I just have to ask this. Are there climate change (i.e., global warming) deniers in any other countries? I know in the USA it is a partisan issue. But is it an issue at all in any other country?
I know that the USA does stand alone on other issues. I know I think we’re the only country that doesn’t have some version of the insanity plea. And I know that there is reportedly only one other country in the world that doesn’t have the metric system.
But what about this issue?
:):)
Yes, but they’ve copied it from the US. It’s the same people who claim that Hillary walks around with one of those parole anklets (and if you think that doesn’t make sense as she’s never been on trial, much less found guilty, the answer is “that is what you think!”), that municipal water-purification plants are poisoning the water with hallucinogenics or that vaccines cause cancer, autism, male-pattern baldness and shortness of breath.
^^I thought this was General Questions, which means factual answers?
Australia has a strong climate denial lobby, which has had considerable political influence. From what i can see it closely parallels the US denial structure, with key billionaires and industry lobby groups backing cheerleaders among conservative politicians. Most big businesses now have however come out acknowledging human induced climate change, whether as an abstract statement that they accept it exists through to pushing for carbon credit systems and so on.
The strength of the climate denialists has perhaps lessened since the federal election earlier this year, with the most prominent advocate, the former Prime Minister Tony Abbott* losing his seat in Parliament when he was challenged by an independent campaigning largely on climate change action. It still remains strong in many places, with coal mining remaining a major employer and economic driver.
Overall, Australia seems comparable to the US in this regard, and well behind the European political consensus. Both sides of Aust politics have really failed to get past the politics of climate change in the past decade.
[* He is truly a repellent turd who was willing to derail any initiative in managing carbon emissions to further his own political ambitions, including his own leadership].
Regarding Britain, the guys at DESMOG have looked at how the deniers in Britain have supported efforts like Brexit.
In essence: Many deniers in Britain (Supported by powerful interests) did work in favor of Brexit in the hopes that it would make it harder for the UK government to deal with the emissions issue once Britain is not a part of Europe (treaties and laws from Europe, they expect, would not be followed after Brexit or it will be easier to make the UK government to give up).
AFAIK a lot of those denier assumptions are faulty, regarding how much the government after a hard Brexit would stop efforts to de-carbonize the economy. But that does not stop willful ignorants looking to see the world burn so as to protect the profits of powerful interests.
I have met Americans in other countries who were climate-change deniers. Does that count?
I knew a Thai computer geek in Bangkok who was a moon-landing denier, so those exist. And a Canadian cornered me in a Bangkok bar one time when he learned I worked for a newspaper to expound on the Jews being behind the Twin Towers collapse, so those exist too. Why not climate-change deniers?
Climate change denial was explicit policy of the Conservative Party of Canada(one of the two major parties here) for many years. It’s only been in the past year or so that they’ve shifted positions to acknowledge that it even exists.
I believe that it’s official policy of the Ontarian, Albertan and Saskatchewan provincial governments that climate change does not exist.
In a word, yes. Climate change denial in the US gets the most press, like everything else, but deniers definitely exist in other countries. Lots of them in Canada, mainly because of the western oil industries; lots of them in Australia, at least in part because of the magnitude of the coal industry, much those exports incidentally going to China. And yes, for a variety of reasons, there are many in the UK – like the notorious twit Christopher Monckton, one of the most egregious of them all.
Maybe it’s just me, but I seem to be noticing the rate of outright climate change denial falling off as we hit one temperature record after another, both globally and locally. Denial is becoming a very difficult fiction to maintain.
Anyone from Russia able to chime in? I imagine the rhetoric there would be very, let’s just say obfuscatory, since a lot of their wealth comes from oil, plus state controlled media. On the other hand, with a colder climate, they may also see changes on the ground a lot more readily. I’m curious about China too, but they seem to have more of a “we’ll deal with whatever happens when it happens” attitude and simply may not care one way or the other.
Cosigned, except that I’d call our current PM, Scott “lump 'o coal” Morrison just as bad as Abbot.
The big difference between the US and Australia, though, is in the electorate. Two graphs: https://images.app.goo.gl/psiS2KWrgFkdF5Q6A and https://images.app.goo.gl/PKVcLmvPaHgHoLQV8
The questions aren’t the same, obviously, but it’s pretty clear that the number of Australians who could fairly be called “deniers” has never been over 20% and is currently falling, whereas in the US it seems to be a majority, and rising.
I tend to think the reason the Coalition is so pro-coal is simply that it’s a wealthy business that can make lots of political donations. It’s not idealogical for them. If the renewables industry ever gets to be vaguely comparable in wealth and donation-potential, expect a massive flip very quickly
is the Murdoch family from Australia or the UK? Wherever they’re from must have a large contingent of climate change denialists.
There is a conservative rump here in Oz who regard anything supported by the greens or the left as a-priori something to be opposed. (And there is a mirror image on the left side.) I once had the dubious experience of having dinner with one of our more well know ultra-conservatives and he was quite up front that this was a big part of what drove his opinions on climate. I suspect we are not alone in having such politicians. Indeed the mere fact that they can upset the “greenies” has clearly driven some policies. Whilst here in Oz we don’t have the entrenched religious culture of say the US, there are certainly some elements of a conservative religious right who believe that the Earth was built for exploitation my man, and that guides a lot of their thinking. OTOH, much of the religious establishment is much more on the left side of this here.
There continue to be small scale scandals about expression of opinions on climate. None of it shows any of the players in a good light. In many areas climate has become a surrogate for other political agendas.
The first paper Rupert Murdoch owned was the evening tabloid here in Adelaide. It was called “The News”. Hence the name of his media empire. For a long time he would visit Adelaide once a year for the AGM of the empire. He cut his teeth learning the news trade in the UK. That clearly influenced a lot of how his papers operate.
“Morons exist” is a factual answer.
Oh, and my apologies: I should have said my answer referred to Spain. I once had a French coworker who was a conspiranoid, but I don’t know enough about French politics to tell if any parties or prominent politicians are of that bent.
While trying to find out whether conspiranoid/conspiranoico actually originated in English or it’s “in Spanish in the original”, I ran into this jewel by El Reno Renardo (warning: not safe for office jobs just on account of noisiness). Lyrics theirs, translation mine:
We’ve never set foot on the Moon,
Stanley Kubrick recorded everything inside a stage
Trojans are created
by antivirus companies
to sell the Pro version
Reptile people aren’t just passing by, and they haven’t come in peace
they bring sado-maso tools to explore your arsehole deep
Darwin was just a nutso
an iguana-fucking primate. His book is great comedy:
as we all know Our Lord Jesus
rode atop a velociraptor.
The Twin Towers wasn’t Islam
no matter what you think, 9-11 was Uncle Sam
Conspiranoid… how will a plane demolish a tower?
Conspiranoid… Paul McCartney is buried next to John
Monsanto’s veggies have hairy tails,
that’s GMOs for you
Planes fumigate us, those lines in the sky weren’t there before
I’m not crazy, I’ve seen this in internet!
Reiki works for me
pharma is a mafia, I don’t vaccinate my kids
Why do they hide the autopsy of the Roswell alien, in Area 51?
Bin Laden wasn’t killed, he’s got a new identity
now he sells MJ and durum in a kebab
Conspiranoid… the yeti doesn’t show up because he’s letargic
Conspiranoid… Blesa’s arms weren’t that long (1)
(Spoken, recorded from a TV program about “mysteries” which spends a lot of time on conspiracy theories (2):
welcome to the Ship of Mystery
when we see images of the Moon, well… there’s lots of people in the US who don’t believe they’re real
some smartypants claim that UFOs are only seen by morons, that kind of thing, we’re used to that
masons (3), the Tilderberg Group (4), the Illuminati, Lady Di, Bruce Lee, so many characters we can use to have a program about conspiracies,
which our very well-informed viewers believe thousands of people immolated themselves knowing full-well what was going on, that two symbols of American technology as were the Twin Towers were brought down, along with another building…)
I believe in Matrix, Illuminatis and the Monster in Loch Ness
Anything else from Cardeñosa(5) and the Third Milenium (6)
Conspiranoid… Germanwings, such strange noises in your black box!
Conspiranoid… Lady Di, that was the mother-in-law
(1): wooow, this one is actually locally-grown! Blesa was a finance manager who commited suicide (shotgun blast to the chest) while under ciminal investigation.
(2): Fourth Millenium, “the Ship of Mystery”, which talks about anything that’s “not well-known”; one day they talk about what is CERN for and the next one about whether octopuses are immigrants from Beta-Centauri (2b)
(2a) Alpha is too well-trodden, you see
(3): one of Franco’s obsessions, or at least one he liked to talk about, was “the international Judeo-Masonic conspiration”
(4): yes, he actually says the name wrong
(5): a reporter who’s a famous conspiranoid
(6): before there was a TV program called “4th Milennium”, there was a radio program called “3rd Milennium”, done by the same people
Yeah but unfortunately it’s not binary.
Among the business-as-usual or “drill, baby, drill” crowd, there was always a split between those denying any warming is happening at all vs “Warming, but caused by nature so what can we do?” vs “Warming, caused by humans, but it’s too late or expensive to do anything”.
So yeah, outright denial has gone down but that hasn’t actually changed much.
I’m not disagreeing with you, just expanding on your point.
Of course in answer to the OP though; climate change denial is nowhere near as mainstream in most of the world as it is in the US. And for once it’s an issue where even in the developing world there is no widespread dismissal of the science because people living in tropical countries, or working the land with minimal irrigation or fertilizers, see very clearly the effects of climate change.
I am not sure I understand this part. All the science I have read state climate to be more like a 30 year condition. So glaciers are good human noticeable indicators of climate change. But tropical effects like heat waves or lower rainfall over a few years are not good indicators of climate change - since they can be normal statistical variances without climate change.
Yes – *individual *extreme weather events cannot be tied to climate change. There is nonetheless a trend of increasing frequency and severity. And it’s happening – we don’t need to wait 30 years to see it.
Furthermore there are in fact some changes in tropical zones that would not be expected sans climate change, like shorelines receding (and some islands disappearing completely), and deadly heatwaves (unsurvivable combination of heat and humidity) etc.
The problem with that approach is that we could have seen or still see short term cold spells and Global warming / Climate change will still be valid.
People live more than 30 years, plus there’s multi-generational history. “I’ve never seen the growing season start this early, nor has mom or grandpa.”