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Issues and Debate of Anthropogenic Climate Change

Decent Essays
In the last few decades, the issue of anthropogenic climate change (ACC)—human caused climate change—has come to the forefront of public, political, and scientific awareness. There has been much debate regarding the legitimacy of ACC, despite an article from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration stating:
Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.
With this in mind, it is important to examine the rationale behind this seemingly unfounded opposition to ACC.
Organized Climate Change Denial by Dunlap and McCright (2011) introduces this rationale and gives a face to this denial. They present the idea of a “denial machine”. This machine is made of various different actors including conservative media, fossil fuel industries, and various front groups—these will be discussed in greater detail within the paper. Essentially, the motivations of the various cogs (actors) vary from economic to ideological to personal, yet overall they rally around shared opposition to “governmental regulatory efforts to ameliorate climate change, such as restrictions to carbon emissions.” (source) A large factor in governmental regulatory efforts is public opinion and, not coincidentally, there were significant declines in public belief of global warming in 2009 and 2010. This spread
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