Piotr Wawrzyniuk / Shutterstock.com. All rights reserved.Arguments about climate change are awash with charges and counter-charges of conspiracy. Climate sceptics routinely deploy terms like ‘hoax’, ‘scam’, ‘cover-up’ and ‘deception’ to describe what they are up against. The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future is the entirely typical title of a book by US Senator James Inhofe. The Propaganda Bureau, The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science and Watermelons: How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing your Children’s Future are just a few of the others. The familiar tropes of conspiracy theory crop up all the time in these accounts: climate scientists are portrayed as a mafia (step out of line and you’ll wake up to find a polar bear head in your bed!), the mainstream media is accused of peddling ‘Goebbels-esque’ propaganda, and anything faintly redolent of a cover-up gets a –gate tacked onto the end (look out, it’s Climategate!).
But the accusations go both ways. Just as its critics see the environmental lobby as a front for big government and grant-guzzling scientists, so environmentalists see their critics as a front for the oil industry. Climate scepticism is regularly characterized as a put-up job, modelled on the nefarious practices of big tobacco. Merchants of Doubt: How A Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming is another typical (and best-selling) book title. All the tropes of conspiracy theory are in place here too: it’s a small group of renegades, operating behind the scenes, in the pay of larger forces, covering up the truth.
