From EurekAlert!
Solutions to combat misinformation include public inoculation, financial transparency
Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
Just as the scientific community was reaching a consensus on the dangerous reality of climate change, the partisan divide on climate change began to widen.
That might seem like a paradox, but it’s also no coincidence, says Justin Farrell, a professor of sociology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES). It was around this time that an organized network, funded by organizations with a lot to lose in a transition to a low-carbon economy, started to coalesce around the goal of undercutting the legitimacy of climate science.
Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, Farrell and two co-authors illustrate how a large-scale misinformation campaign has eroded public trust in climate science and stalled efforts to achieve meaningful policy, but also how an emerging field of research is providing new insights into this critical dynamic.
In the paper, they identify potential strategies to confront these misinformation campaigns across four related areas — public inoculation, legal strategies, political mechanisms, and financial transparency. Other authors include Kathryn McConnell, a Ph.D. student at F&ES, and Robert Brulle at Brown University.
“Many people see these efforts to undermine science as an increasingly dangerous challenge and they feel paralyzed about what to do about it,” said Farrell, the lead author of the paper. “But there’s been a growing amount of research into this challenge over the past few years that will help us chart out some solutions.”
A meaningful response to these misinformation campaigns must include a range of coordinated strategies that counter false content as it is produced and disseminated, Farrell said. But it will also require society to confront the institutional network that enables the spread of this misinformation in the first place.
In the paper, they examine those strategies across the four identified areas:
- Public inoculation: While a growing body of research shows that an individual’s perceptions of science are informed by “cultural cognition” — and thus influenced by their preexisting ideologies and value systems — there is evidence that society can “inoculate” against misinformation by exposing people to refuted scientific arguments before they hear them, much like one can prevent infection through the use of vaccines. This strategy can be strengthened by drawing more attention to the sources of misinformation, and thus similarly build up resistance to their campaigns.
- Legal strategies: Research has also shown the extent to which some industry leaders tied to the climate misinformation network knowingly misled the public about the dangers of climate change. In response, cities and states in the U.S. and U.K. have filed lawsuits alleging that fossil fuel companies, such as ExxonMobil, downplayed the risks of their products. While such lawsuits can be expensive and time-consuming, media coverage has the potential to influence public opinion and “perhaps to further inoculate the public about industry efforts to deliberately mislead them.” The authors also describe how an improved understanding of these networks has helped in the legal defense of climate scientists who have come under attack for their research.
- Political mechanisms: The authors argue that more social science research is needed in order to reveal and better understand how the political process is often manipulated. For instance, they identify a case in which the energy company Entergy Corporation acknowledged hiring a PR firm that in turn paid actors who posed as grassroots supporters of a controversial power plant in New Orleans. They suggest targeted efforts in geographic areas where skepticism of climate change is widespread, including promotion of stronger media coverage of candidate views on climate science, clearer understanding of funding sources, and lawsuits highlighting the effects of climate change in these areas.
- Financial transparency: A growing share of funding for campaigns that promote science misinformation comes from donor-directed foundations that shield the contributor’s identity from the public; in fact, financial giving from these groups quadrupled in the past decade, topping $100 million. While it is often difficult to identify the flow of dollars, nonpartisan organizations tracking money in politics have become important resources for researchers who seek to understand this dynamic. The authors call for new legislation to improve funding transparency.
“We’re really just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding the full network of actors and how they’re moving money in these efforts,” said McConnell, a co-author. “The better we can understand how these networks work, the better the chances that policymakers will be able to create policy that makes a difference.”
These strategies must be coordinated in order to be effective, the authors conclude. For instance, they write, “public inoculation and legal strategies depend on improved financial transparency, just as financial transparency can similarly be strengthened by legal strategies that are themselves dependent on continued research into the financial and ideological sources of misinformation.”
“Ultimately we have to get to the root of the problem, which is the huge imbalance in spending between climate change opponents and those lobbying for new solutions,” said Farrell. “Those interests will always be there, of course, but I’m hopeful that as we learn more about these dynamics things will start to change. I just hope it’s not too late.”
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That may be the most comprehensive guide on how to spread scientific misinformation conducted. To date./
Most people don’t give a cr@p about what scientists say because of what science has become. For instance:
* butter is bad for you; margarine is good. no wait, margarine is bad for you; butter is good.
* eggs are bad because of cholesterol. no wait egg cholesterol is good cholesterol.
* low fat, high carb diet is good for you. no wait, hi carb diet makes people obese
* and on and on and on… Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…
“Political mechanisms: The authors argue that more social science research is needed in order to reveal and better understand how the political process is often manipulated.”
The usual boiler plate about more funding for research. In plain language they are asking for more funding for themselves. How truly arrogantly blind these people are. They really seem to believe or maybe just hope that the great unwashed are not smart enough to understand obvious self dealing. Where did their funding come from?
Once you read “scientific community was reaching a consensus” you know the rest is garbage. Consensus has nothing to do with science.
This has become a statement of faith within the CAGW community. However, it is the farthest thing from the truth. The primary driver of CAGW Skepticism is grass roots web pages like WUWT, not some well funded highly organized conspiracy. All the groups they point at (e.g. big oil etc.) all have gotten onto the CAGW train because they see the hug financial upside when governments are handing out cash.
Hey, Yalies, check this out:
“Notes From Skull Island – why climate skeptics aren’t ‘well funded and well organized’” Guest post by Roger Knights
If our side were well funded and well organized, as warmists charge, it would have the following 22 characteristics–which it doesn’t.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/16/notes-from-skull-island-why-skeptics-arent-well-funded-and-well-organized/
I dug a little to find out exactly who was behind this “organized network, funded by organizations with a lot to lose in a transition to a low-carbon economy.” Sounds pretty nefarious. Seems that the details are paywalled. Looks like this press release is the real misinformation.
The only people with “a lot to loose in a transition to a low-carbon economy” are you and me. The middle class workers. When costs of everything go up, our standard of living goes down. The ‘poor’ get more government handouts (at our cost), and the wealthy have enough extra cash to easily absorbed these new costs.
As far as well organized and highly funded, that is another of their big lies.
No, the big losers are the third world countries that should be building coal-fired power plants to bring electrification to their people. The World Bank has abandoned its role of assisting development by denying help on this and peddling wind mills and solar panels. This policy is stupid and cruel. Shame on them!!
China is stepping in, in place of the world bank. China is building many coal fired power stations in third world countries, for future return of favour of course.
The third world aren’t losers here, it is the working middle class who are being used and abused.
Even if you consider that the third world doesn’t get the money promised them, or the infrastructure built for them. They aren’t losing what they do have, they are losing what is being promised as a gift to them. Not a real loss as the workers who earn a living, are losing their wages to a rort.
“Public inoculation: While a growing body of research shows that an individual’s perceptions of science are informed by “cultural cognition” — and thus influenced by their preexisting ideologies and value systems”
Yep, that’s me. I’ve been a science nerd since I was 6 or 7. In my neighborhood I was the go to kid for c]science information from helping scouts with science related merit badges to making up science related scenarios when playing with discarded refrigerator boxes/space ships. Graduated, with honors in Physics from UC Berkeley. I went into computers but continued to follow science. My “preexisting ideology and value system” values science, actual science and I know false science when I see it.
They are apparently too blind to see that that quote quite accurately describes the state of young adults who have been indoctrinated with emotion and fear during their elementary and high school years concerning the climate, with virtually NO science to back up the basic assumptions upon which that climate hysteria has been based.
It gets worse at the collegiate level where at first programs and now entire schools within a university assume the alarmism is correct (e.g. George Mason University Center for Climate Communication) whose sole purpose is to produce useful idiots who then write drivil like this.
and then this piece of cheap toilet paper will join the 97% consensus jumbo pack on sale at the local shopping club.
but wait there’s more…. it’s a peer reviewed pile of BS that codifies as real science the idiocy that the nebulous concept of science denial is funded by nefarious carbon sources. Now the parrots can cite it. Good grief.
The climate machine is a Frankenstein monster minus the intellect.
A new claim to laugh at
https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/antarctica-melting-away-ice-melt-speed-six-times-higher-40-years-ago-115437978.html
I checked antarctic temperatures yesterday. It is midsummer but I could not find any spot where temperatures were above the freezing point of water. If Antarctica is losing ice I highly doubt that it is because it is melting.
It is a sublimation, not melting – but they wisely stay within a vocabulary of the target audience.
Rick,
The claim is about warmer water melting the ice, not air.
I think what you just did was create a ‘strawman’ .
What a load of waffel discribing something that can be said in a few words.
Just reintroduce scientific honesty and integrity. It would do wonders.
Yale gives itself a generous definition of the term “growing consensus.” Perhaps they should first tackle the gap between what the activists are saying about doom and gloom and what the scientists are actually saying.
Also, their model of what would provide financial transparency is insufficient. I suggest they look at the whole universe of who benefits and who does not benefit, and see who is providing most of the funding:
– Most of the rest of the world, including the entire apparatus of the UN: Benefits to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in expected wealth transfers
– Governments: Benefits to the extent of any hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes.
– Politicians: Benefit to the extent they can direct new spending on infrastructure, and other spending from taxes raised.
– Corporations in general: Benefits to the extent of new spending. (We won’t be spending trillions of dollars and corporate investors not benefit.)
– Activist groups: Expected to benefit from new taxes that kick a portion to activist groups.
– Utilities and power companies: Benefits to the extent of any new investments made in wind and solar
– Oil companies: Probably unchanged. Only lose if oil is left in the ground forever.
– Coal companies: Probably a loser as demand for coal falls.
“Politicians: Benefit to the extent they can direct new spending on infrastructure, and other spending from taxes raised.”
And raising their own salaries, and kickbacks, and side deals, and…
undermine science
==========
Adding the word “science” to your field of study doesn’t make you a scientist.
Aren’t thes authors unable to have a look into a mirror ?
Than they may see directly what they are blaming for…
I was reviewing some of the misinformation masquerading as settled science (sic) that the general public has been forced to hear in recent times.
1. By 2018 there will be no arctic ice, vessels will be able to sail across the North Pole unrestricted.
Someone should have let the fools who tried sailing into the arctic this summer know that, before they had to turn back due to ice blocking their way.
2. There was no medieval warm period.
The Danes farming in Greenland would have been relieved to know the period they enjoying there, was completely in line with future chilly conditions that forced them to abandon their farms.
3. The entire past one thousand years of climate can be deduced by studying a single bristle cone pine tree in North America. The qualifier being you have to graft on actual thermometer reading for modern times to generate what shape hockey stick you are looking for. No elaboration needed.
4.Snow will be a rare thing, our children will not know what snow is.
The children in Canada and central Europe this winter are struggling to see snow due to being buried in it, many feet thick!
5. Island nations will drown in the rising ocean waters if we allow (as if we can stop it) temperatures to increase a further 0.5 deg C.
All the evidence so far shows islands are unaffected by ocean level, but are affected by Arabian sand piling making new islands and Chinese sand harvesting building islands in the South China sea. Also worth noting is the movement of tectonic plates relative to nominal ocean level.
6. The ocean is becoming acidified.
The simple test of checking the PH of the oceans proves this to be a straight lie.
7 Corals will disappear due to warming oceans.
Corals have a record of surviving all past ocean temperatures hot and cold they adapt, just like all living things do.
8. CO2 causes atmospheric warming and the change in the world’s atmospheric temperature is due to human induced CO2.
Not one single scientific report has been tabled that proves CO2 drives temperature higher. There are endless studies that show temperature drives CO2 higher.
9. A warmer world is a catastrophic prospect.
Given the choice between 2 deg C warmer and 2 deg C colder, I will have the warmer option any time it is given to me.
I will stop there, as I am starting to get angry…
At this point in time, the “wedge” that sceptics might find useful is to point out the very large difference between what legitimate “climate scientists” have said (and are saying) compared to the statements and most probably the misinformed beliefs of activists, politicians and especially academics in other fields who take the “catastrophic” assumption as Gospel.
– The starting point of course would be Doran and Zimmerman’s oft quoted 97% study, which did NOT conclude that the consensus was that warming from anthropogenic CO2 emissions were dangerous, much less catastrophic (that was added by politicians like BHO).
– Arrhenius showed that under laboratory conditions, adding CO2 to a closed system, and with all other things being constant, the temperature would rise by an amount that could be calculated. He never wrote that the possible effect of that discovery in the real world would be harmful. (Of course our open atmosphere is not under “Normal (Lab) Conditions”)
– Papers that “prove” an alarmist conclusion are usually not from researchers in the “atmospheric” sciences but rather from other fields (e.g. biology) who take the extreme warming scenario as a given. (Don’t get me started on “papers” from psychologists or “climate communication specialists”.) In contrast the data based studies in the IPCC Assessment Reports (as contrasted to the Summary for Policy Makers) are usually quite tame.
You can note that those working in the ‘social ‘ area are desperate to add the word ‘science ‘ to the name of their area , whilst those working in science have no interest in added the word ‘social ‘ to there areas. And that tells you a great deal .
How many tools fit into the penthouse of an ivory tower? Although the piece, paper, essay, whatever isn’t peer reviewed it is published in a science journal which publishes peer reviewed science. Close enough for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
These pseudo-scientists live in such a comfy cocoon that they haven’t noticed happenings in the socialist paradise of France.
“The movement emerged in mid-November as a response to fuel tax increases, and is named for the fluorescent garments motorists are required to keep in vehicles.” France 24
The last bit is the crux of the matter. Why are they required to keep yellow vests in their cars to begin with? Who’s cousin owns the sewing factory? Why aren’t they required to wear crash helmets based on the precautionary principle. I would start the national conversation there. Although at this point I’m certain that the government would realize their mistake in requiring the vests.
Quote:
“..That might seem like a paradox, but it’s also no coincidence, says Justin Farrell, a professor of sociology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES). It was around this time that an organized network, funded by organizations with a lot to lose in a transition to a low-carbon economy, started to coalesce around the goal of undercutting the legitimacy of climate science…”
What the heck is a sociology professor doing working at a Forestry and Environmental Studies School to begin with???? Where are the wildlife and plant biologists? Seems rather odd.
At any rate, the level of arrogance and overblown egos being put on display by the authors with this “paper” only serve to demonstrate the need on the part of the authors to sell the climate alarmist narrative as an infallible and unquestionable holy religion with little or no regard for the manner in which scientific discourse (on matters like climate) are supposed to operate.
Although I am not a scientist, it seems to be that tossing out the standards of scientific discourse, which is supposed to involve inquiry and skepticism, shows that the authors here may be somewhat aware that they are in fact selling a religion rather than a scientifically sound hypothesis. Only the believers in religious and political doctrines embrace their beliefs as infallible and unquestionable, not those in science (at least not under normal circumstances).
The authors discuss the money going into a supposed skepticism “network” on climate, and not the billions poured into alarmism by the governments of the world. Do they have evidence that their is in fact some organized network created and funded for the sole express purpose of undermining them? Do they expect me to believe that the climate alarmist narrative is not the product of the corruption of climate science by billions of $$$ and leftist political agendas? Do they expect me to believe that climate science is truly incorruptible? If the climate “science” is truly settled, are climate alarmist scientists willing to let that multi-billion dollar gravy train dry up and be spent elsewhere? I seriously doubt that.
The more I see of this, the more I become sympathetic to the idea of world governments pulling the plug on funding science altogether, but I know it will never happen as long as science can be and is being manipulated for ideological, environmental and political activist purposes. The authors here who are trying to make climate science look infallible and unquestionable probably understand how devastating the defunding of science by govts would be to their financial interests and their political and eco-activism.
When you think you are using science to make the world a better place, your ignorance can end up making matters worse….much worse.
“Many people see these efforts to undermine science as an increasingly dangerous challenge”
I believe that all of us are aware of the challenges to science which the AGW proponents have created.
Or, and I think this might be a simpler solution, we could just do science and let the wrong hypotheses get tossed aside.
The climate consensus is getting darker and more paranoid by the day.
This sort of malcious criminalization of opinion differences has to be resisted. Where these authors are going is way past McCarthyism, and rapidly approaching Stalinist/Orwellian suppression.
Shame on the faux academics who are promoting this transparently untrue narrative.
And the fact that their paranoid conspiracy theory has been demonstrated to be categorically false, yet they are still pushing it, speaks volumes about their lack of integrity.
If the CAGW cultists want to be taken seriously, they need to stop lying. Intelligent people tune out liars, and they look for honest answers elsewhere. That is why skeptics never turn believer, and it is also why skeptics turn away from the “experts”, because there is no room in science for liars.
Say what you will about skeptics, at least they are honest.
In my industry, a lie will get you prosecuted, and we are not doing anything near as important as trying to “save the planet”.
One sure way to demonstrate that this is not those promoting the banner of true science being stopped from achieving meaningful policy is by looking at what constitutes meaningful policy.
The current definition is of constraining global emissions to stop 2°C, or even 1.5°C of global warming.
The magnitude of the changes required is contained in the second summary point of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2018.
Figure ES.3 from the report nicely illustrates the emission gaps
A meaningful policy is one that is a contribution towards this objective. Yet the aggregate impact of all conceivable new initiatives will not even stop global emissions from rising.
The primary reason is that developing countries are specifically excluded from any obligation to reduce their emissions under the 1992 Rio Declaration. This was reinforced in the Paris Agreement Article 4.1. With currently about two-thirds of emissions, about 100% of net emissions growth and over 80% of the global population this guarantees that even the 2°C emissions pathway will not be missed.
The second reason is that a number of countries are highly dependent on the production of fossil fuels for a large part of their national income. When I last looked, Russia was only slightly behind the US in fossil fuel production – oil, coal, and gas. But Russia’s nominal GDP is about 8% of the US total ($1.52trn v $19.39trn), so Russia is far more dependent on fossil fuel extraction for its prosperity. In turn, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and other gulf states are more dependent on fossil fuels than Russia. China is less dependent than Russia on the production of fossil fuels, but produces nearly half the world’s coal.
As developing countries have shown no willingness to cut their emissions, and as major non-Western fossil fuel producing nations no willingness to end production in the next few decades, claims of meaningful policy are false. So why are Western climate alarmists try to stop political opposition and sue Western fossil fuel companies?
Public inoculation: This will only work until people realise they are being lied to. Once that realisation happens, this strategy will never work again.
Legal strategies: Demonstrate that this is true, and we’ll listen to what else you have to say. You must demonstrate this first, before we do our part in listening.
Political mechanisms: More social science research is needed? It’s the hard sciences that demonstrated that the world is dying, and you want to do more social science?
Financial transparency: As above, demonstrate this first, then we’ll talk.
The ones who are worried are the subsidy beneficiaries. Here, been through this all before with Common Market subsides. Which seemed like a bonanza for farmers at the time, but ultimately led to their ruin.
Where there’s a subsidy there’s a scam, and when the racketeers get powerful enough they start to challenge the government for control of the situation. It then takes drastic action to set things right.