Reasons For Climate Denialism: How To Speak The Truth

Author: Bob Grove
Published: Tue 01 Jul 2025
Episode Link: https://climategkc.org/reasons-for-climate-denialism-how-to-speak-the-truth/

CLIMATE HOUR – Climate issues are clearly on everyone’s minds. The constant weather disasters, disruption of our food systems, sea level threats to coastal communities. Yet in the face of what we see every time we open our front doors, climate denialism continues to flourish. People continue to deny that the climate is changing or that our lifestyle choices are contributing to that change.

And there’s plenty of disinformation to help the deniers. Scientists in the oil & gas industry were accurately predicting today’s global warming issues as far back as the 1950s. And the petroleum industry spent millions of dollars to deny their own climate research and to reposition global warming as a theory, not a science-based fact. In 2022, they spent over a quarter billion dollars on U.S. media, lobbying and political campaigns to deny accepted climate science.

That’s a lot of money paying for a lot of climate disinformation. So, how do we talk about climate issues with friends and family who are constantly exposed to this disinformation? How do we understand and constructively speak truth to climate deniers?