3. Global warming is a “fraud.” Fake or not?
Climate change and global warming have been for a while one of the favorite topics for conspiracy theorists and fake news. In one of the most recent posts that went viral in February 2023, about the snow in Los Angeles, where Nick Adams is asking “Where is your global warming now, liberals?”
Famed author Stephen King also responded to Adam’s tweet and gave a snarky comment. “Were you born stupid or did you work at it?”. King’s tweet also went viral, but there were still those like Nick Adams and many other climate change and global warming deniers that keep on writing about this.
Earlier this year, Nick Adams, a conservative pundit, shared a post featuring a photo of himself with text superimposed on the image assailing climate change. “Global warming is the most significant fraud perpetrated on humanity this century,” Adams said in the text on Facebook.
Adams included a caption with the photo that dismisses technology meant to combat climate change, saying, “no more windmills, no more solar panels and no more electric cars.”
Multiple social media posts continue to downplay or, in some cases, outright deny the existence of climate change despite overwhelming evidence supporting the scientific consensus it exists and is fueled by human activity.
Analyzing Facebook, and global warming deniers, The Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue said less than 10% of misleading posts were marked as misinformation. And the CCDH researchers linked the majority of these to just 10 publishers. Facebook said this represented a small proportion of climate change content. The CCDH is a non-profit organisation which monitors and lobbies against online hate and misinformation. It found that of 7,000 misleading posts describing climate change as “hysteria”, “alarmism”, a “scam”, or other related terms, only 8% were marked as misinformation.
HOW CAN WE VERIFY THIS?
As per a definition by USA space agency NASA, climate change refers to “long-term change in the average weather patterns that have come to define Earth’s local, regional and global climates”. While global warming is a “long-term heating of Earth’s surface observed since the pre-industrial period (between 1850 and 1900)”. This accelerated heating is caused due to human activities such as the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers carbon dioxide one of the primary greenhouse gases contributing to climate change. Nearly 80% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States in 2020 were carbon dioxide. Although the Earth’s climate has changed throughout its history, NASA said the current warming trend the planet is undergoing is happening too rapidly to be natural.
Earth’s average temperature has increased by around 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, when modern temperature measurements began, and continues to rise, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration reported. Besides the evidence of climate change’s existence, NASA said 97% of “actively publishing climate scientists” agree its real and driven by humans.
A vast majority of international scientific organizations acknowledge the reality of climate change and humanity’s role.
WHAT ARE OTHER SOURCES SAYING?
Irish Times report on the greenhouse effect and why is the Earth becoming so warm, so does the Scientific American and many other verified scientific sources.
FAKE OR NOT?
Most of the world’s scientists found that climate change is real and fueled by human activity. Fake!
