Remember climate change denialism? Remember the large and exceptionally well-funded movement to discredit, in the media and in political life, the idea that the planet was warming and that it was caused by the presence in the atmosphere of carbon from fossil fuels? It seems almost absurd to consider it now, but just as there were movements attempting to discredit the theory of evolution and, further in the past, the idea that the planets orbit the sun, there was once such a movement against climate science.

It is in one sense a great relief, a great boon to our collective sanity, that we no longer have to put up with endless “debates” in the media about issues long settled among scientists. It’s unfortunate, though, that the reason for this is that climate change has become such an observable phenomenon in the present – this summer’s extreme temperatures in Europe, for instance, along with the resulting droughts and wildfires – that the case for any kind of climate scepticism has shrivelled in the dry heat of another scorching summer.

There are still some individual holdouts, needless to say: the kind of people who, when you write an opinion column about the climate crisis, take it upon themselves to post on social media that in Sligo, where they happen to be, it’s actually a brisk 15 degrees and raining steadily, thereby refuting the notion of a heating planet. But such people increasingly seem eccentric historical curiosities, like those Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender in 1945 and continued carrying out guerrilla warfare in the Philippines into the 1970s.

In this vacuum on the political right, created by the near-total dissolution of climate denialism, a new rhetorical strategy has begun to assert........

© The Irish Times