Climate facts for a greener future

Blog series Knowledge Matters

Green Libraries Week runs from 21 – 28 October 2026, and this year's theme is Climate facts for a greener future: Navigating mis- and disinformation in libraries. It's a theme that sits right at the heart of what libraries have always done best – helping people find information they can trust.

At the British Library we know people come to us to explore ideas, ask questions and determine facts. Climate change is a topic where access to reliable, evidence-based information is more important than ever and can sometimes be hard to navigate.

Why now?

Climate change is one of the most misrepresented topics in the public domain. It's technical enough that most of us rely on trusted intermediaries (scientists, journalists and institutions) to make sense of it, and emotionally charged enough that misleading claims travel fast. Libraries are natural allies here: we're trusted, neutral and already in the business of helping people evaluate sources critically.

What does it all mean?

• Misinformation is false or inaccurate information shared without intent to deceive – someone genuinely believes it and passes it on.
• Disinformation is false information created or shared deliberately to mislead.
• Malinformation is genuine information used in a misleading way – true facts stripped of context to create a false impression.

Knowing which one you're dealing with changes how you respond, but the checking process is largely the same.

Tips for checking whether climate information is reliable

Before sharing or acting on a piece of climate information, it's worth pausing and asking a few quick questions. The Met Office's own guidance on spotting weather and climate misinformation offers a good starting framework, and we've adapted it for a library setting:

1. Who is telling you this, and why? Is the source a climate scientist, a relevant institution, or an anonymous account? What might they gain from you believing or sharing this?
2. When was it published? Old data, images or reports are often recirculated as if they're current. A striking photo of flooding or wildfire may be years old and from somewhere else entirely.
3. Does it match what other trusted sources say? Check the claim against two or three independent, reputable sources rather than taking one post at face value.
4. Is it trying to make you feel something before it makes you think? Content designed to provoke fear, anger or outrage is often less concerned with accuracy than with getting a reaction.
5. Can you trace it back to the original source? A headline or quote taken out of context can completely reverse the meaning of the underlying research. Try to find the original study, report or statement.
6. Would you still share this if it turned out to be wrong? A useful gut check before hitting ‘share’.

None of this requires specialist expertise. It is the same critical reading skills libraries have always taught, applied to a fast-moving and often complex topic.

Common signs of misinformation and disinformation

Climate disinformation tends to follow recognisable patterns. Watch out for:

• cherry-picked data. A single cold snap, one unusually cool year or one graph shown out of its longer-term context, used to suggest the broader trend isn't real.
• false or misleading experts. Someone presented as a climate authority whose actual expertise lies elsewhere, or a fringe view dressed up as mainstream scientific opinion.
• manufactured doubt. Language suggesting ‘scientists disagree’ or ‘the science isn't settled’ on points where there is in fact strong consensus.
• loaded or emotive language. Content designed to provoke anger, fear or despair rather than inform.
• false solutions or false trade-offs. Framing climate action as impossible, pointless or as an attack on ordinary people's way of life, rather than engaging with the actual policy detail.
• conspiracy framing. Presenting climate science or climate policy as a hoax or coordinated effort to deceive the public, rather than decades of independent, peer-reviewed research carried out around the world.
• AI-generated content. Increasingly, convincing but fabricated images, video or text, generated specifically to illustrate a false claim (a flooded city that never flooded, for instance).

If a claim uses several of these techniques at once, that's a strong signal to slow down and verify before trusting or sharing it.

Trusted sources for climate information

A good habit is to keep a short mental list of sources you can go back to again and again. Some reliable starting points:

• The Met Office – the UK's national weather and climate service, including its own guidance on spotting climate misinformation.
• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the UN body synthesising the global peer-reviewed climate science.
• The Climate Change Committee – the UK's independent statutory adviser on climate targets and progress.
• Carbon Brief – specialist UK climate science and policy journalism, known for clear explainers and fact-checks.
• Full Fact – the UK's independent fact-checking charity, which regularly checks climate-related claims in the news and on social media.
• NASA Climate Change and NOAA – for global temperature and climate data.
• The Royal Society – for accessible explainers on the underlying science.
• Your local council's sustainability or climate pages (for Camden residents, Camden Council's Climate Action and Resilience pages for what's happening, and being done, locally.

A simple rule of thumb: use sources that show their working, link to underlying data, name real institutions and are open about uncertainty over sources that deal in absolute certainty and strong emotion.

Using our collection to explore climate, nature and environmental history

You can use our climate change research guide to find information on climate change.

It is also worth remembering that one of the joys of our collection is discovering how much material relevant to climate and the environment may turn up in unexpected places.

• Maps. For tracing how landscapes, coastlines and land use have changed over time.
• Newspapers. For seeing how environmental issues have been reported and debated across the decades.
• Oral histories and sound recordings including first-hand testimony from the environmental movement and unexpected sources like mountaineering accounts, which can serve as historical weather records.
• Business and trade journals, including the Business & IP Centre Sustainable Business Guide, useful for anyone researching sustainable business practice or green technology.
• Government and policy records, including the India Office Records and Social Sciences collection, for the political and governmental history of environmental issues.
• The Endangered Archives Programme, offering perspectives on environmental change from parts of the world that are otherwise poorly documented.
• Contemporary fiction and artists' books, including the growing genre of climate fiction, for creative responses to the climate crisis.
• Music collection, including experimental and contemporary pieces responding to the environment and climate.

If you’re aged 18 or over, make sure to get your British Library Reader Pass to get free access to our extensive collection and Reading Rooms in London and Yorkshire.

Using AI responsibly when researching climate information

AI tools are increasingly part of how people search for information, including on climate topics but it's worth keeping a few things in mind.

• Treat AI answers as a starting point, not a final source. AI tools can summarise well but can also get things wrong, present outdated information as current, or state things confidently that aren't true.
• Ask for sources, and check them. A good AI tool should be able to point you to where a claim comes from. If it can't, or the sources don't check out, be cautious.
• Be alert to AI-generated images and video. Fabricated but realistic-looking climate imagery (floods, wildfires, disasters that never happened) is a growing part of the misinformation landscape.
• Cross-check anything specific or surprising (a statistic, a date, a quote) against one of the trusted sources listed above before repeating it.
• Remember AI tools reflect their training data and design choices. They aren't neutral arbiters of truth any more than any other single source is – treat them the same way you'd treat one opinionated friend, rather than an oracle.

Used this way, AI can be a helpful research assistant for climate questions – the key is keeping the same critical habits you'd apply to any other source.

Further reading and resources

A short list to get started:

• The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
• Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie
• How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference by Rebecca Huntley
• Carbon Brief's climate science explainer series
• The Met Office's guidance on spotting climate and weather misinformation
• CILIP's Green Libraries Campaign resources.

A climate claims checklist

Next time you see a climate-related claim online, in the news, or shared by a friend, try running it through this quick checklist:

• Can I identify who is making this claim?
• Do they have relevant expertise?
• Is the information current, not recycled from years ago?
• Have I checked it against at least one trusted, independent source?
• Is the claim based on facts rather than emotions?
• Can I trace it back to an original study, report or statement?
• Would I still share this if I later found out it was wrong?

If you answer no on several of these, that's your cue to dig a little deeper!