Climate deniers sow weather map heat wave misinformation

Climate change deniers are virally spreading skepticism on social media during a heatwave: taking weather maps out of context to imply that forecasters are exaggerating climate change.

During the two most recent heatwaves in Europe, users in different countries and languages ​​misleadingly juxtaposed weather maps, sometimes from different media organizations on incomparable dates.

Such posts usually contain messages suggesting that the color of the cards has been changed to red by media or authorities wanting to create panic.

AFP Fact Check has refuted several versions of the claim that have surfaced in languages ​​including English, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian and Polish.

“Back when there was no need to scare people about global warming, they put suns on weather maps,” reads a post shared in Spanish and Catalan during this week’s heatwave. “Now you have to color the map as if we were in hell ourselves.”

The two maps side by side below the post showed hot weather over Spain. One was white with sun symbols, the other dark red. A digital investigation by AFP revealed they were two different types of maps from different sources — not, as the post claimed, from a single forecaster who had manipulated its color scheme.

Numerous similar claims circulated in English and German during last month’s heatwave.

“In 1986 it was called a normal summer. Today they are coloring the map red and calling it extreme heat,” reads a Facebook post published on May 25, 2022.

The two maps side by side showed similar temperatures over Sweden. One was green and dated 1986, the other orange and dated 2022.

A digital investigation revealed that the year numbers on the cards were incorrect, coming from different news organizations using different color codes.

Thousands of social media users shared the same image in French, claiming it was evidence of a “global warming scam”. The claim was also widely circulated on Twitter.

Posts in Germany in June showed two maps of the Tagesschau news program and claimed they had changed their color from green in 2009 to red in 2019 to play up the climate threat. AFP published a detailed rebuttal of the claim.

Tagesschau explained that the red card was a temperature forecast and even in 2009 such cards used red. The green was a general weather forecast with different color schemes and variables.

A similar montage went viral in French. As an AFP investigation showed, maps from different media organizations were misleadingly juxtaposed at different times of the year.

Previously, users in Spain shared a photo of a newspaper from 1957 reporting a temperature record of 50 degrees Celsius. The article was authentic, but Spanish meteorologists said the temperature measurement was not certified or recorded in official data.

Climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that carbon emissions from humans burning fossil fuels are heating the planet and increasing the risk and severity of heat waves and other extreme weather events.

With temperatures in excess of 40°C, this week’s heatwave in Britain has drawn comparisons to the summer of 1976, when the maximum temperature was 35.9°C.

Experts said the comparison was not helpful.

“Of course there have been heat waves in the past, but the big difference from 1976 is what the rest of the world looked like,” said Friederike Otto, Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change.

“176 there was a heatwave in (Britain), 2022 there are heatwaves all over the world and so there was 2021, 20, 19,” she told reporters on Monday.

Nostalgia for 1976 – sometimes accompanied by misleading map sharing – irritated some users on social media.

“People keep sharing the fake f*cking pic showing ‘WEATHER in my day’ blah blah blah,” wrote a user identified as Talent Stockport on July 17.

“It’s misleading” (sic), the post continued. “Their dissemination is missing out on information that could put people’s lives at risk, and it’s the same kind of people too. The people who are unable to process basic facts.”

The AFP fact check articles cited in this article can be found at factcheck.afp.com with full explanations of the methods used in different languages.