For quite a few years I’ve been devoting most of my energy to climate solutions, having concluded that the battle with climate denial was, for the most part, won, except among the terminally conspiratorial and misinformed.
Now, we find ourselves in a brand new era of climate denial even as the signs of climate disaster have never been more clear.
Biggest contributor is a social media environment where dangerous misinformation is not only not checked, but monetized.
When nearly 200 nations signed the 2015 Paris Agreement, acknowledging the threat of rising global temperatures and vowing action, many hoped that the era of climate denial was finally over.
Ten years later it has roared back, arguably stronger than ever.
As delegates wrapped the annual United Nations climate talks last Saturday, those who have campaigned to reduce the use of fossil fuels expressed growing alarm that forces arrayed against them are gaining ground in the information war.
The oil, gas and coal industries continue to downplay the scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is dangerously heating the planet. It’s a strategy that has been echoed by oil-rich countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and — under the Trump administration — the United States.
President Trump mocks global warming as a hoax, cheered on by a chorus of influencers online who regularly promote disinformation on social media platforms that once tried to curtail it. While such views have long been dismissed as conspiracy theories, their influence on the global policy debates has clearly grown.
The final statement of the U.N. talks, which were held in Belém, Brazil, did not even use the words “fossil fuels.”
“We thought that good ideas would get people to act,” J. Timmons Roberts, a researcher at Brown University and executive director of its Climate Social Science Network, lamented in a briefing on the eve of the talks.
“In fact there’s been a quite systematic campaign that’s been sophisticated and extremely well funded,” he said. “They have succeeded at undermining climate action globally.”
This year’s climate summit took place against a backdrop of increased drilling and mining — in Brazil, the host government recently granted a license to the state oil company to explore new sources of oil near the mouth of the Amazon River.
Even so, Brazil’s leader, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, opened the talks by denouncing obstructionists who “reject scientific evidence and attack institutions.”
“They manipulate algorithms, sow hatred and spread fear,” he said, describing a surge in disinformation and propaganda aimed at blocking action to slow climate change.
The problem has become so acute that the summit, for the first time, put the issue on the agenda. A coalition of countries and international agencies issued a separate “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change,” calling on governments to address climate disinformation, promote transparency and protect journalists, scientists and environmentalists.
The initiative is light, however, on details about how governments should go about it. By Friday, only 21 of the nearly 200 countries that signed the Paris Agreement had also signed the disinformation declaration.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who was in Belém and has attended several climate summits, said the global embrace of the Paris Agreement by most governments and major corporations for a time obscured the still-fierce opposition to ending fossil fuels.
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For critics of the environmental movement, the shifting sentiment on display in Brazil was a victory after years of pressure on energy industries.
“There’s a lot of reality that has hit,” said Steven J. Milloy, the founder of JunkScience.com, a website that has disputed the scientific consensus on climate change. “People are realizing now that we need fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are here to stay.”
Polls consistently show that a majority of adults globally and in the United States consider climate change to be a serious threat.
At the same time, a growing body of research is warning that climate misinformation — from misleading claims from Mr. Trump that wind turbines “kill all the birds” to viral hashtags proclaiming clean energy is a scam — is steadily growing, amplified by social media.
The strategy is not subtle, a recent study found. Climate skeptics present their position as “projecting rationality, authority, and masculine self-control” while those who acknowledge global warming “are depicted through emotionally charged, feminized, and irrational imagery,” and labeled “alarmists” who propose radical solutions.
Political campaigns deploy the same playbook. Republicans frequently claimed the Biden administration was trying to “emasculate” American drivers by forcing them into electric vehicles. Lee Zeldin, Mr. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has labeled climate change a “religion” instead of what it is: a matter of physics.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said that Mr. Trump was pursuing “energy addition, not energy transition.”
“The President has set a strong example for the rest of the world by reversing course on the Green Energy Scam and unleashing our natural resources, like beautiful, clean coal and natural gas, to strengthen our grid stability and lower energy costs,” she said, citing arguments that many economists dispute.
Still, Mr. Trump’s policies threaten more than 500 solar and energy storage projects in the U.S. that were set to provide 116 gigawatts of capacity. His administration also terminated a $4.9 billion loan guarantee for an 800-mile transmission line that would have carried mostly wind power from the Great Plains to some of the most strained parts of the nation’s power grid.
Social media platforms, podcasts and other forms of media regularly amplify climate misinformation.
A recent example: When delegates were evacuated after a fire broke out at a pavilion during COP30, a blog that promotes climate denial suggested — with no evidence — that a battery “touted as clean tech” was the cause. The item was shared dozens of times including by prominent opponents of climate science, though Brazil’s tourism minister said the fire was believed to have been caused by a short circuit in electrical wiring.
While critics have called on social media platforms to do more, they have instead retreated from efforts to fight climate disinformation. “It’s easier now for climate skeptics to get their message out,” said Mr. Milloy, who previously served as an adviser on Mr. Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency.
On the eve of Trump’s inauguration in January, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, announced fewer restrictions on political topics, ending a fact-checking program in the United States that routinely called out those who disputed climate science.
YouTube prohibits promoters of climate disinformation from monetizing their accounts or buying ads, but a number of studieshave argued that it does not enforce its rules vigorously.
“A lot of people are making a lot of money off this clickbait stuff,” said Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director for climate and energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which advised on the information integrity declaration. “This is not just some neutral space where information is flowing.”
Mr. Whitehouse said profits will always be the bottom line for the fossil fuel industry and others opposed to meaningful efforts to fight climate change.
“At one level we’ve been losing the climate disinformation war all along,” Mr. Whitehouse said. “We are where we are because we were completely ineffectual in fending off a decades-long disinformation bombardment.”
Center for Countering Digital Hate:
MISLEADING CLAIMS ABOUT EXTREME WEATHER ARE PART OF A
NEW DENIAL THAT RISKS LIVES:
▶ CCDH has measured a shift away from an Old Denial of warming and its causes, towards a New Denial centered on climate impacts, solutions and advocates.5
▶ Misleading claims about extreme weather are part of the New Denial of climate
impacts, preventing informed debate and risking lives during crisis events.
CCDH RESEARCHERS ANALYZED MISLEADING EXTREME WEATHER
POSTS WITH 221 MILLION VIEWS:
▶ Researchers identified 300 of the most-liked misleading posts about extreme
weather made between April 1, 2023 and April 1, 2025, including 100 posts from
Meta’s platforms, Facebook and Instagram, 100 from YouTube and 100 from X.
▶ Over three-quarters of these posts concerned wildfires and hurricanes, with the LA wildfires and Hurricane Helene ranking as the most discussed events.
▶ False and misleading claims targeted the actions of emergency responders, the causes of extreme weather events, and the distribution of disaster relief aid.
PLATFORMS ARE FAILING TO CORRECT MISLEADING POSTS ABOUT
EXTREME WEATHER:
▶ Every platform studied is failing to debunk false or misleading posts about extreme
weather using fact-checks or user-generated Community Notes:
▷ Meta lacked fact-checks or Community Notes on 98% of posts
▷ X lacked fact-checks or Community Notes on 99% of posts
▷ YouTube lacked fact-checks or Community Notes on 100% of posts
1 IN 3 YOUTUBE VIDEOS DISPLAYED A RECOMMENDATION FOR MORE
MISLEADING CONTENT:
▶ Nearly 1 in 3 YouTube videos promoting misleading extreme weather claims featured a recommendation for further climate denial content next to it.
6 Extreme Weather
PLATFORMS ARE GIVING ‘VERIFIED’ STATUS AND BENEFITS TO
USERS PUSHING MISLEADING CLAIMS:
▶ On X, 88% of misleading extreme weather posts were from verified accounts.
▶ On YouTube, 73% of posts were from verified accounts.
▶ On Meta (Facebook and Instagram), 64% of posts were from verified accounts.
PLATFORMS AND POSTERS ARE PROFITING FROM MISLEADING
POSTS ABOUT EXTREME WEATHER:
▶ YouTube displayed ads adjacent to 29% of misleading extreme weather videos.
▶ X enables paid subscriptions for five content creators pushing misleading extreme weather claims, enabling the creators and the platform to profit.
▶ Meta is sharing ad revenue with three content creators pushing misleading claims, enabling them to share in Meta’s revenue from ads near their posts.
‘SUPERSPREADER’ ALEX JONES DROWNED OUT CREDIBLE
INFORMATION ON LA WILDFIRES:
▶ Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ misleading posts about the LA wildfires amassed 408 million views on X.
▶ Jones claimed that emergency responders were confiscating food, and that the fires were part of a globalist plot or engineered to trigger a wealth transfer.
▶ Jones got more views than all relevant posts from ten leading news outlets and ten key emergency organizations combined, including the LA Times and FEMA.
MISLEADING CLAIMS ABOUT EXTREME WEATHER CAUSE REAL-
WORLD HARM
▶ When inaccurate information spreads in an acute weather crisis, it can put lives at risk, misleading people about the danger they are in.7
▶ It can also endanger first responders, disrupt life-saving decisions, and mislead people about the aid that they need.8
I’d like to know how many of these posts and videos are by “MAGAbabe” or “JoeRoganFan” (accounts created in various petrostates).