Last autumn, community organiser Samia Dumbuya led a climate workshop for young people of colour in East London. “I did an activity to assess their attitudes towards the climate crisis, by posing questions about their relationship to the environment and what they hear about the climate crisis,” she recalls.

One group of young men, Dumbuya noticed, seemed particularly disinterested in the discussion. “As someone who works with young people a lot, young people disengaging can be due to myriad reasons – low energy levels, discomfort with the activities, low confidence to speak up in front of a group,” she explains. So she made a particular effort to speak to the boys and encouraged them to share their feelings with her.

One of them, Dumbuya says, admitted that he didn’t think climate change was a real, urgent problem. “I asked him what led to that belief,” she recalls. “He said that he watches and listens to his favourite influencers on social media – mainly via YouTube – and they don’t see it as a ‘real’ issue.”

It’s shocking to hear of climate scepticism among young people when there’s so much evidence that Gen Z are overwhelmingly invested in tackling the climate crisis. But in spite of this, alarming new research published by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has found that a third of UK teenagers believe climate change is “exaggerated”, largely due to the abundance of climate misinformation on sites like YouTube.

Zoe Rasbash is a climate researcher. Like Dumbuya, she too has met young people through her work who express scepticism when it comes to the climate crisis. “I was running one particular workshop with kids aged around 14 or 16,” she tells Dazed. “And some of them were talking about solar flares – it’s like really old school climate denialism – this [false] idea that ‘the sun just gets pretty hot sometimes’.”

“It felt like these young people were hearing these things on TikTok or Reels or YouTube,” she continues. “It didn’t feel like these were super personally held beliefs. It felt like they were parroting things they’d heard online.” She adds that she wouldn’t call young people espousing these views “all-out climate deniers”.

The report published by CCDH earlier this month found that the nature of climate denial is changing. While “Old Denial” narratives tried to suggest that climate change is not happening or not caused by humans, “New Denial” narratives question the science and solutions for climate change, perpetuating ideas such as “clean energy won’t work” or “climate scientists are unreliable”. In 2018, New Denial narratives constituted just 35 per cent of all climate denial content on YouTube. Today, this has rocketed to 70 per cent. 

Callum Hood is head of research at the CCDH. He explains that New Denial narratives are on the rise primarily because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny that the climate is changing. “Fundamentally, the fall in Old Denial shows that those who have been promoting and communicating climate science have been successful,” he says. “It is simply not tenable to deny the existence or human causes of climate change as it was even just six years ago.” New Denial, then, is all about “denying the impacts of global warming, dismissing the necessary solutions and attacking the scientists and activists who are leading calls for action.”

There is a lot of New Denial content on YouTube. Channels which push these misinforming views are incredibly popular, such as BlazeTV (1.92 million subscribers) and  PragerU (3.21 million subscribers), while other figures who push New Denial narratives like Jordan Peterson (7.64 million subscribers) are also widely watched. Social media analytics tool Social Blade found that the 96 climate denial channels studied by the CCDH had a combined total of 3.4 billion views. Concerningly, young people are particularly at risk of falling prey to this insidious climate misinformation content: the Pew Research Center recently found 13- to 17-year-olds use YouTube more than any other social media platform, with 71 per cent using it daily.

“Young people are much more likely to get their news from social media, such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube and we know that news on social media is much less reliable – and contains more misinformation” – Sander van der Linden

Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Cambridge and consults tech companies such as Meta and Google to help them design strategies for fighting climate misinformation on their platforms. “Young people are much more likely to get their news from social media, such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and we know that news on social media is much less reliable – and contains more misinformation,” he says, citing research which has found that terminally online Gen Z is the generation most susceptible to fake news. “We’ve now seen that one in five young Americans deny the Holocaust! So poor information consumption habits on social media can definitely make things worse.”

Dumbuya suspects young people are drawn to these online echo chambers where climate scepticism flourishes, as they can make them feel “safe, seen and heard”. But they aren’t healthy environments. “I always caution people to distinguish the difference between an echo chamber and a community,” she says. “A community is being in a space where you’re exposed to different perspectives shaped by various lived experiences, whereas echo chambers can narrow your viewpoint and cause you to be sheltered away from the realities of the world.”

But she acknowledges that it’s getting harder for young people to find community, and this could be driving them into the arms of climate sceptics online. “The Tories cutting local funding due to austerity has meant that local services such as youth centres, community centres and local programmes have been significantly reduced because of the lack of financial resources,” she says. “People are isolated from community discussions, reducing their awareness of what is happening around them.”

Disturbingly, YouTube earns up to $13.4 million a year from ads on the 96 channels included in the CCDH analysis. “Discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement. “However, when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.” But while videos overtly claiming that climate change is a hoax are banned from generating ad revenue by YouTube, videos which espouse more subtle and insidious New Denial narratives aren’t covered by this policy.

Hood says that it’s vital platforms update their policies to reflect the shifting nature of climate denial and enforce these policies accordingly, so all climate denial content is demonetised and de-amplified. “Platforms can’t tell us they take climate change seriously while pushing climate denial into people's feeds and profiting from ads that run on denial content,” he says. Van der Linen adds that it’s important for tech companies to reframe the way they look at climate misinformation. “One of the issues here is that in contrast to COVID or elections, misinformation about climate change is often viewed as ‘opinion’ rather than causing direct harm,” he says. “We therefore need to link climate misinformation to indicators of societal harm.”

In the meantime, activists and campaigners like Dumbuya and Rasbash say they will keep approaching young climate sceptics with compassion and patience. “I understand that the climate crisis is an urgent issue where we need everyone on board, however, people won’t be incentivised if we meet them with anger, rage and disappointment in them,” Dumbuya says. “Shaming people to take action is not the way forward towards building a compassionate and equitable future for all.”