Article by Eric Worrell
Climate believers claim climate skepticism is declining and more people are worried about climate change. But if that’s the case, why are there so many elected climate skeptics?
Climate change deniers make up nearly a quarter of US Congress
Climate deniers — 23 in the Senate and 100 in the House — are all Republicans, making the United States an international outlier
Oliver Millman and Dana Noor
Monday 5 August 2024 20.00 AEST Last modified on Tuesday 6 August 2024 00.51 AESTUS politics is an unusual bastion of climate change denial, with nearly a quarter of members of Congress denying the reality of climate change despite growing public concern over dangerous global warming, an analysis has found.
A total of 123 elected federal representatives – 100 in the House of Representatives and 23 in the U.S. Senate – deny the existence of human-caused climate change, according to a recent study of current legislators' speeches, all of them Republicans.
“It's absolutely concerning,” said Kat So, the report's author and manager of energy and environmental campaigns at the Center for American Progress.
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“Certainly, the climate is changing,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz said in 2018. As long as we have Earth, the climate will change.
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“We had a freeze in the 1970s. They said this is going to be a new cooling period,” Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise said in a 2021 interview. Citing studies that have long been debunked but are still frequently cited by climate deniers. “It's getting warmer and colder now, that's what Mother Nature calls it. But the idea that hurricanes or wildfires are just the latest in recent years is a fallacy.
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“In 2013, the number of people on either end of the spectrum between shocked and dismissive was roughly the same, but now there are three people who are shocked for every one who is dismissive, so there’s a fundamental shift in how Americans think about climate change. sexual transformation,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, a climate opinion expert at Yale University.
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Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University who has long studied anti-climate rhetoric, said it was “not surprising” that the report found that old-school climate denial was declining.
“When it becomes more obvious that the climate is warming and extreme weather is getting more severe and happening all the time, it's hard to deny the science,” she said. “All things considered, no one can deny science with a straight face.”
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Learn more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/05/climate-change-denial-congress
Activists like Oreskes claim that climate skepticism is declining while climate concern is rising. But if that’s the case, why are there so many elected climate skeptics in American politics? Why do people who are primarily concerned about climate change continue to vote for representatives who oppose climate action?
I know this can be a difficult concept for climate activists and some climate scientists to grasp, but if your model disagrees with observations, you should keep the observations and abandon the model.
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