Climate of Deception - Organised Misinformation Is Making The Battle Against Climate Change All The Harder

‍Dr David Holmes, Managing Director and CEO, Climate Communications Australia

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The world’s average temperature has already exceeded the target of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels agreed less than a decade ago in Paris. We are now counting the cost in increased natural disasters. But, organised misinformation is making the battle against climate change all the harder.

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Whether the world achieves carbon neutrality in the next decade, and how it does so, will be crucial in determining the kind of climate that future generations will have to endure for centuries.

Few understand the sensitivity of the climate system. The volume of greenhouse gases emitted to the atmosphere by humans since 1750 is now adding the equivalent of five Hiroshima bombs worth of heat energy to the world’s oceans per second.[1]

Even fewer people appreciate that carbon dioxide CO₂ – the most common greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels – stays in the atmosphere for up to 1000 years and, as yet, we have no proven or effective technologies for removing it at scale.

The modelling of ways to keep the world under 2°C, undertaken more than 15 years ago[2] and used by the Australian Climate Change Authority over the past decade, has reflected the observed record accurately.

Every month last year recorded a baseline temperature higher than 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures. This is a mere nine years after the Paris Climate Summit set the target of 1.5°C with the intention of saving from annihilation the 110 nations that make up the ‘coalition of the least developed nations’. These countries are either small island states or sit on the equator. With this 1.5°C threshold now breached, we are facing the task of avoiding 2°C.[3]

The world has just passed the ‘critical decade’ for action on climate change before experiencing its impacts. We are currently in a ‘transformational decade’, where any actions we take to mitigate climate change must co-exist with climate change impacts that are forcing us to adapt at a rate that distracts us from mitigation.

As Inger Anderson, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program, wrote in the foreword to the 2024 UN Emissions Gap Report,

Climate crunch time is here. As wildfires, heatwaves, storms and droughts intensify globally, nations are preparing new nationally determined contributions (NDCs) … Nations must accelerate action now, show a massive increase in ambition in the new pledges and then deliver urgently with policies and implementation. If they do not, the Paris Agreement target of holding global warming to 1.5°C will be dead within a few years and 2°C will take its place in the intensive care unit.[4]

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We are now standing at the foot of a vast mountain of warming that is locking in at least 3°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels.[5] Such a global mean surface temperature corresponds to levels of energy in the climate system that will fuel extreme weather on a scale that is much worse even than the Eemian inter-glacial period of 118,000 years ago – a climate not compatible with today’s infrastructure.

The impacts of climate change on our health, economy, agriculture, migration, and food and military security have been well documented. Adaptation to many of these impacts will not be possible if they coalesce into systemic crises. And leaving action to the late 2030s or the 2040s is entirely inadequate. Mitigation of such crises – that is, replacing human activities that produce emissions with zero-emission substitutes – is the most important form of adaptation.

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Fossil-fuelled climate denial

While the science on the causes and impacts of climate change is clear, misinformation persists in Australia and around the world, particularly in the mainstream media, social media and the thinktanks that identify with, or are supported by, fossil fuel interests.

For more than 100 years, the fossil fuel industry has been able to pollute our atmosphere for free, never having to pay a price. Instead, the cost of fossil fuel pollution is paid collectively through the impacts on our health, economy, and  development.

In Australia, since the 1990s fossil-fuel interests have been lobbying government, and running an anti-science agenda to discredit evidence-based climate science and delay climate action.[6] 

Countering such misinformation has always been an important task. We know from the history of misinformation campaigns, about tobacco, health and climate change itself, that even a small amount of misinformation can sow enough doubt in the public mind to remove the social licence that governments, business and civil society need to take urgent action.[7]

A changing landscape of climate misinformation

In recent years, the news media in countries with a history of high emissions has begun to accept the science, together with the fact that climate change is real and happening. As climate-induced extreme weather events become more common and severe, the media no longer portrays climate change as an unsettled debate between experts. Major studies have shown, however, that while the news media is typically abandoning narratives about whether climate change is happening or arguing that climate change isn’t bad or isn’t caused by humans, it has now turned to a significant attack on the solutions, especially on renewable energy, technology which has a proven ability to mitigate climate change in the short and long term.[8]

One of the most common strategies is not necessarily to attack renewables directly, but to put up false solutions, decoy solutions, and delaying tactics that would allow a continuation of fossil fuel use.[9]

In the Australian context, this includes the claim that renewables are unreliable. Renewables are accused of being intermittent and, ironically, dependent on the weather. They are denigrated for being ‘unaffordable’, and for not providing ‘baseload’ power, a term coined by Peabody Energy, once the largest coal company in the world.[10]

Australia already generates 39.4% of its electricity from renewables[11], and this is currently being scaled up. But it needs to be complemented by a lot more storage, such as battery and pumped hydro, as well as additional transmission infrastructure from the new geographical points of power generation.

Instead of supporting this course of action, those political parties and organisations that have been historically captive to the fossil fuel industry, are proposing that gas provides a more consistent and reliable technology than battery and hydro storage to smooth out ‘intermittent’ renewable sources such as wind and solar. Similarly, nuclear energy is promoted as a ‘stable’ form of energy. This misleadingly focuses on renewables as ‘intermittent’ rather than a part of dispatchable systems that include storage.

Another discourse is that renewables are seen to be destructive of Australian landscapes – in ways from which other forms of energy infrastructure, such as coal power stations or nuclear reactors, seem to be exempt. Further, renewables are argued not to be cost-effective compared with continuing fossil-fuel sources of power.

Recently, the not-for-profit body Climate Communications Australia undertook a study of 2255 news articles on climate solutions across 22 of Australia’s most read news outlets. The study found that 14.9% of them contained misinformation. Of these articles, 29% argued that nuclear is cheaper or better value, 19% argued that renewables were increasing costs with little benefit, and 10% argued that solar farms and wind power degraded the landscape or that offshore wind turbines would harm whales. A further 10% argued that clean energy is inherently unreliable or too hard to install.

In the sample, 7% of articles selectively focused on small cases of local opposition to clean energy, without looking at local support for renewables or comparing such support to that for nuclear of coal-fired installations. A further 7% argued that ‘gas is essential’ as a ‘clean’ form of reliable technology, while ignoring the role of storage. Most misleading were claims that gas would be indispensable even after an energy transition to net zero CO₂ emissions.

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Six different Australias

 The mere existence of organised misinformation and the lack of investigative journalism linking extreme weather to climate change or explaining the efficacy of renewables technology has contributed to catalysing social division on climate in Australia

In 2022, the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub published a study that charted the change in climate change concern, literacy and behaviour over more than a decade.[12]

During that time period, studies consistently showed that Australians split into six groups over climate change: Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful and Dismissive. Interestingly the percentage of the population who are Dismissive of the science increased from 5 to 9%. The good news is that the percentage of Alarmed – alarmed because they have read and accept the science – also increased to more than 30 percent in 2022, compared with 25% in 2020 and 14% in 2011.

The Concerned sound like an important group and have remained at 28 to 29% for more than a decade to 2022. Typically, their literacy is low. They are not concerned because they know much about the science, however, but because of their progressive politics.

The Cautious and Doubtful are swing groups, who tend to accept there is something happening to Australia’s climate, but not that the change is necessarily caused by humans. So these people don’t see any reason to take responsibility for solving the problem. If you tell these groups that climate change is caused by humans, and that they should make a sacrifice to alleviate it, such as paying a tax or altering their personal behaviour, any receptiveness they may have had to the idea that global warming is anthropogenic quickly evaporates.

Those disengaged with climate change have decreased from 6% in 2011 to 2% in 2022, but this group is driven more by distrust in the news media in general and are tuning out on all topics.

Which brings us back to the Dismissive group. This group is influential on social media and blogs. The Dismissives are actually highly literate about climate change, except they are literate in false information. Dismissives can be quite articulate when compared with, say, the Concerned, but not with the Alarmed. Like the Alarmed, the Dismissives have something going for them – their values-action gap is quite small. They do what they say.

Dismissives don’t accept the science, and are often enraged by those who try to explain the dangers of climate change. They continue to support fossil fuels in their personal behaviour or voting intentions. Some Dismissives are also activists, and this group can easily sabotage the communication of science. Some act as trolls on professional news outlets, whilst others will organise community actions to defend coal communities, for instance.

Across all segments, the form of messaging that causes least division is the promotion of renewables. This is an area where arguments about energy independence, technological progress and lower energy costs are widely supported across all six groups, even the Dismissives, as long as you leave ‘climate change’ out of the policy discussion. Studies have found that Dismissives tend to like renewables, because they are shiny and signal progress, and in many cases provide energy independence and a cheaper source of power.

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Conclusion

While promoting renewables may be an easier message to deliver to Australians, despite the anti-renewables lobby, it is nevertheless still important to demonstrate to the public, that climate change is caused by humans. The human contribution now towers over natural impacts. Humans are changing the climate at 170 times the rate that occurred between the cycles of glacial periods[13]. But with humans there will be no future cycles, only an increasingly warming climate. 

Probably one of the most ubiquitous catalysts for misinformation is the common expression that a person ‘believes’ or does not ‘believe’ in climate change (human-caused or otherwise) Climate change is not a matter of belief, rather it turns on science, on extensive multiple lines of evidence that together make it impossible to ignore, regardless of any beliefs one may have.

Listening to the science, and acting on it, is the greatest task facing humanity today.

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References

[1] thebulletin.org/2020/02/earth-is-heating-at-a-rate-equivalent-to-five-atomic-bombs-per-second-or-two-hurricane-sandys/

[2] Meinshausen, M., et al. (2009). Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 °C. Nature 458: 1158–1162. doi.org/10.1038/nature08017

[3] Holmes, D (2013) Two degrees: how we imagine climate change. The Conversation theconversation.com/two-degrees-how-we-imagine-climate-change-18035

[4] United Nations Environment Programme, (2024). Emissions Gap Report 2024: No more hot air … please! Nairobi: UNEP. www.unep.org/emissions-gap-report-2024

[5] *Chart adapted from Meinshausen, et al. (2009). Ibid.

[6] Mann, M. E., (2021). The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. Melbourne and London: Scribe, 368 pp.

[7] Oreskes N. & Conway E. M., (2010). Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming (1st ed). New York: Bloomsbury Press, 355 pp.

[8] Coan, T.G., et al. (2021). Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change. Scientific Reports 11: 22320 doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-01714-4

[9] Lamb, W. F., et al. (2020). Discourses of Climate Delay. Global Sustainability, 3, e17. doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.13 

[10] Diesendorf, M., (2013). Baseload power is a myth, even intermittent renewables will work, in The Conversation, 10 April, 2013. theconversation.com/baseload-power-is-a-myth-even-intermittent-renewables-will-work-13210

[11] Clean Energy Council (2024) Annual Report: Clean Energy Australia 2024. cleanenergycouncil.org.au/getmedia/0cb12425-37ab-479e-9a4b-529622cc9c02/clean-energy-australia-2024.pdf

[12] Richardson, L.M., et al. (2022) Climate Change: Concern, Behaviour and the Six Australias, Melbourne: Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, Monash University

[13] Gaffney, O. & Steffen, W., (2017). The Anthropocene equation, The Anthropocene Review, 4 (1), 53-61, doi.org/10.1177/2053019616688022

[14] Main banner image : Matt Palmer via Unsplash