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Climate change denial: it’s as frustrating, intellectually twisted, and unfalsifiable as creationism, but way more dangerous. Climate change doubt: it’s just lazy.

New Zealand research company UMR released one fucked up report this year on public opinion of climate change. They begin by stating that “polls around the world are showing both falling belief that climate change is happening and that it is largely the result of human activity.” They go on to show that in New Zealand public belief in human-induced climate change has slipped from 71 percent in 2004 to 52 percent in January of this year. Their worst finding, though, is that “predictably, given media coverage, only 18% believe that most scientists agree about climate change and 78% that there is a lot of disagreement.”
   Apart from poor leadership and useless media, this is because Joe Public is a sucker. US Republican spin doctor Frank Luntz knows this. This genius is so adept at spin and bullshit that he could whizz some up in a fairy floss machine and sell it to kids for $5 a pop. Ever wonder what happened to ‘global warming’? Luntz happened. He advised the Bush administration (correctly) that people hold catastrophic associations with ‘global warming’ but that ‘climate change’ sounds much more natural and benign. He’s not a denier. Nevertheless, political expediency always wins the day: “should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”
   For the sake of sanity I’m going to assume everybody attending university is educated enough to know that climate change is happening, that its primary cause is human activity, and that there is a massive scientific consensus on this. We’ve known this for years now. However, scientists are failing to get it through to the masses. The IPCC’s latest report, based on the work of thousands of reviewers and authors, made statements on the likelihood of their conclusions. Unfortunately when they assert things like “climate change is ‘very likely’ to have a human cause,” it isn’t very compelling to the layman. ‘Very likely’ in the technical sense actually means there is over 90 percent certainty. ‘Virtual certainty’ means there is a 99 percent probability of an outcome. You don’t get ‘absolute certainty’ because then you wouldn’t be doing science; you would be doing pseudo-science (just like climate-change-denying hacks).
   It’s easy to feel sorry for scientists. One said it’s “like a marine in battle against a cub scout when it comes to the scientists defending themselves … We’re not PR experts like they are, we’re not lawyers and lobbyists like they are. We’re scientists, trained to do science.” They bear a strange burden. “Climate scientists have, en masse, become Cassandras – gifted with the ability to prophesy future disasters, but cursed with the inability to get anyone to believe them.” Sound like a bunch of masochists to me. Poor bastards.