Climate change is a complex issue, and the amount of information available about it can be overwhelming.  While some people are genuinely sceptical, and others are simply confused, some are just plain in denial. Unfortunately, powerful vested interests, for various reasons, set out to systematically confuse and delude the average person, while the media may sometimes sensationalise stories that, well, aren't really sensational. The Climate Institute has gathered some of the most straightforward resources that set straight some of the claims and unspin the spin.

"The great irony in the current debate about the science of climate change is that the deniers are attempting to take the moral high ground by pointing to supposed errors, uncertainties and cover-ups in the science, but are themselves resorting to dishonest tactics.

"A healthy dose of scepticism is good for science and good for public policy, but the combination of denial and dishonesty is a dangerous medicine."

-The Climate Institute CEO John Connor

The IPCC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the world's leading body on the effects of climate change.  Recently, an error in their 2007 report about the potential melting date of Himalayan glaciers caused climate deniers to distort the magnitude of the error in an attempt to discredit the IPCC's larger body of work.  Read The Climate Institute's take on the Himalayan glacier situation, "Himalayan glacier issue is not a meltdown of all climate science." 

Subsequently, deniers attacked the IPCC's statements on trends in disaster losses.  The IPCC responded with a statement refuting the attack on two fronts: that it assumed the brief section on trends in economic losses, the section under scrutiny, was all that the IPCC had to say about changes in extremes and disasters; and that the attack itself was baseless as the section it criticised was balanced, with many important qualifiers.  Read the full statement.

The next challenge to IPCC science has come from newspaper reports that a reference to the effects of climate change, particuarly fires, on the Amazon.  These reports claimed that the reference was to a WWF report, Global Review of Forest Fires, written by "green campaigners who had no scientific expertise."  The WWF has responded by pointing out that the author of the report used by the IPCC has a PhD in Fire Management and is recognised as an expert in the field. The WWF report included more than 170 references, with the majority to scientific papers, and two peer-reviewed papers written in 2009 have reaffirmed concerns about the effects of climate change in the Amazon.  Read WWF's full statement.

Realclimate.orghas an extensive analysis of the substance and spin surrounding the IPCC controversies that have arisen.  The article includes an easily understandable explanation of how the IPCC is structured and a breakdown of each of the challenges to the IPCC report.

The UK's Guardian has compiled a collection of opinions on climate science, the challenges to the IPCC and visions for how the IPCC should operate.  This piece provides a good canvas of views on the science and the way forward. Climate Consensus under strain

The Science

Climate science currently shows evidence of climate change such as increasing temperatures both on land and in the oceans, melting glaciers and rising sea levels. 

Deniers counterattack this evidence with claims that the Earth is cooling, climate change can only be a natural not anthropogenic occurrence, or that CO₂ is always good for the planet, no matter how much of it there is. 

The Climate Institute addresses some of these issues in our Climate Change Myths section.  Dr Brett Parris, a Research Fellow at Monash University and Chief Economist for World Vision Australia responds to an extensive list of climate science questions and untruths on his website.

A recent report from Britain's Met Office Hadley Centre concluded that the evidence that humans are causing global warming is even stronger than previously stated, and that there is a less than five per cent likelihood that warming is due to natural climactic variations. Read about it in The Australian.

As Stephan Lewandowsky writes in "Climate Debate: Opinion vs. Evidence" on ABC's The Drum, "The laws of physics will relentlessly reassert themselves, unswayed by public opinion, political shenanigans, or elections.  Ultimately the laws of physics will speak so loudly that no amount of wishful thinking can prevent them from being heard." 

Watch ABC's Mediawatch take on The Australian's reports on coral bleaching 

Who are the Deniers?

Organised climate deniers, particularly those who are accusing scientists of a falsifying data to perpetuate a broad global hoax, are "backed by the same lobbies, individuals and organisations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer," according to an article in the UK's Guardian. The same group also denied the dangers of the sulphur oxides that were shown to cause acid rain and the CFC's that were creating a hole in the ozone layer. 

Additional Resources

Skepticalscience.com, one of the best online resources for clear understandable refutations of climate denier arguments, is now an iPhone app.  You can scroll through a list of the deniers' major arguments, each of which can be clicked upon to view an explanation of the actual science, including graphs and links to relevant research and papers.  Download the app.

The Australian diagrees with Ian Plimer's book Heaven and Earth  in a review by University of NSW Professor of Astrophysics Michael Ashley, titled "No Science in Plimer's Primer." 

The Climate Crock of the Week videos offer well-researched and catchy explanations of more than twenty climate science challenges.