“A lie gets half way around the world before the truth gets its boots on” is an old cliché attributed to the usual suspects, but it almost certainly predates the internet – and probably the television and the telephone too. I was thinking of this on Sunday morning when I saw wild conspiracy theories about the violent attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner before I knew there had been an attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or indeed that President Trump was there.

I write this on a blog, the pioneering tool of Web 2.0 – remember that? This was cutting edge when I started Terra Infirma Ltd. It seemed so exciting – no longer did you have to find a publisher for your thoughts, you just could publish them yourself at a click of a button. It was so cool!

But this, of course, was a double edged sword.

Climate change deniers quickly jumped at the opportunity to spread misinformation without even having to pass the slightest editorial test, never mind the standard scientific peer review process. Not long after I started the blog, found myself in a lengthy online argument about climate science with a rather distinguished scientist (from a different discipline) where I was quoting peer-reviewed papers and he was quoting denialist blogs. And this is the problem – those blogs were feeding his confirmation bias to a degree that he started to believe/hope desperately they had authority. I pointed out he would fail an undergraduate who did the same in his discipline.

And now we live in a world where the algorithms are all powerful. I’m still on Twitter/X where my thousands of followers rarely see a glimpse of my work because I don’t spark outrage. I just dream of a pre-enshitification time when you built a community and discussed items of interest – sometimes live on meet-ups. Meanwhile Twitter thinks I want to see street fights, AI slop and, yes, conspiracy theories.

And climate change denial must be the biggest conspiracy theory of them all. It takes some chutzpah, madness or income stream to believe that you know more than the international climate science community – or deep paranoia that they are a (humungous) cabal of communists working to enslave us all.

And the question is how, or even whether, to interact. Do you leave lies unchallenged, or do you create the counterpoint, knowing that your response will make the original post even more attractive to the algorithm? Do we abandon the sewers of Twitter knowing that many prominent politicians are now lapping this s**t up?

I was going to test myself last month when a prominent paid denialist influencer contacted me through an intermediary to come on the podcast. I mulled for a few days, said yes, and suggested some dates. While I waited for a response I even formulated a set of questions, but that reply never came. I’ll never know how it would have gone.

There are a small number of very erudite, witty people on line who leap on every utterance by major purveyors of nonsense and put the arguments to the sword. Others like The EV Guy Jordan Marsden deliberately provoke the ‘reply guys’ in order to bend the algorithms to their will. I did try this for a while on LinkedIn – posting Sustainability news round-ups which would inevitably attract a know-it-all or three, and then put them down politely but firmly, but the stream of victims soon dried up and the views of my posts tumbled accordingly.

So where does that leave me? I’ll probably just keep on keeping on as I have always done.