| 英文摘要: | The characteristics and views of people sceptical about climate change have been analysed extensively. A study now confirms that sceptics in the US have some characteristics of a social movement, but shows that the same group dynamics propel believers. A minority of the public are sceptical about the idea that humans cause climate change. This has received a lot of attention in the media as well as in scientific research. Many became concerned when scepticism — a marginal phenomenon in many countries across the globe — increased in the US and a few other (mainly anglophone) countries towards the end of the 2000s1. Research into the causes of US scepticism has pointed to links with party politics, polarization (that is, conflictual relations between republicans and democrats) and the involvement of conservative think-tanks. Writing in Nature Climate Change, Bliuc and colleagues2 now show that sceptical US citizens see themselves as part of a sceptic movement. This means that their actions are determined not just by their individual beliefs and political views, but also by a shared social identity and by competition with believers. But importantly, Bliuc et al. show that those who believe in climate change also act as members of a group. This finding suggests that to cope with the climate change contrarian movement, efforts on education, persuasion or political messages will not suffice. To convince a sceptical public, believers need to harness knowledge about social movements and intergroup conflict reduction. Interest in sceptics, their views and tactics has increased sharply in recent years. I conducted a basic search of articles mentioning climate change and/or global warming in conjunction with the words scepticism, denier, denial and/or contrarians on Web of Science and identified 226 papers published since 2000. Of these, 121 analysed scepticism itself, with the vast majority (112) published since 2010 (Fig. 1).
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