Denial’s second stage concedes warming but disputes causes and models

Evidence

The next stage of negation acknowledges that the earth may be warming, but we don’t know why it is happening and, besides, predictions are unreliable. The conceptual models are alleged to be faulty, global systems are inherently chaotic so they are unpredictable, and scientific consensus is really collusion. Critics claim further that there is no proof that carbon dioxide causes global warming, which they attribute to a host of natural causes, such as volcanic eruptions, water vapor, cosmic rays, solar cycles, ozone, and the sun (Cook, 2015). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2728

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Completes Beck’s second stage of climate-change denial: cause-disputing and model-discrediting moves.
• XREF: The move of framing scientific consensus as ‘collusion’ parallels the discrediting-evidence mechanism earlier in this same chapter (2721).

Related

• Contested causation is a second denial stage, after outright rejection (similarity 0.91)
• Climate change denial escalates through stages that progressively free behavior from moral self-sanctions (similarity 0.81)
• Denying climate change’s reality and human origin frees polluting from moral self-sanctions (similarity 0.79)
• Climate skeptics claim a false alarm costs more than denial. (similarity 0.78)