Revealed: Most Popular Climate Story on Social Media Told Half a Million People the Science Was a Hoax (excerpts): DeSmog

 "The most popular climate change story across social media in the past six months used a debunked survey from the late 1990s to claim that “tens of thousands of scientists” had declared global warming a “hoax”, a DeSmog analysis has found.

 

Fake News example

Published on YourNewsWire, the story was shared, clicked or “liked” 557,000 times on social media, with 555,000 of those engagements from Facebook. The story's author worked for many years with UK conspiracy theorist David Icke.

DeSmog used the social media analytics tool BuzzSumo to find the most popular climate stories globally over the last six months, using the search term “climate change”.

The YourNewsWire story appears on a site mixed with stories about aliens, conspiracy theories, and anti-Clinton rhetoric together with some serious news. The story was shared on Facebook three times as much as the second most popular article, published by the LA Times.

The LA Times article, from November, reported the comments of California Governor Jerry Brown, who warned President-elect Donald Trump his state would not walk away from its climate change commitments."

Pic from a Change.org petition about Fake News

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"Debunked Oregon Petition

The YourNewsWire story ran under the headline: “Tens of Thousands Of Scientists Declare Climate Change A Hoax” and is a mish-mash of old debunked talking points together with content from other websites also claiming climate change is a hoax.

The intro to the story reads: “A staggering 30,000 scientists have come forward confirming that man-made climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the elite in order to make money.”

The story only briefly references the source for the “30,000 scientists” claim which is, in fact, a survey released 18 years ago known as the Oregon Petition.

An analysis of the petition has found only 39 of the 31,000 signatories actually had a relevant climate science qualification.

Much of the content of the YourNewsWire story was cut and pasted from an article published three days earlier on the website Natural News.

That story, shared more than 80,000 times, ran with the headline: “Over 30,000 scientists say 'Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming' is a complete hoax and science lie.”

 Go to the complete DeSmog article

Related: European Thinktanks Repeating ‘Well-worn’ US Climate Denial Tropes (excerpt): DeSmog

 

 #fakenews,fake news,climate change deniers,Facebook page,climatescience,#fossilfuelcompanies,climate change disinformation,

 

As QAnon Conspiracy Spreads on the Far Right, Climate Science Deniers Jump Aboard (excerpt): DeSmog

QAnon signs at a Trump rally

(Photos added by this blog)

"Back in December 2019, two conspiratorial worldviews collided as, for the first time, QAnon’s Q suggested his followers should question anew a topic that, by now, has been considered, and reconsidered, for decades: climate change.

QAnon sign at a Trump rally in Manchester, New Hampshire on August 15, 2019. Credit: Marc Nozell, CC BY 2.0

“The Paris Agreement on Climate is Another Scam to Ripoff Taxpayers and Enrich the Politicians,” the Q-Drop (the term QAnon followers use to refer to messages they believe come from some sort of government insider who signs messages with the letter Q) claimed, labeling climate action a “con.”

Wikipedia says

In May, a second Q-Drop riffed on climate change, with a link to a snarky tweet about science and the Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg by a would-be House Republican who’d lost her primary race in March.

Both of those Q-Drops were picked up by a report commissioned by a coalition of environmental groups and conducted by the research firm Graphika, which found that a group of vocal climate science deniers began using QAnon hashtags in May — and they haven’t stopped since.

“The QAnon movement hasn’t traditionally covered climate change, but in May, when an influential QAnon account tweeted about climate denial, there was a notable and sustained increase of QAnon content shared within the climate denial group,” Michael Khoo, an advisor on disinformation for the environmental group Friends of the Earth, and Melissa Ryan, CEO of CARD Strategies and author of the Ctrl Alt-Right Delete weekly newsletters, wrote in an article published today on Medium."

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Trump says QAnon conspiracy theorists are people who 'love our country' - National | G

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"Clutching at Q’s Coattails


Not only is QAnon taking up climate denial, but prominent climate deniers have been taking up QAnon.

“The other thing we see is that the right needs QAnon more and more to amplify their messaging,” said Ryan.

Take, for example, Naomi Seibt, a young German YouTuber who has questioned climate science and who has worked with the Heartland Institute, a U.S. think tank and notorious promoter of climate science denial.

“So do you want a beautiful planet that you can stare at but that’s it? It’s just like looking at a TV screen,” the Express, a UK newspaper, quoted Seibt as saying in May. “As a climate realist, I don’t deny that we don’t have some negative impact on the planet. But I don’t think that it’s related to CO2 emissions.”

Seibt briefly rose to broader prominence following a Washington Post article about her in February — though she remains far less well-known than Greta Thunberg, the young environmental activist who the Heartland Institute has sought to compare with Seibt. “She reportedly chose not to renew her contract with [the] Heartland [Institute] in April 2020 after facing potential fines from a regional broadcasting authority,” DeSmog’s profile on Seibt notes.

QAnon

In addition to speaking about climate, Seibt has publicly spoken about her views on race and religion. “Seibt’s rise as the young face of climate skeptics has drawn scrutiny of her past remarks. 

On Friday, video circulated of Seibt’s remarks after a shooting at a German synagogue,” Bloomberg reported on February 28. “'The normal German consumer is at the bottom, so to speak. Then the Muslims come somewhere in between. And the Jew is at the top. That is the suppression characteristic,' she said in comments first reported by The Guardian.”

In July, the trial of that synagogue shooter, charged with murdering two people and the attempted murder of dozens more, began with the accused shooter stating that he felt he was “on the bottom rung of society” and that he was “superseded,” as he sought to justify horrific crimes.

As in Germany, white supremacists in the U.S. have increasingly engaged in racially motivated “mass shooter” armed attacks on unarmed people. And QAnon followers have also begun committing violent acts. 

“I think it's also important to remember that the FBI has declared QAnon a domestic terrorism threat,” said Ryan, “and QAnon has inspired kidnappings, it has inspired at least one murder, it has inspired arson, there is a real danger from these folks who are drawn to this and become just embroiled in it.”

Go to the complete DeSmog article 

Related: Coronavirus doubters follow climate denial playbook: Yale Climate Connections


QAnon, Trump, conspiracy theorists, #fakenews, fake news, climate deniers, Paris Agreement, terrorism, #jailclimatecriminals,  

Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks: DESMOG

On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019, which causes the disease COVID-19, was officially a “public health emergency of international concern.” At the time, there were cases confirmed in 19 countries and deaths in China had reached 170.

The very next day, the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) published an article titled, “Coronavirus in the U.S.: How Bad Will It Be?”

“Is coronavirus worse than the flu?” it began. “No, not even close.”
“It already has spread from person-to-person in the U.S., but it probably won't go far,” ACSH added. “And the American healthcare system is excellent at dealing with this sort of problem.”

ACSH is one of several organizations promoting climate science denial that are now spreading misinformation on the coronavirus, with potentially deadly consequences.

American Council on Science and Health?

The ACSH presents itself to the public as a proponent of “peer-reviewed mainstream science,” in the words of the organization’s mission. Their experts have frequently been quoted in mainstream newspapers and magazines, and they pen columns criticizing journalists who write critically about companies like Monsanto. The group has received funding from oil giants including ExxonMobil, as well as from the agribusiness, chemical and tobacco industries to name a few.

Read the complete DESMOG article

Scientists: Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans: The New Yorker

See the article

How the Climate Kids Are Short-Circuiting Right-Wing Media: NYT

Young people like Greta Thunberg are participating in the culture wars while also managing to float above the fray.

The kids aren’t just all right — they’re scrambling the brains of their political enemies.

Last Friday, millions of people, many of them children and teenagers, took to the streets during the Global Climate Strike, a protest inspired by Fridays for Future, the international youth effort started by the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The protesters’ call for broad action to combat global warming was powerful, as was the message sent by their numbers: Dynamic, frustrated young people are instilling in the climate movement a new urgency. 

Online, the climate kids’ impact can be measured in a different way — by how they’re short-circuiting the right-wing media ecosystem that’s partly responsible for the spread of climate skepticism. Since Friday’s strike, pro-Trump media and conservative cable news pundits have devoted significant resources to turning the children of the climate movement into Public Enemy No. 1.

Read the NYT article 

Related:

Sanders Vows, If Elected, to Pursue Criminal Charges Against Fossil Fuel CEOs for Knowingly 'Destroying the Planet': Common Deams

 

#jailclimatecriminals  #globalwarming  #climate catastrophe  #suethefossilfools

Solar industry fights back against surge of climate trolls on social media: RenewEconomy

 "Watch out for the trolls. Nearly everyone you talk to in the renewable energy and climate space have noticed a marked increase in trolls in recent months, apparently buoyed by the success of the Coalition government and its re-election campaign based around lies and misinformation, particularly on renewables and electric vehicles."

Read the article