"I don't believe in global warming", Banksy, 2009. Flickr/MagnusD. Some rights reserved.We all know about climate scepticism. It's the product of big oil companies spreading lies about science. Just like the tobacco lobby before them, they pay for PR agencies, dressed up as think tanks, to spread doubt about the facts in order to slow us from taking action on the biggest threat our civilisation faces. Isn't it?
In a sense, this is true. In the book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway outline this in detail. But this account troubles me. Because, in a sense, it ignores the vast majority of climate sceptics: the people who believe, adapt and spread these lies; the people motivated not by cynical profiteering, but by a genuine hunt for an imaginary truth. There is a real conspiracy which forms a part of the phenomenon that is climate scepticism, but there's also a broad psychology and sociology which means that the merchants of doubt have a market.
