The American Denial of Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes

Naomi Oreskes is a Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego, who has written extensively on the history of the science of climate change.

The video is in two sections:
The first half of the video below emphasises the long history of climate research, that indicates the dangers of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. She makes a convincing case that there has been a great deal of research since John Tyndall published the evidence of the greenhouse properties of carbon dioxide in 1861, including:

• Arrhenius at the turn of the 20th century


• G.S. Callendar and W.O. Hulburt in the 1930s,


• Suess and Revelle, in the 1950s


• Keeling and U.S. National Academy of Sciences Panel on Weather and Climate Modification in the 1960s,


• Robert M. White, Jule Charney and the JASON committee in the 1970.


• And naturally the four IPCC reports from the late 1980s.

For a more detailed description see The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart

The second half deals with the denial industry that started in the early 1980s.
She describes in detail how the current strategies of the AWG denial industry developed from the following campaigns:

• support for the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars)


• attacking the consensus that sulfur and nitrogen emissions cause acid rain


• denying the consensus that CFCs cause the hole in the ozone layer


• and in particular the tobacco industries attempts to deny the dangers of smoking

She demonstrates that some current deniers worked on those earlier campaigns of disinformation.

The stragegy that was developed in these campaigns involved claims that:

• The Science is uncertain


• The Concerns are exaggerated


• Technology will solve the problem


• There is no need for government interference

Sound familiar?