Climate Denialists, by and large, know that they are lying

Great Debates
1

Note: this thread is not about any individual on this forum. Rather, it’s about media figures, most notably on the right, who push climate denialism talking points.

In a recent thread on climate change, Sam Stone had this to say:

(Snipping because the rest of the quote really isn’t germane to the topic, or the previous sentence.)

I don’t think this is true. In fact, I think giving climate denialists the benefit of the doubt like this is both unreasonable and dangerous, as it allows fundamentally dishonest actors to abuse the intellectual charity inherently expected in the free marketplace of ideas to push lies that will (and indeed already are) hurting millions of people.

So what evidence do we have that these people are not just iedologically biased, but actively lying?

For one, because the evidence they cite contradicts them. BeepKillBeep went over this with Crowder, but you can find similar among other denialists.

For example: “Hide the decline”. Right-wingers across the board were drawn in by climategate, but it’s actually really hard to read the emails in context and come away with the conclusions that many of them took from it. You have to lie about the context (and pretend that they weren’t adding the “real temps” to hide the decline)… And nearly everyone on the right did. This is still an article of faith for many on the right.

Here’s another great example: Christopher Monckton liked to cite a paper by Rachel Pinker. Pinker basically told Monckton in no uncertain terms that he was badly misinterpreting her research. Monckton then continued to cite Pinker’s paper after said debate… to congress. He knew it was wrong and repeated it anyways.

In fact, about Monckton… Skeptical Science keeps a list of all the myths on global warming that Monckton spreads. It’s a really, really, really long list, with many elements contradicting each other. This is not the position of an honest scientist. This is behavior more on par with a creationist who doesn’t even believe what he’s being paid to say. Weird, right?

Now, you could make the argument that Monckton is an outlier here. I’d say that it’s weird that so many of his talking points are shared by others like Patrick Moore and Rush Limbaugh. But this misses the big picture. Fossil fuel companies have known about global warming since the 1970s. They were aware of the consequences, and they were aware that it would be bad for business if it got out. So…

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.

This next bit is particularly telling, IMHO.

Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.

Emphasis mine.

The truth is that the entire right-wing media ecosystem exemplified by people like Crowder, Carlson, Shapiro, and Limbaugh has been taking money from oil companies to spread propaganda for a very long time. Every single one of those people has close ties to institutions run by the Koch brothers, who stand to profit from global warming denialism. The Daily Caller is funded by them. Glenn Beck and The Blaze are funded by them. Reason is funded by them. And so on and so forth.

Climate denialists, at least ones in the public sphere, do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Beyond even the basic step of treating them as fundamentally unserious (which they definitely are, make no mistake), they do not deserve to be treated as though they believe what they say, because, by and large, they don’t. They are being paid good money to lie to you about the most serious issue facing humanity in the 21st century, and there is absolutely no reason to treat them as anything but propaganda mouthpieces for the people who want to sell our future short for a few extra bucks.

2

Well, I agree of course. It is beyond obvious that many of the climate-change-denying commentators are lying. There is absolutely no doubt that they are aware of the reports and data because they discuss them. They wildly distort the findings, usually by cherry-picking particular sentences. The reason this works is scientists tend to be cautious in their wording. So it usually isn’t hard to find some sort of weaker statement on which to pounce. There is only one word to describe this behavior. Lying.

And look, if you’re reading this and you’re going to post times that somebody on the left did the same thing, save your electrons. If they did it, then I’ll call them lying on that issue/statement as well. If you’re going to post about some environmentalist group and some of their aims, I’m more than willing to say I agree with aim X,Y but not Z. E.g., the Sierra Club that came up on the other thread. I agree with protecting forests. I agree with opposing coal. I disagree with their stance on nuclear power. See, it isn’t that hard. You can partially agree and disagree with a group/speaker that’s predominantly on their side.

What I’ve observed is that people in general, although it seems to be somewhat worse on the right at the moment, have a difficult time separating issues. It is all-or-nothing thinking. It Crowder, Shapiro, etc. are lying about climate change, and I admit they’re lying about climate change, then I’m admiting they’re lying about everything. At the moment, the right is very much in lock step with their leadership and commentators. I referenced this in the Trump Impeachment thread as well. I claimed that none of the usual suspects will discuss FOIA reveal until after the Republicans/Fox News/Right-wing Media have released their talking points and they didn’t. I’d say I’m a prophet, but it was not a difficult prediction. If you look at the long-running political threads, then it becomes very easy to see. The comments exactly track with the latest talking points, and almost always post-facto, and almost never in advance. So, I would be surprised if anybody on the right is willing to come here and admit, that yes, on this issue, commentators like Crowder, Shapiro, Moore, Limbaugh, etc are liars.

And I separate here very clearly these commentators are the average Joe and Jane. I fully understand that the layperson is not reading scientific reports or studies. They should at least read the summaries, but I completely understand that they don’t, and really don’t have the time to do so. So, if they’re getting information from these commentators, or friends on Facebook, or whatever, they can be misinformed or ill-informed. No problem. I do my very best to inform such people of the realities surrounding climate change.

3

Yeah, just to clarify, this thread is not about nuclear power or the claims of whatever fringe leftist environmentalist you care to bring up. Please do not bring those subjects into the thread. This is about mainstream pundits broadly understood to be climate denialists, and whether their denialism is born out of ignorance or malice. My vote is on malice.

4

No, I don’t think most climate change denialists are lying, and it’s disappointing to see BPC using the shill gambit* to discredit them wholesale.

As with other forms of denialism (antivaccine ideologues come to mind) there’s a certain percentage of such folk who are deliberately lying, sometimes as a defense mechanism against what they perceive as the Big Lie promulgated by their array of enemies. In the case of climate change, it’s the intellectuals/scientists, alternative power interests and other bogeymen who are supposedly fueling the narrative to profit off climate change research.

A more prosaic and accurate explanation for much of their nonsense is lack of critical thinking skills. An example is dependence on a relatively tiny list of “experts” with whom they agree and whose opinions must be respected because, like, they’re PhDs, man! (never mind that the vast majority of experts with relevant degrees and experience are squarely on the other side).

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been called a shill online (re vaccine and GMO debates) I could buy everyone who’s posted in this thread a full-course meal at a Ruth Chris Steakhouse.*
**only valid as long as there are just a few posters in the thread. Eventually I would only be able to treat everyone to a Happy Meal.

5

I mean… They’re saying things that are bafflingly wrong. When they cite sources they do so not just incorrectly, but in ways that directly contradict the source material. Many of them have this shown to them, then repeat the false statements anyways. They’re also funded by a vast web of dark money sources with a very clear agenda to push - an agenda we now know they knew was based on flat-out falsehoods.

I don’t think that’s the same thing as calling a random person on a message board a shill or implying without basis that they’re paid off.

6

My favorite lie is that the Earth is actually getting cooler.

For “proof” they turned to charts showing the average temperature. Those showed a giant spike in 1998, a freakishly hot year. The next decade’s temperatures continued the upward trend from previous years but didn’t match 1998. QED.

DUMB. The last several years have all been much hotter than that freakishly high 1998. This chart shows the trend in all its messiness.

Yes, Jackmannii, this is partially a lack of critical thinking skills. That chart is not easy to understand. But the source of the problem is that people are loudly lying to them using short words. The recipients of the lies believe they in fact *are *using critical thinking skills and have chosen the right side.

In reality, one side has actual science, the other memes and bumper stickers. I know which one I support.

7

Oh the subject of famous people in political, news, and “news” careers, I don’t believe it’s credible to believe that they’re merely suffering from a shortage of critical thinking skills. Their misinterperations of evidence are ongoing and can only be described as deliberately deceptive.

Yahoos on the street lack critical speaking skills. People with sponsors say what they’re paid to.

8

That’s motivation. Creationism is a good analog to this debate. Some yahoo creationists (like the ones who say if we’re descended from apes, how come there are still apes) do lack critical thinking skills, but the top ones don’t. We know their motivation - religious faith - but that doesn’t mean they aren’t lying. It means they can justify lying to themselves.
Creationists do quote mining also. Are the ones who quote Darwin about the difficulty of explaining the evolution of the eye - but then don’t quote him when he explains it - lying? I think so.

9

I think you have it the other way around. The big/primary/main personalities, the likes of Crowder, Shapiro, Limbaugh, etc., have staff and resources. They aren’t making a mistake. They aren’t failing to use critical thinking. They’re purposefully looking for any weakness in the climate change science to attack it. They’re doing this either for direct or indirect money (this gets a bit complex, so I’ll come back to it if necessary, but in brief, people like Moore gets directly paid by the oil industry, while people like Crowder gets paid by convincing people that they’re “in the know.” He’s satisfying an emotional need and gets them to buy his merchandise).

The smaller personalities are often simply reusing material from big personalities. E.g., small/medium channel YouTube content creators. They might be simply making a critical thinking mistake.

Numerically, it is probably accurate that there are more smaller personalities, than big personalities; however, the ones with the real impact are lying. The types of mistakes they are making are not possible if one is looking at the data, which we know they are because they often reference slices of it. Of course, it is possible that there is some small percentage for whom this is all just an honest mistake, and pure critical thinking, but that does not match the evidence for most of them.

10

Usually the conversation with a leftist goes something like this:

“OK, so you believe climate change is real, now give me that nice juicy hamburger and have this disgusting vegan garbage. Move out of your house with a picket fance and live crammed into a tiny flat with no backyard and where you can hear all your neighbors bedroom activities. Smash that incandescent lightbulb and use those horrid LEDs. Give up that SUV and walk int the freezing cold and rain to the bus stop.”

So “I don’t believe it’s real” shuts down that line of conversation faster than “I think it’s real, but I think science will come to our rescue with carbon capture or sulfur injection, or I think it’s real, but it’s rolling it back isn’t worth destroying 100 years of progress society has made because some bartender and a screechy kid say we need to”.

So I’m sure a lot of deniers from the top of politics on down are actually liers.

11

Literally no conversation with any leftist has ever gone like this.

12

I don’t know if I’d agree with **BPC’s **assessment of deliberate lying, so much as it is that many people have this filter in their mind that automatically inflates the validity of facts that they like, and deflates the validity of facts they don’t like. Confirmation bias on steroids.

My highly-educated, good-at-math-and-all-kinds-of-things aunt is a…9/11 conspiracy theorist and Flat Earther. It baffles me that someone with such a high IQ could believe such things, but she does. Her process goes something like this: If she can think of even **one **thing that supports her argument, it’s debate over, she wins. No matter if you bring up five or ten things that contradict her view, she’ll cling to that one thing that, in her head, justifies her case.

Now, is she deliberately lying? I’d hesitate to put it that way. I think she genuinely, sincerely believes she is right, just like how a mentally ill person can genuinely believe that his unfounded beliefs are correct. I’d think the same of many climate-change denialist pundits - they may genuinely believe that climate change is a hoax, due to latching on to a few “facts” that they like, and mentally discarding all the facts they don’t like. It can be such a natural process of discarding unwanted facts, in fact, that they might not even themselves be aware that they’re thinking this way.

13

I don’t understand the point(s) you’re trying to make. Are you saying that deniers aren’t really deniers? That they say they’re deniers, but they are really believers and they think that science/technology will come to the rescue?

14

I think his point is that many climate-change activists balk at taking extreme personal action or sacrifice for their cause.

15

Yes, pretty much. “I don’t believe it” sounds better than “I believe it but don’t want to be forced to have live like a European” or is shorter than explaining all the promising research on a technological solution rather than a lifestyle devastating solution.

16

Folks like, say, Marc Morano? I doubt he knows enough or cares enough to have a sincere opinion one way or the other on the reality of climate change. What he wants is to make money and be influential, and his lifelong working environment has been right-wing propaganda. Climate denial is a lucrative game to him, and I doubt that evaluating its scientific validity even rates on his list of priorities.

I think the OP’s rather optimistically naive about the cognitive clarity of even the professional science deniers. In order to “know that they are lying”, they’d first have to be remotely interested in the issue of what the truth is and what their ethical responsibilities to the truth are. I see zero evidence that they care about such things.

17

So cowards with no sense of personal responsibility.

18

Well, I think a lot of climate denialists use that attitude towards climate activists as a kind of ass-covering for their own denialism. “Hey, if this person who supposedly believes that the earth is in a dire environmental crisis won’t immediately subject themselves to extreme austerity in order to minimize their own contribution to the crisis, how can they expect me to take them seriously?”

The fact is, of course, that the climate crisis won’t be solved by individuals’ personal lifestyle choices. To a large extent, also of course, the crisis is no longer solvable at all: we’re going to be dealing with the impacts of significant climate change for decades and centuries even if we cease all anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions tomorrow. But to the extent that we can and will eventually resolve the crisis, it will happen via large-scale systemic change brought about by concerted national and international regulation to redirect market forces away from emissions-heavy activities. Not via a few dozen or thousand activists swearing off air travel and refusing to use electric lights, or whatever the denialist ignoramuses think they ought to be doing to adequately demonstrate their bona fides.

19

Just curious, what can you cite in the last, say, 2 years from Ben Shapiro that suggests he’s lying about climate change? He’s come around slower than many, but AFAIK he does not deny that climate change exists and that humans contribute to it.

20

And those few people who do do that, they get dismissed and laughed at: “they can do what they want, but am I gonna live like those loons? Hell no! And why should I trust such a wackadoodle hippie anyway?”