Zombie Climate Denialist Theories Shamble On, Web, TV & Newspapers Their Only Remaining Habitat

Last edited Sun May 19, 2013, 10:13 AM USA/ET - Edit history (1)


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Like a cardiac monitor warning of a soon-to-be lifeless patient, for more than 20 years the red line hovers around zero showing barely a flicker of life. Cook says they expected to see a rising number of papers which had "no position" and didn't feel the need to state the obvious "just as geographers find no reason to remind readers that the earth is round".

In other words, the alternative arguments about the causes of global warming were already dead or dying 20 years ago.

Yet since then, climate science contrarians/deniers/sceptics have continually applied the defibrillator paddles to these failing theories in an attempt to bring them back to life. Despite what you might have seen on TV hospitable dramas, when the heart goes all asystolic no amount of defibrillator action is going to chase away the reaper.

So after giving up on the peer-reviewed literature, the climate science contrarians – often bolstered by support from the fossil fuel industry and free-market idealogues - took their talking points somewhere else. That is, out into the public domain, the mainstream media and the blogosphere and far away from the less forgiving operating theatre of peer-reviewed science journals. To this day, these dead theories hang around like slack-jawed zombies in the graveyards of global media outlets.

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