The shifting sands of climate denial

Outright climate denial is on its last legs, but it is swiftly being replaced by prevarication and whataboutism. Was that a pyrrhic victory?

For the past few weeks, European news outlets has been filled with coverage of the impact of a heat wave. There have been wild fires, flash floods, property destruction, evacuations, mass hospitalizations. The European Travel Commission is warning that European summer tourism could be facing long-term decline, with 10% fewer visitors to the Mediterranean last year already. Considering that tourism makes up 15-20% of GDP in Southern Europe and the sector has only just recovered from a prolonged downturn due to COVID, this will have deep impacts on people's lives and well-being far beyond the season.

That is a lot to be concerned about - and, as the Simpsons meme reminds us, the record breaking heat of 2023 is likely to exceeded in 2024, and in 2025 and so on - but there is something to celebrate. Scientists have been linking extreme weather to climate change since the early 2000s, but this has taken a lot longer to filter through to news coverage. Just a few years ago, such extreme weather events wouldn't have been so clearly tied to broader climate concerns, but this is a newsroom blind spot that appears to be shifting*.

The visceral impacts of climate change are being put front and centre into the mainstream news coverage, unignorably so.

New research published in Nature finds that there is a broad decline in climate denial narratives across a broad swath of TV shows in five different countries. They looked at 30 programs, 19 'mainstream' and 11 'right-wing' in Australia, Brazil, Sweden, the UK, and the USA and saw a marked decline in the presence of straightforward climate skepticism in the coverage compared to similar studies done in 2013 and 2014, "even in countries that have historically had strong traditions of science denial".

There has previously been similar findings from research on editorials and newspaper coverage of extreme weather events, but this new study is particularly notable as TV shows are still most broadly accessed and influential source of information for climate news for general audiences**. Because of this broad audience, and because the format gives reporters one or two minutes to tell a complete story, TV typically isn't where nuance tends to thrive within the news ecosystem. That outright climate denial has disappeared from TV suggests there has been a definitive shift in the discourse.

Because of that, you might be forgiven for thinking the long battle with climate denial is over. But this and several other recent studies indicate denial hasn't quite disappeared, it has simply morphed into a new set of arguments. See the breakdown from that Nature paper below:

"Types of response skepticism in mainstream and right wing channels"

Climate denial has gone through several waves. The original tactic was the simple denial of the existence of climate change; that was the go-to well into the 1980s. When it stopped being quite so effective, the argument shifted slightly to dispute whether the change in climate could be attributed to human beings. This is the flavour of denial that was still prevalent when I was growing up, but which subsequently evolved into another category of denial that I still see, albeit mostly on the fringes: OK, climate is happening and it's our fault, but the impacts of it have been blown out of proportion and implementing the solutions people are proposing will actually be worse!

This one gets less and less impactful every summer, I suspect, as the grim evidence of climate impacts dominates headlines.

But, as ever, there is a whole new set of emergent arguments that, on the face of it, accept climate change but argue for other priorities to be dealt with before any action can be taken to address climate change, or its impacts. The most broad definition of that shift would be that we're now in a world where climate denial takes the form of arguments to delay any real action until we have this whole thing figured out. This is an old trope of "letting perfect be the enemy of the good" and it has been gaining traction across the political spectrum.

As you can see from the graph above, the three most common versions of that argument are especially worth paying attention to. Keep an eye out for them:

1. Economic costs: Assessing climate interventions as costs rather than investments. Such arguments conveniently ignore the much larger projected costs of inaction on climate.
2. Whataboutism: Arguing that intervention in your particular region or country is irrelevant/unfair because much larger emitters like China or the USA aren't doing enough. Shifting blame to other polities is a great way to pass the buck, preferably to places where your leaders have next to no influence.
3. Personal sacrifice: Framing any proposed intervention in terms of individual sacrifices required of ordinary citizens. This is an extension of the well-documented efforts of the fossil fuel industry to shift focus from major polluters to individuals via the infamous carbon footprint campaign done by BP in the early 2000s****.

With such a wide variety of denial out there - helpfully codified in a taxonomy of contrarian claims about climate that Nature put out in 2023 - it's actually now harder to track (and dismiss) bad-faith actors. That puts climate advocacy organisations at a disadvantage.

If your job is to analyse different climate policy options and advocate for the best solutions on the back of that, you are engaging in disputed ground. There is no defined pathway to 'solve' climate change, which means there are many valid opinions about the best choices to make. But that also means groups that are actually opposed to action in any form can simply shift their argument to whatever the least likely solution is and thereby muddy the waters.

As lead author Dr James Painter put it in a piece for The Conversation: "Legitimate policy discussion needs to be carefully distinguished from false claims put out by organized skeptical groups."

The intention of the new wave of climate denial is to confuse matters so that non-specialist audiences - and that includes TV news segment producers and newspaper editors, in many cases - won't be able to distinguish serious climate debate from baseless prevarication. The result? Delay, delay, delay.

While outright denial has declined in climate news coverage over the past decade, some other recent research shows that the tone and tenor of media coverage, in general, has shifted over the same time period.

Three researchers at the University of Otago - David Rozado , Ruth Hughes and Jamin Halberstadt - delved into 23 million headlines from 47 popular media outlets in the United States and used a language models to detect their sentiment and emotion, charting the changes between 2009 and 2019.

The findings tell us a lot about how the media sector itself has changed.

Overall, the sentiment of headlines has become progressively negative. This mirrors the rise of internet-era journalism, where booming social media sites and search engines made eye-catching, sharable headlines all important. Digging a little deeper, the researchers also found that specific types of negative sentiment drove that trendline downwards, especially as new partisan outlets like Breitbart rose to prominence on the back of social algorithms and paid media campaigns.

I should stress that the authors makes no conclusive claims about why these changes have occurred, but flag a couple of hypotheses for further study:

"Financial incentives to maximize click-through ratios could be at play in increasing the sentiment polarity and emotional charge of headlines over time. Conceivably, the temptation of shaping the sentiment and emotional undertones of news headlines to advance political agendas could also be playing a role."

This chimes with yet another study that looked at which types of climate change research actually make it into media coverage. First of all, just 9% of 51320 scientific papers published in 2020 received any coverage, and only 2% received 10 or more mentions across more than 5000 outlets.

Of the ones covered, most are in the 'hard sciences' - rather than those focusing on the social, economic or technological aspects of climate change - and are disproportionately focused on impacts rather than solutions. Papers that cover projections or models of climate impacts make up just 4% of the literature but account for half of the most covered papers in the media.

These are exactly the type of studies that lend themselves to all those doom-and-gloom headlines that have taken over in the past decade.

For me, the story I took from reading all these studies is that this observed decline of neutral headlines almost perfectly lines up with the decline of straightforward climate denial. This is by no means a correlation, but it's a neat parallel: as news coverage**** has become more emotionally charged to suit the new digital media landscape, climate denial has followed suit, becoming more personal and more closely aligned to charged political touchpoints.

I am not trying to point the finger at the internet. I subscribe to Heidi Tworek 's view that technology tends to be blamed for disinformation and any other woes of the public sphere, throughout history, despite the fact that those problem remain common before during and after the ascension of whatever new communication technology is sweeping the world. As she wrote in 2021,

"Seeing the past through clearer eyes can help to avoid what I call a “golden age nostalgia,” a mistaken belief that the information ecosystem worked seamlessly before the internet. Once we understand that it did not, and why, we can ask what approaches are needed to address the broader political, economic and cultural factors that have long fostered the spread of disinformation."

Disinformation is a feature, not a bug. Climate denial has been common since climate change was first observed by scientists. And the reason for that is structural. Changing any fundamental aspect of society - and our energy system is about as fundamental as it gets - is inherently messy and expensive. Those with power and means are naturally not interested in shaking up the status quo because there is a risk they end up without power in whatever comes next. The motive to push back on widespread change has remained consistent, what's changing is the means.

Climate communicators have to adapt to these new tactics. We have to become better at calling out the bad faith arguments and actors, but we also have to break out of comfort zone and deal with the uncertainties in front of us. It's not enough to state and restate evidence that there is a climate problem because that's no longer the nexus of the argument. We have to come with actionable, measurable and well-reasoned solutions to the problems in front of us. And that's a lot harder!

It's a lot of additional steps to prepare for a media appearance or panel debate, as pointing out a problem is always easier than figuring out how to solve it. But, so be it. If we don't step up and adapt, the new denial arguments will drown us out - we've seen this dance play out over and over again. Just as with the challenge of climate change itself, there is and never will be a silver bullet to deal with climate denial. This is part of the game, and we have to stay ahead of the curve in order to keep the public conversation on track.

This article is part of a monthly series aimed at examining the underlying narratives of the European climate debate, with a healthy dose of media criticism along the way. Read the previous article?here.

Note that these are personal takes and do not represent the position of my employer.

*I am also noticing far more discussion of climate change in other parts of the newspaper, notably in sports coverage. This is partly been driven by high profile protests at Wimbledon and the like, and partly due to studies showing that continued temperature rises will fundamentally make it impossible to hold sporting events, with winter sports and cricket the most immediate casualties.

**As indicated by a fascinating survey from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism as part of a larger report which I wrote about in more detail earlier this year.

***For a deep dive into that campaign, check out this excellent piece by Mark Kaufman.

****Or, at least, the framing of news coverage. Very often the substance of an article is where the nuance lies, but that is buried by sensational headlines. There was a climate study example of this phenomenon in The Guardian the day I am publishing this piece.