In 1995, a distinguished group of scientists convened by the United Nations declared that they detect a “human influence” on global temperatures with “effectively irreversible” consequences. In the coming decades, 99.9 percent of scientists would agree that the burning of fossil fuels has disrupted the earth’s climate.
Yet almost 30 years after that warning, during the hottest year on earth 125,000 years, people still argue that the science is unreliable, or that the threat is real, but we shouldn’t do anything about climate change. Conspiracies thrive online, according to a report by the Coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation released last month, in time for the UN climate conference in Dubai. Over the past year, posts with the hashtag #climatescam have received more likes and retweets on the platform known as X than those with #climatecrisis or #climateemergency.
By now, anyone looking out the window can see flowers blooming earlier and lakes freezing later. Why, after all this time, do 15 percent of Americans fall for the lie that global warming isn’t happening? And is there anything that can be done to bring them to reality? New research suggests that understanding why fake news is compelling to people can tell us something about how to defend ourselves against it.
People buy into bad information for different reasons, says Andy Norman, an author and philosopher who co-founded the Mental Immunity Project, which aims to protect people from manipulative information. Because of the quirks of psychology, people may end up overlooking inconvenient facts when confronted with arguments that support their beliefs. “The more you rely on useful beliefs at the expense of true beliefs, the more unfettered your thinking becomes,” Norman said. Another reason people are drawn to conspiracies is that they feel like they’re in on a big, world-transforming secret: Flat Earthers think they see past the illusions that the vast majority don’t.
The annual UN climate summit often coincides with a surge in misleading information on social media. As COP28 escalated in late November, conspiracy theories circulated, claiming that governments are trying to cause food shortages by taking land from farmers, apparently using climate change as an excuse. Spreading lies about global warming like this can promote social division and undermine public and political support for action to reduce emissions, according to the Climate Action Against Disinformation’s report. It can also lead to harassment: Some 73 percent of climate scientists who appear regularly in the media have experienced online abuse.
Part of the problem is the genuine appeal of fake news. A recent study in Nature Human Behavior found that climate change disinformation was more persuasive than scientific facts. Researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland originally set out to see if they could help people fend off disinformation by testing different strategies on nearly 7,000 people from 12 countries, including the United States, India and Nigeria. Participants read a paragraph intended to strengthen their mental defenses – reminders of the scientific consensus around climate change, the trustworthiness of scientists, or the moral responsibility to act, for example. Then they were subjected to a barrage of 20 real tweets that blamed warming on the sun and the “swirling” jet stream, expressed conspiracies about “the climate hoax concocted by the UN,” and warned that the elite ” wants us to eat bugs.”
The interventions did not work as hoped, said Tobia Spampatti, an author of the study and a neuroscience researcher at the University of Geneva. The deluge of fake news – meant to simulate what people encounter in social media echo chambers – had a big effect. Reading the tweets about false conspiracies lowered people’s belief that climate change was happening, their support for action to reduce emissions, and their willingness to personally do something about it. The disinformation was simply more persuasive than scientific fact, in part because it played on people’s emotions, Spampatti said (inciting anger toward elites who want you to eat bugs, for example). The only paragraph that helped people recognize falsehoods was one that prompted them to evaluate the accuracy of the information they were seeing, a nudge that brought some people back to reality.
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The study sought to “pre-bunking,” a tactic to inoculate people against fake news. While the effort flopped, Norman said that doesn’t mean it shows that “grafting” is ineffective. Spampatti and other researchers’ effort to bolster people’s mental defenses used a new, broader approach to pre-bunking, trying to protect against multiple lines of disinformation at once, which didn’t work as well as tried-and-true inoculation techniques , according to Norman.
Norman says it’s crucial that any intervention to stop the spread of disinformation comes with a “weakened dose” of it, like a vaccine, to help people understand why someone might benefit from lying. For example, when the Biden administration learned of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine in late 2021, the White House began to warn the world that Russia would push a false narrative to justify the invasion, including staging a fake, graphic video of a Ukrainian attack on Russian territory. When the video came out, it was quickly dismissed as fake news. “It was a wildly successful attempt to inoculate much of the world against Putin’s preferred narrative about Ukraine,” Norman said.
For climate change, that approach may not succeed—decades of oil-funded disinformation campaigns have already infected the public. “It’s really hard to think of anyone who hasn’t been exposed to climate skepticism or disinformation from fossil fuel industries,” said Emma Frances Bloomfield, a communications professor at the University of Nevada, Los Vegas. “It’s just so pervasive. They have talking heads that go on news shows, they flood media publications and the internet, they pay lobbyists.”
Bloomfield argues that disinformation sticks for a reason, and that it is not enough to simply tell the people who fall for it that there is a scientific consensus. “They have doubts about climate change because they doubt scientific authorities,” Bloomfield said. “They make decisions about the environment not based on the facts or the science, but based on their values or other things that are important to them.”
While political identity may explain some resistance to climate change, there are other reasons why people reject the evidence, as Bloomfield outlines in her forthcoming book Science v. Story: Narrative strategies for science communicators. “In the climate change story, we’re the villains, or at least partially to blame for what’s happening to the environment, and that requires us to make a lot of sacrifices,” Bloomfield said. “It’s a difficult story to take on because of the role we play in it.” To some extent, accepting climate change means accepting inner conflict. You always know you can do more to lower your carbon footprint, whether it’s ditching meat, refusing to fly, or wearing your old clothes until they’re tattered and rotten.
By contrast, embracing climate denial makes people identify as heroes, Bloomfield said. They don’t have to do anything else, and may even see driving around in a gas truck as part of God’s plan. It’s a comforting narrative, and certainly easier than grappling with ethical dilemmas or existential dread.
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Those seeking to amplify climate change tensions or spread doubt, such as fossil fuel companies, social media trolls and countries like Russia and China, are getting a lot of bang for their buck. “It’s much easier and cheaper to cast doubt than to promote certainty,” Bloomfield said. Oil companies including Shell, ExxonMobil and BP spent about $4 million to $5 million this year on Facebook ads related to social issues and politics, according to the Climate Action Against Disinformation report. To sow doubt, you only need to arouse some kind of suspicion. Creating a bulletproof case for something is much more difficult—it can take thousands of scientific studies (or denying hundreds of counterarguments one by oneas Grist did in 2006).
The simplest way to fight disinformation would be to prevent it from happening in the first place, Spampatti said. But even if regulators could get social media companies to try to stop the spread of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, dispelling them is another story. One promising approach, “deep work,” seeks to persuade people through nonjudgmental, one-on-one conversations. Invented by LGBTQ+ advocates, the outreach method involves hearing people’s concerns and helping them work through their conflicted feelings. (Remember how accepting climate change means you can be a small part of the problem?)
Research has shown that deep work is not only successful reducing transphobia, but also that its effects can last for months, a long time compared to other interventions. The strategy may also work for other polarizing problems, based on one experiment in a countryside metal smelting town in British Columbia. After convincing several local governments across the West Kootenay region to switch to 100 percent renewable energy, volunteers with the nonprofit Neighbors United continued having problems in the town of Trail, where they encountered mistrust of environmentalists. They spoke to hundreds of residents, listening to their concerns about losing jobs, finding common ground and telling personal stories about climate change as friends would, instead of debating the facts like antagonists. An astonishing 40 percent of residents shifted their beliefs, and Trail’s city council voted in 2022 to switch to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.
Both facts and stories have a place, Bloomfield said. For conservative audiences, she suggests climate advocates move away from talking about global systems and scientists to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a “nameless, faceless, nebulous group of people” — and toward local issues and people they actually know. Getting information from friends, family and other trusted individuals can really help.
“They are not necessarily as authoritative as the IPCC,” said Bloomfield. “But it helps you connect with that information, and you trust that person, so you trust that information that they’re resharing.”
