Denial of the scientific evidence for Anthropogenic Global Warming was the running theme during the 24 hour broadcast of the Climate Reality Project.

One of the shorts that was broadcast, called “Doubt,” is wel worth a watch. It’s about how the fossil fuel industry took the tobacco industry’s playbook to confuse the public on the science of climate change. Not by disproving the facts, but just by creating enough doubt to make the public dismiss it.

The following quote from the short sums it up quite nicely:

How did the tobacco companies manage to lie to the public in face of all the scientific evidence?

They realized that the science didn’t need to be disproven. It was enough to create doubt in the minds of the public to keep them from recognizing the truth.

This misinformation and spreading of doubt is something I often talk about. Like for example when Chris Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute said a potential new maunder minimum would cause a new little ice age, so we don’t need to do anything. Or the confusion Watts Up With That tries to create every time there is some sort of cold spell.

The short DOUBT shows how eerily similar the tactics of the tobacco industry are to what we are seeing with climate change: