Websites pushing climate science denial are growing their audience in an era where populist rhetoric and the rejection of expertise is gaining traction
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| The Trumpocene epoch: Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Ohio. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP |
Some of the world’s most respected geologists and scientists reckon humans have had such a profound impact on the Earth that we’ve now moved out of the Holocene and into the Anthropocene.
It’s not official. But it’s close.
Dropping nuclear bombs and burning billions of tonnes of fossil fuels will do that to a planet, as will clearing swaths of forests to make way for food production and supermarket car parks and the like.
That’s all in the real world though, and sometimes you might get the horrible, chilling idea that when it comes to the production of our thoughts and ideas, that’s not the place a lot of us live anymore.
So I’d like to also propose the idea of an impending new epoch – the Trumpocene – that in the spirit of the era itself is based solely on a few thoughts held loosely together with hyperlinks and a general feeling of malaise.
In the Trumpocene, the epoch-defining impacts of climate change are nothing more than a conspiracy. Even if these impacts are real, then they’re probably good for us.
The era is named, of course, for the phenomenon that is Donald Trump, the Republican pick for US president whose candidacy has been defined by a loose grasp of facts, jingoistic posturing, populist rhetoric, his amazing hair and his treatment of women.
So what are the things that might define the Trumpocene?
Is it the point at which large numbers of people started to reject the views of large groups of actual experts – people with university qualifications and things – in exchange for the views of anyone who agrees with them? (Brexit, anyone?)
How about that point when a critical mass of people have become convinced that they can Google their way out of the laws of physics?
Let’s go and dig for evidence of the Trumpocene.
A few months ago, Trump gave an interview to polemicist and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who could be the angriest person on the internet.
Jones has a regular online radio and TV show called Infowars that has expanded beyond being a vehicle for Jones’s cult personality to include regular news bulletins and a line in “alternative” health therapies.
Jones thinks that climate change is a scam being forced on us by the United Nations, which, in turn, is a totalitarian regime and kingpin of a new world order.
The a fervent Trump supporter has told his viewers that the both US president, Barack Obama, and the Democrat nominee, Hilary Clinton, were “literal demons” who smelt of sulphur. I kid you not.
In Australia, we have a senator who similarly sees climate change as a thing made up by the UN. Our top-rating radio host, Alan Jones (no relation), has said climate science is “witchcraft”.
Now, before I go on, there’s a prevailing view (often expressed in the comments of this blog) that climate science deniers and oddballs like Alex Jones should be ignored. In some ways, those commenters are right.
But then you look at the popularity of people like Jones and see that, to increasing numbers of people, they are not people to be ignored, but are paragons of fearless truth-telling.
There’s a demographic to which rhetoric from people like Jones and, more broadly, Trump, appeals.
Jones’s YouTube account has about 1.6 million subscribers and is growing. He has 1.2m likes on his Facebook account. His website, according to SimilarWeb, was getting 27m pageviews a month back in February. Now it’s at 36m.
Earlier this year Jones snagged a rare interview with the conservative blogger Matt Drudge. Jones and Drudge expressed mutual admiration.
Drudge’s news and opinion aggregator website, the Drudge Report, is a genuine web phenomenon and considered hugely influential.
With about 1.37bn page views a month, the Drudge Report is the second-ranked media site in the United States — 600m views behind msn.com but 300m ahead of Google’s news page.
The Drudge Report also tends to link to news items that disparage any action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
There’s now a whole media ecosystem that climate science denialism can exist inside, where there’s little scrutiny of the views of deniers. US-based sites like the Drudge Report, Infowars, Breitbart and Daily Caller are part of that ecosystem.
As the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade notes, Breitbart “has the dubious honour of challenging Fox News’s status as America’s most influential conservative media outlet”.
Not only is the outlet having influence, but its executive chairman, Stephen Bannon, is running Trump’s campaign.
Breitbart too is growing its audience, according to those SimilarWeb statistics. In February 2016 the site registered 89m page views. In August, it was up to 143m.
Another characteristic of the Trumpocene might be the heightened levels of hubris combined with triumphant rhetoric and the tendency towards insults.
The Breitbart writer James Delingpole, for example, rejects the evidence of human-caused climate change. Last week he described a Royal Society fellow and climate scientist as a “puffed-up missy”.
“What a bunch of disgraceful, money-grubbing, charlatans the climate alarmists are,” wrote Delingpole, before then trying to link “climate alarmists” with child abusers.
For a while, maybe the Trumpocene and the Anthropocene can coexist.
But even though they exist on separate plains, can we really afford to dismiss the impact of either of them?
Links
- The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age
- We should be putting the brake on the Carmichael coalmine, not hitting the accelerator
- How climate science deniers can accept so many 'impossible things' all at once
- Was that climate change? Scientists are getting faster at linking extreme weather to warming
- 'We’re not going anywhere,' say Climate Change Authority dissenters
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