COP 27: How to Neutralize Climate Disinformation

industry there as well. Last time in Glasgow, the fossil fuel industry sent more representatives than anyone country did, and there's likely to be more of the same in Egypt. The organizers have, in a much publicized and criticized move, allowed major global polluter Coca Cola to sponsor the event. Even worse, they've also hired Coca Cola's publicist Hill and Knowlton to do pr for the conference. If you missed season three of Drill, go back and listen to it.

We did an entire episode on Helen Milton founder John Hill and his work for both the oil industry and the tobacco industry all at the same time. Hill masterminded the strategy of hiring scientists to say tobacco smoking wasn't bad for you, and that the jury was still out on whether it caused cancer. At the very same time, his firm was working for the American Petroleum Institute and some of its member companies. In fact, it was Hill

who brought tobacco folks into the American Petroleum Institute. The long standing relation whip between oil and tobacco eventually resulted in the creation of the cigarette filter, a money maker for oil and gas companies looking for a new place to sell petrochemicals, and a slide of hand for the tobacco industry looking to convince consumers that they could make smoking less harmful by smoking lighter filtered cigarettes. Hill represented Mensanto around the same time, too, so no surprise that

the chemical industry embraced a lot of the same tactics. Definitely, the folks you want strategizing the messaging for your climate conference, I'm sure they won't be reporting directly back to their clients. Q head banging against Wall video.

that makes the rounds every couple of years. A coalition of environmental groups has come together under the banner of Climate Action against Disinformation to monitor the disinformation that spawns

around some of these big inflection points. They initially got organized around COP twenty six in Glasgow and now in advance of COP twenty seven in Cairo, they've put together a report full of information aimed at helping journalists and other communicators avoid unintentionally spreading or amplifying mis and disinformation. The lead author on that report, Connor Gibson, is joining me here today to walk us through it. That's coming up after this quick break.

were hacked and taken out of context and released. And you know, the fact checking that came after the investigations and exonerations that came after that didn't spread. That didn't spread nearly as widely as the phrase climate gate. It never does, Yeah, exactly, it never does. So I think one of the biggest insurmountable feeling trends that I looked at in this report is just the economics of the newsroom.

it currently is. But unfortunately, because it's about economics. I think that is one of the biggest obstacles that reporters will face when it comes to that tension between the responsibility of a reporter to communicate something accurately without feeding into conspiracy theory or myth, and the responsibility of an editor to keep the newspaper in circulation and financially healthy.

of communications expertise. And that's where First Draft and the Data and Society Research Institute, the Union of Concerned Scientists and some others have published really helpful information when it comes to just psychology based communication techniques, perhaps nobody more than academics like Stefan Lewandowski and John Cook, and a lot of the collaborators on reports like the Debunking Handbook and the Conspiracy Theory handbook, just really excellent psychology based

communications advice that these academics have published in order to help people navigate the most basic traps. And this stuff has been around for decades, right like Richard Nixon, I'm not a crook. Everybody hears the word crook. George Lindhoff wrote a book, Don't Think of an Elephant, because the only word that sticks in your brain after you say that is the word elephant. So, you know, a lot of this stuff has been known for a long time.

But I poked around at some headlines, you know, from major outlets, and I still see the same mistakes happening. And you know, a lot of that is not it's not because people are foolish. It's just that there is an amount of faith in the audience when it comes to an honest journalist and editor writing a report and writing a headline that unfortunately just misses the traps that

disinformation relies on in order to spread. And that's got to be really frustrating when you're a professional who writes something that's very intellectually honest, and yet as a result of writing it in an intellectually honest way, it is misinformation and disinformation to spread. So that's really why we

wrote this report. It's why we focused on climate as a topic because of a COP twenty seven coming up in Egypt, and every year when the United Nations climate negotiations happen, there's an inevitable amount of misinformation online and social media related to climate and you can predict what some of it will be. It will be rich people are flying on jets, how ironic and things like that.

There will probably be some outdated imagery circulated, like perhaps frozen wind turbines or you know, solar panels not failing to meet electricity demand in some country. You know, something that's taken out of context that usually has recirculated every few years in a moment like this in order just to see it a narrative of cynicism, in order to make people feel like this isn't a problem that can be addressed, or this isn't a problem that needs to

be addressed. Also, climate journalists are kind of a good target audience for us here because the phenomenon of climate change denial, I think has made climate change reporters a little more sophisticated and understanding these trends. Before social media made disinformation such a rampant problem in the last few years.

characters wasn't as widely known. And there are definitely improvements in how that has been covered, in kind of the level of scrutiny that is applied to those folks as messengers when they have a vested interest or they just have a long history of at this point debunked contrarianism. So you know, we try to write this report and publish it with acknowledgement that we're not writing it because

climate reporters are particularly gullible or anything like that. We think it's one of the more relevant fields with which to understand what communication techniques are required in order to mitigate misinformation and disinformation, as well as a field where some of that understanding is already a little bit more fully developed.

Action Against Disinformation. THEA and Climate Action Against Disinformation is a coalition that is formed actually from work it did a year ago monitoring the previous conference of Parties COP twenty six in Glasgow, Scotland, and that was a less formal effort but the same kind of idea of what is happening this year, which is a variety of groups including the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Stop Funding Heat, Friends

of the Earth, Climate Nexus, Greenpeace. Many organizations are just trying to proactively monitor social media disinformation related to climate change and related to COP twenty seven in Egypt as it's happening, and so they will be publishing daily briefings that will be made available to reporters that are covering it.

Trying to observe disinformation and misinformation on social media as it's emerging in order to kind of sound the law and let people know which types of misleading narratives are being seated in order to undermine the United Nations negotiations this year. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue and a bunch of other organizations published a report earlier this year in twenty twenty called Deny Deceive Delay Documenting and Responding to

Climate Disinformation at COP twenty six and Beyond. And that report I thought was a particularly coherent breakdown of trends on social media, who some of the most prominent misinformers and disinformers were, and just like kind of tracing the who was the original person that put you know, the twenty fourteen photo of a de icing exercise of a windmill and recirculating that into a myth as if it was something that were happening in twenty twenty one.

a serious, widespread problem that needs to be covered. But how do I cover it? What techniques can we use in order to help interrupt misinformation without actually helping it grow?

you know. One example is the hurricane and climate conversation. Science continues to develop. We actually are getting to the point where scientists are more able to estimate how much worse hurricanes are as a result of ocean temperatures being warmer as a result of sea level rise and what that means for storm surge. You know, that is not

something that scientists could do ten years ago. The modeling technology was not at that point, and so the goal coaster shifting as scientific understanding has caught up, and in general, it's still the case that it is difficult to assign like a percentage in terms of how much worse any

given hurricane is as a result of climate change. But there are very specific factors which scientists clearly understand make hurricanes stronger, make them hit harder, make them cause more damage and suffering, and that is a nuance that can be navigated. We have an example of the Washington Post and this report doing a good job talking about climate change in hurricanes without losing track of a couple things.

One is the nuance between how weather variability is unpredictable and it's hard to assign any specific amount of you know, how much worse any given storm is as a result of climate change, but the factors that definitely make hurricanes worse, as well as not losing track of the human suffering and how it is a also not just a climate change story, but it is an impact on humanity story and not to lose that point, you know, while people are still digging up you know, possessions from the wreckage.

illustrating something that's not mentioned. So if you are a communications professional, including journalist, but also advocates activists, you don't want to be using the language that paints a picture that's going to stick, where the misinformation is the thing that is being illustrated. You know, again, this is not intended to shame anybody. The PolitiFact website kind of does not adhere to best practices when it comes to this.

They quote the myth that they are debunking. So even when they have these really great images, including the pants on fire logo, the reality is that they are still quoting the myth at the top of their article. And then oftentimes the next thing is they use the word no, and then they refute the myth.

that can't be done. There was some research in recent years that was a little overconcerned about various backfire effects, and it is turning out that any attempt to fact check or debunk misleading information is worth it first and foremost, so that's the most important thing, is please debunk the

information and spread that as far as possible. That said, there are still best communication practices that can be adhered to, and that's where some of these examples, like uplifting misinformation about climate change on Facebook or repeating Tucker Carlson's words verbatim, that's not the best practice because that uplifts the misleading information, that keeps it in circulation, that continues to frame the conversation.

In terms of misleading language, it is better, as with the example from the Associated Press here to in the headline, address that there is a myth that is circulating before uplifting what the myth and the language surrounding it is.

And a lot of these better fact checks in terms of the language and the order in which things are addressed, are what is now being called the truth sandwich, in which you first warned the audience that they are about to hear misinformation, and you give them important details on what the topic is, who said it, before you uplift any of the misleading information, and you explicitly warn them that they are about to hear something that's misleading after

they've already heard the context in which it is false, and then you can kind of address the explicit topic of misinformation before again reasserting the truth and why that information is false. And that's something I first saw again from academics like John Cook, who's at the George Mason University Center for Climate Communication, in publications like the Debunking Handbook. They've been very clear that just because of how our brains work, it's really important not to mention the myth first.

It's important to mention the truth first and contextualize where the myth happened before you address it explicitly, and then to follow up again by reiterating the truth. That's a much more effective way to this lawe misinformation from a human's brain after they've already been.

have coined the term truth sandwich. The technique of the truth sandwich is something that has been around for longer than that, and I'm not sure if John Cook and Stephan Lewandowski and all the co authors of the Debunking Handbook were first to do it, but They're the first people that I saw addressing it in some of their publications, and I've found those reports to be invaluable in terms of explaining communications best practices from a psychological perspective.

I did not want to signal to an audience that like, this is only something liberals should care about and conservatives should not care, because that conversation is just a race to the bottom, and it's hyper prevalent in our media environment here in the United States. But what makes it so tricky is the fact that when it comes to climate change, Republicans don't care and Democrats do care, and their constituents follow that exact pattern as well, and that

is a factor in all of this. So how is a reporter is supposed to navigate that when that is actually the factual reality of this situation. But it does readers of disservice to signal that you should care about

something or not as a result of partisan royalty. And I think that it's something that can be navigated by framing the conversation around something else and including statements from politicians later in the article, perhaps to help illustrate the partisan divide or the massive disparity in how science is accepted or interpreted depending on partisan affiliation. But making that the story or making that the headline only serves to

increase those divides. When you know, polling indicates there is a little bit more nuance among the electorate in terms of how they care about climate change. Support for renewable energy and other policy solutions to climate change are a little more popular than you would expect when you just read headlines about Republicans trying to tank climate policy and Democrats trying to pass it.

from what she says in the video. She instructs users, when we just name disparities and outcomes without naming who and what is responsible for those disparities, we make it seem like a person's identity is responsible for the problem instead of the people and institutions discriminating against them on

that basis. So there is an implication, an unintentional consequence to glossing over and issue without kind of naming people who are most impacted by it and people who are most responsible for making decisions or incentivizing that problematic trend.

Pollution is the example that Sabrina Joy Stevens uses in the video, and again, environmental organizations I think often fall into this trap just as much as reporters do, where you're trying to do the responsible thing by mentioning, hey, it's communities of color that are most disproportionately subject to polluting infrastructure, which is, you know, responsible for higher rates of chronic illness and preventable death. But that narrative doesn't

include the fact that it's not an accident. Those polluting refineries and facilities are built in communities are that are you know, lower income, majority people of color. Those are decisions that are made on purpose by executives, by politicians, by officials who have the power to permit them, and excluding that from the story does a disservice that is

akin to victim blaming. And it's really important for journalists, i think, to feel empowered to be able to put that in print without it being seen as an activist move. It's actually just part of the reality and something worth including reporting that it's not an accident that these things impact different groups disproportionately, that is by design, and it's okay to put that in print because that's just the

reality of the situation. We don't really need any more examples or data to understand that's how this happens.

that actually leaves a lot left on? Said that precludes accountability? And in my life, I think.

blame to anyone. That is very much sort of how a lot of newsrooms encourage people to write even though in general, the passive voice is something that editors like to edit out of pieces for grammar reasons.

interest of avoiding any sort of opinion or bias. This one was really interesting to me because I'm like, oh, I definitely see this a lot, and I also have seen and had editors actually encourage that type of construction because you're not supposed to ascribe intentionality to anyone.

partisan signaling. There's an irony there where Republicans are more obstructive to climate change, and yet this guide says, don't just write about Republicans and what Republicans don't do and what Democrats do. There's an irony there. There's a lot of nuance here that's actually very very hard to navigate if you're a journalist or a newsroom. And I think that's why this is so important too, is there's not a lot of time to sit and think about this.

If you're a journalist, you're on a deadline for story after story after story. You don't want to get scooped. You want to do an informative piece without taking too much time away from the next responsibility. And that's you know, the competing interests, the finances of a newsroom, and the time constraints on a journalist or an editor are also

major factors here. So I'm hoping that a report like this can help start conversations between journalists and editors and anybody else in the journalist profession about you know, what are the next steps in terms of best practices to navigate some of this stuff, because some of it is

seemingly contradictory. I don't think it is necessarily but like more conversation is needed to figure out what journalistic norms are necessary now that social media misinformation has interrupted previous best practices that are now irrelevant and learned how to exploit them in order to generate coverage for something that shouldn't be covered, or in order to let misinformation go viral before it is debunked in a way that is like less makes less impact than the viral misinformation in

the first place.

twenty one. Very obvious example. Most of Texas's city generation infrastructure that winter was from thermal power, mostly gas and nuclear. That's the majority of what failed, and yet some politicians falsely blamed wind turbines for the lapse of the grid in twenty twenty one, a deadly disaster, as well as the misleading images that circulated online, like frozen wind turbines in Sweden many years previous, where helicopters were actually performing

a maintenance exercise about de icing them. You know, that had nothing to do with Texas. They're completely different regions of the world. Texas did not weatherize any of their electricity generation infrastructure, not just wind turbines, but also there are gas and nuclear plants which froze. So that's an example I think where inoculation could have gone a long way.

But it's complex to anticipate. You can't anticipate a disaster like that necessarily or when it's going to happen, and that means there was no priority for journalists just to start writing articles to make sure people understand the composition of Texas's grid, and.

at and become cynical about. And I think when there's a major event that is predictable that's coming up, that is a good time for journalists to have a think about writing some inoculation pieces like predictable misinformation that will likely circulate in the next few weeks and why that is not true, the cherry picking that's required in order to make that sound reasonable in the minds of people who don't spend all day paying.