According to Euronews, climate scientists are annoyed about what they call “targeted disinformation about heatwaves” on the Internet.

They say this is leading to a noticeable wave of aggression and harassment against researchers, expecially women.

Image created by P. Gosselin using Grok AI

Germany’s online Euronews has an article and accompanying video report that address the increasing spread of misinformation online following extreme heatwaves and the resulting consequences for the scientific community.

Climate scienists resent high-reach posts by skeptics that circulate on social media that are aimed at discrediting news reports of “unprecendented heat waves”. These reports often reference earlier historical heat periods such as the extreme heatwave of 1921 or the record summer of 1976 in the UK. These historical accounts are often accompanied by comments suggesting that people back then “didn’t make such a fuss” about it, which is intended to imply that today’s temperatures are nothing new and have little to do with CO2​ emissions.

More frequent and intense today

Climate scientists vehemently contradict this narrative. They do not deny that severe heatwaves occurred before industrialization. However, the core issue is different, they claim. Due to global warming, these extreme weather events now occur significantly more frequently, intensely, and for longer durations than in the past.

“In the past few years, we have been experiencing heatwaves that are so extreme that some of them would have had near-zero probability without human-caused climate change,” said Sonia Seneviratne, Professor of Climate Science at ETH Zürich.

Climate scientists also resent accusations that global temperature data is being systematically manipulated to artificially sensationalize the climate crisis. That is not true, they insist.

“Harassment”

In the Euronews article, Dr. Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist Berkeley Earth, equates the stream of ccritical comments made by readers to harassment. “Most of the harassment, fortunately, consists of people throwing insults at me online. However, many of my colleagues, especially women, experience significantly worse.”