Remember the last time you saw pictures of the frozen sea? Or when was the last snowy winter from December to February? Or when did autumn feel like autumn, with rain, lighter or longer? You know when every summer you say it’s warmer than last year? And you seem to feel like the sun is burning worse than before even though the temperatures are about the same?
And surely you’ve jumped out of your boots and straight into your sneakers, not knowing what a “spring shoe” looks like, i.e. a pair to wear during those months when it’s neither too cold nor too hot. Or maybe you’ve worn them, but not for more than a few days in a row or a few weeks at most all year.
Then, you’ve probably heard about the increasingly harsh winters in the US, the “black summer” in Australia where thousands of animals and a million hectares of vegetation burned in 2020, or the extreme drought in southern Spain that leaves entire communities without drinking water for days on end.
Well, for many people around us all of this is either “not real”, “exaggerations”, part of a “global plan to impoverish the population”, or “globalist manipulations”. In short, it’s the phenomenon of climate denialism, i.e. all the conspiracy theories that claim climate change doesn’t exist and therefore we have nothing to worry about and nothing to do about it.
The promoters of climate denialism are spreading false information (fake news) in the public space, especially on social media, about climate, the environment and how our lives are being affected more and more every year. Basically, they are telling us that what we feel we “don’t feel” is actually in our imagination or manipulation. That what we observe or feel more and more strongly from year to year, be it drought, cold, floods or anomalies occurring in nature at a certain time of the year does not exist.
Climate denialism among MEPs
Among the people who are rolling out climate denialism on social media in Romania is MEP Cristian Terheș, currently a candidate of the extremist AUR party for a new mandate as an MEP.
Terheș insinuates that global warming is “a scarecrow” like the “ice age of 30-40 years ago”, and from the European Parliament he ridicules the work of environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg, who he says “has no expertise” to talk to the public about climate change and says her activities are pure propaganda. Terheș invokes the need for environmental experts’ opinions as if they did not exist, despite the increasing number of alarming studies published year after year. See some of them here.
Terheș doubles down in another speech on “climate change hysteria” and says Greta Thunberg’s place is “in school, not on the streets”.
In a video appearance on Robert Turcescu’s online show about the “Celsius dictatorship”, Terheș talks about “lies promoted by neo-Marxists” and “a law that will lead to impoverishment”.
Also Terheș, with no education in the field, talks about how the amount of carbon in the atmosphere “is normal”.
Another person who questions heat itself and the basic principles of physics is Gheorghe Piperea, a lawyer by profession and candidate for the extremist AUR party in the European Parliament elections. In a Facebook post, he wonders whether it’s normal for it to be cooler in the shade and why the car dashboard shows a higher temperature than the thermometer.
‘No global warming’, on extremist or pro-Russian lines
Climate denialism is also supported by another Romanian political figure, Ilan Laufer, former minister for the business environment in the Mihai Tudose (PSD) government, current leader of a “sovereignist bloc” and former political partner of the extremist AUR party. Ilan Laufer claims that global warming is “just a scam to impoverish the population”.
Laufer’s “sovereignist bloc” also includes the Coalition for the Nation, led by Dan Chitic, a lawyer promoted by the Russian propaganda organ Sputnik, a supporter of Romania’s exit from the EU, as well as Ninel Peia’s Neamul Românesc party, an anti-vaccinist and the political creator of Diana Șoșoaca, the pro-Russia senator and head of the extremist SOS party.
Another promoter of climate denialism is Sorin Constantinescu, a key figure in the slot machine industry, whom Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu accused of blackmail and who was eventually recruited by the extremist party AUR. Details, here.
Constantinescu says that “global warming is a manipulation” and that “carbon dioxide noxides are 0.00001, but that’s how much we’re getting into with Greta, and with warming, don’t put on any more clothes (…) we are very manipulable, that’s why they want to ban cash” (another fake news story rolled out in Romania).
But a strong core of climate denialism in Romania coincides with the core of the promoters of Russian rhetoric, so-called journalists who have coalesced into an entity called the Romanian Press Club, which includes Iosefina Pascal, Adrian Severin, Ion Cristoiu, Cozmin Gușă and Sorin Roșca Stănescu.
- Context.ro published the investigation “The Network of Lies” in which journalists show who spreads pro-Kremlin propaganda, conspiracies and disinformation in Romania. Among the characters are also those mentioned above.
Cozmin Gșă and his son Andrei own the Gold “information” group (which includes the radio station of the same name, fined many times by the National Audiovisual Council for disinformation).
On the airwaves of Gold FM, which have been rolling out powerful fake news and numerous Russian narratives about the war in Ukraine, several climate change conspiracy theories have also been propagated.
Some examples of climate denialism on Gold FM via Facebook, with Andrei Gușă, Cozmin Gușă, Bogdan Comaroni (a journalist promoted by the Gold & solidnews “media” group, also owned by Gușă), Iosefina Pascal and others:
- Climate change is not a real problem: “The global warming psychosis will cause large masses of people to spend more time in the virtual universe/ The interest of globalists is to spend as much time as possible in the virtual world in order to be disinterested in the policies practiced in the real world”;
- Climateism scams so that some can make money: “Climateism impositions are scams under which the world’s shysters make lots of money! The population’s cheating is part of the plan” (Bogdan Comaroni is a journalist with a degree in Electrical Engineering, according to his LinkedIn account, but he issues opinions about the Earth’s rotations and the activity around it as if he had a degree);
- The EU is hypocritical in the fight against global warming: Petrișor Peiu argues that the EU is “hypocritical” for choosing, after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, to give up dependence on Russian gas and reintroduce the use of coal: “In the rush to give up Russian gas, Germany and Poland have returned to coal. It pollutes twice as much!”. Petrișor Peiu is an economic analyst who preaches economic nationalism, close to the extremist AUR party. Read more here.
- Fires are man-made, not by drought: Iosefina Pascal talks about “aberrant experiments” on the climate and how “we need to manipulate the climate to combat the effects of climate change”. Iosefina Pascal is a frequent feature in Sputnik, Russia’s leading propaganda publication, which devoted nearly 30 pieces to her, praising her for her “courage” and “key issues she points out” in 2020 alone, when she was campaigning against COVID restrictions. Details, here.
Background. What studies say and the retreat of specialists to other networks
One of the virtual places where conspiracies are aired or climate change studies are questioned is Elon Musk’s X (ex-Twitter), after changing its display algorithms. For example, several scientists have left the social network after facing an avalanche of insults and even threats on X/Twitter after climate denialism skyrocketed following Musk’s takeover of the network.
Elon Musk himself told a far-right political event in Italy in December 2023 that “oil and gas should not be demonised in the medium term and that “the climate change alarm is overblown in the short term”, adding that the green movement may have gone too far, causing people to lose faith in the future. At the same event, Musk declared himself an “environmentalist”.
Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, argued that
- “In response to almost every tweet about climate change, I am inundated with responses from verified accounts with misleading or misinformed claims.”
Glaciologist Ruth Mottram, followed by more than 10,000 people on Twitter, has moved on to another platform because:
- “I haven’t encountered insults or even people questioning climate change there,” she told AFP.
Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, himself regularly attacked online, believes:
- “The intensification of disinformation is organized and orchestrated by opponents of climate policy.”
And the examples could go on to at least 100, the number of climate scientists estimated by analysts to have left Twitter because of the insults, after Musk took over the network and broadcast that he intended for “right-wingers to see more left-wing content and left-wingers to see more right-wing content”.
From Greenland’s Inuit to Africa’s children, from coral reefs, famous ski resorts, coffee crops, young people’s mental health, the grapes from which champagne is made, Tajikistan’s food supply, Spain’s waterless cities, disastrous fires in Chile, Australia or Greece, or violent storms and floods in Europe, glaciers in Hymalaia or the ‘incendiary’ forms of lightning that can occur from excessive lightning strikes and other extreme forms of weather and nature, all exist, we feel them more strongly from year to year and they are linked to climate change.
The UN said in July 2023 that climate change was “out of control” after the warmest week measured by meteorologists on Earth: “I believe we are moving to a catastrophic situation, as demonstrated by the last two temperature records,” the organisation said at the time.
Except that 2024 has, at least for the first few months of the year, surpassed the temperature records set during the same period in 2023, and is likely to be an even warmer year overall than the previous one, says the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). So it may even get warmer.
A report released at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2024, showed that climate change could cause millions of deaths by 2050, as well as serious illness and high costs to health systems. The greatest risk is from flooding, and the study’s authors looked at six main consequences of climate change: floods, droughts, heat waves, tropical storms, forest fires and rising sea levels.
According to the study, cited by Reuters, climate change could cause up to 14.5 million deaths worldwide by 2050 and an additional cost burden totalling $1.1 trillion for health systems. Read more about the study here.
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