Climate misinformation turning crisis into catastrophe, report says
False claims obstructing climate action, say researchers, amid calls for climate lies to be criminalised.
Rampant climate misinformation is turning the crisis into a catastrophe, according to the authors of a new report.
It found climate action was being obstructed and delayed by false and misleading information stemming from fossil fuel companies, rightwing politicians and some nation states. The report, from the International Panel on the Information Environment (Ipie), systematically reviewed 300 studies.
The researchers found climate denialism has evolved into campaigns focused on discrediting solutions, such as the false claims that renewable energy caused the recent massive blackout in Spain.
Online bots and trolls hugely amplify false narratives, the researchers say, playing a key role in promoting climate lies. The experts also report that political leaders, civil servants and regulatory agencies are increasingly being targeted in order to delay climate action.
Climate misinformation – the term used by the report for both deliberate and inadvertent falsehoods – is of increasing concern. Last Thursday, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, called for misinformation and greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry to be criminalised. On Saturday, Brazil, host of the upcoming Cop30 climate summit, will rally nations behind a separate UN initiative to crack down on climate misinformation.
The reason you don’t believe in climate change is the same reason you don’t believe in vaccines, is the same reason you hate the Trans community, is the same reason why you hate Māori aspiration – social media hate algorithms.
We hate each other thanks to social media.
While we hate each other more than ever before, we are more lonely than we have ever been before.
We are lonely, more depressed and sicker.
Our loneliness, our depression, our sickness are all fomenting the spin of social media hate algorithms which only further polarise our debate into All Tribe and No Village politics.
I think we are a clever ape who has evolved over 300 000 years. Because we have to compete against other sentient and self conscious clever apes and work with them as groups so our intelligence and ability to use tools could change our environment, we have had to bond and understand each other over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
When we meet in person, our bodies and brains and taking in millions of different details subconsciously and we are working each other out through facial cues, pheromones, gait, stance, smiles, eye contact, etc etc etc: we have taken those 300 000 years of evolution and replaced that with flat screen interaction where we lose all that unseen evolutionary advantage and instead become brainwashed and trapped in rabbit holes of demented reality.
Flat screen interaction is warping our human capacity to tell what is true and what isn’t because we don’t have that sense of the person in front of us and all the million ways we asses each other in our evolved brain.
We have become an ocean of spite and resentment in an All Tribe No Village politics distorted by social media hate algorithms because 300 000 years of evolution can’t work in a flat screen interaction loneliness.
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So true ,I would love to meet Trevor ,bob the fister and blow hard trumpet ,for a lunch one day .No doubt we would get on like a house on fire and come away more enlightened as to what makes a society .
Defame someone such that you hurt their feelings or their reputation is damaged or even worse, their income suffers, and the law will view it very dimly and has avenues for redress.
Condemn the human race to having to endure an irreversible climatic disaster with your lies and it’s nada from the law. Have a ball.
It’s a good story, but climate change has actual science behind it, trans activism not so much.
Social media is only persuasive on a macro level – it works by the bandwagon effect if it works at all. Not many minds are change by it.
Pfft S Munro – you don’t actually know and are just saying what you and someone else you know thinks and that is how social media works. Scepticism is the order of the day – By Order !
As it happens I work in a field where weather is constantly on our minds, and with transgenic organisms.
Social media fills gaps if you are without direct knowledge – but it loses its persuasiveness if you have more tangible objective data.
Climate denial is anti-science. Anti-vaccine and anti-gender-finaticism are not.
Heh, how much empathy do fat gutted burger munchers, pulling their puds, and being nasty on social media deserve?
Grow up, talk to people, join something, exercise, have a life.
You might be fat, eat burgers and not get out much; don’t assume we’re similar.
Why you are a climate denier is the same reason you hate trans, Maori and vaccines…. And love war.
propaganda, lies, mass persuasion, predate social media.
As Hanna Arendt said the purpose of propaganda is not to make you believe lies but make you not know what to believe.
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