Scientists suffering insults and mass-spam are abandoning Twitter for alternative social networks as hostile climate-change denialism surges on the platform following Elon Musk’s takeover.
Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022 — and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network on which many of them rely is getting harder.
Policies aimed at curbing the deadly effects of climate change are accelerating, prompting a rise in what experts identify as organised resistance by opponents of climate reform.
Peter Gleick, a climate and water specialist with nearly 99,000 followers, announced on May 21 he would no longer post on the platform because it was amplifying racism and sexism.
While he is accustomed to “offensive, personal, ad hominem attacks, up to and including direct physical threats”, he told AFP, “in the past few months, since the takeover and changes at Twitter, the amount, vituperativeness, and intensity of abuse has skyrocketed”.
– Climate tweets decline –
Robert Rohde, a physicist and lead scientist at the non-profit environmental data analysis group Berkeley Earth, analysed activity on hundreds of accounts of widely followed specialists posting about climate science before and after the takeover.
He found climate scientists’ tweets were losing impact. The average number of likes they received was down 38 percent and average retweets fell 40 percent.
Twitter has not commented directly about what changes it has made to the algorithms that drive traffic and visibility.
Contacted at its email address for comment, its press department returned its now customary reply, an automated email with a “poop” emoji.
But in a tweet seen as an acknowledgement of a deliberate change, Musk wrote in January: “People on the right should see more ‘left-wing’ stuff and people on the left should see more ‘right-wing’ stuff. But you can just block it if you want to stay in an echo chamber.”
Below, Katharine Hayhoe in 2012. Things have only gotten more automated since then.
“14 Insurance companies have pulled out of Florida, and 7 have gone bankrupt.”
The helpful (and enterprising) Real Estate Salesman (from South Carolina) that I posted on a few months ago, is back, with more warnings about Florida’s property and flood insurance crisis. Gotta love the free market punishing those who ignored climate risks and sunk their life savings in Florida. The good news – it’s cheaper in Myrtle Beach, S. C. – IF you use his secret system. He knows his audience – never uses the “C” word, but keeps repeating “Yes, this is REALLY happening..”.
Description:
After moving to Florida, many people are getting crushed by the skyrocketing homeowners’ insurance and flood insurance requirements and now regret moving to FL. Some ultimately have lost their life savings and end up leaving Florida for a more affordable place. What is really going on in Florida? In this video, I share my experience and the stories of many who have commented on my videos. Florida property taxes, insurance, and HOA fees are all skyrocketing. Many people who bought real estate over the past couple of years are now getting slammed with higher mortgage payments due to increased property taxes, increased homeowners insurance, and increased HOA fees. You name it, it’s happening! If you are thinking about moving to Florida watch this video so you can avoid the pitfalls that are costly.
Home insurance premiums are on the rise, and a key driver for the price increase is climate change. Yet, Americans are moving fastest to Florida, Texas and other states most at risk for climate-related natural disasters, according to a new study from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a data and analytics provider.
Since 2015, the average homeowner has seen the bill for their property coverage grow by roughly 21 percent. But in Florida and Texas, the two states with the highest population gains in 2022, rates have climbed significantly more — 57 percent in Florida and 40 percent in Texas.
Those states are also experiencing extreme weather: Hurricanes like Ian, Nicole and Fiona, as well as record heat, ice and snow storms, wrought billions of dollars of destruction in 2022 and killed nearly 500 Americans.
“The states where climate tends to impact the world more strongly are seeing a bigger jump in population,” said George Hosfield, LexisNexis Risk Solutions’s senior director of home insurance. “We put two and two together, and it seems to be creating a perfect storm — no pun intended.”
NBC News paid a visit to post-Ian south Florida. Predictable sobering news about insurance for damaged homes, as well as slow recovery for tourism, below.
On World Meteorological Day in March, the UN Climate Change Twitter account posted an anodyne tweet reminding people that “every bit of additional global warming worsens climate impacts.” But thanks to Elon Musk’s new paid blue checkmark system, the most prominent replies to it are flooded with nonsense like “these commies are doubling down” and calls to “stop globalist fake alarmism.”
This is just one way in which Twitter is rapidly becoming a hellscape for climate scientists who not long ago relied on the platform to spread the word about their work. The degradation of the platform isn’t just anecdotal. A study released in March by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that “fringe climate denialist websites have gained a foothold in online conversation with thousands of daily mentions on Twitter by highly followed climate-denying actors, pundits and outlets.” Additional researchfrom climate expert Ketan Joshi demonstrated how Musk’s takeover coincided with prominent climate deniers gaining Twitter followers, while climate experts lost them.
“A specific change to the algorithm to boost tweets ‘outside’ of one’s political sphere has resulted in far, far more eyeballs on right-wing content,” Joshi writes.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist and distinguished professor of environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, has been a loud, provocative voice trying to draw attention to what Twitter is becoming.
“Musk, Putin and Saudis intentionally destroyed Twitter. It was the biggest catch-and-kill operation in world history,” he tweeted last month, alluding to Saudi Arabia’s leading role in funding Musk’s Twitter takeover and help he also received from a financier connected to a Russian tycoon.
Mann has also been outspoken about how fossil fuel interests — a group that includes the Russians and Saudis — are getting a hand from Elon Musk in drowning out the voices of climate scientists.
The pollen has tormented employees—and any co-workers within earshot—as they constantly sniffle and interrupt presentations and meetings with coughing and sneezing fits.
Samantha Santos, a 35-year-old New Yorker, said she runs into her office bathroom sometimes to hide her coughing attacks.
“Coughing and sneezing is so not office etiquette,” said Santos, the chief of staff for a team of real-estate agents. She had to mute herself on a call with an apartment renter this spring because she couldn’t stop coughing.
After her coughs subside, she said she follows a new norm in a Covid-19 world: reassuring her co-workers she isn’t contagious. She keeps a stockpile of Covid tests at home and takes one whenever she feels sick. “Don’t worry,” she tells colleagues. “I just took a test.”
Doctors said seasonal allergies started early this year because the mild winter made trees release pollen ahead of schedule. Pollen levels vary across the country but typically peak from April to June. A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021 found that the North American pollen season starts earlier and lasts longer than it did in 1990, with higher concentrations of pollen.
Pilar Williams, a 42-year-old insurance contractor in Chicago, said her allergy symptoms often flare up on her morning walk to the train. She gets a runny nose and itchy eyes, but there is one thing that helps, she said: She has eyelash extensions and skips the mascara.
Once she gets to work, she has to deal with everyone else’s allergies. “Especially because of the whole Covid situation, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, cover your mouth,’ ” Williams said. If she hears someone coughing near the office printer, she added, she will wipe it down.
“I think I’ve always been a little bit extra when it comes to people coughing and sneezing in the office,” she said, “but after Covid, it puts you on edge. Like, who wants to be sick?”
Scolding regular people for contributing to climate change is out of fashion. But scolding people for making new people is, apparently, totally fine. Many climate activists say the worst thing an individual can do, from an emissions perspective, is have kids. The climate-advocacy group Project Drawdown lists “family planning and education,” which are intended to lower fertility rates, as leading solutions to global warming. Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian and celebrated climate researcher, published an op-ed in Scientific American this month titled “Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement.”
In recent years, many climate advocates have emphasized human population itself—as opposed to related factors such as consumption and technology—as the driving force behind environmental destruction. This is, at bottom, a very old idea that can be traced back to the 18th-century cleric Thomas Malthus. It is also analytically unsound and morally objectionable. Critics of overpopulation down through the ages have had a nasty habit of treating people less as individuals with value and agency than as sentient locusts.
Malthus argued against aid to poor Britons on the grounds that they consumed too many of the nation’s resources. In making his case, he semi-accurately described a particular kind of poverty that we still refer to as the “Malthusian trap” today. Agricultural productivity in poor societies is not high enough to support the population without significant labor input, so most people work on small subsistence farms to feed themselves and their families. The inescapably linear growth in the food supply could never outstrip the exponential growth in human populations, he argued.
In their recent piece in The Atlantic (“The Malthusians are Back”), Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramanchandran of The Breakthrough Institute deeply misrepresent the views of current-day climate scientists–including the two of us by name–in a character attack that labels us as “neo-Malthusians”.
In the late 18th century, Thomas Malthus was part of a large and consequential debate about a changing system of political economy. Britain’s emerging capitalist system was driving manufacturing and other innovations that generated substantive wealth, but also left a significant portion of the population desperately poor. Adam Smith had already noticed this in The Wealth of Nations. Factory owners he noted, were “always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour,” and sometimes even entered into “particular combinations to sink the wages of labour.” In theory, workers should reject starvation wages, but in practice they often had no alternative. Wages were sometimes so low that workers’ children did starve; the situation was so bad—and so common—that laborers routinely tried to rear “at least four” children in order that two would survive.
In response, a system had developed known as the “poor laws”—an early form of what we call welfare. But Malthus opposed the system of poor laws because he thought it removed the logical consequences of having children and thus contributed to unsustainable population growth. Put baldly, effect, he believed that the poor should be left to starve.
We hear from anti-clean energy activists that they are concerned about their “view shed”. I’m a little worried about climate change’s impact on my view shed. Who do I complain to?
Periodic update on the continuing troubles of climate denier/ misogynist and (alleged) human trafficker Andrew Tate, following his dustup, above, with Greta Thunberg. (which has had 314 million views, 3.8 million likes, 557 K retweets as of today)
Ok, it’s petty. Not proud of it, but it’s a tiny ray of sunshine I can squeeze out of this dismal gig.
Sounds like Romania is tired of their reputation as a haven for human traffickers, and hopes to use Mr Tate to demonstrate that it ain’t so.
Andrew Tate, a pugilistic online influencer and self-crowned “king of toxic masculinity,” never made any secret of why he had chosen Romania as his home and business base.
“I like living in a society where my money, my influence and my power mean that I’m not below or beholden” to any laws, Mr. Tate told his fans.
But, like much of what the former kickboxer has told his millions of mostly young male followers on social media — including claims that he is a trillionaire and has 19 passports — Mr. Tate’s proclamation of faith in Romania as a risk-free haven for antisocial behavior reflected more fantasy than reality.
The Romanian authorities arrested Mr. Tate, a citizen of both the United States and Britain, and his younger brother, Tristan, in December on charges of human trafficking, rape and forming an organized criminal group. Held for three months in a jail in Bucharest, the capital, both men, who deny any wrongdoing, are now under house arrest, awaiting trial.
Their home is a sprawling compound down a dingy dead-end street in Voluntari, a town next to Bucharest that is dotted with shiny new office towers and derelict empty lots. It looks more like an industrial warehouse than the lair of a man who boasted of immense wealth and posted videos of himself hanging out in private jets with beautiful women and driving fast cars.
The high-end cars that once crowded the courtyard, including a Rolls-Royce, a Porsche, an Aston Martin and a BMW, are all gone, confiscated by the Romanian authorities. The only vehicle left is a clunky Russian Lada. It was not worth impounding.
Romania still ranks far below most fellow members of the European Union in clean-government rankings. In last year’s Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International, only Bulgaria and Hungary were lower. And Romania, according to the State Department’s 2022 report on human trafficking, remains “a primary source country for sex trafficking” in Europe.
But Romania has in recent years made a serious effort to tackle the endemic graft and general lawlessness that long blighted the country — and that apparently attracted Mr. Tate. Before his arrest, he said he liked “living in countries where corruption is accessible to everybody,” and where anybody can pay a $50 bribe to get out of a speeding ticket.
