Patrick Moore's climate-change denial book is a chapter-by-chapter compilation of misinformation and pseudoscience. Notes from the Road fact-checks his credibility and every chapter, one by one.
Updated August 24, 2026
Ireceived a copy of Patrick Moore's book, Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom from a friend who went down the anti-climate change denialist rabbithole. In this concise work, Moore uses internet news headlines to propagate a series of misleading assertions and flat-out disinformation concerning climate change and related environmental matters. His content is tailored for easy consumption but contains inaccurate information that aims to undermine established scientific principles, particularly when reaching an audience with limited exposure to sound scientific education.
I read the whole book and fact-checked it, chapter by chapter. Below is a short summary of what I found in each one, and a link to my full, sourced rebuttal.
Patrick Moore's new book, "Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom' is laced with misinformation, and features lines of argument that are incompatible with modern science.
Read my full rebuttal of Patrick Moore's credibility, and each chapter of the book, here:
Exposing Patrick Moore
Patrick Moore Credibility
Chapter 1 Fact-check: Baobab Trees
Chapter 2 Fact-check: Coral Bleaching
Chapter 3 Fact-check: Carbon Dioxide
Chapter 4 Fact-check: Polar Bears
Chapter 5 Fact-check: Estimated Threats to Biodiversity
Chapter 6 Fact-check: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Chapter 7 Fact-check: Genetically Modified Foods
Chapter 8 Fact-check: Nuclear Radiation
Chapter 9 Fact-check: Wildfires
Chapter 10 Fact-check: Ocean Acidification
Chapter 11 Fact-check: Walruses
Patrick Moore, born in British Columbia in 1947, joined Greenpeace as a young crewmember, then drifted toward far-right ideology and a consulting career greenwashing the logging, plastics, GMO and oil industries. He has been filmed refusing to drink Roundup after claiming on camera that it's safe. He has attacked teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg over her age and her Asperger's diagnosis rather than her science. He still calls himself a "co-founder" of Greenpeace, a claim the organization's actual founders reject. He has expressed sympathy for the January 6 insurrection. None of this makes him wrong about climate science by itself — but he also has no formal training in it, has never published peer-reviewed research, and interviews no scientists in his book.
Read the full rundown on Patrick Moore's credibility →
Moore dismisses a 2018 study documenting the sudden die-off of Africa's oldest and largest baobab trees as "fake news," built entirely off the headline — not the actual paper. The study never claimed climate change was the sole cause, and its authors point to specific stresses (including drought) as likely contributing factors. Moore doesn't engage with the data at all.
Read the full Chapter 1 fact-check →
Moore claims coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 was overblown media fakery, and argues that because reefs survived hotter periods in Earth's deep past, today's bleaching events are nothing to worry about. This ignores the pace of current warming and confuses coral species' evolutionary resilience over millions of years with the survival of the reef ecosystems that exist today.
Read the full Chapter 2 fact-check →
Moore argues that because CO2 levels were higher at points in Earth's deep history, the idea that CO2 drives climate change today must be an unproven hypothesis. It's a well-worn denialist talking point that ignores paleoclimatology entirely — the relationship between CO2 and temperature is a well-established, well-evidenced theory, not a guess, and CO2 today is at its highest level in over a million years.
Read the full Chapter 3 fact-check →
Moore calls polar bear endangerment "the most fake news story of all," citing a 400% population increase. That number traces back to an unscientific guess in a 1958 Russian children's book, not to any actual survey. Scientific tracking didn't begin until the 1970s, and the IUCN currently lists polar bears as vulnerable due to sea ice loss.
Read the full Chapter 4 fact-check →
Moore rejects the scientific estimate that roughly one million species face extinction, and that 8.7 million species exist on Earth, calling the math "fakery at the most shameless possible level." He misunderstands how taxonomists actually generate these estimates, and the extinction graph he cites — sourced from the CO2 Coalition, a group he directs — was called out by the IUCN's own red list authority as a reversed version of the real data.
Read the full Chapter 5 fact-check →
Moore claims the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a myth. It isn't — it's an extensively studied, measured accumulation of plastic debris covering an area roughly twice the size of Texas, documented by NOAA, The Ocean Cleanup, and peer-reviewed oceanographic surveys.
Read the full Chapter 6 fact-check →
Moore frames any concern about GMOs as anti-science hysteria, flattening a nuanced, case-by-case scientific and regulatory conversation into a simple yes-or-no debate that doesn't reflect how scientists actually evaluate these crops.
Read the full Chapter 7 fact-check →
Moore downplays the health and environmental impact of nuclear accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, understating radiation risk in ways that contradict the scientific and public health consensus.
Read the full Chapter 8 fact-check →
Moore argues wildfires aren't getting worse because of climate change. The data on fire severity, season length, and area burned across the western United States and Canada says otherwise.
Read the full Chapter 9 fact-check →
Moore titles this chapter "A Complete Fabrication" and spends twenty-five pages arguing that "acidification" is scare language, that the pre-industrial pH baseline is an unsubstantiated guess, and that a graph with an R² of 0.0137 proves lower pH is actually good for marine life. He never mentions the buoys off Hawaii, Bermuda, and the Canary Islands that have measured ocean pH falling for decades, or the one number — the rate of change — that separates today's carbon pulse from the survivable ones in Earth's deep past.
Read the full Chapter 10 fact-check →
Moore calls the walrus cliff deaths in Netflix's Our Planet "another fraud perpetrated by Sir David Attenborough," building his case on a single tabloid clipping and one blogger while never mentioning the film's own director, who stated on the record that her crew watched the cliffs by radio and no bears were present when the animals fell. Along the way, he also gets basic walrus biology wrong — claiming tusks are used to dig for clams and inventing a hard dive-depth limit — while accusing his opponent of exploiting the public's ignorance of nature.
Read the full Chapter 11 fact-check →
Read my rebuttal of the other Patrick Moore chapters here:
Exposing Patrick Moore
Patrick Moore Credibility
Chapter 1 Fact-check: Baobab Trees
Chapter 2 Fact-check: Coral Bleaching
Chapter 3 Fact-check: Carbon Dioxide
Chapter 4 Fact-check: Polar Bears
Chapter 5 Fact-check: Estimated Threats to Biodiversity
Chapter 6 Fact-check: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Chapter 7 Fact-check: Genetically Modified Foods
Chapter 8 Fact-check: Nuclear Radiation
Chapter 9 Fact-check: Wildfires
Chapter 10 Fact-check: Ocean Acidification
Chapter 11 Fact-check: Walruses
