Guest essay by Eric Worrall
John Cook and Lewandowsky appear to have moved on from claiming climate skeptics are mentally defective to a new position, a claim that climate skeptics don’t actually exist, that we are mostly software masquerading as humans.
Revealed: quarter of all tweets about climate crisis produced by bots
Draft of Brown study says findings suggest ‘substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages’
Oliver Milman in New York @olliemilman
Fri 21 Feb 2020 19.00 AEDTThe social media conversation over the climate crisis is being reshaped by an army of automated Twitter bots, with a new analysis finding that a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, the Guardian can reveal.
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The study of Twitter bots and climate was undertaken by Brown University and has yet to be published. Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account.
“These findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support for Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement,” states the draft study, seen by the Guardian.
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Thomas Marlow, a PhD candidate at Brown who led the study, said the research came about as he and his colleagues are “always kind of wondering why there’s persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more or less settled on”.
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Marlow said he was surprised that bots were responsible for a quarter of climate tweets on an average day. “I was like, ‘Wow that seems really high,’” he said.
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Stephan Lewandowsky, an academic at the University of Bristol who co-authored the research, said he was “not at all surprised” at the Brown University study due to his own interactions with climate-related messages on Twitter.
“More often than not, they turn out to have all the fingerprints of bots,” he said. “The more denialist trolls are out there, the more likely people will think that there is a diversity of opinion and hence will weaken their support for climate science.
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John Cook, an Australian cognitive scientist and co-author with Lewandowsky, said that bots are “dangerous and potentially influential”, with evidence showing that when people are exposed to facts and misinformation they are often left misled.
“This is one of the most insidious and dangerous elements of misinformation spread by bots – not just that misinformation is convincing to people but that just the mere existence of misinformation in social networks can cause people to trust accurate information less or disengage from the facts,” Cook said.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/21/climate-tweets-twitter-bots-analysis
If only those pesky bot writers would donate their software services to climate modellers.
Now if you will all excuse me, I have adjust my circuits.
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Cook, Lewandowsky and their like minded ilk.
Their history has been somewhere within ignorant, absurdly vile and calumny.
They are well known for stretching meanings, filtering inputs and outputs, dodgy research designs and practise coupled with pre-determined results directing their efforts.
I don’t pay attention on twitter. Too many immature children spouting off their worst impulses. I’d rarely go there if it wasn’t for Joe Bastardi and Ryan Maue.
On other electronic forums, the same alarmist commenters whose first response to linked facts tends towards “You lie!”; are often the same infants who accuse people of being bots. Usually when the infant has been hammered by facts.
Add in Cook’s and Lewandowsky’s overt phobias against reality, realists and real facts; I’d suspect that Cook’s and Lewandowsky’s bot accusations stem from their own desire for effective bots.
As Curly points out above, Cook and Lewandowsky are well know for wild fanciful projections.
Publishing in the Grauniad is proof positive of their bogus nature.
Just wondering if John Cook applied the same, uh, scientific “rigor” in developing this conclusion as he did in developing the conclusion that 97% of all climate scientists agreed that “mankind had caused at least half of the 0.7 deg-C of global warming since 1950.”
See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/03/cooks-97-consensus-disproven-by-a-new-paper-showing-major-math-errors/
And Lewandowsky shares guilt by association.
Well, he should. He was also John Cook’s PhD Supervisor at the University of Western Australia, 2016. They publish together quite a lot.
“They publish together quite a lot.”
Are they bot boys ?
“and has yet to be published”
And if it’s like most climate “science”, it never will be.
To see what it looks like to have a minority government that at least claims to believe in the end of the world, supported by several small parties that also believe the world is ending, come look at Canada. Utterly ridiculous situation, all entirely as predicted
And can we compare the percentage of bots in the hot headed but fear-driven warmist camp to that deemed to contaminate our cold hearted but courageous denialist camp?
Bots? Gotta love ’em. How about this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qnd-hdmgfk
(Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey – “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”)
Or maybe those coal miners have learned to code, as former VP Biden suggested.
If the science is settled how do they explain away USCRN?
““I was like, ‘Wow that seems really high,’” he said.” Only because it is. Notice how the AGW crowd is soooo into denial while accusing everyone else of being in denial? It keeps their tiny fantasy world from exploding. I note, too, they counted the “fingerprints of bots”, ie another model.
A better study would be how many AGW believers are bots in the sense they simply parrot what they are told and are no better than a machine when it comes to knowing the truth. They simply repeat the mantra.
…all of them
try to get anyone of them to explain how it’s our fault…and we have to do something
…when all of the increase has come from China
(China would tell them to pound sand…they can’t get money out of China)
That’s funny – always thought Lewandowsky was a bot. Don’t tell me he’s a real person.
“I was like, ‘Wow that seems really high,’”
I feel compelled to leave the discussion now.
I think. Therefore, I’m not a bot — unlike many alarmists.
It’s those damn Russians, they never follow the rules of the sandbox.
**”So one of the things I think is going on, is that it’s actually not about the policy content or public opinion content, it’s much more about perceptions of identity. Manitoba is an interesting province because they clearly can’t be grouped with Alberta and Saskatchewan… but when we’re looking for where the breakdowns and divisions are, it’s much more about identity and the group that you belong to.”
In the end, Thomas said, these shifts towards one another on policy issues might not mean unity at the ballot box.
“(People) can be worried about climate change, and support certain kinds of energy policy but what might trump that would be their partisanship.”
sarah.lawrynuik@freepress.mb.ca
Sarah Lawrynuik
Reporter
Sarah Lawrynuik reports on climate change for the Winnipeg Free Press. Funding for the Free Press climate change reporter comes from the Government of Canada through the Local Journalism Initiative.**
The above appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press today.
The reader can judge the intent of the “initiative”.
The balloon comment should have read: ‘lead us to your taker, Al Gore’
““I was like, ‘Wow that seems really high,’” he said.”
More like:
“I was like, ‘Wow our teammates seem really high,’”
Their rooms need to be investigated more than those of the Russian biathlonists.
Do they still give PhDs in ValSpeak at Brown?
As if!
Interesting how over the months I have seen ever increasing anti-Greta Thunberg/Al Gore et al. and anti-Climate Change Hysteria comments by individual posters…..
Imagine that! Leftists admitting that the twitterverse is not a reflection of the real world. The democrats and their press will be devastated!
It’s not just with their climate crusade.
The progressive mob calls anyone criticizing them a Russian bot.
It can be any topic.
They are wrong, dumb and dishonest about everything and despise being told how so.
Thomas Marlow, PhD candidate, masters all the usual language tricks of the climate alarmist crowd:
“kind of wondering” “about something” “science more or less settled on”
Yes Thomas, it’s worse than you think… LOL
The quoted comment seems to offer a choice . . .so, I choose “less” settled on.
Science is more or less settled and the conclusion is more or less worrying. Urgent measures are more or less called for. We should more or less panic.
Whats truly concerning is the growing push to criminalize “Climate Denial” with some extremists even actually recommending Greta Thunberg “Put them agaunst the wall” as the proper punishment!!!
Cant use death penalty agains murderes, rapists, terrorists etc but Climate Deniers deserve it in their eyes
Again, If Climate Armageddon is coming because of increasing CO2 Levels then CO2 must be decreased. However application of SCIENCE will inform you that the ONLY way to reduce CO2 is to reduce the emission of CO2, That means converting as much energy consuming processes, that is, transportation, manufacturing and electricity from Fossil fuel to Nuclear generated power. Problem is the GND, The Environmentalists and the Climate Change believers are NOT pushing for a program to switch the production of the majority of energy from fossil fuel to nuclear power. Point in fact, the programs in the USA pushed by renewal energy advocates make Nuclear power more expensive and cause the shutdown of nuclear power.Electric cars running from electricity generated by CCTGs Increase the amount of CO2. Wind and Solar generators actually INCREASES the need CCGT and peaking gas generators.
‘More than half of all internet traffic is now automated, mostly by what are referred to as “bots.” That’s short for “web robot.” These are not manlike machines sitting at keyboards and reading computer monitors. They are software applications. They do automated tasks, following scripts written for them.
By some estimates, during the 2016 election cycle, one-fifth of online debates were between machines with no human beings involved at all. Bots can be programmed to generate political stories or get into political arguments. Why pay people to do this when you can automate the process with Artificial Intelligence? The next time you get into an online debate with a stranger, that stranger may not even be human.
Bots follow scripts given by their human masters. Those scripts reflect the beliefs, biases, prejudices, and purposes of those humans. By automating the process, bots turn the work of a single human into something that looks like the work of thousands, maybe millions. They invade social networks. They generate posts and lay out stories meant to persuade people of a certain point of view, or sometimes to paralyze the political opposition with confusion.
And then there are the real people. In 2016, a group of people in Veles, Macedonia – most of them teenagers – made their city famous as the “Fake News Capital of the World.” They discovered that the American elections were a gold mine. All they had to do was make up stories that people wanted to believe. Every click on one of their stories meant money in their pockets. Whether or not the stories were true, made no difference. If people clicked on the story, it made money. So, they wrote outrageous things – the more outrageous the better, as long as it felt like something that could be true.
‘Brown study’. Sounds like they’ve been studying the Brown stuff stuck to the bottom of their shoe.
I don’t think I am a bot.
But I’m confident that Cook and Lewandowski are two cheeks of the same unsavoury arse.
We’ve been hearing that this is “Settled Science” for 2 decades and 97% of climate scientists agree.
Let’s see how that holds up and compare it to real settled science.
Here’s a good one………the law of physics that allow us to determine mass, weight and gravity: Fg = G (m1 ∙ m2) / r2
So weight= mass of an object X acceleration of gravity.
At the Earth’s surface, where g=9.8 m/s2, a persons weight.
Turns out, that a person at the North/South Pole weighs around 1% more than at the equator because of being closer to the center of gravity for our planet, which has a force of 9.863 m/s2 (times your mass at the poles to get weight) vs just 9.764 m/s2 (times your mass to get weight) at the equator. There is a slight negative affect in the opposite direction of the force of gravity at the equator because of the KNOWN centrifugal force from the rotating planet which is dialed in to that number.
We can use that and make a prediction that a person who weighs 99 lbs at the equator will weigh around 100 lbs at the poles. If you do an experiment that predicts that stuff at the poles will weigh around 1% more based on this principle of physics, then weigh 1,000 things at the poles, then weigh them at the equator, 1,000 of those 1,000 measurements will solidly confirm this settled science with EMPIRICAL DATA.
This is probably an excessively high standard to hold climate science to with regards to being settled science but settled science means that its irrefutable and has been proven, not modeled with speculative theories but proven with EMPIRICAL DATA.
Very few legit people of science would argue with the known physics of CO2 and its ability to warm the earth. This is not disputed. It’s the amount of warming and affects on the planet/life that are disputed……..by the skeptic side. While the other side brings out the “settled science” response to support its position about all the really bad things that will happen but without the authentic EMPIRICAL DATA.
Note that we were able to correctly predict the weights of stuff using the settled science in the earlier example………..confirming. Those insisting on the climate crisis have made dozens of predictions for over 30 years, which we can use to see if this really is settled science(verified with empirical data).
I’ll just use one example here that goes back decades but represents the same deleterious things that we have been told constantly would affect polar bears, humans, crops and many other things.
U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked
June 29, 1989
https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
Ironically, not only did none of those predictions verify, in many cases, like with crop yields, the complete opposite happened. And not despite of climate change but because of climate change and the benefits that were measure by EMPIRICAL DATA, that defied the models and predictions. They were the result of global warming, the best weather/climate for life in the last 1,000 years and increase in CO2………..all of which have EMPIRICAL DATA to prove it.
Supposedly, today’s settled science has also identified CO2 as a pollutant. Often referred to as “carbon” pollution(though carbon is a solid and CO2 is a gas).
Hmmm. Let’s see how that stacks up compared to a known law of settled science that uses the authentic role of CO2 for life on this planet. Photosynthesis.
We all learned this one in grade school science/biology. Plants take:
Sun(light) + H2O + Minerals + CO2 and convert to O2 + Food(sugars)
Can it be that Sun + H2O + Minerals +CO2 POLLUTION = O2 + Food +CLIMATE APOCALYPSE? This is the “settled science” we are being sold.
Again, the observations/EMPIRICAL DATA show the complete opposite.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/47705/
How can this be a climate crisis for life, when the planet is greening up so fast based on EMPIRICAL DATA and most life is flourishing?
60 years ago, the position of SETTLED SCIENCE was that warmer global temperature were beneficial to life and 2+ degrees warmer was referred to by 97% of scientists as a climate OPTIMUM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum
What changed in 60 years? Settled science can’t change by definition. Scientists who knew that global warming was beneficial to our planet 60 years ago based on EMPIRICAL DATA of the past (Medieval/Roman/Minoan Warm Periods) did not make some profound paleoclimatology discoveries since then that caused them to see the past differently.
What changed is that climate science was hijacked on a massive scale and used to promote a political agenda that has ZERO to do with climate.
People that don’t believe that cannot explain the EMPIRICAL DATA which is evidence. This planet and life on it has entered the start of a new climate optimum. The observations prove it.
When we don’t do exactly what they say must be done and the deadline passes in 2030, authentic settled science, with near certainty will feature a greener planet and most life doing better. Same thing in 2100.
Higher CO2, warmer temperatures………..greener planet. Authentic settled science.
Will there be some negative consequences as we get warmer and warmer? Sure but they won’t exceed the positives FOR LIFE until we get to around +4 deg. C.
Humans will have some increasing issues prior to that, maybe +2 deg. C is the break even point in 2100 but if our main concern is for the planet………all the EMPIRICAL DATA is telling us that it wants much more CO2 and warmer temperatures.
Very nice analysis, Mike. Thanks.