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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After reading the article I had a hearty laugh when I envisioned the following scene on a mathematicians congress:
“The deniers who disagree with our demonstration that square root of 4 is approximatively equal to 3.14 will be prosecuted by our lawyers in accordance with the UN binding agreements on computer modeling !”
Of course any resemblance with existing politically correct events is purely fortuitous.
There you go. It’s a fairy tale, not science.
I almost expected the next few sentences to involve two children lost in a wood, following a trail towards a house made of candy where the wicked witch lived. I remember now, it was called “Hansel and Gretel”, wasn’t it?
I have a hard time figuring out which “side” is providing which “information”. The mainstream media and much of the internet regularly supplies misinformation about the climate an how it changes. When you have only a vague theory it’s hard to get people excited about it. Certainly calling storms that virtually everyone’s grand parents can vouch happened before “unprecendented” (by 1% or so) doesn’t make many converts. The highest temperatue evah(by .02deg) when grandma tells stories about the Dust Bowl where the family had to drive to California to find a place to live makes a few 90deg day pale in comparison.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel by English writer George Orwell published in June 1949. The novel is set in the year 1984 when most of the world population have become victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda. Oceania is ruled by the “Party”, who employ the “Thought Police” to persecute individualism and independent thinking. Here we come.
Commenters should resist the tendency to throw out the baby of sociology / psychology with the bathwater of sociological indoctrination into left-wing (or any other) ideological viewpoint.
Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson have an interesting discussion (link below) about the injustice of this indoctrination at American universities, naming Yale, Brown and Middlebury as poster children for social justice institutions. If they want to cultivate social justice warriors, fine, says Haidt, just be up front about it. I know nothing about the institution he is discussing here, a consortium of university professors dedicated to countering this trend, but I think most readers will enjoy listening to the interview on “The Perilous State of the University”. I believe it is men like these who will spearhead the change in the American university system away from hysteria and toward more rational thought.
For a quick summary of that thinking, advance to 2:30:00.
Sorry, make that 1:30:00 to see summary.
“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.”
And so I read on,then I clicked the link.
Zero evidence offered in either.
Also no names.
If their slander and speculation had evidence,I expected them to produce that evidence.
So it seems the Soft impersonators of science still have the intelligence to avoid getting themselves sued into poverty, or they really have nothing but used pages of paper to say S.F.A.
Which is the standards of present academia.
It would seem that science that does not mock its roots in skepticism would go a long way to gaining clarity concerning climate change, its causes, and its effects.
Four strategies to manipulate, bully and isolate those who aren’t yet persuaded that anthropogenic global warming is an imminent existential threat.
Why not try the highly radical strategy of publishing the IPCC’s empirical evidence that the TCR used in its models is correct? And disclosing the relative contributions of natural and anthropogenic causes of observed warming?
That should do the trick.
All this depends upon the perception of the authors on “What they mean by climate change”? Is it global warming or as defined by IPCC and UNCCC. If they are talking of global warming — Do they have “Climate Sensitivity factor” realistically or varying between x and y?
When such studies are made, they must clear in black and white on climate change. Otherwise such studies have no meaning.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
“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.” But there in no consensus on the AGW conjecture. Scientists have never registered and voted on the validity of the AGW conjecture but even if they had the results would have no value because science is not a democracy or a popularity contest. The laws of science are not some sort of legislation. Scientific theories are not validated through a voting process. The reality is that based upon the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, the climate change that we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has nay effect on climate and there is plenty of scientific rationale to support the idea that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. This is all a matter of science.
The big problem is that the AGW conjecture is based on only partial science and is full of holes. For example, the AGW conjecture depends upon the existence of a radiant greenhouse effect caused by trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere with LWIR absorption bands. Such a radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed in a real greenhouse, in the Earth’s atmosphere or anywhere else in the solar system for that matter. The radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction so hence the AGW conjecture is science fiction as well.
Yes I know that the climate has always changed, and always will . But why do the Warmers think that is a bad thing. So it get just a little warmer, less storms and more Greening.
We should us this saying of theirs against them. Keep on saying that its good that the climate appears to be changing to a slightly warmer and Greener world, so much the better.
This just shows that more CO2 is a good thing.
MJE
Just more loo paper.