Communications Earth & Environment

• Any regular viewer of BBC’s Question Time could be forgiven for thinking that old-fashioned climate science denialism is alive and kicking.
• In the US media and UK media, there is strong evidence too that the prevalence of these arguments may be shifting.
• Australia, the UK and the US were chosen for their long history of climate scepticism, whereas Brazil and Sweden were included for the more recent arrival of scepticism among key political parties.
• But we also distinguished between “general response” scepticism, usually advanced by organised sceptical groups, and “directed” response scepticism, where country-specific economic, social and political obstacles to enacting climate policies were mentioned.

Science scepticism is no longer mainstream

• First, we found that on mainstream channels, the presence of science scepticism, science sceptics and general contestation around the IPCC’s report was much less present in our sample than in the coverage of the previous round of IPCC reports in 2013 and 2014, even in countries that have historically had strong traditions of science denial.
• Second, response scepticism was in some of the coverage by mainstream channels.
• But for those active in opposing organised scepticism, any definitive shift towards response scepticism across the media, such as vocal opposition to net zero policies, represents an important new challenge to climate action.