We came across posts on the following topic on the social media platform X:
The posts claim that a large number of scientists had signed a formal statement, called the World Climate Declaration, that affirmed that ‘there is no climate emergency’. Among the signatories were said to be included Nobel Prize winners.
The number of scientists said to have signed the statement was quoted differently across the various sources, with some stating that 1,100 scientists had signed the statement whereas others indicated that over 1,900 had signed it.
The Climate Declaration
We found the climate declaration on a website for the Clintel Foundation. The statement boldly claims that ‘there is no climate emergency’.
The Clintel Foundation claims to be an ‘independent foundation informing people about climate change and climate policies, and says that it was founded by ‘emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok’.
It also makes various related claims to support its primary claim, including that ‘natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming’, ‘warming is far slower than predicted’, ‘climate policy relies on inadequate models’, and that ‘global warming has not increased natural disasters’.
We have addressed similar claims in our previous fact-checks and found that they misrepresent and cherry-pick information to mislead readers on the reality of climate change, for which there is a considerable scientific consensus.
The page for the statements claims that ‘a global network of over 1900 scientists and professionals’ had prepared the statement, calling for climate science to be ‘less political’.
A list of 28 prominent signatories was listed on the page, but we were unable to access the full list by the site, with access from our geographical region ‘temporarily limited for security reasons’ at the time of the attempted access.
Among the signatories listed were two Nobel Laureates, Professor John F. Clauser and Professor Ivar Giaever, who appeared to be among the signatories with the highest profile on the list.
When we conducted a search on the two individuals, we found that the two were genuinely Nobel prize recipients, but that their prizes were for physics and for work unrelated to climate science.
Giaever won the Nobel prize in 1973 for work on superconductors, while Clauser won his in 2022 for work on light particles.
News reports also indicated that Clauser and Giaever had become known for climate scepticism after winning their Nobel prizes.
The Science of the Matter
Further keyword searches on the declaration revealed that the campaign inviting signatories to the statement had been running for some time, explaining the changing number of signatories in the media and also resulting in periodic fact-checks when claims related to the statement resurfaced.
We found fact-checks addressing the document on AFP Fact Check in 2022, Euronews in 2022 and Politifact in 2023, with the number of signatories changing between each article.
These sources point out that not all of the signatories were scientists, and that several were from other professions or listed no science background at all. AFP and Euronews for instance found that fewer than one percent of the signatories described themselves climatologists or climate scientists.
Some of the signatories had a scientific background unrelated to the climate, such as geophysicists, geologists and engineers, while other unaffiliated job titles listed among signatories were fisherman, airline pilot, sommelier, musician, lawyer, linguist, retired teacher, urologist and psychoanalyst. Politifact also noted in its fact-check that six signatories were deceased.
Of concern was also the fact that several signatories were involved in the energy industry. AFP noted that several signatories worked for Shell, the oil industry, the mining industry, or for climate-sceptic free market thinktanks with financial ties to the energy industry.
In addition, AFP related reports from Dutch media that suggested money from fossil fuel companies had been channelled to fund the work of the Clintel Foundation’s founder Berkhout, though the founders had denied these claims.
More Reliable Sources
Climate Feedback, a global network of scientists that debunks inaccurate climate change claims, reviewed the original article in 2019 and found the declaration to have ‘very low’ credibility, with many reviewers finding the information presented to be biased, inaccurate, misleading and cherry-picking information.
The group also assessed an update version of the letter in 2022 and found that it repeated inaccurate claims about climate science.
AFP notes that several analyses of existing climate studies in recent years found that the consensus that humans were driving global warming by burning fossil fuels is ‘close to 100 per cent’.
It also quoted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change, which invited 721 experts from 90 countries to review scientific knowledge on climate change, and said that there was ‘unequivocal’ evidence that humans were warming the climate by burning fossil fuels.
Finally, AFP found that several of the supporting claims in the statement had been previously fact-checked and debunked both by AFP and other climate experts.
This included the claims that current climate changes were part of natural warming, that climate policy relies on inadequate models, that more CO2 was favourable for nature, and that there was no statistical evidence that global warming was intensifying natural disasters and their frequency.
A Thousand Signatures without the Science
Our findings therefore reveal that while the list of signatories is authentic, and even possibly contains signatures from many individuals working in scientific fields, it is only a miniscule proportion of these who are experts in the field of climate science.
Even the Nobel Laureates, who are the most prolific of the signatories, had been lauded for achievements in fields other than climate science.
While the X posts emphasise the large number of signatories and some of their credentials, information about the signatories is presented in a partial and misleading manner to embellish their credibility.
The world climate declaration rehashes several widely debunked claims about climate change. More reliable sources regarding climate science are available which highlight the overwhelming consensus on the impact of human activity in causing climate change.
As such, we find the posts that over a thousand scientists had signed a statement saying that there is no climate emergency to be highly misleading and mostly false.