Climate change denial is increasing in young people as misinformation tactics have shifted, a new report has found.
The report, published by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), found that online climate denial content is moving away from outright denial, and more towards what is dubbed "New Denial", which involves undermining the effects of climate change and downplaying its impact.
This comes as 31 percent of 13 to 17-year-olds believe that climate change is "being purposefully over-exaggerated", according to a 2023 poll of U.K. teens by Survation for the CCDH.
"[There has been an] evolution from what we've called the Old Denial—which is the rejection of anthropogenic climate change [and] the reality of anthropogenic climate change—to the New Denial, which is undermining competence in solutions, and undermining a mining competence in science and scientists," Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the CCDH, said in a press conference. "The numbers are really stark from 2018 to 2023. We've seen New Denial go from 35 percent to 70 percent, and Old Denial collapse from 65 percent to 30 percent, of all the claims made on the YouTube videos that we analyzed."
The report made these findings after analyzing thousands of hours of YouTube videos posted by 96 channels between January 1, 2018, to September 30, 2023, using an AI model. They found that "Old Denial", involving direct denial that climate change exists, is fading, and "New Denial" is growing in popularity, championed by channels such as Jordan Peterson, PragerU and BlazeTV.
Specifically, the presence of Old Denial narratives such as "Global warming is not happening" dropped from 48 percent of videos to only 14 percent between 2018 and 2023, with "Humans are not causing global warming and climate change" declining from 17 to 16 percent.
Meanwhile, New Denial claims spiked: "Climate solutions won't work" jumped from being present in 9 to 30 percent of videos, "Climate science and the climate movement are unreliable" increased from 23 to 35 percent, and "The impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless" increased from 4 to 6.
Large numbers of teenagers spend a lot of time on YouTube: a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 71 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds used YouTube daily, and 16 percent report being on the site nearly constantly. Therefore, it's likely that many teens are being regularly exposed to climate denialist videos.
"When YouTube algorithms are introduced into this scenario, the distorting impact of disinformation, across various domains, is strengthened as we are guided to explore other sources of similar misinformation," Lawrence Torcello, an associate professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, told Newsweek.
It's also likely that teens in the U.S. are being affected in much the same way that this report found U.K. teens are.
"YouTube videos are a common gateway for denialist propaganda and those are just as popular in the USA as they are in the UK," Lee McIntyre, a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and misinformation expert, told Newsweek. "Years back I interviewed about twenty Flat Earthers about how they became radicalized into their alternative, counter-intuitive (false) view. Every one of them told me it was through YouTube videos."
"The true goal of climate deniers is not necessarily to get you to believe that climate change isn't happening but to delay any action so they can continue to make a profit. This is the same strategy that tobacco companies used in the 1950s. Conspiracy theorists/disinformers are so good at this because they are exploiting well-known cognitive biases that all of us have. Mere exposure to fraudulent information is enough to convince some people. The message may evolve as they target a new, slightly more sophisticated audience, but the goal remains the same: climate inaction," McIntyre explained.
Despite the success in communicating that climate change is happening and is real, there has been less focus on sharing information about solutions and the impacts of the climate, which New Denial seems to have latched onto and made their talking point.
"It's a story of the success of the climate movement, and climate advocacy and climate science. They've been really effective in communicating that science over a period of years. But what has been less effective is the communications around solutions, in part because quite often, it's industry or government or others that are having to do that communication, and they just haven't been as effective," Ahmed said. "So the bad guys are really looking for opportunities to undermine action on climate change. And they can do that either by undermining the science or by undermining later on in the chain."
The report also found that many of these channels have numerous paid adverts running on videos touting these claims, which Ahmed says is only serving to incentivize posting views like these online.
"The fact is that there is a reward given for getting maximum viewers. It's an accelerated incentivized game of trying to produce the most compelling content possible. So there's not just a push factor of 'Well, I want to have it seen', but there's also that there's that potential economic reward at the end of the line," Ahmed said.
"You can choose who you do business with, you can't claim to be green, and then be the world's biggest megaphone for lies about climate change," Ahmed said. "Don't monetize, don't reward it. And don't profit from it yourself. You can't claim to be green. And then both monitor both profit from and reward climate denial content. That's a that's an obscene position."
Tackling this won't be easy, and will involve more communication about the topics that the New Denial claims target, including climate solutions.
"I think we have to keep communicating the basic science, what we've learned," Ahmed told Newsweek at the press conference. "[The climate change movement] has been incredibly effective in explaining how a tragedy of the commons affects us each as individuals. They have done an incredibly effective job at explaining how the carbonization of our economy and the Industrial Revolution and everything that emanates from there has affected each of us."
"So I think that we have to keep confidently asserting the basic science, trying to find new ways to communicate that to people. But we now know that there is a new area that we have to really clarify for people: to give them understanding about how solutions work, how they are cost-effective, how we as individuals, but also we as voters, in terms of voting in politicians who will do the right thing, and take the right systemic, make the right systemic changes so that we can decarbonize our economies and avert the worst ravages of climate change."
"I think it is about knowing where knowing what they already know that they can communicate and persuade people because they've done that with anthropogenic climate change. The challenge now is to do that for a different kind of denial," he said.
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About the writer
Jess Thomson is a Newsweek Science Reporter based in London UK. Her focus is reporting on science, technology and healthcare. ... Read more
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