Climate change scepticism

Climate change denial, or global warming denial, is part of the global warming controversy. It involves denial, dismissal, unwarranted doubt or contrarian views contradicting the scientific opinion on climate change, including the extent to which it is caused by humans, its impacts on nature and human society, or the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions. Some deniers do endorse the term, but others often prefer the term climate change skepticism. However several scientists researching this phenomenon have noted that "skepticism" is a misnomer and an inaccurate description when referring to those who deny anthropogenic global warming. In effect, the two terms form a continuous, overlapping range of views, and generally have the same characteristics: both reject, to a greater or lesser extent, mainstream scientific opinion on climate change. Climate change denial can also be implicit, when individuals or social groups accept the science but fail to come to terms with it or to translate their acceptance into action. Several social science studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism and pseudoscience.

The campaign to undermine public trust in climate science has been described as a "denial machine" organized by industrial, political and ideological interests, and supported by conservative media and skeptical bloggers to manufacture uncertainty about global warming. In the public debate, phrases such as climate skepticism have frequently been used with the same meaning as climate denialism. The labels are contested: those actively challenging climate science commonly describe themselves as "skeptics", but many do not comply with common standards of scientific skepticism and, regardless of evidence, persistently deny the validity of human caused global warming.

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