It is always easier to believe that there are no problems, and we are safe to enjoy our way of life without undesired consequences. And as our news is filled with world catastrophes and political conflicts, there is a great need for positive news. Positive news however is not pretending there’s no crisis (as brilliantly exposed in Adam McKay’s 2021 film “Don’t look up”), positive news is about right solutions to actual issues.
Climate change denial is one of the main trends of scepticism exploiting social media to mal-inform, purposefully misinform the public to create confusion and apathy, more recently on the increase among young people.
They use so called FLICC techniques of argument, which stands for “Fake Experts, Logical Fallacies, Impossible Expectations, Cherry Picking, and Conspiracy Theories” as discussed on skepticalscience.com, a website that exposes denial “industry” (link below).
In here I concentrate on Logical Fallacy, which means misinterpreting facts/data in order to come to a false conclusion. Recently I read an opinion that appeared in local press whose readers are not always familiar with denial techniques. In particular that view could be identified as straw man fallacy, which “can take many forms, it usually involves distorting, exaggerating, oversimplifying, or taking parts out of context.”
The writer used NOAA ice core data of paleoclimatic temperature variation in the Pleistocene era, with the warmest peaks (3°C) higher than the present temperature (1.5 °C) to support the claim that the current climate change is not anthropogenic and is going to end.
Before we get to the data interpretation in the context of observed climate variability it is important to mention that all temperature ice core data is estimated based on isotopic oxygen content in different ice layers, a so-called proxy, and it is subject to considerable uncertainty. In addition, the ice core data for the last twenty years is not reliable because “the snow that falls on the ice sheet needs time to form into solid ice” (Carbon Brief website, link below). For that period, we need to refer to the measured temperature data. Graph below presents data from Greenland ice cores based on the Carbon Brief website (all glaciologists observe similar patterns of data from the Northern hemisphere). Looking at the last 11000 years we observe that temperature varied, and the current level is indeed not the highest, but the past warming occurred over two thousand years (from 10000-8000BC).
Slow warming during interglacial periods was caused by the gradual changes of the earth’s orbit relative to the sun. This contrasts with the current warming rapidly progressing since the industrial revolution, linked closely with an increase of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. This is a result of human effect on environment, predominantly due to burning of fossil fuels (so called greenhouse gas effect). The global average temperature is projected to continue and in 2050 overtake all the interglacial levels, only 26 years from now (modelled data presented on the graph).
It is a known fact to many of us, but the confusion caused by climate change denial still persists hence it is important to recognise reasoning behind misinterpretation which is linked to the vested interests of fossil fuel corporations. For anyone interested I recommend George Monbiot’s “Heat”, ch.2 “The Denial Industry”.
Skeptical Science, https://skepticalscience.com/give-science-denial-the-flicc.html
Carbon Brief, https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-what-greenland-ice-cores-say-about-past-and-present-climate-change/
