The four types of climate denier, and why you should ignore them all
Damian Carrington
The shill, the grifter, the egomaniac and the ideological fool: each distorts the urgent global debate in their own way
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The science is clear, the severity understood at the highest levels everywhere, and serious debates about what to do are turning into action. The deniers have nothing to contribute to this.
However infuriating they are, arguing with them or debunking their theories is likely only to generate publicity or money for them.
It also helps to generate a fake air of controversy over climate action that provides cover for the vested interests seeking to delay the end of the fossil fuel age.
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Every nation in the world signed up to the
2015 Paris climate deal, pledging to keep global heating below 2C and ideally to 1.5C. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change involves thousands of international scientists and is arguably the greatest scientific endeavour in history. It has spent three decades spelling out in painstaking detail how humanity is causing global heating, how catastrophic that threatens to be – and how drastic action is required to avert the worst.
The world of finance and business is catching up fast with the science, and almost all the technology needed already exists. In short, no sane or serious actor can countenance denial of climate danger. Bad-faith arguments motivated by greed, egomania or ideology have nothing to add.