32 years since Hansen’s testimony. What changed?
Social media misinformation trumps our efforts to fight the climate crisis.
Source: unsplash
This week marks 32 years since NASA Scientist Dr. James Hansen addressed the U.S. Senate, testifying on human-induced climate change. Yes, this was in 1988, when the New York Times famously declared: “Global Warming has begun”. Has anything changed since then? Yes and no. The issue remains in the campaign promises of suited political leaders, yet policies hardly transgress the walls of government. What has changed, though, is that the climate emergency has evolved from a shocking revelation to a tedious and often contradictory narrative. Solutions to this problem still live in the imaginary, technological future. But is tomorrow here to save us?
For individuals like Tony Blair, the answer is an unequivocal yes. In his recent essay for New Statesman, he stressed that our future success is contingent on technological possibilities. However, relying on the promises of future innovation to solve present havoc is naive: geoengineering is not a solution, but rather, a puzzle piece. When innovation catches up to solve the problem, the issue might not look the same. This is because the difference between 1988 and now is that the growth of communication technology heavily complicates the narrative. The New York Times’ alarming headline sits in the outskirts of history, with social media and disinformation now undermining Hansen’s chilling testimony.
You don’t have to dig deep to realise that communication technologies thrive on misinformation. Climate breakdown, while a widely proven phenomenon, is deeply politicised, debated and argued. Donald Trump, Steven J. Milloy and Jim Inhofe are just a few of the prominent politicians who utilised communication technology to stir doubts and drive narrative controversy. From Trump’s countless tweets to Milloy’s appearance on Fox News in which he called climate science “a junk science”, it is undeniable that the narrative surrounding climate breakdown has become shaky, to say the least.
Joan Donavan, a researcher at Harvard University, brilliantly stated that “misinformation at scale is a feature of social media, not a bug.” And she wouldn’t be wrong. Even volunteer Reddit moderators have admitted that the Reddit science forum is a source of scepticism and misinformation. “I’m a Global Warming skeptic, and I invite you to change my mind” is just one example of popular science threads on the platform. While debate is an inevitable reality of the digital world, it often allows for facts to be downplayed, or even change entirely. Social media does not require you to use evidence to support assertions. Reliable research is not a central point of online forums and “confirmation bias” often overtakes fact-based reasoning.
The issue is that technologies lack congruence and cohesion. While geoengineering relies on scientific facts, communication technologies lack systematic moderation, allowing solvable problems to become malleable. Facebook exemplifies this: the site released its 2020 sustainability report, claiming that they reached net zero emissions for its global operations, while an independent report by Stop Funding Heat revealed that Facebook still fails to mention climate misinformation in its community and advertising standards. This allows the decay of very same facts that Facebook bases its climate policies on. Ironically, technologies often work against each other, rather than for each other. Solving the problem may be achievable, but maintaining its urgency and validity is what is difficult.
For a pragmatic society, we rely a lot on the future to solve our problems. But even when technological promises seem like appealing solutions, we forget that technologies often contradict, complicate, and even exacerbate our problems. 30 years after his 1988 testimony, Hansen argued: “The solution isn’t complicated, it’s not rocket science.” However, the equation is not as simple as problem + solution = resolution. Just like in every soap opera, the narrative is hardly coherent: there’s always a cheating husband or an evil twin complicating events. The climate tale undeniably falls within those tracks, only instead of a pantomime villain, it’s disinformation that is complicating the story.