Original article (in Serbian) was published on 9/10/2024; Author: Milica Ljubičić
The web portal Nulta tacka, known for denying climate change, recently published an article claiming that American billionaire Bill Gates said that journalists have a “moral obligation to lie about the dangers of climate change”. They did not specify when and where Bill Gates made this statement, but based on a reconstruction by Raskrikavanje, this claim has been manipulatively interpreted based on articles taken from two controversial web portals in America.
“Bill Gates says that mainstream media journalists have a moral obligation to lie to the public about the dangers of climate change”, claims Nulta tacka at the beginning of yet another very extensive article in which they deny climate change.
They do not specify when and where Bill Gates made this statement, even though they attribute it to him as a quote.
However, reading further into the text, one can infer how they manipulatively derived this claim.
Nulta tacka and the American website The Peoples Voice (the website from which they took the text) connect Bill Gates to the “Climate Media Transformation Plan”, which was launched last year. Indeed, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is among the donors of one of the organizations behind this project – the “Solution Journalism Network”.
Based on this connection, Nulta tacka manipulatively concluded that Gates personally said that journalists have a “moral obligation to lie”.
This is not true, nor is it the message of these organizations. On the contrary.
On the Climate Media Transformation Plan website, they state that the project arose as a contribution from hundreds of journalists reporting on climate change.
The goal is not, as they state, to be a definitive guide to climate reporting, but to highlight priorities and provide useful advice so that journalists interested in improving reporting on climate issues can find inspiration and guidance.
This project is also backed by the organization “Covering Climate Now”, which has been working for years to improve media reporting on climate change.
Nulta tacka and TPV cited some articles published over the years by credible authors on the “Covering Climate Now” website with the aim of problematizing them.
The “Covering Climate Now” (CCN) organization was formed in 2019 and gathers and trains hundreds of journalists around the world on how to report on climate change and emphasizes the importance of reporting on this topic.
Nulta tacka thus states that “according to CCN, journalists have a moral obligation to advocate for the climate agenda”.
This conclusion is drawn from a four-year-old article by journalist Ena Hajat published on this website.
In the article, the author stated that journalists have a “moral obligation to declare a climate emergency”. She questions whether, if scientists have a moral obligation to tell the truth, shouldn’t that also apply to journalists.
“Shouldn’t news organizations tell the real truth about climate issues and, not less importantly, about solutions?” Hajat uses the example of the coronavirus pandemic during which journalists sought to inform the public and point out the disinformation that was spreading widely.
Her position has been interpreted in the text as a claim that journalists have a moral obligation to advocate for the climate agenda.
Fossil fuels are (not) to blame for climate change
Nulta tacka’s text also suggests that the burning of fossil fuels is not the cause of global warming and that there is no basis for these claims.
Scientific studies, however, contradict this.
The Global Carbon Project, which comprises an international consortium of scientists from over 90 institutions, published that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels reached record levels in 2023. They state that last year, approximately 37 million tons of carbon dioxide were released solely from burning fossil fuels.
The United Nations warns that fossil fuels – coal, oil, and gas – overwhelmingly contribute to global climate change, accounting for over 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
“Greenhouse gas emissions blanket the Earth and trap the sun’s heat. This leads to global warming and climate change. The world is now warming faster than at any point in recorded history”, state the United Nations.
NASA also indicates that the rise in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is the primary reason for the increasing temperatures on Earth. “The global surface temperature in 2023 was 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than the average for NASA’s baseline period (1950-1980), making it the hottest year on record”.
A study by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showed that the ocean “slowed the absorption of carbon dioxide because it has already accumulated significant amounts.
The graph shows how much carbon is emitted from fossil fuels (yellow) and land-use changes (orange), and how much carbon is absorbed in the atmosphere (purple), oceans (blue), or on land (green), from 1959 to 2023.
