Climate change denial (also global warming denial or climate denial) is the pseudoscientific[6] dismissal or unwarranted doubt that contradicts the scientific consensus on climate change. Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where there is none.[7][8][9] Climate change denial includes doubts to the extent of how much climate change is caused by humans, its effects on nature and human society, and the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions.[10][11][12] To a lesser extent, climate change denial can also be implicit when people accept the science but fail to reconcile it with their belief or action.[13] Several social science studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism,[14][15] pseudoscience,[16] or propaganda.[17]
Many of the issues that are settled within the scientific community, such as human responsibility for global warming, remain the subject of politically or economically motivated attempts to downplay, dismiss or deny them—an ideological phenomenon categorized by academics and scientists as climate change denial. Climate scientists, especially in the United States, have reported government and oil-industry pressure to censor or suppress their work and hide scientific data, with directives not to discuss the subject in public communications. The fossil fuels lobby has been identified as overtly or covertly supporting efforts to undermine or discredit the scientific consensus on global warming.[18][19]
Activities to undermine public trust in climate science are organized by industrial, political and ideological interests.[21][22] Climate change denial has been associated with the fossil fuels lobby, the Koch brothers, industry advocates, ultraconservative think tanks and ultraconservative alternative media, often in the United States.[17][23][24][25] More than 90% of papers that are skeptical on climate change originate from right-wing think tanks.[26] Climate change denial is undermining the efforts to act on or adapt to climate change, and exerts a powerful influence on politics of global warming and the manufactured global warming controversy.[27][28]
In the 1970s, oil companies published research which broadly concurred with the scientific community's view on global warming. Since then, for several decades, oil companies have been organizing a widespread and systematic climate change denial campaign to seed public disinformation, a strategy that has been compared to the organized denial of the hazards of tobacco smoking by the tobacco industry. Some of the campaigns are even carried out by the same individuals who previously spread the tobacco industry's denialist propaganda.[29][30][31]