Dealing in Doubt: The climate denial machine vs climate science

Published: Sep 2013

This report describes organized attacks on climate science, scientists and scientific institutions like the UN  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), that have gone on for more than 20 years. It sets out some of the key moments in this campaign of climate denial started by the fossil fuel industry, and traces them to their sources.

The tobacco industry's misinformation and PR campaign in the US against regulation reached a peak just as laws controlling tobacco were about to be introduced. Similarly, the campaign against climate change science - and scientists - has intensified as global policy on climate change has become more likely. This time though there is a difference. The corporate PR campaign has gone viral, spawning a denial movement that is distributed, decentralised and largely immune to reasoned response.

This report updates Greenpeace's March 2010 report, ahead of the forthcoming 2013 release of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment report.

With this new edition of Dealing In Doubt Greenpeace:

  • Detail the ongoing attempts to attack the integrity of individual climate scientists and their work.
  • Look beyond the strategic parallels between the tobacco industry's campaign for "Sound Science" (where they labeled mainstream science as "junk") to the current climate denial campaign, to new research that has come to light revealing the deeper connections: the funding, personnel and institutions between the two policy fights.
  • Detail how some scientists are now fighting back and taking legal action.
  • Showcase the Heartland Institute as an example of how tobacco-friendly free market think tanks use a wide range of tactics to wage a campaign against the climate science.
  • Reveal the range of tricks used by the denier campaign, from "pal review" instead of peer review, to personal attacks on scientists through Freedom of Information requests, self-publishing books, and the general conspiratorial noise from the denial machine in the blogosphere.
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