Pushing back against climate misinformation and climate silence

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The Sustainable Hour no. 513 | Transcript | Podcast notes

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Our guest in The Sustainable Hour no. 513 is John Cook, a Senior Research Fellow with the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change at the University of Melbourne.

John Cook researches using critical thinking, psychology, and gamification to counter misinformation about topics such as climate change and vaccines. He started of the Skeptical Science website which can be found at www.skepticalscience.com

John mentions a paper that found that a) attacks on scientists are a big part of climate misinformation and b) climate misinformation is transitioning towards solutions misinformation: 
→ Nature.com – 16 November 2021:
Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change

He also refers to a paper that found that 40% of climate misinformation on Twitter are ad hominem attacks, 20% are conspiracy theories: 
→ Arxiv – 24 April 2024:
Augmented CARDS: A machine learning approach to identifying triggers of climate change misinformation on Twitter

Research on climate silence and how it’s driven by pluralistic ignorance:
→ ScienceDirect, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Volume 47, September 2016, pages 79-90:
Climate of silence: Pluralistic ignorance as a barrier to climate change discussion

. . .

We start and end the Hour with clips from speeches by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and we end the Hour with Baba Brinkman‘s song ‘Lost In The Numbers’.

Find more links and details about Colin Mockett‘s Global Outlook and the Sky News clips we play in the transcript.

. . .

That’s it for the 513th Sustainable Hour. We all owe this week’s guest, John Cook, a great debt of gratitude for the time and effort that he has put into creating and continually updating his masterful website Skeptical Science. The fossil fuel psychopaths have devoted endless amounts of money – billions of dollars – to perpetuate their lies, half truths and misinformation all designed to prolong their demise. By creating and continually updating his website, www.skepticalscience.com, John has given all climate concerned people invaluable information to push back against these lies, half-truths and misinformation as we face up to this fossil fuel generated global calamity. 

John continues to do this in spite of the abuse and threats he has received right from the start. This is inspirational work in the truest sense of that word. We can’t recommend his work highly enough. Take the time to check out this website, you won’t regret it.

We’ll be back next week with more inspirational guests who are doing more than “their bit”. In John’s words: “Be yourself” and “don’t be silent about climate”.  

“The most important thing that all of us can do to help solve climate change is just open our mouths and talk about it to our friends and families. (…) What we can do is an all hands approach: that we all, including all citizens, can play a role in pushing back against misinformation. When people on social media platforms see their friends and peers pushing back against misinformation, that has an influence, that matters. So we can all make a difference. But certainly, I think we do need to see more courage from the media, from journalists, in pushing back against misinformation.”
~ John Cook, Skeptical Science

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Renewables versus nuclear – webinar

Dave Sweeney from ACF wrote:

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has not backed down from his dangerous proposal for Australia: replacing a CO2 problem with a high-level radioactive waste problem.

Future-focused environmentalists must fight against this slow, expensive and inadequate distraction from real climate action. Renewable energy now provides 40% of Australia’s electricity. Increasing our sun and wind power supply is our best and fastest way to slow climate impacts.

That’s why we’re organising together for a future that’s renewable, not radioactive!

Don’t Nuke the Climate, in collaboration with Friends of the Earth, the Australian Conservation Foundation and Nuclear Free WA are hosting a forum to discuss these important issues.

Will we see you there?

What: Don’t Nuke the Climate webinar
When: Saturday 3 August, 11am-12.30pm AEST (that’s 9am in WA and 10.30am in SA and NT) – the main discussion will last one hour, with an optional half-hour Q&A
Where: online on Zoom – register for the link

You’ll hear from me and other environmental, First Nations and impacted community voices. The session will be MC’d by author, commentator and former Senator Scott Ludlam.

It’s important to learn, network, and take collective action. Community power is the best antidote to dangerous nuclear power and it is far stronger when we come together.

A great, recent example of collective power was grassroots groups from the Coalition’s seven proposed nuclear reactor sites coming together to send a loud and resounding “No!” to the plan.

Lead organiser Wendy Farmer said, “I’m really hoping that it will show communities that united, we can really make a change. We can actually demand what we want as community. To me, it’s really important that we just aren’t dumped on and told ‘this is what’s good for you, and this is what’s going to happen’.” ¹

These communities are at the forefront of the Coalition’s irresponsible nuclear push. Join our webinar to learn how you can stand with them and how the Coalition’s move would impact the entire nation.

I hope to see you on the morning of Saturday 3 August!

For a cleaner and safer future,

Dave Sweeney
Nuclear Free Campaigner

¹ The Age: Can the Voices model help communities fight off nuclear reactors? 20 July 2024.

85 per cent of new electricity: from renewables

And you say renewables don’t work?

In a landmark year for renewable energy, 85% of new electricity generation capacity added globally in 2023 came from clean energy sources. This surge in clean energy adoption puts the world on track to meet the ambitious target of 16.4% annual growth in renewable energy capacity by 2030. Germany is well within reach of its goal of 80% renewable electricity by 2030, while Brazil is leading the G20 nations with an impressive 89% of its electricity coming from renewable sources. Even in traditionally coal-dependent China, clean energy is making waves. In May 2024, coal’s share of power generation hit a record low, driven by the country’s push for clean energy. 
Source: The Waggle newsletter from Project Regeneration

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Transcript of The Sustainable Hour no. 513

Antonio Guterres:
We are at the moment of truth, but we have a breakdown of trust.

Jingle:
The Sustainable Hour. For a green, clean, sustainable Geelong. The Sustainable Hour.

Anthony Gleeson:
Welcome to the Sustainable Hour. We’d like to acknowledge that we’re broadcasting from the land of the Wadawurrung people. We pay tribute to the elders past, present and those that earn that great honour in the future. Always was and always will be First Nations land. We also like to acknowledge that we can’t hope to have any form of climate justice without justice for First Nations people. And in their ancient wisdom, which they’ve honed from nurturing both their land and their communities for millennia before they were invaded, lies so many of the answers for us as we face up to the climate emergency.

Chris Kenny, Sky News:
Energy policies committed to pushing renewable energy and forcing out fossil fuels like coal and gas. Now, of course, these energy policies are driven by climate alarmism and a panicked and unrealistic eagerness to cut greenhouse gas emissions. And one of the reasons we don’t get a rational sensible debate about any of this is that the green left, including the Federal Labor government, are obsessed with climate alarmism, spreading fear and misinformation, sadly, about global warming.

Mik Aidt:
Australia, we need to talk. Sky News host Chris Kenny here says that climate alarmism and misinformation from the green left is spreading fear, unnecessary fear, that our unregulated burning of coal and gas and petrol is getting more and more dangerous. And according to him, caring about what’s happening to the climate, caring about the environment, and trying to regenerate the ecosystems that are falling apart, collapsing – like the Great Bear Reef – that’s, I’m sorry to say Chris Kenny, that’s not just a Melbourne inner-city hippie kind of thing driven by green lefties and misinformed fear. No, it’s actually what the scientists are observing and what we can see on the news. The scientists are telling us that we need to care about the climate. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. This would be the only way for us to survive on this planet. We have to start caring about nature. It’s those lies of Sky News – and the manipulation – that is dangerous. And it’s completely the other way around. It’s the lies and the manipulation from places such as Sky News that is so dangerous for all of us.

Really, if you think about it, the reason that humanity as a whole has allowed this climate emergency to continue escalating, knowingly, with all the scientists having been shouting at us for decades that we are the ones, we are the reason for all those problems that we are seeing – with record breaking heat temperatures, like right now in the Persian Gulf where the combination of heat and humidity makes it feel like that it’s 65 degrees Celsius in the air. Or with the news that’s coming in now that June… the global average on Earth was the hottest June ever recorded. Graphs of temperatures and of carbon emissions are going up and up. It’s getting out of hand.

But the fossil fuel companies are making record profits. So they’re doing everything they can to keep this drill-baby-drill party going on. In alliance with corrupt politicians and think tanks that go under these very nice sounding names like the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the Institute for Public Affairs, or Heartland Institute. And there’s this entire network, the Atlas Network – a global network of more than 500 of these so-called free market think tanks. 500 of them! And so far they’ve been successful in keeping the story that, ‘Oh, we don’t have to do anything.’

So many people out there have this attitude that, ‘As long as it’s legal, it must be because our government thinks it’s safe’. So we keep flying, we burn as much fossil fuels as we like, because we can. It’s legal. We don’t see that the reason it’s legal – even though it’s dangerous like hell to humanity and the future for our children and all life on the planet – is because of this think tank media-politician-produced smokescreen, lies and misinformation.

And now with Trump thundering on about his drill-baby drill and his plans to turn something which is already a climate destroying polluting nation like no other on the planet apart from China… If he wins the election, he will make sure to make the United States into a paradise for climate denial. And if nothing else, for that reason, we can’t just be quiet and polite about this topic anymore. We need to understand what’s going on.

So that’s what The Sustainable Hour will be all about today. I mean, we where we’re broadcasting this Sustainable Hour… it’s followed every week by a show where we have to listen to all sorts of fairy tales and manipulated fossil fuel promoting lies. And it’s fully legal, and it’s apparently okay with our station manager in the name of free speech – until we say no. No! It’s enough! We need to stop it because it’s dangerous. We need to speak up.

But before I get too entangled in that discussion, we also need to hear what’s actually happening around the world. What has the mainstream media missed out on? For that we have our man with the global outlook, Colin Mockett OAM, who’s eager to let us know all about it. What do you have for us today, Colin?

Colin Mockett’s Global Outlook:
Thank you, Mik. And our World Roundup this week begins in Italy, where it was quietly announced that electricity produced from renewable sources in the first six months of this year surpassed power that was generated from fossil fuels for the first time in that nation ever.

The figures are a boost for Italy’s efforts to pivot towards cleaner forms of generation. Under its energy and climate plan, Italy plans to increase the electricity produced by renewables to 63 per cent of the total by the end of this decade. Now this confirmed a report by the International Energy Authority which forecast that renewable generation would overtake coal in global electricity generation for the first time in 2025. The rise of renewable generation, essentially solar, wind and hydro, is likely to result in a small drop in CO2 emissions from the power sector in 2025. That’s the IEA report forecasted.

And that fits in with a media release after last week’s technology breakdown, which, if you remember, closed banks, supermarkets and airports and sent warning signals around the world that the demand for electricity is set to grow, especially in Australia. That’s there’s been a significant increase in the number of data centres in Australia, and this looms as a test for our own nation’s energy grid.

At the weekend we were warned that we might require more future energy than we planned. That’s because cloud-based computing and artificial intelligence accelerate the demand for data storage. 

Melbourne and Sydney have emerged as key locations worldwide for tech companies to place their data centres. That’s the name for vast industrial facilities that are housed in the house servers and send and receive data 24-7. The places where an update went wrong last weekend and cause those outages, that’s from one of the data centres. These centres require huge amounts of electricity to run their high-intensity computing and cooling systems. The existing data centres are already major power users in Australia. They’re estimated to consume about 5 per cent of the available generation, and they’re expected to drive further electricity demand growth alongside homes that are switching from gas to electric appliances and the growing adoption of electric vehicles.

In light of all this, new modelling from the American financial firm UBS suggests that official forecasts may be underestimating the scale of the extra demand that data centres could drive in the coming years, and will need an invigorated renewable generation sector. 

Elsewhere in the world, the U.S. government has announced plans to phase out completely single-use plastics in federal operations by 2035 as part of a broader effort to combat which it deems a rising global crisis. The U.S. government is the biggest buyer of goods and services. The decision could have a significant impact on global markets, spurring industries to develop new products and reducing the planet warming emissions associated with manufacturing plastics.

“Plastic production and waste have doubled over the past two decades, littering our oceans, poisoning the air of communities near production facilities and threatening public health”, the administration said.

Under its new goal, the government will phase out federal procurement of single-use plastics from food service operations, events and packages by 2027, and all federal operations by 2035. According to the non-profit Oceana, 15 million metric tonnes of plastic enter the oceans every year, including most of them are single-use plastics. And you might read that as being the new democratic administration planting a few hand grenades in the same way that Donald Trump did before he left office. Even if Trump wins he’s going to find it very difficult to roll back this sort of legislation that’s being brought in now. 

Now finally to Texas where the fast food chain ‘Whataburgers’ has gone viral in the wake of the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl. Beryl left around 1.8 million utility customers in Houston without power for most of last week. Thousands of people are still without power in isolated areas of Texas, as Houston experienced a post-hurricane heat wave with temperatures climbing into the mid 40’s… Amid frustrations with the local utility company, which is called ‘Centrepoint Energy’, it doesn’t have an Act that lists where the outages are still occurring. Many Houstonians became creative. They turned to the Whataburger app, which lists all of the company’s 56 franchise outlets in the region, and they state which ones are operating and which ones are closed.

Now this turned out to be the most effective data on where the region’s power cuts are taking place. Now bearing this in mind, I’ve included this as a potential tool to use if the UBS forecast is accurate and we face power cuts here in Victoria. I’m just telling you now that McDonald’s lists all of their Victorian restaurants on their website, and each of them tells you when they’re open and when they’re closed and when they’re operating. 

And that little tip ends my roundup for the week.

Jingle:
Listen to our Sustainable Hour – for the future.

Anthony Gleeson:
Our guest today is John Cook. John is a senior research fellow with the Centre for Behavioural Change at Melbourne Uni. He researches using critical thinking, psychology and gamification to counter misinformation about topics like climate change and vaccines. So John, thanks for coming on. Welcome to the Sustainable Hour.

John Cook:
G’day, Tony. It’s great to talk to you. Yes, so in 2007, I am well, even going back a little bit further from there, I got into some arguments with my father-in-law about climate change, and I wasn’t really that engaged with the issue at the time, but he was throwing these arguments at me that climate change wasn’t real, it wasn’t human-caused, it was all a hoax. And I started digging into it and found that his arguments weren’t based on science. And like a son-in-law that doesn’t want to lose an argument with his father-in-law at the next family get-together. I started in-depth research into what the science said about each of the different possible arguments that I be encountering next time we got together. And then, like the massive nerd that I am, I started building a database of each argument and what the science said about each climate myth. At some point, I realised other people have these kinds of arguments with their cranky uncles in their family, and this might be a useful resource for other people. So I cleaned it up and started the website Skeptical Science, designed to be a resource for debunking climate misinformation using peer-reviewed science.

Mik Aidt:
There’s so many people out there talking many, many different stories about climate. What are the most common ones?

John Cook:
Yeah, I’ve been researching that very question over the last couple of years, actually using machine learning to quantify what are the most common arguments. And it depends on where you look. Twitter looks a lot different to blogs, for instance, surprisingly. But the overall picture is that the most common form of climate misinformation is attacking the science or attacking the scientists. So it’s not about providing an alternative explanation for what’s happening in the world. It’s about just eroding public trust in climate science.

Mik Aidt:
So what’s your response to people like Bjørn Lomborg? He’s actually from Denmark. I think he lives in America now, but he comes up with a lot of data, which is actually real. But he interprets it’s very different than other people do.

John Cook:
There’s a misinformation technique that academics call ‘poltering’. You could also call it ‘cherry picking’, which is using factual statements to actually mislead people. And Bjørn Lomborg is one of the vivid examples that I use. I actually use it in my book, ‘Cranky Uncle’, where he argues, looking at real sea level rise data, he says, ‘Look at the sea level rise over the last two years. It hasn’t really gone up much. So maybe the problem is not as bad as people are saying.’

And when you look at that two-year sea level rise, yeah, it hasn’t gone up very much because data jumps up and down from year to year because of natural fluctuations. But when you look at the long-term trend, sea level rise is clearly going up over a period of decades. So what he’s doing is just taking a very short period to paint a misleading picture distracting from the bigger picture, which is long-term sea level rise.

Colin Mockett:
Hey, John, can I just come in very quickly? There is the common Australian way of spelling sceptical and the American way of spelling sceptical. Can you spell out to us what your, can you spell out for our readers how they can access your website, please?

John Cook:
Yeah, so SkepticalScience.com is spelled “S-K-E-P-T-I-C-A-L science dot com”. The official reason why I spelt sceptical with a K is because that’s how you spell it in America. And the U.S. is one of the chief places where misinformation starts and where people believe climate misinformation. So it was really a website for a predominantly U.S. audience. That’s the official reason why it’s about with a K. The real reason why it’s about with a K was back in 2007, that’s how I thought you spelt sceptical.

Mik Aidt:
John, there seems to be a rise of misinformation about renewables. For instance, we hear a lot about wind turbines that are killing birds or killing whales. And we hear stories about EVs don’t work or generally a story about the renewables are never going to work. Is that part of what you are looking at in your sceptical database?

John Cook:
Yes, I mentioned before that the big trend in our data was attacks on science. But the second biggest trend we see is a long term transition away from science misinformation towards misinformation attacking solutions. So that includes policy to reduce emissions, but also renewable energy, wind, energy, solar panels and electrical vehicles. And the general conclusion we take from our research is that the future of climate misinformation is going to be attacking climate solutions.

Anthony Gleeson:
John, have you mentioned before about attacks on scientists to, I guess, as part to try and intimidate them to be quiet about and not tell the truth. Have you experienced any of that yourself as the person who put together a whole website debunking a lot of misinformation?

John Cook:
Yes, definitely. That’s been a big part of my personal experience working on climate misinformation. And it got especially intense in 2013 and 2014, which is when we published a scientific paper finding 97 per cent scientific consensus on human-caused global warming. That paper got a lot of attention. It was tweeted by President Obama and got a lot of media attention. And then following all the positive attention, there was a wave of negative attention, which hasn’t really stopped. We’ve got a database. I am collecting databases. As I said, I’m a nerd. I have a database of all the articles attacking our 97 per cent consensus paper, well over 500 articles now, including reports, mainstream media articles, blogs, even congressional hearings in the US attacking our research.

Colin Mockett:
Hey, John, do you take it that little bit further and find out who’s funding the misinformation?

John Cook:
The challenge with tracking funding is the funders have found ways to get money to climate deniers in ways that can’t be tracked. They use dark money routes, such as organisations called Donors Trust. So they donate all their money to Donors Trust and then Donors Trust distribute it to different organisations that produce climate misinformation. But it’s like a firewall between the recipient and the funder.

So from the outside, we don’t know. it used to be back in the day, fossil fuel companies would fund conservative think tanks who produce climate misinformation directly. That doesn’t happen so much anymore. tracking funding is a lot more difficult. There’s some great work done by academics like Bob Brewell in the US who has tracked funding in the past, but he’s documented that there’s suddenly the ability to track dropped off a cliff once they started using donors trust.

Colin Mockett:
And look, just taking that a step further, we know that misinformation doesn’t seem to have any effect at all on the supporters, for example, of President Trump. I mean, he’s down as telling so many lies and yet his supporters still will continue with him. And we see a similar thing like that here with people who will still say that wind farm kills birds. And you can’t, even when you show them the data, that the biggest killer of birds in Australia is cats. And that’s hundreds compared to maybe a handful that are killed by wind farms. But people just won’t accept it. How do we get over.. You’re the social scientist who can tell us.

John Cook:
Firstly, it’s important to recognise that pushing back against misinformation does have an impact, but it doesn’t work with everyone. So there is a small percentage of the population who are dismissive about climate science. They tend to subscribe to conspiracy theories, distrusting the science and data coming from scientific institutions. And it’s very difficult to persuade them with facts, with fact checking. But they’re a small but vocal minority. The vast majority of the public are open to facts, but also vulnerable to misinformation. And that’s where our efforts should be directed towards.

I guess that comes back to the media that people read and watch – it’s very negative about climate and it gives those that misinformation central space.

Yeah, there’s a variety of ways that people can get climate misinformation and any misinformation through the media, particularly in the case of climate change, conservative media tends to promote climate misinformation more, but also social media like Twitter, Facebook, the different platforms and we find a very influential and damaging source of misinformation is politicians. So when politicians promote misinformation, that more than anything influences the public’s opinion because humans are social animals and we tend to we tend to follow cues that come from our tribal leaders. And often those are political leaders.

Jingle
Scott Morrison:
This is coal. Don’t be afraid.

U.S. Senator Whitehouse:
At the heart of this conflict is a battle between truth and science and power and lies.

Colin Mockett: (24:44)
Have you any way of explaining, John, how the Peter Dutton thought bubble of nuclear power gained so much traction and still has traction in Australia when it’s clearly unworkable? But for some reason, everybody’s picked up on it as if it’s an actual real impetus.

John Cook:
Yeah, I mean, I think that part of the dynamic for why has had traction is what I just said, is that when your tribal leaders promote something that influences the tribe. So if the leader of a political party is championing something like nuclear power, then that’s going to have an influence, despite the fact that all the evidence says that there are better options available. And what’s the truth around

Well, the key thing that I think people need to understand is that renewable energy is cheaper and can provide power quicker than nuclear power, which is more expensive and is going to take much longer before it can actually provide power for the public. So it seems a no-brainer that renewable is a much more practical, affordable solution to providing our energy needs and also dealing with climate change.

Sky News clip: Outsiders – 2 June 2024
…that actually has a very minimal impact on the environment. It’s called nuclear power. There is that Just dig a little bit your aim right on the ground, footprint, clean you’re I had to correct you there. It’s called nuclear power and it is the most expensive form of power on the planet. Except that it isn’t. Well, not if you’re a whale. There you go. A bit of wacademia for…

Mik Aidt:
And I’ll stop him there. Just the headline for what the outsiders here at Sky News are talking about. It’s called ‘Your Weekly Dose of Climate Insanity’. And they’re warning people, you know, that we’re ‘destroying the planet to save the planet’. What’s your take on the kind of reporting that’s coming out of Sky News?

John Cook:
Well, I’ll give you two answers to kind of the narrow response to those arguments and then I think the broader tone of their reporting.

Firstly, this talking point of destroying the planet to save the planet. It’s obviously misleading, they’re misrepresenting and exaggerating the environmental impact. Generally, you hear this argument a lot. It is misrepresenting or exaggerating the impact of renewable projects, but more importantly, it’s ignoring what’s the alternative because if we’re not getting our power from wind or solar, then we’re getting it from the coal plant down the road. And this is often an issue even when environmentalists are objecting to a specific local project, renewable project, not considering that the alternative to this project is something that’s much more damaging, both locally, like to the atmosphere, but also on a climate level.

As for the general reporting, this climate insanity show, it’s actually quite damaging and dangerous because what it’s doing is feeding into tribalism. I mentioned before that the most common form of climate misinformation is attacking scientists or attacking anyone who is advocating for climate action. It’s about othering those people and taking an us versus them mentality. And that is polarising the issue. It’s making the public more tribal and polarised. And when you have a polarised public, it’s harder to get a social consensus and then get progress.

Exactly. And they use the words they use. They, for instance, talk about the greenies as a ‘cult’. And then they laugh. They laugh at them.

Yeah, certainly using religious metaphors is a common form of ad hominem in climate misinformation. So it’s accusing climate scientists of being the high priests of the climate cult, that kind of thing, which is pretty ironic because firstly, climate science is evidence based. It’s quite the opposite of a religion. And secondly, climate denial is actually ideologically driven. It’s where people’s beliefs drive them towards rejecting science, specifically the belief in small governments and unregulated markets.

Mik Aidt:
So, John, can we talk about what can we do about this situation? Because as you say, it’s actually quite dangerous and it’s holding us back from the kind of change that we need to see. With Sky News, I wonder how come that ABC and SBS, which are our public broadcasters, they are supposed to be the broadcasters the We’re paying for these public broadcasters through our taxes. Why are they not taking up the challenge? Why are they not fact checking and telling everyone that Sky News is exactly, as you say, dangerous?

John Cook:
I mean, I certainly would be preaching to the choir there because I would like to see more fact checking from, well, not just the ABC, but from more media outlets and academic outlets, like scientists, as well. But I think the general answer to your question, like, ‘what can we do?’ is an all hands approach. I think that we all, including all citizens, can play a role in pushing back against misinformation. When people on social media platforms see their friends and peers pushing back against misinformation, that has an influence, that matters. So we can all make a difference. But certainly, I think we do need to see more courage from the media, from journalists in pushing back against misinformation.

Colin Mockett:
Look, I can answer your question in two sentences, Mik. The first one would be during 20 odd years we had conservative governments, they had a double impetus against the ABC and SBS. Number one: they cut funding to their news broadcasts. And number two: they consistently blamed both organisations of having a left-wing bias. And then they stacked the new management as they cleared out people and they had redundancies. They stacked the new management with people from commercial media who were much more amenable to their way of thinking. And they effectively emasculated both of those organisations.

And the thing that really heartens me is that nowadays the ABC and SBS are really only working to a tiny segment of elderly Australians. And young Australians aren’t getting their information from what we call the established media at all. They’re getting it all online. And that’s the one where we should be really looking for regulation. I think the ABC and SBS are past helping. I don’t think you can get them back to being even neutral, let alone the independent stance that they had before.

John Cook:
Just to follow on from what Colin was saying too, there’s a dynamic within the scientific community, which is similar. Somebody mentioned earlier about these attacks on scientists designed to intimidate. That’s certainly part of it. They’re also designed to reduce the public trust in science. But the intimidation does have an effect. And generally, when people or community are attacked with a stereotype, such as being alarmist, even at an unconscious level, the community act in the other direction to try to avoid that stereotype. So we do see that scientists who are climate scientists who are accused of being alarmists by climate deniers, generally tend to, even at a subconscious level, tend to downplay the impact of their scientific results. So rather than being alarmist, scientists are actually underestimating their results rather than overestimating. And it seems like a similar thing might be happening with the ABC and SBS.

Mik Aidt:
We need to talk about one of the social media platforms, which has changed a lot in just the last two years. And that’s what used to be called Twitter now X. And I say that because I used to love to be on Twitter. Twitter was my source of information, the information that I did not out in the mainstream, I would always know it hours and days ahead on Twitter. Because if you have the right amount of friends that you’re connected to on Twitter, you just seem to be getting all the good and accurate news as it happens. However, what happened as we know is that Elon Musk took over and things began to change. The drop that broke the camel’s back for me was when Elon Musk himself put out this tweet where he said… it was a picture of a climate activist and you see her on the left and she says, ‘I want to fight climate change’. And then you see some guy looking in through the door who says, ‘Be honest’. ‘I am being honest’, she says. ‘Be honest’. ‘I want communism,’ she then says. ‘Thank you’.

FYI: Since 26 April 2024 I have stopped using Twitter/X because I think Elon Musk, the owner of this platform, is a climate denying fool, and I do in no way want to support his business. pic.twitter.com/lTK9ZcnZdI

— Mik Aidt (@mikaidt) May 22, 2024

So that’s a little story, you know, these memes that are circulated. And this was put out by Musk himself. I thought, I cannot be part of a platform where the man who owns it, the owner of the platform is a climate denying fool. So I left and I haven’t used Twitter now for months and I miss it. So what’s going on with Twitter? Because it just seems to be getting worse and worse as far as I can see.

John Cook:
We actually have study coming out in the journal, it was approved a couple of days ago. It will come out in a few weeks where we analyse climate tweets just over a six month period. It was actually the period before and after Elon Musk took over Twitter because we were interested in that very question, like how has it changed? And very quickly, I’ll say that we at a global level, we didn’t detect at least over that short six month period a difference between pre-Musk and post-Musk. It was already pretty bad anyway.

But what we did find was that 40 per cent of climate misinformation tweets were attacking scientists and other climate actors, and another 20 per cent were conspiracy theories. So kind of in that same family of just casting doubt on climate science in general. So that’s more than half climate misinformation tweets were just about attacking the science and trying to erode public trust in climate science. And that’s worse than in terms of the amount of, I guess, uncivil ad hominem attacks, it’s worse than any other source of climate misinformation that we’ve looked at. So I think that Twitter is quite a toxic environment, but it was already that way even before Elon Musk took over.

Colin Mockett:
Hey look, can I just come in and take you back again to the nuclear debate? It’s not only attacking the science, if you like, and ignoring the scientists saying that this is not going to work and it’s going to take too long to bring it in. It’s also ignoring our own memories. We all have memories of what happened after Chernobyl, or many of us have, and those who haven’t can read about the devastation of Northern Europe after the Russian or the Ukrainian Chernobyl power station blew up. We all have memories of the tsunami that destroyed the Japanese nuclear plant, and that’s still got no-go areas completely around that whole area. Fish stocks have never recovered. We’ve all got memories of that, but that’s completely, that’s never brought into the equation. That’s not attacking scientists, that’s completely ignoring something that we all knew happened. And it’s the danger of nuclear. We know that nuclear bombs ended the Second World War, but we don’t think about the devastation of the two communities that were hit by those bombs.

John Cook:
Well, it’s interesting that the chief arguments against nuclear power in Australia currently are about… – in fact, I did this just earlier – are about costs and timeliness. But there are a lot of reasons or arguments against nuclear power. But as a scientist, I kind of find it interesting that the emphasis is different now. The danger element is not as prominent as it has been in the past. But I think part of the reason for that is probably because renewables have just progressed so far in the last few decades in terms of costs and the technology, so I guess that when you stack the two against each other, there’s no competition.

Colin Mockett:
Yes, and in the little clip that Mik played with the Sky News discussion, they were referring to nuclear as green energy. That’s just an outright lie.

John Cook:
Yeah, there’s a lot of very insidious framing of non-renewable energy. I mean, labeling nuclear as green is one way, but what I find even more insidious is even the term ‘natural gas’, which we should just call it ‘methane gas’ which is a fossil fuel, you know, it’s destructive to the environment, it causes climate change. But even just calling it natural gas is a win for the fossil fuel industry because it portrays it as this natural and therefore harmless energy source when it’s anything but. But they’ve done a very good job in marketing and, I guess, just downplaying the environmental impacts.

Anthony Gleeson: (40:58)
John, to continue that conversation, I guess, at a local level, there’s a fair bit of opposition against offshore wind farms, and that seems to centre around, it’s amazing how many people have suddenly become friends of whales, and citing that as a reason for being against them. Can you enlighten us on that at all? Is there any evidence at all that you’re aware of that sees whales being under threat from these offshore wind turbines?

John Cook:
No, there’s no credible evidence that offshore wind is harming whales. But there is credible evidence that other sources like fossil fuel, like coal plants, are having environmental impacts, maybe not directly on whales, but affecting the food sources of whales. So again, that comes back to we need to be looking at if not wind, what are the alternatives? And those alternatives are harmful to environment. So it’s a case of misrepresentation.

Anthony Gleeson:
And seismic blasting, looking for gas?

John Cook:
Yeah, well, yeah, that certainly has environmental impacts.

Colin Mockett:
One of the things that I do know is that offshore wind is probably the biggest contributor to the United Kingdom’s green energy supplement because they’ve got a lot of offshore wind. We’ve got a lot of solar. And you would think the impetus in Australia would be utilising the desert areas that get plenty of sun. And we’re talking here about the Northern Territory. And you would have thought that a lot of impetus would have gone on to solar energy and batteries up there and providing power to the rest of Australia with linkage. But apparently, no, we’re still saying ‘We need gas’ and ‘We need to keep on fracking’ and ‘We need an offshore gas storage facility in Victoria’. It’s quite bizarre the hold that the fossil fuel companies have over our decision makers in government.

John Cook:
Not so much bizarre as I would say disturbing. The gas industry have done a very good job in embedding themselves in society and making themselves seem indispensable. We just moved to Melbourne a couple of years ago and got a house built out in the western suburbs. And we were very adamant that we didn’t want any gas in our house. And that just blew the builders minds because no one does that. And it was just not only the default, didn’t even know how to put in solar hot water, like electric hot water in the house to the point they even started putting a gas thing, you know, whatever you call the thing in the side of the house, even after we’d instructed them not just because that’s all they knew how to do. So it’s the status quo and they spend a lot of money to make sure that they maintain the status quo. So it does take a lot of political will to shift that kind of status quo and to achieve the political will requires a lot of social momentum. And so again, it comes back to us as citizens. But if consumers send the signal to industries, like the building industry ‘We want houses that are environmentally friendly’, then the market will shift. So it again is an example of how the public can affect change.

Anthony Gleeson:
Did you get yours in the finish?

John Cook:
Oh yes. Yeah, we were not. We were very determined. We were never having gas in this house. So we got we got there. Had a few glitches along the way, but we were persistent and won out.

Mik Aidt:
John, there’s one graph that I would like you to have a look at and then explain to me. And it’s a graph that Bjørn Lomborg uses in his presentation. It’s about deaths and it’s about how many people die from, you could say from climate, from floods, droughts, storms, wildfires and so on. And it would appear that we’re seeing more and more of this. So you would also think that there’s more and more people dying from it. However, what Bjørn Blomberg is saying, and he shows this graph that is saying that back in the 1920s and 1930s, was on an average like a half a million people dying every year from floods and droughts and storms and wildfires. Whereas last year, and generally nowadays, it’s less than 10,000 people a year who die from these events these extreme weather events. Is that true?

John Cook:
What we’re seeing is that over time, as we modernise our technology, our infrastructure, has improved our ability to withstand floods and natural events. But at the same time, natural events are becoming more intense due to climate change. So, yes, we do see less deaths because of our improved modern infrastructure, but we are also experiencing more intense floods and weather events that are stressing our infrastructure and will only accelerate and get worse over time. So to take the fact that deaths may have gone down due to infrastructure and therefore write off all the increased damage that’s only going to get worse in the future is again an example of misleading the public by looking at one thing and ignoring the other.

Colin Mockett:
As Winston Churchill said, ‘There are lies, damned lies and statistics.’

John Cook:
Was it Churchill that said that?

Colin Mockett:
I’m not sure who said it anyway, but it’s dead right. You can bend your statistics to say anything if you’re weasely enough.

Mik Aidt:
I love your scepticism, John Cook. Can you sort of take us out of the Hour? What should we take with us as we move out in society? I hear you, that we need to each and every one of us speak up, but I think many of us don’t feel we have the confidence to do it because, ‘Who knows?’ And ‘What’s wrong and right in this?’ And ‘Where do we have the best sources and the right sources’ and so on? So give us some guidance here as the Hour is about to end.

John Cook: (48:19)
A couple of thoughts. Firstly, there’s this phenomenon in my field of climate communication called climate silence. And that’s when people don’t talk about climate change to their friends and family, even though they care about the issue and they accept the reality and they want to see climate action, but they don’t talk about it. And the main reason why there’s climate silence is because people think, wrongly, that other people don’t care about it. And this is a big jargon phrase. It’s called pluralistic ignorance.

We’re ignorant of the fact that we’re in the plurality… I can’t even say the word. We’re in the majority. It should be called majority ignorance – it would be a lot easier to say. Anyway. So just knowing that more than half of the Australian public or the US public or any of the world really accept the reality of climate change and want to see climate action.

Just understanding that social fact is important. But when we don’t know it, then we silence ourselves and it causes this spiral of silence because we’re not talking about it and then other people think that no one cares about climate change.

So therefore, as I’ve said earlier, the most important thing that all of us can do to help solve climate change is just open our mouths and talk about it to our friends and families.

The other reason why people tend to self-censor is because they’re worried that they’re going to get pushback if they do talk about climate change, that their cranky uncle is going to throw some crazy argument and they don’t know all the science, they don’t have all the information at their fingertips and it could be made to look stupid. It’s important to know that we don’t have to be climate experts to be able to talk about climate change.

Even just communicating that we care about the issue matters. That sends a social signal. So while I do encourage everyone to get more informed, jump on skepticalscience.com and learn about what the science says and how the misinformation is wrong – nevertheless, don’t let that stop you from talking about it. Because sending that social signal to your friends and family that you care about the issue, that matters as well.

Anthony Gleeson:
How are you going with your father-in-law? Any progress?

John Cook:
What I learned is: people whose beliefs aren’t based on facts can’t be persuaded by facts. Or it’s difficult to persuade them with facts at least. So unfortunately, I’ve not made headway with my father-in-law. However, like just to end on a positive note, I also had similar arguments with my own father who was also sceptical about climate change. And even though I was doing a PhD on climate misinformation, I was not really having much headway there either. Then one day he suddenly changed his mind and said, ‘I accept that climate change is real’. And I asked him, what changed your mind? And he said, ‘Oh I’ve always thought this’. And I said like, ‘What? Do you not remember argument we’ve had for the last few years?

And so I had to kind of go back and deconstruct why he changed his mind. And I think what happened was he got solar panels. He lives in Queensland, where there was a very generous feed-in tariff. So he was he was getting money back for living in the sunshine state and he wasn’t actually paying electricity bills. So he got solar panels. He was very clear on this for hip pocket reasons, not for environmental reasons. But there’s this interesting psychological dynamic. When our behavior and our beliefs conflict, we feel this discomfort, this cognitive dissonance. And usually we’ve got to change one to come in line with the other. And that’s the whole premise behind trying to communicate climate change and change people’s beliefs about climate change, thinking that then their behavior will change. It doesn’t have to happen in that order. You can change their behavior, and then their beliefs will change to come in line with them. I think that’s what happened with my dad.

There is literature on how children can have a persuasive effect on sceptical parents or grandparents and probably be more effective than a scientist, for instance. So, so… yeah, there is literature on if you educate students, that can then have a flow-on effect to their parents.

Colin Mockett:
That’s another two programs you’ve given us now. We’ll get you back in for both of those. Thank you, John.

Mik Aidt:
John, if you were to say ‘be…’-something, what would you say? Be… what?

John Cook:
Okay, the very short answer is ‘Be yourself’. And by that, I mean: take what’s unique about you and combine them in different ways and bring that to the table, use that for climate action. The tangible example is myself. I am a scientist, but before that I was a cartoonist, and before that I studied physics at the University of Queensland. And what I’m doing now is combining all these different things in unique ways using psychological science and critical thinking and cartoons and humour as a way to communicate the reality of climate change and educate the public. So that’s something that’s very unique, that’s had an impact. But I think we all have unique skills and passions. Combine those and use those for climate.

Mik Aidt:
Be yourself, use humour and don’t be climate silent.

Colin Mockett:
And stay a climate sceptic. And don’t forget that website. If you need to bolster your argument against those people who are still yet to be convinced, there’s the website of climate sceptics.

John Cook:
SkepticalScience.com

SONG
Baba Brinkman: ‘Lost In The Numbers’ (54:55)

I have a friend and he’s into the climate, a contrarian. Clever, clever, and he seems to know better than scientists in those areas. Yes my friend, you have arguments in your defense, I’m aware of it. And we could stay friends even if your opinions are a bit of an embarrassment.

‘Dont worry. Everything’s gonna be just fine.’
‘We’ve heard this kind of thing before. What’s different this time? They said the population bomb is coming and we’re all gonna starve. Resources are gonna run out soon and life will be hard. Y2K is gonna get us. We’re all gonna die! We’ll run out of oil or ozone and we’re all gonna fry! Civilisation is doomed.’

It’s always the lefties who salivated the thought of consumerism’s death wheeze
That gut feeling that modern life is too good to be true has a lot more to do with this debate than CO2

Climate change is not a problem. It’s what? A couple degrees? Are we supposed to panic over what?
A warm breeze? Yes, it’s happening and it’s caused by human emissions.
So don’t call me a science denier. This is not creationism. Call me a contrarian. A luke-warmer. Call me a skeptic. All I’m suggesting is we consider the costs and the benefits.

If CO2 goes up, crops are gonna be more productive can adapt to a planet that’s warming up a bit.
Chances are global warming is gonna be harmless. So we must have the courage to stand up to these alarmists.

You miscalculated it. The cost of climate change. You underestimated it! You lost in the numbers. You miscalculated it. The cost of going green.

What’s the plan? Are we gonna tell African nations that after we got rich off of fossil fuels they can’t partake in them? It’s the height of hypocrisy for a western democracy to block any path to prosperity for people living in poverty and let’s be honest, renewables are too expensive. They power 5 per cent of global energy? Unimpressive. And that 5 per cent is massively subsidised. So renewables only survive because governments take sides and distort the market so they can overcharge.

Fossil fuel is what lifted us out of our former darkness. And now the forces of environmental hysteria are desperate to drag us back into a bygone era. You want chaos? Try shutting the power mains off. Try rolling blackouts, gas shortages, massive layoffs. Economic collapse, skyrocketing energy costs. You wanna stop fossil fuels? Try shutting everything off. Nah, here’s what’s gonna happen: Emissions will increase, but for like 20 or 30 years. Along with prosperity. We will get off of fossil fuels after a while. We just can’t let it happen on the back of an African child.

Miscalculated the cost of climate change.
You underestimated, you lost in the numbers.
You miscalculated the cost of going green.

Let the market decide, don’t be too eager.
Renewables can take over as soon as they’re cheaper – and no sooner.
Otherwise we all pay out of pocket.
Yeah climate change is real and here’s how you stop it.
You do nothing.
Enjoy the fruits of progress. As more and more products hit the market and cost less. You invest in adapting to sea level and temperature rise. As the GDP soars to indefinite highs.
Thanks to innovation, thanks to human ingenuity.
What you don’t do is put the brakes on it prematurely.
Cause every dollar you spend on decarbonisation,
that’s a dollar you don’t spend on a hospital patient.
Even the IPCC doesn’t paint such a bad picture.
They say in 80 years everyone’s gonna be 10.

So the cost of acting now is ten times higher. That’s built into the models. You can check if you think I’m a liar. The worst thing we could do is saddle today’s poor. With a burden their grandchildren would have no trouble paying for. The best thing we could do is all become prosperous. Rich enough to adapt if climate change tries to bother. What do you think, y ‘all? Are you with me?

I’ve got a friend and he’s into the Climate Contrarians.

Antonio Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General: (59:44)
This has to be the decade of decisive climate action. That means trust, multilateralism, and collaboration. We have a choice: collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.

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Events we have talked about in The Sustainable Hour

Events in Victoria

The following is a collation of Victorian climate change events, activities, seminars, exhibitions, meetings and protests. Most are free, many ask for RSVP (which lets the organising group know how many to expect), some ask for donations to cover expenses, and a few require registration and fees. This calendar is provided as a free service by volunteers of the Victorian Climate Action Network. Information is as accurate as possible, but changes may occur.

Petitions

→ List of running petitions where we encourage you to add your name

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Live-streaming on Wednesdays

The Sustainable Hour is streamed live on the Internet and broadcasted on FM airwaves in the Geelong region every Wednesday from 11am to 12pm (Melbourne time).

→ To listen to the program on your computer or phone, click here – or go to www.947thepulse.com where you then click on ‘Listen Live’ on the right.

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Podcast archive

Over 500 hours of sustainable podcasts.

Listen to all of The Sustainable Hour radio shows as well as special Regenerative Hours and Climate Revolution episodes in full length.

→ Archive on climatesafety.info – with additional links
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