New study uncovers the 'keystone domino' strategy of climate denial | Dana Nuccitelli

How climate denial blogs misinform so many people with such poor scientific arguments.

The body of evidence supporting human-caused global warming is vast - too vast for climate denial blogs to attack it all. Instead they focus on what a new study published in the journal Bioscience calls "keystone dominoes." These are individual pieces of evidence that capture peoples' attention, like polar bears. The authors write:

These topics are used as "proxies" for AGW [human-caused global warming] in general; in other words, they represent keystone dominoes that are strategically placed in front of many hundreds of others, each representing a separate line of evidence for AGW. By appearing to knock over the keystone domino, audiences targeted by the communication may assume all other dominoes are toppled in a form of "dismissal by association."