Climate crisis misinformation is thriving on Elon Musk’s Twitter, research shows

Network map showing followers for key amplifiers of climate disinformation during COP27, grouped by common traits or identifying factors. Network mapping around COP26 showed that, among accounts following key climate misinformers on Twitter, 7.5 percent were primarily focused on climate - for COP27 the cluster constitutes a mere 0.33 percent. The shift reveals how right-wing ‘culture war’ influencers are becoming the most prominent voices in spreading climate misinformation. Such content drives an ecosystem in which environmental issues, including COP summits, can more easily be framed and amplified as a polarising topic - a trend covered in depth by a recent peer-reviewed paper in Nature Climate Change. Overall, the audience for key misinformation influencers has a similar composition to last year’s COP26 network. Accounts in the ‘U.S. Conservative’ cluster comprise the largest portion of the map, including highly influential pundits like Dinesh D’Souza (2.9m followers) and Tom Fitton (1.9m followers) alongside elected officials like House Rep. Lauren Boebert (2m followers) who focus on broadly right-wing “culture war” issues. Taken together, the US, UK, and Canada Conservative clusters make up 72.25 percent of the overall network. While climate issues do not dominate their content strategy, these accounts do share related misinformation during key climate-related events, including COP, or as part of wider outputs. Climate content regularly features alongside other misleading, disproven and/or unsubstantiated claims on an array of topics, including around electoral fraud, vaccinations, the COVID-19 pandemic, migration, and child trafficking rings run by so-called ‘elites’ Graphic: Climate Action Against Disinformation / Graphika

January 22, 2023

Climate crisis misinformation is thriving on Elon Musk’s Twitter, research shows

By Beatrice Nolan 20 January 2023 (Insider) – Misinformation about the climate crisis is flourishing on Elon Musk’s Twitter, according to a study: Deny, Deceive, Delay Vol. 2: Exposing New Trends in Climate Mis- and Disinformation at COP27.[pdf]. The study, published on 19 January 2023 by Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), said Twitter was recommending the […]

Percentage of OECD countries experiencing higher-than-average inflation, 1970-2022. The global inflation shock that began in the United States in 2021 and took hold worldwide in 2022 will have powerful economic and political ripple effects in 2023. It will be the principal driver of global recession, add to financial stress, and stoke social discontent and political instability everywhere. Today’s historically high inflation comes from multiple sources. First was the Covid-19 pandemic, which prompted governments to cushion the fall in incomes with extraordinary fiscal and monetary stimulus at the same time that it disrupted global supply. Then, just as the United States and Europe were coming out of the pandemic thanks to vaccines, China doubled down on its zero-Covid policy, locking down the global economy’s most important manufacturing and shipping hubs. Finally, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s sanctions in response put a strain on the global supply of energy, food, and fertilizer. This unprecedented confluence of overlapping shocks pushed inflation to levels most countries hadn’t seen in nearly 50 years. Graphic: Eurasia Group

January 22, 2023

Eurasia Group’s Top Risks for 2023 – “The risks this year are the most dangerous we’ve encountered in the 25 years since we started Eurasia Group”

By Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan 3 January 2023 (Eurasia Group) – Russia has no way to win in Ukraine. The European Union is stronger than ever. NATO rediscovered its reason for being. The G7 is strengthening. Renewables are becoming dirt cheap. American hard power remains unrivaled. Midterms in the United States were decidedly normal […]

Climate activist Greta Thunberg of Sweden listens as Vanessa Nakate of Uganda speaks at a press conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on 19 January 2023. The activists urged attendees to give less power in the climate-change fight to oil companies. Photo: AP

January 21, 2023

Greta Thunberg: It’s “absurd” to think oil companies causing the climate crisis have a solution to it – “As long as they can get away with it, they will continue to invest in fossil fuels, they will continue to throw people under the bus”

By Rachel Koning Beals 19 January 2023 (MarketWatch) – Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, age 20 and arguably the face of a generation that wants to roll back decades of reliance on oil and gas by means of alternative energy sources, had a message Thursday as she mingled with the corporate and political bigwigs meeting […]

Summary of all global warming projections (nominal scenarios) reported by ExxonMobil scientists in internal documents and peer-reviewed publications (gray lines), superimposed on historically observed temperature change (red). Solid gray lines (and asterisked numerical labels) indicate global warming projections modeled by ExxonMobil scientists themselves; dashed gray lines indicate projections internally reproduced by ExxonMobil scientists from third-party sources. Shades of gray and numerical labels scale with model start dates, from earliest (1977: lightest, “1”) to latest (2003: darkest, “12”). Numerical labels correspond to panels in Fig. 1, which displays all original graphical projections reported by ExxonMobil scientists. Observations reflect the smoothed annual average of five historical time series. Graphic: Supran, et al., 2023 / Science

January 21, 2023

Exxon disputed climate findings for years. Its scientists knew better. “ExxonMobil scientists knew about this problem to a shockingly fine degree as far back as the 1980s, but company spokesmen denied, challenged, and obscured this science.”

By Alice McCarthy 12 January 2023 (The Harvard Gazette) – Projections created internally by ExxonMobil starting in the late 1970s on the impact of fossil fuels on climate change were very accurate, even surpassing those of some academic and governmental scientists, according to an analysis published Thursday in Science by a team of Harvard-led researchers. Despite those […]

A youth runs over what remains of the glacier that lost most of its volume during the last years, on top of the Zugspitze Mountain near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Saturday, 25 June 2022. Once the world had hope that when nations got together, they could stop climate change. Thirty years after leaders around the globe first got together to try, that hope has melted. Photo: Michael Probst / AP Photo

December 23, 2022

Climate negotiations: 30 years of melting hope and U.S. power – “Such innovative, exciting proposals were put forward in the early years, which if they had been implemented, we would be in a so much better situation”

By Seth Borenstein 4 November 2022 (AP) – Thirty years ago there was hope that a warming world could clean up its act. It didn’t. The United States helped forge two historic agreements to curb climate change then torpedoed both when new political administrations took over. Rich and poor nations squabbled about who should do what. During […]

Rising sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea since 1901. The waters around Puerto Rico have warmed by heat two degrees Fahrenheit. Data: EPA Climate Change Indicators in the United States. Graphic: EPA

December 20, 2022

Big oil is behind conspiracy to deceive public, first climate racketeering lawsuit says – “What’s different about this case is that we have their enterprise in writing: the decision by rival companies, their front groups, scientists, and associations to act together to change public opinion”

By Nina Lakhani 20 December 2022 (The Guardian) – The same racketeering legislation used to bring down mob bosses, motorcycle gangs, football executives and international fraudsters is to be tested against oil and coal companies who are accused of conspiring to deceive the public over the climate crisis. In an ambitious move, an attempt will […]

Inside the King Abdullah research center in Riyadh, a space station-like compound powered by 20,000 solar panels. Photo: Iman Al-Dabbagh / The New York Times

December 20, 2022

Inside the Saudi strategy to keep the world hooked on oil – “People would like us to give up on investment in hydrocarbons. But no.”

By Hiroko Tabuchi 21 November 2022 (The New York Times) – Shimmering in the desert is a futuristic research center with an urgent mission: Make Saudi Arabia’s oil-based economy greener, and quickly. The goal is to rapidly build more solar panels and expand electric-car use so the kingdom eventually burns far less oil. But Saudi […]

Abortion laws by U.S. state in 2022 after the after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health U.S. Supreme Court decision. Graphic: Center for Reproductive Rights

November 20, 2022

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina: Data on a post-Dobbs world – “In just four short months post-Dobbs, thousands of women’s lives were impacted”

By Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD 7 November 2022 (Your Local Epidemiologist) – Last week, five new studies provided a first look into Dobbs v. Jackson’s impact on access to abortion care. This was largely thanks to JAMA Network that published a special issue on this topic. This is the story that data is telling. Shift in location of abortions Just […]

Satellite view of the turf farm site in the Qatar desert, August 2021. World Cup organisers have created a large-scale tree and turf nursery, the largest turf farm in the world, according to the organisers, in the middle of the desert. It covers an area of 425,000 m2. While irrigation uses treated sewage water, the claim that this will absorb CO2 emissions from the atmosphere and contribute to reducing the impact of the event is not credible as this carbon storage is unlikely to be permanent in these artificial and vulnerable green spaces, while carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries to millenia. Lusail stadium is the largest of the FWC stadiums, with a capacity of 80,000 seats. It is represented here to show the scale of the turf farm. Lusail stadium is not located next to the turf farm. Photo: Google Earth

November 19, 2022

World Cup 2022: The “mirage” of carbon offsetting

By Stéphane Mandard 19 November 2022 (Le Monde) – Organizers will have to buy 3.6 million carbon credits to compensate for emissions, according to FIFA. Carbon Market Watch says this estimate is too low – and a long way off. FIFA claims that the World Cup in Qatar will be the first to be “carbon […]

November 13, 2022

COP27: Corporate climate pledges rife with greenwashing, says U.N. expert group – “Too many of these net-zero pledges are little more than empty slogans and hype”

By Gloria Dickie and Simon Jessop 8 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) – Promises by companies, banks and cities to achieve net-zero emissions often amount to little more than greenwashing, U.N. experts said in a report on Tuesday as they set out proposed new standards to harden net-zero claims. The report, released at the […]

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Tag: propaganda