“How these arguments play out on television is hugely important because of its dominance as a source of climate information…Legitimate policy discussion needs to be carefully distinguished from false claims put out by organized skeptical groups.”
Any regular viewer of BBC’s Question Time could be forgiven for thinking that old-fashioned climate science denialism is alive and kicking. In a recent edition, panelist Julia Hartley-Brewer called the IPCC’s climate models “complete nonsense,” and dismissed the 2022 record U.K. heatwave and the floods in Pakistan by saying: “It’s called weather.”
But for some time now, researchers have suggested that the balance of arguments propagated by climate skeptics or denialists has shifted from denying or undermining climate science to challenging policy solutions designed to reduce emissions.
For example, computer-assisted methods applied to thousands of contrarian blogs or websites have found that since the year 2000, “evidence skepticism” — which argues that climate change is not happening, or is not caused by humans, or the effects won’t be too bad — has been on the decline, while “response” or “solutions skepticism” has been on the rise.
In the U.S. media and U.K. media, there is strong evidence too that the prevalence of these arguments may be shifting. By 2019, much less space was being given to those denying the science in newspaper outlets in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S., except in some right-leaning...
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