Faced with the harsh reality of high temperatures and fires caused by climate change in Europe, climate deniers, also known as climate skeptics, have found a viral way to spread doubts and fake news about global warming on social media during the heat wave: the publication of weather maps with the wrong dates and out of context, suggesting that meteorologists are exaggerating climate change by “too much” using the color red.
During the two recent heat waves in Europe, climate deniers from different countries and languages ​​juxtaposed weather maps from different media on the wrong dates, aiming to spread misinformation. Publications often suggest that the color of maps was “changed to red” by the media or authorities in order to “create panic”.
The AFP agency’s digital verification service, however, deconstructed several versions of these allegations, which were published in English, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian and Polish, suggesting a curious orderly and joint action.
In France, two maps purporting to prove that the media is intentionally trying to “scare people” with the 2022 heat wave have been shared thousands of times on social media since July 15.
In an actual map of temperatures in France on July 17, some denialist netizens purposely altered the data and dates, offering an alleged weather forecast with “similar temperatures in 2002, but much less red”, implying that the media is “deliberately exaggerating its extreme heat cover this summer”.
“Twenty years between these two maps… At that time, they were probably doing less brainwashing… Living in fear, in fear of tomorrow… The media is doing real psychological work on the population… And it’s not going really bad,” one of the climate deniers said on Facebook.
“What a weather disaster today was a beautiful summer day in 2002…” lamented another Facebook post on July 16.
The problem was that the second map was actually from 2019, and the maps came from different sources that didn’t use the same color palette — and not, as the post claimed, from a single weatherman who had manipulated their color palette.
color coding
Similar fake news was published in May and June in English and German, among other languages, on social media.
In an example shared on Twitter and elsewhere, two maps of Sweden showed similar temperatures side by side: one was green and dated 1986, while the other was orange and dated 2022, implying that over the years, “the same temperatures would correspond to increasingly alarming colors”.
But a digital investigation revealed that the years shown on the maps were not correct, and that these came from different media, again using different color codes.
In another type of weather post, netizens in Spain shared a photo from a 1957 newspaper that reported a record temperature of 50°C. The article was genuine, but users were unaware of the fact that it had been posted. The article was authentic, but Spanish meteorologists explained that the temperature measurement had not been certified, or officially recorded.
Climate scientists agree that carbon emissions from humanity’s burning of fossil fuels are warming the planet, increasing the frequency and severity of heat waves and other extreme weather events.
With temperatures in excess of 40°C, this week’s heat wave in Britain also drew comparisons with the summer of 1976, when the temperature reached 35.9°C. Experts say this precedent does not contradict the idea that hot flashes will become increasingly common.
“Of course there have been heat waves in the past, but the big difference from 1976 is the state of the rest of the world,” says Friederike Otto, a researcher at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.
“In 1976 there was a heat wave [na Grã-Bretanha]in 2022 there are heat waves all over the world, and there were also heat waves in 2021, 2020 and 2019.”
Detailed verification of the facts cited in this text is available at factual.afp.com.
