An international team of researchers has found the most common form of climate misinformation is attacks on the reliability of climate science, while misinformation targeting climate solutions is on the rise.
Monash University’s Dr John Cook joined colleagues from the University of Exeter in the UK and Trinity College Dublin in Ireland to train a machine learning model to automatically detect and categorise climate misinformation.
The researchers then constructed a two-decade history of climate misinformation to find common topics, themes, peaks, and changes over time.
It’s the largest content analysis to date on climate misinformation, with findings published today in the paper Computer‑assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.
Researchers used conservative think-tank (CTT) websites and climate change denial blogs to construct their history.
“Our study found claims used by such think-tanks and blogs focus on attacking the integrity of climate science and scientists, and, increasingly, challenged climate policy and renewable energy,” Dr Cook said.
“Organised climate change contrarianism has played a significant role in the spread of misinformation and the delay to meaningful action to mitigate climate change.”
Researchers said climate misinformation leads to a number of negative outcomes including reduced climate literacy, public polarisation, cancelling out accurate information and influencing how scientists engage with the public.
“The problem of misinformation is so widespread, practical solutions need to be scalable to match the size of the problem,” Dr Cook said.
“Misinformation spreads so quickly across social networks, we need to be able to identify misinformation claims instantly in order to respond quickly. Our research provides a tool to achieve this.”
As a result of their analysis, researchers developed a taxonomy to categorise claims about climate science and policy used by opponents of climate action.
They reviewed 255,449 documents from 20 prominent CTTs and 33 blogs.
They found the five major claims about climate change used by CTTs and blogs were:
- It’s not happening
- It’s not us
- It’s not bad
- Solutions won’t work
- Climate science / scientists are unreliable
Within these were a number of sub-claims providing a detailed delineation of specific arguments.
In general, CTTs were found to focus predominantly on the shortcomings of climate solutions and labelled them as harmful to the economy, environment and society, along with attacking climate science and scientists.
Blogs, on the other hand, consistently devoted the largest share of their claims to attacking climate science and scientists.
Of note was the spike in policy claims in late 2009, which not only coincided with intense debate on the American Clean Energy and Security Act, but also with the COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen.
“While some research has examined attacks on climate scientists, the bulk of research into climate misinformation has focused on trend, attribution, impact, or solutions,” Dr Cook said.
“These categories, corresponding to our categories ‘it’s not real’, ‘it’s not us’, and ‘it’s not bad’, are the least prevalent forms of climate misinformation.
“This shows a need for more research into attacks on climate science and scientists, and development of educational resources and public communication to counter these efforts.”
The researchers also investigated how influential conservative funders and “dark money” funding sources disproportionately support CTTs which increasingly espouse claims that question the reliability of climate scientists and the climate change movement.
