“Check out my DeSmog page here,” is what Tom Nelson writes in the ‘About’ section of his Substack publication, to link his profile on a publication called DeSmog. Calling itself ‘the world’s number one source for accurate, fact-based information regarding global warming misinformation campaigns’, DeSmog is a well-known platform to try and debunk – or smear – the so-called climate sceptics. The publication was founded in January 2006 by Canadian PR-expert James Hoggan. Hoggan has said that his interest in climate issues began in 2003 when he was invited to join the board of the David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian environmental organisation that unconditionally backs the theory of a man-made climate crisis. Interaction with pro-climate crisis scientists and political activists such as Al Gore led Hoggan to take the climate issues presented to him very seriously, and this led to the founding of DeSmog – ‘to raise awareness and help people become savvy about the global problem of climate change disinformation.’

Climate crisis PR and the ‘disinformation database’

Indirectly, the origin story itself shows that the purpose of the publication is not to provide unbiased scientific information on the arguments of all parties to the climate debate, but to present only one side of the science to the public, so as to support the founders’ chosen and unchallengeable basic claim that humans are changing the climate and a catastrophe lies ahead. In essence, the website can also be seen as a PR-publication for one side, which ironically was acknowledged by Richard Littlemore, one of DeSmog’s key authors back in the day, as early as 2009. In November 2009, emails from scientists on the computer server of the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit were made public by a whistleblower or perhaps hackers. The whole affair became known as Climategate. These emails contained 15 years of communications between the most prominent climate scientists in the world. And they were embarrassing. The emails provided insight into the practices that ranged from bad professionalism to fraudulent science. Bias, data manipulation, dodging freedom of information requests, and trying to subvert the peer-review process were uncovered. In one of the leaked emails, DeSmog author Littlemore informed Michael Mann, author of the flawed ‘hockey stick’ graph of rising temperatures in the 20^th century and a prominent climate scientist who played a major role in Climategate and mainstream climate science in general, that DeSmog’s role in reporting on these issues was ‘all about PR here, not much about science.’

While such bias should make one sceptical of the publication, DeSmog is used by both the mainstream press and fact-checkers of all kinds as a source of essentially unchallengeable truth today. And despite the errors – which can happen with any of us – there is in fact a great deal of truth to be found there. For example, it factually describes that John F. Clauser, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022, has said he does not believe there is a climate crisis. Similarly, it reviews the lives and work of many other scientists of the same calibre, and shows where and in what words they have denied a man-made climate crisis. But if everything is as said, what is the problem? The point is that the heading under which information about these renowned scientists and other ‘sceptics’ is listed to the public is called ‘Climate Disinformation Database’.

Nelson’s profile, which he refers to on his Substack, is also on the same database. Why is he giving a link to it? “It’s quoting what I have actually said. Somebody spent a lot of time on it, and I wouldn’t have spent that much time myself to write up this kind of ‘about me’ page. So it’s a pretty good ‘about me’ page and if people want to take a look at it, they can get a reference to my work over the last few years,” Nelson explains. DeSmog’s editor, for example, has read through all of his posts on social media platform X and highlighted the most important ones. It also outlines which prominent scientists he has interviewed on his climate podcast. And there’s also a section explaining that Nelson is the producer of Climate: The Movie, a recent documentary by British documentary filmmaker Martin Durkin, which critically examines the climate catastrophe claims. Nelson says he is not at all bothered by the coverage of his work alongside world-renowned scientists at such a ‘disinformation database’. “Whenever somebody in the climate cult talks about ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation’, I replace that with ‘information’ and that’s what it is – it’s information,” he says.

How a woodpecker lead to climate realism

Nelson is an electronic engineer with a master’s degree and has worked in tech and software for many years. He became interested in climate issues in the second half of the 2000s, and this is linked to his hobby of birdwatching. In 2004, claims were made of the rediscovery in the United States of a species of bird that was declared extinct in the 1980s, the ivory-billed woodpecker. Nelson recalls it was reported on the radio and some people were moved to tears that a species thought to no longer exist had been rediscovered. It was also the subject of an in-depth, peer-reviewed paper by 17 authors published in a scientific journal. But when Nelson delved deeper, he discovered something he was not expecting to find – no evidence of the supposed rediscovery. According to him the whole story was based on a particularly blurry video and an even blurrier photo as evidence of the species’ rediscovery. “It was completely crazy. It was just groupthink. They didn’t see it and they never did get a picture of it. It was all a complete crock,” Nelson says.

Around the same time, a friend told him to take a similar look at the debate about climate and global warming. Until then, he hadn’t paid much attention to the issue and believed that if that’s what the scientists were saying, then humans were probably causing global warming with their CO2 emissions, and possibly a catastrophe would eventually follow. “When I looked at the evidence for myself I was surprised to find that there was nothing, no evidence that there’s a climate crisis,” he says. According to Nelson, anyone can search and look for themselves and see for themselves whether the heat is really too warm now, or were the heatwaves of the 1930s worse? Are polar bears really going extinct? Have yields dropped dramatically? Are droughts in the US state of California worse than 200 years ago? Is the stormy weather becoming more frequent and storms more powerful? Are there really more wildfires? “You don’t have to be a climatologist. You don’t have to have a degree. Just an ordinary person who can read data and use Google and look at graphs – you can check all these alarming things yourself,” he says. “It’s a complete crock. All of it. Every single bit of anything alarming you’ve heard about the climate and CO2 causing bad weather, it’s all a complete baloney. Not true and no evidence supports it,” Nelson says.

Since about 2006, he has been researching, publishing and arguing about climate issues on a daily basis. According to Nelson, the whole climate emergency is a scam for power and money. There is a lot of money in the energy transition movement, while all sorts of ‘climate restrictions’, be they carbon credits or nudges to change our diets from beef to insects, or possible travelling instructions, are part of this power play, he argues.

Podcast interview led to producing the film

Nelson started his climate podcast series, where he critically discusses climate science with renowned scientists and other researchers interested in the topic, in 2022. One of his first guests was documentary filmmaker Martin Durkin. Nelson was already a fan of Durkin’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which was released back in 2007. This film as well critically examined the climate catastrophe predictions.

Speaking about the film, Durkin said at one point that he could actually make a much more meaningful film now. This led to the plan to make a new film and Nelson joined the project as the producer. The new film was released in March this year. Nelson says all the credit for making the film goes to Durkin. “He did all the interviews. He wrote the script, he did the narration and I give him a hundred percent of the credit, to him and his team, for producing such a great movie,” he says, adding that the film didn’t cost much to make financially. “Martin is very good at spending small amounts of money well, and it did not cost that much to make this movie. Largely travel and a lot of people volunteered their time,” Nelson says.

The declaration of a man-made climate crisis is criticised in the film by a number of respected scientists: the aforementioned Nobel Laureate in Physics Dr. Clauser, Professor Steven Koonin, who is the author of Unsettled and a former provost and vice-president of Caltech, Professor Richard Lindzen, who is a former professor of meteorology at Harvard and MIT, Princeton Physics Professor William Happer, Professor Nir Shaviv from Racah Institute of Physics in Israel, Professor Ross McKitrick from the University of Guelph and several others.

Nelson points out that many people may even be surprised to learn that these scientists, who are also called “climate deniers”, do not actually say that the climate is not changing, but on the contrary – they say that the climate is changing all the time. It is simply a question of the cause of climate change, or in other words, of why the change is happening. The climate is a complex system, and we obviously do not even know all the drivers. But the world-renowned physicists Clauser, Koonin, Lindzen and other scientists who speak in the film are given the title of ‘climate deniers’ simply because they oppose, for example, the claim that climate change is caused solely or mainly by anthropogenic CO2.

Since people are constantly presented with CO2 as the main cause, it becomes ingrained in their consciousness, even though they may not have any idea how much of CO2 there actually is in the atmosphere. “People don’t know that it’s about 0.04%. They’re guessing numbers like 5% or more. People are worried that the atmosphere is going to fill with CO2. They think CO2 maybe looks like black gas, black soot or something,” Nelson notes, adding that this ignorance is kind of baffling.

There is no business model behind the film

Nelson points out that they didn’t make the climate film to make money. “We just want a lot of people to see it, because it’s just so important to fight back against this scam. It is kind of the fight of our lifetimes. Because if we let the bad guys win, they’re going to reduce our freedom. And it’s going to be a much worse world if we let them impose all this crazy stuff on us to try to prevent bad weather,” Nelson says. “And as I keep saying, we could spend $50 trillion. We could never have an internal combustion car again. Never eat any meat and go live in caves. And still, there would be no measurable weather or climate benefit ever,” Nelson says.

There has been a major media push to block the film. Facebook, for example, has declared it ‘misinformation’ on the basis of the opinions of fact-checking portals it funds, and these fact-checks also form the basis of what the mainstream press thinks. However, Nelson says that this has not significantly disrupted the distribution of the film, as it has been widely shared, including on platforms that do not engage in censorship – such as X or Rumble. “It’s going to be very hard for anyone to take it down just because it’s up everywhere now,” Nelson says, adding that it’s a little surprising that the film is still available on YouTube.

When will the climate crisis be over?

There are a number of factors, apart from the press and the attitude of the social media companies, that are hindering the spread of critical assessments of the climate crisis. For example, many young scientists, who are also critical of the issue, are reluctant to express their criticism publicly. “They don’t dare to speak out because they’re not going to get published then. They might lose their job. Their family might get some blowback,” Nelson says. If a researcher can no longer publish his or her work in the scientific press, it essentially puts a damper on their entire career. “It’s so much easier to just sit back and pretend it’s true,” Nelson says.

However, he believes that this is all changing as more and more people start to look critically at the whole issue. One of the reasons for this ‘awakening’, according to Nelson, is the Covid crisis – a fact that has been acknowledged to him by a number of people recently. “They say they found out that we were not being told the truth about Covid and that the government and the press were lying to us. And then they started asking themselves, what else are they lying to us about?” he says.

The mainstream press, of course, is still in the business of avoiding these questions and all too often labelling them as misinformation, but Nelson notes that by now one might well be asking, what is the mainstream really? For example, Joe Rogan’s well-known podcast has 14.5 million followers, which makes publications like CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post look like dwarfs in comparison. For example, CNN’s prime time ratings have dropped constantly and are now below 500,000. Rogan and other podcast producers with large audiences, however, are already ridiculing climate alarmism. What this means, according to Nelson, is that more and more people are becoming climate realists. Nelson ultimately believes that the whole climate catastrophe movement will crumble faster than we would think. “I think people are just going to stop talking about it. I think that’s how this is going to end. There’s not going to be a big revelation where people say, hey, we were wrong completely. Sorry about that. They’re just going to stop talking about it. That’s my prediction,” Nelson says.