Computer Assisted Classification Of Contrarian Claims About Climate

Received 2021 Mar 16; Accepted 2021 Sep 29; Collection date 2021. Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to... The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from... To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. A growing body of scholarship investigates the role of misinformation in shaping the debate on climate change.

Our research builds on and extends this literature by (1) developing and validating a comprehensive taxonomy of climate contrarianism, (2) conducting the largest content analysis to date on contrarian claims, (3) developing a computational... Our study finds that the claims utilized by CTTs and contrarian blogs have focused on attacking the integrity of climate science and scientists and, increasingly, has challenged climate policy and renewable energy. We further demonstrate the utility of our approach by exploring the influence of corporate and foundation funding on the production and dissemination of specific contrarian claims. Subject terms: Climate change, Psychology and behaviour, Environmental social sciences Organized climate change contrarianism has played a significant role in the spread of misinformation and the delay of meaningful action to mitigate climate change1. Research suggests that climate misinformation leads to a number of negative outcomes such as reduced climate literacy2, public polarization3, canceling out accurate information4, reinforcing climate silence5, and influencing how scientists engage with the public6.

While experimental research offers valuable insight into effective interventions for countering misinformation3,7,8, researchers increasingly recognize that interdisciplinary approaches are required to develop practical solutions at a scale commensurate with the size of online misinformation... These solutions not only require the ability to categorize relevant contrarian claims at a level of specificity suitable for debunking, but also to achieve these objectives at a scale consistent with the realities of... Scientific Reports volume 11, Article number: 22320 (2021) Cite this article A growing body of scholarship investigates the role of misinformation in shaping the debate on climate change. Our research builds on and extends this literature by (1) developing and validating a comprehensive taxonomy of climate contrarianism, (2) conducting the largest content analysis to date on contrarian claims, (3) developing a computational... Our study finds that the claims utilized by CTTs and contrarian blogs have focused on attacking the integrity of climate science and scientists and, increasingly, has challenged climate policy and renewable energy.

We further demonstrate the utility of our approach by exploring the influence of corporate and foundation funding on the production and dissemination of specific contrarian claims. Organized climate change contrarianism has played a significant role in the spread of misinformation and the delay of meaningful action to mitigate climate change1. Research suggests that climate misinformation leads to a number of negative outcomes such as reduced climate literacy2, public polarization3, canceling out accurate information4, reinforcing climate silence5, and influencing how scientists engage with the public6. While experimental research offers valuable insight into effective interventions for countering misinformation3,7,8, researchers increasingly recognize that interdisciplinary approaches are required to develop practical solutions at a scale commensurate with the size of online misinformation... These solutions not only require the ability to categorize relevant contrarian claims at a level of specificity suitable for debunking, but also to achieve these objectives at a scale consistent with the realities of... An emerging interdisciplinary literature examines the detection and categorization of climate misinformation, with the vast majority relying on manual content analysis.

Studies have focused on claims associated with challenges to mainstream positions on climate science (i.e., trend, attribution, and impact contrarianism)10,11, doubt about mitigation policies and technologies12,13, and outright attacks on the reliability of climate... Researchers, moreover, have examined the prevalence of contrarian claims in conservative think tank (CTT) communications14,16, congressional testimonies17,18, fossil fuel industry communications19, and legacy and social media20,21. Given the significant costs associated with manual approaches for content analysis, several recent studies have explored computational methods for examining climate misinformation, ranging from applications of unsupervised machine learning methods to measure climate themes... Our work builds on and extends existing computational approaches by developing a model to detect specific contrarian claims, as opposed to broad topics or themes. We develop a comprehensive taxonomy of contrarian claims that is sufficiently detailed to assist in monitoring and counteracting climate contrarianism. We then conduct the largest content analysis of contrarian claims to date on CTTs and blogs—two key cogs in the so-called climate change “denial machine”24—and employ these data to train a state-of-the-art deep learning...

Next, we construct a detailed history of climate change contrarianism over the past two decades, based on a corpus of 255,449 documents from 20 prominent CTTs and 33 central contrarian blogs. Lastly, we demonstrate the utility of our computational approach by observing the extent to which funding from “dark money”25, the fossil fuel industry, and other conservative donors correlates with the use of particular claims...

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