 One of the most famous documents in all of the tobacco, millions and millions of pages of tobacco documents is a document in which an industry executive says, doubt is our product. A lot of this opposition to climate science is organized by vested interests and political networks. There's a recent paper by Robert Broley that painstakingly went through tax returns filed by a huge number of so-called think tanks and lobbying outfits in the United States. What he concluded from his scholarly research is that up to a billion dollars a year goes into a machine, into a propaganda machine, part of which is used to deny climate science. We see this connection between vested interests, which doesn't just include the fossil fuel industry. It includes people who don't want government interference in industry. So we have vested interests. We have the media, which promotes the sound bites that the vested interests develop, and then we have the politicians that endorse it and use it to build a platform. At the top of the information food chain right now seems to be bloggers and things like that. I think that very often you see new ideas maybe coming out first in scientific reports, but those aren't very accessible to most people. They are digested very quickly by bloggers who will spin them in different ways. Some of them trying to accurately reflect what they understand the scientists to have said, or sometimes even the scientists themselves will be bloggers. But other times they may wish to give it a different ideological spin and repackage it for an audience that knows what websites to go to to hear what they would like to hear. One of the main ways that we get our information is through the news and through the media. And the Union of Concerned Scientists has done this study last year and the year before where they've looked at the percentage of information on climate science that is incorrect in the media. Now even if you look at CNN, last year 30% of the information on CNN was false. And CNN is seen as a pretty main line news media outlet. But if you look at Fox News, which most of the people where I live watch and which most of my in-laws watch, Fox News last year over 70% of the information on climate science was false. And the year before that it was over 90%. So when you look at politicians, where are they getting the sound bites that they're parroting? They're getting it from the media. They have outlets for their information, they have radio shows, they have books, they have a whole television network in the US devoted to this disinformation. And so their message is getting out there and a lot of people get that and they read it and they view it. And so I think it's a lot of confusion and it's being intentionally put out there by certain factions of the right wing. One of the tactics that you see in sort of climate change denialism is an effort to spin and misrepresent peer-reviewed scientific studies. So often studies that say one thing for example show that some aspect of climate change is even worse than we thought will somehow be spun by climate change deniers. As if it doesn't provide evidence for concern. The use of scientists with credentials is absolutely critical to the strategy because if a tobacco industry executive said, well I'm not convinced that smoking is really harmful, that wouldn't pass the laugh test. But if a distinguished scientist says it, then it seems like there's a scientific debate. And so a journalist who might not feel compelled to quote a tobacco industry executive will feel compelled to quote a distinguished scientist. So a key part of the tobacco strategy, and we can trace this back to the 1950s, this has been going on for more than half a century, was to recruit scientists. Science denial often will cherry pick a scientist or a sentence from something that a scientist wrote and say here's a scientist who says that climate change is not happening. Here's a scientist, and sure there are other scientists out there who say it is happening, but there are two equal and opposite experts. So there's a debate, let's just have the debate. Probably the toughest situation I was ever in. I once did a debate on the reality of global warming with a prominent skeptic. And I was young and naive, and I went in and laid out the science. And the other person said things that we do not accept as being their mainstream science and said about 30 of them in a five minute opening statement. And one, I know what to do with. Two, I know what to do with. 30, now we're just gonna sit there and argue until it ends. And this problem that we don't, in a public forum, a debate is a horrible thing because it's so easy to cause rank confusion. Participating in debates where you have that structure, it just reinforces that idea that there are exactly two possibilities and that anything that weakens one must strengthen the other. So it doesn't teach people how science works properly and it gives equal time to ideas that are wrong. There is some incentive behind oil industry funding to certain parts of the right, but and it's a cultural thing too, that it's almost become uncool in the Republican side to believe in global warming. I think that's absolutely crucial for the public to understand that a lot of this is motivated by money, by vested interests, by ideology, by other psychological factors. And that none of the opposition to climate science is scientific.