As world leaders gather this week at a major summit to discuss ways to address the effects of global warming, one of the biggest obstacles they face is misinformation.
Among the largest sources of false or misleading information about the global climate, according to a report published this week: influential nations, including Russia and China, whose diplomats will attend. Others include companies that extract fossil fuels and online provocateurs who make money by sharing claims that global warming is a hoax.
They spread diverse and frequently refuted falsehoods: humans are not responsible for climate change; recent wildfires were sparked by arson rather than warmer, drier conditions; he the world is getting colder; oil and gas giants are leading the way towards carbon neutrality; and environmental warnings are an excuse for authoritarian elites to destabilize the developing world and force everyone to act. isolation and towards a diet of insects and foods grown in the laboratory.
Their efforts have already significantly eroded the public pressure and political will needed to avoid a terrible future for the planet, experts said.
“What has changed dramatically is how central climate misinformation and disinformation has become to public life,” said Jennie King, author of a new report by Climate Action Against Misinformation, an international coalition of more than 50 environmental defense groups.
Unfounded claims, the coalition warned in its report, have increased conspiracy theories, social divisions and harassment. The report noted an “alarming mobilization toward violence” against those associated with climate change work, including Spanish meteorologists who reported on extreme spring weather and then clashed. sinister threats and accusations that they were “murderers.”
The campaign against meaningful action to curb emissions is driven by an ecosystem with “strange informal alliances and overlaps” between countries, corporations and people, all with disparate agendas and motivations but united in their desire to debunk the threat of climate change, he said. Mrs. King. .
“It’s really about the normalization of disinformation, and not just the sheer volume,” said King, who heads the coalition’s intelligence unit at the summit. “That’s what worries me the most: the huge traction and emotional resonance that this type of content seems to have.”
Researchers expect misinformation and misleading characterizations of the summit’s goals to increase as delegates gather in the United Arab Emirates for the summit, known as COP28. Already this week, baseless conspiracy theories circulated on social media claiming that governments were using climate change as a pretext to seize land from farmers and cause deliberate food shortages.
The United Arab Emirates is a major oil exporter known less for its climate commitments than for the voracious resource consumption of its most populous city, Dubai. This summer, a Qatari disinformation expert discovered at least 100 fake social media accounts defending the location of the summit and its president, Emirati oil executive Sultan Ahmen al-Jaber. An internal document revealed this week that the Emirates planned to use its hosting role to strike oil and gas deals around the world.
Social media content promoting outright climate change denial increased ahead of last year’s summit, which was held in Egypt, the researchers said. These types of publications have continued to accumulate opinions and quotes from leading politicians and experts this year. The content has at times irritated followers; a report this spring from the watchdog group world witness found that 73 percent of climate scientists who regularly appear in the media had experienced online harassment or abuse as a result of their work.
Climate activists such as Greta Thunberg came under fire from Chinese state media, which falsely accused her of calling for an end to the use of chopsticks and denounced her as a “Swedish princess” after she pushed for China to further reduce its emissions. RT, a Russian state television network, mocked Thunberg in March as “Dr. Climate Gollum” after receiving an honorary doctorate. from the University of Helsinki.
He EU disinformation laboratoryA nonprofit group that studies misinformation, said in a report this year that it had found dozens of active websites in Europe and the United States that focused exclusively on climate misinformation, a “striking” departure from most other disinformation websites, which tend to compile a hodgepodge of questionable topics.
Climate Action Against Disinformation found that, every month since COP27, the hashtag #climatescam generated more retweets and likes than #climatecrisis and #climateemergency on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The hashtag appeared in widely circulated publications that falsely blamed arson committed by migrants due to forest fires or repeated debunked claims that television stations manipulated weather maps.
The researchers attributed much of #climatescam’s traction to a small group of influential accounts, which they said tended to be much more vocal about climate denial on X than on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. One account, which researchers said had originated as an anti-vaccine forum on Telegram before pivoting to climate denial on X this year, had just a few hundred followers when it shared its first #climatescam post in March; now it has more than 250,000.
Some of the sites promoting climate misinformation made money from advertising, a source of revenue that researchers say was made possible by more than 150 ad exchanges owned by some of the largest tech companies. According to the report, the marketplaces, which largely use automated auctions to buy and sell online ads, placed ads on at least 15 websites known to host climate denial content. In doing so, policies put in place by many of the exchanges to block the monetization of climate denial content and other misinformation were ignored.
This fall, ads for McDonald’s and LL Bean appeared alongside an op-ed that described “a dominant ‘climate change’ agenda” as “implementing socialism under the guise of saving the planet” by “tyrannical central planners around the world.” world”.
Some climate disinformation was spread by countries like Russia and China, which often direct that content to parts of the world where they seek to exert influence at the expense of the United States and the rest of the West. The report found that Russian state media had framed emissions reduction plans as a form of “Western imperialism” designed to undermine the development of the so-called global south, or the southern part of the world, which includes some of the poorest countries. and less favored. industrialized countries. (Experts say global warming is a financial threat to developing nations, which are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change despite contributing a disproportionately small share of greenhouse gas emissions.)
Russian propaganda around climate change, which routinely downplays the phenomenon as exaggerated or even positive, has become increasingly entangled in geopolitics. The country framed economic sanctions against it after it invaded Ukraine as evidence of the importance of its fossil fuel exports to maintaining global energy security. Climate disinformation also figured in a campaign in Brazil that promoted the views of Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent advocate of Russia’s imperial ambitions, according to the US State Department’s Center for Global Engagement.
However, Climate Action Against Disinformation researchers found that Russian climate disinformation was opportunistic and therefore inconsistent. The report noted that “fossil fuel investments in Africa were condemned as attempts to steal the continent’s resources when linked to Western countries, but hailed as champions of economic development when linked to Russia.”
In China, misinformation about climate change has a long history, according to A study in May by Annie Lab, a fact-checking project at the University of Hong Kong. For years, calls to fight climate change were presented in China as a tool used by the West to slow China’s economic growth, rather than as an attempt to address a global problem.
Even after China accepted the need for international action, first agreeing at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 to set targets for reducing emissions, misinformation and disinformation on the issue remained common in the Chinese media, the lab wrote.
Climate Action Against Misinformation also said China’s state-owned oil giant, China National Petroleum Corporation, was among international energy companies making misleading claims about its environmental practices, a strategy known as “greenwashing.” The company’s advertisements, which were often targeted at countries in Asia and Africa, sometimes used an increasingly popular tactic What researchers call “nature rinsing”: employing images of landscapes and scenery in your marketing to create a false, more forgiving association between nature and fossil fuels.
A Facebook ad this year, which researchers say cost between $120 and $595 to place and reached one million viewers, featured emojis of flowers, a hard-hat worker and a green heart.
“With the arrival of spring, let’s enjoy the beautiful fields of flowers that cover the oil field!” the ad said.
