Denying climate change is worse than spreading the usual kind of conspiracy theory: it costs lives

Worse than the dottiest 9/11 conspiracy theorists, climate-change deniers from our Tory Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, to the US senator James Inhofe are dawdling as the worlds poorest die.

The deniers of global warming have come in from the cold. Photo: Getty

Conspiracy theorists are often the subject of scorn or mockery; rejected and ridiculed by the rest of us, they hide away on internet chat forums where they blather on about the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, the rise of the Illuminati or the omnipresence of Mossad. Not the climate-change deniers. Unlike Israels intelligence agency, they really do seem to be omnipresent these days. Indeed, unlike the Illuminati, they even control national governments.

For instance, Australias new prime minister, Tony Abbott, has called the science on climate change absolute crap and already abolished the countrys Climate Commission. In 2012, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for the most important job in the world, was of the view that we dont know whats causing climate change on this planet. Here in the UK, the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, a Conservative, is, in the words of the Financial Times, a known climate change sceptic. So, too, is a Conservative member of the Commons energy and climate change committee, Peter Lilley.

Denialism abounds. In March, a YouGov poll found that only 39 per cent of the British public believed human activity was making the world warmer, down from 55 per cent per cent in 2008, while the proportion of Brits who believed that the world wasnt getting warmer had quadrupled up from 7 per cent in 2008 to 28 per cent.

Depressingly, you can draw no other conclusion from these facts than that the conspiracy theorists are winning. The deniers of global warming have come in from the cold. The merchants of doubt, to borrow a phrase from the science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, seem to have perfected the dark art of keeping the controversy alive, sowing seeds of doubt and confusion in the minds of politicians, journalists and voters, in spite of the scientific consensus.

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Denying climate change is worse than spreading the usual kind of conspiracy theory: it costs lives