Action on climate change faces new threat: The doomers who think it’s too late to act
The science of climate change is, unfortunately, a controversial subject. The disinformation campaigns motivated by the political and economic opposition – both historic and current – mean that despite overwhelming evidence in support of human actions modifying the climate, the greenhouse gas emissions always reach a peak.
While denial is a prominent and well known obstacle to action, in this extract of Science under the siege: how to fight the five most powerful forces that threaten our world (Publicaffairs, 2025), authors Michael MannDistinguished distinguished professor in the Department of Earth and Environment Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and Peter HoozDean for the National School of Tropical Medicine of the Baylor College of Medicine, examine another obstacle: climate destiny.
The Doomism produces viral content on social networks – which has been called “climate unhappiness”, marked by dramatic but not sustained affirmations of the collapse of glacial caps, warming in grade and imminent extinction.
Doom porn is sold, and it has surely borne fruit for polluters, petostats and ratherocrats that attract its flames. Consider the vitriol led by Katharine Hayhoe and Mike [Michael Mann] Through defenders of the ostensible climate who insist that it is too late to act and reject our mailbox on urgency and efficiency as “hopium”, the involvement being that we sell “hope” in the manner, for example, drug addicts could sell drugs.
This is the kind of smear that you might expect from climate negators, but it comes rather from those who are ostensibly on the side of climate action. “I hate Mann & Hayhoe”, Tweete Eliot Jacobson, a self-evaluated “doomer” with a substantial twitter (75,000), which turns us as “drug addicts of hope”.
“Mann (like Hayhoe) is a standard blocker for anyone who defies his hopium. Give yourself someone else,” said another Daomer on Twitter (now x).
These are just a few examples. Twitter is full of such accusations against eminent climatologists and climatic communicators. From the point of view of the bad actors opposed to climate action, the attacks constitute a “twofer”.
The first, and the most obvious, is that Doom-Monging convinces many climate defenders that climate action is a hopeless cause.
But puffed attacks against climate science and traditional scientists advance a division program, dividing basic climate activists and leading votes to the scientific community. This division battle was carefully maintained by bots and trolls, others joining the melee, unwillingly allowing themselves to be armed for the purposes of bad actors.
In relation: We are in the 3 years that have reached a critical climate threshold. Can we reverse the course?
Of course, not everyone falls in love. But the condemned has gone from the darkness relating to prominence in a political economy where extreme claims and vitrioral attacks become viral and create huge almost cult suites which are indeed – as we will see it shortly – easily monetized.
Part of the friendly fire comes from scientific colleagues who have taken the path of destiny or at least what we could call “Doft doomism”, that is to say that the programs are not sufficient to prevent catastrophic warming. An example is Kevin Anderson, a perfectly respected British climate. Anderson accused traditional climate researchers of implying the threat of climate change to guarantee subsidies: “The global framing is firmly fixed in a politically dogmatic stone with an academic and a large part of the climate community which is afraid to question this for fear of the loss of funding, prestige, etc.”
The accusation is worryingly similar to the (opposite) accusation by climate negationaries – that climatologists overestimate the climate threat to guarantee money. One wonders who is. Do climate researchers underestimate or overestimate the threat? The logic dictates that it cannot be both.
Even the venerated by the climate, James Hansen, whose early forecasts of warming turned out to be prophetic, was sucked in the vortex of a sweet softome. The scientific consensus is that we can always avoid catastrophic planetary warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (3 degrees fahrenheit) if we quickly reduce carbon emissions this decade.
Hansen said that the climate research community has underestimated the sensitivity of the climate to carbon dioxide emissions and that carbon-supported emissions will inevitably cross this threshold. Its rhetoric has become more and more heated and of a conspiratorial nature, including vitriol attacks against science and consumer scientists, such as tweeter at the end of 2023: “The United Nations and COP28 are lying. They know that the targets of global warming 1.5 ° C and 2 ° C are dead.”
Hansen argued that we should rather turn to potentially very dangerous “geo -engineering” patterns – techniques offered such as the firing of reflective chemicals in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight or the spill of iron particles in the oceans to fertilize the natural absorption of carbon by algae.
There are several disturbing problems here. First, Hansen confuses his austere hypotheses on political inaction with hypotheses on climate climate physics. Secondly, Hansen uses this trumpeur framing to plead in favor of potentially dangerous geo-engineering technofixes. Such interventions suffer from both potential involuntary consequences (shooting chemical particles in the stratosphere to block sunlight could have unfavorable and unpredictable impacts on our atmosphere and our climate) and what is known as “moral risk” (belief that there is a simple technifix that we can use in the future provides an excuse for the continuous fossil duct today).
In the end, polluters and petostats are those who benefit from high -level climatologists who have opposed each other. They would like nothing more than that we inevitably accept the supposed of a fossil fuel future, which is global supervision.
Thus, we obtain division and deviation, with a doomism in the mixture. A food frenzy follows. It starts with journalists and scientists they cite. Articles are published on social networks and provide fodder for trolls and division bots.
Authentic users quickly entered the crash and join the battery. Consequently, the Twitter climate today is filled with toxic messaging and assault against the main climate communicators who are subject to an endless attack on “hopium” accusations of ostensible climate defenders each time we dare to say that it is not too late to do something about the climate crisis.
It may be the most successful gambit to date in the attack on climate action.
Extract from Science under the siege: how to fight the five most powerful forces that threaten our world By Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hooz, Copyright © 2025 by Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hooz. Used with the permission of Publicaffairs, a Hachette Book Group division, Inc.
