Climate skeptic theories are flourishing on social media, with influencers joining the front of climate misinformation while scientists are harassed online. Overview of this information war, eight days before COP28, in Dubai.
“Misinformation and disinformation about the climate emergency are delaying the adoption of urgent measures aimed at restoring the prospect of a viable future on the planet,” deplored the United Nations in a June 2023 note about this misleading information or false, relayed without or with the intention of causing harm. “A small but vocal minority of climate skeptics continues to reject this consensus and occupy a disproportionate space on certain digital platforms,” added the UN.
Here are three trends in climate misinformation this year.
Fires, heatwaves, droughts
Climate skeptics have found food for thought in megafires and waves of heatwaves and droughts. According to them, the first would have been knowingly provoked; the latter would have nothing exceptional and their scale would even be inflated by the “global elites” to justify restrictive climate policies, for example reducing automobile traffic.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which analyzed thousands of posts on air pollution in June 2023 due to fires in Canada.
AFP demonstrated that many claims relayed around the fires in August on the island of Maui, Hawaii were also false.
And in France, many Internet users have for months minimized or even denied the scientific findings on drought and extremely low groundwater levels.
Political or health speech
After the “yellow vest” movement in France, then the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, the discourse of distrust towards the authorities shifted to the climate theme.
“Terms like “climate dictatorship” are experiencing sudden and dazzling growth,” according to a note from the Jean Jaurès Foundation published in April 2023 after nearly two years of study (2021-2022) of speeches relayed by French Internet users on Twitter. These “narratives” are “almost exclusively carried by anti-vaccine communities, with fairly partial and later revivals by sovereignist communities,” she noted.
These theories “put their hand […] on all public policy debates” regarding climate, underlines Jennie King, director of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, in London.
Since the takeover of Twitter, now X, by Elon Musk in October 2022, their virality has continued to grow.
Thus, wind turbines or the level of CO2 emissions in France are regularly the subject of misleading or false statements.
With the end of Covid, influencers positioned in the “well-being” niche have entered the field.
“Their arguments are closely linked to concerns about physical integrity, including a recurring accusation that pro-climate policies are a pretext for harming people’s health,” the Climate NGO coalition noted in a report. Action Against Disinformation (CAAD).
False information was thus circulated claiming that the World Economic Forum wanted to make Europeans eat insects without being informed, or that American cities were considering banning meat and dairy products.
Targeted scientists
The year 2023 will be marked by the multiplication of ad hominem attacks against political leaders, scientists and journalists.
“In this kind of information war, everyone is considered a target,” explains Jennie King.
During a heat wave in Spain in April, the weather agency reported threats against its employees from advocates of the “chemtrails” theory according to which weather disasters are orchestrated by the authorities thanks to planes dropping chemicals chemicals.
Harassed online, climatologist Christophe Cassou, research director at CNRS and main author of the 6th report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), temporarily suspended his account on X.
“When we cannot attack the message which is robust and established, we attack the messengers,” he denounced on Franceinfo on August 19.