In an interview with Extinction Rebellion, the novelist said he found the negative response to his writing about the climate crisis ‘surprising, if not disheartening’

Fresh from another internet pile-on over his views on the climate emergency, Jonathan Franzen has warned that hate speech on social media is dividing humanity and preventing the cooperation needed to tackle the environmental crisis.

The American novelist was speaking to the Extinction Rebellion podcast, to be released on Wednesday, about the aggressive online response to his recent New Yorker article about the climate catastrophe. He is not on social media, he said, “so I don’t experience the Twitter rage except through the accounts of a couple of friends who have not learned that they shouldn’t tell me about these things”.

Jonathan Franzen’s right: you need to pick your battles | Oliver Burkeman Read more

Franzen said that he found it “surprising, if not disheartening, to learn that the messenger was being attacked even if the facts of the message were not being challenged … In the context of a threatened social order, the kind of polarisation and hysteria and real hate speech that is occurring primarily on the internet, much less often face to face, is part of the problem.”

In his September New Yorker article, Franzen shared his belief that a climate apocalypse is unavoidable and so it is “important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning”. Among his critics were scientists, who particularly objected to his statement that “consensus among scientists and policymakers is that we’ll pass this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius”.

Franzen admitted that his claim about warming could have been expressed more clearly.

“That remark about things spiralling out of control past the two degree point was in the context of saying we should have as substantial and immediate reductions in carbon emissions as we possibly can – not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it will at least, if nothing else, somewhat slow the pace of change and give us time to prepare and adapt and become more resilient. Obviously, a world of two degrees is better than a world of seven degrees,” he said.

In the New Yorker, he urged readers to “save what you love specifically – a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble – and take heart in your small successes”. Franzen is on the board of American Bird Conservancy, and has written extensively about the need to protect birds.

“I feel like all I do is fail, but every once in a while we have some little success and that was really the ultimate message of my New Yorker piece,” he said. “You’re not going to probably save anything permanently but, to save something for a while, to watch a formerly wrecked place recover ecologically, to see a species that you care about whose population was declining rebounding – I have hope for those places, and I have hope for those species. In the context of the larger failure, that is not nothing.”

Franzen supports Extinction Rebellion, which is in the middle of two weeks of protests in London. “It’s different from some of the earlier climate activist organisations over here. I appreciate that and I’m all for it,” he told the activists’ podcast.