Fake News is Exacerbating Climate Change: Here's Why

It has been proven countless times over the course of the past half-century that climate change and global warming are real, both National Geographic & NASA have confirmed it, yet the issue has been extremely politicized. In America, this has resulted in fortellings of doom and gloom from the Left, and borderline insane efforts to downplay reality from the Right. Giving rise on both ends of the political spectrum, to ridiculous fact-bending extremism to promote either ignoring the problem, or going to impossible and threatening lengths to fix it.

The left takes incidents like the recent fires; A California blaze caused by an accident during a Gender Reveal party ,the loss of thousands of acres of Amazon Rain Forest to a forest fire, and a huge bushfire and extinction of Koalas in Australia. Using them as tools to blow the effects of climate change way out of proportion to promote the urgency of reducing human impact on the climate.

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Amazon Rain Forest fire from New York Times taken by Eraldo Perez

While this is a noble goal we should strive for, many climate activists, journalists and experts, have urged that exaggeration and fear-mongering are not going to help, if anything they'll make things worse. According to “Why Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong” there are several instances in which the statements that paint the effects of climate change as extremely severe, actually have little to do directly with climate change. For example, take the major examples from Australia, Koalas are now functionally extinct, but that could’ve happened whether the climate changed dramatically or not. While the recent bushfire was the most devastating one in decades, it has more so to do with humans moving closer and closer to bushfire hot spots. Both of these examples have to do with a major factor of what causes global warming, population growth, but aren’t actual examples of climate change.

UK teens protesting during the Youth Strike 4 Climate event

By immediately going into a “the planet is dying” holier-than-thou tirade every time a fire or a hurricane rages through. It ends up putting many people into the defeatist mindset of “why should I care if the planet is doomed no matter what I do?” or allows their Confirmation Bias to thrive in the assumption that those who raise concerns about the climate are the crazy ones, not those among us who deny the scientific truth. It also sews seeds of fundamental misunderstandings about how climate change actually works and how we as individuals can help slow its seemingly inevitable and undeniably deadly progress, which will hurt us in the long run.

On the flip-side, you have "news outlets" like climate.news that have titles such "Real Scientists Declare: there is no climate emergency" which still continue to decry scientific reality as a hoax. With other such ridiculous claims such as Bill Nye not being a scientist, and that Great Thunberg has been abused and brainwashed by the Eco-Fascist agenda. Now, the term “real scientists” is inherently suspicious, but even upon closer examination, this article and others like it have very few places in which they can credit their sources or statements with actual scientific research, merely echoing other sites that avidly decry climate change as a hoax.

Unfortunately, regardless of the facts, the vast majority of people are not extremely critical readers, and to be fair, fact-checking and reviewing everything you read on the internet would be absolutely exhausting, would simply take articles like these as fact. Especially if it already appeals to their preexisting beliefs. Which is why it should be up to journalists to debunk their own stories and not be blindly allowed to post falsehoods the way this “news website” has done.

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These two extremes generate apathy, whether out of overwhelming dread or fanatical disbelief, which results in the climate issue remaining under-helped and unresolved. No the world isn't literally on fire, but climate change is still real and needs to be addressed soon if not immediately. Just another frustrating layer of the world of Fake News we find ourselves bogged down by.