POLITICALLY charged climate change denialism rears its ugly head in Kobus Raath’s letter, “Scientists have not agreed on presence, cause of climate change” (The Herald, August 18). Doubt is their only product and Raath follows typical denialist rhetoric in his attempt to discredit projections of dangerous climate change reported in Guy Rogers’s article (“’Weather on steroids’ will bring mega-storms to E Cape – expert”, The Herald August 10).

Raath is “surprised” that Bob Scholes (the CSIR climate change scientist cited in Rogers’s article) would use information from Al Gore’s “now scientifically discredited Inconvenient Truth”. He is “even more surprised that he (Scholes) is unaware of the contents of the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change” that stemmed from a conference attended by “some 200 of the world’s most eminent climate scientists”.

Where in Rogers’s article is there any mention of Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and that this was the source of Scholes’s information? Nowhere! Thus, even if the film had been “scientifically discredited” (which it hasn’t), Raath’s statement is disingenuous to say the least.

Suffice it to say that despite some minor errors Gore’s movie is soundly based on peer reviewed science. In other words, the basic theory of anthropogenic global warming presented in the film, namely that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas increases correlate with increases in global warming, and that these increases are the major cause of the global warming trend observed in the last 150 years, and that they can be causally linked to it via fundamental physics, has not been falsified.

The “International Conference on Climate Change” can be utterly disregarded as a credible source for genuine scientific information on climate change. It is run by the right-wing “think-tank”, “The Heartland Institute”, where the only delegates are climate change “sceptics”. Of the 200 “eminent scientists” perhaps three or four can claim to be climate scientists of any note and none can claim to be “eminent”.

The Heartland Institute also opposes restriction on smoking and criticises the science on second-hand tobacco smoke. Their full report (NIPCC) has been debunked by the premier blog site on climate science, RealClimate, run by five truly eminent climate scientists.

The comment by these scientists after their debunking was: “Some of us thought that the ‘NIPCC’ report was so self-evidently nonsense that we shouldn’t even give it the benefit of any publicity”.

Is Raath perhaps just seriously misinformed regarding the overwhelming scientific consensus (that anthropogenic climate change is both real and dangerous) and not have the scientific literacy to discriminate between the real science in the peer reviewed literature as opposed to the pseudo-science (even anti-science) extracted from internet blog sites? Or is he perhaps well aware of the misinformation he is spinning and thus party to the denialist political game-plan evident in the quote from the “Manhattan Declaration”, namely, “attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future of climate change”?

In any other language this is “protect business as usual for the fossil fuel industry, especially coal”.

In December this year governments will meet in Copenhagen to debate what will replace the Kyoto Protocol agreement that expires in 2012. The results of the preliminary scientific congress, held in Copenhagen in March this year, and which will provide the basis for whatever decisions might be made, are available as a synopsis report (http://climatecongress.ku.dk/ ).

This report concludes that climate change is progressing on the high side of the 2007 IPCC projections. Of the report’s six key messages the last is “inaction is inexcusable”. It is thus Raath’s denialism that could not be “further from the truth”. – Hugh Laue, vice-chairman, Zwartkops Trust, Port Elizabeth

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THE term “negationism” is usually employed when referring to historical revisionism, whereby existing knowledge of an historical criminal event is distorted or questioned to make the event appear in a more favourable light. The holocaust denial is the most flagrant example of negationism.

It is human nature to go against the mainstream ideas, and it is most fortunate, since this is what gives birth to new ideas, trends and discoveries. The fact of questioning any assumption is a fundamental step towards the truth (in its scientific sense).

As a former physicist, I am the first to defend my right to object to an idea when I don’t feel it has sufficient evidence to support it. But as long as my hypothesis is not strong enough to counter the initial one, then the rule of the game in science is to accept it as true.

Kobus Raath, this letter is an answer to your climate change negationism. The correlation made with holocaust denial is intentional.

I will not go through the monotonous exercise of proving every single point of yours wrong, but I urge all Herald readers of one thing: document yourselves. Check the facts. Confront sources.

One of the strong points of this space is to give anyone a right of opinion, the downside being that anyone can write anything and anything can be dangerous if not taken with the right distance.

The questioning of global warming was still accepted 15 years ago, when the major oil consortiums were spending millions on research to prove it wrong and keep the media quiet about “an inconvenient truth”. The same happened only a decade before, with tobacco.

At the time, the few major tobacco producers were trying to save their market by discrediting assertions that tobacco could cause lung cancer. Who would seriously try this now?

Environmental negationism is not only utterly foolish, given the mountain of evidence gathered for the past 50 years, it is dangerous, particularly in a country dragging behind most developed countries in terms of policies to tackle global warming. An environmental-conscious mindset takes decades to build, please don’t ruin all efforts deployed by NGOs, companies, lobby groups, politics, media etc. – Kevin Minkoff, Port Elizabeth