We have already talked a little bit about climate change denial, but we thought that a very interesting study from the University of Michigan was worth an update. The study showed that almost 15% of Americans do not believe climate change and global warming are real. This study was intriguing because it used artificial intelligence to analyze the tweets posted by 1.3 million people on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) between 2017 and 2019. That is a lot of data. “Over half of the tweets we looked at simply denied that climate change was real, that it was a hoax,” said Joshua Newell, co-author of the study and professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan. “It wasn’t surprising, but it was disappointing, I would hope that more and more Americans would believe in climate change and the importance of addressing it.” The results of this study were consistent with a study from Yale University estimating 16% of Americans (almost 50 million people) did not believe in climate change as of 2023.
Interestingly, the study showed that denialism is highest in the central and southern US. It also showed Republicans were less likely than Democrats to believe in climate science, perhaps because Donald Trump became a very influential climate denier. “Public figures such as Trump are highly influential when they use these events to trigger disbelief in climate change among social media users.” In general, areas with more Democrats along both the east and west coasts tended to have more people who accepted climate change and global warming. “It comports with my understanding that there is a small but very vocal and active minority of the public that still denies the overwhelming evidence of human-caused warming,” said Michael Mann, climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, about the study.”
Michael Mann is a US climate scientist who won a defamation lawsuit against conservative writers “who called his pioneering climate change research “fraudulent”, comparing his research to the work of a convicted child molester and was awarded $1 million in damages.” Mann says we have a new reality described in his book “The New Climate War,” where scientists must rebut the misinformation and disinformation bad people promote on social media, and his reasoning is compelled. He says we must do this “not because we’re going to win them over, their ideological heels are dug in, but because they are infecting the entire social media space with myths, falsehoods and toxic anti-scientific sentiment.” His statement should make all of us join in on the efforts to confront all these lies on social media, and one way may be to put public pressure on the social media platforms to combat disinformation.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/14/americans-believe-climate-change-study?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
Gounaridis, D., Newell, J.P. The social anatomy of climate change denial in the United States. Sci Rep 14, 2097 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-50591-6
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/09/us-climate-scientist-
michael-mann-wins-1m-in-defamation-lawsuit
Photo by Markus Spiske: https://www.pexels.com/photo/climate-people-street-crowd-2990610/
