Actions against climate change face new threats: Dwemers who think they’re too late to act

Climate change science is, unfortunately, a controversial topic. The disinformation campaign, driven by historical and current political and economic opposition, means that despite overwhelming evidence in favour of human behavior, is changing the climate, but greenhouse gas emissions are still at their peak.

Negationism is a well-known and well-known barrier to behavior, but an excerpt from science under siege: How to fight the five most powerful forces that threaten our world (Publicaffairs, 2025), Michael Mann, Michael Mann, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Science and Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Peter Hotez’s dean for nation of the hotelz climate.

Doomism creates viral social media content – what we call “Climate Doom Porn” is marked by dramatic but unsupported claims about ice sheet collapse, runaway warming and imminent extinction.

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Doom porn is for sale and certainly gives birth to fruit for the polluters, gasoline and mobility who are instigating its flames. Consider Vitriol directed at Katherine Hayhoe and the microphone [Michael Mann] By advocates who argue that it’s too late to act and dismiss our message about urgency and effectiveness as a “hopium,” this means that junkies on the streets may sell drugs, for example.

It’s a smear you might expect from a climate denier, but instead, ostensibly comes from someone on the side of climate action. “I hate Man & High Ho,” Elliot Jacobson is a self-approved “dwemer” with a considerable number of Twitter (75,000) describing us as “Hopium addicts.”

“Mann (like Hayhoe) is a cereal blocker for anyone who challenges his Hopium.

These are just a few examples. Twitter is full of such accusations against prominent climate scientists and climate communicators. In terms of bad actors opposed to climate action, the attack constitutes “Twofer.”

First and most obviously, the existence of destiny convinces many climate advocates that climate action is a hopeless cause.

But the fierce attacks on mainstream climate science and scientists advance the agenda of division, splitting the ranks and file climate activists and key voices from the scientific community. This divisive battle is carefully nurtured by bots and trolls, and others can join the fight and unconsciously create weapons for the purposes of the bad actor.

Related: Within 3 years of reaching critical climate thresholds. Can I reverse the course?

Of course, not everyone falls into that. However, extreme claims and violent attacks went viral, and as soon as they could be seen, the fate rose prominently from the relatively unclearity of the political economy that produced huge, almost cultivated follow-ups that were quickly monetized.

Part of the friendly fire comes from fellow scientists who have come down the path of fateism, or at least what we might call “soft domism,” namely, emission reductions alone are not enough to prevent catastrophic warming. An example is Kevin Anderson, a fully respected British climate scientist. Anderson accused mainstream climate researchers of underestimating the threat of climate change to secure grants.

The charges are disturbingly similar to (opposite) accusations by climate deniers that climate scientists exaggerate the climate threats to secure grants. It’s strange which one is. Are climate researchers underestimating or exaggerating the threat? The logic tells us that it cannot be both.

Even James Hansen, a respected climate scientist whose early predictions of warming proved to be prophetic, was sucked into the vortex of soft domism. The scientific consensus is that rapid reductions in carbon emissions over the past decade will avoid catastrophic planetary warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit).

Hansen argues that the climate research community underestimates climate sensitivity to carbon emissions and that sustaining carbon emissions makes that threshold inevitable. His rhetoric has grown increasingly and conspiratorially, including tweeting in late 2023, including Vitrix attacks on mainstream science and scientists.

Hansen argued instead that they should look at a potentially very dangerous “geo-engineering” scheme. This proposed a technique that would shoot reflective chemicals into the stratosphere, in order to fertilize the natural uptake of carbon by algae, reflecting sunlight on the back and discarding iron particles into the ocean.

There are some annoying issues here. First, Hansen blends his Deur’s assumptions about policy inaction and assumptions about climate physics. Second, Hansen uses this misleading framing to advocate for potentially dangerous geoengineering techniques. There is a belief that such interventions have potential unintended consequences (which could shoot chemical particles into the stratosphere and block sunlight), “which could have negative impacts on the atmosphere and climate and have unpredictable effects), and what is known as “moral hazard” (there are simple technofixes that can be adopted in the future.

Ultimately, the polluters and the Petrostate benefit from prominent climate scientists who oppose each other. They hope that it is merely an acceptance for us of what is inevitably assumed in the future of fossil fuels, which is the overall framing.

So we doom the mix and get division and bias. The feeding frenzy continues. It starts with the journalists and scientists they cite. The article has been posted on social media and provides fodder for divisive trolls and bots.

Real users will soon accompany Fracas and join Pile-on. As a result, today’s climate Twitter is filled with toxic Doomist messaging and attacks on major climate communicators subject to an endless onslaught of “Hopium” accusations from supervisable climate advocates.

This may be the most successful gambit in attacks on the climate.