Decades ago we predicted that we would be seeing these
unprecedented heatwaves
and wildfires and floods and superstorms.
Professor Michael Mann has been one of the leading scientists
in his field for several decades.
But it wasn’t until relatively recently
that he came uncomfortably close to his subject.
I would say that it was my sabbatical in Australia
during the so-called Black Summer of
late to 2019, early 2020,
where I first came face to face with climate change.
This is an emergency on dozens of fronts.
The heat is unbearable.
Unprecedented heat and drought led to
bushfires that blanketed the Australian continent.
It was like a scene out of a dystopian Hollywood film,
like being in Mad Max.
It was dangerous to go outside on many days.
That had a profound impact on me because again
it’s one thing to study the impacts of climate change.
It’s something else entirely to live those impacts.
While firefighters battled the flames,
another struggle was underway -
one which Professor Mann also found himself caught up in.
I spent most of my time trying to provide some context
for Australians to appreciate that what was happening here
was a direct consequence of human-caused climate change.
It's a challenge
to communicate the science, its implications to the public in the
face of all the misinformation that was being put out
claiming that this was all arson,
it had nothing to do with climate change.
Unless climate change is changing juvenile behaviour,
It is hard to overlook crucial facts
such as how the fires actually started.
And so it was interesting to be on the frontlines,
both of the, you know, devastating impacts
of climate change that we're playing out in real time
and the frontlines of the climate disinformation campaign.
For those of us who have been studying the topic,
studying the science of climate change for decades now,
what we're seeing is the worst thing that you can possibly see if you're
a climate scientist, we're seeing our predictions come true.
I’m Marianna Spring and this is BBC Trending.
And in this special series we’re going to be looking at
how denial and disinformation
are hindering the fight to prevent catastrophic
climate change around the world.
…this global warming hoax. I’ve said many times,
we’ve been here before,
scientific hoaxes…
The overwhelming majority of scientists agree that
we are now at a turning point
where only urgent and dramatic action can cut carbon emissions.
In this first episode of The Denial Files,
I’m speaking to Michael Mann,
one of the most eminent climate scientists in the world.
He’s also spent many years observing the methods of those
opposed to climate action -
fossil fuel interests - the oil, gas and coal companies
and their allies - “the forces of inaction” as Mann calls them.
We’ll be talking about how their tactics have shifted
as the evidence of climate change has mounted up.
And we’ll be exploring the new playbook of climate change denial.
Professor Mann has himself been a target of climate change deniers
for almost a quarter of a century.
The initial spark for these attacks came in 1998,
when he led a study which tracked changes in
average global temperatures over the previous 1,000 years.
What you see is very small temperature changes
until you get to the Industrial Revolution
and then the temperatures shoot up and they
shoot up in a way that is correlated closely
with the increase in carbon pollution from
fossil fuel burning and other human activities.
The graph which showed this phenomenon was nicknamed
the Hockey Stick because that’s what it looked like.
It was a landmark moment in climate science,
and the graph sent a clear message -
global temperatures were rising,
and human activity was to blame.
When it was published, Mann found himself caught in the firing line
of those who denied the existence of man-made climate change.
I was not prepared for this sort of
crescendo of attacks that I was subject to.
There were allusions to sort of my ethnic background,
the fact that I’m Jewish,
part of a Jewish cabal and Jewish conspiracy and
this was a common argument among websites promoting
these sort of climate conspiracy theories.
And it really was intended to spur violence.
At one point I received an envelope with white powder in it.
And so I readily open this frankly dubious-looking envelope
now that I think about it and sort of
I could see that there was a white substance that was
wafting into the air.
And I realised at that point that I had
potentially been subject to what could be a deadly substance.
Eventually, my room had police tape over it.
So it looked like a crime scene.
We had to make sure the FBI came in.
Thankfully the powder was harmless.
In the years since then
the truth of the Hockey Stick graph
has been proved time and time again.
The devastating impacts of wildfires and floods
have become increasingly present.
More people around the world are waking up to
the threat of climate change.
While there’s been a decline in outright denial of climate change,
Professor Mann says the denialists have not gone away.
Instead, he says, his opponents have adopted new tactics -
softer, more insidious forms of denial.
So the fact that, you know, the person on the street
can tell that something's happening,
can see that climate change is real,
it makes it very difficult for the forces of inaction -
fossil fuel interests,
those who advocate for them,
right wing media outlets,
it's very difficult for them to deny that climate change is happening.
So instead, they've turned to other tactics
in their effort to prevent us from moving on.
In the end, all they care about is that we remain
addicted to fossil fuels.
And whilst the methods may be different,
the potential consequences remain catastrophic.
What’s important for us now is to recognise those tactics,
because if we can recognise them we can push them aside.
So let’s run through the playbook of these softer forms of denial.
It’s made up of a lot of words that begin with the letter D.
Delay tactics -
climate change is real, but it's not that much of a problem.
We can just cope with it, we can adapt to it.
This is not a time for pessimism.
This is a time for optimism.
Fear and doubt is not a good thought process
because this is a time for tremendous hope
and joy and optimism and action.
But to embrace the possibilities of tomorrow
we must reject the perennial prophets of doom
and their predictions of the apocalypse.
Division - getting climate advocates fighting with each other,
arguing with each other about lifestyle choices,
finger pointing carbon shaming efforts to divide climate advocates
so that they don't speak with one voice.
Deflection - deflecting attention away from the needed policies
towards individual behaviour as if it's just on us.
It's just a matter of you and me, using, you know,
recyclable bottles, and changing our diet and
changing our travel plans.
They would happily have us so focused on our own
individual carbon footprint,
that we fail to notice the overwhelming
carbon footprint here, the footprint of carbon polluters.
Some people might argue that,
while it's not overall as effective, it's
still good if people are proactively engaged in
doing stuff in their own lives that might
make a difference to reducing climate change.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
What we can't do is allow polluters to convince us
that that is all that needs to be done
because the most powerful individual action we can take
is voting and holding our policymakers accountable,
you and I, we can't put a price on carbon,
we can't block new fossil fuel infrastructure.
Only our policymakers, our elected representatives, can do those things.
And there’s one more D on the list.
One that’s perhaps the polar opposite of denial.
It's done. It's over. It's too late.
So doomism, or doom mongering, despair mongering
is basically the effort to convince us that it's too late to do anything.
For doomists like this TikTokker
all that humanity can do is sit back
and wait for the end of the world.
There is no stopping climate change,
and we will witness climate change as an escalating series
of catastrophic climate catastrophes
filmed on someone else's phone and posted to social media.
And what's so pernicious about this tactic
is that it takes those individuals who would otherwise be
most active, most on the frontlines demanding change,
environmental progressives, it takes them
and it leads them down the path of disengagement.
So why is understanding this new disinformation landscape important?
What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!
What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it?…
One reason is that in November,
world leaders will come together to discuss how we
cut carbon emissions.
The event, known as COP26,
is regarded by many as our last best chance
to avoid the devastating effects of runaway climate change.
The stakes couldn’t be higher.
The only thing standing in our way right now is political willpower.
We have the technology to decarbonise our economy.
We're seeing major policy progress now
with the United States, once again, in a leadership position on
this issue with China coming to the table
with Europe, the EU, UK, other countries
putting forward bold pledges going into
this next international climate summit.
All of these favorable factors are starting to align.
And the only thing now that's holding us back
are these new climate war tactics.
What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!
In my job as the BBC’s specialist disinformation reporter,
I’ve spent the last 18 months covering conspiracy theories
about Covid, elections, vaccines.
And one thing that I’ve noticed is the increasing number of
the same people who also seem to believe that
climate change isn’t an issue, or that it’s a hoax.
Social media is where most people are likely to encounter
these and other types of disinformation.
Social media has also been weaponised to abuse climate activists.
Attack the messenger and you don’t have to engage
with their message.
I often get comments underneath telling me that I'm too young to
have an opinion or
sometimes racially-based comments as well.
That's Theresa Rose Sebastian - a 17-year-old climate activist
who was born in India and now lives in Ireland.
I've had messages sort of sent to me,
telling me that nobody cares, or that I should just, you know, shut up.
Another criticism I get a lot is actually the fact that I'm
apparently too loud, which I don't quite understand.
Because in my state, the gravity of the situation is so serious,
I can't do anything but be loud, I have to keep raising this up because
places like my home in India,
it's not a 20 years potential issue.
It's a today issue. It's a yesterday issue.
Some of the experiences I've had in person,
they've at times made me feel a bit scared
to raise my voice and I feel a bit
honestly scared to say something but it
for me, it comes back to the fact that I love what I do.
And I do it because I love who I'm fighting for, what I'm fighting for.
Despite the racial slurs and the insults,
Theresa feels like she’s had an easier time than some.
I have experiences with friends who've gotten death threats,
rape threats for their activism.
And it's often just absolutely horrible.
The sort of stuff a lot of my friends have received,
just because they believe in the right to a just and sustainable future.
You can break a person apart
through the internet, through these online abuses,
and not get, you know, arrested or not get into trouble for it.
Nowadays, there are several prominent young climate activists,
often young women who find themselves subject to
misogynistic, racist, ableist hate online,
possibly from the same people who sought to attack you.
How much does that worry you that that's happening?
It worries me a lot.
This is an effort to make sure that they don't participate
in the discussion and what's so unfortunate
is that if you look at sort of the personality profile
of a typical climate change denier in the United States,
it's going to be an old, conservative, white male.
Do climate disinformation tactics fall neatly on the right or left
or are there a variety of different actors?
In terms of the perpetrators, typically,
it's those with a pro-fossil fuel agenda.
Russia, for example, under Vladimir Putin
sees itself as benefitting, first of all,
their main asset at this point are the fossil fuels that are still buried
beneath their ground, and they want to monetise that asset.
And they think that somehow they might even benefit in a warmer planet.
And so that has led, for example, Russia as a state actor,
to engage in efforts to prevent other countries from moving on,
and they've used social media, in particular,
to try to, you know, advance that agenda.
However, in recent months President Putin has also spoken
of the need to tackle climate change
and has moved to accepting that human activity is part of the problem.
Professor Mann says he believes there are many reasons to
be optimistic ahead of COP26.
But the coming years will be crucial,
and progress depends on keeping up the pressure.
So what could make the difference?
Our secret weapon in this war
is the moral authority of our children
who are out on the streets, marching, protesting,
demanding that we act so that we do not mortgage the planet for them,
for our children, and grandchildren.
And that's been a game changer.
My message is that we’ll be watching you…
[CLAPPING]
The eyes of all future generations are upon you,
and if you choose to fail us I say, “We will never forgive you”.
It's recentred the conversation where it always should have been,
not simply on science, or economics, or policy, or politics,
but on our ethical obligation
not to mortgage this planet for future generations.
And I'm optimistic that now
that we've recentred the battle, in those terms,
that we will win this battle.
That’s it for this time.
My thanks to producer Kayleen Devlin,
series producer Vibeke Venema
and our editor Ed Main.
Thanks for listening.
If you want to get in touch with your thoughts on this
or any of our other programmes
you can email me: marianna.spring@bbc.co.uk