The rise of climate denial: Social media’s role in climate misinformation

In January last year, when scientists renewed a call for action after the eight-year period till 2023 ended as the hottest ever, there was a peak in something other than temperatures: climate denialism.

While the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres tweeted, “The past eight years were the warmest on record globally. We can’t relinquish our future to inaction. We need urgent, large-scale & systemic #ClimateAction now” on January 13, Jordan Peterson, psychologist and media commentator, replied, “I’ll take “climate change” over interventionist globalist bureaucrats any day”.

Peterson’s tirade on X continued well into June, the hottest month till then, when he called climate change “the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free card”, even claiming that “excess CO2 has greened the planet and increased crop yields 15%”.

Now, in January 2024, Peterson is among the people and entities studied by the Center for Countering Digital Hate for its research into climate misinformation.

What CCDH analysed

In its report, The New Climate Denial, published on January 16, CCDH used an artificial intelligence model to evaluate the content in more than 12,000 YouTube videos from 96 channels it said featured climate crisis denial content, including videos from Blaze TV, a conservative media channel, the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank, and Peterson. The videos were published from January 2018 through September 2023.

The AI tool processed YouTube transcripts and sought to identify whether particular climate denial themes were present, CCDH said in the report. Independent evaluators checked part of the text transcripts and graded the model’s accuracy. The independent evaluators said it accurately found denial claims about 78% of the time.

Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, who helped develop the AI model used in the CCDH study.

“Science denial (e.g. casting doubt on the reality of human-caused global warming), solutions misinformation (arguing that climate solutions won’t work or are harmful), and attacks on climate science (personal attacks on scientists or casting doubt on climate science itself),” Cook, a leading researcher on climate scepticism, told HT in an email interview.

It all works towards the same purpose: delaying climate action, said Cook. “The people promoting climate denial want to maintain the status quo — our dependence on fossil fuels. They do this for various reasons such as political ideology (wanting to keep the industry unregulated) or vested interests (to maintain profits for the fossil fuel industry).”

The researchers quantified a rise in what they called New Denial — the departure from rejection of anthropogenic climate change, to attacks on climate science and scientists, and rhetoric seeking to undermine confidence in solutions for the crisis.

Such claims formed about 70% of all climate denial claims on YouTube, up from 35% six years ago, they said.

The emergence of a new denial

“A new front has opened up in this battle,” Imran Ahmed, the organization’s CEO, said at a news conference. “They’ve gone from saying climate change isn’t happening to now saying: ‘Hey, climate change is happening, but there is no hope. There are no solutions.’”

“In 2018, outright denialist claims like “the weather is cold” and “we’re heading into an ice age” were popular among climate denialists – but as temperatures and evidence of global warming have increased, those narratives are no longer as effective… “Old Denial” claims that anthropogenic climate change isn’t happening have dropped from 65% of all claims in 2018 to just 30% of claims in 2023,” the report said.

Peterson, for instance, rarely posted climate denial content to his YouTube channel until 2021 when his output of New Denial rose sharply.

Peterson’s channel has 7.5 million subscribers. In the last three years, he increasingly hosted talks with climate contrarians under titles such as “The Great Climate Con”, “Killing the Poor to Save the Planet” and “The Predictions Are Wrong”.66 His output of climate denial content, with a marked emphasis on New Denial, has risen every year since 2020.

What has changed?

Experts linked the shift to the growing evidence for climate change, making it harder to deny warming. The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, triggered by global warming — 2023 was 1.48°C warmer than the pre-industrial average — has increased manifold, costing millions in economic losses, leading to hundreds of thousands of lives every year, and triggering multiple tipping points that are set to worsen the impacts.

Climatologist and geophysicist Michael Mann has also written that climate deniers have shifted their narrative in the face of increasing evidence of climate change, away from outright denial and towards what he calls “inactivism”, defined as attempts to undermine climate action by the promotion of five Ds: deflection, delay, division, despair and doom.

“These lies, welcomed, enabled, and often funded by oil and gas tycoons who benefit financially, are cynically used by political leaders to explain why they remain stubbornly incapable of taking urgent corrective action,” Ahmed said.

Who is leading the misinformation battle?

But the report had more damning revelations for YouTube.

“YouTube is potentially making up to $13.4 million per year in ad revenue from channels studied in this report,” it found. While the policies of the platform bar monetisation of Old Denial, they do not cover New Denial.

Google’s current policy for YouTube creators prohibits ads for and monetization of “content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change”.

The platform specifies that this includes claims that global warming is not happening, that climate change is a hoax and that denial that human activity or human greenhouse gasses are contributing to climate change, reflecting Old Denial claims.

After a 2021 research by the non-profit revealed how Google and Facebook monetise climate denial content, Google promised to enforce its policies. However, the definition of climate denial content has changed since.

“Google must update its policy on climate denial content to reflect New Denial,” the CCDH report recommended, highlighting that the rules do not cover the New Denial claims now being pushed by denialists, “namely that the impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless, that climate solutions won’t work or that climate science and the climate movement are unreliable”.

The 2021 report, The Toxic Ten: How 10 fringe publishers fuel 69% of digital climate change denial, also found that the misinformation mostly comes from a handful of “super polluter” publishers.

Social media platforms have an important role in slowing the spread of climate denial, Cook said, adding that efforts must be made by the governments as well in creating legislation that ensures greater “transparency around corporate and philanthropic funding of misinformation sources”.