CONSTANTINE BOUSSALIS HAS been thinking about climate misinformation for a long time.
The TCD academic is part of an international research project that’s examined claims made by conservative think-tanks and contrarian blogs over the past two decades, drawing on 255,449 documents with a total of more than 174 million words.
Boussalis worked with colleagues in Exeter and Melbourne to develop a machine learning system that sorts these claims into five categories of misinformation: climate solutions won’t work; scientists and environmentalists are unreliable; global warming isn’t happening, or it’s happening but it’s not caused by humans – or it’s not a bad thing.
One clear trend has been the relative decline of attacks on science; instead policy responses are increasingly being targeted instead. More material now focuses on proposed solutions being harmful, ineffective or too hard to implement. However, Boussalis warns against assuming that climate denialism has had its day.
“We see headlines suggesting that the goalposts have shifted but that’s not necessarily the case,” he says. “Outright denial is still there even among think-tank types.”
The project focused on the United States, where a multi-pronged campaign to block green policies has invested huge resources in trying to manipulate public debate.
Boussalis points out that climate misinformation is usually produced by well-resourced organisations rather than at grassroots level. Conservative foundations, for example, will provide material support to think-tanks that generate misinformation, which is then promoted by conservative media outlets and social media accounts.
There is growing consensus that stronger measures are needed to tackle the problem, with Pinterest this month announcing that it was banning false or misleading climate claims. The image-sharing site said it would be removing content that denies the existence, causes or impacts of climate change, or “misrepresents scientific data” to reduce trust in climate science and experts.
Other social media platforms have also been urged to step up their efforts against misinformation. Recent research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) suggested that Facebook failed to label half of posts promoting articles from the world’s leading publishers of climate denial, despite the company having committed to labelling certain content about climate change.
Another CCDH report published last year found that ten publishers were responsible for up to 69% of interactions with climate denial articles on the site.
Some of the content from these sources is not so much untrue as subtly misleading. Last month, a US blog called Watts Up With That? published a widely-shared article that claimed that meteorological records showed no January warming in either Ireland or Sweden since 1988. A fact-check by USA Today concluded that it was missing context, since both countries have significantly warmed if annual temperatures are taken into account.
The situation in Ireland
Climate misinformation is particularly rife in America, but Boussalis points out that scepticism can be found in Ireland too. “The Irish public generally believes that anthropogenic climate change is real and that we need to do something about it, but there are pockets of conservatism among elected officials and in some interest groups.”
Eileen Culloty from the School of Communications at DCU argues that American talking points have found their way into some Irish circles as well.
“A lot of climate misinformation and disinformation stems from a well-organised, decades-long campaign to undermine science and delay action, concentrated mostly in the US,” she told The Journal.
“We don’t have the same sophisticated networks of think-tanks and research institutes in Ireland and Europe, but the claims we see here often come directly from American organisations. The arguments you get in Ireland – the idea that climate is always changing, for example, or that there’s no point doing anything when China’s carbon footprint is so much higher – haven’t come out of nowhere. These are narratives that have been crafted by PR professionals in the US, pushed by vested interests.”
Another worry in the Irish context is that disinformation could be targeted at communities that feel left behind, particularly in rural Ireland. “I think there are certain people trying to use climate change now to sow division, perhaps to raise their own profiles,” she says. “We know from research that climate change disinformation is linked to polarisation, and in Ireland that would be a concern in terms of the perception of an urban-rural divide.”
Climate denial might be rare in Ireland, but experts caution that “discourses of delay” – arguments for stepping back from climate action – are still prevalent.
“We get quite a lot of those in the Irish space, especially around agriculture and cycling infrastructure,” says David Robbins, director of the DCU Centre for Climate and Society.
“With basically any action that might lead to reduced emissions, you see people indulging in discourses of delay. Yes, they accept humans are responsible, but then solutions or policies that are put forward are dismissed.”
Robbins sees corporate PR claims as another challenge, with fossil fuel-reliant businesses citing measures such as carbon offsetting to promote an environmentally-friendly image – a tactic many have criticised as greenwashing. “Companies are cherry-picking particular actions without really accounting for the carbon cost of their activities.”
But corporations are not the only ones wanting to avoid responsibility for the problem. “The argument sometimes made here is that what we do makes very little difference because we contribute very little to global emissions,” says Robbins. “There’s this idea that if the big emitters aren’t making changes, then we shouldn’t do anything either.”
Misinformation has had a wider circulation in countries with well-funded networks of conservative groups and media outlets, but experts warn that what we see in Ireland – a scepticism about the need for transformative solutions – has consequences too.
This work is co-funded by Journal Media and a grant programme from the European Parliament. Any opinions or conclusions expressed in this work are the author’s own. The European Parliament has no involvement in nor responsibility for the editorial content published by the project. For more information, see here.
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