A new interactive tool from Tortoise shows how online untruths about the climate are growing, changing shape and spreading.
The climate has shifted: 2024 was the hottest year in history, with record-breaking temperatures in the atmosphere and warmer oceans ushering in what scientists have described as a dangerous new era of wildfires and floods amplified by climate change.
The political climate has shifted too. Even for politicians who accept the scientific consensus, the high short-term costs of tackling climate change pose a daunting challenge.
Meanwhile climate-sceptic leaders are determined to block any shift in policy. The US president, Donald Trump, says there will be no new “windmills” under his administration – meaning wind turbines – and has persistently attacked wind energy, including repeatedly claiming that wind turbines kill whales.
Scientists say there is no evidence for this claim, but it’s widespread online, cited as fact by everyone from Jordan Petersen, the popular Canadian psychologist, to Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary.
The technological climate is changing too. Following Trump’s election victory, Mark Zuckerberg has abandoned third-party fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, while misleading posts about climate have flourished on X since Elon Musk took control of the site.
Pressure on platforms to filter out misinformation online has given way to a climate that favours free speech – the question is whether it also favours the unchecked spread of falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
Tortoise has identified more than 300 influencers who are spreading content about climate change that ranges from scepticism to misinformation. Claims made over the past three years on X, YouTube, TikTok and media sites have been compiled in a searchable database that shows how online untruths about climate are growing, changing shape and spreading.
When floods or wildfires hit, it’s now become commonplace for scientists to examine whether climate change has caused or amplified a natural disaster. They frequently, but not always, find that it has. Commentators online disagree.
When wildfires ravaged eastern Canada in 2023, researchers affiliated with the World Weather Attribution initiative, founded by scientists at the Dutch national weather service and Imperial College London, said that climate change “more than doubled” the likelihood of extreme fire-weather conditions. Friends of Science, a Canadian climate-sceptic group, said of the same fires: “It’s not climate change.” Clyde Do Something, a Canadian Youtuber, said: “Arson is the big cause of a lot of these fires.”
When wildfires break out, many commentators online now divert attention away from carbon emissions, and towards the management of forests. That happened after the devastating Australian bushfires in 2019-2020, when a researcher at the Heartland Institute, a conservative US thinktank, suggested “new environmental policies… may be most responsible” for the severity of the fires.
While human actions, intentionally or by accident, often provide the spark for a wildfire, experts say the scene is set by a combination of heatwaves and the expansion of civilisation into the wilderness, as a denser network of roads around forest areas creates more opportunities for people to start a fire.
It’s true that better fire management is an important part of limiting the impact of fires. That can include ‘prescribed burns’ – a controlled fire to clear fallen trees and other vegetation that can fuel a massive blaze. But these arguments are being made by climate sceptics as a smokescreen. Alongside them, they advocate the continued use of fossil fuels which will – if emissions are not captured and stored – worsen climate change.
Climate sceptics seized on the explosion of an underwater volcano – in the Pacific island nation of Tonga in January 2022 – as an alternative explanation for a warming planet. The volcanic eruption hurled water vapour into the atmosphere, where it traps heat, contributing to warming. William Happer, an American physicist who argues that increased carbon dioxide is beneficial, pointed to the eruption in a discussion on Sky News Australia in 2023 as a natural explanation for changes in weather patterns.
The claims about Tonga spiked in late summer 2024, over two years after the eruption, with the architect Robin Monotti – who has more than 200,000 followers on X – referring to “proof” that water vapour is the earth’s main greenhouse gas, not CO2. That is not the case. Scientists have found that the Tonga explosion resulted in a slight cooling effect in the southern hemisphere through 2022 and 2023.
Alongside disputes about scientific findings, climate sceptics are increasingly focusing on individual scientists, including Michael Mann, whose most famous research shows northern hemisphere average temperatures rising sharply in a shape that resembles a hockey stick.
Last year, Mann won a libel case against conservative writers who called his work “fraudulent” and said he had “molested and tortured” data. The data analysed by Tortoise finds Mann has been the focus of climate-sceptic posts more than 350 times between 2021 and 2024, including personal attacks describing him as a “professional climate alarmist”.
Electric vehicle sales have surged in recent years, now accounting for nearly one in five new car sales in the UK. So have myths around EVs. Critics argue that they are more environmentally damaging than petrol and diesel vehicles.
A colourful version of this argument was made by Richard Wellings, an author and researcher, who tweeted in 2021 that “the imposition of electric vehicles will involve theft of land and resources on a massive scale, immense environmental destruction and probably proxy wars too”.
Howard Cox, Reform UK’s candidate in the 2024 elections for London mayor and founder of a lobby group against fuel duty, said during his election campaign that “from cradle to grave” electric vehicles produce more CO2 emissions than diesel and petrol vehicles.
That is not the case. While there are higher emissions associated with manufacturing an EV, a battery EV produces about half as many emissions as a petrol car over its lifetime, according to the International Energy Agency.
Wind turbines face relentless criticism from climate sceptics, who have rallied around the North Atlantic right whale, an endangered species they say is being deranged by the noise of offshore wind turbine construction. Michael Shellenberger, an environmental journalist who is a passionate supporter of nuclear energy, has become one of the leading advocates of this claim, which he describes as “the biggest environmental scandal in the world”.
Scientists say that most right whale deaths are caused by collisions with shipping or entanglement with commercial fishing lines, rather than being driven into panic by undersea construction noise. This rebuttal of the claim appears unlikely to sway Trump, who opposes offshore wind projects, justifying his opposition by saying: “They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales.”
Climate scepticism now takes different guises, adopting the cloak of environmentalism to display concern about whales, or social justice to question the cost of the transition. And climate sceptics consistently make a bread-and-butter appeal to economic strength.
Trump has amplified the widespread claim that Germany made an economic mistake in transitioning to renewable energy. In fact, Germany’s reliance on Russian natural gas has been its weakness, forcing the country to turn to imports of liquefied natural gas which resulted in a spike in energy prices.
Climate change was once associated with oil and gas lobbying, and there’s still evidence of associations between prominent climate sceptic politicians and the industry.
In December, Nigel Farage attended the launch in London of a new European offshoot of the Heartland Institute, which has received funding from Exxon. The offshoot, Heartland UK/Europe, is headed by Lois Perry, a former leader of the UK Independence Party.
Fringe commentators continue to advocate the expansion of fossil fuel use, in line with industry interests. But sowing doubt about climate change has also become an electoral dividing line in UK politics – a cultural issue as well as a topic of business lobbying. Farage’s posts on the subject range from dismissing climate change as an irrelevance given the relative size of the UK and criticising the cost of clean technology. He posted in October 2024: “the more wind turbines we build, the more expensive our electricity is”. In fact, wind is now one of the cheapest forms of energy.
Measured by reach, the most prominent British voices of climate scepticism include mainstream politicians and media outlets on the right – Farage, the website Spiked, the Spectator and GB News – and often focus on the cost of net zero, the risk to the economy of the green transition and energy bills. There’s a broader spectrum of right-leaning content creators, including the YouTuber Chris Williamson, who is a former Love Island contestant, and comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, who are hosts of Triggernometry.
These creators don’t always express climate-sceptic views themselves, but host broad, conversational shows that create platforms for more polemical voices. Williamson has hosted Alex Epstein, an author who argues against the scientific consensus on climate science and champions the economic benefits of oil, gas and coal. Triggernometry has hosted Shellenberger, the author and environmental journalist who campaigns to protect whales and argues that growth and technology, by themselves, will solve environmental problems.
The constellation of climate sceptics is small and close-knit. Its ideologues regularly appear on many of the same YouTube shows. But their reach, measured in clicks on posts, has grown over time. And in the past few years, climate scepticism has taken a new twist.
Alongside simply rejecting a crisis that’s increasingly visible, or delaying action, there’s an increasingly prominent sceptic argument: control.
Since the pandemic – and the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 – climate change is increasingly seen as a way for governments and elites to dominate or deceive the public. The global elite, a group that includes Bill Gates and Taylor Swift, are hypocrites for using fossil fuels while expressing concern about climate change. It’s the poor who suffer.
There are valid questions to be raised about the costs of the energy transition, and how fairly they are shared, but in the mouths of climate sceptics the narratives tie in with populist claims that the elite are corrupt. As Farage puts it: “So much of what is being done in the name of climate change is nothing less than a racket.”
Policies or lifestyle choices aimed at tackling climate change – from reducing meat to driving less – are regularly framed by online commentators as “climate communism”, attempts to lower living standards and reduce freedom. Low-emission zones and 15-minute cities, the idea of creating dense neighbourhoods where residents live within a short walk of shops, primary schools and parks, have been wrapped into conspiracy theories about “climate lockdowns”.
Farming accounts for a small share of jobs and economies in western Europe, but threats to farmers have been effective as a focus for broader conspiratorial claims about coercive government. The suggestion that Ireland may cull up to 200,000 cows to meet emissions targets – an idea floated in 2023, which now appears to have been rejected – cut through with right-wing commentators.
The Telegraph, in a column that referred to the idea as a “warning to Net Zero Britain”, spoke of an “eco-modernist agenda to do away with conventional meat altogether.” The reports were picked up by Elon Musk and then by the right-wing activist Peter Imanuelsen, who tweets as PeterSweden. Imanuelsen posted: “A source from an Irish farmer told me the government is ordering him to SLAUGHTER 20% of his cows.” Imanuelsen described the move as “climate communism”.
More extreme claims suggest that wildfires are being deliberately lit by climate activists to promote their agenda, while others suggest that storms are being engineered. Such claims are niche but reach a wide audience.
Climate-sceptic narratives have merged with Covid-sceptic ones, and some of the personalities are the same. Together, a UK movement founded by businessman Alan D Miller in response to the government’s Covid measures, have now achieved significant reach online with posts criticising climate change policies.
Overall, in the snapshot of data from climate influencers that Tortoise analysed
- climate sceptic posts grew by 43 per cent on YouTube from 2021 to 2024;
- climate sceptic posts grew by 82 per cent on X from 2021 to 2024; and
- claims that climate change is an instrument of control now represent about 36 per cent of climate-sceptic content on YouTube and 40 per cent of climate-sceptic posts on X.
Misinformation has consequences. Research suggests that climate misinformation online drives growing political divides between social media users. Outlandish theories about controlling the weather have led to TV meteorologists receiving threats from viewers. Scientists have been the target of personal attacks.
The world is complicated and difficult to describe. There’s scope for different points of view and arguments about how best to tackle crises such as climate change. But online platforms are increasingly giving free rein to falsehoods and misleading claims, which are being picked up, boosted by politicians, and sometimes turned into policy.
Google, owner of YouTube, said in 2021 that it would demonetise content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus” around climate change. Twitter said in 2022 that climate denialism “shouldn’t be monetized”. TikTok said in 2023 that it would start removing content that “undermines well-established scientific consensus” about climate change.
But since those pledges were made, climate scepticism has flourished online. Google’s policy does little to deter content that advocates delay or promotes the idea that climate policies are an insidious form of control.
Ads continue to be placed against content such as this video, from the YouTubers Natali and Clayton Morris, which includes a reference to a “new plan by the United Nations… They’ll tell us how to eat, they’ll tell us what to eat, they’ll tell us how we travel.”
Under Musk, X now has no official policy on climate misinformation.
TikTok has a relatively low number of climate-sceptic posts compared to other platforms but, in the dataset we analysed, posts of this kind on TikTok grew from zero to 260 between 2021 and 2024.
YouTube said it had strict policies that governed where it allowed ads to appear and enforced those policies vigorously. The company said it had suspended monetisation on several videos flagged by Tortoise for violating misinformation guidelines.
A TikTok spokesperson said the company was one of the first platforms to actively incorporate the climate into misinformation policies, and had introduced interventions so it could direct people who search for climate content towards authoritative information. The platform also said it had removed posts flagged by Tortoise or made them ineligible for recommendation, where it found content that violated its guidelines.
X did not respond to a request for comment.
2024 was the first year in which global temperatures averaged 1.5C. This is an ominous threshold.
In 2015, countries that signed the Paris agreement on climate change agreed to a goal of keeping warming “well below” 2C above the pre-industrial average, and aimed to limit the rise to 1.5C. These numbers were not chosen at random. The risks of catastrophic effects – more intense heatwaves, more destructive storms – increase significantly above these limits.
Fast forward ten years, and the world is on track for 3C of warming this century. There is a scientific consensus that this challenge needs to be solved. The spread of misinformation is destroying the political consensus needed to solve it.
Original source: https://www.tortoisemedia.com
https://www.animalagricultureclimatechange.org/meat-misinformation-social-media/
