Climate change science is, unfortunately, a controversial topic. Disinformation campaigns driven by political and economic opposition — both historical and current — mean that despite overwhelming evidence in support of human actions altering the climate, greenhouse gas emissions are still peaking.
While denialism is a prominent and well-known barrier to action, in this excerpt from Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World (PublicAffairs, 2025), authors Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Peter Hotez, Dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, examine another obstacle: climate doomism.
Doomism produces viral social media content — what’s been termed “climate doom porn,” marked by dramatic but unsupported claims of collapsing ice sheets, runaway warming, and imminent extinction.
Doom porn sells, and it has surely borne fruit for the polluters, petrostates, and plutocrats who are fanning its flames. Consider the vitriol directed at Katharine Hayhoe and Mike [Michael Mann] by ostensible climate advocates who insist it’s too late to act and dismiss our messaging on urgency and efficacy as “hopium,” the implication being that we are selling “hope” in the way, say, junkies on the street might sell drugs.
It’s the sort of smear you might expect from climate deniers, but instead it comes from those who ostensibly are on the side of climate action. “I loathe Mann & Hayhoe,” tweets Eliot Jacobson, a self-avowed “doomer” with a substantial Twitter following (75,000), who derides us as “hopium addicts.”
“Mann (like Hayhoe) is a serial blocker for anyone who challenges his hopium. Gimme someone else,” says another doomer on Twitter (now X).
These are just a few examples. Twitter is rife with such accusations against prominent climate scientists and climate communicators. From the standpoint of bad actors opposed to climate action, the attacks constitute a “twofer.”
The first, and most obvious, is that doom-mongering convinces many would-be climate advocates that climate action is a hopeless cause.
But the blistering attacks against mainstream climate science and scientists advance an agenda of division, dividing the rank-and-file climate activists and leading voices from the…
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