Climate disasters are on the rise, so is disinformation
President of Kenya William Ruto (C) surrounded by other African leaders delivers his closing speech during the closure of the Africa Climate Summit 2023 at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in Nairobi on September 6, 2023.
As delegates poured into the Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC) on the first day of the inaugural Africa Climate Summit, hope for saving our burning planet was written on their faces.
A new, bold story about Africa, by Africans, was in the making. President William Ruto led the way as Kenyans watched on social media, newspapers and television.
The continent's leaders were on a mission to change the narrative on behalf of their people. If the world's greenhouse gas emissions were stored in a water bottle, Africa's share of the emissions would only fill the bottle's cap - an insignificant four per cent.
Despite this small contribution, studies show that the direct effects of climate change, such as droughts, floods, cyclones and earthquakes, continue to plague the continent.
Barely two weeks after the climate summit, Libyans were hit by devastating floods, which some researchers speaking to the journal Nature linked to climate change, civil war and poor infrastructure.
Scientists in the country and the region are predicting an impending El Niño, which will be felt during the short October-November-December rainy season.
Even when climate-related disasters are in full view, misinformation continues to spread. While a study released by the Alliance for Science on the sidelines of the summit showed that climate misinformation is fading in the mainstream media, our analysis shows that it is thriving on social media.
Some of the misinformation claims analysed in the Alliance for Science report include: Greenland is not losing its ice, and that wind turbines are toxic.
Speaking at the launch of the report, Dr Sheila Ochugboju, Executive Director of the Alliance for Science, said that media conversations about climate have helped to provide the world with accurate information about climate change.
"This is just the beginning. Overt climate misinformation may have been pushed to the margins, but the power of the fossil fuel lobby means that things have shifted from denial to delay. We need swift action to save the 1.5 degrees Celsius Paris target, and to ensure adequate funding for climate resilience and growth in vulnerable regions like sub-Saharan Africa," she said.
The Earth Journalism Network also released a report in September saying that misleading information about the climate encourages continued reliance on fossil fuels, hinders climate action and undermines trust in scientists and the media.
On 5 September, the second day of the Africa Climate Summit, an inglorious hashtag trended on X (formerly Twitter), with more than 15,000 posts following the trend. The hashtag (#) was ClimateScam.
At around 9.39am, #ClimateScam was the top trending topic on Twitter in Kenya.
An analysis of the origin of the hashtag in Kenya goes back to the first tweet shared on the first day of the summit, in response to a post made by the Ministry of Health through its verified handles.
We analysed data between 4 and 15 September.
The tweet was posted on 4 September by a user called @amerucanbantu, whose reply contained only the hashtags #ClimateScam and #ClimateHoax.
Ivan Musebe, an investigative data analyst at Code for Africa, explained that replying to verified accounts with a significant number of followers is a common tactic used by parody and bot accounts to gain a popular audience on social media platforms, especially the X platform.
A reply by the @amerucan_bantu with the trending hashtag #ClimateScam to the Ministry of Health post.
Wide Awake media tweet claiming Covid-19 and climate crisis are totalitarian power grab schemes.
Globally, a UK-based Twitter user who runs the X site @wideawake_media has also been pushing the climate scam narrative. Back in September, the user's tweets claimed, among other things, that the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis were both "totalitarian power grabs" that had nothing to do with saving lives or the planet.
These claims are false and have been debunked by scientists, medical experts and journalists, including USA Today.
The narrative then trickled down to Kenya, where a popular user with the handle @KenyanSays accused the government of hypocrisy for legalising tree felling while also hosting the 2023 Africa Climate Summit. The user also accused UN officials of polluting the environment by arriving in fuel-guzzling vehicles.
In another tweet, a user called @amerix claims that Bill Gates is planning to cut down and bury 75 million hectares of trees to 'save' the world from climate change, a claim explained by Christopher Helman, a Forbes contributor.
Quoting his tweet verbatim, he claims that climate activism is a propaganda campaign by global buccaneers to plunder natural resources and impoverish humanity, and that climate activists are fraudsters.
Amplification of the above tweets was done through retweeting with the @amerix and @KenyanSays being the main seeders.
Network diagram showing accounts spreading narratives using the hashtag #climatescam (source: CfA using Gephi/Twitter)
While some believe that climate change in general is a scam, other users following the trend suggested that Africa had been duped.
A user called @Recherist, who posted his tweet on 8 September, claimed that the summit was a global scam.
Another user, Halidu Yakubu, with a Ghanaian flag on his X page, alluded to the summit's stamping of authority on the West and the destruction of Russia and China's latest craze for the African continent.
One user responding to CNN reporter Larry Madowo made the argument that Africa must develop, regardless of the means used to get there - subtly justifying the exploitation of fossil fuels for development.
A YouTube channel called Sovereignty, The Secret of Great Nation is hosted by a Ghanaian called Kofi Ali Adbul-Yekin. Kofi introduces his 37-minute video by saying that West Africans need to save themselves from 'hell'.
While he believes climate change is real, he thinks the recent summit was a sham.
"My problem is with the climate summit that was held in Nairobi, Kenya. I listened to everyone who spoke there. I watched from the beginning to the end and at the end I started to eat off my own fingers," he said.
The man went on to name people who attended the summit, and some, like Kenya's former president Uhuru Kenyatta, who were not even there.
He said the guest of honour - a non-existent protocol during the summit - was from the United Arab Emirates, referring to Sultan Al Jaber, the president of COP28.
The man, whose Youtube channel had about 12 subscribers at the time of writing, said he was an economist and that the "investment" Africa received during the summit was a "total fraud".
He brings in the industrialisation debate and calls Africans 'victims'.
Referring to the signing of $23 billion, he said African leaders had been given pen and paper to sign the continent away.
"This is how our destiny is signed away. This is what I call fake investment," he said.
Globally, a team of climate deniers who signed a World Climate Declaration said there was no such thing as a climate emergency.
They were backed by Nobel laureates and professors, mostly from the United States.
One of the issues they raise is that global warming is a little slower than expected, a phenomenon that scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which provides evidence-based reports on the state of warming, would disagree with.
"The report provides new estimates of the likelihood of exceeding 1.5°C of global warming in the coming decades and concludes that limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach without immediate, rapid and large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions," an IPCC statement said in 2021.
The World Climate Declaration also claims that carbon dioxide, the world's most potent greenhouse gas emitter, is plant food and therefore less harmful.
"CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential for all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is good for nature, greening the Earth: extra CO2 in the air has boosted the growth of the world's plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing crop yields worldwide," they said.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) explains that natural increases in carbon dioxide concentrations have periodically warmed the Earth's temperature during ice age cycles over the past million years or more.
