2023-09-03 05:30:00
In recent years, several studies have focused on the phenomenon of climate sceptics, i.e. those who contest the scientific consensus which, since the 1970s and more particularly since the 1990s with the reports of the IPCC (Groupement Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Experts), established the reality of climate change in which human activities have a responsibility.
These movements, many of which have their roots in the United States in the anti-system conspiratorial and conspiratorial movements, have used social networks massively to spread their theses and, sometimes, violently attack climate scientists or defenders of the climate. ‘environment. This climate-skeptical movement has sometimes received the support of populist leaders in certain countries, such as Donald Trump in the United States or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who have gone against their scientists to support fake news on the climate.
With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the conspiratorial movement abandoned climate issues to focus on the management of the epidemic by the public authorities, treatments and vaccines against Covid. With the pandemic having fallen sharply and climate-related events having multiplied around the world (drought, megafires, new reports from the IPCC, etc.), antivaxers have moved towards climate issues.
3.5 times more anti-climate than pro-climate messages
A study by the CNRS and the Institute of Complex Systems of Paris-Ile-de-France, entitled “The new fronts of denialism and climato-skepticism”, published last February, analyzed two years of exchanges on Twitter. This “climatoscope” estimates that “a large French denialist community was structured in the summer of 2022 on Twitter”, producing or relaying “3.5 times more toxic messages than the IPCC community”.
“The denialist community on Twitter is mainly made up of accounts that participated in numerous anti-system/antivax protest campaigns during the pandemic. Moreover, out of 10,000 accounts, nearly 6,000 relayed Kremlin propaganda on the war in Ukraine,” the researchers found, establishing the connections between these communities and showing that “the issue of combating global warming and the characteristics of denialist militants make this societal issue a particularly favorable terrain for foreign interference operations of the subversion type. »
Perfectly mastering Twitter, using robot accounts or practicing astroturfing (operations to make certain subjects popular, in a very short time), climate skeptics, by their massive presence, manage to skew the debate. “Twitter rhetoric from denialist and techno-solutionist communities is likely to inhibit the dissemination of scientific knowledge and IPCC findings by negatively affecting the online activity of climate science and climate change scientists. »
As for the political profile of climate skeptics, the study estimates that “apart from a non-negligible proportion of accounts involved in the informational sphere of Reconquête!, the denialist community is not a priori composed of political activists from traditional parties. (LFI, PS, EELV, Renaissance, LR or RN). »
The risk of seeing the emergence of French-style Trumpism
However, in a study by the Jean Jaurès Foundation, published in April on “conspiratorial discourse attacking public opinion”, the researchers demonstrated real divisions between the groups marked on the left who are “overwhelmingly convinced of the human origin of global warming” and, on the contrary, conservative groups. “There is a correlation between positions on the identity divide and dispositions to climato-skepticism”. The study also established that “four out of ten French people adhere to climate-conspiratorial statements”, markers “of a powerful cleavage between people and elites. »
This division, this “feeling that France from above is making France from below pay for the climate crisis”, must be particularly taken into account in the conduct of climate and energy policies, considers the study, which feels that the automobile (end of combustion, switch to electric) “can become an accelerator […] strong resistance in certain segments of the population. »
If in France, unlike the United States or Brazil, “no leading political offer currently adopts a climate-conspiratorial or frontally anti-ecological position”, the study estimates that “the anti-ecological reaction could favor the emergence of French-style Trumpism”.
The recent statement by an RN deputy finding that the Giec “exaggerates” is perhaps one of the first fruits of this…
(Article published in La Dépêche du Midi on Sunday September 3, 2023)
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