Series of Altered News Headlines, targeting Global Climate Change

Climate Change conspiracy memes, created and propagated mainly by climate change deniers, are often seen on social media streams, especially on Twitter. These Tweets are accompanied with Hashtags such as #climatehoax, #globalwarminghoax,  #climatechangehoax etc.

Here, we are going to investigate two such purported claims using altered news reports.

A Twitter handle calling himself to be a “Meme terrorist” had Tweeted soon after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, indicating that Queen’s death was a result of global climate change. The Tweet had attributed the news to the famous American news agency, CNBC as seen below.

Twitter | Archived

We were unable to find any news published on the CNBC website, relating the death of Queen Elizabeth II to climate change. Further inspection revealed that the screenshot used in the Tweet was in fact an altered version of a news item published on CNBC.

The original news report was titled as “Queen Elizabeth is dead: Here are the plans for the next 10 days”and can be seen here. Archived

The comparison of the edited screenshot and the original CNBC report can be seen below.

We also compared the headlines of the other articles published in CNBC as well and noticed that the font type used in the purported image was also different from the regular title font. More on this here

Also Read : ‘Windmills’ targeted by Climate Deniers on Twitter

Let’s` take another tweet related with climate change

“Climate Scam” A Twitter handle, regularly publishes content questioning the veracity of statements related to climate change, recently published a screenshot of a CNN report which implied that the news agency had reported that climate change is seasonal and will be back next year.

The purported screenshot attributed to CNN read as “As temperatures cool this fall, it’s important to remember that climate change will be back next summer” as seen below.

Twitter | Archived

Did CNN report this ?

We did a keyword search and weren’t able to find any news item related to CNN reporting such a report. Further research led up to the original article published by the CNN on September 04^th, which had been used to make the above false claim.

In fact, the original news report, co-authored by Amanda Davies and Ben Morse, was titled as “Sebastian Vettel believes the world needs to ‘rethink our behaviors’ to tackle climate change” as seen below.

CNN | Archived

So, it`s clear that the viral screenshot claiming that CNN had reported climate change to be seasonal is an altered screenshot.

Hence, it’s clear that this again is clearly edited to portray a misleading picture on global climate change.

Even though parts of the US had been experiencing relatively chilly periods during early parts of the summer this time around, summer in America is becoming hotter, longer and more dangerous.

There have been few discussions on the topic of whether climate change is seasonal or not. We plan to analyze this topic in detail in a future article. 

However, creating these sorts of misleading screenshots to target climate change and climate activists is not a new phenomenon.

Here is a Reuters Fact check from 2021 which shows an altered screenshot of a Guardian newspaper and been used to target the climate activist group, “Insulate Britain”. Archived

More recently, Climate-change deniers on social media had devised a viral way of spreading skepticism during a heatwave: by publishing weather maps out of context to imply forecasters are exaggerating climate change. Full report here

Also Read : Post falsely claims Earth warmer than present for 83% of past 10,000 years