Guest essay by Eric Worrall
After training a computer to look for online climate “misinformation”, John Cook was surprised that people don’t trust the proposed solutions.
Climate change: How machine learning holds a key to combating misinformation
John Cook
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub“A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”
This quote appears in many forms. In some variants, the quote involves footwear. In other cases, the truth is struggling to get its pants on.
Regardless of the details, the sentiment encapsulates a key challenge of misinformation. By the time the meticulous task of fact-checking is complete and the correction has been disseminated, the misinformation has already spread widely and achieved all sorts of mischief.
Consequently, misinformation researchers speak wistfully of the “holy grail of fact-checking” – automatically detecting and debunking misinformation in one fell swoop. Machine learning offers the potential of both speed and scale – the ability to identify misinformation the instant it appears online, and the technical capacity to distribute solutions at the scale required to match the size of the problem.
But the holy grail quest faces a seemingly insurmountable hurdle. Misinformation evolves and sprouts new forms. How can you detect a myth before you even know what it is or what form it will take?
…
Once we had trained our machine to detect and categorise different misinformation claims, we fed our model 20 years’ worth of climate misinformation – more than 250,000 articles from 20 prominent conservative think-tank websites and 33 blogs. It’s the largest content analysis to date on climate misinformation, making it possible to construct a two-decade history of climate misinformation.
The results weren’t what I expected at all.
The erosion of public trust in climate scientists
During the past 15 years, I’ve been debunking scientific climate misinformation – the type of myths that fell under the categories “it’s not happening”, “it’s not us”, or “it’s not bad”.
It turns out these were the least common forms of climate misinformation. Instead, the largest category of climate misinformation was attacks on scientists and on climate science itself.
Climate misinformation isn’t about providing its own alternative explanation of what’s happening to our climate. Instead, it’s focused on casting doubt on the integrity of climate science, and eroding public trust in climate scientists.
…
But that’s not where misinformation is focused – the focus is on attacking scientists and science itself. There’s a dearth of research into understanding and countering this type of misinformation, let alone public engagement and education campaigns to counter their damage.
…
Read more: https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2021/12/08/1384230/climate-change-how-machine-learning-holds-a-key-to-combating-misinformation
John Cook, we don’t have to provide an alternative explanation. It is enough for us to show that the alarmist model of global climate change is wrong.
Cook has a fascinating track record when it comes to climate communication, he has produced some interesting visual communication pieces in his time (see right and below).
But the one question he is not asking is, is there a legitimate reason for people to be skeptical?
How many predictions of imminent catastrophe have failed? How many “cheaper than coal” renewable energy schemes have instead driven up electricity bills? Why do places like California and Europe have such expensive energy, if renewables are the cheapest option? Why do greens expect people to go on believing them, when so much of what they say is just plain wrong?
Climate communication can only take a movement so far.
In the end, renewable energy advocates have to deliver value. If they can’t deliver, all the AI “misinformation” bots in the world won’t save their precious green revolution, from the gathering spontaneous uprising of ordinary people who are fed up with politicians frittering away their hard earned tax dollars on useless green boondoggles which inflict painful costs on ordinary people.
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When it come to “climate misinformation”, John Cook, ex cartoonist from UQ, is a super-spreader !
Neil Ferguson is saying that COP 26 could have been a super-spreader event that would explain the recent rise of covid in Scotland, and he’s calling for another lockdown.
One could imagine Josef Goebbels trying to do the same thing. It was Hansen & Gore that kicked the whole thing off and the “misinformation” Cook is targeting is the “truth finally getting it’s pants on“. And if he is concerned about public trust, he might try genuine hearings about the CRU East Anglia email hacks or a Red Team – Blue Team exercise as proposed by folks in the Trump administration.
Cook’s solution is all laid out here, if he chooses to follow the advice:
Pandemic researchers — recruit your own best critics
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01392-8
I find it interesting that Nature calls for one solution for Covid19 & the opposite solution for Climate Change. With this bifurcated scheme, I predict Cook will continue to be surprised by his findings: “The results weren’t what I expected at all.” (lol)
“and the “misinformation” Cook is targeting is the “truth finally getting it’s pants on“.”
Exactly.
Cook say , “It turns out these [claims that it’s not happening, not us, not bad] were the least common forms of climate misinformation. Instead, the largest category of climate misinformation was attacks on scientists and on climate science itself.”
But the included graph shows that claims of “The science is unreliable” have fallen from 40% to 30% over the past 20 years, and there is no data given for “attacks on scientists.”
The largest increase was in claims that “the solutions won’t work.” They went from about 20% to about 50% in the past twenty years. This makes sense, since we are now at a point where solutions such as wind and solar are proving to be unworkable.
Cook….”How can you detect a myth before you even know what it is or what form it will take?”
Going to Skepitcal Science is a good start.
Fixed John Cook’s (no relation to me) sentence for him. Regarding his last bit there, it’s actually a variant of a quite common false talking point about what skeptic climate scientists are alleged to say, which, as near as I can tell, traces back to a speech given by the AGW side’s beloved alarmist book author Ross Gelbspan. I wrote about the occurrences of that “it’s not happening” talking point in my 2014 blog post ” ‘Skeptic Climate Scientists are Inconsistent on what They Say.’ Spread This Line Widely; NEVER Check its Veracity.”
What Cook and his SS pals have been spreading is DISinformation.
Wonder if this climate misinformation from 2008 would be detected by his AI
“IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation’s most senior weather experts warned yesterday.
“Perhaps we should call it our new climate,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate analysis, David Jones.”
Exactly. Most proclamations from scientists are probably wrong or at least incomplete.
I trust engineers more than scientists. If an engineer builds a bridge or airplane, it had better work! And it almost always does.
Thank you good Sir, we engineers frequently have to behave like doctors, & save lives, before they are under threat!!! Climate scientificky peeps have no responsibility or duty of care, & their predictions are always way past their retirement days, & never held accountable, & yes I’ll say it again, “we were simply basing our predictions on the best available science at the time!!!” Best get out of gaol/ jail free card on offer!!!
An architect friend of my forestry consulting firm- when I asked how architects were trained in the ancient world- said there really were not architects as we know them- they were builders with a lot of experience- the earliest tended to over engineer buildings for safety. Then as time went by the slowly improved on their techniques. The earliest Greek (and especially Egyptian) temples had pillars way bigger than necessary. By the time of the Parthenon, they mastered the techniques.
He also said that those paying for the buildings- sometimes had the architect stand under an arch as the lintel was installed. If it wasn’t installed correctly or the arch wasn’t designed correctly, the “architect” would be the first to know. Now that’s a fine way to encourage responsibility! As for “climate scientists”- any who don’t drastically lower THEIR carbon footprint – are proving themselves to be liars, idiots and hypocrites. At least the engineers, architects and builders had better prove themselves or else. No “else” for climate scientists so they can claim anything about the future climate. We foresters have much in common with engineers- we use science to accomplish something useful for humanity. And if we ruin a forest while harvesting wood- everyone will know it very quickly. But the “climate scientists” can ruin economies and our advanced civilizations and they’ll be dead before its proven they were the cause- partly because not enough people pay attention to skeptics- partly due to the disinformation on that skeptical science web site.
IIRC, in the code of Hammurabi, there is a section that says if a building collapses, killing the owner, the builder will be put to death.
“Hey, Balathu, make sure those extra beams get installed, or you get to visit the headsman with me.”
Architects here in New Zealand are a lot like climate scientists.
They have designed many leaky buildings and many buildings that have had to be demolished because they are not up to earthquake standards.
Their excuse is that they were not aware or they did not know that certain building materials were faulty and their designs let water in.
The founders Theater in Hamilton is lying idle due to perceived earth quake risk and will be demolished but not a word from the architect.
Climate scientists will claim that the did not know and they followed the science when the climate emergency fades and they realize that they should have looked and studied past warm periods over the last 12000 years before hyping up a small warming after the end of the Little Ice Age.
Real scientists don’t make proclamations.
Real scientists ask questions, formulate hypotheses to possibly answer the questions, design tests or experiments to test the answers to such questions, draw conclusions (if able), and then challenge other scientists to replicate their experimental data and/or come up with better alternative hypotheses and proofs thereof.
Wash, rinse, repeat, and only only expect to create successively better approximations, not to proclaim the ultimate “truth”.
Someone stop “Machine Learning” as it might uncover all Climate Armageddon misinformation!!
Not really: it will be as good or bad as its human programmers.
‘machine learning’ as it’s quaintly termed, has nothing to do wuth programming, which is sheer mathematics. It has everything to do with the ‘training’ material.
If you tell the system that every paper you disagree with is wrong, it will automatically flag every new paper you disagree with as wrong. You can then point to the results and say: “Look! I was right!” This a Climate Scientology in action again, full circle to the original conjecture.
Certain media organizations make a fortune with algorithms able to do that and push advertising 🙂
Exactly, neural nets only respond according to the input-output pairs they have been fed.
”Climate misinformation isn’t about providing its own alternative explanation of what’s happening to our climate. Instead, it’s focused on casting doubt on the integrity of climate science”
And a good thing too. Or does cuckoo believe there should be no doubts about the integrity of science? This is blatant scientism [ an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation ] and it’s spreading faster than Christianity.
The Data Mannipulators who created the bogus Hockey Stick global temperature profile are the ones casting doubt on the integrity of climate science. Pointing this out is not misinformation.
“This is blatant scientism [ an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation ] and it’s spreading faster than Christianity.”
What in the world did you think was going to happen?
If you train the children to ignore the possibility that materialism only scientists could be mistaken (victims of confirmation bias, essentially) does it not seem inevitable to you that many will assume that the “scientific community” is effectively immune from such mundane human vulnerabilities?
I suggest you can’t have this cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.
You can indeed have a cake and then eat it. But you cannot eat a cake and then still have it.
Confirmation bias is inherent and nearly impossible for the individual to tease out of his work product. It takes someone else to point it out. Unfortunately, in mainstream climate science there is nobody to point it out.
I read the saying to mean the cake can only be eaten or uneaten . . but yes. one has to have it before eating it . .
Anyway, if the “scientific community” discounts the possibility that there is a “Creator” component to the universe, I suggest they are creating a systemic “confirmation bias”, and have gone off the deep end, so to speak. Not mentioning that they are discounting that potential is just asking for people to engage in “scientism”, it seems to me.
Science did pretty well before that ubiquitous silent assumption became the norm. But, on atheism, there simply is no logical reason to refrain from “killing off” your competition, obviously. It’s a good thing . .
”the focus is on attacking scientists and science itself.”
Cuckoo seems – like many warministas – to be unable to differentiate between science and scientists.
Nothing wrong with attacking the science it is supposed to be robust enough to survive that. The issue is that “climate scientists” then want to dictate the solution mixing lefty ideology along the way and force it on the population of the world. They push the one line plan that renewables and emission control will save the world when it is obvious to an imbecile that it is never going to work.
If climate scientists stopped being activists that would be a good start as it’s hard to trust someone who comes across like a snake oil salesman.
It’s also quite evident that the world doesn’t need saving.
I watched George Carlin say that on one of his shows. Very good !
last I knew that particular show can still be found on Utube
Ldb: “it is obvious to an imbecile….” But not obvious to Mr. Cook, suggesting some notch below “imbecile” applies.
TMH (though politically incorrect these days) comes to my mind when I see what these mathematician PhD trespassers in meteorology and paleoclimatology propose as the master-controller of all things climate.
After some consideration it occurs that they are purposefully ignorant of anything that contradicts their self aggrandizing (and quite lucrative) narrative of how climate surely must work.
They wish for the general public to be forced into that same state of ignorance.
Once a scientist takes an activist position supporting a pet theory, that person has forsaken the responsibility of scientific neutrality and no longer can be considered unbiased in presented research, especially when proxies are used in deceptive ways to help the media form a bias in the minds of the public.
“science itself”
This *is* science. Some people make outrageous claims, and others call them out on their claims. That’s how real science works.
Trying to shut down one side of the argument to the benefit of the other side is not science. It’s censorship.
I’d trust Dr Jill on a matter of science before Dr John.
Anyway, some needs to tell Cook that Fauci already claimed the mantle of “personifying science”
Michael Mann the Nobel Prize winner beat Fauci to the punch by years.
Sheer projection, yet again! The truth is:
Climate Scientology isn’t about providing its own explanation of what’s happening to our climate. Instead, it’s focused on casting doubt on the integrity of climate skepticism, and eroding public trust in climate skeptics.
Cook’s defense of his position consists almost exclusively of casting aspersions on his detractors – most normal persons BS detector goes off when presented with such proof – machine learned or otherwise.
Mine beeps like a fire alarm whenever I read carp like this.
Mine goes off like a five-alarm siren every time I see his face
The motto of the Skeptical Science web site is, “getting skeptical about global warming skepticism”. So a few years ago I posted a comment there asking if it was OK to be skeptical about those who are skeptical of global warming skepticism. I was then told that any more comments like that and I’d be locked out of the site.
What really ticks me off about the Skeptical Science web site is their list of “Global Warming & Climate Change Myths”: https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php
I’m no scientist but having read almost everything here at WUWT for a few years I can see just how defective that list of myths is. I think it might be an interesting and fun project for the WUWT community to deconstruct that list- which could then be attached as another page to this blog.
One example of their myths is (#6), “models are unreliable”- and the comeback to that is “Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean.”
Wow, models that can successfully predict past temperatures!
Every one of the comebacks is extremely ignorant! The list of myths has 198 entries. Funny, but that table of “myths” on the left and their “true science” on the right should be reversed.
With the number of tunable variables available in the climate models the only thing that is surprising is that these models don’t match past climates perfectly.
The other telling point is that even after “successfully predicting past climate”, these same models are all over the map when trying to predict future temperatures. If the models were as good as claimed and the science was as well understood as they claim, then the models should agree on what is going to happen in the future.
The fact that the models don’t agree on the future just proves that any past agreement is nothing more than the result of careful tuning.
PS: In their projections of the past, the models don’t match the actual data, but rather they match the homogenized and carefully massaged data.
Don’t forget that the future
predictionsprojections turned out to be nothing more than simple linear extrapolations of CO2 content, as divined by the operators, regardless of the number of CPU cycles wasted.“One example of their myths is (#6), “models are unreliable”- and the comeback to that is “Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean.””
The models are not reproducing past temperature since 1900, they are reproducing a bogus, bastadized past temperature record. The written, historic temperature records don’t look anthing like the computer-generated bogus temperature record profile.
What does it say when your Climate computer model reproduces science fiction, in the form of past temperatures? It would say to me that the model is also science fiction.
“Instead, it’s focused on casting doubt on the integrity of climate skepticism, and eroding public trust in climate skeptics.”
This is certainly what Cook is all about.
It’s difficult to cast doubt on skeptics. All skeptics do is ask questions and ask alarmists to prove their assertions. What is there to doubt?
The problem for alarmists like Cook is they have no evidence to backup their climate change claims, so they make it up, like this AI effort. GIGO.
That doesn’t seem to be working too good for them, but I guess they have nothing else to do but continue to double-down on claiming assertions are facts.
Skeptics know the difference.
So he automated a keyword search, then prescribed the sources where the searches would be done….you could get any result you want out of that approach just by selecting or rejecting the words or phrases that skew the count in what you consider to be an appropriate manner.
If you torture the data long enough, it will tell you anything.
Besides, it is long known in marketing communications that good advertising cannot compensate for a bad product. Same applies here, all the propaganda in the world cannot make up for bad science.
He omitted to add “John Cook” to the list of sources.
“you could get any result you want out of that approach”
That’s the idea.
All’s fair in Love and Climate Change Propaganda. After all, he’s saving the world.
The irony, it burns.
It does burn. A primary strategy of the warmunists is to publish garbage science (e.g., the hokey shtick) and then refuse to print retraction or corrections even in the face of overwhelming evidence of error. This is such a classic propagandist ploy, i. e., accuse your opposition of committing your crime so that you claim the advantage of being first to the post.
What with these self appointed climate worriers wanting to fight all the time?
All they ever talk about is fighting, attacking and combating stuff.
It’s how you frame continuing on when you are on a losing cause. You don’t have to battle if your cause is popular as people just agree and follow the cause.
Jeez I wonder why no one trusts climate science with tosser like Mr Cook how long has he been working on that PhD in bullshitology
It’s a special area of Climate Science tm which is called climate psychology. It’s a sign that your science field has got so retarded that you are struggling to convince the drunk down the pub,
Closely related to that non-science field of study “Climate Communications”. (E.g. George Mason University among many others.)
Yet MSM treats their releases as Gospel.
Likely the “SS” part of his “self portrait” was a Freudian double entendre.
The first letter of his family name must certainly be misspelled — should be a ‘K’.
In seemingly ironic fashion, John Cook’s PhD is in Philosophy (no joke! – I used to have a direct link to his thesis PDF file, but now I have to use an Internet Archive capture of the link). I featured his presentation among several others under the basic idea that the issuing Universities should revoke these since they rely on meritless ‘evidence’ about their accusations of energy companies colluding with skeptic climate scientists to spread disinformation: “Reposition Graduate Degrees as Theory rather than Fact“
“….and eroding public trust in climate scientists.”
Then stop lying, exaggerating and making sh@t up, easy.
Cook is 97 percent of the problem, not the solution.
Mr. Abbott: 97% is precisely. mathematically correct. Ya gotta use the right inputs.
To paraphrase Dr Fauci, when you criticise climate scientists you criticise science itself.
Exactly. To paraphrase a well-known meme:
“I am Science!”
The fight against “misinformation” is just the elite fighting to censor the truth that challenges their lies. People don’t trust “the science”, people don’t trust the media and the government, because of 20 years of “climate science” lies, 2 years of COVID lies, and none stop lies on every other issue. Censorship and increasingly draconian measure in the so called “democracies” of US, EU, … are the only hope of the lying elites.
It is easier to fool people than convince them they’ve been fooled.
Until they are shivering in the dark.
I wonder how long it will take before “its not bad” begins to increase.
Meh.
Maybe never considering most people, climate scientists included, dont know the difference between climate and weather and latch onto every unfavourable weather event as being caused by climate change.
That’s what they accused us of back in the antedluvian past. My response was of the form; we know, colder is weather, warmer is climate change. Then they began telling us colder was also because of CO2 enhanced Global Warming, soon renamed as Climate Change and so we became Climate deniers, a completely meaningless phrase. Climate psychology, working for the grifters every day.
If he truly wanted an “AI Misinformation Detector” to be acceopted by the skeptic community as a useful tool, he would *also* share the details of its implementation, and exactly how it was trained. Not holding my CO2 in.
I disagree. An artificial intelligence is better than no intelligence at all.
Misinformed intelligence is destructive. Intelligence and vigor combined with ignorance or ideology-driven “facts” are the most destructive of all.
John Cook PhD (cognitive psychology UWA) B.Sc. (UQ) is not qualified to assess climate research and ought not be taken seriously.
Mr. Hanley: Attacking Science again, eh? Dr. Fauci on line 1 for you. /sarc
When the mathematical basis of climate science is a lie, then everything built on that lie is also a lie.
I’m struggling with this bit (too much double negative)
Quote:”Climate misinformation isn’t about providing its own alternative explanation of what’s happening to our climate. Instead, it’s focused on casting doubt on the integrity of climate science, and eroding public trust in climate scientists.”
That’s not how Science and Scepticism is supposed to work.
The Sceptic/Reviewer will look at and assess the scientist’s work i.e. The Science, and criticise that.
(When it hasn’t been ‘lost’ ‘accidentally deleted” “eaten by the dog” or locked behind a paywall)
The Sceptic will look for logical and scientific errors.
(Violations of the laws of thermodynamics are a good place to start)
Error #1: It is NOT the task of the sceptic or reviewer to postulate a new theory
Error #2: Revolving around the ‘eroding public trust‘ bit and is that:
The Scientist should not take criticism of their work as personal criticism.
Science is supposed NOT to be a fashion parade by its very definition
That goes to the very heart of the matter and if we’re in Cliche Mode today:
“If you cannot stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”
and is where Cook falls flat on his face – as those pictures reveal.
He is promoting himself more than his work.
Sorry Cookie, you are doing science now, not cartoons.
Diametrically opposite vocations and if you cannot differentiate them, you can not be A Scientist. Fall at the first hurdle.
So exactly what sort of place is Monash?
Not a University that’s for sure – more like some sort of modelling agency is it, are Kate Moss and Noami Campbell on their books?
(Patently not and if Cook is their best advert……… <words fail>)
edit to PS
He patently doesn’t know what computers are or what they do – he is appealing to a False God.
One fantasy holds the key to the other fantasy. OK, I’ll buy that.
“Machine Learning” is how you launder stupidity.
Ha ha. Consider that stolen!😜
We used to call it “scientific debate”, but now it’s “attack on science”. As if science was a personified deity of some sort, sacred and to be believed. “Climate denier”, anyone?
Science for the Science God!
Skepticism of “solutions” is growing as the ridiculous costs begin to appear. Note too that the graph is of fractions. The decline in other forms of skepticism does not mean they are lessening in number. Skepticism as a whole is growing.
John Cook has never been involved in climate misinformation.
He has, however, been involved in a great deal of climate disinformation.
Definition of misinformation
: incorrect or misleading information
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/misinformation
Definition of disinformation
: false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinformation
” Climate misinformation isn’t about providing its own alternative explanation of what’s happening to our climate. Instead, it’s focused on casting doubt on the integrity of climate science, and eroding public trust in climate scientists. ”
Was dr. Cook looking at a mirror and describing himself when he wrote this???
No, he was just checking his hat was straight.
Unfortunately it wasn’t his hat it was his night filled gozunder