Disinformation is one of the biggest challenges of the climate summit

As world leaders gather at a major summit this week to discuss ways to tackle the effects of global warming, one of the biggest obstacles they face is disinformation.

According to one of the largest sources of false or misleading weather information in the world a report Released this week: Influential countries, including Russia and China, whose diplomats will attend. Others include the fossil fuel companies and the online provocateurs who make money by sharing claims that global warming is a hoax.

They spread various and often debunked falsehoods: humans are not responsible for climate change; recent wildfires were caused by arson rather than warmer and drier conditions; the the world is cooling down; oil and gas giants are leading the way toward carbon neutrality; and environmental warnings are an excuse for authoritarian elites to destabilize developing countries and force everyone to do so lockdown and on a diet of insects and laboratory food.

Their efforts have already significantly eroded the public pressure and political will needed to prevent a bleak future for the planet, experts say.

“What has changed dramatically is how central to public life climate misinformation and disinformation has become,” said Jennie King, author of a new report from Climate Action Against Disinformation, an international coalition of more than 50 environmental advocacy groups.

The unsubstantiated claims, the coalition warned in its report, have increased conspiracy theories, social division and intimidation. The report noted an “alarming mobilization to violence” against those involved in climate change work, including Spanish meteorologists who reported extreme spring weather and subsequently faced ominous threats And accusations that they were ‘murderers’.

The campaign against meaningful action to reduce emissions is driven by an ecosystem of ‘weird informal ties and overlaps’ between countries, companies and people – all with differing agendas and motivations, but united in their desire to tackle the threat of climate change. discredit, Ms. King said. .

“It’s really about the normalization of disinformation, not just the scale of it,” said Ms. King, who heads the coalition’s intelligence unit at the summit. “That’s what concerns me most: how attractive and how emotionally resonant this kind of content seems to be.”

Researchers expect that disinformation and misleading characterizations of the summit’s objectives will increase as delegates gather in the United Arab Emirates for the summit, known as COP28. Already this week, unsupported conspiracy theories circulated on social media, claiming that governments were using climate change as a pretext to take land from farmers and deliberately cause food shortages.

The United Arab Emirates is one of the top oil exporters known less for its climate commitments than for the voracious consumption of resources in its most populous city, Dubai. At least this summer, a disinformation expert in Qatar discovered this 100 Fake Social Media Accounts defending the location of the summit and its president, Emirati oil executive Sultan al-Jaber. An internal document revealed this week that the Emirates plan to use its hosting role to pursue oil and gas deals around the world.

Social media content promoting outright climate denial increased ahead of last year’s summit, held in Egypt, researchers said. Such messages have continued to lead to opinions and quotes from top politicians and experts this year. The content has sometimes galvanized followers; a report this spring from the watchdog group Global witness found that 73 percent of climate scientists who regularly appear in the media have experienced online harassment or abuse as a result of their work.

Climate activists such as Greta Thunberg were targeted by Chinese state media, which falsely accused her of calling for an end to the use of chopsticks and labeled her a “Swedish princess” after she pushed for more emissions cuts from China. RT, a Russian state television network, mocked Ms. Thunberg in March as “Dr. Climate Gollum” after receiving an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Helsinki.

The EU Disinfo Laba nonprofit organization that studies disinformation said in a report this year that it had found dozens of active websites in Europe and the United States that focused exclusively on climate disinformation — a “striking” departure from most other disinformation websites, which tend to be a hodgepodge of questionable topics.

Climate Action Against Disinformation found that the hashtag #climatescam generated more retweets and likes than #climatecrisis and #climateemergency on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, every month since COP27. The hashtag appeared in widespread posts wrongly accused arson committed by migrants due to forest fires or repeated debunked claims that television channels manipulated weather maps.

Researchers attributed much of #climatescam’s popularity to a small group of influential accounts, which they said were much louder about climate denial on X than on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. One account, which researchers said originated as an anti-vaccine forum on Telegram before switching to climate denial on X this year, had just a few hundred followers when it shared its first #climatescam post in March; it now has more than 250,000.

Some sites promoting climate misinformation monetized ads — a revenue stream that researchers say was made possible by more than 150 ad exchanges owned by some of the largest tech companies. The marketplaces, which largely use automated auctions to buy and sell online ads, placed ads on at least fifteen websites known for hosting climate denial content, according to the report. This ignored policies put in place by many of the exchanges to prevent climate denial content and other disinformation from being monetized.

Advertisements for McDonald’s and LL Bean appeared this fall alongside an opinion column that described “an overbearing climate change agenda” as “implementing socialism under the guise of saving the planet” by “tyrannical central planners around the world.”

Some of the climate disinformation has been spread by countries like Russia and China, which often direct such content to parts of the world where they seek to exert influence at the expense of the United States and the rest of the West. The report shows that Russian state media have framed the emissions reduction plans as a form of “Western imperialism” designed to undermine the development of the so-called Global South, or the global south, which includes some of the poorest and least developed countries belong. industrialized countries. (Experts say global warming is a financial threat to developing countries, which are more vulnerable to climate change shocks despite accounting for a disproportionately small share of greenhouse gas emissions.)

Russian propaganda surrounding climate change, which routinely downplays the phenomenon as exaggerated or even positive, has become increasingly embroiled in geopolitics. The country imposed economic sanctions on the country after it invaded Ukraine, demonstrating the importance of fossil fuel exports in maintaining global energy security. According to the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center, climate disinformation also played a role in a campaign in Brazil that promoted the views of Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent supporter of Russia’s imperial ambitions.

However, researchers from Climate Action Against Disinformation found that Russian climate disinformation was opportunistic and therefore inconsistent. The report noted that “fossil fuel investments in Africa were condemned as attempts to steal the continent’s resources when linked to Western countries, but praised as supportive of economic development when linked to Russia.”

According to China, disinformation about climate change has a long history A study in May by Annie Lab, a fact-checking project at the University of Hong Kong. For years, calls to combat climate change in China were portrayed as a tool used by the West to hinder China’s economic growth, rather than an effort to address a global problem.

Even after China accepted the need for international action and first agreed to set emissions reduction targets at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, misinformation and disinformation on the issue remained rife in the Chinese media . wrote.

Climate Action Against Disinformation also said that China’s state oil giant, the China National Petroleum Corporation, was among international energy companies making misleading claims about their environmental practices, a strategy known as ‘greenwashing’. Sometimes company advertisements were used, often targeting countries in Asia and Africa an increasingly popular tactic that researchers call “naturewashing”: the use of images of landscapes and landscapes in their marketing to create a false and more forgiving association between nature and fossil fuels.

One Facebook ad this year, which researchers say cost $120 to $595 to post and reached a million viewers, included emojis of blossoms, a worker in a hard hat and a green heart.

“With the arrival of spring, let us enjoy the beautiful flower fields that cover the oil field!” the ad said.