The Church of Climate Semiotics: When Graphs Become Heresy

This paper — The Aesthetics of Climate Misinformation by Anton and Petter Törnberg — is an extreme example institutional navel-gazing. It’s an academic attempt to psychoanalyze anyone skeptical of climate orthodoxy, dressed up in AI jargon and sprinkled with the self-assured tone of a priest lecturing on heresy. The irony is almost poetic: a study accusing others of aesthetic manipulation while itself performing the very act it condemns — turning dissent into pathology through rhetorical theater.

The authors set the tone early, assuming from the first paragraph that “climate misinformation” is an established category of sin, not a question to be examined. They claim to study how skeptics “appropriate scientific aesthetics – graphs, statistics, and technical imagery – to contest the scientific consensus”. Translation: people who use data and charts are suspicious because they look too scientific. Apparently, the mere act of presenting evidence in graphical form now constitutes “aesthetic mimicry” — unless you work for the IPCC, in which case it’s “peer-reviewed visualization.”

ABSTRACT

Climate misinformation today is increasingly conveyed through multimodal content, where images and text interact to shape meaning, emotional resonance, and enhance credibility. Yet, research on climate misinformation has rarely explored how these modes work in tandem. This paper introduces a multimodal analytical framework to examine climate-related visual misinformation. Analyzing 17,848 image-text posts, we combine BERTopic, CLIP, and qualitative framing analysis to investigate how climate denialist narratives are constructed. Our findings reveal a paradoxical communication strategy: the movement appropriates scientific aesthetics – graphs, statistics, and technical imagery – to contest the scientific consensus, projecting rationality, authority, and masculine self-control. In contrast, climate advocates are depicted through emotionally charged, feminized, and irrational imagery. These contrasting multimodal framings supports a strategy of strategic depoliticization, presenting ideological claims as neutral, objective truths. We argue that understanding climate misinformation requires moving beyond factual accuracy to examine the multimodal forms through which it gains legitimacy and emotional power.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2025.2557684#abstract

The paper’s central thesis is that climate skeptics are clever illusionists using a “masculine, rational aesthetic” to appear credible, while “climate advocates are depicted through emotionally charged, feminized, and irrational imagery”. In other words, men with spreadsheets are bad, and activists screaming in the streets are misunderstood victims of patriarchal semiotics. One can almost hear the subtext: “Logic is violence; emotion is virtue.”

It’s hard not to smile at the earnestness with which the authors “discover” that critics of climate policy use graphs and numbers. They treat this revelation as if they’ve unearthed a global conspiracy: “A significant portion of the material is dominated by technical imagery such as graphs, heat maps, and statistics”. To a normal person, that might suggest the skeptics are engaging in scientific debate. To the Törnbergs, it’s evidence of psychological manipulation — the “appropriation of objectivity.” In their worldview, you can’t be rational unless you have an institutional badge to prove it.

The methodology is equally entertaining. The authors feed 17,848 image-text posts into machine-learning models (BERTopic and CLIP), then announce that AI has confirmed what they already believed: anyone unconvinced by climate dogma is engaged in a “strategic depoliticization” campaign. In plain English, they’ve trained a robot to sniff out heresy. The “computational multimodal framing analysis” sounds impressive until you realize it’s just a neural net sorting memes by vibe and labeling any graph that contradicts the IPCC as “denialist.” This is not science; it’s digital theology.

Their discussion of “gendered framing” takes the satire to new heights. They interpret memes of Greta Thunberg as proof of patriarchal oppression: skeptics are “masculine, objective,” while Greta represents “emotional femininity”. Never mind that Thunberg built her entire brand on emotional appeals; the authors view any mockery of that performative hysteria as sexist. They even note disapprovingly that some memes depict her with a halo, “mocking the way she is idolized” — which, of course, is the point. The irony of worshiping a teenage prophet while accusing others of cult behavior seems lost on them.

By page 17, the tone shifts from sociology to caricature. Climate skeptics, we are told, use images of Mao, Goebbels, and the Great Leap Forward to frame climate activism as authoritarian. The authors call this “ideological framing,” but it’s really just a mirror held up to the movement’s own authoritarian tendencies. If one must submit to carbon rationing, energy lockdowns, and eco-censorship under threat of planetary doom, perhaps the comparisons aren’t as outlandish as they seem. Yet the Törnbergs never entertain the possibility that critics might be responding to real overreach — they simply diagnose it as semiotic deviance.

The paper’s closing sections turn philosophical, lamenting that “addressing climate misinformation requires more than correcting factual errors” — it demands “grappling with the aesthetic and affective strategies through which denialist narratives gain legitimacy”. Translation: it’s not enough to censor dissent; we must now police its tone. Facts aren’t the issue — feelings are. The battle, they insist, is over “how it is shown and felt,” a confession that climate politics has abandoned reason altogether.

Throughout, the authors treat “denialism” as a supernatural force that must be contained, not understood. They show no curiosity about why intelligent people might reject climate orthodoxy — the endless failed predictions, the model discrepancies, the politicization of funding, or the economic toll of Net Zero policies. Instead, they pathologize dissent as aesthetic subversion. It’s the academic equivalent of calling someone a witch because their charts look too convincing.

One can’t help noticing that every example of “misinformation” cited — graphs of vegetation growth, discussions of CO2’s agricultural benefits, skepticism of wind power reliability — are all legitimate debates. None of these topics are factually false; they’re simply inconvenient to the climate narrative. The authors never refute them — they just dismiss them as “frames,” as though the evidence vanishes when wrapped in the wrong color palette.

Perhaps the most unintentionally comic line comes when they describe skeptics’ use of data as a “paradoxical communication strategy” — appropriating science to question science. Yes, imagine that: people using evidence to test a hypothesis. What shocking behavior. In their worldview, “science” isn’t a process of inquiry — it’s a sacred trust that must not be questioned by laymen, bloggers, or anyone outside the priesthood of approved institutions. The word “denialist” thus functions not as a descriptor, but as an excommunication.

In the end, this paper reads less like research and more like bureaucratic self-defense. It’s an elaborate justification for why institutional authority must be preserved, even as public trust collapses. The “aesthetic of misinformation” is simply the aesthetic of skepticism — charts, logic, and humor — which threatens those whose careers depend on selling catastrophe. The authors’ conclusion, that “environmental politics will be shaped not only by what is said but by how it is shown and felt”, is unintentionally correct. The problem is that the climate movement has built its empire entirely on feelings, while pretending to speak for science.

So yes, let’s have more graphs, more numbers, more critical memes — not fewer. If the establishment finds that threatening, it tells us something profound: the crisis isn’t in the climate; it’s in the confidence of those who claim to own the truth.