by Dave On Fire

Created on: March 04, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

As long as there has been climate change (and it's been observed for a couple of decades now) there have been climate change deniers. Some people, and some institutions, simply make too much money out of pollution to bear the thought of it being brought under control. Unsurprisingly, oil companies are among the worst, represented by the pseudo-scientific advocacy bodies who once made a living from saying tobacco was good for you, but a worryingly broad (if, thankfully, ever-shrinking) selection of politicians and journalists buy into this conspiracy.

As the evidence for global warming becomes more and more compelling, the deniers strategically fall back to weaker positions. They revise their statements to suit the zeitgeist, finding contradictory and increasingly poor excuses not to act on climate change, desperate to find a line in the sand that they can defend. A few battle-hardened mercenaries still stand on the first lines, but for the most part they retreat along the following sort of route:

Position 1:

> We won't lift a finger to stop climate change because
> Climate change isn't happening.

Some people still passionately argue that climate change is the figment of a paranoid imagination - a paranoid imagination that's incredibly skilled at fiddling graphs. This "paranoia" seems to have an especially strong grip on scientists, who have formed an overwhelmingly strong consensus that climate change is happening. The Royal Society have been particularly vocal about the fact that disagreement among scientists on climate change is a myth.

Position 2: OK,

> climate change is happening,
> but we won't lift a finger to stop it because
> climate change has nothing to do with human activity.

Who's emitting all the gases then? What's that you say? Volcanoes? Trees? Oh, grow up!

Basically the criticisms of position 1 can be applied equally to position 2, and once one falls, the other inevitably follows soon after.

Position 3: OK, OK,

> climate change is happening,
> it's happening as a direct result as human activity,
> but we won't lift a finger to stop it because
> climate change is a good thing

Right. Fair enough, I guess. We can grow olives in Scotland or, for that matter, make decent wine in England. And there'll be no need to go to Spain for your holidays when it's that sunny up here.

On the other hand, there will more frequent and severe floods and droughts, heatstroke will stalk us at every corner, plants and wildlife will be confused sometimes into extinction transforming

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