Debunk climate science mis- and dis- information
“IT’S a good day for us, it’s a good day for [climate] science,” exclaimed an eminent climate scientist after a jury awarded him a million dollars in a defamation suit against two writers. The news flooded major US media outlets at the start of February.
Michael Mann, one of the world’s renowned climate scientists, won a defamation case against two writers: a policy analyst and then a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and a right-wing author at the National Review for online posts published 12 years ago.
The fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, had written an online post: “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.” Sandusky was a former assistant football coach who was convicted of molesting children. Then, the right-wing author called Mann’s research “the fraudulent climate change ‘hockey stick’ graph.”
The defamation case stemmed from the research of Mann and his two colleagues on what was called the “hockey stick graph” which The Atlantic called “the most controversial chart in science.”
Mann, together with Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, published in 1998 a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet’s past temperatures. According to The Atlantic, “The graph depicting this result looked rather like a hockey stick — after a long period of relatively minor temperature variations (the ‘shaft’), it showed a sharp upswing during the last century or so (‘the blade’).”
In 2001, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prominently featured the hockey stick in its Third Assessment Report.
Mann is a presidential-distinguished professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. He is also the leading influential voice on climate change with an engaged audience of 2 million people and one of the foremost defenders of climate science.
He has authored several books including “Our Fragile Moment” and “The New Climate War.” I came across his name in 2016 when I watched “Before the Blood,” a 96-minute documentary film co-produced by American artist-turned-climate activist Leonardo DiCaprio. The film narrated the effects of climate change globally and discussed climate change denial.
The Mann interview
Ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 2021, I had the privilege to have a virtual interview with Mann on “why we need to act on climate change now.” Full interview is on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/episode/1H6UykpagqgOW8dPE4FPX0.
These interviews were published in two parts in my column on October 16 and Oct. 23, 2021, respectively.
Misinformation is the sharing of inaccurate and misleading information in an unintentional way while disinformation is the deliberate dissemination of false or inaccurate information in order to discredit a person or organization.
According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), both are persistent false information, widely spread through media networks, shifting public opinion in a significant way toward a distrust in facts and authority. WEF’s Global Risks Report 2024 ranked misinformation and disinformation as the second most likely factors to present a material crisis on a global scale this year. They can trigger civil unrest and be a risk of repression and erosion of human rights.
Climate change is still not accepted as true in the United States. A new University of Michigan study, “The social anatomy of climate change denial in the United States,” reveals that 15 percent of Americans deny that climate change is real. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication in the Philippines reported that a minuscule 3 percent do not believe that climate change is happening.
Climate scientists have been facing waves of attacks, more often from anonymous accounts questioning either the reality of global warming, or the role of human activities in climate change. Following the change of ownership of X (Twitter), they received threats and suffered insults. This explosion of hate and misinformation made climate science communications harder.
Malaysia’s “The Star” newspaper called these organized opponents of climate reforms “trolls” or “bots,” while the Parisbased “Le Monde” said that they are “act like an underground army.”
The science of climate change is sound and overwhelming, showing that humaninduced, climate-related disasters are growing in frequency and intensifying sooner than originally forecasted. We must not rest on the fact that 87 percent of our fellow Filipinos believe that climate change is happening. We must continue to fact-check information and debunk any false statement or data.
The author is the executive director of the Young Environmental Forum and a nonresident fellow of Stratbase ADR Institute. He completed his climate change and development course at the University of East Anglia (UK) and an executive program on sustainability leadership at Yale University (USA). Email ludwig.federigan@ gmail.com.