If COP30 wants to crack down on climate ‘misinformation,’ it could start by cleaning its own house

‘Consensus’ climate activists and scientists have been spreading misleading information about a looming ‘climate catastrophe’ for decades.

By PAUL MACRAE, Climate Realists of B.C., Jan. 28, 2026

In November, 2025, the Council of the Parties 30 (COP30) climate conference in Brazil approved a Declaration, co-written and strongly supported by Canada, demanding “concrete action” against “climate disinformation” in favour of “accurate, evidence-based information on climate issues.” 

In particular, COP30’s Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change aims to reduce “the growing impact of disinformation, misinformation, denialism and deliberate attacks on environmental journalists, defenders, scientists and researchers that undermine climate action and threaten societal stability.”¹ 

What form this “concrete action” would take isn’t spelled out—stern warnings? Fines? Jail terms? But the Declaration’s over-all aim is clear: to suppress and censor individuals and groups that dare question the so-called “scientific consensus”—the doctrine that climate change is a looming global catastrophe and that we can only stop this catastrophe by drastically reducing human-caused carbon emissions (thereby, as a happy byproduct, ending Western civilization as we know it).

Of course, nobody, including the climate-catastrophe skeptics COP30 hopes to muzzle, wants to see climate “disinformation” and “misinformation.” But climate skeptics also suggest: If COP30 is truly serious about battling all climate “disinformation” and “misinformation,” objectively and therefore credibly—it could begin by cleaning up its own house. 

Why? Because most of the climate “disinformation” and “misinformation” aimed at the public comes not from climate skeptics but from the climate-catastrophe promoters themselves, including (but not limited to) the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations, many “consensus” climate scientists, environmental activists, politicians, and the media. 

‘Scary scenarios’ and ‘simplified, dramatic statements’

The late Dr. Stephen Schneider of Stanford University set the tone for climate misinformation and disinformation back in 1989 when he declared, in a Discover magazine interview, that the “consensus” viewpoint required “broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”²

Compare Schneider’s view with that of physicist Richard P. Feynman, who wrote: “You should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. … I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is … bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist.”³

Rather than “bending over backwards,” climate catastrophists have been following Schneider’s prescription for years, creating a thick fog of misinformation and disinformation to terrify the public, politicians and the media into accepting the catastrophist climate doctrine without question. 

Misleading information in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth 

If the COP30 Information Integrity Police are serious about combating all misleading and distorted information on climate, past and present, they could begin with Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, in which a British judge found no less than nine scientific errors, major and minor.⁴

Gore’s errors included claims that polar-bear populations were declining (the last numbers estimate was 21,000-30,000 bears), that sea levels could rise 7 metres (23 feet) “in the near future” (hasn’t happened), that Pacific islands were sinking (nope), and more. All of these claims are false or not as clear-cut as Gore pretends.

In the film’s most glaring error, Gore strongly implies (but shrewdly doesn’t say directly) that the advance and retreat of Ice Age glaciers during the past 600,000 years (as shown in his huge wall chart, Figure 1) was caused by fluctuations in carbon-dioxide levels. In Gore’s words: “It’s a complicated relationship [between CO2 and temperature], but the most important part is this: When there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, the temperature increases because more heat from the Sun is trapped inside.”⁵

Yes, this relationship is “complicated.” But even Gore supporters admit that Gore’s strongly implied claim that carbon-dioxide changes caused temperature changes during this time is scientifically backwards. For example, Dr. Andrew Weaver, one of Canada’s leading climate catastrophists, has written: “Yes, temperature changes came before carbon-dioxide changes in the recent glacial record.”⁶ (Weaver has since toned down his rhetoric and now warns against “fear-based messaging.”⁷ )

In other words, Gore’s film deliberately misled moviegoers about the real relationship between CO2 and temperature during this long stretch of Ice Age time, not to mention the eight other errors identified by the British judge. Will the COP30 Climate Police take “decisive action” against Gore to correct these nine errors, most of which are clearly scientific “disinformation” and/or “misinformation”?

Climategate emails: A trove of ‘consensus’ misinformation

The leaked 2009 “Climategate” emails revealed a treasure trove of leading climate scientists actively promoting climate disinformation and misinformation.⁸

For example, the Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago has always been a major problem for the catastrophist viewpoint. If today’s temperatures are “unprecedented” for thousands of years, as the catastrophists claim, how could the MWP be as warm or warmer than today? The famous “hockey-stick” graph (Figure 2), which showed current temperatures leaping up like an excited puppy (the stick’s “blade”), tried to avoid this inconvenient truth about the MWP by flattening it out of existence (the “hockey stick’s” straight shaft). 

But in a 1999 Climategate email, climate scientist Keith Briffa messaged hockey-stick creator Michael E. Mann as follows: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more’.” But Briffa added: “In reality the situation is not quite so simple—I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago [i.e., the MWP].”⁹

In the end, Briffa abandoned the Medieval Warm Period to keep the scary hockey-stick story “tidy.” Will we see Briffa and Mann brought up before the COP30 Climate Inquisition for peddling misinformation about the MWP and today’s supposedly “unprecedented” temperatures?

No ‘global warming’ from 1998-2014

From about 1998 to 2014, the climate didn’t warm (see Figure 3), which was another serious problem for catastrophist climate scientists. After all, aren’t we supposed to be in a period of rapid “global warming”? And so, in a Climategate email dated July 5, 2005, seven years into this non-warming period, the head of Britain’s Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones, wrote: “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has, but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”¹⁰

This email raises the question: If the world had “cooled” since 1998, why should Jones, as a presumably objective scientist, wish to hide this information from the public? And why would his fellow scientists “come down on” him if he revealed what should be public scientific information? In trying to keep the public in the dark about the then-seven-years’-long “cooling,” wasn’t Jones promoting “misinformation”? And if COP30 truly cares about climate “misinformation,” shouldn’t its censors be knocking on his office door?

Warming at a ‘much faster rate’? Really?

In a 2009 Climategate email, a decade into the non-warming, IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth lamented: “The fact is that we cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment and it’s a travesty that we can’t.”¹¹

Given Trenberth’s email, it’s curious that in 2008, just a year earlier, IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri told an Australian audience that warming was occurring “at a much faster rate.”¹² It’s beyond belief that the head of the IPCC was not aware that “global warming” had stalled since 1998, and therefore could not be increasing “faster”. Will COP30’s Climate Police be knocking on Pachauri’s door at four in the morning with handcuffs and truncheons? 

Forest fires off the charts?

In a more recent example, climate catastrophists tell the public that the number and size of forest fires are at “unprecedented” levels due to “global warming” caused by, of course, our carbon emissions. But this claim only holds true if the catastrophists cherry-pick their timeline (i.e., employ misinformation/disinformation). For example, Figure 5 shows the number of forest fires (top line) and the area burned (bottom line in hectares) in the United States since 1990. 

Yes, in 2023 there was a big jump in area burned and number of forest fires in the U.S. But look more closely: oddly, although CO2 emissions have been steadily increasing since 1990, the number of forest fires has actually declined since 1990, and the area burned held more or less steady until 2023, then fell back closer to normal in 2024. Still, 2023 is big and scary and seems to support the catastrophist theory….

But a quite different and much less apocalyptic picture emerges if we extend the timeline back to, say, 1926, rather than cherry-picking 1990 (Figure 2).¹³

The longer timeline reveals clearly that the number of forest fires (black line) was much higher than today in the U.S. from 1926-1982, and that the area burned (vertical bars) was much larger than today from 1926-1950. And yet “consensus” climate scientists and supporters continue to misinform the public about a supposedly dangerous “increase” in forest fires when they must know that, historically, forest fires were much more prevalent a hundred years ago and have actually gone down, not just in the United States but in Canada (which has the same forest-fire pattern as the U.S., see Figure 6) and globally (Figure 7).

In the interest of climate accuracy, will the COP30 Climate Police be paying a visit to the scientists, politicians and media peddling this cherry-picked forest-fire misinformation?

‘Extreme’ weather events not so extreme after all

Here is another even more recent example of “consensus” misinformation from the media: An Associated Press news story in November 2025 had Pope Leo XIV calling for more climate action and includes this paragraph: “Scientists say in addition to deadly heat, a warming atmosphere leads to more frequent and deadly extreme weather such as flooding, droughts, violent downpours and more powerful hurricanes.”¹⁴

In fact, “scientists” say nothing of the sort. In its most recent report, AR6 (2021), the IPCC backed away from this type of alarming “extreme-weather” claim.¹⁵ The report includes a table of possible extreme-weather events (Figure 8) that indicates “low confidence” for human-caused increases in, among others, heavy precipitation, coastal flooding, tropical cyclones (hurricanes), severe wind storms, droughts—in fact, most of the “extreme-weather” events lamented in the AP article.¹⁶

Why has the IPCC toned down its catastrophic rhetoric (a bit)? Until the AR6 report, the IPCC’s “most-probable” future scenario was the “apocalyptic” RCP8.5, which was aggressive “business as usual” (we’re not only still using coal, but burning much more coal!). But AR6 recognized that RCP8.5 is no longer probable, noting: “High-end scenarios (like RCP8.5) can be very useful to explore high-end risks of climate change but are not typical ‘business-as-usual’ projections and should therefore not be presented as such.”¹⁷

Yet invoking the extreme RCP8.5 scenario is exactly what the AP article does, as did UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres when he declared, in 2023, that “the era of global warming has ended” and “the era of global boiling has arrived.”¹⁸ If even the IPCC no longer supports this catastrophic climate rhetoric, shouldn’t the COP30 Climate Cops visit the AP reporter and Guterres and inform them, with force if necessary, that they are presenting “misinformation” not supported by “the science”?

Bill Gates joins the ‘deniers’

 Just before COP30, the Climate Cops were gifted with the chance to make big gains in combating “climate misinformation,” and enhancing their credibility, by casting its net of censure around a very big fish, Microsoft founder and multi-billionaire Bill Gates.

Gates has been a faithful climate-apocalypse promoter for many years. But in October 2025 he published a memo on his website urging less action and spending on climate and more action and spending on the world’s “biggest problems,” which he identified as “poverty and disease, just as they have always been.”¹⁹

Gates wrote: “Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.” Maybe climate activist Greta Thunberg’s “future” hasn’t been “stolen” after all!²⁰

In other words, Gates was no longer promoting climate catastrophism, which means that by COP30’s lights he is now a climate-catastrophe skeptic. Worse: Gates is offering pretty much the same “misinformation” that Bjorn Lomborg (the “skeptical environmentalist”) and most climate realists have been presenting for many years.

Of course, Gates’s memo drew widespread outrage from “consensus” scientists, who protested that they never claimed the world was going to end. For example, climate scientist Zeke Housfather declared: “Outside a fringe community of climate doomers, there are few who think that climate change could realistically threaten the extinction of the human race (though some folks need to be a bit cautious about throwing around the term ‘existential threat’ willy nilly).”²¹

Unfortunately for Housfather’s claim of “consensus” rhetorical restraint, in 2020 a “fringe community” of 11,000 scientists signed a declaration stating, in “willy nilly” fashion: “Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to ‘tell it like it is.’ On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.”²²

Note the terms “catastrophic” and “climate emergency.” And, of course, as we’ve seen, this lunatic “fringe community” of “doomers” includes not only this group of 11,000 scientists but UN Chief Antonio (Global Boiling) Guterres, Pope Leo XIV, and at least one AP reporter, among many others.

So the COP30 Climate Integrity Guardians face a dilemma: If they truly care about “societal stability,” not to mention their own credibility, shouldn’t they try to muzzle Gates for arguing against COP30’s preferred “climate action”?

Or could we try open debate?

Or, if it’s reluctant to gag a major public figure like Gates, perhaps COP30 could recognize that trying to stifle climate debate can backfire on them since, as we’ve seen, so many leading figures in the catastrophist camp have been generating “misinformation” and “disinformation” for decades. Indeed, a recent Wall Street Journal editorial argued: “If progressives want to know why so many Americans [and Canadians] don’t believe claims of the climate apocalypse, it’s because so much of climate science has been shown to be unbelievable.”²³

In other words, if catastrophist climate scientists and their supporters had been much more scrupulous themselves about avoiding apocalyptic climate “misinformation” and “disinformation,” they’d be facing much less climate skepticism. But if COP30 supporters prefer censorship, perhaps cracking down on the catastrophists’ own high-profile promoters of “misinformation,” including Al Gore, Phil Jones, the Climategate emailers, and most recently Gates, could win back some of the public’s trust.

That said, isn’t having scientists and laypeople openly debate their theories, rather than suppressing critics, the best way to reach scientific truth? The answer is obvious, at least to climate skeptics. Surely COP30 should be seeking climate truth through respectful open debate, not trying to prop up a failing catastrophist theory with censorship. 

Also obvious: Canadians should be ashamed that their country, supposedly a supporter of free speech, not only voted for the COP30 declaration but was one of the chief architects.

Notes

1.  United Nations Climate Change, “Countries seal landmark declaration at COP30—marking first time information integrity is prioritized at UN Climate Conference.” Nov. 12, 2025. The full text of the declaration can be found at https://www.unesco.org/en/information-integrity-climate-change/cop30declaration. Not surprisingly, one of the main drafters of the Declaration was former federal cabinet Minister for Climate Alarmism (a.k.a., Environment), Steven Guilbeault. [↩]
2. Schneider is quoted in Jonathan Schell, “Our Fragile Earth.” Discover, October, 1989, pp. 45-48. See also Stephen Schneider, “Don’t Bet All Environmental Changes Will Be Beneficial,” APS (American Physical Society) News, August/September 1996, p. 5, where he defends himself against what he considers misrepresentation of his views. [↩]
3. Feynman, “Cargo cult science: The 1974 Caltech Commencement Address.” In The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1999, p. 212. [↩]
4. Wikipedia’s discussion of the case can be found with the search terms “Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education and Skills.” [↩]
5. Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. Emmaus, Penn., Rodale Press, 2006, p. 67. [↩]
6. Andrew Weaver, “Climate change is no conspiracy.” Letter to the Victoria Times Colonist, May 24, 2007, p. A15. [↩]
7. Vaughn Palmer, “Ex-B.C. Green leader Andrew Weaver disturbed by climate fear-mongering.” Vancouver Sun, Jan. 18, 2023. [↩]
8. For details on Climategate and the emails, see John Costella, The Climategate Emails. Lavoisier Group, 2010. Available as a free online pdf. [↩]
9. Keith Briffa, Climategate email to Michael Mann, September 22, 1999. [↩]
10. Climategate email, July 5, 2005. [↩]
11. Kevin Trenberth to Michael Mann, Oct. 12, 2009. Trenberth later made the fortuitous discovery that the “missing” heat was hiding in the oceans, thereby “saving” the carbon-dioxide theory from failure! For a comment on Trenberth’s discovery, see “Is there missing heat in the climate system?” by Roger Pielke Sr., April 16, 2010. [↩]
12. Michael Duffy, “Truly inconvenient truths about climate change being ignored.” Sydney Morning Herald, Nov. 8, 2008. [↩]
13. NIFC data from 1926 comes from a student at University of Saskatchewan who brought in earlier data to extend the timeline for a more accurate picture. Personal communication. [↩]
14. Anton L. Delgado, “Pope calls for urgent action on climate.” Associated Press, Nov. 22, 2025. [↩]
15. Ross McKitrick, “IPCC uses worst-case scenario to exaggerated emissions forecasts.” Fraser Institute, June 23, 2020. [↩]
16. Table 12.12, IPCC AR6, Working Group I, Chapter 12, Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment,” p. 1856. It’s hard to find, so here’s the link: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Chapter12.pdf. See also Tom Harris, “Even the IPCC does not support climate activists’ lies.” America Out Loud, April 4, 2024. [↩]
17. IPCC, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change: Frequently Asked Questions, FAQ 3.3, “How plausible are high emissions scenarios, and how do they inform policy?” [↩]
18. UN News, “Hottest July ever signals ‘era of global boiling has arrived’ says UN chief.” July 27, 2023. [↩]
19. Bill Gates, “Three tough truths about climate: What I want everyone at COP30 to know.” Gates Notes, Oct. 27, 2025. [↩]
20. In a speech in 2018, Thunberg said: “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.” “You Are Stealing Our Future: Greta Thunberg, 15, Condemns the World’s Inaction on Climate Change,” Dec. 13, 2018. [↩]
21. Zeke Housfather, On the Gates climate memo.” The Climate Brink, Nov. 5, 2025. [↩]
22. William Ripple, et al., “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.” Bioscience, January 2020. [↩]
23. Editorial, “A Climate Study Retraction for the Ages.” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 10, 2025. [↩]