In 1995, a leading group of scientists convened by the United Nations declared that they had detected a “human influence” on global temperatures with “effectively irreversible” consequences. In the coming decades, 99.9 percent of scientists would come to agree that burning fossil fuels had disrupted the Earth’s climate.

Yet almost 30 years after that warning, during the hottest year on Earth in 125,000 years, people are still arguing that the science is unreliable, or that the threat is real but we shouldn’t do anything about climate change. Conspiracies are thriving online, according to a report by the coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation released last month, in time for the U.N. climate conference in Dubai. Over the past year, posts with the hashtag #climatescam have gotten more likes and retweets on the platform known as X than ones with #climatecrisis or #climateemergency. 

By now, anyone looking out the window can see flowers blooming earlier and lakes freezing later. Why, after all this time, do 15 percent of Americans fall for the lie that global warming isn’t happening? And is there anything that can be done to bring them around to reality? New research suggests that understanding why fake news is compelling to people can tell us something about how to defend ourselves against it.

People buy into bad information for different reasons, said Andy Norman, an author and philosopher who co-founded the Mental Immunity Project, which aims to protect people from manipulative information. Due to quirks of psychology, people can end up overlooking inconvenient facts when confronted with arguments that support their beliefs. “The more you rely on useful beliefs at the expense of true beliefs, the more unhinged your thinking becomes,” Norman said. Another reason people are drawn to conspiracies is that they feel like they’re in on a big, world-transforming secret: Flat Earthers think they’re seeing past the illusions that the vast majority don’t.

The annual U.N. climate summits often coincide with a surge in misleading information on social media. As COP28 ramped up in late November, conspiracy theories circulated claiming that governments were trying to cause food shortages by seizing land from farmers, supposedly using climate change as an excuse. Spreading lies about global warming like these can further social divisions and undermine public and political support for action to reduce emissions, according to the Climate Action Against Disinformation report. It can also lead to harassment: Some 73 percent of climate scientists who regularly appear in the media have experienced online abuse.

Part of the problem is the genuine appeal of fake news. A recent study in Nature Human Behavior found that climate change disinformation was more persuasive than scientific facts. Researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland had originally intended to see if they could help people fend off disinformation, testing different strategies on nearly 7,000 people from 12 countries, including the United States, India, and Nigeria. Participants read a paragraph intended to strengthen their mental defenses — reminders of the scientific consensus around climate change, the trustworthiness of scientists, or the moral responsibility to act, for example. Then they were subjected to a barrage of 20 real tweets that blamed warming on the sun and the “wavy” jet stream, spouted conspiracies about “the climate hoax devised by the U.N.,” and warned that the elites “want us to eat bugs.” 

The interventions didn’t work as hoped, said Tobia Spampatti, an author of the study and a neuroscience researcher at the University of Geneva. The flood of fake news — meant to simulate what people encounter in social media echo chambers — had a big effect. Reading the tweets about bogus conspiracies lowered people’s belief that climate change was happening, their support for action to reduce emissions, and their willingness to do something about it personally. The disinformation was simply more compelling than scientific facts, partly because it plays with people’s emotions, Spampatti said (eliciting anger toward elites who want you to eat bugs, for example). The only paragraph that helped people recognize falsehoods was one that prompted them to evaluate the accuracy of the information they were seeing, a nudge that brought some people back to reality.

The study attempted to use “pre-bunking,” a tactic to vaccinate people against fake news. While the effort flopped, Norman said that doesn’t mean it shows “inoculation” is ineffective. Spampatti and other researchers’ effort to fortify people’s mental defenses used a new, broader approach to pre-bunking, trying to protect against a bunch of lines of disinformation at once, that didn’t work as well as tried-and-true inoculation techniques, according to Norman.

Norman says it’s crucial that any intervention to stop the spread of disinformation comes with a “weakened dose” of it, like a vaccine, to help people understand why someone might benefit from lying. For example, when the Biden administration learned of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine in late 2021, the White House began warning the world that Russia would push a false narrative to justify the invasion, including staging a fake, graphic video of a Ukrainian attack on Russian territory. When the video came out, it was quickly dismissed as fake news. “It was a wildly successful attempt to inoculate much of the world against Putin’s preferred narrative about Ukraine,” Norman said.

For climate change, that approach might not succeed — decades of oil-funded disinformation campaigns have already infected the public. “It’s really hard to think about someone who hasn’t been exposed to climate skepticism or disinformation from fossil fuel industries,” said Emma Frances Bloomfield, a communication professor at the University of Nevada, Los Vegas. “It’s just so pervasive. They have talking heads who go on news programs, they flood media publications and the internet, they pay lobbyists.”

Bloomfield argues that disinformation sticks for a reason, and that simply telling the people who fall for it that there’s a scientific consensus isn’t enough. “They’re doubting climate change because they doubt scientific authorities,” Bloomfield said. “They’re making decisions about the environment, not based on the facts or the science, but based on their values or other things that are important to them.”

While political identity can explain some resistance to climate change, there are other reasons people dismiss the evidence, as Bloomfield outlines in her upcoming book Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators. “In the climate change story, we’re the villains, or at least partially blameworthy for what’s happening to the environment, and it requires us to make a lot of sacrifices,” Bloomfield said. “That’s a hard story to adopt because of the role we’re playing within it.” Accepting climate change, to some degree, means accepting inner conflict. You always know you could do more to lower your carbon footprint, whether that’s ditching meat, refusing to fly, or wearing your old clothes until they’re threadbare and ratty.

By contrast, embracing climate denial allows people to identify as heroes, Bloomfield said. They don’t have to do anything differently, and might even see driving around in a gas-guzzling truck as part of God’s plan. It’s a comforting narrative, and certainly easier than wrestling with ethical dilemmas or existential dread.

Those seeking to amplify tensions around climate change or spread doubt, such as fossil fuel companies, social media trolls, and countries like Russia and China, get a lot of bang for their buck. “It’s a lot easier and cheaper to push doubt than to push certainty,” Bloomfield said. Oil companies including Shell, ExxonMobil, and BP spent about $4 million to $5 million on Facebook ads related to social issues and politics this year, according to the Climate Action Against Disinformation report. To sow doubt, you only need to arouse some suspicion. Creating a bullet-proof case for something is much harder — it might take thousands of scientific studies (or debunking hundreds of counterarguments one by one, as Grist did in 2006).

The most straightforward way to fight disinformation would be to stop it from happening in the first place, Spampatti said. But even if regulators were able to get social media companies to try to stop the spread of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, dislodging them is a different story.  One promising approach, “deep canvassing,” seeks to persuade people through nonjudgmental, one-on-one conversations. The outreach method, invented by LGBTQ+ advocates, involves hearing people’s concerns and helping them work through their conflicted feelings. (Remember how accepting climate change means accepting you might be a tiny part of the problem?)

Research has shown that deep canvassing isn’t just successful at reducing transphobia, but also that its effects can last for months, a long time compared to other interventions. The strategy can work for other polarizing problems, too, based on one experiment in a rural metal-smelting town in British Columbia. After convincing several local governments across the West Kootenay region to shift to 100 percent renewable energy, volunteers with the nonprofit Neighbors United kept running into difficulties in the town of Trail, where they encountered distrust of environmentalists. They spoke to hundreds of residents, listening to their worries about losing jobs, finding common ground, and telling personal stories about climate change like friends would, instead of debating the facts like antagonists. A stunning 40 percent of residents shifted their beliefs, and Trail’s city council voted in 2022 to shift to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

Both facts and stories have a place, Bloomfield said. For conservative audiences, she suggests that climate advocates move away from talking about global systems and scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a “nameless, faceless, nebulous group of people” — and toward local matters and people they actually know. Getting information from friends, family, and other trusted individuals can really help.

“They’re not necessarily as authoritative as the IPCC,” Bloomfield said. “But it helps you connect with that information, and you trust that person, so you trust that information that they’re resharing.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why people still fall for fake news about climate change on Dec 18, 2023.

This story was originally published Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action. 

A proposal that would allow industries to permanently stash climate-polluting carbon dioxide beneath U.S. Forest Service land puts those habitats and the people in or near them at risk, according to opponents of the measure.

Chief among opponents’ concerns is that carbon dioxide could leak from storage wells or pipelines and injure or kill people and animals, as well as harm the trees in the forests and their habitat, said Victoria Bogdan Tejeda, attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. 

“There are enough broad-ranging concerns with this rule that this isn’t the time to move forward and experiment when the consequences are so high,” said Bogdan Tejeda.

In 2020, a carbon dioxide pipeline ruptured in Mississippi, sending 49 people to the hospital. 

The debate about the proposal in the U.S. comes as the capture and storage of carbon to mitigate climate change was one of the talking points at the UN COP28 climate summit in Dubai. 

Concentrations of the gas, which is odorless and heavier than oxygen, can also prevent combustion engines from operating. Bodan Tejeda, of the Center for Biological Diversity, worries that people even a mile or two from a carbon dioxide leak could start suffocating and have no way to escape.

Proponents of the proposal, however, say storage can be managed safely, and such regulatory changes are needed to meet the nation’s climate goals. 

“The geologic storage of CO₂ beneath federal lands offers a significant opportunity to catalyze a domestic carbon management industry that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions while creating and maintaining high-paying jobs,” said Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, a non-partisan collaboration of more than 100 companies, unions, conservation and environmental policy organizations.

Capturing carbon either from industrial processes that burn fossil fuels, or directly from the air, and storing it permanently underground is considered necessary to stave off the worst impacts of climate change under several scenarios. But not all underground spaces can permanently hold the carbon, which is injected hundreds of feet underground. So developers have been in a land grab of sorts in Louisiana, Texas, and elsewhere for suitable underground so-called pore space. 

Jim Furnish, a retired U.S. Forest Service deputy chief who consults on forestry issues, said he was startled by the proposal. He said it’s a reversal of historic Forest Service policy that only allows temporary use of forest service lands, usually for five to 20 years. 

More broadly, the measure would “provide a powerful incentive to continue to burn fossil fuels,” Furnish said. “It’s the opposite of a virtuous cycle.” 

Stolark says unless federal authorities provide clarity for carbon storage on federal lands, which comprise 30 percent of all U.S. surface lands, the nation will not be able to meet 2050 greenhouse gas reduction targets. 

The Forest Service manages about 193 million acres in the United States. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, about 130 million acres of suitable carbon storage is under federal land, including the Forest Service.

The Forest Service said the Nov. 3 proposal would allow it to evaluate such permanent storage requests; it is not currently considering any specific proposals to store carbon under its lands. A spokesman said the agency previously received and denied applications for underground carbon storage on two forests in the South, an epicenter for carbon capture and storage proposals.

Any such project would have to follow U.S. environmental laws, the service said. The Environmental Protection Agency would regulate the wells under its underground injection well program. 

If the rule is finalized, disruptions to forests would begin long before any carbon dioxide was piped underground, said June Sekera, an economist and policy researcher at Boston University and The New School who has been studying carbon capture. 

Drilling rigs and heavy equipment would be brought into forests to evaluate whether the spaces under the forests were suitable for carbon storage. Trees would have to come down to make way for that equipment, and many more trees would likely be felled to make way for the pipelines. Infrastructure for the injection wells would be permanent, she said.

“All of the other recreation and human uses of these forests are at odds with this type of use because this type of use is dangerous,” said Laura Haight, U.S. policy director at Partnership for Policy Integrity, which focuses on forest issues.

Almost 200 carbon capture and storage projects have been proposed in the United States in the last five years, many spurred in the past year by increased incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act intended to address global warming. 

The Forest Service, when contacted, did not respond to a question of how those incentives of up to $180 per ton of carbon stored would be handled if the carbon were injected under federal lands.

About 140 groups have asked the Forest Service to extend the 60-day public comment period on the proposal, which now ends January 2, for another 60 days. It would be, according to the groups, the first time the United States would permit CO₂ to be injected under federal lands. 

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, R-Calif., ranking member of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries, said he also intends to call for an extension of the comment period. Huffman called the measure a “sacrifice of public lands as a life support for fossil fuels.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Plan to stash planet-heating carbon dioxide under U.S. national forests alarms critics on Dec 17, 2023.

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For Muskan, the arrival of summer in Delhi is the “beginning of hell.” As temperatures in her cramped, densely populated east Delhi neighborhood often soar above 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit), she dreams of only one thing: air conditioning.

During the day, in the tiny, windowless kitchen where she cooks for her family, she often feels like she will collapse from the heat and her health deteriorates. Nights are even more painful. Sleep becomes almost impossible in their single-room apartment.

Her three children, sticky and uncomfortable, cry out begging to be cooled down, and she wakes every five minutes to douse them and herself with cold water and wet scarves.

The single fan hanging from the flaking yellow ceiling does little to ease their woes and the putrid stench from the sewage and festering rubbish means opening a window is impossible. In any case, as she points out: “It’s usually even hotter outside.”

In her previous marriage, the 30-year-old had tasted the sweet relief of air conditioning in Delhi’s increasingly blistering summers. But after her husband died, her family remarried her to a scrap dealer, whose earnings are barely enough to pay for rent and food. The costs involved in renting or buying an air conditioner (AC) are far beyond their means, yet she fears for her family without one.

“I can’t keep seeing my children suffer like this,” she says. “I keep promising that next summer we will get an AC but the reality is I know we can’t afford it. But as more and more people around us buy ACs, the hotter it gets outside. Soon, I don’t know how we will survive.”

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India’s market for ACs is growing faster than almost anywhere else in the world. A mixture of rising incomes, rising temperatures in an already hot and humid climate, and increasing affordability and access are driving more and more Indians towards buying or renting one as soon as they can afford it – and sometimes even when they cannot.

Between 8 percent and 10 percent of the country’s 300 million households – home to 1.4 billion people – have an AC, but that number is expected to hit close to 50 percent by 2037, according to government projections. A report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that by 2050, India will have more than 1 billion ACs in operation.

Vaibhav Chaturvedi, a fellow at the council on energy, environment and water, a Delhi thinktank, was among those who believed AC penetration would exceed all current predictions.

“Traditionally, air conditioning was viewed as a luxury commodity but not any more,” he said. “It is seen as a necessity to survive. The way the market is developing, it could be that 100 percent of households have AC by 2050.”

Others are more sceptical that ACs will become so widespread among India’s poor people, and have raised concerns that access to sufficient cooling, particularly to work, sleep, and stay healthy, could drive up the already rampant inequality in the country even further.

The problem of keeping cool in increasingly hotter temperatures — while not exacerbating the climate crisis in the process — is not India’s alone. Globally, AC numbers have increased to more than 2 billion. More than 20 percent of all the world’s electricity is used by fans or ACs, a proportion that is expected to soar further in coming years.

It could have significant implications for the global effort to keep temperature rises within 1.5 degrees C. Around the world, ACs are still largely inefficient and use a huge amount of electricity mostly generated by fossil fuels.

En masse, they can drive up outside temperatures as they pump out heat from indoors to outdoors. They contain chemical refrigerants which, if leaked, can be almost 1,500 times more environmentally destructive than CO₂.

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At this year’s UN COP28 climate summit, which took place in Dubai, the issue was at the forefront of discussions as some of the world’s largest economies signed up to the first ever global cooling pledge, led by the UN environment program.

So far, more than 60 signatories including the US, UK, Nigeria, and Brazil have signed on to cut their cooling emissions by 68 percent by 2050. India, however, has not joined.

There is little doubt in the minds of experts and citizens that India’s need for ACs is both essential and unstoppable. March 2022 was the hottest since 1901 and there were more than 200 heatwave days across the whole year. This February was the hottest in 122 years and in June a deadly heatwave in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar killed at least 100 people, which is probably a radical undercount.

In July, during the pre-monsoon humidity in Delhi the wet bulb temperature hit a record high of 30 degrees C — when it hits 35 degrees C, the human body, no matter how healthy, can not survive for more than a few hours as it can no longer cool itself down.

Experts commonly point to “cooling degree days” to demonstrate India’s overwhelming – and largely unmet — requirement for cooling: a figure calculated by the number of hours in a day that temperatures go above 18 degrees C.

By this calculation, India has more than 3,000 cooling degree days per year, one of the highest in the world. If applied to all 1.4 billion people in the country, it comes to more than 3 trillion annually — a figure four times higher than China and five times higher than the US.

“People are going to buy ACs, that’s a given,” says Satish Kumar, president and executive director of the Alliance for an Energy Efficient Economy.

“The latent demand for cooling is massive. What we have to focus on is how to chart a more sustainable and energy efficient path, one where air conditioning is not the be all and end all solution.”

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Extreme heat is particularly problematic in cities such as Delhi, home to 32 million people, where the number of hot days is expected to increase by 33 percent, heatwaves will be 30 times more likely and overall temperatures could rise by as much as 5 degrees C. By 2028, it will also become the most populous city on the planet, according to UN projections.

A phenomenon known as “urban heat islands” has already emerged across India’s capital. Here, surfaces of homes, roads and rooftops are predominantly covered with concrete, brick, steel and tarmac, which absorb and trap the heat. Homes are often high-rise buildings packed tightly together and there are few trees to provide shade.

With an increasing number of ACs also belching out hot air into these confined, unventilated urban areas, temperatures sometimes rise 6 degrees C above the city average.

In the congested alleyways of old Delhi, in a neighbourhood known as Chandni Chowk, historically people have had ways of adapting to Delhi’s hot summers. Kamla, 65, a chai seller, lives in a traditional courtyard home, about a century old, which has thick walls to keep the inside cool, as well as several terraces and an outdoor kitchen for ventilation. Though Chandni Chowk is deemed an urban heat island, and often becomes one of the hottest places in Delhi, in the hot summer months Kamla and her children and grandchildren rely only on a single fan and sleep outside at night.

“AC is not a necessity for me, I have lived with this heat all my life” she says. “It is difficult but it is life. But people are different now, they can’t bear the summers for even a few days. I have seen many people are buying ACs as a status symbol even when they can’t afford it.”

But in Shaheen Bagh, another heat island neighborhood in Delhi where people mostly live in small modern high-rise buildings, Nazim Khan, 54, who has run his AC-rental business for more than a decade, described the rise in temperatures, desperation and demand he had witnessed first-hand.

“It’s a matter of survival,” he says. “I would say 50 percent of the apartments in this neighborhood are unlivable without an AC: they are small with no windows or ventilation even for cooking. I see families making huge sacrifices to afford one.”

For most families in this neighborhood, renting a secondhand AC is the only affordable option, though it often leaves them with the most inefficient models, which come with much higher electricity costs and are more prone to leaking gas.

It has become common for several families or groups to collectively rent out an AC to share the cost and then all sleep together in a single room for the summer months.

Khan rents out each of his 50 ACs, which are more than eight years old, for 7,000 rupees ($84) for a season that runs from April to October. During those months, his team of laborers run around the city non-stop installing and repairing the machines, which often break down in the extreme temperatures.

“We are like emergency workers,” he said. “Every summer I see more people dying. They say it was from one disease or another but we all know that it’s the terrible heat that leads to their death.”

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The vast amount of electricity that India’s growing number of ACs will require presents a significant challenge. Already during peak summertime hours, ACs have accounted for 40 percent to 60 percent of total power demand in the cities of Delhi and Mumbai. According to the IEA, by 2050, the amount of power India consumes solely for air conditioning is expected to exceed the total power consumption of all of Africa.

Most of this electricity is produced by burning coal, and while India’s capacity from renewables such as solar power is expanding, it is happening nowhere near as fast as the growth of the AC market, which will soon outpace all other household appliances.

India already struggles to meet its current power demand, with long power outages and load-shedding inflicted mostly on poorer districts during peak summer hours.

With peak demand likely to increase by another 60 percent in the next seven years – half of which would come from ACs, fans, and coolers – the government has also looked to boost coal production to help fill in the gaps, which is likely to drive up India’s CO₂ emissions even as it commits to net zero by 2070.

Nonetheless, many are working to ensure that India does not become overwhelmed by its growing cooling demand. In 2019, the Indian government became the first in the world to implement a national cooling action plan, which was described as ambitious in scope even if the subsequent implementation is moving slowly.

Individual states such as Tamil Nadu have also recently announced their own. The efficiency of ACs, seen as crucial to reducing the energy demand, is also increasing faster every year thanks to various initiatives, which will gradually also make the secondhand market more efficient.

Yet Rajan Rawal, a professor in energy performance at CEPT University in Ahmedabad, was among those emphasizing that ACs should not be considered the only solution to staying cool. “Buildings and urban planning, urban design have an important role to play,” he says.

India’s cities may already be hot and overcrowded, but estimates say that the number of buildings in India is expected to double in the next 20 years.

As India undergoes this huge, largely unregulated development boom, vast numbers of new homes and buildings are being constructed in the cheapest and quickest way possible; mostly from brick, steel, and concrete, which can quickly turn homes to ovens in the summer.

Little thought is given how to keep them cool or ventilated, except by assuming residents will install an AC. Meanwhile, the materials traditionally used in India to build heat-deflecting houses are largely being neglected.

While new building efficiency codes have been introduced, they are not mandatory. In India’s market, where price drives everything, few developers are willing to voluntarily take on any extra cost or added time to make new homes more suitable to extreme heat. Even cheap measures such as painting roofs white to deflect heat are still not widespread.

“Modern buildings are not a good skin,” says Rawal. “They are inefficient and drive up temperatures. Wherever the possibility exists, we must build climate response-sustainable or energy-efficient buildings to reduce the individual need required to cool down.”

Rajan also said that growing over-reliance on ACs in India put people at risk of losing their high tolerance and adaptation to heat, which will become increasingly more vital in coming years.

“It is a scientific fact that we will have more and more heatwaves, more and more severe conditions,” he says. “What AC does is it stops providing an opportunity to adapt. If we don’t sweat, if we don’t shiver for a few minutes every day, we will land ourselves in trouble.”

Aakash Hassan contributed reporting.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘A matter of survival’: India’s unstoppable need for air conditioners on Dec 16, 2023.