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climate denial
How Climate Denial Greased Trump's Ascent to Fibber-in-Chief
Where the GOP learned to lie as a matter of course is an interesting question, and as a long-time climate activist I’ve had a front row seat: It’s the climate fight, more than anything else, that taught them to regard reality as optional.
Feb 03, 2026
The past stretch of days—say, since the murder of Renee Good—has been marked by brutality, but also by a dishonesty so deep and stupid that it’s begun to finally turn on the liars. Following the execution of Alex Pretti, for instance, various White House officials were quick to start just plain lying: He was an “assassin” and a “domestic terrorist” who "wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement."
As many videos emerged in the course of the day, those lies were shown for what they were. Pretti was, at worst, trying to help a woman who was being unnecessarily gassed; for his pains he was executed once he’d been disarmed; the only “weapon” he’d “brandished” was a cell phone. Oh, and instead of being a domestic terrorist he was a VA nurse who treated former soldiers with compassion and dignity.
Politicians, it goes without saying, have sometimes engaged in dishonesty, often with hideous consequences. The Gulf of Tonkin “attacks” that gave America an excuse for war in Vietnam were at least in part fabrications; the “weapons of mass destruction” weren’t in Iraq and there was no compelling reason to think they were. Hell, we had a president—Richard Nixon—known as Tricky Dick for the smears and fibs that marked his whole career, from his first congressional race to the last days of Watergate. But the presidents who told those lies generally attempted to manufacture cover stories or cloud them in enough shadows that they might pass for mistakes. By now, however, we’ve reached a point where the president and his party just recite up-is-down lies constantly. Consider this reckoning of President Donald Trump's first term:
When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection. This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign.
By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency—averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day. What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year—and 39 claims a day in his final year.
Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.
The second term, obviously, is far worse than the first. At this point, it would be far easier for the Post to assign a reporter to list the true things the president says—a list as short as his… temper. (And of course the second-term Post wouldn’t do this, since its owner has castrated one of America’s great papers in an effort to curry favor with the fibber-in-chief). Every lie he tells is then repeated by his satraps in the administration and Congress—the closest they come to shame is when they lie and say that they haven’t heard his latest lies so they don’t have to publicly swallow them. Here at home we’ve gotten so used to this that the lies often barely register—but when Trump went to Davos and gave a speech literally filled with whoppers, European leaders were astonished. He was telling them things that they knew to be absurd—that China has no wind farms, say—and expecting them to go along.
Where the GOP learned to lie as a matter of course is an interesting question, and I’m afraid I’ve had a front row seat. I think it’s the climate fight, more than anything else, that taught them to regard reality as optional. And I think this because I remember the start of it all. When Jim Hansen first testified before the Senate that global warming was real, it caused a society-wide stir; running for the White House, the sitting vice-president George Herbert Walker Bush said he would combat the greenhouse effect with “the White House effect.” He made no attempt to deny it, or pretend it wasn’t a problem; it was reality, he wanted to lead the world, he had to at least pretend to deal with it.
And of course he could have—he could have resurrected Jimmy Carter’s plans (only eight years old) for a rapid solar research and development program, for instance. He seemed like he might; during the campaign he promised to convene a "global conference on the environment at the White House" during his first year in office. That didn’t happen, and it’s fairly easy to figure out why.
At about this same time—1989-1990—the fossil fuel industry was making a fateful decision. They were well aware that global warming was real; as a series of archival documents and whistleblowers have now laid out in excruciating detail, the big oil companies had conducted their own research programs, and reached conclusions just like Hansen’s. (Indeed, Exxon’s internal estimates of how hot the world would be by 2020 turned out to be even more accurate than NASA’s). We know that the executives of these companies believed their scientists—Exxon, for instance, began building drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming, and plotting which corners of the Arctic to lease for drilling once it had inevitably melted.
It always has seemed to me that the worst fate would be to walk over this cliff without knowing it was there. Dignity demands understanding.
But they decided, across the industry, that the price of telling the truth would be too high. Inevitably it would mean having to leave at least some of their reserves of coal, gas, and oil in the ground, and those reserves were valued in the tens of trillions of dollars. And so they started forming the coalitions and councils, hiring the veterans of the fights over tobacco and asbestos and even DDT—they started lying.
Their lies were, at first, made concessions to some notion of plausibility. The science was “uncertain.” It was mostly China’s fault. Climate always fluctuates. Computer models are “unreliable.” And so on—these were never good-faith objections, they were always the arguments from selfishness. And as time went on they became more and more outlandish. Before the 1990s were over, the CEO of Exxon was telling a key crowd of Chinese leaders that the Earth was cooling and that it would make no difference if we waited a quarter century to start phasing out fossil fuels. Again, his scientists had assured him that this was nonsense years before.
It took a while for this to filter down through the entire GOP ecosystem. George W. Bush actually ran for president in 2000 promising to officially establish that carbon dioxide was a pollutant and to regulate its emissions. Shortly after taking office, however, his vice-president—oil-patch CEO Dick Cheney—held a series of private meetings with his industry brethren, and before long W. announced that he had made a mistake and that CO2 was not in fact a problem.
That was the signal for the rest of the Republican party—save for a few iconoclasts like John McCain—to fall in line, and by the time he ran for president even McCain had pretty much given up talking about global warming. The biggest donors by far to GOP campaign funds were the Koch brothers and the vast network they had assembled of right-wing billionaires—and the Koch brothers were the biggest oil and gas barons in America, owners of an unrivaled fleet of pipelines and refineries. The efforts of this group of oil-adjacent cronies became ever more extreme—eventually they were funding groups to put up billboards equating climate scientists with Charles Manson.
And eventually, inevitably, it produced a president who felt no compunction about just saying that climate change wasn’t real, and using all the power he could muster to kill off both the scientific effort that had alerted us to the crisis, and the policy effort to do something about it. His crew assisted in this cover-up in all the usual ways—we learned January 30, for instance, that a federal judge had ruled that the Department of Energy’s effort to produce a report pooh-poohing climate danger had violated all manner of federal law.
Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts said the Energy Department did not deny that it had failed to hold open meetings or assemble a balance of viewpoints, as the law requires, when it created the panel, known as the Climate Working Group.
“These violations are now established as a matter of law,” wrote Judge Young, who was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan. He said the Climate Working Group was, in fact, a federal advisory committee designed to inform policy, and not, as the Energy Department claimed, merely “assembled to exchange facts or information.”
What makes this campaign of deception all the more remarkable is that it’s happened even as the actual facts of global warming have become painfully clear. Back in 1988 it was still pretty much theory; now it’s flood and fire, storm and sea-level rise. We live on a planet losing the ice at its poles, and the vast coral reefs in between, where tens of millions of humans are already on the move because their homes can no longer support them. It’s also remarkable because in 1988 the solutions were hard—solar power was still the most expensive energy on Earth. Now it’s the cheapest. Most of the world has recognized these truths, coming together if fitfully to try and least talk about it. But whenever America is in the hands of Republicans it just walks away.
Perhaps, given this long history, I can offer a few hard-earned ideas about how to try and deal with Trump’s many assaults on the truth. They won’t do all that we might hope, but they’re nonetheless important.
- Don’t give up. Telling the the truth repeatedly actually can work. Because more than 80% of Americans saw the video of Alex Pretti’s execution, the lies backfired. And at least in part because 95% of Americans live in counties that have had a federally declared disaster since 2011, it’s hard to convince most people that there’s not something afoot. Indeed, polling demonstrates that public concern and understanding of climate change has held relatively stable for the last 30 years, with about two-thirds of Americans acknowledging that we’ve got trouble. And since it’s clear that about one-third of America is beyond the reach of fact or feeling, that’s not bad.
- More than ever we need to support independent media. Throughout Trump’s second term, it’s been as much Substackers, YouTubers, and others of this breed who’ve been keeping things straight as it has the ‘legacy media.’ (As one small example, check out this epic—in both content and length—rant about renewable energy’s benefits that appeared on YouTube over the weekend). That legacy media is increasingly craven and corrupted (see, for instance, CBS News), or just simply out of business—we now have big cities in America without daily newspapers. The administration clearly recognizes this trend—that’s why they’re trying to prosecute Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, and others covering the Minnesota debacle. Many of these independent journalists have a point of view—I certainly do. And I can tell you that, though I continue to work for and love brave institutions like the New Yorker, I’m also very grateful for things like Substack that are increasingly taking up the slack. (Tips on how to support Lemon and Fort here)
- Even on days when one despairs (and that’s an awful lot of days) it’s good to remind oneself that the truth has real value in and of itself. I’ve written more words than anyone else on the climate crisis—one motivation was to try and spur action, but another was simply to record and spread this news. It always has seemed to me that the worst fate would be to walk over this cliff without knowing it was there. Dignity demands understanding.
I have no idea if I’ll live to see the day when the truth regains a strong footing in our culture, but I do have a certain amount of faith it will happen eventually, if only because reality reality ultimately trumps (not Trumps) political reality. Physics and chemistry are functional truth, despite their liberal bias. I remember the week after Hurricane Sandy hit New York shutting down the financial district, and the cover of Business Week magazine was simply a big block of text: “It’s Global Warming Stupid.” Eventually that message will get through; our job is to see if we can make that happen before the damage is any worse than it has to be.
Oh, and word on the street is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going after Springfield Ohio this week—home of the biggest lie of the last election campaign. Haitians are not eating cats and dogs. ICE is killing good people. The last three years are the hottest on record. Pass it on.
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'Attack on Independent Science': Trump EPA Removes All Mention of Human-Caused Climate Crisis From Public Webpages
Climate scientist Daniel Swain called it "a deliberate effort to misinform."
Dec 09, 2025
The Trump administration has removed all references to human-caused climate change from Environmental Protection Agency webpages, as well as large amounts of data showing the dramatic warming of the climate over recent decades and the resulting risks.
According to a Tuesday report from the Washington Post, one page on the "Causes of Climate Change" stated as recently as October that "it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land," a statement that reflects the overwhelming consensus in peer-reviewed literature on climate.
That statement is now nowhere to be found, with those that remain only mentioning "natural" causes of planetary warming like volcanic activity and variations in solar activity.
"The new, near-exclusive emphasis on natural causes of climate change on the EPA's website is now completely out of sync with all available evidence demonstrating overwhelming human influence on contemporary warming trends," explained Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, who posted about the changes on social media.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which examines tens of thousands of studies from around the globe, found that virtually all warming since the dawn of the industrial era can be attributed to human carbon emissions.
This can be confirmed using the Wayback Machine's last snapshot (from Oct 8, 2025). At some point between Oct 8 & Dec 8, major changes were made to this and other EPA climate change content. Information has either been removed completely or "adjusted" to emphasize natural causes.
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— Daniel Swain (@weatherwest.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Pages about the catastrophic results of climate change have also been scrubbed: One of them allowed users to view several climate change indicators, like the historic decline of Arctic sea ice and glaciers and the increased rates of coastal flooding due to rising sea levels. That page has been deleted entirely.
Another page, which answered frequently asked questions about climate change, now no longer includes questions like, "Is there scientific consensus that human activities are causing today’s climate change?” "How can people reduce the risks of climate change?" and "Who is most at risk from the impacts of climate change?" The page provides no indication that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon, instead only discussing natural factors.
That page links to another that has since been deleted. It once provided extensive information about the risks climate change poses to human health, "from increasing the risk of extreme heat events and heavy storms to increasing the risk of asthma attacks and changing the spread of certain diseases carried by ticks and mosquitoes." Another deleted page discussed the impacts of climate change on children's health and low-income populations.
“This is, I think, one of the more dramatic scrubbings we’ve seen so far in the climate space,” said Swain. "This website is now completely incorrect regarding the changes in climate that we’re seeing today and their causes... It’s clearly a deliberate effort to misinform.”
During his 2024 campaign for reelection, President Donald Trump and his affiliated super political action committees received more than $96 million in direct contributions from oil and gas industry donors, according to a January report from Climate Power. Since retaking office, he has moved to dramatically expand the extraction and use of planet-heating fossil fuels while eliminating investment in clean energy and electric vehicles.
Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said, "Deleting and distorting this scientific information only serves to give a free pass to fossil fuel polluters who are raking in profits even as communities reel from extreme heatwaves, record-breaking floods, intensified storms, and catastrophic wildfires."
Cleetus said that the purging of climate information from EPA sites was a prelude to "the likely overturning of the endangerment finding, a legal and scientific foundation for standards to limit the heat-trapping emissions driving climate change and threatening human health."
In July, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled a proposal to rescind the 2009 finding, which determined that climate change endangers human life and serves as the legal basis for greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act.
Undermining climate science is core to that effort, which Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, said at the time, "could unravel virtually every US climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules.”
Shortly after Zeldin announced the rule change, the Department of Energy cobbled together a “Climate Working Group” comprising five authors handpicked by Secretary Chris Wright to produce a climate report that disputes the IPCC's findings and the scientific consensus on climate change.
The report did not undergo peer review and omitted around 99% of the scientific literature the IPCC relied on for its comprehensive findings. A group of climate scientists that independently reviewed the paper found that it “exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics.”
Cleetus said Tuesday that “EPA is trying to bury the evidence on human-caused climate change, but it cannot change the reality of climate science or the harsh toll climate impacts are taking on people’s lives... This isn’t just about data on a website; it’s an attack on independent science and scientific integrity.”
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The ‘COP of Truth’ Just Normalized a New Kind of Climate Denialism
The new denialism no longer bellows about hoaxes; it asks for more studies, more modelling, more consultations, always in the service of delay.
Dec 02, 2025
Belém promised a “COP of truth.” What unfolded was a courteous unravelling of ambition, as denialism left global climate action wobbling at the moment it needs steel.
As the Chair of the UK’s COP30 youth delegation, I realized within hours that this United Nations climate conference would be defined by its optics—not its outcomes. The venue teemed with political hopefuls more interested in cameras than commitments, and with a record 1,600 fossil fuel and 531 carbon-capture lobbyists, 1 in every 25 attendees served commercial interests.
Then came the negotiations, where delegates quietly diluted the science. References to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), long regarded as the global lodestar of climate knowledge, were either softened into ambiguity or dropped altogether. Several companies went even further, trumpeting improvements in emissions intensity as if they were genuine reductions.
It was greenwashing par excellence, a polite fiction to excuse keeping emissions exactly where they are.
After the failures of COP29 and COP30, the process will only matter again if governments are finally pushed toward honesty and supported by tools that can hold them to it.
So it was no surprise when the negotiations titled toward erasure, governing not just the deal but the language that framed it. The term “fossil fuel” vanished from the final Belém Political Package, replaced with sweeping and unenforceable vows to renewables and adaptation funding.
We should have foreseen how settled climate science would be twisted and spun. After all, one investigation found more than 14,000 pieces of COP-related disinformation in just the three months before Belém. Much of it was generated by AI, including a widely shared fake video that showed the host city swallowed by floods.
This version of climate denialism reveals the moral credibility of climate action is being leveraged to keep emissions frozen in place. It no longer bellows about hoaxes, except by Donald Trump who has happily dragged America back into isolationism. In the diplomatic world it asks for more studies, more modelling, more consultations, always in the service of delay. It is denialism wearing the mask of governance, and it is far more corrosive than the loud bluff it replaced.
The timing could hardly be worse. The IPCC’s carbon budget for a 50% chance of staying below 1.5°C will vanish by 2029 if emissions continue at today’s pace. This is also the first year after the Global Stocktake that mandates governments to draft national plans that will set our course until 2030.
And what happens now determines the shape of the decisive decade. Crossing 1.5°C sharply raises the risk of irreversible cryosphere collapse—rapid ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland which will lock the world into meters of sea-level rise that imperil coastal megacities across every hemisphere. At 2°C, another billion people will face severe water scarcity—especially in the Global South where adaptation capacity is lowest and exposure is highest. This reality is why the deliberate sidelining of climate science is not just exasperating but catastrophic.
And COP30’s lone nod to honesty—the Declaration on Information Integrity—feels painfully thin. The declaration, which promises to counter climate falsehoods, was only signed by 12 countries. And with no sanctions or accountability, it is a gesture at truth in the exact moment truth needed teeth.
We need a global firewall for climate truth: binding rules for climate information, a UN body capable of verifying data with transparent AI, and legal duties on platforms to curb the algorithmic spread of lies. Climate inaction is becoming a matter of legal liability. That burden should fall equally on those who deliberately twist the science.
There must be a counterweight capable of tracing disinformation, naming the culprits of confusion, and dragging the debate back to the science that anchors it. Only then can we hope to restart global climate momentum. And in an irony worthy of our age, the technology that helped generate the mess—AI—may be the only thing sharp enough to cut through it.
According to Sachin Dev Duggal, Britain’s foremost expert on applied artificial intelligence and EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2023, the internet is now a space where reliable information sits beside convincing fabrications, and no amount of earnest climate communication will fix this without tools that can separate accuracy from invention at scale.
AI is already showing what those tools might look like. It can review millions of words in seconds and test claims against established climate data with a consistency no human team can match. We are already seeing this in practice. For example, the machine-learning model ClimateBERT has analysed corporate reports and exposed misleading emissions claims. Another model, CLIMINATOR, has also been trained to hold political and corporate actors to account by checking whether their climate statements align with the evidence or contradict it. And the FactCrisis project, cofounded by the EU, has used AI during heatwaves to track false statistics and identify accounts pushing them, offering a glimpse of what becomes possible when AI and international bodies finally start reinforcing one another.
Duggal argues that the next step is a decentralized verification model. Climate data from satellites, sensors, and national inventories would sit in a shared public ledger that no ministry or corporation can quietly revise. When a government or company makes a claim about progress, anyone could check it against a record that does not bend to convenience. It would make the small acts of creative reporting that feed climate denialism far harder to get away with.
Yet today’s AI carries a flaw that limits its usefulness. Large language models are fluent but ungrounded, reproducing the language of climate science without retaining the facts that give it weight, which makes them unreliable referees in a space awash with motivated distortions. Duggal sees that any serious AI tool must reconnect claims to their evidence, trace where the data came from, and reveal the steps that turned information into a conclusion. This is the direction of his SeKondBrain project, which concentrates on how to build these evidential scaffolds so that an AI system can point to the exact documents, numbers, or assumptions that shaped its judgement. That kind of traceability matters because it gives climate negotiators and regulators something concrete to interrogate. And without systems built to preserve and expose the evidence behind their outputs, AI will remain too opaque to play any serious role in protecting science.
After the failures of COP29 and COP30, the process will only matter again if governments are finally pushed toward honesty and supported by tools that can hold them to it. Without that basic partnership, we may have reached the point where another COP has nothing left to say.
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