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Hello there!

Thanks for inviting me here today, to give this presentation demystifying climate disinformation.

I’m your guide, the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition’s Communications co-chair Phil Newell. The CAAD coalition consists of over 120 organizations around the world, working together to create solutions to disinformation. The image here is the front cover of our latest report, which itself is based largely on the content I’m about to go over, though without the canadian tailoring.

I’ve been iterating on this presentation for about the last year, and have been working on climate communications since 2011. A couple years later started focusing on disinfo, and wrote a daily newsletter about it for about ten years, totalling over 2 million words about climate denial. But as 2025 comes to a close, climate disinfo is still quite a big problem.

So I’m glad you want to help! First off, if you’re here watching this, then you’re probably not of the misbelief that climate change is a hoax. But that doesn’t mean you haven’t been influenced by climate disinformation. No one is immune to propaganda.

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Are you influenced by propaganda and disinformation? �Let’s see!

Have you heard that carrots will help you see better in the dark?

What percent of people, globally, want more climate action from their leaders?

What percent of Canadians support expanding wind and solar?

What percent of people would give 1% of their monthly income to fight climate change?

Don’t believe me? Well pop quiz time, hot shots!

Here are some questions on climate and clean energy support. I’ll read through and ask, you all just offer your best, off the cuff, gut reaction guess as to the answer, either in the chat or jot it down to yourself.

Who here has ever heard that carrots will improve your night vision?

Now, if you know these already, don’t spoil it, but if you haven’t, just guess out loud- What percent of people on Earth want more climate action from leaders?

�What about in Canada, what percentage of canadians do you think support wind and solar?

Now, how many of us would give 1% of our monthly income to fight climate change? What about globally, what percent of people do you think would give 1% of their monthly income to fight climate change?

We’ll find out the answers through the presentation, and in the process, perhaps reveal the real impact of disinformation.

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What are propaganda, mis- and disinformation? According to me, a simple practitioner:

Propaganda ��= Any repeated political message

Misinformation��= Wrong

Disinformation��= Wrong, On Purpose, For Money

Information Integrity

= the opposite of all this

Climate Disinformation �= Wrong about climate change, on purpose

First though, my working definitions of terms I’m using.

Propaganda, for starters, is simply any political message that gets repeated. The classic connotation is sinister, Cold War-era Russian Propaganda, but really everything from overt political slogans like “Yes, We Can” to World War Two campaigns falsely claiming eating more carrots can help you see in the dark are propaganda. Had you heard that before? If so, you can thank the UK government’s World War Two propaganda campaign to deal with a vegetable surplus. None of us were alive for british war-time propaganda, but many of us have heard about carrots, or to Keep Calm and Carry On.

Then there’s misinformation.

Misinfo is wrong. There is but one objective reality that we share, yet there are infinite ways to be wrong about it… and people seem bound and determined to find every single one and post it online.

Disinformation is wrong, on purpose, for money. Which is commercial speech, and false advertising is illegal in most places.

Climate disinformation, then, is wrong about climate change, on purpose, for money.

And then information integrity is, basically, the opposite of all this. It’s the umbrella term for addressing disinformation and upholding scientific consensus, that the UN and others have been using to talk about these issues in a proactive way. Info integrity encompasses the kind of things you’re being trained to look for when learning- multiple lines of evidence, consensus, peer-review, citing your sources, those fundamentals of facts.

Pretty straightforward, according to me, a humble working man with a lowly masters’ degree.

Ask a PhD., though, and you’ll get something decidedly more complicated.

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Wrong, On Purpose, To Obstruct Climate Action

Here are key graphics from two studies cataloging climate disinformation narratives, one that uses Machine Learning to break climate disinformation down into 5 main claims with dozens of sub- and sub-sub claims, and another on the Discourses of Delay that have become more popular as industry has had to obstruct climate policies, instead of just deny climate science.

Then they updated the AI detection to include the discourses of delay in this study just released recently, with this wonderfully concise graphic showing all the different ways to lie about climate change.

So it’s not just about being wrong about fossil fuels causing climate change, but also how bad it will be, and then fearmongering about solutions, and attacking activists, really anything and everything they can make up, because when you’re lying, all the options are open.

Just throw a dart at the board, and apply the lie to the current context.

Then there are policymakers and the coalition’s definition, which is somewhere between this and my working definition.

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CAAD, EU, UN definitions of mis/disinfo

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Disinformation twists what you think other people think

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Climategate: Polarized and Poisoned Climate Politics

While many may now take for granted the 2011 finding that climate change denial is predominantly a phenomenon of white conservative males, prior to 2009, there was sufficient reason for conservative politicians in the US to appear willing to tackle climate change. A notable example is the 2009 ad calling for climate action at the Copenhagen COP that included Donald J. Trump’s signature. Yeah, President Pulled Out of the Paris Agreement TWICE. That Donald J. Trump.

So what happened? What NATO calls a “hack-and-leak attack” was used to poison and polarize climate politics.

In the weeks before the Copenhagen COP, hackers obtained climate scientists’ emails, stored them on a Russian server, and sent them to climate denial bloggers, who then misrepresented the emails to make false allegations about the scientists’ discourse and findings.

These false claims of controversy were then amplified by right-wing blogs and partisan news outlets who polarized the story and hyped it as a scandal.

That conservative media-driven controversy was then covered credulously by mainstream press, who reported on the scandal as a scandal, before doing their due diligence to find out the truth and determine if the climate scientists really were saying what the bloggers and partisan outlets claimed.

As a result, instead of a global breakthrough that year, the COP was sabotaged by the disinformation attack that came to be known as Climategate. Eventually, nine separate investigations cleared all the scientists of the charges of misconduct. But the disinformation had already done its damage and had sown partisanship.

In the aftermath of Climategate, US conservatives were reportedly largely convinced by the lies about climate scientists.

Climategate was always a lie, but it was a useful one, giving right-wing news outlets a manufactured scandal; one that could then be used to justify torpedoing negotiations at the Copenhagen COP by those petrostates hungry for reasons to block climate action.

Climategate worked because the lies spread on digital media first, and then got validated by mainstream sources, showing how even just the appearance of virality on social media justified coverage in the mainstream- a dynamic they very much noticed and made the most of over the last decade.

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Polluters and Petrostates invest in politics and propaganda to prevent regulations on pollution and harmful products, using disinformation to obstruct climate action

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Disinformation Subsidy:

Monied interest create and spread disinfo as fertilizer to grow “grassroots” (online) groups into political opposition- but it’s not organic grassroots, its industrial astroturf.

Disinformation�Where Who �does it come from?

Wrong question! I often hear disinfo being described as though it’s a naturally occurring phenomenon, a fog that comes, on little cat feet, an active subject capable of doing things as though it were a sentient, living breathing person. But it’s not, it’s a tool, a tactic, a passive object that the powerful use to maintain the status quo. And that’s who we need to focus on.

The better question, then, is WHO is the disinformation coming from? Remember, lies don’t spread themselves, they need people!

So polluters and propagandists will not only spread their messages themselves, they’ll also prop up others. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, through “disinformation subsidies”- instead of giving money, at least at first, they’re providing the rhetoric and other communications products people need in order to get mad at climate scientists.

What you see here is a diagram from a study by Nicolas Graham of the University of British Columbia, of the complicated ecosystem of fossil fuel industry funders, think tank and individual funding recipients, lawyers, university, banks, and other affiliates of the climate obstruction industry.

What, is that too complicated? Okay, here’s another graph from the study, just showing the Fraser institute and other core nodes of the international Atlas disinformation network. Much more clear, right? No, I know, it’s a mess.

Bottom line is that this is how monied interest create and spread disinfo as fertilizer to grow “grassroots” (online) groups into political opposition- but it’s not organic grassroots, it’s fed on corporate propaganda and disinformation, so its industrial astroturf.

So I could rattle off the names of various people, parties and groups, but honestly the web is so vast and interconnected that any attempt to actually explain each of these actors and their relations immediately makes you start looking like a conspiracy-addled nutjob, aka Charlie Kelly hunting for Pepe Silvia.

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Wrong, on purpose, for LOTS of money

So let’s step back from the chaos of the internet for a moment, and regain a little composure, because this story is much older than the online.

Forget about social media, the internet, podcasts and bots, and hearken back to the good old days of smoking inside and a two-martini lunch and MadMen, the glamorous 20th century Madison Avenue advertising and public relations world.

Fun fact: my climate change-focused public relations group was based in an office on Madison Avenue, New York City, so I’ve never actually seen the show, but I have actually literally been a MadMan.

A real one. Let me introduce to a couple more. Meet John Hill and Richard Darrow, co-founder and an executive at Hill and Knowlton, a public relations firm that worked for Big Oil and then Big Tobacco and then Big Oil again, founding things like the Tobacco Institute to match the American Petroleum Institute’s role as the industry’s attack dog and propagandist.

For example, to deal with the smoke and fumes of their products, API set up the Smoke and Fumes committee in 1952, a very real name for a very real committee of executives from companies that would become Chevron, Exxon and Shell, that was funding research into the industry’s very real pollution- and how to deny its harms.

It carried much of this research out not in its own name, because who would believe the industry, but instead through the Stanford Research Institute, originally part of Stanford University, because who wouldn’t believe Stanford?

But who got hired and fired was a Smoke and Fumes committee question, and what they looked into and said about it was always influenced by Smoke and Fumes.

So by the late 1960s, the head of Phillip Morris could hear about Hill and Darrow’s handiwork at the Stanford Research Institute, where they were doing animal testing for Shell. Yes, that Shell!

And SRI wasn’t necessarily always wrong. That same year, 1968, the Stanford Research institute told the American Petroleum Institute that CO2 emissions would warm temperatures, melt ice caps, and cause serious global damage.

But that came nearly half a century after API’s founding, and the lobby group wasn’t about to stop profiting off their polluting products. Instead, they just turned up the volume on the PR to bury their, and the rest of the world’s, head in the sand as long as possible.

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One of the traditional corporate propaganda tactics was sponsored content, where ads are disguised as regular reporting, or where reporters do ads directly, something that continues to the present day, as experts like Michelle Amazeen have documented the harms of in books like Content Confusion, which is open access so you can read it in full for free. (And full disclosure, she’s a client of mine, so this slide is sort of sponsored content- consider it an ad!)

Among other things, it tells the story of the evolution of disinfo ads, from the tobacco-funded programming to tobacco-funded digital ads that look basically identical to, for example, the Washington Post’s actual reported content.

I’d ask you to try and spot the disclosure but it’s so small that on this small screen, it’s basically impossible. Which is basically the problem- the whole point of sponsored content is to disguise ads as trustworthy reported content.

So this is something you can keep an eye out for in your local media markets, and make a point to call out when you see it. Letters to the editor complaining about how sponsored content makes you trust an outlet less is exactly the kind of thing editors can use internally to advocate against the practice, while also serving to alert other readers to the issue.

And then making things all the worse, is social media, where for example the tiny little “sponsored content” disclosures disappear all together, and the ad looks entirely indistinguishable from a regular story.

Because while real media has some real transparency measures, online anyone can pay for a website and make it look like a real news outlet.

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So the disinfo and propaganda successfully bought both industries a couple decades. But while the two industries differed in what they sell, by the early 1990s it became scientifically evident that they have at least one very important thing in common, that they also share with their friends in Big Ag: a little, literally, thing called PM2.5, short for Particulate Matter of 2.5 micrometers, which is science-speak for tiny specks of smog, smoke, and ash.

Whether you’re burning coal and oil, or cigarettes, or grasslands and forests to make pasture land for cattle or soy or in forest fires, you’re producing PM2.5, and it’s getting up in your lungs and causing problems, from asthma to strokes and heart attacks and oh yeah cancer. I’m not a doctor, but it doesn’t take a medical degree to understand that lungs are for air, not ash.

And ultimately, truth won out, and in the US, smoking rates are down as there are restrictions on advertising for tobacco products, campaigns to prevent kids from starting the addictive habit, and ultimately and likely most importantly, regulations that prevent smoking inside and in public places to protect people from second-hand smoke. So instead of smoking inside being the norm, now there’s the social stigma that comes from having to stand outside in the rain or snow or blazing heat to smoke, while everyone else enjoys the meal or party inside.

Around the turn of the 21st century, tobacco burned out as they had to settle the major lawsuits about lying about causing cancer with addictive products, and to keep the next generation of PR industry and tobacco lawyers employed, Big Oil stepped in.

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So you may have heard about Merchants of Doubt, a great book that charts the history of how Big Carbon and Big Tobacco shared a playbook, thinktanks, and even lawyers. Specifically, there are more modern Mad Men to introduce you to: Chris Horner and Steve Milloy tobacco-turned-fossil fuel defending lawyers and disinformers.

Here’s Horner in the tobacco archives, pitching a plan to RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company to “reform agency science, focusing on the need based upon your interests” to essentially forbid inconvenient studies from being used to make regulations.

He and Steve Milloy then took that plan to deny the health impacts of second hand smoke, crossed out tobacco everywhere, replaced with air pollution from burning fossil fuels, and went to sell it to Big Oil.

The plan that Milloy came up with to protect the tobacco industry from regulations about second hand smoke was to invoke and co-opt the scientific ideals of transparency and reproducibility, in order to undercut the science that showed smoke’s bad for your lungs, and also shows that smog from burning forests for farmland is bad for everyone. With PM2.5 as the constant, it was easy to adapt to fossil fuels.

So we’re now living out the right-wing war on clean air, and we’ll have to see whether or not the current administration will be successful in carrying out this policy of air pollution denial.

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What happened? How’d we get here?

In no small part, Big Tech helped liars get around information integrity measures that real journalists use to keep lies out of the media- things like fact checking before publication and conflict of interest disclosures in media are of course basically nowhere on social media.

Back in 2016, my own emails were the subject of a Climategate-esque hack and leak type attack, where instead of hacking for the emails, none other than Chris Horner successfully sued for some scientists emails, which included some from me. He misrepresented what I said by a full 180 degrees, and planted the story in the Washington Times, a fake news site that didn’t quite have the juice to make it a real scandal so it didn’t make the whole Fox News cycle.

And Horner’s still up to those exact same tricks, here’s a screenshot from last month where he’s using private emails from climate scientists to try and manufacture a scandal, this time about scientists keeping judges informed about science.

Which, unfortunately successfully got them to censor the chapter on climate science by removing it all together -here he is responding to Steve Milloy as they try and ratchet up the pressure to use this as an excuse to defund the National Academies of Science, right out in the open on Xitter.

And then here’s Horner in the Wall Street Journal, laying out the next step of the science censoring plan: the Supreme Court.

No back room, Smoke and Fumes committee necessary!

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Because yes, deception and disinfo have been around forever, but now social media is supercharging the whole process. In mainstream media, lies are kept at bay by fact checking, but in many online places, well, no one knows you’re a dog.

And with some platforms, they don’t care, so long as you keep paying for ads. For example, a headline: Meta banned the Epoch Times from advertising. Then it accepted $300k in new ads targeting Canadians. Epoch just made a new account with a new name, and Meta broadcast their ads another 22 million times.

Dogs in disguise.

That’s why Russia’s been able to so easily infiltrate so many information environments- in addition to the obvious state arms, they also covertly pay people to do their bidding online. And you’d think it’d be harder than that, but no, they gave a bunch of podcasters ten million dollars, and the useful idiots claimed they had no idea they were doing russian propaganda, even though they were googling things like “what time is it in Moscow” to see if they’d get a response to a question emailed to their funder.

And increasingly, as I told a Swedish journalist, the Kremlin is injecting chaos and disinformation into the information environment during extreme weather events, to further confuse and enrage their far-right audience.

Online, no one knows you’re a dog, or russian propagandist.

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Disinformation subsidies masking propaganda as podcasts

Fracking and/or dark money built up:

Murdoch media built:

Tucker Carlson
Piers Morgan
Megyn Kelly
Glenn Beck

$10 million in Russian funding built up: �

Tim Pool
Benny Johnson
Dave Rubin

So when MediaMatters published this graphic last year, showing how rightwing podcasters have built huge english language audiences, I didn’t see it as an example of how the public wants disinfo, because I recognized the Tenet media names among the big bubbles, and saw that most of those big red bubbles aren’t just podcasts. They’re paid propaganda.

Big Carbon and other Billionaire dark money built up: Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Tom Fitton, Dan Bongino, Dinesh D’Souza, and Steven Crowder, whose rejection of a $50 million dollar contract as not enough by half resulted in the guy at the Daily Wire responding that, and I quote, Steven Crowder “was paid by PJTV, when I met him, which was owned by a billionaire at the time. Then he was paid by CRTV for a number of years, which was owned by a billionaire at the time. Then he worked for The Blaze, which was subsidized by a billionaire.”

That’s ELEVEN of the bubbles. Then there’s Tucker Carlson, Piers Morgan, Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck, all beneficiaries of Murdoch Media, and then the three literal (unwitting) Russian propagandists. Their legal defense is that they’re just useful idiots who didn’t know they were being used to spread Russian propaganda and climate disinformation.

In total, at least 18 of those big red bubbles have had major financial and institutional backing.

This is what the image looked like to me. Not a representation of demand, but of supply. Of the infrastructure to spread propaganda, of digital potemkin villages.

Because sure enough, ahead of COP31 CAAD looked at the claims these podcasters were making, and found “nearly a third, 461, of the total 1,564 false claims, the most “new climate denial” claims so far in 2025 came from Ben Shapiro, whose Daily Wire was launched with at least $4.7 million in fossil fuel funds.”

So the takeaway here isn’t that podcast listeners, and by proxy the larger public, crave transphobic bigotry and other hate and disinformation and Russian propaganda, and we should give that to them.

The lesson is that if you spend 10 million dollars on propaganda, and are allowed to game social media platforms, you can build an audience.

And with that audience, thanks to social media, you can start to reshape reality.

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Polluters make campaign contributions to politicians who then block climate action

In Canada, the fossil industry is working to replicate the strategy that’s made America grating again globally, with Canada’s attempted takeover well underway, building off the biased outlets and social media audiences that have been radicalized by American disinformation spread on American disinformation platforms posing as social media websites. Check out DeSmog for more investigative reporting exposing the oily underbelly of conservative Canadian politics, though I also just found this story from last week about a certain someone’s appeal to the “15-20% think we should ignore the climate problem” being potentially driven by the reaction climate content now gets on certain platforms bought by billionaires and turned into disinformation and hate machines.

Because guess what? Those addiction scientists that worked to make cigarettes as addictive as possible aren’t all unemployed- instead, they were hired by social media companies, which is why so many algorithms are built to be addictive. More engagement means more ad sales, and nothing gets people engaging like fiery false content. That’s one of the reasons why I tell people to stay away from any direct back-and-forth with disinfluencers online- that debate is exactly what they need to make people think there’s still a debate!

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Social Media is not real�- but it shapes reality

Because so much of our interaction with the world is now through the Internet, social media, easily gamed as it is, is actually shaping how users experience reality. So for example, there used to be stark, obvious-to-analysts differences between US far-right accounts and climate deniers and regular conservatives more broadly that CAAD used to see in its research.

For example, here’s a map of Canadian climate conversations we did in 2024, showing the mainstream users sharing content, with the right-wing in its own little bubble there, still in the fringe of national political discourse online.

But through the billionaire-backed “anti-woke” anti-ESG campaign, those disinfluencers paid by industry have very deliberately collapsed those distinctions here in the US, to the point that “computationally speaking” climate deniers are indistinguishable from the “right-wing culture wars influencers,” the people using hate and ragebait and bullying to build their audiences online.

And obviously that’s a problem, and thanks to the global nature of social media, it’s a problem you’re having to deal with, too.

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Social Media is a “funhouse mirror factory”

Because social media distorts how we think about the real world. One study calls it a “funhouse mirror factory” as social media exposes users to disinfo that feels like it’s a popular belief widely held by lots of people.

But just a relative handful of people post the majority of the content online, with CCDH finding 10 publishers were behind 69% of Facebook’s climate denial. That dynamic, where a few voices are amplified and feel like they represent a larger public, distorts our image of public opinion, like a funhouse mirror warps our image of ourselves.

And they’re increasingly using influencers as advertisers, with pandering posts aimed at exploiting women, Black people and the LGBTQ+ community, even as they’re funding anti-Trans organizations as part of the larger manufacturing of a backlash.

Here in the US, we found that of 45 major anti-trans organizations, 80% had received fossil fuel funding. That’s not a coincidence. Climate denial is unpopular, but being a bully builds you an audience online, which turns that funhouse mirror factory into a political powerhouse.

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Disinformation and Propaganda shape how we�think about others

Because in reality, conspiracy theorists are in the minority of 12%, but believe that the vast majority, 93%, agrees with them!

And when platforms make decisions to amplify the idiots, well… it works. On Xitter, Alex Jones, both literally and intellectually bankrupt, got over 408 million views for conspiracies during the LA wildfires last year, more than ten official news and ten major government emergency response services, combined.

Meanwhile, if you can afford to brainwash the public, well then google will be happy to take your money and serve up advertisements. For example, ahead of COP31, Big Oil boosted its google ads by 2,900%!

If you have millions of dollars to functionally pay for friends and followers, the funhouse mirror factories will help you create the illusion of popularity. But it’s not real.

So if you think you need to still be there so people will see your content: think again. You’re wasting time with websites that are run to push rightwing propaganda and disinformation, so instead wasting more time there, considering investing your time in the necessary infrastructure to reach, and build, an audience elsewhere, that can’t be so easily bought out from under you. Maybe that’s reddit or tiktok or pinterest or wikipedia, maybe that’s in your actual real world communities, for example through letters to the editor and other small but meaningful ways to show your neighborhood that climate policy is popular.

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Disinformation and Propaganda shape how we�think about others

Because overall, 69% of the global public is willing to give 1% of their monthly income to fight climate change, a pretty sizable majority of the world, but on average, we only think 43% of others are willing to pay- a minority.

The graph here shows individual countries actual and perceived percentages, and all this red is the difference between how generous and willing people are to pay to fight climate change, and how much less willing we think we are.

Is that more or less what you’d guessed? If you got it right, congrats! If you’re surprised by this, well, that’s why we’re here.

The difference, again, is the impact of disinformation: we think everyone else is less willing to fight climate change because we’re all so exposed to propaganda and climate disinformation that we think others are falling for.

Disinformation makes all of us underestimate popular support for climate action.

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It’s not persuasion, it’s peer pressure!

So it’s not that we need persuasion to convince the public to support climate action. It’s not a debate, it’s peer pressure- bullying. And it’s been that way for decades! For example, here’s a clip from the Simpsons, from the 1995 episode where Lisa becomes a vegetarian, so the school shows the kids a video from their friends in the meat industry, and it’s a perfect demonstration of how it works. So as a reward for sticking with me this far, let’s watch some cartoons!

[play clip]

The propaganda didn’t make Lisa start eating meat again, it just gave people rhetoric to attack her, while normalizing and excusing that behavior to discourage others from following Lisa’s example or voicing their agreement with her. In the same way, climategate didn’t actually change conservatives’ minds, so much as it gave them a rhetorical weapon to defend their denial, and prop up the potemkin village.

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The opponents of climate action use disinfo to inflate their perceived popularity to sabotage efforts to pass policies protecting the public from their profit-generating pollution.

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Inoculation: now in metaphor form!

Weakened virus provides a learning example for the immune system in the same way that warning people about mis/disinfo can prepare them so that they don’t fall for it.

What can we do about climate disinformation? �Inoculation: now in metaphor form!

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Inoculation: now in metaphor form!

The Debunking Handbook shows The Truth Sandwich.

Disinfo is like an infected specimen- you wouldn’t just toss a dirty needle to your buddy! You’d use tongs and gloves and safety gear to handle it carefully.

Debunking Disinfo? Serve up a Truth Sandwich!

PUT THE TRUTH (NOT the myth) IN BOLD ALL-CAPS BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT YOU WANT PEOPLE TO REMEMBER

Well… not quite. Check out the Debunking Handbook for instructions on serving up a Truth Sandwich by packing disinformation between the reality you need people to know about.

You lead not with the myth you’re debunking but with the fact that’s most important to set the frame, then you warn that people might hear about the myth, then you explain how and why it’s wrong (usually because it’s their job to be wrong) then you close with the takeaway facts you’re reinforcing.

Consider disinformation like something glowing green you find in a needle- you wouldn’t just pick something dangerous up bare handed and toss it to your buddy, or worse, figure out what it is by consuming it yourself!

You’d use some safety gear.

Same is true for disinformation, you have to pack it within the facts and reality, so if you have a whole page-long debunking, the actual myth itself should only be a small portion of the content, with the vast majority being the corrective material.

That truth sandwich structure is broadly applicable, and I think is a perfect structure for Letters to the Editor.

You state the big fact first, something like “a price on carbon is popular among both economists and the general public as a tool for addressing climate change.” Then you warn about the myth- “but last week, readers were exposed to disinformation about a carbon price,” before explaining where it came from: “which is why the outlet did readers a disservice by exposing them to lies from an industry-funded source whose business depends on fossil fuels.”

Then you reiterate your take-away fact: “the vast majority of Canadians support wind and solar, and politicians should act on that support.”

Regardless of the medium itself, making sure the lies are safely sandwiched between reality is vital to make sure people remember what’s true, and don’t just write off the whole thing as “still up for debate”.

Fact-myth-fallacy-fact. Yummy!

The Debunking Handbook is from the team behind SkepticalScience, a website that started as an effort to debunk the most common climate lies, and eventually grew into, well, that machine-learning bullseye of disinfo myths. So you can check out their “most used climate myths” sidebar to find the easy answers to the most common 200 denial lies for help creating a truth sandwich.

One of the easiest ways to discredit an argument is to point out that it’s been debunked… for a decade!

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Inoculation: now in metaphor form!

How To FLICC Off Reality

Another tool to help explain the fallacy is the FLICC chart, which lets you simply find which tricks they used to concoct the disinfo.

There are Fake experts, like the “scientician” in the Simpsons clip. There are Logical Fallacies, like the “blowfish,” that takes a small impact, and over-inflates it to exaggerate it as a huge negative consequence.

There are Impossible Expectations, like claiming any given policy won’t itself fully solve warming. There’s cherry-picking, and quote-mining and other forms of paltering, and then there are the easy explain-it-all-away Conspiracy theories.

You never have to actually engage with the substance of the disinformation, because it’s always going to fall into one of these categories. You just have to learn to recognize them, which is pretty easy once you get going.

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Inoculation: now in metaphor form!

Highlight the real villains: fossil fuel industry and the billionaires taking control
We Make The Future’s Race Class Narrative architecture offers a great framework, and research shows anti-racist messaging reduces support for the far-right.
Accommodating the racists, on the other hand, only makes them stronger.

Messaging that works

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Inoculation: now in metaphor form!

Everyone likes to laugh (at baddies)

Humor defangs hate by punching back up at those punching down.
Humor provides an enticing entry point for unsuspecting audiences not looking for political content
Humor triggers positive emotions, offsetting the ‘doom and gloom’ when piquing interest
Humor provides greater chance of �‘going viral’

Would you rather that person you’re trying to impress see something really funny on your feed, or something really terrifying?

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Template for a Disinfo-Debunking

The introduction paragraph (or two) should summarize the situation. [Person or Organization] is spreading disinfo about [issue, scientist, organization] for a reason: the [fossil fuel] industry funds their [campaign/employer] to sow doubt about/block action on [climate change]. This is where you make the audience care that they're being lied to, ideally by giving enough info to get by even if they don't care enough to read on. Then you get into the details.

Address the key factual error or example of how the content is inaccurate to show this isn't just a difference of opinions, but a clear distortion of the facts. Pick the two most damning deceptions to debunk. This is where you make the facts clear with the empirical reasons you have for being confident this is disinformation to debunk.

E.g. This person claims wind turbines are giving whales cancer, but if anything's hurting whales, it's climate change. Here's the numbers of whales hit by fishing boats and killed by warming: [Big number]. Here's the number of whales that have gotten cancer from wind turbines: Zero.

A second or third main point should be a logical fallacy or rhetorical trick used to construct the disinfo, like using fake experts or conspiracy theories. While the first point(s) should be unmistakable, numerical errors about what is wrong, including another point on how this myth was created helps inoculate and show the initial errors aren't innocent mistakes.

E.g. 'Deniers point to this quote from an email to claim scientists admitted wrongdoing, but that quote was actually fake, they just stuck together two entirely different phrases from different contexts.'

After proving it is wrong and explaining how the content is wrong, provide additional context to explain why someone would, to quote the classic 2005 episode of PBS's Arthur, just go on the internet and tell lies.

Conflicts of interest, political bias, and other history reassures readers that this false content wasn't a fluke and makes them skeptical of future similar claims. Together the facts and context sections should combine to show readers it's wrong, and not by accident, but by intent. Show, don't tell, how they're lying.

Conclude with a reassertion of reality, using accurate messages and the sticky story of why someone would lie about these important facts. The trick is to replace the myth with something that will cover up the disinfo and stick in its place in people's brains. That's why a debunking needs to tell a narrative story, combining both the scientific facts and the explanation of who's spreading disinformation, and an explanation as to why.

Putting it all together, here’s a template for a debunking Letter to the Editor that you can go back to for reference.

Remember, the largest number of people are just reading the headline and not clicking through, or just reading the first sentence or two but not the whole thing, so make sure that’s straightforward and to the point.

That said, some outlets have specific style conventions, like the Wall Street Journal wants you to reference the author and headline you’re responding to, so always check for those nuances. And in general you probably have about a week to get an LTE in to respond to an event or story, though smaller outlets may be more forgiving.

Here’s the basic version though, that you can basically play mad libs with:

[Person or Organization] is lying/spreading disinfo about [issue, scientist, organization] for a reason: the [fossil fuel/agriculture/tobacco] industry funds their [campaign/employer] to sow doubt about/block action on [climate change/public health].

This person claims wind turbines are giving whales cancer, but if anything's hurting whales, it's climate change. Here's the numbers of whales hit by fishing boats and killed by warming: [Big number]. Here's the number of whales that have gotten cancer from wind turbines: Zero.

Why the lies? Perhaps because the person’s employer receives funding from the fossil fuel industry, who has an obvious financial interest in obstructing climate action.

When all they’re left with is lies, you know it’s time for real climate action. A huge majority of Canadians support climate action, leaders should take note.

Conclude with a reassertion of reality, using accurate messages and the sticky story of why someone would lie about these important facts. The trick is to replace the myth with something that will cover up the disinfo and stick in its place in people's brains, which means telling a story, not having a scientific debate.

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A warning on fact-checking

Fact checks, FAQs, explainers, and everything else, only work for people who want to be correct!

Typhoid Mary was a cook who made at least 7 families sick and likely caused the 3,000 cases of Salmonella in NYC in 1907.

She tested positive in 120 of 163 tests over 2 years and was then released on the condition that she wash her hands after pooping and stop cooking for people.

But instead she got another job as a cook, and killed 2 more people. She had to be permanently quarantined to stop spreading disease.

NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO BE HEALTHY (correct). SOME PEOPLE JUST WANT TO COOK (lie).

Note that I didn’t suggest fact checks as a solution to disinformation. That’s because they’re actually for misinformation, not disinfo.

While I very much believe in the importance of fact checking, and recognize the value of inoculations, both vaccine and informational, they’re not enough to stop disinfo.

Because they only work for people who want to be correct. But not everyone wants to be correct. And that’s who we have to address.

Disinformation isn’t like the medical world, where finding “patient zero” for a disease is important for stopping an outbreak, and if we could simply identify who first posted the mis or disinformation online, we could let them know they’re wrong, and they’d stop spreading it.

Even from the medical world we know this information-deficit based treatment doesn’t work. Typhoid Mary is a case study.

Back in 1907, a doctor traced an outbreak of thousands of cases of Salmonella in New York City to a cook, who was then quarantined for two years while they tested and confirmed she was the source. She was told to wash her hands, and stop cooking for people.

But because cooking is all she knew how to do for a living and they didn’t train her to do anything else for those 2 years of testing, she went out got another job as a cook, and killed 2 more people. Authorities had to quarantine her for the rest of her life.

Not everyone wants to be healthy or correct. Some people get paid to cook- to lie. Fact checks won’t stop them.

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Inoculation: now in metaphor form!

What can we actually do about climate disinformation?

Create consequences

Rapid response to generate outrage as a means to build political power to stop them.

Discredit disinfluencers

Opposition research to marginalize, ostracise, and discredit professional liars.

Ostracize industry enablers

Divestment: Don’t do business with Public Relations firms, financial institutions, technology providers and others whose business is disinformation.

So what can we actually DO about climate disinfo? It falls into three categories, each aimed at reducing the amount of disinfo polluting our information environment.

First? Creating consequences, for example through rapid response efforts that generate outrage and backlash to make it clear the disinfo is unpopular. This is where Letters to the Editor come in- when something that makes you mad gets reported on, send off a quick LTE!

Second? Discrediting disinfluencers with opposition research so that mainstream sources don’t fall for their lies. So when you write that LTE, resist the urge to focus on the specific facts or narrative, and remember that they want the debate, so instead focus on why that person is simply not credible as a speaker, so readers know not to fall for it next time, though hopefully there won’t be one, because the outlet and reporter shouldn’t trust them either.

Third? Ostracise enablers in related industries that work for Big Carbon, like public relations, advertising, finance, and tech companies whose work is used to facilitate the spread of disinformation. Remember, fossil fuel interests use their money to appear more popular- follow that money, and create consequences for taking it.

Make it uncomfortable for professional liars to do their jobs. Create whatever friction you can to make it clear that climate policy is popular and denial and disinfo is for losers. Maybe the Letter is about one of the advertisements or pieces of sponsored content, for example, that calls out the harmful and deceptive practice.

The disinfo itself is often just a distraction from whatever bad news that bad actors don’t want the public talking about- that’s what you should talk about!

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We’ll never have the billions of dollars to advertise that the industry has, which is why some groups advocate for a ban on fossil fuel ads, for example, to level the playing field.

At the national level, here in Canada, there’s actually already a law that can address climate disinformation, the Competition Act.

And thanks to recent amendments, it “explicitly targets greenwashing” and any individual can file a complaint against businesses under it.

So there are direct, public-facing opportunities to actually start reducing the amount of disinformation in the information environment, we don’t have to always just live with it and find ways around the impact of disinformation.

At least there almost was, before Carney scrapped it in the face of, you guessed it, industrial disinformation. I’ll read you the quote I dashed off to Marc at the National Observer last November- "Canada told the fossil fuel industry greenwashing was illegal, and its response was that having to be honest and transparent would make it too hard to do business. Apparently the threat worked, so now Canadians will be subjected to more false claims and have fewer ways to protect themselves against industrial disinformation, despite polling showing over 80% of Canadians want the country to do more on disinformation, not less.”

Always more work to be done!

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Countries that signed the Declaration:

Armenia Austria Belgium Brazil Canada Chile Czechia Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Iceland Luxembourg Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Slovenia Spain Sweden Uruguay

2025 saw a number of encouraging policy developments that promise to keep moving in 2026- From the outlawing of greenwash in france and fossil fuel ads in the Hague to the debating of a law against spreading false content during extreme weather events in Japan, to Brazil’s Supreme Court rulings on social media, we’re finally starting to treat Big Carbon and Big Tech like Big Tobacco.

Because last year leaders from around the world, and in particular Brazil, put info integrity on the international diplomatic agenda, with summits and declarations and a Global Initiative for information Integrity on Climate Change, or GIIICC.

What’s that, besides a mouthful I’m calling GEEK? It’s a start. The start of a new global community that prioritizes the truth, committed to shutting down bad actors and promoting good ones.

So this is the part where I used to rattle off the initial countries that joined one by one but then it got to be a pain to keep updating so now, here’s the current list, up to 14, while at COP30, so here’s the flags, at least for now.

There, for the first time, information integrity was on the agenda, and a Declaration organized by the GIIICC was signed by a total 21 countries who expressed a recognition of the problem posed by disinformation as well as calling for solutions to be enacted and enforced. Here’s the list from the website, and then in a size you might be able to actually read.

Good news is Canada’s already a member!

Which is great, because this isn’t an impossible problem to solve.

Expose the bad actors, create policy solutions to stop them, and fill media with high quality information. That’s how you overcome climate obstruction and disinformation. But we have to do it together, as a community.

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Because even policymakers are not immune to disinformation. As a follow-up of the study showing 69% of the public would give 1% of their monthly income to fight climate change, researchers asked UN Environment Assembly attendees what percentage of the public they thought would give 1%.

And even though they’re actively trying to secure climate policy, they too dramatically underestimated the public support, with a mean estimate of just 37.8%, a full 30% lower than the 69% majority, and with the most responses coming in way down at 10 to 20 percent.

Because the real impact of disinformation isn’t to make us think climate change is a hoax, it’s to make us think everyone else thinks it’s a hoax.

Disinfo doesn’t make you think that you’re wrong. It makes you feel like you’re alone.

The way to counter that isn’t just facts. We need to shatter the funhouse mirror factory, and build real community in their place.

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