Opinion

Why is climate misinformation going unchallenged among farmers?

Climate denial will inevitably distort the forthcoming election debates

There is a growing belief among some in the farming community that methane is being described as it is in inventories for purely political reasons, not scientific ones. Photograph: Alan Betson
There is a growing belief among some in the farming community that methane is being described as it is in inventories for purely political reasons, not scientific ones. Photograph: Alan Betson
Sadhbh O'Neill
Tue Mar 12 2024 - 06:00

A TikTok video has gone viral in farming circles over the past few weeks with 365,000 views to date. It depicts a young farmer from Northern Ireland describing the process by which carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is transformed in cattle via photosynthesis and the rumen microbiome to form methane. As described by him, livestock farming is like recycling: natural inputs are metabolised into natural outputs. Nothing to worry about. The waste gases (methane) break down in about 12 years, and if no additional animals are added to the herd there is no “additional” warming. Ergo, the “net” climate impact of a stable herd is zero.

Unfortunately, this is incorrect. Although a sustained stable rate of methane annual emissions will result in a stabilisation of resultant atmospheric concentrations, slow long-term warming would still occur.

Content being shared in WhatsApp groups lately by the Beef Plan Movement, a grassroots organisation formed around a draft plan for better conditions and pricing for beef farmers, to more than 2,000 farmers include discussions with atmospheric physicist and climate sceptic Richard Lindzen, who not only described agriculture’s methane emissions as a “red herring” but told farmers they were being “idiotically treated”.

While it might be said that TikTok videos are just entertainment and that the Beef Plan Movement is still relatively small and not representative of most farmers, there is a growing belief among some in the farming community that methane is being described as it is in inventories for purely political reasons, not scientific ones. There’s also widening support for the idea that agricultural soils sequester enough carbon to offset methane, and that farmers are being deliberately sacrificed to make the energy transition easier. This crude mix of climate denial and legitimate grievance fuels the anger that we’ve seen from farmers in recent months all over Europe.

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It is true that methane behaves differently to other long-lived greenhouse gases, and its warming impact is more accurately captured by the “GWP* (GWP Star, global warming potential) metric” – a new means of measuring the warming impact of greenhouse gases more accurately than the carbon dioxide equivalence metric used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, GWP* provides only a partial picture of the climate impact of livestock. Furthermore, using GWP* effectively grandfathers emissions from high emitting countries. In the view of one prominent IPCC scientist, moving to GWP* could have “unethical consequences” such as rewarding historic emitters and putting developing countries at an unfair disadvantage.

According to a recent report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, discussions about climate change are being exploited by far-right political parties in Ireland to position themselves as the ‘true defenders’ of rural interests

Nevertheless, many farmers genuinely believe that methane’s impact is not accurately represented in inventories, and that they have been “gaslit” by policy elites, including the 97 per cent + of climate scientists who endorse the IPCC’s assessments. Emboldened by the work of by a handful of scientists and in the absence of comprehensive rebuttals from farm leaders or political representatives, farmers may embrace climate denial because it is easier to believe that rural livelihoods are under attack by policies on emissions, water quality and rewetting than to reverse out of the cul de sac into which Ireland’s agribusinesses walked farmers after 2011.

Political leaders should not underestimate this problem. It is not going to go away. Climate denial will inevitably distort forthcoming election debates. According to a recent report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, discussions about climate change are being exploited by far-right political parties in Ireland to position themselves as the “true defenders” of rural interests. The report finds that discussions on social media, X (formerly Twitter) in particular, often frame climate change as part of a broader culture war and a conspiracy to control the population and curtail freedoms.

There are serious repercussions for policy debate when people are increasingly getting their news from sources other than established broadcasters or print media. While Teagasc has a brief explanation of methane on its website, and the Environmental Protection Agency publishes the national inventory every year using the standard IPCC methodologies, neither agency has as yet succeeded in taking on the myth-busting challenge.

Without effective climate literacy training and debunking of false information, myths solidify in the minds of those who may already be loath to trust experts. Researchers in this field recommend that rebuttals and reframings should come from trusted in-group messengers and that efforts should be made to “inoculate” the targeted audience in advance. None of this means climate policies should get a clear pass: they should be robustly scrutinised for their social and economic impacts. Farmers are entitled to a socially just transition. But rejecting science because the truth is too inconvenient is a perilous strategy that will have far-reaching implications.

Sadhbh O’Neill is the senior climate adviser to Friends of the Earth Ireland