As natural disasters and environmental extremes became more common around the world this summer, scientists repeatedly pointed to a shared driver: climate change.
Conspiracy theorists pointed to anything but.
Some falsely claimed that the record-breaking heat waves that devastated parts of North America, Europe and Asia were normal, and that they were sensationalized as part of a globalist hoax. Others made up stories that cloud-seeding planes or a nearby dam, rather than torrential rain, had caused the unusually intense flooding in northern Italy (and in places like Vermont and Rwanda).
The devastating wildfire on Maui this month spawned particularly ludicrous claims. Social media racking up millions of views blamed a “directed energy weapon” (the proof: years-old footage not shot in Hawaii). And as Florida braced for Hurricane Idalia this week, some people online falsely claimed that such storms are unaffected by fossil fuel emissions.
The baseless claims that now regularly follow natural disasters and dangerous weather, and which contradict the preponderance of scientific evidence, can often seem frivolous and fantastical. They persist, however: they attract large audiences and frustrate climate experts, who say the world has little time to avoid a global warming catastrophe.
The claims can start with blog posts paid for by the oil and gas industry, or based on rumors shared among neighbors. Online forums are full of comments in multiple languages that reject both the science behind fossil fuel emissions and the authority of scientists. Sometimes they are reinforced by top politicians and experts – for example, Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called climate change a “hoax” during the first primary debate last week.
“It’s really one of the worst challenges we’re facing,” said Eleni Myrivili, head of heat for the United Nations’ human settlements program, who also works on heat issues for the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center.
Having played a similar role for the city of Athens, which was threatened by a devastating wave of wildfires this month, Dr Myrivili said climate disinformation is “one of the most painful things because it is like adding of annoyance.”
Outright climate deniers are a minority: 74 percent of Americans believe global warming is happening, versus 15 percent who don’t, according to a survey conducted this spring by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. While 61 percent understand that much of the blame lies with humans — the consensus of almost the entire scientific community — 28 percent say the phenomenon is largely a natural evolution.
Experts say the tactics and tenor of climate denial have evolved. For decades, the oil and gas industry has spent billions of dollars on a coordinated and highly technical campaign to sway public opinion against climate science and, subsequently, climate action. Lately, conspiracy theorists and extremists have taken a more decentralized approach, generating revenue through deceptive clickbait about global warming.
“These two universes of actors have collided in the online space and have actually found a marriage of convenience,” said Jennie King, chief of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms. “You have the casual and the formal, the traditional and the highly digital now occupying the same ecosystem and taking it to new extremes.”
The consequences of global warming are complex. Without these measures, natural disasters and extreme weather events would still occur, albeit on a smaller scale, for example. That helps feed a lot of false stories, says Susannah Crockford, an environmental anthropologist at the University of Exeter in England.
Dr. Crockford, who studies climate denial, said she sympathized with the urge to fabricate explanations that shifted responsibility from climate change to an ogre like arsonists or “the elite.”
“Blaming a specific enemy makes it easier to fight — you just have to get rid of the bad people who make this possible, and then the problem goes away,” said Dr. Crockford.
Climate Action Against Disinformation, a coalition of dozens of groups fighting false narratives, has been analyzing wildfire claims for the past three years. In a report last month, the organization showed how such claims are recycled and adapted to the zeitgeist. The Black Lives Matter movement and antifa protesters were scapegoats when wildfires broke out in California, Oregon and Washington in 2020. By the time Canada suffered its own wildfires this summer, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was being unfoundedly linked to eco-terrorist activity.
In Maui, fears that predatory developers would raid after the fire quickly turned into unsupported claims that wealthy real estate investors had caused the blaze. A video of Hawaii’s governor saying the state could acquire land in Lahaina to protect it for locals was manipulated and offered as misleading evidence that his plan was to buy land to build a technologically advanced “smart create city.
One YouTube video shared unfounded claims that Oprah Winfrey had a hand in causing the island’s inferno, hoping to seize land from native residents. As evidence, the video’s host noted that Ms. Winfrey had recently purchased a substantial property on Maui (she’s lived part-time on the island for 15 years) and that her belongings had escaped this month’s hell (her home was miles away). of the nearest fire). The presenter added a so-called red flag: in an interview about the fire, Mrs. Winfrey did not appear sufficiently sad.
Ms Winfrey did not respond to a request for comment.
County officials in Maui have been warning for years about the risk that climate change could lead to more frequent and intense wildfires. Experts later suggested that the fire in Lahaina was fueled by worsening drought, low humidity and storms related to a hurricane hundreds of miles away.
However, global warming did not take into account the false theories circulating on social media. A TikTok user said that “some people took pictures of the lasers coming down and starting the fire on Maui.” As proof, she shared two images: one from the SpaceX Instagram account showing the company’s Falcon 9 rocket launched from California in 2018, the other from a five-year-old photo posted to Facebook after a controlled eruption from an Ohio oil refinery. (Other images claiming to capture a “direct energy weapon” at work in Maui show transformer explosions in Chile and Louisiana.)
Climate activists are concerned that social platforms and technology such as artificial intelligence will help produce and accelerate the spread of disinformation about natural disasters and extreme weather.
This year, researchers found advertisements from retailers, electronics manufacturers and airlines on YouTube videos falsely claiming that the rainforest was too humid to catch fire or that the world was cooling. (YouTube has said it is removing ads from videos denying climate change.) A report this month from Pomona College found that within six months of Elon Musk taking over Twitter, nearly half of users who regularly talked about the environment spoken, was no longer active.
Scientists and other climate change experts are beset by personal attacks, including claims that they are shills for a globalist cabal or other shadowy forces, said Ms. King of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The erosion of trust in experts traps everyone in an ‘antechamber of discussion’, bickering over credibility instead of taking action.
“The danger is not that people have indigestible views in themselves,” she said. “It’s more our inability to have a good faith conversation about these absolutely critical issues for years to come.”
