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Young people and scientists occupy new coal-sponsored Science Museum gallery, joined by broadcaster and wildlife campaigner Chris Packham

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April 12, 2024 by Extinction Rebellion

  • 30+ young people, scientists and supporters occupy Science Museum’s new climate gallery in protest over its sponsorship by coal-producing conglomerate Adani
  • Group announce plan to remain over weekend ahead of the opening to school groups next week
  • Naturalist Chris Packham says sponsorship deal is “beyond greenwash – it’s grotesque” and attends to support the protesters
  • Science Museum criticised over ties to conglomerate involved in manufacturing drones for the Israeli military amidst bombardment of Gaza and destructive coal mining operations in India and Australia opposed by Indigenous groups

This evening, more than 30 protesters led by young people from Youth Action for Climate Justice and members of Scientists for Extinction Rebellion have occupied the Science Museum’s new climate gallery, Energy Revolution, over its sponsorship by the coal giant and arms manufacturer, Adani. Naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham joined the group as they began their protest, with scientists and young people now intending to remain in the museum over the weekend, with the first school visits to the gallery beginning on Monday.

Chris Packham, who famously claimed that peacefully breaking the law is the ethically responsible thing to do when it comes to protecting the planet, told the protesters: “For me science is the art of understanding truth and beauty and a lot of that beauty lies in the natural world. Science tells us that the fossil fuel industry is responsible for the accelerating destruction of our natural world. The Science Museum is a place to spark imagination, to provide answers but also to encourage us to ask questions. The question I’m asking today is a big one, “why on earth are we allowing a destructive industry to sponsor an educational exhibition whilst simultaneously setting fire to young peoples futures?” This is beyond greenwash – it’s grotesque. We urgently need an ‘Energy Revolution’ to steer us away from the course of planetary destruction on which we are heading. We need a rapid, just transition to renewables – that revolution means an end to coal, and starts with the young people and scientists occupying this space this evening. Science tells us the truth, and the truth is that we must change.”

Naturalist Chris Packham at the Science Museum occupation 12 April 2024. Image: Extinction Rebellion.
Naturalist Chris Packham at the Science Museum occupation 12 April 2024. Image: Extinction Rebellion.

The Energy Revolution gallery opened to the public just a few weeks ago amidst protest, with over 150 people taking part in a day of creative action. A few days earlier, guests arriving for the private VIP launch were greeted by protesters as they arrived, as well as the museum throwing a lavish dinner for the Adani Group’s billionaire chairman, Gautam Adani, with the Adani Group’s logo plastered on screens around the room. 

To coincide with today’s protest, activists have released a new video exposing the truth behind the misleading claims made by Gautam Adani during his speech at the opening of the gallery. While he discussed the energy transition from oil and gas, he neglected to mention coal, the industry from which the Adani Group derives 60% of its revenue. The Science Museum has attempted to defend its sponsorship deal by claiming it has only partnered with the Green Energy division, although evidence clearly shows that it is directly linked to Adani’s coal business and that the museum has maintained a relationship with the main Adani Group.

At 2pm on Saturday, the occupiers will invite members of the public to join them for an interactive assembly inside the gallery to discuss alternatives to toxic fossil fuel sponsorship at the Science Museum. The group plans to tell the public the truth about the gallery’s sponsor and the urgency of keeping fossil fuels in the ground for a liveable future. Throughout their occupation, the protesters are also constructing sculptures of fragments of coal as a poignant reminder of Adani’s core polluting business.

Since the announcement of Adani sponsorship of the gallery in 2021, the museum has faced a raft of opposition and protests, including the resignation of two trustees, and of former museum director Chris Rapley from the Advisory Board. The museum has also recently faced protests over Adani’s involvement in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza via its partnership with Israeli arms firm Elbit Systems.

Ian McDermott, a Chemistry teacher who will no longer organise school trips to the museum, has said: “For decades I ran a couple of trips to the museum a year, but I just don’t think it’s in the students’ interests to engage with the greenwashing of the companies destroying their futures.”

Protest placard reads Greenwash detected
Protest placard reads Greenwash detected

Adani is the world’s largest private developer of new coal mines and coal-fired power plants, including Australia’s largest, the Carmichael Coal Mine built on Wangan and Jagalingou ancestral land. This ongoing investment in coal mining and power flies in the face of the scientific warning that most fossil fuel reserves cannot be burned and emitted if global warming increase is limited to 1.5°C, or even 2°C above pre industrial levels.

Anya, a young person occupying the gallery said: “To have a coal company sponsoring an exhibition on the future of energy is blatantly deceiving. Through this sponsorship deal, the Science Museum is helping Adani attach itself to the image of a positive and sustainable future when in reality it is a coal giant, weapons manufacturer and genocide supporter. It’s plain wrong for the Science Museum to be deceiving visitors, including young people like me, when it comes to the climate crisis.”

This is not the only instance of the museum welcoming fossil fuel companies to sponsor and influence its science education programmes and galleries. The Museum’s STEM Training Academy, which aims to support teachers in delivering science education, is sponsored by oil and gas giant BP, while the Museum’s interactive children’s gallery is named after Norwegian oil and gas company, Equinor. 

Dr. Aaron Thierry, a scientist, who has researched climate impacts in the Arctic, is among those currently occupying the museum: “It’s not just Adani’s brand that the science museum is greenwashing, they’re also allowing the oil and gas giants BP and Equinor to sponsor their exhibits, disregarding the fact that these companies continue to expand fossil fuel production against the warnings of climate scientists. The latest science has shown we must leave the majority of fossil fuels unburned to prevent catastrophic changes to our climate. That an institution like the Science Museum is working with such rouge companies is a disgrace. The museum’s management needs to follow the example of Britain’s other leading cultural institutions and drop all ties to the fossil fuel industry.“

Scientists for Extinction Rebellion and Youth Action for Climate Justice (who have led this action) are members of Fossil Free Science Museum Coalition who are campaigning for the Science Museum to end its sponsorship by fossil fuel companies.

Youth Action for Climate Justice (formerly UKSCN London) is a radical youth organisation mobilising for climate justice. YACJ aims to create a new generation of young activists who are educated about society and the change we need, in order to work with other movements to change the system we live in. The group was previously part of Youth Strike for Climate Movement and coordinated the London youth climate strikes in 2019 and 2020, which brought thousands of young people to the streets of London. Instagram | Twitter

Scientists for Extinction Rebellion are scientists who agree with Extinction Rebellion that it is time to take direct action to confront catastrophic climate and ecological breakdown. Instagram | Twitter

Other groups involved are: International Solidarity for Academic Freedom in India (InSAF India), India Labour Solidarity (UK), Students for Survival; and numerous Extinction Rebellion groups.

Continue ReadingYoung people and scientists occupy new coal-sponsored Science Museum gallery, joined by broadcaster and wildlife campaigner Chris Packham

The disagreement between two climate scientists that will decide our future

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Vladi333/Shutterstock

Robert Chris, The Open University and Hugh Hunt, University of Cambridge

Getting to net zero emissions by mid-century is conventionally understood as humanity’s best hope for keeping Earth’s surface temperature (already 1.2°C above its pre-industrial level) from increasing well beyond 1.5°C – potentially reaching a point at which it could cause widespread societal breakdown.

At least one prominent climate scientist, however, disagrees.

James Hansen of Columbia University in the US published a paper with colleagues in November which claims temperatures are set to rise further and faster than the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In his view, the 1.5°C target is dead.

He also claims net zero is no longer sufficient to prevent warming of more than 2°C. To regain some control over Earth’s rising temperature, Hansen supports accelerating the retirement of fossil fuels, greater cooperation between major polluters that accommodates the needs of the developing world and, controversially, intervening in Earth’s “radiation balance” (the difference between incoming and outgoing light and heat) to cool the planet’s surface.

You can listen to more articles from The Conversation narrated by Noa.

There would probably be wide support for the first two prescriptions. But Hansen’s support for what amounts to the deliberate reduction of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface has brought into the open an idea that makes many uncomfortable.

Michael Mann from the University of Pennsylvania in the US and another titan of climate science, spoke for many when he dismissed solar radiation management as “potentially very dangerous” and a “desperate action” motivated by the “fallacy … that large-scale warming will be substantially greater than current-generation models project”.

Their positions are irreconcilable. So who is right – Hansen or Mann?

Earth’s radiation balance

First, an explanation.

There are only two ways to reduce global warming. One is to increase the amount of heat radiated from Earth’s surface that escapes to space. The other is to increase the amount of sunlight reflected back to space before it lands on something – whether a particle in the atmosphere or something on Earth’s surface – and is converted to heat.

There are many ways to do both. Anything that reduces the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will let more heat escape to space (replacing fossil fuels with renewables, eating less meat and tilling the soil less for example). Anything that makes the planet brighter will reflect more sunlight to space (such as refreezing the Arctic, making clouds whiter or putting more reflective particles in the atmosphere).

But the key difference between the two, in terms of their impact on global warming, is their response time. That is, the time it takes for a change in the factors that allow more heat to escape or sunlight to be reflected to appear as a change in Earth’s surface temperature.

Intervening to speed up the loss of heat from Earth’s surface cools the planet slowly, over decades and longer. Intervening to increase the sunlight Earth reflects back to space cools the planet more or less immediately.

The essence of the dispute between Mann and Hansen is whether reducing greenhouse gases, by a combination of reducing new emissions and permanently removing past emissions from the atmosphere, is now enough on its own to prevent warming from reaching levels that threaten economic and social stability.

Mann says it is. Hansen says that, while doing these things remains essential, it is no longer sufficient and we must also make Earth more reflective.

When will warming end?

Mann aligns with IPCC orthodoxy when he says that emissions reaching net zero will result, within a decade or two, in Earth’s surface temperature stabilising at the level it has then reached.

In effect, there is no significant warming in the pipeline from past emissions. All future warming will be due to future emissions. This is the basis for the global policy imperative to get to net zero.

In his new paper, Hansen argues that if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases remains close to its current level, the surface temperature will stabilise after several hundred years between 8°C and 10°C above the pre-industrial level.

Of this, at least 2°C will emerge by mid-century, and probably a further 3°C a century from now. A temperature increase of this magnitude would be catastrophic for life on Earth. Hansen adds that to avoid such an outcome, brightening Earth is now necessary to halt the warming in the pipeline from past emissions.

Crevices in an ice sheet.
Bright surfaces, like ice sheets, reflect light to space.
Tobetv/Shutterstock

But at the same time, we must also largely eliminate emissions if we are to stop recreating this problem in the future.

Still getting hotter…

We are scientists who study the feasibility and effectiveness of alternative responses to climate change, addressing both the engineering and political realities of enabling change at the scale and speed necessary.

We find Mann’s rebuttal of Hansen’s claims unconvincing. Crucially, Mann does not engage directly with Hansen’s analysis of new data covering the last 65 million years.

Hansen explains how the models used by IPCC scientists to assess future climate scenarios have significantly underestimated the warming effect of increased greenhouse gas emissions, the cooling effect of aerosols and how long the climate takes to respond to these changes.

Besides greenhouse gases, humanity also emits aerosols. These are tiny particles comprising a wide range of chemicals. Some, such as the sulphur dioxide emitted when coal and oil are burned, offset the warming from greenhouse gases by reflecting sunlight back to space.

Others, such as soot, have the opposite effect and add to warming. The cooling aerosols dominate by a large margin.

Hansen projects that in coming months, lower levels of aerosol pollution from shipping will cause warming of as much as 0.5°C more than IPCC models have predicted. This will take global warming close to 2°C as early as next year, although it is likely then to fall slightly as the present El Niño wanes.

Underpinning Hansen’s argument is his conviction that the climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously reported. The IPCC estimates that doubling atmospheric CO₂ raises Earth’s temperature by 3°C. Hansen calculates it to be 4.8°C.

This, and the much longer climate response time that Hansen calculates from the historical record, would have a significant impact on climate model projections.

Time for reflection

The differences between Mann and Hansen are significant for the global response to climate change.

Mann says that allowing emissions to reach net zero by mid-century is sufficient, while Hansen maintains that on its own it would be disastrous and that steps must now be taken in addition to brighten the planet.

Brightening Earth could also reverse the reductions in reflectivity already caused by climate change. Data indicates that from 1998 to 2017, Earth dimmed by about 0.5 watts per square metre, largely due to the loss of ice.

Given what’s at stake, we hope Mann and Hansen resolve these differences quickly to help the public and policymakers understand what it will take to minimise the likelihood of imminent massive and widespread ecosystem destruction and its disastrous effects on humanity.

While 1.5°C may be dead, there may still be time to prevent cascading system failures. But not if we continue to squabble over the nature and extent of the risks.

Imagine weekly climate newsletter

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Robert Chris, Honorary Associate, Geography, The Open University and Hugh Hunt, Professor of Engineering Dynamics and Vibration, University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Roger Hallam was involved in starting the climate activism groups Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. He is still involved with Just Stop Oil and often gets arrested and imprisoned. [22/3 Apologies had a typo calling Roger Roget]

https://rogerhallam.com/starmers-treason/

…

I used to be a social science researcher at King’s College, London. The name of the game in that trade is to look at everything in context. So I will provide some context. There is overwhelming evidence that the climate science industry is structurally underestimating the realities we face. “Worst than expected” is the standard phrase of just about every article as new stats are published. A few years ago we were going to pass 1.5C around 2050 – now it is already happening. I remember reading reports that the Arctic will melt in the summer around 2100. Papers now predict 2035, if not before. AMOC – the ocean current that stops the 60 million people on these islands from starving to death – was going to collapse at some point next century. Now a recent paper tells us the odds are it will collapse by 2050. If you have not been paying attention, this will create a collapse of temperatures overnight of 3-8C across Europe. So don’t be surprised if it happens before your pension comes due. 

I’m like you. I don’t like to believe things are true if they conflict with my baseline beliefs – like “we will muddle through”. But then it becomes more difficult when it actually comes true. Scientists have been telling us privately and then publicly for years that staying under 1.5C was bollocks – and now here we are. For two decades or more the best kept secret of the climate space has been that aerosols (pollution from burning fossil fuel emissions) have been holding down temperatures by .5C-1C. As we passed 1.8C last September the pretence started to collapse as scientists raged about each other on a dark corner of Twitter. It’s the start of the exposure of the world’s biggest cover up. That they knew we were fucked a decade or more ago. Not that the media is interested. Everyone is still in on the pretence, it seems.

…

Roger Hallam https://rogerhallam.com/starmers-treason/ An interesting article. [22/3 Apologies had a typo calling Roger Roget]

Continue ReadingThe disagreement between two climate scientists that will decide our future

Science shows the severe climate consequences of new fossil fuel extraction

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An offshore drilling platform.
Mike Mareen/Shutterstock

Ed Hawkins, University of Reading

The world has just suffered through its warmest month ever recorded. Heatwaves have swept across southern Europe, the US and China, breaking many temperature records in the process.

Climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades that this type of event will become more frequent as the world continues to warm. The major culprit behind this is the burning of fossil fuels. So it’s extremely concerning that the UK government has announced its intention to grant hundreds of licences for new North Sea oil and gas extraction.

Although burning fossil fuels to generate power and heat has enabled society to develop and flourish, we are now experiencing the unintended side effects. The carbon dioxide that has been added to the atmosphere is leading to a rise in global temperatures, causing heatwaves to become hotter and downpours more intense. The resulting large-scale disruption and suffering is becoming ever more visible.

This warming will continue, with worsening climatic consequences, until we reduce global carbon dioxide emissions to “net zero”. After that, we will still have to live and suffer in a warmer climate for generations. The collective choices we make now will matter in the future.

The small-scale, but high-profile, disruptions caused by Just Stop Oil protesters in the UK are extremely frustrating for many. But their single demand – for no licenses for new UK coal, oil and gas projects – is consistent with the science underpinning the international agreements that the UK has signed.

Temperatures are rising

Since the 1860s, the scientific community has understood that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would warm the climate. And as long ago as 1938, the burning of fossil fuels was linked to the observed rise in both carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures. Fast forward to now and global temperatures are warmer, and increasing faster, than at any point in human civilisation.

In response to the overwhelming scientific evidence, the UK and 193 other nations came together in 2015 to ratify the Paris agreement on climate change. One of the agreed goals is to limit global warming to well below 2°C, and even aim for 1.5°C, compared to the pre-industrial era.

However, the latest synthesis report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which all governments explicitly endorsed, paints a stark reality. If we burn all of the fossil fuels that we currently have access to, then global warming will exceed 1.5°C and may reach 2°C.

To avoid breaching the limits set out by the Paris agreement, some of the coal, oil and gas that we can already extract must remain unburnt. New fossil fuel extraction projects will make it even harder to stop further global warming.

Build up renewable infrastructure

There are other options. The UK government’s official advisers, the Climate Change Committee, have put forward a vision for UK power generation consistent with a net zero future. They say that the UK could provide all of its energy needs by 2050 through a combination of renewables, bioenergy, nuclear, hydrogen, storage and demand management, with some carbon capture and storage for fossil gas-based generation in the meantime.

A family walking dogs on a beach in front of an offshore wind farm.
The UK can achieve energy security without causing additional global warming.
Nigel Jarvis/Shutterstock

If the UK followed the example of China and rapidly increased its investments in renewable energy, then it could achieve energy security without causing additional global warming. China emits the most carbon dioxide of any country in the world. But it is installing more renewable energy generation than the rest of the world combined.

Rapidly reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, and not issuing new licenses to extract oil and gas, is the most effective way of minimising future climate-related disruptions. The sooner those with the power to shape our future recognise this, the better.

Imagine weekly climate newsletter

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 20,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.The Conversation

Ed Hawkins, Professor of Climate Science, University of Reading

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue ReadingScience shows the severe climate consequences of new fossil fuel extraction

Will 2023 be the hottest year yet? Climate scientists are ‘virtually certain’ after October record

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https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/11/08/will-2023-be-the-hottest-year-yet-climate-scientists-are-virtually-certain-after-october-r

After four months of global records being “obliterated”, temperatures in October have left climate scientists nearly certain that 2023 will be the hottest on record.

Scientists now say that 2023 is “virtually certain” to be the warmest year on record.

Data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reveals that this October was the warmest on record globally. As a whole, it was 1.7ºC above pre-industrial averages after four consecutive months of temperature records being broken.

In Europe, it was the fourth warmest October on record with temperatures 1.3ºC higher than the 1991 to 2020 average.

“October 2023 has seen exceptional temperature anomalies, following on from four months of global temperature records being obliterated,” says Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S, the European Union’s climate change agency. 

Globally averaged surface air temperature anomalies relative to 1991–2020 for each October from 1940 to 2023. Data Source: ERA5.C3S/ECMWF
Globally averaged surface air temperature anomalies relative to 1991–2020 for each October from 1940 to 2023. Data Source: ERA5.C3S/ECMWF

…

https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/11/08/will-2023-be-the-hottest-year-yet-climate-scientists-are-virtually-certain-after-october-r

Continue ReadingWill 2023 be the hottest year yet? Climate scientists are ‘virtually certain’ after October record

Jordan Peterson Generates Millions of YouTube Hits for Climate Crisis Deniers

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Original article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

The conservative influencer has ‘become a central cog in the denial machine,’ says climate scientist Michael Mann.

ByGeoff Dembicki on 5 Sept, 2023 @ 09:46 PDT

Imag eof climate change denier Jordan Peterson.
‘Climate change is the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free card,’ Peterson recently tweeted. Image:  Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC.

Fringe climate crisis deniers who claim that the earth is “cooling” and greenhouse emissions are good for “biological productivity” are getting exposed to millions more people than they normally would on YouTube thanks to conservative influencer Jordan Peterson. 

That’s according to viewership data newly reviewed by DeSmog, which reveals a massive visibility boost for public figures who’ve been active in the climate denial movement for years but whose ideas — such as the claim that plants are growing much better due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — are now rarely taken seriously by most legacy media outlets.  

They include climate crisis deniers like Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Richard Lindzen, Alex Epstein and Bjorn Lomborg. Despite having either a modest YouTube presence or none at all, these figures have collectively garnered nearly five million views after being interviewed on Peterson’s channel, which has 7.31 million subscribers. The New York Times, by comparison, has 4.33 million YouTube subscribers. 

This is especially worrying to climate scientists and disinformation experts because Peterson for years has been actively courting alienated males in their 20s and younger. Traditionally, people who are “doubtful” or “dismissive” of climate change have tended to skew older. Peterson is now planting doubt via his podcast and social media posts about the severity and urgency of global warming in the minds of younger generations.

“‘Climate change,’” he tweeted in June, is “the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free card.”

And he is now in the process of putting real political power behind the climate crisis denial movement. In late October and early November, a new group Peterson founded called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) will hold in London, England, its first ever meetings. It has on its advisory board Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who during GOP debates in August said that “the climate change agenda is a hoax.”

Image of climate change denier Vivek Ramaswamy.
ARC advisor Ramaswamy: ‘the climate change agenda is a hoax.’ Image: Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC.

Advisors to the group include Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who earlier this year argued on Peterson’s podcast that “climate change is a real problem, but it’s not this catastrophic end of the world.” Lomborg didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog. Other advisors are Texas Republican congressmember Dan Crenshaw; Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee; former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott; and dozens of conservative policymakers, financiers, activists and journalists from the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia.  

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is being supported by founders and leaders of the Legatum Group, a Dubai-based investment firm behind The Legatum Institute, a pro-Brexit think tank in London with close ties to the U.K. Conservative Party. The Legatum Group is a leading investor in the rightwing British television network GB News. Read DeSmog’s in-depth report on ARC’s U.K. links here.

Experts argue this makes Peterson a key organizer at the global level for efforts to oppose and delay action on climate change. “I would say that Jordan Peterson has become a central cog in the denial machine,” Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, told DeSmog. 

“It’s concerning that he’s poisoning the minds of so many influenceable people with his pseudo-intellectual and pseudoscientific drivel, drivel that is being weaponized in the right-wing assault on science and reason,” Mann added, referring to Peterson’s frequent downplaying of climate risks, including the conservative influencer’s insistence that rising levels of carbon dioxide are good for the planet.  

Spreading Denial, Making Money

Peterson’s influence depends to a significant degree on his gigantic YouTube following, which is larger than that of the liberal-leaning news network MSNBC. It also surpasses the following of The Daily Wire, a digital conservative outlet co-founded by Ben Shapiro that has a partnership with Peterson, which last year claimed a yearly revenue of $100 million.   

Google, which owns YouTube, announced a policy in October 2021 prohibiting advertisements on content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” Elaborating on the policy in an email to DeSmog, a Google spokesperson wrote that “Debate or discussion of climate change topics is allowed, but when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.” 

Yet a Peterson interview from this year entitled “The Great Climate Con,” during which he framed rising greenhouse gas emissions as a positive for making the planet “green in the driest areas,” was accompanied by ads for Birch Gold and Masterworks. Climate scientists say that is a misleading argument because it doesn’t take into account the massively negative effects that intensified droughts, wildfires and heatwaves due to global warming have on plants and ecosystems. 

“Debate or discussion of climate change topics is allowed, but when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”— Google spokesperson

“We’ve reviewed the videos,” the Google spokesperson wrote, “and did not take action on them.”

“What’s the point of having policies if you’re not going to enforce them?” Claire Atkin, co-founder of the anti-disinformation watchdog group Check My Ads, told DeSmog. “YouTube and its ecosystem of marketing tools allow Jordan Peterson to not only spread [misleading statements], but to make money off them.”

Peterson didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog about his current income nor his recent shift towards promoting climate crisis denial online. 

‘Twisted Symbiotic Relationship’

One example of Peterson’s amplifying effect is his interview with Judith Curry, a former Georgia Institute of Technology climatologist who now does consulting work for clients including petroleum companies and natural gas traders. In testimony to Congress in 2015 she claimed incorrectly that recent data “calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change.” 

While appearing on Peterson’s podcast earlier this year she argued that due to “natural variability” the planet could grow cooler over the next three decades rather than warmer, a position with no credible scientific basis, especially considering that July was the hottest month in recorded human history. Posted to YouTube, where Curry has no official channel, the interview garnered more than 960,000 views. She didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog.

Conservative author and fossil fuel activist Alex Epstein had a modest YouTube following of 15.2 thousand subscribers when he was interviewed by Peterson. “It’s out!” he tweeted after the video was posted. It now has over 1.04 million views, a significant boost considering that the vast majority of videos on his page have under 500 views.  

“I think Jordan Peterson has become more interested in humanistic thinking about fossil fuels,” Epstein wrote in an email to DeSmog. “He has become even more convinced, thanks to my work and others, that the popular movement to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use is based on invalid thinking methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values.” 

Image of climate change denier Alex Epstein.
Most videos on Epstein’s YouTube page receive fewer than 500 views.  Image: Gage Skidmore, wikimwdia,  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

During his interview with Peterson, Epstein claimed that “It’s kind of obvious if you have a warmer world with more CO2, it’s a more tropical world with more life. It’s a more green world in the life sense of green. And yet the green movement hates it.” 

Peterson has echoed that statement frequently in his podcast, despite actual scientists saying that greening caused by rising greenhouse gases shouldn’t be celebrated. He claimed during his interview with Steven Koonin, author of a book on climate change science called Unsettled, that “since the year 2000 the world has greened by 15 percent … why the hell isn’t that good news?” That interview has since been viewed more than 1.1 million times. Koonin didn’t respond to a media request. 

“Peterson—who doesn’t appear to know much at all about the science or politics of global warming—has become an influential promoter of illogical ideas,” Benjamin Franta, a senior research fellow in climate litigation at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, told DeSmog.

During an interview in 2022 on Joe Rogan’s podcast, for instance, Peterson argued that the climate is too complex a system to be modeled accurately, “and that’s a huge problem when you’re trying to model over 100 years because the errors compound just like interest.” “He sounds intelligent, but he’s completely wrong,” one climate scientist told the Guardian. 

Though Peterson is among the most visible promoters of climate crisis denial, he’s also part of a wider digital network. Researchers with Climate Action Against Disinformation and the Center for Countering Digital Hate earlier this year found 200 videos on YouTube promoting delay or skepticism around measures to address the climate emergency, garnering nearly 74 million views altogether.    

“[There’s] a twisted symbiotic relationship between these platforms and climate denial content,” Erika Seiber, a climate disinformation spokesperson at the nonprofit Friends of the Earth who is part of the disinfo coalition, told DeSmog. “YouTube runs ads on the content, incentivizing the creation of yet more misleading content, which allows deniers like Peterson to flourish and for their networks to grow.” 

Enabled by Google and YouTube, climate crisis denial could be having real-world influence, disinformation experts say. A poll this summer suggested that 72 percent of U.S. Republican supporters think that the economy should be prioritized over addressing climate change, a 13 point increase from 2018, even as cities sweltered under record heat waves. Conservatives are opposing coastal wind turbines under the pretense of protecting whales. Republican Congressmembers in June passed bills protecting gas stoves in people’s homes. 

“You can see how climate denial content from Peterson and others has informed policy discussions,” Seiber said. “It’s incredibly concerning.”

Original article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingJordan Peterson Generates Millions of YouTube Hits for Climate Crisis Deniers