climate change denial

On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Republican Senator Jim Inhofe displayed a snowball—on 26 February 2015, in winter—as evidence the globe was not warming, in a year that was found to be Earth's warmest on record at the time. The director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies distinguished local weather in a single location in a single week from global climate change.

Climate change denial (also global warming denial) is a form of science denial characterized by rejecting, refusing to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the extensive evidence for anthropogenic global warming that has led to a scientific consensus on climate change. Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where none exists. Climate change denial includes raising unreasonable doubts about the extent to which climate change is caused by humans, its effects on nature and human society, and understating the costs of climate change adaptation while overstating the costs of mitigating it. To a lesser extent, climate change denial can also be implicit when people accept the science but fail to reconcile it with their belief or action. Several studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism, pseudoscience, or propaganda.