Elon Musk Tweets Misleading Climate Claims Denying Farming’s Role in Earth’s Heating

Scientists fear misinformation about climate change will proliferate after Twitter's wealthy owner, Elon Musk, tweeted that farming has no major effect on the climate.

Last June, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO claimed that activities on Earth's surface, such as farming, have no meaningful influence on climate change.

"Overwhelmingly, the risk of climate change is due to moving billions of tons of carbon from deep underground into the atmosphere. Over time, if we keep doing this, the chemical makeup of our atmosphere will change enough to induce meaningful climate change," he tweeted.

As of this writing, the said tweet already garnered more than 45,000 likes and 6,000 retweets.

False Claims

Scientists were quick to debunk Musk's statements.

Studies showed that greenhouse gas pollution from agriculture, forestry, and other land uses made up 13-21% of global emissions from 2010 to 2019.

Experts also stressed that humans have heated the planet by 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit), which causes extreme weather occurrences.

"Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unquestionably caused global warming," International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a global research organization based in Austria said, as quoted by DW News.

Data from Our World, a British nonprofit research group, supported this claim by saying that around 25 to 30 percent of global emission comes from the food system and when agricultural products are included, it rises to around one-third, the AFP reported.

Robert Rohde, a lead scientist at the nonprofit research center Berkeley Earth, also responded to Musk's controversial statement, noting that global warming emissions are considered as a diverse issue caused by all facets of human activity and "are already changing our climate."

Read Also: Adapting To Climate Change Could Still Mean Environmental Troubles

Denial And Abuses

Climate Action Against Disinformation observed an increase in the level of climate denial on Twitter last year.

Data starting from July 2022 shows that tweets with the "climate denial" term rose from about 30,000 per week to about 110,000. The said tweets include claims that climate change is a "scam" pushed by "globalists."

Since Musk took over Twitter, the level of abuse from climate deniers has also increased, scientists pointed out.

Julia Steinberger, a professor of ecological economics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and author of the latest report from the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called Musk a climate denier after his infamous tweet.

Some of the replies she received were genuine criticism about climate denial and what Musk really meant by the word "meaningful." However, many replies came from climate deniers and abusive trolls. This prompted her to block tens of thousands of Twitter accounts.

"Things have definitely gotten a lot worse since Musk took over," she emphasized.

Musk, who has more than 146 million followers on Twitter, has repeatedly expressed his conspiracy theories since he bought the famous social media platform in October.

A few of his recent tweets include those of billionaire philanthropist George Soros, a target of his antisemitic insults; Nancy Pelosi, a US politician from the Democratic Party; and the investigative journalism group Bellingcat.

"I'll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of doing that is losing money, so be it," said Musk in an interview with US broadcaster CNBC in May.

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