The Black Summer bushfires burnt 24 million hectares, directly killed at least 33 people, destroyed more than 3000 homes and killed or displaced nearly three billion animals, yet new research says they did not produce the shift in Australians' views on climate science that many in the climate movement expected.
Who Got Burned, Who Got Heard
The people at the bottom paid first. The fires tore through homes, land and lives, while the public conversation got dragged toward arson claims and away from climate science. Researchers analysing three national surveys before, during and after the 2019/20 fires found that in the weeks after the peak of the fires, more Australians came to question the science of climate change, with many echoing claims in conservative media that the fires were the result of arson rather than climate.
They grouped the 1061 subjects of the study into three groups: climate change acceptors, fence-sitters and sceptics, and asked them to rank opinion statements about climate change by degree of endorsement. Before the fires began, 64.6 per cent accepted climate science. After the fires, that figure fell to 54.46 per cent. The number of fence-sitters grew from 27.13 per cent to 37.09 per cent. The number of sceptics stayed relatively stable, moving only from 8.28 per cent to 8.45 per cent.
"Our results suggest the Black Summer bushfires did not elicit greater acceptance of anthropogenic climate change or heightened concern. Instead, misinformation, particularly conservative media narratives attributing the fires to mass arson, may have influenced beliefs about the fires’ causes, especially among undecided and sceptical individuals," the paper said.
What the Apparatus Pushed
The research, published today by the Royal Society, said misinformation may have dampened the fires' impact on the public's perception of climate risk, as shown by the widespread endorsement of the false claim that arsonists caused the bushfires. That belief was held by 88.89 per cent of sceptics, 56.96 per cent of fence-sitters and 38.79 per cent of acceptors. By contrast, attribution of the fires to climate change was endorsed by 87.07 per cent of acceptors but rejected by most other participants, suggesting that competing narratives and the simultaneous onset of the COVID-19 pandemic may have diverted public attention.
"Online misinformation spread under the #ArsonEmergency hashtag, notably the claim that arsonists were a major cause of the fires, subsequently influenced conservative mass media reporting of the bushfires," the paper said. The paper was written in collaboration with the CSIRO, The University of Western Australia, The University of Melbourne and Lancaster University in the UK.
It cited a prominent example: an article published in The Australian under the title "Bushfires: firebugs fuelling crisis as national arson toll hits 183," claiming that "more than 180 alleged arson cases have been recorded since the start of the bushfire season." The article played a prominent role in fuelling online climate change denial narratives and was shared by prominent conservatives, such as Donald Trump Jr, to his audience of four million followers on Twitter, the paper said, propelling the misinformation to a much larger online audience. The arson claims were grossly exaggerated, calculated based on a range of fire-related offences other than arson and relied on annual figures rather than the Black Summer bushfire season.
A spokesman for News Corp Australia rejected the assertion. "Claims that our publications blamed this disaster on arson are false and do not hold up to scrutiny. Nor did our mastheads overstate the role of arson, as some critics claimed, to downplay focus on climate change," he said. "Nor did our publications ignore climate change issues in our bushfire coverage. Our four state-based mastheads and The Australian published 3335 stories about the bushfires between September 1, 2019, and January 23, 2020. Only 3.4 per cent mentioned arson or arsonists. One hundred and sixty of our employees covered the fires for months, reporting events in real time as a live, breaking emergency, often placing their own wellbeing in danger to tell the stories that mattered to our communities."
How Misinformation Works
The researchers said misinformation facilitated what they called motivated reasoning, "the tendency for individuals to interpret information in ways that protect or reinforce their prior beliefs," allowing some people to interpret the causes of bushfires in ways that protected or reinforced their pre-existing climate change beliefs, and others to shift from being acceptors to fence-sitters.
Dr Mark Hurlstone, a senior lecturer in psychology who researches attitudes to climate change at the University of Lancaster, said bad actors seeking to seed disinformation harness reports of arson as the cause of fires due to the public's misunderstanding of wildfires and climate change. He said many people did not understand that, however fires are ignited, hotter and drier conditions caused by climate change made them far more destructive. "Climate change isn't causing these fires; it's priming the landscape for these fires to burn intensely and to spread widely," he said.
A CSIRO study published in the journal Nature in 2021 showed the annual area burnt in Australian forests had increased by 800 per cent in the previous 32 years, primarily due to climate change. A previous study by World Weather Attribution said that compared with the climate of 1900, the probability of Fire Weather Index as high as in 2019/20 has increased by more than a factor of four. Another World Weather Attribution study published in July found that climate "whiplash" driven by climate change had exacerbated the fire threat before wildfires devastated parts of France, Spain and the UK this northern summer. Whiplash describes how climate change has intensified winter rains, which boost forest fuel loads, as well as summer heat and drought, which dries out the landscape, accelerating fire risk.
According to Hurlstone, studies like these tend to be published after fires, and after reports of arson in social and mass media have already caused misunderstanding of how climate change makes fires worse. He said climate scientists and communicators must better prepare the public to understand climate crises before they begin.