False information about climate change flourished online over the past year, researchers say, with denialist social media posts and conspiracy theories surging after US environmental reforms and Elon Musk's Twitter takeover.
"What really surprised us this year was to see a resurgence in language that is reminiscent of the 1980s: phrases like 'climate hoax' and 'climate scam' that deny the phenomenon of climate change," said Jennie King, head of civic action at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based digital research group.
Popular topics included the false claims that CO2 does not cause climate change or that global warming is not caused by human activity, said Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a coalition of campaigners, in a report.
"Let me expose what the climate scam is actually all about," read one of the most-shared tweets, cited in another survey by US non-profit Advance Democracy, Inc (ADI).
"It is a wealth transfer from you—to the global elite."
An analysis of Twitter messages—carried out for AFP by two computational social scientists at City, University of London—counted 1.1 million tweets or retweets using strong climate-sceptic terms in 2022.
That was nearly twice the figure for 2021, said researchers Max Falkenberg and Andrea Baronchelli. They found climate denial posts peaked in December, the month after Tesla billionaire Musk took over the platform.
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