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This chapter traces the origins of climate change denial. In the 1990s, as the scientific evidence for human-caused climate change grew stronger and calls for action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions grew louder, fossil fuel industry executives decided to launch a massive, media-savvy public relations campaign rather than concede the potential threat posed by global warming and the necessity of ultimately reducing fossil fuel use. While presenting a seemingly forward-thinking, proenvironmental public face, oil companies and allied economic and political interests were working behind the scenes to sow doubt about the validity of the underlying science on climate change. Their objective was to forestall any governmental policy action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions while seeking to maintain a positive corporate image. This chapter looks at the scientific community's efforts to fight against the disinformation campaigns funded by climate change deniers, giving rise to the so-called “climate wars”.

This chapter comments on the climate change deniers' last attack—a Battle of the Bulge—against climate science in general and human-caused climate change in particular. To many in the scientific community, the climate wars had been won—in favor of the science. However, it was increasingly clear that the climate change denial campaign was not simply going to fade away. There was too much at stake for the special interests behind the scenes. By early 2009, there were numerous indications that a major climate change denial offensive was gearing up. This chapter discusses the climate change denial machine's campaign against new efforts by the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; the contrarian attacks against the hockey stick; the deniers' use of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in their Serengeti strategy; and deniers' groundless accusations of fraud and malfeasance against climate scientists, exemplified by Paul Driessen's article “None Dare Call It Fraud: The Science Driving Global Warming Policy”.

In this chapter, the author focuses on the scientific community's fightback against the assaults of the climate change denial movement. Each of the investigations launched in response to the climategate affair ultimately proved exculpatory, not only for the author but also for the scientists of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU), and indeed all of the scientists who were embroiled in the scandal, as well as for the underlying science of climate change itself. By spring 2010, climate change deniers had lost some ground. The author narrates his clash with Ken Cuccinelli, the newly elected attorney general of Virginia, that arose when the latter demanded that the University of Virginia turn over essentially every e-mail, record, or document it had that related to the author during his time on the faculty there from 1999 to 2005. He also discusses new revelations that shattered the myth of the Wegman Report, along with the impact of the climategate and Cuccinelli affairs on the climate change denial machine.

This chapter identifies some obstacles to taking action. Failures of understanding among scientists, policy-makers, and the general public can lead to excessive respect for science that can turn to disillusionment. Policy-makers are often blamed for responding to incentives that voters provide. This is exploited by some of the world’s largest corporations and richest people who support climate change–denying front groups. Even without these obstacles, climate change would be difficult for us to address. It is difficult to attribute particular events to climate change. We respond dramatically to what we sense, not to what we think. Evolution built us to respond to rapid movements of middle-sized objects, not to the slow buildup of insensible gases in the atmosphere. Finally, climate change is the world’s largest and most complex collective action problem. Each of us, acting on our own desires, contributes to outcomes that we neither desire nor intend.

Planetary improvement is less about improving the planet in some objective, ‘natural’ sense as it is about improving and sustaining a very distinct mode of inhabiting this planet, of making natures and organizing lives (human and nonhuman alike). Cleantech entrepreneurs envision themselves greening the economy bit by bit, and refuse to see how the economy is actually transforming their visions and ideas, molding any new technologies or the possibility thereof into a commodity form that primarily serves the needs of capital. Through the maintenance of four conceptual and practical separations, cleantech proponents are able to gesture vaguely towards world-making ambitions, while at the same time insulating these visions from their day-to-day business activities and short-term financial projections: (1) a separation between personal and professional commitments; (2) the difference between thinking (about climate change) and doing (something profitable); (3) the difference between abstract and concrete concerns; and (4) the distinction between short-term (fundable) solutions and long-term visions. What emerges is a way of seeing the future as a forever receding horizon of possibility, whose radical transformation is preserved in people’s minds while the perpetuation of an unsustainable status quo is preserved in reality.

Chapter Four discusses the roles played in undermining the science of climate change by the denialist counter-institutions of knowledge funded by the fossil-fuel industries, and particularly the way those institutions have reduced the science of climate change to a proxy in broader economic and political struggles. One of the charges frequently made by denialists is that climate science does not correspond with the observed data. One of the central arguments of this chapter covers the relation between scientific models and a “reality” that is only indirectly available to them and that is configured in a form that is amenable to analysis. The chapter also argues that the epistemic solidity of the craft of modeling can thus not be derived from its access to and reflection of a field of independently given data. Rather, it is a function of a rigorous regime of knowledge and of the convergence of many different models on an explanation of climate change that directly implies the effect of greenhouse gases. More generally, modeling is a convergence of the resources and constraints of the institution of science, which should be understood as a normative apparatus and as a field deeply entangled with the imperatives of capitalism.

This chapter considers how climate change deniers would raise two more talking points against human-caused climate change when one was refuted, reminiscent of the heads of the Hydra, and how they would recycle the same arguments no matter how many times they were disproved in the peer reviewed literature. In 2007, climate science was on somewhat of a winning streak. Al Gore's summer 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth had introduced a far greater number of Americans to the science of climate change than ever before, and the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was also released. This chapter discusses the AR4 findings as well as the four main pillars of climate change denial that contrarians continued to cling to: climate models are crude, untested, and unvalidated; the instrumental record of global temperatures is unreliable; other data contradict the claim that Earth is warming; even if Earth is warming, it could be due to natural factors. It also looks at new arguments raised by deniers following the complete or near collapse by 2007 of these four pillars, as well as their continued attacks against the hockey stick.

In this epilogue, the author reflects on the climate wars that erupted over his hockey stick. He argues that the recalcitrance of those who have funded or otherwise participated in climate change denial may end up costing more lives than cigarette smoking ever has. He says the decades of delay in reducing carbon emissions have already incurred a very real cost to humanity and our environment. As of late 2011, carbon dioxide concentrations are at roughly 392 ppm, up from 388 ppm a year and a half earlier. These concentrations could reach 450 ppm in about 2030, which translates to least 2 degrees Celsius warming of the climate relative to preindustrial levels, a level experts generally agree constitutes dangerous human interference with the climate system. To avoid reaching that level, the author emphasizes the need to bring our annual emissions to a peak in less than a decade. He discusses the challenges posed by climate change, the proper role for scientists in the societal discourse surrounding climate change, and the lessons that can be learned from his story.

This chapter describes the coming of the Penumbral Period, and the fall of Western civilization. Historians view 1988 as the start of the Penumbral Period, when world scientific and political leaders created a new, hybrid scientific-governmental organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to communicate relevant science, and form the foundation for international governance to protect the planet and its inhabitants. But critics claimed that the scientific uncertainties were too great to justify the expense, and the inconvenience of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change denial spread widely by the end of the millennium. The year 2009 is viewed as the “last best chance” for the Western world to save itself, as leaders met in Copenhagen, Denmark, to try to agree on a binding, international law to prevent disruptive climate change. However, in 2023, the leaders still refused to accept that what lay behind the increasing destructiveness of disasters was the burning of fossil fuels.

This chapter looks at what gets in the way of our capacity for consciousness about ourselves, others, and nature—and the implications for our lives and the future of our planet. It draws from classic experiments on how perceptions are often suppressed, denied, and/or distorted in individuals who have been conditioned through their early experiences to believe that dominating and being dominated are our only alternatives, as well as how such individuals tend to have difficulty dealing with change. It presents recent studies using brain scans showing that this difficulty (with its implications for denial of climate change and other present threats) is associated with a particular kind of brain development. It also draws from new studies confirming that people from such backgrounds tend to vote for “strongman leaders”; support a punitive political agenda (such as capital punishment, heavy investment in prisons, use of military force in international affairs, and punishment of “immoral” women and gays); and deflect their suppressed fear and anger into prejudices against “inferior” or “dangerous” out-groups (all exploited by antidemocratic populists such as Trump in our world today). It examines how the cultural construction of gender roles and relations and the social categories provided by our languages affect what people perceive as moral, normal, and/or inevitable, revealing the psychosocial dynamics that habituate people to suppress their capacity for empathy, to accept authoritarian control, and to become unable to see more equitable, compassionate, less stressful life options.

The chapter begins with a reflection on historical notions of sacred place and how senses of sacred place are perceived and understood. Pilgrimage networks are constructed from memories of sacred places and ritualized in relationship to holy people or events. In medieval Norway, the notion of sacred landscape emerged as an interweaving of Norse and Christian elements. This sacred geography was transformed by the development of modern energy forms, transportation, and infrastructure projects made possible in part through Norway’s petroleum wealth. Even so, the pilgrimage network sought to re-establish a route network from forgotten and reimagined paths, which slowly was pieced together from the 1960s onward. The chapter ends by asking how notions of landscape, interspecies relationships, and political theologies have reconstructed notions of sacred place, sainthood, and landscape in a secularizing, increasingly multiethnic and multireligious Norway.