Climate deniers have garnered far more media attention than prominent climate scientists over the years, fueling public confusion and slowing the response to global warming, researchers reported Tuesday.

From 2000 through 2016, hundreds of academics, business people and politicians who doubted global warming or attributed rising temperatures to "natural" causes got 50 percent more ink than an equal number of top scientists, according to a study in Nature Communications.

Even in a more select group of mainstream English language news outlets with high standards of evidence - from the New York Times to The Wall Street Journal - sceptics were still cited slightly more often.