Warning: This article contains quotes from Friederike Otto, Michael Mann, John Cook and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s Jennie King.

With the amount of free speech one sees on the internet nowadays, who can doubt that The Truth is in dire need of protection? I speak, of course, of the threat from climate change denial, that most pernicious of weeds, currently choking the garden of online verity with its weedy lies. And its thriving, don’t you know? If anything it’s worse than when Exxon first planted it, way back in the days when climate scientists were forced into slave labour for Big Oil and made to lie about the true evils of carbon dioxide. Something obviously needs to be done to restore the internet’s borders and lawns so that they can once again provide a safe playground for our children. Legislation could do the trick perhaps, but, in the meantime, who is out there who could possibly come to our rescue with the hoe of justice and the trowel of truth?

As I have acknowledged before now, John Cook of FLICC fame is a man of some stature. Furthermore, Professor Friederike Otto’s ground-breaking work, demonstrating how hotter weather is impossible without extra heat, has previously attracted my attention. And as for Michael Mann, what he doesn’t know about statistics is quite frankly not worth fiddling with. But put them all together and you have something far greater than the sum of its parts. What you have is an assembly of avengers. In fact, all that would be missing from the perfect superhero line-up would be a guest appearance from a spokesperson for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. If only Jennie King were here, she’d know what to do.

Thankfully, the dream team is not just the stuff of dreams, it is the stuff of stuff – the sort of stuff that journalists have already been writing. Take, for example, the stuff that Stuart Braun wrote for DW recently. It starts by asking the question we all want answering: Why is climate denial still thriving online?

The Fantastic Four are already standing in the wings, eager to make their heroic entrance, but first Stuart needs to fully justify their invocation:

An extreme global heatwave has been blamed on climate change, yet online misinformation has evolved to counter the facts — despite platforms like TikTok banning climate denial.

By ‘online misinformation’, I presume he is referring to the correction that El Niño is actually playing the dominant role. But let us not get distracted from the crusade. Stuart continues:

Record global temperatures on July 3 kicked off the hottest week ever recorded as intense heatwaves gripped the planet. Climate scientist Friederike Otto of London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment called the heat “a death sentence for people and ecosystems.”

An early opening blow from Otto there. Die you miserable deniers! But who’s that lurking in the next paragraph? Why, it’s one of those dastardly misinformers:

Yet the next day, a political journalist in the UK, Isabel Oakeshott, tweeted that “climate change headbangers panicking about a few hot days last month can calm down … It’s 13 degrees and pouring.” She added that she was “about to light the woodburner.” Within a day, over 2.2 million people had seen the tweet.

An incredulous Braun asks:

Amid the worst heatwaves ever recorded in the US, China, Mexico, Siberia and beyond, and near-unanimous scientific consensus that humans have induced global heating — in large part by burning fossil fuels — how does such denial continue to flourish?

I dunno, Stuart. But XR Cambridge seemed to have Oakeshott’s number when they sarcastically tweeted:

Pakistan, you can stop complaining about the unprecedented floods now because actually it’s 13C in the Cotswolds in @IsabelOakeshott’s garden so 1/3 of the country underwater and loads of deaths and livelihoods destroyed probably didn’t happen.

Except it is well established that a third of Pakistan ending up underwater didn’t happen. But let us not get distracted from the crusade. Stuart has more climate denial weediness to uproot:

“So how are they going to charge their EVs when there is no electricity?” another wrote, implying that renewable energy is not a reliable power source — despite wind and solar being the cheapest and fastest-growing forms of energy.

Implying? Cheapest? Has the Oxford English Dictionary been updated recently without me being informed? Anyway, let’s not get distracted from the crusade. John Cook is about to fly in through a window:

These are old rhetorical tricks that today are targeted less at climate science than solutions, says John Cook, a climatologist and senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, and author of the Skeptical Science blog that has long debunked climate misinformation. The idea that “solutions will be harmful” or “solutions won’t work” is a repackaging of old attacks on the cost of climate action from the 1990s, he added.

KERPOW!!! THWOK!!! ARRGH!!!

Then, after a nice sunset photo of one of those aesthetically pleasing windfarms we all want in our back yard (suitably packaged with the caption “Solar and wind power is now cheaper than fossil alternatives”), we have a surprise contribution from the Center for Countering Digital Hate:

“The goal posts have moved,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the global Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Climate denial now employs deflection and “sows doubt” to ultimately delay the energy transition. The logic runs that “doing something is worse than doing nothing,” Hood explained, referring also to the notion of “climate inactivism” coined by climate researcher and author Michael Mann.

Curse you Michael, with your coined notions! I have no power to withstand such magic. And as for my digital hate, that can surely be no match for Jennie King’s strategic dialogue:

“There are clear vulnerabilities in the way social media platforms are designed and governed at present which allows such content to rise to the surface,” said Jennie King, head of climate research & policy at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a global think tank researching extremism and disinformation.

There follows a lot of stuff about ‘algorithmic bias’, ‘echo chambers’, ‘superpolluter publishers’, the Russian state, the ‘toxic ten’, and broken promises from Google and Facebook, before Stuart once again calls upon Jennie’s superpowers with:

“Misinformation thrives in moments of crisis,” said Jennie King of intersecting health, cost of living, energy and inflation crises in recent years…”The weaponization of ‘genuine trauma’ was evident in the first waves of the [Covid-19] pandemic when the term ‘climate lockdown’ emerged across social media, promotors claiming the lockdown was a dress rehearsal for a coming wave of ‘green tyranny’,” King explained.

I have to admit that I hadn’t quite realised it was we climate deniers that were weaponizing ‘genuine trauma’ during the pandemic. There was me thinking it was the government. But let us not get distracted from the crusade. We still need to know how we can fight online climate change denial. Jennie King returns to the fray:

Like Facebook, TikTok promised to ban climate denial content in April. But Jennie King says such attempts at content moderation are “crude” and “unenforceable,” adding that “it is not criminal to deny climate change.” The ultimate solution would be to “demonetize” climate denial, she believes, something big tech companies have so far largely failed to do.

Well, we have yet to see what is enforceable. Roll on the Online Safety Bill. Meanwhile, John Cook has his own final solution to offer:

John Cook, meanwhile, has long advocated for “pre-emptive inoculating messages” that neutralize what he calls “climate disbeliefs” by explaining “the flawed argumentation technique used in the misinformation,” and that reinforce the scientific consensus on climate change.

Well, all I can say is this. If this article by Stuart Braun is supposed to be a good example of Cook’s ‘inoculating messages’, then one shouldn’t find it in the least bit surprising that climate change denial is on the rise. Talk about the vaccination helping to spread the disease!

So, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go now to sow more doubt and digitize my hate. This climate change isn’t going to deny itself, don’t you know?