Conspiracy theorists are often the subject of scorn or mockery;
rejected and ridiculed by the rest of us, they hide away on internet
chat forums where they blather on about the collapse of 7 World Trade
Center, the rise of the Illuminati or the omnipresence of Mossad. Not
the climate-change deniers. Unlike Israel's intelligence agency, they
really do seem to be omnipresent these days. Indeed, unlike the
Illuminati, they even control national governments.
For instance, Australia's new prime minister, Tony Abbott, has called
the science on climate change "absolute crap" and already abolished the
country's Climate Commission. In 2012, Mitt Romney, the Republican
nominee for the most important job in the world, was of the view that
"we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet". Here in
the UK, the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, a Conservative, is, in
the words of the
Financial Times, a "known climate change
sceptic". So, too, is a Conservative member of the Commons energy and
climate change committee, Peter Lilley.
Denialism abounds. In March, a YouGov poll found that only 39% of the
British public believed human activity was making the world warmer, down
from 55% in 2008, while the proportion of Brits who believed that the
world wasn't getting warmer had quadrupled - up from 7% in 2008 to 28%.
Depressingly, you can draw no other conclusion from these facts than
that the conspiracy theorists are winning. The deniers of global warming
have come in from the cold. The "merchants of doubt", to borrow a
phrase from the science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, seem
to have perfected the dark art of "keeping the controversy alive",
sowing seeds of doubt and confusion in the minds of politicians,
journalists and voters, in spite of the scientific consensus.
Thus, I use both the terms "denier" (rather than "sceptic") and
"conspiracy theorist" advisedly. After all, they either deny that the
world is warming or deny that mankind is responsible for this warming.
Remember: 97% of climate scientists agree the world is warming and that
mankind is responsible. Consider also: a survey by Oreskes of every
peer-reviewed abstract on the subject "global climate change" published
between 1993 and 2003 - 928 in total - couldn't find a single paper that
rejected the consensus position on human-induced climate change.
The real sceptics are the cautious scientists of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change who, year after year, assess and reassess the
new data and go through thousands of peer-reviewed studies, forming
groups and committees to check and doublecheck the results.
As for the "conspiracy theorist" tag, let me be blunt: climate-change
deniers are the biggest conspiracy theorists of all. In order to embrace
the delusions of the deniers, you have to adopt the belief that tens of
thousands of researchers, some of them awardwinning scientists, from
across the world (not to mention the political spectrum) have conducted
behind the scenes, undetected by the media, a campaign of peer-reviewed
deceit in defiance of empirical data. How else to explain what the US
Republican senator James Inhofe, a darling of the deniers, calls "the
greatest hoax ever perpetrated against the American people"?
Yet it isn't just barmy GOP politicians. Or the gaffe-prone prime
minister of Australia. Take Richard Lindzen, the doyen of the selfstyled
"climate sceptics" and a tenured professor of meteorology at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Earlier this year, I interviewed
him for my al-Jazeera TV series
Head to Head;
unlike the vast majority of his fellow deniers, Lindzen has the
advantage of being a trained scientist who has bothered to study our
planet's climate.
Why, I asked the softly-spoken professor, did he think national
academies of science from 34 different countries - including the United
States, the United Kingdom, China, India, Russia, France, Germany,
Japan, Mexico, Canada, Brazil and South Africa - had all signed up to
the IPCC consensus position on man-made climate change?
Richard Lindzen: "They've been told: 'Issue a statement on this.'"
Me: "Told by who?"
RL: "Well, I'd rather not say, to be honest."
Me: "Why not?"
RL: "Because in each case, it would be in some ways embarrassing - I
mean, each of them are dependent [sic] on the goodwill of the
government. And if they're told 'sign on', they'll sign on."
Huh? Are we expected to believe that 34 different national academies of
science are all working hand in glove with their country governments to
exaggerate the impact of carbon-dioxide emissions on the climate and
cover up the supposed evidence of global cooling? To what end - and on
whose orders? Greenpeace? Al Gore?
To be honest, I don't have a problem with most conspiracy theorists. If
they want to believe that the 9/11 attacks were an "inside job" or that
the Nasa moon landings were "faked", so be it. Each to his own. In any
case, most of these cranks and clowns do no harm to anything, other than
their own reputation (or non-reputation).
But the climate-change deniers of today, with their astonishing
combination of manufactured doubt, faux outrage, mass paranoia and
evidence-free pseudoscience, are endangering our planet. According to
the World Health Organisation, "climatic changes already are estimated
to cause over 150,000 deaths annually". The poorest countries,
incidentally, bear the brunt of these preventable fatalities.
It's no laughing matter. This particular conspiracy theory costs lives.
Mehdi Hasan is the political director of the Huffington Post UK and a contributing writer for the New Statesman, where this article is cross-posted
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