2016 ) conducted a meta‐analysis about climate change opinions. They gathered 25 polls conducted in 56 countries, which were published in 171 academic studies. They found political affiliation and trust in scientists were much stronger predictors of climate change opinions than any demographic variable, subjective knowledge about climate change, self‐identification as an environmental activist, or experiences of extreme weather events (see Hornsey et al., 2016 , Table  1 , p. 625). However, the meta‐analysis did not examine: 1) the form of denial that explains climate change as a natural occurrence; 2) a robust set of climate change information sources (news media, political leaders, scientists) and how these sources shape opinions; and 3) cross‐national differences. In addition, half of the published studies are based on the United States, which raises questions about whether key explanations are US‐specific or are more universal.

Summary of existing literature on trust in scientists and views about the anthropogenic‐causes of climate change

*Source: Hornsey et al. ( 2016 ) Appendix. The above table only reports on studies with samples of more than 400, considering anthropogenic climate change belief, and including trust in scientists as a predictor of these beliefs.

This study uses surveys of Americans and Canadians to examine trust in various information sources about climate change and how these influence the attribution of climate change to natural causes. We contribute to well‐established findings that people with right‐wing views are more likely to be climate change deniers, but we build on this literature with a cross‐national approach. The cross‐national comparison is important to highlight the role of trust in different information sources in the process of attitude formation. Cross‐national differences are evident: in the United States, trust in President Trump correlates with a soft form of denial; in Canada, soft denial relates to political ideology. Contrary to expectations about the United States being more divided by political ideology on the topic of climate change, we find that – after accounting for trust in political leaders – Canadians’ views are driven more by ideological position than those of Americans. We also find that while few (2% to 3%) of respondents stated that they do not think climate change exists, 21% of Americans and 12% of Canadians expressed soft denial. This contemporary iteration of climate denial is important to study since it is more common than outright denial, but also because studying this phenomenon in a comparative perspective helps identify similarities and differences in why such soft denial has become so popular. These findings contribute to existing scholarship by offering insights into an under‐studied form of climate change denial, a more comprehensive view of the information environment surrounding these views, and an understanding of which explanations of climate change views are robust and which are specific to the US context.

In terms of sociological theory, this paper examines the role of multiple social institutions (media, government, and higher education) in shaping citizens’ views about climate change. In particular, we address how these institutions, especially media, overlap in Canada and the United States, which may lead to similarities in views about climate change. Yet, these countries also have different political cultures that could be attributed to differences in their political systems (two‐party versus multi‐party systems). Specifically, the United States may be polarized into two camps aligning with life‐long party affiliations, in contrast to Canada that has more fluid partisanship identity which reduces polarized views. Science is largely conducted in institutions of higher education; American and Canadian academic cultures overlap given the proximity of these two countries.

In general, cross‐national comparisons help to reveal robust explanations, moving beyond single‐country case studies and idiosyncratic explanations (Boulianne, 2019 ). The United States and Canada are ideal for comparison: they both have federal systems, similar levels of carbon dioxide emissions, and harmonized policies as part of ensuring good trade relations (Lachapelle et al., 2012 ). Furthermore, “the geographic contiguity and cultural proximity of the two federations provides ample opportunity for such other types of spillover as, to take one example, ideational contagion” (Lachapelle et al., 2012 p. 337). As such, we might expect some similarities as physical proximity helps the spread of ideas across borders. Yet, the countries have different political leaders, which might produce differences to the extent that leaders offer cues to the public about complex policy issues, such as climate change action (Zaller, 1992 ).

Climate change denial

Previous literature outlines many different types of climate change skepticism. For example, Haltinner and Sarathchandra ( 2021 ) place deniers at four points on a continuum: 1) epistemic deniers, who do not think humans are influencing the climate as they do not believe that climate change is occurring, 2) epistemic doubters, who are uncertain that climate change is real and impacted by human activity, 3) attribution deniers, who believe in climate change but that it is due to natural causes, and 4) attribution doubters, those who believe in climate change but are unsure that it is an anthropogenic phenomenon. The authors examine the relationship between various demographic variables, political ideology, and (dis)trust in science and attribution denial; only political ideology was predictive of this form of skepticism. Individuals who scored higher on conservatism were more likely to believe that climate change is a natural occurrence, compared to those who identify as liberal.

This paper looks specifically at those who see climate change as a naturally occurring phenomenon. Haltinner and Sarathchandra ( 2021 ) label these individuals attribution deniers. Akter et al. ( 2012 ) refer to this type of denial as attribution skepticism, while Benegal ( 2018 ) categorizes it as soft denial. Concentrating on a specific subset of climate skeptics is an important line of research, as previous work suggests “important fragmentations within the skeptical public” (Sarathchandra & Haltinner, 2021 p. 230). Dunlap and McCright ( 2015 p. 301) argue that existing policy reports “give denial short shrift.” We argue that this pattern is also true about academic attention to attribution deniers.

Political ideology, partisanship, and politics in cross‐national perspective

In the United States, climate change is one of many policy areas on which the public is deeply divided. This polarization may be the outcome of the US two‐party system: countries with multi‐party systems may not record polarization to the same degree. There is also the issue of measuring political affiliation versus political ideology, which was distinguished in the meta‐analysis by Hornsey et al. ( 2016 ). Political affiliation is a difficult concept to transport outside of the United States, especially to countries where political affiliations are fluid, party platforms are complex combinations of policies, and people have multiple parties to choose from when voting (Krange Kaltenborn & Hultman, 2019 ; Schickler & Green, 1997 ). For example, Whitmarsh ( 2011 ) shows that Conservative supporters in the United Kingdom are the most skeptical of climate change, Liberal and Labour in the middle, and Greens the least skeptical. In Canada, Conservative supporters are also the least likely to believe in climate change, with New Democrats in the middle, and Liberal, Greens, and the Bloc Québecois being least skeptical (Lachapelle et al., 2012 ).

Fisher et al. ( 2013 ) find that the polarization is not about the science of climate change, but rather the policy solutions; however their findings are based on an analysis of Congressional Hearings from 2005 to 2009, leaving questions about whether this is the case among the public. In a 2019 study, Smith and Mayer find that both the perceived danger of climate change and the importance of climate change as an issue are considerably more partisan and polarized in Anglophone states – including the United States and Canada – compared with Western European and post‐Communist states. Canada is a unique point of comparison for the United States. Canada has a multi‐party system, but national elections are historically won by one of two major parties. The other parties interact with these major parties in terms of policy agendas and possible coalitions in the case of a minority government. In addition, Canadians are much more strategic in how they vote in particular elections, rather than relying on life‐long party affiliations to decide for whom to vote (Schickler & Green, 1997 ). As such, it is not clear whether Canadians’ opinions align with existing party platforms or rely solely on climate change policies when deciding who to vote for. For this reason, our survey question focuses on ideology versus party affiliation. Due to the Canadian multi‐party system, we might expect that partisanship is less of an issue in Canada than the United States.

A US‐Canada comparison raises questions about the degree to which the polarized and highly partisan discussion of climate change extends beyond geographic boundaries. Much previous research has found an association between climate change denial (broadly construed) and right‐wing or conservative ideology (or identifying as Republican) in the United States (Ballew et al., 2020 ; Benegal, 2018 ; Schmid‐Petri et al., 2017 ; Hornsey et al., 2016 ; Sarathchandra & Haltinner, 2021 ). Using survey data from 2005 to 2009, Tesler ( 2018 ) finds that the United States is distinctive in its degree of polarization. When the Republican US government withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, climate change skepticism became a foundational element of conservatism (Schmid‐Petri et al., 2017 ).

On a more global scale, this brand of conservatism is connected to neoliberalism, which does not support state intervention in the economy, the environment, or other domains (Dunlap & McCright, 2015 ). Climate denial is linked to neoliberalism which prioritizes the economy at the expense of the environment (Neubauer, 2011 ). Climate change as a policy issue would require state intervention to balance environmental protection with economic development. Dunlap and McCright ( 2015 ) argue that climate denial is strongest in neoliberalist countries, including Canada and the United States, but also Australia and the United Kingdom.

Our first research question examines whether political ideology influences this form of climate change denial that focuses on natural occurrences. Although political ideology and political affiliation are not identical constructs, they are highly correlated (Abramowitz & Saunders, 2008 ; Smith & Mayer, 2019 ), and a measure of political ideology is more appropriate to capture political sentiment across both nations. We extend research by exploring whether political ideology has a consistent effect in both Canada and the United States.

• RQ1: How does political ideology relate to climate change denial (natural occurrence) in Canada and the United States?

Political ideology has a direct influence on views about climate change, but may also have an indirect effect through the information sources used. We examine the direct effects of political ideology on trust in scientists, media sources, and political leaders in relation to climate change, as well as the indirect effects of political ideology through the politicizing of information sources (see Figure  1 ). Finally, we examine the robustness of this model across two countries, the United States and Canada. In the section following, we outline how this model might work differently in Canada compared to the United States, which is the focal point of much research (Hornsey et al., 2016 ).

Theoretical model with research questions

Information sources

Trust in political leaders.

With the Trump administration withdrawing from the Paris Agreement in 2017, climate change denial may have new energy. Scholars have pointed to Trump's populist style, which includes attacking the media and other elites (Boulianne et al., 2020 ). This approach resonates with some citizens, leading to greater trust in Trump as a political leader; however, it also contributes to anti‐intellectualism and increases public skepticism toward scientists and scientific claims related to climate change (Merkley, 2020 ).

In contrast, none of the major party leaders denied climate change during the 2019 and 2021 Canadian elections, but they differed in their attention to this issue (Boulianne et al., 2021 ). Also, their policies differed in terms of how to address it and the ambitiousness of their goals to reduce relevant emissions (Nisbet, 2020 ). Maxime Bernier, leader of the populist People's Party of Canada, did advance the framing of climate change as a natural occurrence (Bernier, 2019 ); however, neither this leader nor his party received much electoral support in 2019 or 2021. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–2015) was an avid climate change denier and invoked policies to restrict government‐employed scientists from sharing their findings with the media (see discussion in Boulianne & Belland, 2019 ). However, current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (of the Liberal Party) subscribes to the science of climate change.

• RQ2: How does political ideology influence trust in political leaders (Trump/Trudeau) as sources of information about climate change in Canada and the United States?
• RQ3: How does trust in political leaders relate to climate change denial (natural occurrence) in Canada and the United States?

Trust in mainstream news

The majority of people rely on mainstream news media for environmental information (Boulianne & Belland, 2019 ; Funk et al., 2017 ). However, according to a Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans who have a “great deal/fair amount” of trust in the mass media dropped from 53% in 1997 to 32% in 2016 (Swift, 2016 ). Furthermore, trust in the media is strongly correlated with political partisanship, with only 14% of Republicans reporting a “great deal/fair amount” of trust versus 51% of Democrats in 2016 (Swift, 2016 ). For climate change more specifically, the public does not consider the media to be a trustworthy source; media reports are often interpreted as being sensationalized or politicized (Buys et al., 2014 ). This mistrust in conventional media can consequently push people to seek out alternative news sources, which may be further biased or rife with misinformation (James, 2019 ). Use of Fox News is linked to climate change denial, whereas the use of mainstream news sources is not (Bolin & Hamilton, 2018 ; Feldman et al., 2012 ). According to the Digital News Report 2019 , 29% of Americans use Fox News each week (Newman et al., 2019 ).

Canada is an interesting comparator for the United States because Canadians’ media diets include a good deal of American news sources, though the sources used are mostly mainstream (Brin, 2019 ). While CNN (27% broadcast, 19% online) and MSN (15%) news are common in Canadians’ media diets, Fox News is used by only 9% of Canadians (Brin, 2019 ). In the United States, Fox News has been connected to right‐wing ideology, climate change denial, and support for Trump. Furthermore, the Canadian media ecosystem is distinct in that it has a publicly funded broadcasting system (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or CBC), which is used by up to 32% of English Canadians (Brin, 2019 ). In the scholarship of media systems, public broadcasting media are distinguishing features that lead to more informed citizenry (Esser, 2019 ). Lastly, while Americans and Canadians consume some similar US‐based news sources, Americans do not consume Canadian news sources and Canada's media ecosystem is distinctive in terms of consumption of CBC.

• RQ4: How does political ideology influence trust in media as a source of information about climate change in Canada and the United States?
• RQ5: How does trust in media relate to climate change denial (natural occurrence) in Canada and the United States?

Trust in scientists

Within the scientific community, the anthropogenic nature of climate change and its potential consequences are certain (Groves, 2019 ; James, 2019 ; Pew Research Center, 2015 ; Schmid‐Petri et al., 2017 ). The public's faith in climate science influences not only its receptiveness to climate change information and concern about the issue (Malka et al., 2009 ) but also the degree to which they support public policies to combat it (Akter et al., 2012 ; Hornsey et al., 2016 ; Sleeth‐Keppler et al., 2017 ; Stoutenborough et al., 2014 ). In the past, the public generally relied on scientists as a trusted source of information regarding climate change (Buys et al., 2014 ), but this is changing. Sleeth‐Keppler et al. ( 2017 ) explain that the public feels alienated from public institutions, such as universities, as well as disconnected from scientists because they do not share the same values related to the importance of the scientific method. In addition, recent research reveals that even an individual's trust in scientific messengers can be heavily influenced by political partisanship (Bolson et al., 2019 ; Hamilton & Saito, 2015 ; Leiserowitz et al., 2012 ; Myers et al., 2017 ). This demonstrates that the degree to which the public trusts scientists is not only dependent upon the work those scientists perform but is also impacted by how this work may be publicly undermined by other social and political actors (Groves, 2019 ).

Table  1 summarizes the subset of studies in Hornsey et al. ( 2016 ) that offers large‐scale survey analysis on climate change views. We focus on the subset of studies that examines trust in scientists and specifically anthropogenic causes of climate change, as this subset of results is most closely aligned with our interest in forms of denial. Not surprisingly, trust in scientists highly correlates with beliefs that humans are causing climate change (Table  1 ). Table  1 establishes the dominance of US research on this subject, but also raises a question about the possible existence of cross‐national differences. In Costa Rica, trust in scientists has a relatively small impact on climate change views (Vignola et al., 2013 ). However, trust in scientists has the largest impact on climate change views in the two studies conducted in Australia (Hine et al., 2013 , two waves). The existing research suggests cross‐national differences in the importance of trust in scientists in shaping one's views about climate change. Yet, this line of research does not consider natural occurrence as a form of climate change denial. As mentioned, this form of denial pits scientific claims against each other, that is, warming since the ice age versus warming due to recent human activity.

• RQ6: How does political ideology influence trust in scientists as a source of information about climate change in Canada and the United States?
• RQ7: How does trust in scientists relate to climate change denial (natural occurrence) in Canada and the United States?

The US survey data were collected using an online panel ( n = 1510) between June 9 and June 30, 2017. The Canadian survey data were collected using an online panel ( n = 1545) between September 20 and October 3, 2019. Both studies were conducted in the context of national elections. For the United States, the survey was conducted seven months after the election. This time span allowed President Trump to enact his views about climate change, which included de‐funding the Environmental Protection Agency and prompted public protests such as the March for Science (April 2017). In Canada, the survey was conducted weeks before the election, in which Prime Minister Trudeau was re‐elected. During this time period, there were global climate strikes, including strikes in Canada, and Prime Minister Trudeau met with Greta Thunberg to discuss his climate change agenda.

The US survey was administered by Kantar‐Lightspeed, and the Canadian survey by Dynata. In both cases, age and gender distribution closely replicate census data. Respondents had to be a minimum of 18 years old to participate. Table  2 outlines the descriptive statistics for each variable used in the analysis. While the response categories for demographic variables varied slightly, they are recoded to offer a consistent measurement approach. Question wording about ideology, information sources, and climate change are identical in both surveys.

Descriptive statistics

Quota sampling was used on gender to match population data from the US government (51% females; Howden & Meyer, 2011 ) and Statistics Canada (51%, Statistics Canada 2017). The variable was recoded to a binary dummy variable where 1 = female and 0 = male. Approximately 50% of the US sample ( n = 1510) and 52% of the Canadian sample ( n = 1537) are female.

Quota sampling was used on age to match population data from the US government (Howden and Meyer, 2011 ) and Statistics Canada (2017). The US census and sample estimates are as follows: 13.1% aged 18 to 24 years (survey: 12.4%); 17.5% aged 25 to 34 years (survey: 18.2%); 17.5% aged 35 to 44 years (survey: 17.1%); 19.2% aged 45–54 years (survey: 18.2%); and 32.7% aged 55 or older (survey: 34.1%). The Canadian census and sample estimates are as follows: 10.9% aged 18 to 24 years (survey: 8.5%); 16.4% aged 25 to 34 years (survey: 22.9%); 16.2% aged 35 to 44 years (survey: 16.7%); 17.9% aged 45 to 54 years (survey: 18.3%); and 38.6% aged 55 or older (survey: 33.6%).

The education variable was recoded into four categories. In the United States, categories were coded as follows: 1 as grade school, some high school, and graduated high school or GED; 2 as graduated college, associate's degree, technical school, or vocational training; 3 as graduated college – bachelor's degree; and 4 as advanced degree, postgraduate, or doctoral degree (M.A., PhD, etc.). In Canada, categories were coded as follows: 1 as no schooling, some elementary school, completed elementary school, some secondary, high school, completed secondary/high school; 2 as some technical, community college, CEGEP, college classique, completed some technical, community college, CEGEP, college classique, some university; 3 as bachelor's degree; and 4 as master's, professional, or doctorate degree.

Household annual income was asked using different approaches in each country, but recoded to have matching intervals: 1 ($0 to $30,000); 2 ($30,000 to 60,000); 3 ($60,000 to 200,000); and 4 ($200,000 or more).

Respondents were asked about ideology using the following: “In politics, people sometimes talk of left and right. Where would you place yourself on this scale? Note: sometimes people refer to the left as liberal and to the right as conservative.” In the United States, respondents were also offered the option of “neither left nor right” but this option was not available in the Canadian survey. These responses were identified as “zeros” and any responses lower than 6 on the 11‐point scale were also coded as “zero”. The recoding ensures that the response options are identical in the Canadian and American results. The remaining respondents (6, 7, 8, 9, 10) were coded as 1 (right‐wing). The theory is related to right‐wing ideology and the recoding enables a focus on right‐wing ideology. The recoding created a variable with identical proportions in both countries; 36% of Americans and 34% of Canadians identified as right‐wing, which further facilitates a cross‐national comparison. In addition, the simplification helps with interpreting the differential effects of ideology across the different measures of trust in sources and climate denial in both countries.

Cause of climate change

Respondents were asked, “Do you think that climate change is a natural occurrence or human caused?” with response options as follows: natural; human caused; both equally; and climate change does not exist. The question was inspired by the Pew line of questioning about attribution (see Klima, 2016 ). Only 3% of Americans and 2% of Canadians selected the last category (climate change does not exist). This small number of outright deniers does not influence the results, so we decided to exclude them. For this paper, we computed the variable “cause of climate change” as a dummy variable where “naturally caused” responses are coded as 1 and all other response options are coded as 0. Approximately 21.19% of the American sample and 12.33% of the Canadian sample reported believing that climate change was naturally caused.

Trust in sources

Respondents were asked, “How much do you trust or distrust [scientists/mainstream news media/President/Prime Minister] as a source of information about climate change?” Table  2 lists the averages and standard deviations by country. The response scale ranged from strongly distrust (1) to strongly trust (4). Canadian and American respondents have similar levels of trust in scientists but differ in their views about the media.

To examine the direct effects of political ideology on trust in scientists, media, and political leaders as well as the role of all of these variables on denial, we employ simultaneous equation modeling using Amos 27. The figures are country‐specific and summarize the coefficients related to the seven research questions. Additional analysis appears in Appendices A – F . In addition, the data and replication files are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19164071.v1

To begin, we report on even‐numbered hypotheses, which examine the role of ideology in trust in different information sources, comparing Canada (Figure  2 ) with the United States (Figure  3 ). In relation to Research Question 2, we find that political ideology influences trust in political leaders about climate change and this relationship is stronger in the United States than in Canada. The question wording for trust in political leaders references President Trump in the United States and Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada. In the United States, those who identify with the right side of the ideological scale are more trusting of the Republican president about climate change. In Canada, ideology is a weaker predictor of trust in Prime Minister Trudeau (Liberal) related to the topic of climate change information. When modeled as a differential effect (interaction effect in Appendix A ), we find that political ideology has a stronger influence on trust in the political leader of the United States compared to Canada (Appendix A ). As further support for the magnitude of this effect, adding the interaction variable to the baseline model for pooled results increases the explained variance (R square) from 0.049 to 0.132 (Appendix A ).

Simultaneous equation model for Canada

Simultaneous equation model for the United States

In terms of trust in mainstream news media (Research Question 4), Americans who identify with the right side of the ideological scale are less trusting of news media about climate change (Figure  3 ). Right‐wing ideology is also a predictor of media distrust in Canada (Figure  2 ). To answer Research Question 6, we find political ideology correlates with levels of trust in scientists on the topic of climate change. In the United States, those respondents who identify with the right side of the ideological scale are less trusting in scientists (Figure  3 ). Right‐wing ideology is also a predictor of distrust in scientists in Canada (Figure  2 ).

In relation to the odd‐numbered research questions, we outline the effects of ideology and trust in different information sources in relation to soft climate change denial. American respondents are more likely to believe that climate change is naturally occurring (Table  2 , Appendix B ). In relation to Research Question 1, political ideology relates to this form of climate change denial; respondents who identify with the right side of the ideological scale are more likely to believe climate change is naturally occurring. However, this relationship is more substantial in Canada (Figure  2 vs. Figure  3 ). In other words, it is rare for a Canadian to attribute climate change to natural causes, but those Canadians who do are more likely to identify as right‐wing versus left‐wing or independent. Modeling country differences in the role of ideology on climate change denial yields the same conclusion, and the interaction variable is statistically significant (see Appendix B ). To answer Research Question 1, we find that ideology has a stronger influence in Canada than the US, though this finding requires some qualification. In the United States, soft climate change denial is attributed to trust in a specific political leader, that is, President Donald Trump.

In contrast, data from Canada show no impact of trust in the Prime Minister on climate change denial (Figure  2 ). For Research Question 3, trust in political leaders matters more in the United States than Canada in relation to soft denial, but political ideology is more predictive of such denial in Canada than in the United States. We test these differential effects by introducing an interaction variable for country and trust in political leaders and find that it is statistically significant (Appendix B ).

Research Question 5 looks at trust in media and climate change denial. In both countries, trust in mainstream media sources negatively correlates with soft denial; those respondents who trust the media are less likely to think of climate change as a natural occurrence. This pattern is consistent in both countries. Individuals who trust in scientists are also less likely to believe in naturally occurring climate change (RQ7). In other words, distrust of news media and scientists is linked to soft climate change denial. In the United States, trust in political leaders is important for soft climate change denial.

As mentioned, the existing meta‐analysis by Hornsey et al. ( 2016 ) establishes political orientation as a significant predictor of climate change views; specifically that political ideology is a poorer predictor than political affiliation (0.149 vs. 0.301). In contrast, our cross‐national survey establishes that political ideology is a major predictor with implications far beyond climate change views. Political ideology also influences trust in information sources that inform beliefs about climate change.

Brulle et al. ( 2012 ) examine climate change views in the United States from 2002 to 2010. Of the more than 20 predictors of these opinions, they find that elite cues are a critical factor in people's climate change opinions. Our findings support this conclusion in the United States, extending research beyond the study of ideology as the source of climate change views. Trust in President Trump as a source of information about climate change is a top determinant of climate change views in the United States. However, this is not the case in Canada where trust in media and scientists are more important factors compared to trust in Prime Minister Trudeau.

Our research is based on cross‐sectional data collected in the context of elections in both countries and as such we cannot assess the causal order of our variables. We assume that people form their ideological views first, then form their opinions about the media, scientists, and leaders as sources of information about climate change, then finally, they form their views about this new form of soft climate denial. In the case of the United States, this causal ordering makes sense in that there was a change of leader in November 2016; in June 2017, citizens could form their views about this new leader as a source of information about climate change. In addition, as mentioned, soft denial seems to be a more contemporary iteration of climate denial, so it is possible they changed their views to align with their new leader's views. The causal process is less certain in Canada, because the 2019 election re‐elected Trudeau. It is not clear whether Canadians’ views about Trudeau impact their climate denial. This limitation is not specific to our research. As mentioned, a meta‐analysis of research does not consider the causal order of ideology and climate change opinions, nor does this research cite any over‐time panel data that could test the causal order (Hornsey et al., 2016 ). We offer some insights.

In the post‐Trump period, we could consider whether this soft denial and the related skepticism towards media and science is an enduring feature of American political culture. This skepticism is tied to populist discourse and populism has a global reach including in India, Switzerland, and many other European countries (Norris, 2020 ). Certainly, the COVID‐19 pandemic and the anti‐vaccination movement have placed scientific information at the forefront of policy debates. Our findings provide insight into the role of different information sources and political ideology in forming views about the pandemic and vaccination. Elite cues are important – ideology predicts which elites are trusted and these trusted elites are influential on public opinion.

As mentioned, limited research has been conducted specifically on soft climate change denial which manifests as skepticism in the attribution of climate change to human activity (Akter et al., 2012 ; Benegal, 2018 ; Klima, 2016 ; Nisbet & Myers, 2007 ). This attribution is important, as research suggests support for climate change policies relates to beliefs in the human causes of climate change (Akter et al., 2012 ; Hornsey et al., 2016 ; Sleeth‐Keppler et al., 2017 ; Stoutenborough et al., 2014 ). The soft form of climate change denial differs from existing patterns of cross‐national differences in climate change views, which suggest the US is more polarized than other countries (Tesler, 2018 ) due to its two‐party system. We find that right‐wing Canadians are more likely to believe in natural causes of climate change, indicating that Canada is more ideologically polarized in the case of attribution skepticism. In contrast, the effects of political ideology are smaller in the United States than in Canada once political leaders are considered in the model.

Our cross‐national study also highlights robust findings in relation to climate change views, including some consistent findings across the United States and Canada. Right‐wing ideology has a strong influence on distrust of scientists in both countries which is also linked to climate change denial in both countries. The connection found between trust and climate change views is consistent with that of Hornsey et al. ( 2016 ), however their meta‐analysis did not explore cross‐national differences. Lachapelle et al. ( 2012 ) find that Canadians are more likely than Americans to accept the scientific narrative about climate change. With our specific focus on the under‐studied form of soft denial, we did not see this pattern; our results for both countries are similar. However, with this form of climate change denial, trust in science remains a significant predictor; those who trust scientists are less likely to think climate change is naturally caused. Soft denial places science at center stage in terms of differentiating warming since the ice age versus climate change due to recent human activity.

Additionally, the meta‐analysis did not examine the role of mainstream news media in climate change views (Hornsey et al., 2016 ); this is a considerable gap because the majority of citizens receive their climate change information from news media. We compared two countries with some overlap in news sources but also with some distinct patterns in the media ecosystem. As previously outlined, Canada has a unique media landscape that includes many mainstream American news sources, whereas the American news diet does not include Canadian sources. For this reason, we did not expect trust in mainstream news sources to differ between Canada and the United States. The two countries demonstrate differences in relation to ideology and media. We explain these differences in terms of the US media ecosystem including prominent right‐wing news sources, such as Fox News, whereas the Canadian media ecosystem includes the CBC as a publicly funded broadcasting system (Brin, 2019 ).

As previously mentioned, Canada and the United States are ideal for comparison in climate change research due to similarities in federal systems, levels of carbon dioxide emissions, and trade relation policies (Lachapelle et al., 2012 ). However, the two countries differ in terms of political leaders and ideologies, which may account for the distinct patterns we observed in climate change views. In the United States, trust in President Trump as a source of climate change information is a strong predictor of attribution skepticism. In contrast, trust in the Canadian Prime Minister does not influence climate change views. Trusting President Trump about climate change increases the likelihood of believing that climate change is a natural occurrence. Considering the set of findings about distrust, the difference in views about political leaders might be a function of partisanship and populist style, where the US President cultivates distrust in all institutions, including scientific institutions and media outlets.

We have a number of recommendations for further research. First, our category of mainstream media sources is quite broad and detrimental with respect to understanding US‐Canada differences. We encourage a more nuanced approach to determine whether these mainstream media sources are Canadian or American as well as an isolation of distinct media sources in each country (e.g., Fox News versus the CBC). Second, we encourage additional research to examine the use of various information sources (government, religious leaders, friends, celebrities) and how this differs by country. Third, we need to look beyond ideology and trust in scientists as explanations for people's views when trying to examine variations in trust in information sources and to understand this form of climate change denial. The model fit statistics are modest in relation to this form of climate change denial and poor in relation to trust in information sources. Further research should explore other variables and their influence on trust in information sources. Our paper is best positioned to highlight the connection between political ideology, political leaders, and scientists in relation to the attribution skepticism form of climate change denial.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was made possible [in part] by an award from the Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge, funded in part by the Government of Canada. We thank Eric Merkley at the University of Toronto for managing the data collection for the Canadian survey and providing us with secondary access to the anonymous data. We thank Karolina Koc‐Michalska (Audencia Business School) for sharing the US data on climate change, which was funded through a grant from the Audencia Foundation.

APPENDIX TABLE A. LINEAR REGRESSION OF TRUST IN INFORMATION SOURCES

APPENDIX TABLE B. BINARY LOGISTIC REGRESSION OF CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL (NATURAL OCCURRENCE)

*Model 1 to 4 include the baseline model plus one interaction variable. R square is Cox & Snell.

APPENDIX TABLE C. SIMULTANEOUS EQUATION MODEL AMOS OUTPUT FOR CANADA

APPENDIX TABLE D. SIMULTANEOUS EQUATION MODEL AMOS OUTPUT FOR THE UNITED STATES

APPENDIX TABLE E. CORRELATION MATRIX FOR CANADA

APPENDIX TABLE F. CORRELATION MATRIX FOR THE UNITED STATES

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Want to sway the opinion of climate deniers? Start by acknowledging and respecting people’s beliefs. That’s one of four suggestions a Stanford researcher unearthed in a review of the psychology behind why some people reject climate change despite knowledge or access to the facts.

A new Stanford-led paper reviewed the psychological motivations of “motivated denial,” in which people know or have access to the facts, but nevertheless deny them. (Image credit: iStock)

Denying the effects of climate change serves as a barrier to taking the actions needed to mitigate the worst effects, including rising seas, more intense hurricanes and increased droughts and heatwaves. However, the researchers found that those who deny human causes for climate change can be swayed through conversations that appeal to their different identities, reframe solutions – or even embrace their climate views.

“I think in the climate change sphere there’s this thinking of, ‘there’s the deniers over there, let’s just not even engage with them – it’s not worth it,’” said behavioral scientist Gabrielle Wong-Parodi , lead author of the paper published in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability Jan. 8. “A lot of the tactics and strategies start from the point that something is wrong with the climate deniers, rather than trying to acknowledge that they have a belief and opinion and it matters. But I think there is an opportunity to keep trying to understand one another, especially now.”

The researchers focused on what is referred to as “motivated denial” – knowing or having access to the facts, but nevertheless denying them. For some people, accepting that humans cause climate change questions self-worth, threatens financial institutions and is accompanied by an overwhelming sense of responsibility.

Although efforts to sway climate deniers may seem futile, the researchers found four approaches in peer-reviewed studies from the past two years that could be most effective:

• Reframing solutions to climate change as ways to uphold the social system and work toward its stability and longevity
• Reducing the ideological divide by incorporating the purity of the Earth, rather than how we harm or care for it
• Having conversations about the scientific consensus around climate change with trusted individuals
• Encouraging people to explicitly discuss their values and stance on climate change prior to engaging with climate information

Wong-Parodi said she found the fourth approach to be the most intriguing because less research has been done in that area than the other three – and it seems to have a lot of potential for behavior change. Self-affirmation is challenged when people face climate change because it requires them to consider their contribution to the problem, which can threaten their sense of integrity and trigger self-defense.

“A good portion of people who deny climate change recognize that there is some change, but the change is so threatening because it basically could affect your quality of life. It could affect your income. It could affect a number of different things that you care about,” said Wong-Parodi, an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

Some preliminary studies suggest that rather than trying to get around people’s identities and denial of climate change, conversations should instead embrace their views. We should not try to ignore who people are, but rather acknowledge their views so that they can be dealt with and the conversation can move on to behavioral changes – such as finding solutions that match their values and do not threaten a person’s sense of identity or quality of life, according to Wong-Parodi.

“I think we often forget that people can have many identities – there might be a political identity, but there is also an identity as a mother, or an identity as a friend or an identity as a student,” said Wong-Parodi, who is also a fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment . “You can elicit other identities when you’re talking about climate change that may be more effective.”

To read all stories about Stanford science, subscribe to the biweekly  Stanford Science Digest .

Additional co-authors include Irina Feygina, an independent practitioner in Brooklyn, NY.

This work was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Media Contacts

Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences: (650) 725-6457; [email protected]

Danielle T. Tucker, School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences: (650) 497-9541, [email protected]

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Article Contents

Introduction, climate change disbelief and its potential roots, data, measures, and method, summary and conclusion.

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Socioeconomic Roots of Climate Change Denial and Uncertainty among the European Population

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Christiane Lübke, Socioeconomic Roots of Climate Change Denial and Uncertainty among the European Population, European Sociological Review , Volume 38, Issue 1, February 2022, Pages 153–168, https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcab035

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Despite the overwhelming scientific consensus, in many Western countries, there appears to be a considerable share of people questioning the existence and anthropogenic cause of climate change. Climate change disbelief includes the absolute rejection of the existence of anthropogenic climate change (climate change denial) as well as a lack of sureness about the anthropogenic cause of climate change (climate change uncertainty). Although considerable research on this phenomenon has been conducted, the roots of climate change disbelief are not yet fully understood. In this article, data from Round 8 of the European Social Survey are used to study the possible socioeconomic roots of climate change disbelief at the individual, regional, and country level. Results show that climate change denial is a marginal phenomenon among European populations but that a great share of people attributes climate change equally to human influences and natural processes. Thereby, it appears that the level of climate change disbelief varies between countries, and even more so between regions within countries. Results of various three-level multilevel models show that socioeconomic factors can partly explain this variation. Individuals who feel insecure about their economic future are significantly more likely to reject the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Furthermore, climate change denial and uncertainty are more common in more rural and less prosperous regions and in countries more economically dependent on fossil fuels. The results contribute to a deeper understanding of climate change disbelief among the European population and have important implications for climate change mitigation efforts.

Despite the overwhelming scientific consensus on the existence and anthropogenic causes of climate change ( IPCC, 2018 ), climate change disbelief has penetrated into public perceptions in many Western countries. A significant number of people persistently claim that the global climate is not changing at all, or that climate change is caused by natural processes rather than by human activities ( McCright and Dunlap, 2011a ; Poortinga et al. , 2019 ). While considerable research on this phenomenon has been conducted, several open questions still remain. These include the lack of clear understanding of the causes and the considerable cross-national variation of climate change disbelief. In this article, I seek to fill these gaps by discussing and examining the socioeconomic roots of different types of climate change disbelief among European populations at the individual, regional, and national levels.

There is clear evidence that climate change disbelief is not just the result of a lack of awareness or understanding ( Whitmarsh, 2011 ; Lockwood, 2018 ). Instead, climate change disbelief appears to be part of a broader, cross-national ideology that is characterized by opposing what is called ‘the mainstream’ and challenges basic human rights, scientific facts, and democratic principles ( Lockwood, 2018 ; Huber, 2020 ). Evidence of such an anti-mainstream ideology has also been observed on issues other than the environment, such as immigration, globalization, and pluralism. The spread of this ideology has been held responsible for the increasing popularity of populist radical right parties ( Inglehart and Norris, 2017 ; De Vries, 2018 ). Explanations for this development typically refer to a backlash against modernization ( Inglehart and Norris, 2016 ; McCright et al. , 2016 ; De Vries, 2018 ; Gidron and Hall, 2020 ). Climate change disbelief is assumed to be an ideological counter-reaction among some social groups, especially those who hold conservative values and support populist radical right parties ( Poortinga et al. , 2011 ; Whitmarsh, 2011 ; Lockwood, 2018 ; Krange, Kaltenborn and Hultman, 2019 ). It is, however, unclear whether the spread of climate change disbelief is also linked with factors other than ideological worldviews. In this article, I seek to fill this gap in the research by discussing and examining the socioeconomic roots of climate change disbelief among European populations.

Previous research has also shown that the level of climate change disbelief greatly varies between countries. This is most apparent in comparing the United States and Europe, whereas the level of climate change disbelief is much higher in the United States than in European countries ( McCright and Dunlap, 2011a ). Cross-European studies, however, also documented a great variation in the level of climate change disbelief across European countries ( McCright, Dunlap and Marquart-Pyatt, 2015 ; Poortinga et al. , 2019 ). Despite the increasing number of studies on that issue, the reasons for these cross-national variations are still not understood. Most existing studies on this topic have focused on single countries, such as Great Britain ( Poortinga et al. , 2011 ), Germany ( Engels et al. , 2013 ), or Norway ( Krange, Kaltenborn and Hultman, 2019 ); or did not adopt a multilevel approach to disentangle the contextual factors that shape climate change disbelief ( Poortinga et al. , 2019 ). In this study, I will focus on socioeconomic factors as potential explanations of these cross-national variations within Europe. In addition to previous studies, I will extend the analysis to the economic conditions at the regional level, assuming that economic development of the region where people live might shape people’s climate change belief, as they determine the actual opportunities and constraints that individuals face more than national averages. Using individual-level data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and contextual data provided by EUROSTAT, a series of multilevel logistic regressions are estimated that include factors on the individual, regional, and national level (three-level models with random effects at the regional and country levels).

By focusing on socioeconomic explanations for climate change disbelief, this study contributes to understanding the roots of climate change disbelief in Europe. This is crucial for understanding the opportunities and challenges governments face in establishing efficient and widely accepted policies for mitigating climate change. Together with many other countries around the globe, the European countries have signed the Paris agreement on limiting the temperature increase to below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels ( UNFCCC, 2015 ). The substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions needed to meet this target requires fundamental shifts in many areas of the economy, and of daily life. Efforts to implement such changes can only succeed if people are aware of the existence and the human causes of climate change. Studying climate change disbelief also contributes to the ongoing debate about on the roots of populism in many Western countries. Despite the plethora of research on the topic, the drivers of the increasing popularity of populist ideas are still not fully understood. Studying the roots of climate change denial and uncertainty will help us better understand the increasing popularity of populist ideas and parties in general.

The term climate change disbelief is used to describe the public rejection of the realities of global warming. It covers very different forms and dimensions, including the disbelief of the existence of climate change (called trend disbelief) and its human causes (attribution disbelief) ( Whitmarsh, 2011 ; Engels et al. , 2013 ; van Rensburg, 2015 ; Poortinga et al. , 2019 ). Recent surveys have shown that the share of people who completely reject the existence of climate change is very low in Europe, but that there is a substantial share of people who question the anthropogenic causes of climate change ( Poortinga et al. , 2018 ). The latter includes people who completely reject the human influence and those who do not fully realize the great extent of the human causes of climate change ( van Rensburg, 2015 ; Björnberg et al. , 2017 ). However, recognizing the anthropogenic causes of climate change in full is essential to supporting actions to mitigate climate change. Therefore, I use the term climate change denial 1 to refer to individuals who either state that the climate is not changing or that there is no anthropogenic climate change source. Furthermore, I use the term climate change uncertainty to refer to individuals who are uncertain and claim that natural processes and human activities about equally cause climate change.

The rejection of the realities of climate change has been described as a symptom of a broader anti-mainstream ideology that is characterized by opposing ongoing societal changes of modernization ( McCright, 2016 ; McCright et al. , 2016 ; see also Boström, Lidskog and Uggla, 2017 ). Explanations for this development typically refer to a backlash against modernization ( Inglehart and Norris, 2016 ; McCright et al. , 2016 ; De Vries, 2018 ; Gidron and Hall, 2020 ). The Anti-Reflexivity thesis describes climate change denial as a counter-movement against achievements of reflexive modernization ( McCright, 2016 ). Reflexivity refers to the idea that late-modern societies increasingly become aware of the ecological, technological, and social risks generated by their own technic-economic development and thus start to demand actions to tackle these problems ( Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994 ; see also Boström, Lidskog and Uggla, 2017 ). This process is mainly driven by scientific progress and social movements ( McCright, 2016 ). However, certain individuals and groups of society are unwilling to accept these insights and attempt to defend the status quo and the existing system against scientific evidence and widespread social movements ( McCright et al. , 2016 ). As the societal self-reflection process also includes the recognition of climate change as global problem, these groups are also unwilling to accept that there is a need to change in order to tackle climate change and question the existence and anthropogenic cause of climate change.

Ideological Explanations of Climate Change Disbelief

According to McCright (2016) , this anti-reflexive counter-reaction is motivated by both ideological and economic considerations. Ideological (also called cultural) explanations often refer to conservative values that make people unwilling to accept climate change mitigation changes. Climate change denial might thus be motivated by the wish to maintain or regain traditional social structures. This explanation has been called the ‘conservative white male effect’ ( McCright and Dunlap, 2011b ; Poortinga et al. , 2018 ; Krange, Kaltenborn and Hultman, 2019 ). Others have attributed climate change disbelief to a loss of trust in institutions such as political parties, the media, and science, and to the tendency to take an opposing stance towards all those they perceive as representing ‘the mainstream’ or the cosmopolitan elite ( Inglehart and Norris, 2016 ; Lockwood, 2018 ; Huber, 2020 ).

These ideological explanations are supported by the consistent findings that politically conservative men report higher levels of climate change denial than their liberal counterparts ( McCright and Dunlap, 2011a ; Krange, Kaltenborn and Hultman, 2019 ; Poortinga et al. , 2019 , 2011 ). This divide becomes most obvious in the large partisan polarization on climate change belief in the United States, whereby Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to express doubt about climate change ( McCright and Dunlap, 2011a ). Political orientation also appears to be an important predictor of climate change denial outside the United States, as shown by studies using data from single countries such as Australia ( Tranter, 2013 ), Great Britain ( Poortinga et al. , 2011 ), Germany ( Engels et al. , 2013 ), or Norway ( Krange, Kaltenborn and Hultman, 2019 ) as well as studies examining cross-national data ( McCright, Dunlap and Marquart-Pyatt, 2015 ; Tranter and Booth, 2015 ; Poortinga et al. , 2019 ). Focusing on individuals’ left-right ideology in the European context, studies have shown that individuals who place themselves on the right side of the political spectrum were less likely to believe in anthropogenic climate change and to perceive climate change to be a serious problem compared to individuals who place themselves on the left side ( Poortinga et al. , 2011 ; Whitmarsh, 2011 ).

Socioeconomic Explanations of Climate Change Disbelief

In addition to ideological roots, the resistance to societal changes and thus the tendency to disbelieve in climate change might also be caused by socioeconomic factors ( McCright et al. , 2016 ). It is often assumed that there is a tradeoff between economic considerations and the importance people place on environmental issues such as climate change ( Scruggs and Benegal, 2012 ; Kachi, Bernauer and Gampfer, 2015 ). In particular, individuals are believed to have a ‘finite pool of worries’ ( Whitmarsh, 2011 ). This describes the phenomenon that people can only pay attention to a small number of developments and perceive them as threats. Anything that is not part of this simply is outside of their perception. Individuals concerned about the current economic situation or the future economic outlook might thus not be able to pay attention to climate change and thus ignore or even reject any information on the existence and human cause of climate change.

This explanation has been used to describe the relationship between economic wealth and climate change awareness in a cross-sectional perspective. It has often been assumed that individuals living in more economically advanced countries are more likely to be concerned about climate change because they ‘have no other worries’ (in this context also called the prosperity hypothesis, see Franzen and Meyer, 2010 ). Empirical findings on this, however, yielded mixed results. While some studies found a significant correlation between national economic conditions and climate change concern ( Scruggs and Benegal, 2012 ; Knight, 2018 ), others studies found little if any evidence of such a correlation ( Kachi, Bernauer and Gampfer, 2015 ; Mildenberger and Leiserowitz, 2017 ). One reason for these mixed results could be the way economic conditions are operationalized. Most studies rely on contextual information such as the country’s unemployment levels or GDP rates to capture economic worries. It is assumed that a high unemployment rate is perceived as a threat to individuals’ economic security and thus increases economic worries. While this approach is appropriate, it nevertheless overlooks two important points: first, the national average does not necessarily equal the situation in the region where a person lives. Individuals are probably more likely to react to conditions in the region where they live rather than to the average conditions in their country as they determine the real opportunities and constraints that individuals face.

Second, previous research hardly considers socioeconomic factors at the individual level. Research, however, has shown that in particular subjective worries about current economic situation and future economic outlook shape individuals’ preferences and worldviews. There is, for example, a rich literature on the political effects of self-perceived job insecurity showing that subjective insecurities in particular reduce trust in political institutions ( Wroe, 2016 ; Nguyen, 2017 ), and give rise to anti-immigrant attitudes ( Billiet, Meuleman and De Witte, 2014 ). Based on these considerations, the following hypotheses about the socioeconomic roots of climate change denial will be examined:

H1 : Individuals who live in economically disadvantaged regions or countries are more likely to disbelieve the existence of anthropogenic climate change. H2 : Individuals who subjectify perceive economic hardship or feel insecure about their economic future are more likely to disbelieve the existence of anthropogenic climate change.

In addition, climate change disbelief might also be shaped by economic self-interests. Mitigation of climate change requires a substantial rebuild of the current economic system and might thus be perceived as a threat to the current socioeconomic security. Individuals employed in sectors dependent on fossil fuels, for example, might be concerned about the stability of their current jobs. This might be particularly the case in countries highly dependent on fossil fuel production and consumption ( Tranter and Booth, 2015 ; Knight, 2018 ). It is argued that individuals living in areas where the economy is highly dependent on the fossil fuel industry may perceive climate change mitigation as an economic threat to what is seen as the basis of economic prosperity. Denying climate change might thus be motivated by a desire to protect one’s economic interests and maintain the status quo. In favour of this line of argumentation, Tranter and Booth (2015) indeed found that individuals in countries with greater carbon emissions per capita were more likely to dismiss climate change. Knight (2018) confirmed this finding by showing that a country’s dependency on fossil fuel production was significant and negatively related to the share of its population who acknowledged the human causes of climate change. However, these studies neither controlled for individual data nor focused on Europe. Nevertheless, I expect that:

H3 : Individuals who live in regions or countries more dependent on fossil fuels are more likely to deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change.

Individual-level data were drawn from Round 8 of the ESS, a population-representative cross-national survey that has been conducted every 2 years across Europe since 2002. Round 8 was collected in 2016/2017, and included questions designed to assess people’s perceptions of global warming, including their belief in the existence and anthropogenic causes of climate change ( Poortinga et al. , 2018 ). The analysis covers 25,230 individuals living in 165 regions across 20 European countries, which are Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), Switzerland (CH), Czechia (CZ), Germany (DE), Estonia (EE), Spain (ES), Finland (FI), France (FR), United Kingdom (UK), Hungary (HU), Ireland (IE), Iceland (IS), Italy (IT), Lithuania (LT), the Netherlands (NL), Norway (NO), Poland (PL), Portugal (PT), and Sweden (SE). Israel, the Russian Federation, and Slovenia are excluded from the analyses due to missing context data.

The regions within the countries were defined using the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) established by Eurostat. The NUTS classification determines three regional levels, mostly along administrative boundaries, with a minimum and a maximum population size for each level. NUTS 1 captures major socioeconomic regions with a minimum population of three million to a maximum population of seven million. NUTS 2 refers to basic regions with a minimum population of 800,000. NUTS 3 refers to small regions with a minimum population of 150,000 ( Eurostat, 2020 ). I followed the recommendations of the ESS Documentation ( ESS Round 8: European Social Survey, 2020 ) and used a mix of all NUTS units, depending on the sample size and data availability. Regions with fewer than 50 respondents were clustered within a higher NUTS level or summarized with neighbouring regions. The number of regions per country varied from two (Iceland) to 18 (France). Table A1 in the Appendix shows the total number of valid observations, the NUTS level used, and the number of resulting regions for each country. Country- and regional-specific context data were derived from Eurostat (see also Table A2 in the Appendix).

The outcome variables refer to different forms of climate change disbelief, namely climate change denial and climate change uncertainty. Climate change denial refers to individuals holding the position that the climate is definitely or probably not changing, or that climate change is mainly or entirely due to natural processes. Individuals stating that the climate is probably or definitely changing, and that that climate change is at least partly caused by human activity formed the reference group. In addition, climate change uncertainty refers to individuals stating that the climate is probably or definitely changing, but that climate change is about equally caused by human activity and natural processes. The reference group was those who do not only believe in climate change but also attributed it mainly to human activities.

The following analyses included several control variables. Gender is a dummy variable with the value 0 for women and 1 for men. Age is operationalized as metric variables ranging from 18 to 80 years. Education is recoded into a variable with three categories, based on the international classification scheme ISCED: no or only primary education (used as the reference category), secondary education, and tertiary education. Furthermore, individuals’ social class is controlled for based on the class scheme proposed by Oesch (2006) . Social class was distinguished into five groups: ‘higher-grade service class’ (1), ‘lower-grade service class’ (2), ‘small business owners’ (3), ‘skilled worker’ (4), and ‘unskilled worker’ (5). All individuals who reported being unemployed were included in the category ‘unemployed’ (6), and all individuals who were not employed for any other reason (such as those who were in education or retired) were included in the category ‘others’ (7).

Ideological factors of climate change denial and uncertainty were captured by conservation values and political orientation. Using the well-established Schwartz scale of human values, the analysis includes a metric variable capturing an individual’s conservation values (vs. openness-to-change). The political orientation was introduced as a metric variable based on the standard left-right self-placement. Respondents are asked to position themselves on an 11-point scale from 0 (far left) to 10 (far right). Economic factors were first captured by perceived current economic hardship, distinguishing between individuals who find it difficult or very difficult to live on their present income (1), and those living comfortably or coping with their present income (0). Second, I measured individuals’ self-reported economic outlook. I distinguished between individuals who considered it very likely or likely that their ‘household income will not be enough for necessities in the next 12 months’ (1) and those who considered that situation very unlikely or unlikely (0). Descriptive statistics of variables at the individual level are displayed in Table A3 in Appendix.

Several regional and country-level variables were used to operationalize socioeconomic situation at the contextual level: first, I considered the unemployment rate (as a share of the unemployed within the labour force) and short-term changes therein at the regional and country level to capture current labour market situation. Second, countries and regional economic prosperity were measured using GDP at current market prices (PPP, per capita) and again recent changes therein. Third, I considered CO2 emissions per GDP to indicate countries’ economic dependency on fossil fuels. At the regional level, I further controlled for population density and total population change. All of the contextual variables were provided by EUROSTAT standardized to have a zero mean and a unit standard deviation across countries or regions.

Multilevel logistic regression analysis (also called random coefficient regression) was applied, as this facilitates accounting for the hierarchical structure of the data used ( Snijders and Bosker, 2012 ; Stegmueller, 2013 ; Hox, Moerbeek and van de Schoot, 2017 ). Contrary to many other studies employing multilevel analysis, I chose to use regions as a further contextual level in addition to countries. This has the advantage of enabling me to more precisely describe the socioeconomic and cultural context of the region in which a person actually lives. Second, using within-country regions as a further contextual level increases the number of contextual units, and enables me to obtain more reliable results ( Bryan and Jenkins, 2016 ). Thus, I estimated three-level models with random effects at the regional and the country level. This modelling approach allows me to highlight the existing variance in climate change disbelief across and within European countries, and to separate compositional effects from ‘true’ structural effects based on differences between regions and countries ( Hox, Moerbeek and van de Schoot, 2017 ).

Descriptive Results

Figure 1 shows the mean level of climate change denial and climate change uncertainty across 20 European countries covered by the present analyses. Starting with climate change denial, it appears that the share of population in each country who denied the existence and anthropogenic causes of climate change entirely was rather low (dark bars). The highest level of climate denial by far was observed in Lithuania, where about 26 per cent of respondents denied the reality of anthropogenic climate change. The level of climate change denial was much lower in the other countries, ranging from about 15 per cent in Czechia to 6 per cent in Iceland, and Spain. The level of climate change uncertainty appears to be much higher across European countries (grey bars). The share of people who felt uncertain about the cause of climate change and attributed it equally to natural processes and human activity ranges from 29 per cent in Austria to 55 per cent in Poland. Thus, the great majority of Europeans acknowledged the existence of climate change, but in many countries large parts of the population did not appear fully aware of the dominant anthropogenic cause of climate change.

Level of climate change denial and uncertainty across European countries Source : ESS Round 8, own calculations (weighted using design and population weights).

In addition to these variations between countries, my analysis further revealed a considerable variation of climate change denial and climate change uncertainty between regions within countries. Figure 2 maps this regional distribution of climate change denial, whereby a darker colour indicates a higher share of climate change denial. Considerable variation in the level of climate change denial between regions can be observed in most countries. This variation was strongest in Lithuania, where the level of climate change denial ranges from 9 per cent to about 48 per cent (see Table A4 in Appendix for highest and the lowest values, as well as the standard deviation of climate change denial of the regions within each country). The variation was also quite strong in Estonia, Austria, Ireland, France, and Norway. As illustrated in Figure 3 , the level of climate change uncertainty similarly varies between regions and ranges from 22 per cent to about 74 per cent (see again also Table A4 in the Appendix). This variation was particularly high in Hungary, Poland, and Czechia. It appears that climate change disbelief is not concentrated in a few countries, but are spread throughout Europe, and emerged as an issue in certain regions of many European countries. However, no clear geographical pattern of climate change denial and uncertainty appears at first sight.

Regional variation in the level of climate change denial

Source : ESS Round 8, own calculations and presentation based on shapefiles of NUTS 2013 provided by Eurostat GISCO. Intervals are obtained by the boxplot method.

Regional variation in the level of climate change uncertainty

Multilevel Results on the Individual and Contextual Determinants of Climate Change Disbelief

In the following, individual, regional-level and country-specific determinants of climate change denial and climate change uncertainty are successively explored. Table 1 shows the results of various multilevel logistic regression models concerning climate change denial, and Table 2 the corresponding results concerning climate change uncertainty. The analyses start with three-level multilevel models without any covariable (so-called ‘empty model’) to gauge the variance at the country and regional level. The variance at the country level was highly statistically significant, and the interclass correlation (ICC) was 0.04 for climate change denial and 0.03 for climate change uncertainty. The ICC indicates the size of variance that is explained by differences between context levels ( Snijders and Bosker, 2012 ). Here, it indicated that 4 per cent of the variation in climate change denial and 3 per cent of climate change uncertainty is attributable to differences at the country level. Furthermore, there were also significant variations at the regional level. The ICCs of 0.07 and of 0.05, respectively indicated that 7 per cent of the variation in climate change denial and 5 per cent of climate change uncertainty were attributable to differences at the regional level. The estimates of the variance components did not change considerably when individual level variables were included. These results indicated that there is considerable variation between countries, and even greater variation between regions within Europe. Thus, these findings highlight the need for a multilevel model that accounts both country and regional level variance.

Individual level determinants of climate change denial

Notes : Average marginal effects (AME) from multi-level logistic regression models on climate change denial, standard error in parentheses.

N  = 28,044 individuals, 165 regions, 20 countries.

P  <   0.05;

P  <   0.01;

P  <   0.001.

Individual level determinants of climate change uncertainty

Note : Average marginal effects (AME) from multi-level logistic regression models on climate change uncertainty, standard error in parentheses.

N  = 25,230 individuals, 165 regions, 20 countries.

Before I turn to contextual factors that might explain these variations, I present results concerning individual-level variables. First, results concerning the individual-level correlates of climate change denial are presented in Table 1 . These results confirm previous research showing that men are more likely than women to reject the realities of global warming (e.g. Engels et al. , 2013 ; Poortinga et al. , 2019 ) and further indicate that climate change denial increases with age. Furthermore, significant educational differences appeared. Individuals with secondary or tertiary education were much less likely to deny climate change than those with primary level of education. There were hardly any significant differences between socioeconomic groups. Only unskilled workers were significantly more likely than members of the higher-grade service class to deny climate change.

In addition to these socio-demographic and socioeconomic variables, Model 3 included variables capturing ideological worldviews and Model 4 variables capturing subjective economic situation. It appears that political orientation, but not conservative values were significantly linked with climate change. Individuals who described themselves as more politically right-wing were more likely to deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Holding conservative values was, like in the study recently conducted by Poortinga (2019) , not significantly related to climate change denial. It further appears that individual economic outlook is an important predictor of climate change denial. Individuals who reported they believe that their economic situation will be worse in the future were significantly more likely to deny climate change than those who were optimistic about their economic future. In contrast, people who perceived their economic situation as bad were not more likely to reject climate change. This suggests that it is not an individual's current level of economic hardship, but his or her fear of losing economic security in the near future, that influences climate change belief or disbelief. Model 5 in Table 1 included variables of both ideological worldview and subjective economic situation simultaneously. Effects of both political orientation and subjective economic outlook remained significant, suggesting that ideological and economic explanations of climate change denial are distinct.

Results concerning individual-level determinants of climate change uncertainty are presented in Table 2 . As outlined above, climate change uncertainty refers to individuals’ feeling unsure about the anthropogenic cause of climate change and attributing climate change about equally to natural processes and human activities. The reference group here consists of those who reported that they attribute climate change mainly or entirely to human activities. Climate change uncertainty was observed to increase with age, but, contrary to climate change denial, was more common among women than men. There was again a significant association with education, indicating that individuals with tertiary education were less likely to feel uncertain about the causes of climate change. Individuals with secondary education, however, did not differ from those with primary education. In contrast to climate change denial, socioeconomic status appeared to be an important determinant of climate change uncertainty. Individuals with lower socioeconomic status such as skilled workers, unskilled workers, and people who were unemployed were more likely to attribute climate change equally to natural processes and human activities. Members of lower-grad service class and in particular small business owners were more likely to feel unsure about the cause of climate change compared to members of the higher-grade service class.

Analogue to Table 1 , Table 2 also contains indicators of individuals’ ideological worldview and subjective economic situation. It appears that again ideological variables were significantly linked with climate change uncertainty. Those holding conservative values and placing themselves more on the right sight of the political spectrum were more likely to be uncertain about the cause of climate change. Individuals’ subjective economic situation, however, was not significantly linked with climate change uncertainty.

In the next step, the effects of several contextual variables at both the regional and the national level were tested. At the regional level, I considered population density, population growth, the unemployment rate and GDP per capita, and the changes in unemployment and GDP in recent years. At the country level, I again introduced the unemployment rate, GDP per capita, and the respective changes. Furthermore, the CO 2 emissions per GDP (the current rate as well as reductions in recent years) were introduced at the country level as a measure of economic dependency on fossil fuels. Table 3 displays results from three-level logistic regressions in which I included one macro variable at a time.

Effects of contextual variables on climate change denial and uncertainty

Note : Average marginal effects (AMEs) from multi-level models on climate change denial and uncertainty, standard error in parentheses. The effects are obtained from different multi-level models controlling for individual-level variables mentioned in Tables 2 and 3 , which are age, gender, level of education, socio-economic status, conservative values, political orientation, perceived current economic hardship, and expected economic hardship.

N  = 28,044/25,230 individuals, 165 regions, 20 countries.

No data available for Spain.

At the regional level, the present analysis found no significant association between climate change denial and indicators of current economic conditions. Notably, this is in contrast to the initial analysis, which uncovered substantial variation attributed to differences at the regional level (see again Table 2 ). There were, however, two significant effects for climate change uncertainty. Climate change uncertainty was less likely in regions with a higher population density and a higher GDP per capita. This suggests that individuals living in prosperous urban areas are more likely to accept the anthropogenic cause of climate change than those living in more rural and less affluent regions within Europe. This effect, however, is rather small and only significant at 5 per cent level.

At the country level, there was a significant relationship between unemployment rate and climate change disbelief, which, contradicts the assumed direction. It appears that both climate change denial and climate change uncertainty were more likely in countries with a lower unemployment rate. Recent changes in unemployment, however, were not significantly linked with climate change disbelief. There was also no significant with the GDP and its recent changes. There was, however, a significant relationship between climate change denial and a country’s CO 2 emissions per GDP. That means that individuals living in countries where the economy is more dependent on fossil fuels, and where the transition to a low-carbon economy is thus more costly, were less likely to report acceptance of the realities of global warming. In addition, levels of climate change denial were also higher in countries that have recently reduced their CO 2 emissions per GDP.

In this article, I used data from Round 8 of the ESS to investigate the socioeconomic roots of climate change disbelief among the European population. Different forms of climate change disbelief were distinguished: climate change denial and climate change uncertainty. Climate change denial was defined as the absolute rejection of the existence of and the anthropogenic causes of climate change. Climate change uncertainty refers to the lack of sureness about the anthropogenic cause of climate change and is used to describe individuals who attribute climate change equally to both natural processes and human activities.

The results of this study confirm that climate change denial is a marginal phenomenon among European populations, and that a great majority of Europeans acknowledge the reality of climate change and attribute it at least partly to human activities (see also Poortinga et al. , 2018 ). There is, however, great uncertainty concerning its anthropogenic cause as a considerable share of people is not aware of the great importance human activities have for climate change. It further appeared that the level of climate change denial and uncertainty varies between countries, and to an even greater extent between regions within countries. These regional variations have so far been mostly hidden behind national averages, but surely need to be explored further. They show that climate change disbelief accumulates in certain regions across Europe, even in countries where the average level of disbelief is relatively small. Studying these regional variations can further enhance our understanding of the roots of climate change denial and uncertainty.

This article focused on socioeconomic roots of climate change disbelief, which have so far been widely overlooked in previous research. The results of the presented analysis showed that climate change disbelief is not only linked with certain ideological worldviews but also with economic factors at the individual, regional and national level. Climate change disbelief was much more common among members of social classes who are strongly exposed to labour market risks (such as unskilled workers and small business owners), as well as among those who reported feeling insecure about their economic situation in the future. In contrast, people who reported currently experiencing economic hardship were not more or less likely to deny climate change. This finding confirms previous research arguing that it is not economic hardship or deprivation per se , but the fear of losing one’s social status that makes people more prone to support populist ideas and parties ( Gidron and Hall, 2020 ). Furthermore, in the present study, climate change denial and uncertainty were more common in more rural and less prosperous regions and countries more economically dependent on fossil fuels. These results indicate that climate change disbelief is not only shaped by ideological factors but also by economic context.

All in all, the results suggest that socioeconomic factors also shape an individual’s climate change belief, and that they may work in addition to or in conjunction with cultural factors. In the present analysis, they appeared to be distinct determinates. However, much more research is needed to understand the causes and the considerable cross-national variation of climate change disbelief in more detail and discover the interrelation between economic and ideological factors. Thus, future research on climate change denial should strive to include economic factors, particularly those at the contextual level. The great regional variation that remained after controlling for socioeconomic conditions may, however, also point to the importance of long-term structural changes that go beyond the time horizon of this study. In addition, it could suggest that there are long-term cultural differences between regions that may, for example, affect people’s trust in institutions. There might be persistent, long-term cultural differences between regions and countries that are hard to measure, but that shape people's reactions to socioeconomic insecurity, and, thus, their attitudes and beliefs ( Cantoni, Hagemeister and Westcott, 2019 ). Analysing such cultural differences could considerably enhance our understanding of the rising support for populist ideas in general. Future attempts to explain the roots of climate change denial should go beyond measuring economic and cultural factors at the individual level to consider contextual factors. Studying such regional differences might help us better understand the roots of climate change denial and populist ideas.

The findings of this study have to be seen in the light of some limitations. A major limitation is that because only cross-sectional data were analysed, no causal associations could be detected. Another limitation is that the study focused only on ideological and socioeconomic explanations of climate change disbelief. In addition, there are certainly other factors that might also affect climate change perception, such as experience with severe weather or the kind of media coverage (see for example Scruggs and Benegal, 2012 ). There is an emerging research strand that shows that individuals climate change belief is also shaped by different experiences with weather anomalies and severe weather events, which can make people more aware of climate change and serve as a kind of evidence of its existence ( Whitmarsh, 2008 ; McCright, Dunlap and Xiao, 2014 ; Cutler et al. , 2018 ). The revealed regional variations of climate change denial and climate change uncertainty might thus also be attributed to different exposure to extreme weather so far.

Despite these limitations, this article contributes to our understanding of the roots of climate change disbelief, and, thus, to the more general understanding of the rising anti-reflexivity in many Western countries. This also includes the success of mostly extreme right-wing populist parties who deny climate change in many places. Climate change denial appears to be part of a broader, cross-national populist ideology that opposes what is called ‘the mainstream’, and that also includes extreme positions on issues other than the environment, such as immigration, globalization, and pluralism.

The term climate change skepticism is often used synonymously to describe disbelief in anthropogenic climate change. Skepticism (or doubt) is, however, an integral part of the scientific process, and thus the usage of climate change skepticism is misleading in the sense that it suggests that disbelief in climate change is a legitimate debate. Denial, in contrast, describes the automatic refusal of climate change regardless of any evidence ( Lewandowsky et al. , 2016 ). I therefore prefer to use the term climate change denial to capture individual motivated disbelief in the existence and the anthropogenic causes of climate change.

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Overview of countries and regions included in analysis

Source : ESS Round 8, own calculations.

Descriptive statistics of contextual variables

Source : ESS Round 8, own calculations (unweighted, unstandardized).

Descriptive statistics of variables at individual level ( N  = 28,044)

Source : ESS Round 8, own calculations (unweighted).

Distribution of climate change denial and uncertainty across Europe

Source : ESS Round 8, own calculations (weighted using design and population weights).

Christiane Lübke is postdoc at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her research interests include environmental awareness and risk perception, pro-environmental behaviour and sustainable lifestyles, social inequality, technological change, and job insecurity.

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Articles on Climate change denial

Displaying 1 - 20 of 131 articles.

Repeating aids believing: climate misinformation feels more true through repetition - even if you back climate science

Yangxueqing (Mary) Jiang , Australian National University ; Eryn Newman , Australian National University ; Kate Reynolds , The University of Melbourne , and Norbert Schwarz , USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Australia now has a $70 ‘shadow price’ on carbon emissions. Here’s why we won’t see a real price any time soon

John Quiggin , The University of Queensland

Can we be inoculated against climate misinformation? Yes – if we prebunk rather than debunk

Christian Turney , University of Technology Sydney and Sander van der Linden , University of Cambridge

Climate change believers are more likely to cooperate with strangers, new research finds

Ananish Chaudhuri , University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau ; Quentin Douglas Atkinson , University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau , and Scott Claessens , University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

Climate change: multi-country media analysis shows scepticism of the basic science is dying out

James Painter , University of Oxford

The new climate denial? Using wealth to insulate yourself from discomfort and change

Hannah Della Bosca , University of Sydney

We’ve lost a giant: Vale Professor Will Steffen, climate science pioneer

John Finnigan , CSIRO ; Pep Canadell , CSIRO , and Steven J Lade , Stockholm University

Exxon scientists accurately forecast climate change back in the 1970s – what if we had listened to them and acted then?

John Grant , Sheffield Hallam University

For 110 years, climate change has been in the news. Are we finally ready to listen?

Linden Ashcroft , The University of Melbourne

Three reasons why climate change models are our best hope for understanding the future

Mark Maslin , UCL

‘Don’t Look Up’: Hollywood’s primer on climate denial illustrates 5 myths that fuel rejection of science

Gale Sinatra , University of Southern California and Barbara K. Hofer , Middlebury

Climate change denial 2.0 was on full display at COP26, but there was also pushback

David Tindall , University of British Columbia ; Mark CJ Stoddart , Memorial University of Newfoundland , and Riley E Dunlap , Oklahoma State University

The ‘97% climate consensus’ is over. Now it’s well above 99% (and the evidence is even stronger than that)

Steve Turton , CQUniversity Australia

Fossil fuel misinformation may sideline one of the most important climate change reports ever released

Christian Downie , Australian National University

A controversial US book is feeding climate denial in Australia. Its central claim is true, yet irrelevant

Ian Lowe , Griffith University

Matt Canavan suggested the cold snap means global warming isn’t real. We bust this and 2 other climate myths

Nerilie Abram , Australian National University ; Martin De Kauwe , UNSW Sydney , and Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick , UNSW Sydney

Most people consider climate change a serious issue, but rank other problems as more important. That affects climate policy

Sam Crawley , Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Three possible futures for global climate scepticism

Eloise Harding , University of Southampton

‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial

Paul Braterman , University of Glasgow

Faith and politics mix to drive evangelical Christians’ climate change denial

Adrian Bardon , Wake Forest University

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Meet the Money Behind The Climate Denial Movement

Nearly a billion dollars a year is flowing into the organized climate change counter-movement

Colin Schultz

The overwhelming majority of climate scientists , international governmental bodies , relevant research institutes and scientific societies are in unison in saying that climate change is real, that it's a problem, and that we should probably do something about it now, not later. And yet, for some reason, the idea persists in some peoples' minds that climate change is up for debate, or that climate change is no big deal.

Actually, it's not “for some reason” that people are confused. There's a very obvious reason. There is a very well-funded, well-orchestrated climate change-denial movement, one funded by powerful people with very deep pockets. In a new and incredibly thorough study , Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle took a deep dive into the financial structure of the climate deniers, to see who is holding the purse strings .

According to Brulle's research , the 91 think tanks and advocacy organizations and trade associations that make up the American climate denial industry pull down just shy of a billion dollars each year , money used to lobby or sway public opinion on climate change and other issues. (The grand total also includes funds used to support initiatives unrelated to climate change denial, as explained in a quote Brulle gave to The Guardian : “Since the majority of the organizations are multiple focus organizations, not all of this income was devoted to climate change activities.”)

“The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires,” says the Guardian , “often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change.”

“This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power,” he said. “They have their profits and they hire people to write books that say climate change is not real. They hire people to go on TV and say climate change is not real. It ends up that people without economic power don't have the same size voice as the people who have economic power, and so it ends up distorting democracy.

Last year, PBS talked to Brulle about his investigation into the climate change countermovement . The project, says Brulle, is the first part of three: in the future he'll turn a similar eye to the climate movement and to the environmental movement. But for now, the focus is on the deniers.

Now, what you can see in the movement itself is that it has two real roots. One is in the conservative movement itself, in that you see a lot of conservative foundations that had been funding the growth of the conservative movement all along now appear as funding the climate countermovement. You also can see dedicated industry foundations that come in to start funding the climate countermovement.   So it’s kind of a combination of both industry and conservative philanthropies that are funding this process, and what they did was they borrowed a great deal of the strategy and tactics that came out of the tobacco industry’s efforts to prevent action on the health impacts of smoking. What you see is the tactics that this movement uses were developed and tested in the tobacco industry first, and now they’re being applied to the climate change movement, and in fact, some of the same people and some of the same organizations that were involved in the tobacco issue are also involved in climate change.

Here's where the money is coming from:

Click to legibilize. Funding breakdown of a subset of the climate change countermovement players in Brulle's analysis. Photo: Brulle

The climate denial movement is a powerful political force, says Brulle. They've got to be, too, to outweigh in the public's mind the opinions of pretty much every relevant scientist. Brulle:

With delay and obfuscation as their goals, the U.S. CCCM has been quite successful in recent decades. However, the key actors in this cultural and political conflict are not just the “experts” who appear in the media spotlight. The roots of climate-change denial go deeper, because individuals’ efforts have been bankrolled and directed by organizations that receive sustained support from foundations and funders known for their overall commitments to conservative causes. Thus to fully understand the opposition to climate change legislation, we need to focus on the institutionalized efforts that have built and maintain this organized campaign. Just as in a theatrical show, there are stars in the spotlight. In the drama of climate change, these are often prominent contrarian scientists or conservative politicians, such as Senator James Inhofe. However, they are only the most visible and transparent parts of a larger production. Supporting this effort are directors, script writers, and, most importantly, a series of producers, in the form of conservative foundations. Clarifying the institutional dynamics of the CCCM can aid our understanding of how anthropogenic climate change has been turned into a controversy rather than a scientific fact in the U.S.

More from Smithsonian magazine:

A Friendly Reminder From Pretty Much Every Climate Scientist in the World: Climate Change Is Real It’s 95 Percent Certain That We’re the Main Cause of Climate Change Head of World’s Largest Oil Company Suggests Climate Change is No Big Deal Three Quarters of Americans Now Believe Climate Change Is Affecting the Weather

Editor's note, October 25, 2019: This story has been updated to clarify that total amount includes funds spent on initiatives unrelated to climate change.

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Colin Schultz | | READ MORE

Colin Schultz is a freelance science writer and editor based in Toronto, Canada. He blogs for Smart News and contributes to the American Geophysical Union. He has a B.Sc. in physical science and philosophy, and a M.A. in journalism.

• Environment

Scientists Have Been Talking About Climate Change for More Than a Century. Here’s Why It Took So Long for the World to Listen

This post is in partnership with the History News Network , the website that puts the news into historical perspective. A version of the article below was originally published at HNN.

The girl got up to speak before a crowd of global leaders. “Coming here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future. Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come.” She continued: “I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rain forests full of birds and butterflies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see. Did you have to worry about these little things when you were my age? All this is happening before our eyes.” She challenged the adults in the room: “parents should be able to comfort their children by saying ‘everything’s going to be alright,’ ‘we’re doing the best we can’ and ‘it’s not the end of the world.’ But I don’t think you can say that to us anymore.”

No, these were not Greta Thunberg’s words earlier this year. This appeal came from Severn Suzuki at the Rio Earth Summit back in 1992. In the 27 years since, we have produced more than half of all the greenhouse gas emissions in history .

Reading recent media reports, you could be forgiven for thinking that climate change is a sudden crisis. From the New York Times : “ Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change .” From the Financial Times : “ Climate Change is Reaching a Tipping Point .” If the contents of these articles have surprised Americans, it reveals far more about the national discourse than then any new climate science. Scientists have understood the greenhouse effect since the 19th century. They have understood the potential for human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming for decades. Only the fog of denialism has obscured the long-held scientific consensus from the general public.

Who knew what when?

Joseph Fourier was Napoleon’s science adviser. In the early 19th century, he studied the nature of heat transfer and concluded that given the Earth’s distance from the sun, our planet should be far colder than it was. In an 1824 work, Fourier explained that the atmosphere must retain some of Earth’s heat . He speculated that human activities might also impact Earth’s temperature. Just over a decade later, Claude Pouillet theorized that water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere trap infrared heat and warm the Earth. In 1859, the Irish physicist John Tyndall demonstrated empirically that certain molecules such as CO2 and methane absorb infrared radiation. More of these molecules meant more warming. Building on Tyndall’s work, Sweden’s Svante Arrhenius investigated the connection between atmospheric CO2 and the Earth’s climate. Arrhenius devised mathematical rules for the relationship. In doing so, he produced the first climate model. He also recognized that humans had the potential to change Earth’s climate, writing “the enormous combustion of coal by our industrial establishments suffices to increase the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air to a perceptible degree.”

Later scientific work supported Arrhenius’ main conclusions and led to major advancements in climate science and forecasting. While Arrhenius’ findings were discussed and debated in the first half of the 20th century, global emissions rose. After WWII, emission growth accelerated and began to raise concerns in the scientific community. During the 1950s, American scientists made a series of troubling discoveries. Oceanographer Roger Reveille showed that the oceans had a limited capacity to absorb CO2 . Furthermore, CO2 lingered in the atmosphere for far longer than expected, allowing it to accumulate over time. At the Mauna Loa observatory, Charles David Keeling conclusively showed that atmospheric CO2 concentrations were rising . Before John F. Kennedy took office, many scientists were already warning that current emissions trends had the potential to drastically alter the climate within decades. Reveille described the global emissions trajectory as an uncontrolled and unprecedented “large-scale geophysical experiment.”

In 1965, President Johnson received a report from his science advisory committee on climate change. The report’s introduction explained that “pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air.” The scientists explained that they “can conclude with fair assurance that at the present time, fossil fuels are the only source of CO2 being added to the ocean-atmosphere-biosphere system.” The report then discussed the hazards posed by climate change including melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and ocean acidity. The conclusion from the available data was that by the year 2000, atmospheric CO2 would be 25% higher than pre-industrial levels, at 350 parts per million.

The report was accurate except for one detail. Humanity increased its emissions faster than expected and by 2000, CO2 concentrations were measured at 370 parts per million, nearly 33% above pre-industrial levels.

Policymakers in the Nixon Administration also took notice of the mounting scientific evidence. Adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote to Nixon that it was “pretty clearly agreed” that CO2 levels would rise by 25% by 2000. The long-term implications of this could be dire, with rising temperatures and rising sea levels, “goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter,” Moynihan wrote. Nixon himself pushed NATO to study the impacts of climate change. In 1969, NATO established the Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society (CCMS) partly to explore environmental threats.

The Clinching Evidence

By the 1970s, the scientific community had long understood the greenhouse effect. With increasing accuracy, they could model the relationship between atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and Earth’s temperature. They knew that CO2 concentrations were rising, and human activities were the likely cause. The only thing they lacked was conclusive empirical evidence that global temperature was rising. Some researchers had begun to notice an upward trend in temperature records , but global temperature is affected by many factors. The scientific method is an inherently conservative process . Scientists do not “confirm” their hypothesis, but instead rule out alternative and “null” hypotheses. Despite the strong evidence and logic for anthropogenic global warming, researchers needed to see the signal (warming) emerge clearly from the noise (natural variability). Given short-term temperature variability, that signal would take time to fully emerge. Meanwhile, as research continued, other alarming findings were published.

Scientists knew that CO2 was not the only greenhouse gases humans had put into the atmosphere. During the 1970s, research by James Lovelock revealed that levels of human-produced chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were rapidly rising. Used as refrigerants and propellants, CFCs were 10,000 times as effective as CO2 in trapping heat. Later, scientists discovered CFCs also destroy the ozone layer.

In 1979, at the behest of America’s National Academy of Sciences, MIT meteorologist Jule Charney convened a dozen leading climate scientists to study CO2 and climate. Using increasingly sophisticated climate models, the scientists refined estimates for the scale and speed of global warming. The Charney Report ’s forward stated, “we now have incontrovertible evidence that the atmosphere is indeed changing and that we ourselves contribute to that change.” The report “estimate[d] the most probable global warming for a doubling of CO2 to be near 3°C.” Forty years later, newer observations and more powerful models have supported that original estimate. The researchers also forecasted CO2 levels would double by the mid-21st century. The report’s expected rate of warming agreed with numbers posited by John Sawyer of the UK’s Meteorological Office in a 1972 article in Nature . Sawyer projected warming of 0.6°C by 2000, which also proved remarkably accurate.

Shortly after the release of the Charney Report, many American politicians began to oppose environmental action. The Reagan Administration worked to roll back environmental regulations. Obeying a radical free-market ideology, they gutted the Environmental Protection Agency and ignored scientific concerns about acid rain, ozone depletion and climate change.

However, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts had already meaningfully improved air and water quality. Other nations had followed suit with similar anti-pollution policies. Interestingly, the success of these regulations made it easier for researchers to observe global warming trends. Many of the aerosol pollutants had the unintended effect of blocking incoming solar radiation. As a result, they had masked some of the emissions-driven greenhouse effect . As concentrations of these pollutants fell, a clear warming trend emerged. Scientists also corroborated ground temperature observations with satellite measurements. In addition, historical ice cores also provided independent evidence of the CO2-temperature relationship .

Sounding the Alarm

Despite his Midwestern reserve, James Hansen brought a stark message to Washington on a sweltering June day in 1988. “The evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” Hansen led NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and was one of the world’s foremost climate modelers. In his Congressional testimony, he explained that NASA was 99% certain that the observed temperature changes were not natural variation. The next day, the New York Times ran the headline “ Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate .” Hansen’s powerful testimony made it clear to politicians and the public where the scientists stood on climate change.

Also in 1988, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC was created to study both the physical science of climate change and the numerous effects of the changes. To do that, the IPCC evaluates global research on climate change, adaptation, mitigation and impacts. Thousands of leading scientists contribute to IPCC assessment reports as authors and reviewers. IPCC reports represent the largest scientific endeavor in human history and showcase the scientific process at its very best. The work is rigorous, interdisciplinary and cutting edge.

While the IPCC has contributed massively to our understanding of our changing world, its core message has remained largely unchanged for three decades. The First Assessment Report (FAR) in 1990 stated “emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases.” Since then, the dangers have only grown closer and clearer with each report. New reports not only forecast hazards but describe the present chaos too. As the 2018 Special Report (SR15) explained: “we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes.”

Wasted Time

As this story has shown, climate science is not a new discipline and the scientific consensus on climate change is far older than many people think. Ironically, the history of climate denialism is far shorter. Indeed, a 1968 Stanford University study that reported “significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000 and these could bring about climatic changes,” was funded by the American Petroleum Institute. During the 1970s, fossil fuel companies conducted research demonstrating that CO2 emissions would likely increase global temperature. Only with political changes in the 1980s did climate denialism take off.

Not only is climate denialism relatively new, but it is uniquely American. No other Western nation has anywhere near America’s level of climate change skepticism. The epidemic of denialism has many causes. It is partly the result of a concerted effort by fossil fuel interests to confuse the American public on the science of climate change. It is partly due to free-market ideologues that refuse to accept a role for regulation. It is partly because of the media’s misguided notion of fairness and equal time for all views. It is partly due to the popular erosion of trust in experts. It is partly because the consequences of climate change are enormous and terrifying. Yet, you can no more reject anthropogenic climate change than you can reject gravity or magnetism. The laws of physics operate independently of human belief.

However, many who bear blame for our current predicament do not deny the science. For decades, global leaders have greeted dire forecasts with rounds of empty promises. James Hansen has been frustrated the lack of progress since his 1988 testimony. “All we’ve done is agree there’s a problem…we haven’t acknowledged what is required to solve it.” The costs of dealing with climate change are only increasing. Economic harms may run into the trillions . According to the IPCC’s SR15, to avoid some of climate change’s most devastating effects, global temperature rise should be kept to below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels . That would likely require a reduction in emissions to half of 2010 levels by 2030, and to net-zero emissions by 2050. Had the world embarked on that path after Hansen’s spoke on Capitol Hill, it would have required annual emissions reductions of less than 2%. Now, according to the latest IPCC report, the same goal requires annual reductions of nearly 8% . 1.5°C appears to be slipping out of reach.

We have known about the causes of climate change for a long time. We have known about the impacts of climate change for a long time. And we have known about the solution to climate change for a long time. An academic review earlier this year demonstrated the impressive accuracy of climate models from the 1970s. This is no longer a scientific issue. While science can continue to forecast with greater geographic and temporal precision, the biggest unknown remains our action. What we choose today will shape the future.

David Carlin works on Climate Change for the UN Environment Program’s Finance Initiative (UNEP-FI). He leads a global project to help banks understand and assess the risks and opportunities brought about by Climate Change.

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Interview: Science historian Naomi Oreskes schools the Supreme Court on climate change

By Jessica McKenzie | August 15, 2024

In a 2007 decision, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens contended that when Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1970, “the study of climate change was in its infancy” and it wasn’t until later that decade that the federal government “began devoting serious attention to the possibility that carbon dioxide emissions associated with human activity could provoke climate change.” Even so, the Court found in Massachusetts v. EPA that the Clean Air Act authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as air pollutants, because the act was “capacious” in its definition of air pollutants.

A 2022 decision by a starkly different Supreme Court all but reversed the Massachusetts decision, greatly curtailing the EPA’s ability to limit power plant emissions of carbon dioxide. The basis of the decision in that case, West Virginia v. EPA , involved a new and hotly contested legal theory: the so-called “major questions doctrine” that the current, conservative-dominated Court has adopted. Under that doctrine, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, there must have been “clear congressional authorization” for executive branch agencies such as the EPA to take actions with “vast economic and political significance.” The decision holds that there was no such authorization, greatly limiting the EPA’s efforts to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.

Considered together, the Massachusetts and West Virginia cases raise an important question: Did Congress understand that regulating air pollutants like carbon dioxide would have vast economic and political impacts when it passed the Clean Air Act more than 50 years ago?

The answer to that question, according to a forthcoming paper in the Ecology Law Review , is clearly “yes.”

What began as a modest inquiry by science historian Naomi Oreskes into what scientists and elected officials knew about carbon dioxide in 1970 ballooned into a years-long investigation that underlies the law review paper, made available to the Bulletin ahead of its expected publication later this month. That investigation, which Oreskes conducted along with other researchers from Harvard and Duke universities, shows that experts long ago recognized the climate-altering impacts of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and that they also knew that regulation of these emissions could have wide-ranging economic impacts. These facts were shared and discussed among White House staffers and high-ranking elected and administrative officials, including the primary architects of the Clean Air Act.

Such conversations were not limited to the halls of power. The paper also reveals the extent to which discussions about carbon dioxide and global warming penetrated popular culture early on. Among those pop culture efforts was a 1958 educational film by Frank Capra (whose better-known movies include Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life ) called The Unchained Goddess , in which the character Dr. Research explains that the carbon dioxide emitted from factories and automobiles was already warming the atmosphere, and if the polar ice caps melted, one day tourists “in glass bottom boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.” The greenhouse effect from carbon dioxide emissions was also covered in My Weekly Reader and other school materials for children.

In February 1969, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg appeared on The Merv Griffin Show , discussing how the proliferation of automobiles and “their excrement” was warming the Earth. The show prompted a concerned citizen to write to US Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, asking him to contradict this dangerous misinformation. Jackson passed the letter on to presidential science advisor Lee DuBridge, who replied at length, confirming that the greenhouse effect was real and was the result of gases from burning fossil fuels. “We are, in a word, performing a gigantic experiment on ourselves,” DuBridge wrote. “It seems to me of great importance that we know the meaning of this experiment and its possible outcomes before discovering them too late and perhaps to our sorrow.”

Shortly thereafter, DuBridge floated the idea of a “polluter’s tax” on Meet the Press. “I don’t like to be a calamity howler, but sometimes it takes a few calamity howlers to wake people up to the fact that there are serious problems and to arouse people to the point where they are willing to do something about it,” he told television viewers. “I think we are at that point now.” That point was 1969.

In the following interview, Oreskes and I discuss the origins of her investigation and how its conclusions about the history of climate science could impact future environmental court cases.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Jessica McKenzie: What first prompted this research?

Naomi Oreskes: We’ve been working on this for a long time, since Mass. versus EPA . What originally triggered my interest was that comment by Justice Stevens, where he said climate change was in its infancy at the time of the 1970 Clean Air Act. I just remember thinking, holy cow.

I don’t blame the justices, because obviously, they’re not scientists. They can’t be expected to know the level of detail that I know about science. They have to deal with everything. But still, isn’t that what their clerks are for? Even some relatively rudimentary investigations into the history of science—Spencer Weart’s book, for example, The Discovery of Global Warming, has been around for decades now—would have corrected that misapprehension. It was kind of similar to that infamous comment by Justice Scalia, ‘troposphere-stratosphere. That’s why I hate science cases.’ [Oreskes was paraphrasing; the exact quote was: “Troposphere, whatever.
 I told you before I’m not a scientist. [Laughter]
 That’s why I don’t want to have to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth.”]

It was a window into how little these justices and their clerks know about this history.

Around the same time, I can’t remember the exact details now, Jody Freeman [an environmental law professor at Harvard University who also served as a Counselor for Energy and Climate Change in the Obama White House] called me and basically asked the same question: “Well, what did scientists know about this question in 1970?” I thought, if Jody doesn’t know—and she’s one of the top environmental lawyers and law professors in the country—and the justices don’t know, maybe there’s something in this.

I hired Colleen [Lanier-Christensen] to help me, thinking this would be just a little project to make the case that in fact, scientists in 1970 did know. Dave Keeling [of the Keeling Curve, the graph that shows rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels] had already been measuring CO2 for 12 years at that point. He and Roger Revelle [who led the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla from 1951 to 1964], Burt Bolin [the first chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], Gordon McDonald [another early climate researcher and member of the first presidential Council on Environmental Quality]—key leading players—had already said yes, this is a real thing that we have to worry about. So I thought, we’ll just write a short paper about what scientists knew.

When we started digging—Colleen is an amazing researcher, she’s really dogged—suddenly this universe exploded in front of us: congressional hearings and executive branch reports, Alvin Weinberg in the national laboratory system—it was a giant story. We realized this is bigger than we thought, let’s raise a little money. So, we raised a little money, we brought Hannah Conway [an environmental historian at Duke] on board. And then West Virginia happened and we’re like, okay, Ashton [Macfarlane, a Harvard researcher] should be involved with this. The whole thing just grew to be way bigger than I ever anticipated.

Jessica McKenzie

Jessica McKenzie is an associate editor at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists . Her work has been published in The New York Times , National Geographic , Audubon Magazine , Backpacker , The Counter , and... Read More

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The story we have now is quite compelling. There was this universe of discussion—it wasn’t just a narrow scientific discussion among a handful of experts. It was an extensive discussion that included many of the most important members of Congress at that time, including Ed Muskie, who was the principal sponsor of the Clean Air Act. It included Alvin Weinberg, the head of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It included the science advisor to President Nixon, Lee DuBridge. Really top-level people were discussing this, both among themselves and in congressional hearings, and, in the case of DuBridge, on television.

McKenzie: Obviously, I know how the Supreme Court changed between those two decisions [Massachusetts and West Virginia]. Has the court doubled down on this claim that climate change research was in its infancy, or was that not a part of the West Virginia decision?

Oreskes: I think what happened in West Virginia is even worse, because they’re making assertions about what Congress did or didn’t intend. The question of congressional intent, of course, is an important, legitimate one, but they’re making assertions without the facts. And in fact, what we can show is that Congress was well aware of carbon dioxide, and they understood it as a pollutant. One of the interesting things we discovered was a discussion about what kind of pollutant it was.

We don’t want to overstate our case; we think it’s strong enough that it doesn’t need to be overstated. But there’s a very interesting discussion about what kind of pollutant CO2 is. Many people said, it is a pollutant, but it’s a different kind of pollutant. It’s not the same as SOx [sulfur dioxide] and NOx [nitrogen oxides], which could kill people, and were killing people in Los Angeles and London, and were understood as acute health threats. They were the main focus of the Clean Air Act.

But they recognized that there were these other pollutants that represented a more long-term threat. What’s very clear from the Congressional discussions and hearings is that they write the Clean Air Act in a capacious way in order to account for the fact that in the next few years, we will understand more about these other pollutants, and they clearly want the EPA administrator to be able to regulate these additional pollutants as well.

One interesting discussion we had among ourselves—we kept coming across things where scientists or regulators said things like, “in due course.” What did they mean by “due course”? That was hard to pin down. But we did find places where it became pretty clear that people who were having this conversation thought, probably within the decade. They did not think that 60 years later, we would still be fighting about this.

Because the court opened up this whole space to argue about congressional intent, we think that our evidence about congressional intent is actually more important after West Virginia than it was before. Before you might have argued, well, it was just sort of interesting to know. But now it potentially takes on a significant legal dimension.

Another important piece about West Virginia is this court’s use of the so-called major questions doctrine, where the court asserts, again, without really any textual basis, that agencies can’t make major decisions without explicit congressional direction, for issues that have vast economic consequences. Whether that’s right or wrong from a legal perspective, we have evidence that shows that people did recognize, even in 1969, that regulating carbon dioxide would have vast economic consequences. One of them was Glenn Seaborg, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, the man who discovered plutonium. He said this would have huge ramifications for the automobile industry. And in fact, we see places where representatives of the automobile industry are involved in these conversations, because they recognize that it potentially has vast economic consequences.

McKenzie: During the research process, were there any giant surprises? I imagine that some of this material you were already familiar with from your research for Merchants of Doubt and your other work. But what were the most shocking things to come up while working on this paper?

Oreskes: I think there were a few surprises. The early recognition of the vast economic significance of carbon dioxide pollution, for example—I don’t know if they use the phrase “vast economic,” but large economic, major economic. That was a surprise to us. We didn’t necessarily expect that people would be already thinking through the economic consequences as early as 1969. So that was one big surprise.

I’d say the biggest surprise was the scale of the conversation. I already knew that there were specialists, scientists like Dave Keeling and Roger Revelle, who had been involved and interested in this issue going back to the 1950s. But the more we dug, the more we found, and the scale of what was involved, and also the prestige of some of the people was a surprise. I don’t know if you know who Christian Junge is, but there is a layer in the atmosphere that is known as the Junge Layer. And among meteorologists and atmospheric physicists, Junge is a big name—like Watt in the history of steam engines. Christian Junge in the 1950s was working on this question for the Air Force Geophysical Research Laboratory. It showed that this wasn’t some weird backwater of science, this was mainstream. And then of course, the fact that the Air Force is involved, there’s this very strong link into the US government that the Air Force is aware of this, knows about it, is potentially concerned about it. I thought that was important and interesting.

I would say the other thing is both the depth and the breadth of the conversation. So Sports Illustrated —

McKenzie: I was going to bring that up! And then that sort of back and forth with the television viewer and Allen Ginsberg, I feel like we get like a glimmer of the future and how this became a contested space.

Oreskes: Allen Ginsberg and the whole exchange between that constituent and Scoop Jackson—Scoop Jackson was a super powerful senator, right? I mean, as a child growing up, we didn’t really like him because he was considered very hawkish; he supported the war in Vietnam. People used to call him the senator from Boeing. So not someone who was well loved by liberals or environmentalists. And there is this very human moment where you see he gets a letter from an irate constituent. He doesn’t know what the answer is. So he writes to Lee DuBridge, asking, “Well, Lee, is there anything to this?” and it’s very beautiful in a way. Then Lee DuBridge writes back this multi-page letter explaining in great detail. I thought that was just such a beautiful human moment of a powerful person actually trying to learn, right? How great is that?

McKenzie: The open mindedness before accepted dogma, or accepted lines of inquiry and belief set it.

Oreskes: Exactly. And it leaves us with a deep feeling of missed opportunity here, and how we (as a country) have gone backward. That breadth and the depth of the conversation, the way it is seeping into popular culture; it is written up in Sports Illustrated , Fortune , The Weekly Reader. Allen Ginsburg; it’s on the Merv Griffin Show … we thought about writing a third paper, specifically about the popular culture piece. And then the whole project got so big, we never got to do the popular culture article (although we still might do it). I do think that’s a really interesting and very surprising part of the story. I don’t think any of us had any idea that someone like Allen Ginsberg would have known about this and been talking about it on television.

McKenzie: Once you read all that, you really start wondering “how did we forget?” Both, how did we forget, and then also, how do we get stuck having the same conversation or even regress? Going from this pretty calm, confident certainty that this is a thing, that it might be really, really bad, to debating whether it’s a thing at all, and whether humans are involved? While reading I was just getting so angry and frustrated. It’s just like, what happened? How did we mess this up so bad, when we knew?

Oreskes: There’s a pattern in my work where people say, “Well, I read your book, it made me so angry.” I’m like, good, it should make you angry. We should be angry about all this. So I agree 100 percent with the way you just characterized it, how one might think about this material.

In some of my other work, and in my teaching, I teach agnotology, the study of the social construction of ignorance. This paper is not framed that way, because it’s a paper for a law review. And we’re trying to make a very specific point about the law, and about a specific law, the Clean Air Act, and what Congress knew and intended when it wrote that act. So this wasn’t the place to get into a theoretical discussion about knowledge in society. But there obviously is a larger argument here. In academic life, but also journalism, we focus so much on knowledge and how we know things. And education is about learning and teaching. But we don’t pay nearly enough attention, in my opinion, to the flip side of that, to the forces that work against knowledge and understanding. And those forces are very complex. Sometimes they’re deliberate. Sometimes they’re accidental. Sometimes they’re just a victim of circumstances.

We think there is a very complicated story about what happened next. I think one element that’s totally legitimate is the greater focus on the acute urban air pollution, the smog. It was totally reasonable that people in 1970 were more focused on an immediate threat that was damaging people’s health.

I forget, there were two important staffers, Tom Jorling, and Leon Billings, and I forget which one of them said it, but he once told us, “Yeah, we weren’t even thinking about CO2.” And I thought, how’s that possible? We’ve got a gazillion documents that showed that actually, they (and then we have to parse who “they” is) were thinking about CO2.

The documents show that key staff members to Ed Muskie were primarily focused on the acute threat. And that makes total sense. So you can understand then how that becomes the focus of EPA, the national ambient air quality standards, and CO2 recedes into the background.

There’s a pattern in my work where people say, ‘Well, I read your book, it made me so angry.’ I’m like, good, it should make you angry. We should be angry about all this.

McKenzie: You can’t do everything, so you’ve got to prioritize.

Oreskes: Right. There’s only so many hours in the day, so much political capital. It wasn’t wrong to prioritize on the short-term threat. And meanwhile, science plays some role in this as well, because the scientists by and large say, “Well, that’s okay. There’s a lot about this problem that we don’t really understand. So we don’t mind having a bit more time to figure this out.”

So when the first Bush administration comes to power, he [George H.W. Bush] funds the Global Climate Research Program very abundantly. From other work that I’ve done, and also the work of other researchers, one of the things we know is there was a big fight in the Bush administration about what they were going to do about climate change. Bush had run for office claiming to be an environmentalist, and promising to address the “greenhouse effect” with the “White House effect.” But there were powerful forces in the party, and in the White House, working against that.

What H.W. does is to fund a very abundant research program. And, again, I’m not really blaming the people, one can understand it, but to some extent, I think it’s fair to say that the scientific community was bought, because what the Bush administration does is say, “Well, there are still a lot of scientific uncertainties, right?” And scientists say, “Well, yeah, there are.” And so [Bush says] “How would you like nearly 2 billion dollars for a giant program to really make climate science, the thing.” And scientists say, “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”

But of course, that then becomes one of the key themes that the industry, starting from the ‘90s, picks up on—to claim that it’s all so uncertain that it’s too soon to do anything about it. So what starts out as reasonable prioritization, and a reasonable desire to nail the problem down more clearly, gets shifted largely through the influence of the fossil fuel industry and its allies into, “Oh, there’s way too much uncertainty. We can’t do anything about this. We need more research.”

So there are parts of the story that we can understand, they make sense. And then there are parts of the story that are ugly, where the fossil fuel industry, knowing all of this, having all of this information and knowing as much or more than the academics, scientists, work to undermine the public and government understanding of climate science. In another paper I wrote with Geoffery Supran and Stefan Rahmstorf, we showed that Exxon’s modeling in the 1970s and ‘80s was as good or better than anything academics were doing at the time. But in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, they made the decision to go down the path of denial. That’s where the story turns ugly. And that’s what connects this new work back to my earlier work on the history of climate change denial. It doesn’t start out as a story of denial. It starts out—

McKenzie: —as open inquiry.

Oreskes: Exactly. As you say, it starts as open inquiry, and legitimate prioritization. In 1965, LBJ makes this big, special message to Congress, where he mentions carbon dioxide, but I’ve always thought one could kind of forgive LBJ in 1965 for not doing more about the climate issue. He’s got some other problems to worry about, and they’re a lot more immediate. So it’s a story that begins with legitimate inquiry, legitimate scientific investigation, and then legitimate political prioritization. But then it devolves into something quite ugly.

“The Unchained Goddess,” a film that voiced concern about human caused climate change in 1958. “Tourists in glass bottom boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.” The quoted passage begins at 50:12.

McKenzie: The other thing I noticed, as an editor at the Bulletin , is how often carbon dioxide was discussed alongside radioactive pollution. These questions of atmospheric pollution, and climate and weather, they were all sort of tied in with nuclear history and grappling with what had happened during World War Two.

Oreskes: As historians, we pick out one thread to follow in a very complex tapestry of life, politics, science, and history. Spencer Weart wrote about this years ago in his book, Nuclear Fear , where he talks about exactly what you said, how the problem of atmospheric fallout develops in the ‘50s, around the same time that people are also becoming more acutely aware of acute air pollution from industrial sources. And particularly, you think about the London smog, in the late ‘50s, where people die from polluted air.

At the same time, you have people dying from radioactive fallout, like in the Lucky Dragon incident in the Pacific . So you have these deadly things falling out of the sky—I mean, urban air pollution isn’t exactly falling, but metaphorically it is. So they are linked in people’s minds. And you see some of the speeches we quote, some of the people mention background radiation as one of these more chronic, rather than acute forms of pollution. CO2 seems to be similar to radiation: you can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t touch it. But it’s there, it can hurt you. But radiation is scarier, because it can hurt you faster. Much faster.

And of course, Rachel Carson in Silent Spring talks about radioactive fallout—it’s a forgotten piece of that story—but she was very concerned about the various forms of pollution, both in the atmosphere and in the oceans. Many people have forgotten that her book before Silent Spring was The Sea Around Us . In that book, she’s quite concerned about pollution that could be damaging marine life.

McKenzie: The other thing that really struck me is how early we were thinking about equity, fairness, justice. When I read, “How long will it be until the carbon dioxide from North American Europe begins to affect the climate in Asia and Africa?” I was, like, “We were already talking about that?”

Oreskes: There are people who have tried to claim that if Congress did talk about climate change that they meant, the climate of California or the climate of New York, and that one sentence—as well as many others—refutes that claim. They understand they’re talking about global climate change; something that we do in Michigan, can affect people in Bangladesh. And they knew that in the 1960s.

McKenzie: And there was at least one quote about why this particularly cannot be a state’s issue, because there are not invisible barriers between states that keep the pollution contained.

Oreskes: We came across all kinds of reports of international meetings in which they’re saying exactly that, that somehow we have to figure out a way to deal with this together. Because it’s true of all air pollution, and it’s already understood in the ‘60s. This is why there’s a call for the national ambient air quality standards, because pollution in Michigan doesn’t stay in Michigan.

McKenzie: I just reported a big piece about geoengineering and was struck by the parallels to the debate over whether we should spray aerosols in the atmosphere [to cool the planet]. And the other thing I found while reporting that story is that even though I was desperately looking for new things to say, there had been kind of similar knowledge and debate for so long, I was really grasping at straws. I felt like scientific advances had been incremental, but the broader framework of the debate hadn’t changed much, other than that climate change had gotten much worse, and that desperation is changing people’s openness to geoengineering.

They understand they’re talking about global climate change; something that we do in Michigan, can affect people in Bangladesh. And they knew that in the 1960s.

Oreskes: I know a lot about this, and I know a lot of the people involved, and I feel that a lot of people involved are very cavalier about the governance issues. Like “Well, we’ll get that sorted.” Well, you haven’t got it sorted for ocean mining. We never got it sorted for climate change. We kind of did it for acid rain, but in a not-100-percent-effective way. So why do you think that suddenly, we’re going to all sit at a table, sing Kumbaya and have world peace?

McKenzie: The Supreme Court has continued to hand down some bad climate and environment decisions. I’m thinking most recently of the overturning of the Chevron Doctrine. How does this research have bearing on more recent or current cases working their way through the court?

Oreskes: We’re not naïve; we don’t think that John Roberts is going to read this paper and completely change his views about these matters.

McKenzie: Wouldn’t it be nice though?

Oreskes: It would be nice. But my hope is two things: That maybe his clerks will read these papers. One of the things we know that’s good about Roberts, and some of the other justices as well, is that he makes an effort to get the best clerks; he doesn’t have a political litmus test for his clerks. And that’s a good thing. Even if his clerks are conservative, we have to hope that they will read this paper, and that there will be some arguments that they will have to at least take into consideration, and that it could help to moderate some of the more extreme and inappropriate things that that the Court has said.

Our other audience is lawyers. We think this paper will help strengthen the arguments and the resolve of lawyers who may want to fight back.

McKenzie: As you said, the Supreme Court does everything; they can’t specialize in this. They have to have this information presented to them either by their colleagues or clerks or the people arguing cases.

Oreskes: Exactly. And the one good thing we see, particularly in the West Virginia decision, if the court feels strongly that we need to have a better understanding of what Congress was thinking at the time that the statutes were written, that’s a historical question. That actually opens a space for historians to make useful contributions to these debates, because we are the people who have the toolkit, the skill set, to find the documents and to answer these historical questions. That assumes of course that the court meant what they said, and it wasn’t just an excuse. To the extent that they do believe that the historical argument is valid—then it means that they should at least be willing to consider these historical arguments.

McKenzie: I know this is in a legal journal, but I imagine I’m not the only person in the mainstream press writing about it. What impact can this have on the broader public? What is the significance of changing people’s understanding of climate change as new or only recently decided, as opposed to something with this really long, really deep history?

Oreskes: I think two things: One is what you just said yourself, that a lot of people have the impression that this is something relatively recent, that we’ve only just recently been trying to sort out. And I think it does shift how you feel about its importance, its significance, and the sense that we are so overdue to act on this. It makes you feel more strongly that we’ve already waited a really long time. There’s no excuse to wait any longer.

A second thing that relates to the first is it invites again, the question that you just asked: If we knew all this stuff back in 1969, why are we now even arguing if this is even a thing? That invites a kind of curiosity about malfeasance, about what the fossil fuel industry and its allies have done.

And it’s not just about climate change. That’s the really sad thing about this whole story. I mean, I’ve been doing some work recently about other related things. These patterns of industry denial of science are sadly not restricted to the fossil fuel industry. And we have to understand them, in order to understand why we live in a sea of chemicals that we know are toxic, and yet they don’t get regulated; why we’re still dealing with the legacies of industrial accidents, oil spills. Maybe you’ve been following the lawsuits about talc and ovarian cancer? That’s another area where there’s good evidence that the science got muddled by industry disinformation. Then there’s the whole history of tobacco, which is ongoing today, as the tobacco industry continues to market its products to young people in Asia and elsewhere in the world. These are big patterns that really hurt people.

In order to try to fix the problem, we have to understand what it is, we have to understand where it came from, and how long it’s been going on.

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Kyoto Tells Us How Humanity Can Come Together on Climate Change

A play celebrates the agreement that opened nations worldwide to accepting the science of climate change

By Ben Santer

Kyoto production photo at the Swan Theatre, June 17, 2024.

Manuel Harlan/RSC

It’s a very strange experience to watch a play in which you are a character—and to shake hands with the person who plays you. I did both this July while attending a performance of Kyoto at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in England. The moment meant more, of course, than just a glimpse of oneself on history’s stage. The play shows how science won out over climate denial in a critical face-off between scientists and industry over the future of the planet.

Kyoto is a play about the Kyoto Protocol —an agreement made more than 25 years ago that as summarized by the United Nations, committed “industrialized countries and economies in transition to limit and reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions in accordance with agreed individual targets.” Written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson , the play is a co-production of Good Chance and the Royal Shakespeare Company that provides a dramatic retelling of a historic meeting in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, where the protocol was finalized.

At this meeting, a key Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientific assessment helped to inform the international emissions reduction negotiations—the Working Group I part of the IPCC Second Assessment Report , which was completed in 1995 and published in early 1996. I was convening lead author of chapter eight, “Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.” The role of the IPCC, back in 1995 and today, was to advise the governments of the world on the science and impacts of climate change, as well as on strategies for mitigating and adapting to those impacts.

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In 1990 the first IPCC scientific assessment had concluded that the jury was still out on whether a human-caused climate change signal could be identified in real-world climate data. The 1995 assessment’s chapter reached a very different conclusion, encapsulated in 12 simple words: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” This was a powerful, historic statement from cautious scientists and a rather conservative organization.

Multiple factors contributed to this dramatic transition. Advances in the science of climate fingerprinting , for example, made a big difference in climate research during the five years between the two reports.

Fingerprinting seeks to understand the unique signatures of different human and natural influences on Earth’s climate. This uniqueness becomes apparent if we probe beyond a single number—such as the average temperature of Earth’s surface, including land and oceans—and look instead at complex patterns of climate change. Patterns have discriminatory power and allow scientists to separate the signature of human-caused fossil-fuel burning from the signatures of purely natural phenomena (such as El Niño and La Niña climate patterns, changes in the sun’s energy output, and effects of volcanic eruptions).

Kyoto describes some of the fingerprint evidence that was presented during a key meeting in Madrid in November 1995, ahead of the Kyoto face-off dramatized in the performance. The “discernible human influence on global climate” conclusion was finalized in Madrid, where the participants included 177 delegates from 96 countries, representatives from 14 nongovernmental organizations and 28 lead authors of the IPCC Second Assessment Report.

Ben Santer ( left ) in conversation with Dale Rapley ( right ), the actor playing Ben Santer in Kyoto.

David Morley

As a lead author of the evidence chapter, I was there among them in that Madrid plenary room. So were several of the other characters in Kyoto , including the play’s central one—Donald Pearlman, who was a lawyer and lobbyist for the Climate Council, a consortium of energy interests.

Pearlman and I were on opposite sides of the Madrid chessboard. My efforts were directed toward synthesizing and assessing complex science and ensuring that the science was accurately represented in the IPCC report. His were directed toward delaying international efforts to reduce emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Such reductions were bad for the business interests he represented and for the revenues of oil-producing countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Pearlman, who passed away in 2005 , understood the singular importance of the Madrid “discernible human influence” conclusion. He knew it was the scientific equivalent of the Biblical handwriting on the wall . The jury was no longer out. Human-caused fingerprints had been identified in records of Earth’s surface and atmospheric temperature . Humans were no longer innocent bystanders in the climate system; they were active participants. Burning fossil fuels had changed the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere, thereby warming the planet and sending Earth’s vital signs into concerning territory. The Madrid conclusion meant that the days of unfettered fossil-fuel use and carbon pollution were numbered.

It also made Pearlman’s lobbying job more difficult. His response was to attack the science and the scientists as part of a rearguard action to delay international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As Pearlman’s character explains in Kyoto , it was a deliberate “scorched-Earth” strategy: torch the science and the scientists.

I had firsthand experience of this strategy in a memorable personal meeting with Pearlman in Washington D.C. on May 21, 1996. After I spoke at the Rayburn House Office Building in Congress about the scientific evidence for human fingerprints on global climate, Pearlman confronted me and started screaming at me—literally screaming. He expressed outrage at what he claimed were unauthorized changes to the chapter I had been responsible for. The changes had in fact been authorized by the IPCC , as Pearlman knew very well. He had been present at the Madrid meeting where the changes were discussed.

Ultimately he lost. Despite tremendous differences between countries in terms of their national self-interest, culpability for the problem of human-caused climate change and vulnerability to the effects of climate change, a historic international agreement was finally reached. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol commits participating countries to a common goal—that of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and avoiding “dangerous anthropogenic interference” in Earth’s climate system. The play Kyoto is the powerful story of how that agreement was achieved.

In one memorable line in Kyoto , Pearlman’s wife Shirley asks him: “Are we on the wrong side?” The question is prompted by an exposé of Pearlman’s lobbying activities in the German news magazine Der Spiegel . Shirley wants to know whether her husband’s efforts to cast doubt on the climate change science—and on the scientists involved in advancing that science—place them on the wrong side of history. The Pearlman character in the play responds by saying: “No, Shirley. We’re not on the wrong side.”

But Pearlman and the industries he represented were on the wrong side of the science. Nearly 30 years after the Madrid IPCC meeting, and after Pearlman’s concerted efforts to undercut climate science, human fingerprints on Earth’s climate are now unequivocal and ubiquitous. The cautious 1995 “discernible human influence” finding has been confirmed and strengthened by all four subsequent IPCC assessments. The scientists in Madrid got it right.

Pearlman and his employers were also on the wrong side of history . Today 191 countries have ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Although the U.S. Congress never did ratify it, the protocol helped to pave the way for the 2016 Paris Agreement . The serious consequences of human-caused global warming are now manifest to all, building momentum for real action to cut carbon pollution. The days of climate science denial are numbered.

But they are not quite over yet. Another Donald—former president Donald Trump—has repeatedly denied the reality and seriousness of climate change. It’s no surprise that his backers look a lot like Pearlman’s.

There is a very small probability that Trump will ever watch Kyoto . There’s an even smaller probability that Trump will consider whether he, too, is on the wrong side of science and history .

Sadly, he is. Trump’s possible return to the U.S. presidency would reprise Pearlman’s heyday, when manufactured doubt obscured mature scientific understanding. Kyoto tells the story of how that scientific understanding evolved and how powerful vested interests tried to destroy it. Giving that account today is absolutely vital, with the bill for climate change coming due all around us .

I hope Kyoto will have a discernible influence on millions around the world. I hope the play reaches audiences I could never dream of reaching through all the scientific papers I’ve ever written. And I hope it provides us with what mathematicians call an existence principle—proof that something difficult is possible. The existence principle in Kyoto is that humanity can and did come together in December 1997 and agreed to solve a seemingly intractable problem.

See Kyoto if you can. It will inspire you to find your own way of changing our world for the better.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American .

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• Published: 17 June 2012

Promoting pro-environmental action in climate change deniers

• Paul G. Bain 1 ,
• Matthew J. Hornsey 1 ,
• Renata Bongiorno 1 &
• Carla Jeffries 1  

Nature Climate Change volume  2 ,  pages 600–603 ( 2012 ) Cite this article

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An Addendum to this article was published on 27 July 2012

This article has been updated

A sizeable (and growing) proportion of the public in Western democracies deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change 1 , 2 . It is commonly assumed that convincing deniers that climate change is real is necessary for them to act pro-environmentally 3 , 4 . However, the likelihood of ‘conversion’ using scientific evidence is limited because these attitudes increasingly reflect ideological positions 5 , 6 . An alternative approach is to identify outcomes of mitigation efforts that deniers find important. People have strong interests in the welfare of their society, so deniers may act in ways supporting mitigation efforts where they believe these efforts will have positive societal effects. In Study 1, climate change deniers ( N =155) intended to act more pro-environmentally where they thought climate change action would create a society where people are more considerate and caring, and where there is greater economic/technological development. Study 2 ( N =347) replicated this experimentally, showing that framing climate change action as increasing consideration for others, or improving economic/technological development, led to greater pro-environmental action intentions than a frame emphasizing avoiding the risks of climate change. To motivate deniers’ pro-environmental actions, communication should focus on how mitigation efforts can promote a better society, rather than focusing on the reality of climate change and averting its risks.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant (DP0984678) to the first author. The authors thank A. Mackintosh, M. Manning, O. Hoegh-Guldberg, J. Lawrence and A. Ryan for their comments on manuscript drafts.

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P.G.B. designed the studies, coordinated data collection, analysed the data and wrote the paper. M.J.H. contributed to the design and analysis of both studies and writing the paper. R.B. contributed to the design and analysis of Study 2 and writing the paper. C.J. contributed to the analysis of Study 1 and writing the paper.

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Correspondence to Paul G. Bain .

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Bain, P., Hornsey, M., Bongiorno, R. et al. Promoting pro-environmental action in climate change deniers. Nature Clim Change 2 , 600–603 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1532

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Oxford researchers propose ‘Carbon Removal Budget’ to tackle climate change

New research from the University of Oxford, published in the journal Carbon Management , makes the case for a novel ‘Carbon Removal Budget’ to help tackle climate change. It would sit alongside the Carbon Budget that governs how much CO2 can safely be emitted globally.

Dr Ben Caldecott , the Lombard Odier Associate Professor at the University of Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and lead author said, 'Carbon removal is the ‘net’ in ‘net zero’ and it is mission critical for tackling climate change. However, carbon removal is not in infinite supply and is certainly not free to produce.'

To limit global warming we need to level off the cumulative stock of carbon in the atmosphere and achieve the state of ‘net zero’, when all emissions that can be eliminated are, and any residual emissions are neutralised by durably removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Traditional carbon removal methods like planting trees and restoring wetlands are part of this mix, as are more novel options like biochar and technologies that directly capture and store carbon. The availability of carbon removal is, however, constrained. For example, some carbon removal methods depend on significant energy consumption and require vast tracts of land.

Caldecott added, 'The Carbon Removal Budget is the cumulative amount of carbon removal available to realise global temperature goals. We need a way to value this finite removal capacity and allocate it in a fair and effective way. The Carbon Removal Budget allows us to do this, in the same way that the Carbon Budget allows us to value remaining carbon emissions and figure out how we distribute that globally between different countries, sectors, and companies.'

Dr Injy Johnstone, Research Fellow at the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group and co-author said, 'We have seen growing interest by private and public actors alike in how we can scale carbon removal. Companies like Microsoft , for instance, are making big voluntary investments in new types of carbon removal. At the same time, many countries, including the UK , are also considering how they too can drive demand for carbon removal, including by integrating carbon removal into existing compliance emissions trading or tax regimes.' 

Dr Johnstone added, 'However, carbon removal is a scarce resource, one which not all countries or companies have the same capacity to develop and deploy, meaning we need a Carbon Removal Budget to help equitably manage both supply and demand.'

The authors argue that carbon removal budgets can help to answer several urgent questions. How much carbon removal is needed and when? What methods for carbon removal should be prioritised? What impediments exist to the different types of removal supply and how can we overcome them? Critically, how should we allocate the finite, even if growing, carbon removal supply between different countries, companies, and financial institutions?

Dr Caldecott said, 'For example, it is not clear why a fossil fuel company should be using carbon removal today when there are ways to reduce its emissions today, especially when we need to preserve removals for future emissions that are extremely hard or impossible to eliminate.'

'Embedding carbon removal budgets into decision-making is necessary for an effective response to climate change. It will become an essential part of net zero transition plans, whether for countries, companies, or financial institutions.'

Read the full article in the journal Carbon Management   here .

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For our common home lecture series , september 4 - who tells your story framing of climate change by women and indigenous peoples at the united nations, september 16 - democracy in a hotter time, october 2 - spokane candidates climate change forum.

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Speaker: Bi Zhao

Civil society organizations (CSO) have become indispensable actors in global climate governance. Since its founding in 1992, the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have been a central venue for CSOs to define and construct the meaning of climate change. Over the years, many CSOs have framed climate change as a social justice issue that intersects with gender inequality and indigenous peoples' rights violations. In our book, we examine the different ways in which civil society groups advocate for justice at UNFCCC COPs. We focus on two communities, the women's groups and the indigenous peoples, and investigate how each constructs a frame around climate change. We argue that these groups develop frames through two forms of interest representation: self-representation and crossover-representation. We find that women’s groups are self-representative in that they focus on gender framing to lead and shape gender discourse at UNFCCC. This self-representation is motivated by the saturation of gender discourse. By contrast, indigenous framing indicates crossover-representation, where both indigenous peoples’ organizations and other CSOs specialized in issues like forestry and health participate in indigenous peoples’ advocacy. Crossover-representation is motivated by the low density of organizations specialized in indigenous peoples. We adopt a mixed-methods approach to analyze CSOs’ framing efforts. First, we use Twitter (X) data to empirically observe variations in the use of frames among CSOs. We then conduct in-depth interviews with CSOs to learn about their understanding of climate change discourse and the motivation to shape it.

About the speaker : Dr. Bi Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Gonzaga University. Her research interests include non-state actors in global climate change governance and transnational human rights advocacy. In particular, she focuses on the role and participation of historically marginalized peoples in climate change politics and policymaking. She received her PhD in Political Science from Purdue University. Her work was published in the Journal of Human Rights, Environmental Policy and Governance, among others.

Speaker: Dr. David Orr

What is at stake in 2024? A large movement threatens to undo our democracy. They have said as much, and we should believe them. But an even larger danger to democracy is on our doorstep: searing heat, massive storms, and flooding in some places, dust, fire, and drought in others. Heat will affect everyone, but those hit hardest will be those least responsible and most vulnerable: the poor, disadvantaged, young, and our grandchildren who bear none of the responsibility. Without fast and systemic action, millions of Americans could become climate refugees forced from their homes by mid-century. Our great work in this election year and beyond is to unite all those who wish to drink clean water, breathe clean air, live in a stable climate, and work in a fair and inclusive economy, and also believe that we the people should have a say in creating our common future.

About the speaker : David Orr is a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University and the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor, emeritus, at Oberlin College.

What do local candidates for office think about climate change? How will it affect your vote in November? To aid citizens in their democratic deliberations, Gonzaga’s Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment is proud to host the Spokane Candidates Climate Change Forum on the first Wednesday each October.

October 22 - Rewilding the Urban Frontier: River Conservation in the Anthropocene

Speakers: greg gordon phd, margo hill, heidi lasher, and robert l. bartlett phd.

While acknowledging the profound impact our species has had on the natural world, and rivers in particular, Rewilding the Urban Frontier: River Conservation in the Anthropocene argues that this new age in which humans have inexorably modified the planet presents opportunities for rethinking our relationship to the natural world and potentially healing the age-old rift between humans and nature. More than any other ecosystem, urban rivers typify our evolving relationship with nature. Once a necessity for the development of civilization, by the twentieth century, America’s rivers became neglected and abused, channelized, dammed, filled with sewage, and toxic waste. But then, spawned by America’s rising environmental awareness, the Clean Water Act of 1972 initiated a clean-up of the nation’s waterways. Fifty years later, most of America’s rivers are “fishable and swimmable” once again. But along with river revitalization, America has also experienced an explosion in urban growth such that our natural ecosystems are highly fragmented and disappearing under asphalt and concrete. Yet, urban rivers provide crucial wildlife corridors and connectivity to core conservation areas and offer opportunities to connect to the natural environment. Done right, rewilding urban rivers can help forestall biodiversity loss and address environmental and social inequities.

About the speakers :

• Greg Gordon was born at the junction of Cherry Creek and the South Fork of the Platte River and spent much of his adult life living along the Clark Fork and Dearborn rivers. He now lives a short walk from the confluence of Hangman Creek and the Spokane River and is a professor of Environmental Studies at Gonzaga University.
• Margo Hill, JD, MURP, is a Spokane Tribal member and grew up on the Spokane Indian reservation. She serves as the Associate Director of Small, Urban, Rural and Tribal Center on Mobility (SURTCOM). Dr. Hill served as the Spokane Tribal Attorney for 10 years and as a Coeur d’Alene Tribal Court Judge. Ms. Hill earned her Juris Doctorate from Gonzaga School of Law and her Master of Urban and Regional Planning from Eastern Washington University.
• Heidi Lasher, MPA, MFA, spent more than 20 years working as a freelance communications and policy consultant, specializing in global health topics such as safe water, immunization services, vaccine supply chains, and family planning. In 2019, she pivoted from consulting and began writing her own work. Her nonfiction essays have been published in several magazines and literary journals including Orion Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Litro Magazine, Cream City Review, and in Allegory Review’s nonfiction anthology, Allegheny. She is currently working on a collection of essays about time, change, and growing older along the Spokane River.
• Prior to retiring from Eastern Washington University in 2020, Robert L. “Bob” Bartlett spent eighteen years at Gonzaga University where he held a variety of enriching positions. His passion is learning, writing, and storytelling. He continues to consider myself a work in progress--a storytelling who’s learning to write. Now in retirement his professional goals include; sharing the great outdoors with others who look like him, being a fly-fishing educator and instructor, writing a monthly column on wellness in Spokane’s Black Lens newspaper titled, “From the Water’s Edge”, being a member of and serving on the boards of environmentally minded organizations and pursue writing on my obsession for family and rivers.

Speaker: Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director at Population Balance and Senior Lecturer at Antioch University

Human population has doubled from 4 billion in 1970 to 8 billion currently, and is expected to grow by another 2.5 billion this century. While leading scientific authorities warn that overpopulation and rampant overconsumption are driving climate change, resource scarcity, and biodiversity collapse, there is widespread dismissal of the role of population in these crises among journalists, academics, environmental organizations, and policymakers. In this talk, Nandita will discuss the factors behind the silencing of this discourse, namely the growth-biased socio-economic systems, past population policies, pronatalism, and human exceptionalism. She will explain the harmful implications of population denial on the most vulnerable people and ecosystems, how the powerful institutions of the state, the church, the military, and the economy perpetuate and benefit from this denial, and why we must urgently move past it. Strategies on how to hold power accountable, while embracing population and economic degrowth as a means to advance social, reproductive, and ecological justice, will be discussed.

About the speaker : Nandita Bajaj is the Executive Director of Population Balance, a US nonprofit that works to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. She also co-hosts The Overpopulation Podcast, a popular series that delves into the nuances of the drivers and impacts of human expansionism with expert guests. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Humane Education at Antioch University, where she teaches about the combined impacts of pronatalism and human expansionism on reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice. In addition to a number of peer-reviewed papers and forthcoming book chapters, her work has appeared in major news outlets including Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Guardian, Newsweek, Ms. Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, and National Post.

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