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Transcript:
Chris Gloninger: I woke up a typical day. And I opened up my emails and there was an email from a viewer and he wrote that. What is your home address? Us conservative Iowans want to give you a welcome that you'll always remember, kind of what the blank tried to do with Justice Kavanaugh. Being in the news, I knew exactly what that meant, because that was when somebody was arrested near the justice's house with zip ties and weapons. My heart raced and I felt paralyzed. I felt stuck and I knew my wife was out shopping. And I remember picking up the phone and calling her and asking her where she was. I knew she was shopping, but I didn't know if she was coming back home or if she was still out running errands. And I said, please come back.
Narrator (Neil King): Next Chris Cloninger calls the police as the chief meteorologist for KCCI, a local TV station in Des Moines, Iowa. His name and even his home address are easy to find for him. This last email is the final straw after a string of threats he's received these past months.
Chris and his wife don't feel safe at home anymore, so they move into a hotel.
Chris Gloninger: We packed everything up. We quickly raced to get our toiletries, our clothes all packed together.
Narrator: Unfortunately, Chris's case is far from unique. But what sparked all this? I'm Neil King, and in this episode of Living Planets, we're exploring the world of climate misinformation and conspiracy theories, how it's fuelling online hate and what can be done about it. To understand what Chris went through and why this shook him so deeply, we need to go back. Back to where it all began. A childhood storm that fueled a lifelong passion.
Chris Gloninger: For many meteorologists. It's a weather event at a young age that we experience, that leave us with a lasting memory that propels us into the field. And for me, it was hurricane Bob in 1991 that hit my hometown on eastern Long Island.
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Chris Gloninger: It wasn't a particularly intense hurricane, but we were without power for nearly two weeks.
Narrator: There was a lot of damage across the area, and as a young child I was fascinated that weather, which up until that point was snow, rain, some thunderstorms could turn so violent. And I wanted to understand the why.
Chris's fascination with the weather continues through middle and high school. He completes a degree in meteorology and atmospheric science after struggling through math.
Chris Gloninger: I wasn't sure if I wanted to go into research or I wanted to go into broadcast. My dynamic meteorology professor told me that you have the personality that you should try. Broadcast.
Narrator: After graduating, he works his way up, grafting at various stations around the US Northeast and Midwest. It's the late 2000 early 20 tens, and not many TV weather forecasters are dropping mentions of climate change in their reports. He eventually lands his dream job in Boston. The city has good weather, which for meteorologists is defined a little differently than for viewers.
Chris Gloninger: Even though I grew up on Long Island. I love the Boston news market because of the strong nor'easters and all of the snow.
Narrator: By the time Chris arrives in Boston, the droughts, storms, and heat waves linked to planetary heating are undeniably becoming more frequent and intense. And thanks to the ever improving science of weather attribution, researchers can even determine exactly how much climate change has influenced an extreme weather event. Then, in 2017, Chris covers Hurricane Harvey.
Chris Gloninger: And that storm, when it hit Texas, was eye opening. It dumped 60 inches of rain. And what we know is scientists is that every degree of warming we see across the planet. It holds 7% more moisture.
Narrator: All that extra moisture manifests in super storms and hurricanes like Harvey and more recently, Helene and Milton.
Chris Gloninger: So Chris flew back, walked into the newsroom, and told station management that we need to be doing more to cover climate change.
Narrator: At first, the station bosses are skeptical about the need for a weekly segment devoted to climate change. Does it really warrant a recurring series on one topic?
Chris Gloninger: And what we found was that it was so overwhelming, the amount of content that we needed to prioritize which stories were most important to tell.
Narrator: At the time, no local station is devoting a weekly segment to climate change, says Chris. They are breaking new ground with this. The feedback is largely positive, and Chris is happy to be doing what he feels is essential work.
Chris Gloninger: And to finally have station management see that we should be devoting at least three minutes a week to talking climate change. It was exciting to tell some of the stories that I was able to tell with people that were truly affected by climate change was also really rewarding, and for a wider audience to understand that, I had felt like I had achieved my goal, the reason why I went into broadcast.
Narrator: The segment leads to a job offer as chief meteorologist in distant Des Moines, Iowa, where Chris says station bosses wanted him to bring climate change into his reports.
Chris Gloninger: For me to bring the climate message to a part of the country where they really haven't been talking about it, but yet it's so important because the because of the agricultural industry. I wanted to take that as a challenge.
So I left my dream job to go to Iowa to work on that part of my career, because I thought that this would be a new audience. And when it comes to climate change communication, it isn't a cookie cutter approach. It isn't a one size fits all approach.
Narrator: Instead of doing full segments like in Boston, he peppers references to climate change to make concrete links with everyday life. So he might mention how ongoing drought is affecting farmers in the largely agricultural state and explain the link to climate change, or include a 22nd explainer in the middle of a forecast about the wildfires making air quality poorer in Iowa. Dropping in that global warming had made them much likelier. It's then that the first threats start arriving in his inbox. As a TV news weatherman, he is used to the odd complaint. A viewer upset it had rained on their barbecue when sun had been forecast.
Chris Gloninger: At first there was the usual pushback.
Narrator: But this is different. One man starts sending aggressive, harassing emails and they just keep coming.
Chris Gloninger: But it quickly turned fairly intense.
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Multiple Speakers: You bald headed idiot. / Do you want us to publish your contact details and those of your family? / You guys are hiding something from the public. / You'll pay for this. / Stop the breathing of those that made them and their affiliates.
Narrator: Chris says there are some positive messages to the station about his climate coverage, but a very loud minority are negative. One thing he notices about the negative emails is that they are politicizing the science.
Chris Gloninger: They were saying, we're tired of this liberal agenda. We're tired of this Biden puppet. Those were the the common responses that I would get. And if you noticed the common theme, there was politics, which again, it should never be about politics, because this is a science that has the support of 99% of its academic community.
Narrator: We'll be right back after this short message.
Trailer
Narrator: There's an overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and is causing more frequent and intense weather extremes that will only get worse as global average temperatures increase. And there's a consensus that this is all caused by human activity like burning oil, coal and gas. These fossil fuels release heat trapping greenhouse gases. So why is the conversation so polarized? To understand that, we have to take a little trip back in time to the middle of the 20th century. In the late 1950s, families were moving to the suburbs, buying big houses and filling them with brand new appliances. Car culture was booming at a new age of mass consumerism was dawning. The energy powering all this was largely oil, coal and gas.
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Narrator: Around the same time, US scientists Charles Keeling figured out a way to measure CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. We did an episode on that a while back if you want to check it out. Documents prove that scientists in the 1960s had warned the US oil and gas industry largest trade association, that burning fossil fuels would without a doubt cause temperature changes and severe damage to the environment and climates. By then, big players in the coal sector knew, and by the 1970s. Companies like GM and Ford or ExxonMobil did too. In fact, Exxon's own projections about global warming have proven to be very accurate. Fossil fuel interests began to pour money into ads and research, sowing the seeds of doubt about climate change. In 1988, Exxon dropped a now infamous memo. It admitted that the greenhouse effect was serious, but instead of acting on it, the company said the uncertainty of the science should be played up to avoid a shift to renewable energy.
At the same time, a major international lobby group called the Global Climate Coalition was set up to help downplay the consensus on climate change. At first, that misinformation came in the form of outright denial that sounded something like this.
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Narrator: But dangerous weather multiplied, glaciers melted, and sea levels rose. Denial became more difficult over the years, though, that misinformation has morphed into something else.
Ece Elbeyi: One of the changes we see that again, instead of denying climate change and whether it's happening or not, one of the strategies is that attacking scientists themselves, like personally, to undermine their credibility and to erode trust that would get from the public otherwise. And here also conspiracy narratives and, and discourses play a huge role into that too.
Narrator: That's Ece Elbeyi, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. She co-authored a review of 300 articles published over the last decade on climate misinformation, that misinformation now also often comes in the form of delaying them, basically casting doubt on climate action or solutions to slow the move away from fossil fuels.
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Narrator: Research from 2024 shows how fossil fuel companies and petrochemical companies spent millions on Facebook and Instagram advertising that included misleading green claims about the commitment to renewable energy. The sector actually spends just 1% of global investment into clean power. At the same time, it's exploring new oil and gas fields. Sometimes misinformation veers into wild conspiracy theories.
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Narrator: In their review, Ed Shelby and the team of researchers found players who benefit from showing climate action, like fossil fuel companies, work with lobbyists and think tanks to.
Ece Elbeyi: Affect decision makers and also influence broader public.
Narrator: These players are all part of an ecology of influence that spreads misinformation.
Ece Elbeyi: Also, we can say that the networks behind this misinformation have become more intricate over time.
Narrator: Media outlets, trolls, Russian bot farms and influencers amplify misinformation on social media platforms, where algorithms favor emotionally charged messaging, like conspiracy theories about climate scientists being part of a hidden agenda to control populations, or climate action being a threat to national sovereignty and to the economy. That's common among Europe's right wing populist parties.
Ece Elbeyi: For political actors, we can say that, especially those aligned with the nationalist and conservative platforms, misinformation can be a tool to mobilize their base. So they might not explicitly deny climate change, but they frame climate solutions like, for instance, international agreements or carbon regulations as traced to national sovereignty or economic freedom.
Narrator: The shift in tactics has made it more difficult to refute climate misinformation.
Ece Elbeyi: So that's why it's getting worse in a sense that if it was denying climate change with objective measures, then it would be easier to, to rectify it. But now it is becoming more and more an identity issue because we see that people, also public individuals, align themselves in position to the groups that they are supporting.
Narrator: Political identity, as Essie says, is one reason a person might share misinformation or send angry messages to someone. But why do people share seemingly outlandish conspiracy theories and make the jump to sending hateful or threatening messages? To answer this question, it's important to understand how conspiracy theories work. In the hit 90s show the X-Files, one of the big conspiracies was a government cover up of an alien plan to colonize Earth, and the believers, like Fox Mulder I kind of presented as fringe tinfoil hat figures, but we've all gotten in touch with our inner Mulder at some point.
Ece Elbeyi: And I do think that actually conspiracy theories can appeal to anyone, and that in the right situation, anyone could find that conspiracy appealing.
Narrator: Daniel Jolley is an associate professor in psychology at the University of Nottingham in the UK, and his research.
Daniel Jolley: Tackles why people believe in conspiracy theories. Do you know why so many millions find them appealing and also their consequences? How they impact both me and also you.
Narrator: So it's wise to be skeptical and question power. But skepticism needs to be grounded in good evidence and logic. And yes, real cover ups do happen. History has its fair share of shady backroom deals and hushed up scandals. Think of Watergate or medical experiments on indigenous groups. But conspiracy theories are different, partly because they usually imagine thousands of people keeping giant secrets without a single group chat leak.
Daniel Jolley: It's trying to explain some kind of big issue or event that climate change, vaccination, terrorist attack as the perceived group who is powerful. Now I'm really saying the word perceived and really pushing that a little bit, because conspirators can be a whole range of different, different groups.
Narrator: So that can be around governments. But even medical staff, scientists and minority communities like immigrants or LGBTQ groups.
Daniel Jolley: Who are not pay for groups but are perceived to be powerful. And then the motive, they're doing something for their own hidden agenda. Usually it's around money or power.
Narrator: They can also feed another need by painting one group as evil and your group as good could.
Daniel Jolley: It actually makes me my group, feel a bit more valued and a bit more kind of comforted.
Narrator: Personality traits like high levels of paranoia, insecurity, ego centricity and a reliance on intuition can make some more inclined to believe in conspiracies. Though once a person believes in one conspiracy, they are likely to fall for others.
Daniel Jolley: He makes you kind of doubt actually, other people around you. He makes you feel like the world is just corrupt and is crumbling. What philosophers like to call anomie. Now, matter of fact, therefore, if you see the world through this very cynical lens, it makes you digest and think about other content, i.e. other events, other issues through the same conspiratorial lens.
Narrator: Conspiracy theories always also revolve around crises.
Daniel Jolley: If you think of the theories that you know of, they all, as I said, they're all about significant events. People are trying to explain issues that are massive, issues that make us feel uncertain, anxious, perilous. They thrive in those sort of environments.
Narrator: That crisis could be a societal one, like a recession, a pandemic, climate change, or even a personal crisis like you're a victim of bullying.
Daniel Jolley: So something is happening to you where it makes you feel anxious and threatened, and to seek, therefore meaning to explain that kind of volatile kind of feelings that you have when bad things happen to us. We search for meaning, and a conspiracy can offer that kind of simple solution.
Narrator: Climate misinformation and conspiracy theories often spike in the wake of crises like extreme weather disasters. After Hurricane Helene devastated communities in North Carolina in 2024, false claims went viral that FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was blocking aid to hard hit areas. Some linked that to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which claims elites are trying to replace white Americans with non-white immigrants and calling for violence against FEMA workers.
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Narrator: Into when deadly flash flooding in Texas on July 4th this year killed at least 100 people. Conspiracy theories accusing scientists and government agencies of manipulating the weather using cloud seeding surged. Some lawmakers pushed the totally false narrative, too.
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Daniel Jolley: So yet weather conspiracies I think will come way more into our rhetoric because the weather is of course changing. And, you know, over the next few years, environmental risks are real high priority. So misinformation and conspirator beliefs, I think, will play an even bigger role than they are now.
Narrator: Daniel's research has also linked exposure to conspiracy theories with disengagement from politics and climate action, for example. It also indicates people may be more likely to engage in unethical, criminal or even violent behavior against those perceived to be involved in the conspiracy.
Daniel Jolley: Meteorologists are amongst the most visible when it comes to communicators of climate science, and as such they can therefore come the brunt of attacks. Because if you see from the conspiratorial lens, that person sees that group to be conspiring, they're doing bad things and arguably they need to be stopped. But of course, it's not real. And this conspirator isn't just a random person that doesn't really exist. There are actual people. So when they come to being trolled, when they come to, you know, actual, you know, assaults in person, potentially this could have a real kind of impact.
Narrator: So can anything be done to stop the spread of misinformation? What about stopping people from falling down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Experts recommend laws that punish companies engaging in greenwashing and spreading misinformation and regulations to improve content moderation by social media companies.
They also suggest requirements for fossil fuel companies to be transparent about their emissions would help, as would banning fossil fuel advertising. Both Etsy and Daniel say education in how to identify misinformation is key to.
Daniel Jolley: Making people aware of misinformation in advance, so that they'll have a kind of immunity. As I said, it is important not to marginalize or exclude vulnerable groups from public debate because this information disinformation tends to thrive in context of exclusion, where people feel that decisions are being made without them or even against them, and this exclusion can directly erode public trust in scientists and science more generally.
Narrator: But what about someone who has already fallen down the conspiracy rabbit hole? It's important to acknowledge that the conspiracy will be linked to the person's identity.
Daniel Jolley: So they will be really. Motivated to defend those beliefs. So I think in a way it's built in trust, not just debunking. So instead, it could be trying to understand why they have that belief, you know, when did it first start. How are you feeling? How do you feel now? What does it offer to you? So there you're trying to understand okay.
What was happening at the time? Were they feeling anxious? Were they feeling alienated? Maybe that person felt isolated. They felt ostracized. So if I could try and deal with some of that, maybe it'll put them into a into a better place.
Narrator: Building trust, empathetic listening and encouraging them to get out of themselves and into real world communities is a better tack.
Daniel Jolley: So yeah, I think interventions focusing on the spiritual beliefs themselves, I think is really important. Absolutely. And that's required.
Narrator: Support is also needed for those on the receiving end of abuse, says Daniel. He mentions workplace and peer supports, access to therapy, and also for internet users to show public support for online targets of abuse.
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Chris Gloninger: That trauma never went away and that wound kept being reopened.
Narrator: After receiving the death threat. Chris Cloninger seeks therapy. He is diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
He can't sleep. Installing a new alarm system in his house doesn't erase the fear. His health begins to suffer. He develops a skin condition. Chris and his wife pretty much stopped socializing and spent most of their time at home, not even answering the door for trick or treaters at Halloween. Some mock him for this reaction.
Chris Gloninger: But when it hits home, when it hits you, when it hits your family, there's no moving past that without professional help.
Narrator: The police catch the man who sent the death threat quickly. He admits to the charges, avoids jail time and gets a $150 fine. On top of this, station management doesn't want Chris mentioning climate change in his forecasts anymore because of what he calls a loud minority.
Chris Gloninger: They just made my life very, very difficult during my last year there by pushing back on everything. That's how it all kind of came together. You can't really I don't think any human has the ability to really survive that professionally for for more than a year.
Narrator: Chris feels betrayed and decides to bow out of broadcast meteorology entirely. Not being able to talk about climate change, the issue, he thinks, is the most important one of our time is what pushes him to leave. But ending a 20 year career isn't a decision he makes lightly. You then had your final broadcast, right? Can you describe that day, that final broadcast? How are you feeling that day?
Chris Gloninger: It was tough, right? your whole journey to getting there flashes, you know, in front of you. you think back to when you were the kid who lived through a hurricane. I was fascinated by the power of nature. Your difficult journey. Look, I made weather maps on the refrigerator that I would present to my parents every night when I was a kid and God, it still gets me emotional to this day. and that was one of the hardest things I ever had to do on air was say goodbye, because it wasn't just goodbye to that audience. I knew deep down that this was the end of my career that I was kind of giving up.
So, yeah, it's hard and it's still hard to talk about. Sorry.
Narrator: But he doesn't regret taking the job in Des Moines. Partly because once he announced what happened to him, there was a huge outpouring of support.
Chris Gloninger: But I'm going to reach off camera because I think this is an impactful visual for those that. So you can kind of see for your own eyes.
Neil: That's a big folder...
Chris Gloninger: …positive emails I received once I said I was leaving and there were about 300 emails and the post-it notes. There are about 50 of them. And those post-it notes, are from communities. They're highlighting communities that are traditionally conservative, that maybe swung 80% to Donald Trump and 20% to Biden, that like what I was doing.
Narrator: The emails made him feel that he'd achieved at least some of his goal of bringing climate change to a new audience. It also helped him start the healing process.
Chris Gloninger: So I still look at those messages. If I'm having a bad day or I'm thinking that, you know, I was dealt this impossible hand of cards, you know that those emails do help.
Narrator: Now, Chris works with a company in Boston on climate resilience and adaptation projects, and helping engineers communicate the work they do. On top of that, he still volunteers his time to speak on climate change whenever asked. But what about the future for climate communicators like himself?
Chris Gloninger: I think a mistake would be to back off, and I do think that there's less coverage of climate change because of the fear of retaliation. And I encourage. Meteorologists to double down. The media has not done an effective job at telling that story, because climate change, going into the last election in the United States in 2024, was ranked 20th when it comes to important issues to voters. So that's why meteorologists need to double down. That's why journalists need to keep doing this job and telling the story and finding creative ways to tell it to a wider audience, because we really need to fight this misinformation and disinformation. But meteorologists, if you're going through tough times, you know, come to me to, you know, for support, find others that will support you, but you can't stop talking about it because the job is more difficult to do.
Narrator: This episode of Living Planet was researched and written by Jennifer Collins. It was edited and narrated by me. Neil King, our sound engineer was Jürgen Kuhn. To download this and past episodes of Living Planet, go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You'll also find some bonus material on our YouTube channel, DW podcasts if you like what we do. Make sure to hit the subscribe button and leave a rating or review. That's it. Thanks for listening and bye for now.