Welcome back to DRILL. I'm Amy Westervelt, and over the next couple months, I'm prepping to go to my very first COP. That stands for Conference of the Parties. It's an annual UN climate summit that brings together all the countries that are parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or unf Triple C. It's true I've been a climate reporter for more than twenty years and have somehow managed to avoid going to COP all this time.
I'm going this year because it relates to a couple of projects we're working on for next year, and because the organizing committee from Brazil has vowed to make climate information integrity a focus of this year's gathering. That's important because, as we'll learn today, climate miss and disinformation is a huge part of the reason the world has not acted on this issue. I'm also curious to get a front row seat because there's a real crisis of legitimacy happening
with the COPS. This year is COP thirty. That means they've been happening for thirty years, and we don't seem any closer to a global solution to climate change than we were thirty years ago. I'm also interested to see what happens when one of the world's biggest obstructors, the United States, decides not to go. Who will pick up the slack? Will it be Saudi, Yes, but also Japan,
even Europe. A lot of negotiators are heading into cop wanting to protect their countries, resources, their countries' approach to markets, all of those things. So it will be interesting to see what happens up close. And to get ready, I'm reading this new book from the Climate Social Science Network that pulls together everything we currently know about climate instruction all over the world. It's great prep for this conference.
I'm joined today by two researchers who look at how misinformation functions, why it's so effective, and what can be done to combat it. John Cook is a Senior Research Fellow with the Melbourne Center for Behavior Change at the University of Melbourne, researching how to use critical thinking to
counter misinformation. You might have seen his research referenced in the past around the idea of paltering, a misinformation technique that the oil companies love, where you use accurate bits of information assembled in such a way that they mislead people. Also joining us is Dominic Stecula. He's an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University whose research focuses
on the information environment and its effects on society. We talked about all sorts of things, from the rule ideology, polarization, and social media play in misinformation to concepts like solutions, aversion, and elite cues. That's coming up after this quick break. This is Drilled Season fourteen obstruction.
I'm sure you guys get asked this one hundred times a week, but I'm asky to do it again. Can I have you define the difference between misinformation and disinformation? And I think you make this really interesting point about the fact that intentionality maybe doesn't matter so much here, so I'd love to hear you say more about that as well.
In this literature on misinformation and disinformation, a lot of attention has been paid to intentionality, right, And the basic definition of misinformation is a false or misleading content that's shared without any intent to deceive, whereas disinformation is shared with intent to deceive. But what we say in the chapter is that on climate and really often in most
other things, intent is unknowable, right. Sometimes you get to know the intent through the release of private correspondence of a certain cable network, for example, right, But in general, intent is unknowable, and the same claim like volcanoes emit more co two than humans, misleads audiences regardless of whether
the person sharing it wants to deceive or doesn't. So we think that it's better to focus on what these claims do, and what they do is they erode understanding and ultimately stall any meaningful climate action.
And I would just add to that that when people believe misinformation, they will often make arguments that look exactly the same from the outside, using the same misleading techniques as people who are intentionally trying to deceive. And the reason for that is because when we are motivated to
believe something, we gravitate towards these different biases. And for example, we might be biased towards believing certain types of information, and that leads us to cherry pick data, So just pick the bits of information that suit our beliefs and
ignore all the information that contradicts our beliefs. So someone might be cherry picking because they're biased, or they might be cherry picking because they're intentionally trying to deceive people you don't know from the outside self deception looks exactly the same as intentional deception from the outside.
Right. Interesting, Okay, Can I have you find the elaboration likelihood model of attitude change and talk about how it shows up when we're talking about climate misinformation.
So it's a big theory in psychology and communications, and the gist of it is that we tend to process messages in different ways. Sometimes it's via central route and that's the careful evaluation, and we do that when we're motivated and able to really evaluate a claim or the messages.
This processed through the peripheral route, so things like shortcuts like you know, using a specific source, a vibe, quote unquote, an identity, and we do that when we have limited time or ability to really process and evaluate the claim. Since climate is a very complex issue, most people tend to lean on the ladder, on the peripheral route, on the shortcuts they don't really have have frequently the ability
and sometimes time to really process carefully the claims. But that's how ELM really pops up in the context of climate misinformation because we tend to rely on this peripheral route, on these shortcuts that we take mental shortcuts like who's saying things, what's the vibe, the identity behind the speaker, the identity that's triggered by the thing that's claimed. So that's really the kind of the underlying basis for how this pops up in the broader context of climate misinformation.
Yeah, I had never seen this before and it was really really interesting for me, so appreciate it.
It's similar to some of the kind of Danny Kanama and the kind of thinking fast and slow, kind of cognitive you know, system one, system two thinking. It's it's a similar similar idea, But yeah, that's that's kind of I think how I would it's there's obviously more to
it than this, but that's how I would. I would kind of characterize where it fits in the context of what we're talking about, right, And a broad idea is that, let's say, a twenty second clip from a politician you trust can outweigh an eight hundred word explainer because the clip hits this peripheral route, right, the identity, the emotion, whereas the explainer demands a lot more cognitive effort that you might not have.
And a lot of misinformation arguments are superficially persuasive, They just flow. They might have a logical fallacy, but they just have a kind of a fly to it that that sounds kind of truthy to people. Yeah.
Yeah, public opinion comes up a lot in this and obviously one of the key, maybe the key uses of misinformation is to shape public opinion. But i'd love to have you actually define what that means for people and then talk a little bit about how climate misinformation works to sort of shape public opinion in one direction or another. You mentioned this bottom up and top down approaches in the paper too, and it'd be great to have you explain what that is.
So, yeah, with public opinion, it can cover a couple of different things. Like one of the obvious things is people's perceptions about climate change. Do they think that climate change is happening and human cause and that the impacts will be bad? And we talked more specifically about those beliefs later in the chapter. But it also extends to people's attitudes about climate action. Do they support policies to
mitigate climate change? Do they support renewable energy? And so there's that whole mix of perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes, and misinformation has several aims. It's about using people's perceptions about climate change, but ultimately it's about reducing public support for climate action.
I'll just add maybe more and more just broader kind of meta as a as a political scientist, you know, public opinion is this really important feature of you know, democratics theory, right, and what we think of as what makes democratic society actually democratic. Right, And the idea is that this kind of aggregation of what people think and want should be reflected in what the politicians do and the policies that the government ends up pursuing.
Right.
So though in many ways public opinion in theory at least should be the driver the push or stall of policy, and in the context of climate change, it definitely can stall it as well. So misinformation in that context kind of tilts that playing field because it makes action harder even when majorities support and believe in climate change and support certain kinds of climate action. As we've seen in a lot of polling in the United States but also in other countries in terms of the bottom up versus
top down movements and pushing on public opinion. The idea is that you know, in terms of bottom up, everyday average people can share things they believe or you know, they wrongly believed in terms of misinformed claims, and because of how we structure our time and the kind of virtual spaces in which we tend to spend a lot of our time at using you know, social media, et cetera,
that bottom up pressure. You know, viral claims that are misinformed impact public opinion, right when when unchecked, misinformation spreading on social media can really do a lot of damage. So that's the bottom bottom up component. The top down component is the elites, you know, and by elites I mean I mean here politicians, interest groups of all kinds, including the fossil fuel industry. They can see certain narratives and influence the public. Public then public then repeats those claims.
So the top down bottom up dynamic is mutually reinforcing. In many ways, they reinforce each other, right, Like a lot of the claims that one unquote organically show up on social media have been supplied by elites, by interest groups.
Right.
So, for example, in the context of climate misinformation, you can have a meme about evs being dirtier than gascar, and that might spread on social media and it may appear to be something that's organic that that people are just sharing among themselves.
But where did that come from? Where did it originate?
Well, frequently those types of tidbits, those types of misinformed, misinformed content, they originate with the lobbying group, with a specific interest group that has a vested interest in spreading
a certain narrative. So in that sense that the kind of bottom up and top down influences of public opinion are mutually reinforcing because one feeds into another, and then that pushes public opinion into into places that is maybe less than ideal because it is based on information that is not truthful, not correct, and ultimately deceiving.
Okay, so you talk about the the fact that Americans aligned with the Republican Party are more skeptical now of climate science than they were in the nineteen nineties, and kind of use that as a jumping off point to talk about the role that ideology plays and shaping climate opinions, and then you know how climate misinformation kind of plays
into that. So I'd love to have you talk a little bit about ideology and just the role that it plays in climate misinformation, which I realized you could probably spend two hours plus plus, but I don't know. I guess, yeah, how does it work and why is it such an indicator of how effective climate misinformation will be.
In the psychology field, we talk about the concept of solutions a version, which is the idea that when people don't lack a proposed solution to a problem, then they're more likely to deny that as a problem in the
first place, and we see this with climate change. Political conservatives often done let I lack some of the They often proposed solutions to climate change, such as regulating fossil fuels and trying to reduce emissions in that way, and so rather than coming up with their own free market solutions to climate change, instead, unfortunately they deny the problem needs solving. And so this is really the main driver
of why political ideology shapes people's climate opinions. And really, back in the early nineteen nineties, we were at this crossroad where the problem of climate change was becoming more real, like the scientists were becoming clear on the need to act on climate change, and conservative groups really had this option where they could have either proposed conservative solutions to
climate change or denied the problem. And it's a real historic tragedy that instead the conservative think tanks opted to deny the problem and produce misinformation, and ever since then misinformation has been polluting the information landscape and polarizing the public.
Yeah, totally agree with everything John said.
I mean, a few things I would add is that when we think of ideology, most people, at least in the United States, they are not consistently liberal or conservative right people kind of views that are all over the place. But increasingly, in a polarized political landscape like ours, the society is sorting along those partisan minds more and more
so than ever before. Historically, when you knew the fact that somebody is a liberal or conservative, you know, forty fifty years ago, that didn't really predict your ability to guess whether they're a Democrat or Republican, right, because there were liberals and conservatives in both parties. There were south and racist Democrats, and there were northern kind of liberal Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller.
To a certain extent that no longer exists.
Right, the ideology and partisanship are sorted in a sense that if I now know that somebody identifies as a conservative, I have a pretty good guess that they also are a Republican.
And say, with liberals and Democrats.
And Essentially, ideology matters for climate views because artisanship and partisan polarization that kind of drives a lot of our politics these days. Climate is one of the issues on which parties have polarized. And that simply means that if you want to be a member of good standing of the Republican Party, you know that you need to be against climate action, right, you need to be opposed to know,
socialist leftists who want to implement certain policies. I'm obviously using air quotes here, which is not very useful tools for radio. That you know, that's that's that's an access of major division in society now in the United States, and and that essentially translates to this tribal way of thinking about climate because you know what's expected of people in your political tribe to believe, so any kind of thoughtful engagement with any kind of facts, et cetera, that comes second to that.
Right.
When something becomes more of an identity than just a belief about a specific thing, it's much harder to change that right because it is part of a package of things that you choose to identify as So ideology in that context is also.
Proubling for climate views.
In the context of polarized American politics because ideology and partisanship are very tight together now and it's one of those divisive things where there's a lot less room for actual thoughtful debate now because it's one of those issues in which the public is polarized, and you just know that if you're left or right, that's the view you're supposed to have.
End of discussion.
Yeah, okay, can you define for me elite cues and tell me about how they shape public opinion on climate change?
What are these things?
I can say a few things since published under but essentially cues coming from trusted leaders, And in the context of climate change, we mostly mean leaders like politicians. And you know, in given that American politics is so polarized and politics is an important part of how people kind of see themselves, messages coming from major political figures carry right. They're important because politics is important. But it doesn't just
mean politicians. It also means other trusted societal for the lack of a better word, influencers, right like religious leaders, celebrities, etc. The elite queues would essentially be messages that come from trusted opinion sources that have the power to sway public opinion. They matter in the context of what we're talking about here because they not only can influence how your own team thinks about something, but they can also influence how
the other team thinks. So one example being The Inconvenient Truth the movie and al Gore being a main messenger when climate change really became a very salient issue in the early two thousands. Al Gore was a trusted opinion leader for a lot of Democrats as a presidential candidate and a former two term vice president. But what we might now forget is that he was also a very
disliked figure on the right. His assessment on among Republicans in the United States was as negative as Hillary Clintons in twenty sixteen, for example, right, he was a very
polarizing figure. And the reason why I bring him up is that because he was the messenger, he obviously moved Democrats in a pro climate direction because he was a trusted leader on their side, but because he was so hated by the other side, he also moved Republicans in the other direction, just because the kind of the logic is if the person that you really hate says something, then you're just gonna almost by default to the opposite right.
And that's the power of elite cues in the sense that they can move, they can move your team, but they can also do some damage by if you're choosing the wrong messenger, it can really backfire in a sense of making people really skeptical of what the content of the message is because the messenger is so distrusted and so dislike.
And I'll just add to that, A couple of studies have looked at what drives public opinion about climate change, looking at all the different factors such as economic factors and an elite cues, and they found that elite cues are one of the biggest drivers of public opinion about climate change, which really understoodes that people are travel as Dominique was saying earlier, and so when out tribal leaders giving us these cues in a certain direction, people tend to follow that.
I actually was just listening earlier today to like old c Span tape of the head of the r n C at the time during the Gore Bush election, like laying into decre who she was actually you know, Bruce Harrison's wife too, which is like a whole weird connection in and of itself. And not a coincidence. I'm sure, Okay, So I want to talk about the news media again.
I feel like this each of these topics could like be you know, the whole long discussion in and of themselves, but in broad strokes, what role does the news media play in shaping public opinion, especially on climate and what has it done to kind of either amplify or try to correct misinformation.
So the media have in some cases helped amplifile spread climate misinformation, and sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's unintentional. Conservative media outlets have been a particularly as time has gone on, they've gotten worse at it, have been quite a productive source of climate misinformation, and so that's more of an
intentional misleading the public kind of source. But you also have unintentional misinforming, such as when just mainstream media present climate change as a false balance where they give both sides of an issue equal weight, which is entirely appropriate when it's issues of political opinion or policy, but when it comes to issues where there's a scientific consensus, then presenting like a fifty to fifty debate between a scientist
and a climate denier just has a misinforming effect. So I mean, we were talking at the beginning about misinformation and disinformation and how difficult it is to the difference between the two. We see that with how media have covered climate change too, whether it's intentional or not. There are these different ways of misinforming the public.
Yet the false balance that Jones referring to the norm in a lot of newsrooms.
And the profound fear of being seen as biased, leads to certain types of coverage that that, like John highlighted.
Is not ideal in the context of a scientific issue.
I think that the problem with a lot of the of the media, including non partisan media. So I'm not even talking now about certain cable news networks or explicity partisan sources of information, but just your run of the mill mainstream news sources outside of even just the false balance, which which is wrong and should be avoided. What has happened is that increasingly, as the public has alarized on this issue, the issue is presented more as a political
one than a scientific one. I've done a big study with content analysis of climate change coverage, looking at decades of climate change and global warming news in American media starting in the nineties and going going into twenty sixteen. And what has happened is experts are futured prominently, which is good, but increasingly they share the space with politicians, and a lot of coverage includes references and quotes from politicians, and the moment politicians kind of crowd out the experts.
To people on the receiving end, to the news consumers, it just becomes a partisan issue and not a scientific issue. So in that sense, it isn't just a false balance of all. We need to present this issue in a quote unquote balanced and fair way.
We don't want to be called, you know, partisan hacks.
So we're going to have a pro climate change and an anti climate change person on. Even beyond that, the sheer fact that the volume of politicians in the climate change coverage has helped to polarize the public and make it an issue where to be a good member, to be a member in good standing of the of a certain political party, you need to have a specific political position on that issue.
Yeah. I've been a reporter for a long time and I keep seeing this in amongst a lot of climate reporters right now, especially like I don't know, like I feel like, at least in the US, people have moved away somewhat from the false equivalence thing. But there's this kind of archetype of a reporter who I think thinks that makes them seem smarter if they are like more open to industry talking points, you know, like it makes them I don't.
Know, I don't know. Anyway, it's academia as well.
Oh great, great, amazing.
I find it very annoying. Okay, So, actually you mentioned academia, and I know that's not a specific focus in this chapter, but kind of tying into elite cues and some of the news media staff in general too, I wonder how much kind of using academics, especially at really elite universities helps with pushing climate misinformation to various publics as well. How important is like that messenger for these guys.
That's an interesting question. So from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty, I was based at George my University in Virginia.
Belly of the Beast, John exactly.
Yeah, so you know you've got to change from within, right, That was That's the thin. And so George Mason has really ground zero for where the Koch brothers have tried
to spread their influence through academia and universities. So the Coke Brothers are basically the fossil fuel industry, like the incredibly rich, incredibly influential, and playing a very impressive long game in terms of influencing much just public opinion, but influencing universities and thought and then and then that going on to influence elites, political elites and the public as well.
So so, and this has been a strategy going over decades, and it's been quite effective in terms of influencing the public towards their not only their political beliefs, it also casting down on climate change.
And I would add to it the growing strain of populace as we document in a chapter we have the whole case study of Brazil, but in general, just populism and anti intellectualism essentially means that increasingly even experts themselves are not a very trusted group for a certain segment
of the population. So when we talk about elite queues, you know, the academic expert Q might be useful for a lot of people, but for some it might be a polarizing one because they view academics, researchers as as the out as the outgroup, right, they view them as the enemy. So Why on earth would would you trust somebody who who is who is an outgroup and who doesn't have your and your country's best interests in heart?
Right?
Which is I mean like Vice President Jadi Vance literally said that professors are the enemy. Right. So, so in that sense, that makes messaging.
Harvard guy calls Harvard.
Guys exactly, yeah, exactly.
So it is a very tricky landscape now, right, because in that sense, even even expertise alone and credentials are being challenged in order to sew doubt and divide.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I was reading this and I sent him a snippet of it to my husband because my sister in law is like this. She is like super anti any kind of like expert. I don't know, any kind of experts. People with advanced degrees she calls. She refers to them as educationalists.
So she would not be a huge, huge kind of me and John. Okay, I avoid Amy's sister amazing.
It's really like.
Some of the stuff that she says, I'm like, wow, where's this coming from?
Mostly Facebook is the answer.
Yes, yeah, So.
Actually that's something that that you highlight in this chapter too. And you know, I think like we all know that it's gotten worse with social media, but can you talk a little bit about just how much worse and how quickly and and maybe even like I don't know, I feel like you get at this in a couple of
different ways in the chapter. But it's not just that social media has changed, you know, the infrastructure for information to move, but it's also changed like how people think about information and how they I don't know, like how maybe how susceptible they are to climate misinformation. So what are some of the key things to look out for there?
So, I mean social media is important because it is where most people get their information and spend a lot of their time. Now, you know, traditional media still matters, So not to say that people that you know, people don't want cable or don't want evening news or don't read the newspaper, but their power is waiting considerably. And what we have instead is, you know, this very fragmented information landscape that includes all kinds of forms of delivering information.
I mean, podcasts are big now, right and some of the most important ways in which people get informed now and one that's growing in important and our podcasts and you know that's when we see people like Joe Rogan who have tremendous power and sway over people, not just in the United States but all over the world.
And we have.
Social media where you know, people get to interact and see things in real time, and it's becoming very difficult to consume news in a way. As a news consumer, your essentially your job has gotten a lot harder over the years because if you just wanted to get reliable information twenty thirty years ago, you could just subscribe to a newspaper, maybe a magazine, right, you would listen to
to like NPR or something. You had a few sources that you know, all adhere to journalistic principles and delivered
for the most part, pretty pretty healthy information diet to you. Now, to curate that space for you is incredibly difficult because on social media, the burden falls on you to make a timeline on Facebook or on Twitter now x on TikTok, to control what you see and to create a space for you for yourself that is full of content that is coming from professionals who you trust, their kind of information gathering strategies, etc. Right, it's just very difficult for
you to do, even if you want to be responsible news consumers. It is a very tremendously difficult thing to do. And even if you try to spend time doing this, a lot of what you see isn't just what you want to see, right, It's not just the account that you follow. A lot of it is algorithmically driven. The algorithm is a black box, and it's serving you content that is not necessarily having your best interest in mind.
Right.
So, I think social media are best understood in that space as a place where misinformation can spread very very fast and unchecked and can do a lot of damage before anybody can really do anything about it. And that's assuming they want to do something about it, which you know now what we know about major social media companies. With Donald Trump in again in the White House, they're previously held positions of trying to fact check and maybe
halt the spread of misinformation. Those commitments are no longer there, right. So it is very difficult, I think, for you as a news consumer to just operate out in the world right now, because it's very time consuming. It's very difficult to curate a space for yourself, and it's really it's really hard.
Yeah, no, it really is.
I know.
I am I had an intern this summer, very smart young woman, pretty savvy news consumer, wanted to work for a climate news organization, and like, in our first conversation, she told me that she exclusively gets her news from this one newsletter on substack, And I looked up the guy who does it, and he's just he's like a policy and pr guy. Not She's like, yeah, some he like often gets news stories out even before you know,
the major newspapers. And they said, well, yeah, because he's not doing any reporting or fact checking, so it's pretty fast.
Worse could have been some guy on TikTok, right, I could have been I know.
So yeah, it's not even like, oh you know, I don't know like doma un educated people are getting their news that way, but everybody, like everybody is really doing it.
John, I know you've like you know, worked with these companies and stuff too.
So curious to hear your thoughts as well.
Yeah, it feels like a lifetime ago now, But I did do some work with Facebook on fact checking climate misinformation back when they cared about that, So I think the people I worked with are the longer even there, or at least that whole department seems to have been disappeared, But what we were doing was like, well, the impression I got from working with Facebook was that they were concerned about the perception that they were allowing this information
to spread on their platform, and so they were being pushed in these different directions. There was like conservative politicians that were bullying Zuckerberg in public hearings about censoring climate misinformation, as they put it, and then there was a lot of people criticizing them for letting this information spread. So they were trying to thread this path of least controversy, which I thought was interesting. And one way that they tried to manage it was by publishing what they call
the Climate Change Information Center. I haven't even checked to see whether it's still online now, and the idea there was promote facts about climate change, but also they were debunking some climate myths, and myself and a few other scientists who work on debunking were helping them write those. So it was an interesting experience. It was good that they were at least trying something, and we were constantly
pressuring them to try to go further. But what I learned from that is that these corporations are not a single money with, but there's lots of forces within them, all tugging in different directions, and so that made after it was a case of two steps forward, one step back.
Yeah, I want to have you walk me through this typology of disinformation susceptible publics. I found this really useful to this way of thinking about the different groups of people.
Yeah.
Could I have you rattle that off please?
Yeah. So the typology is really a spectrum. So at one end of the spectrum, you have people who are immune to climate misinformation. So if they hear some misinformation on Twitter or x or wherever, they'll you know, they'll see it for what it is. And these people tend to be fairly knowledgeable about climate change so that they are less prone to being misled. Then along the spectrum you have people who are vulnerable to misinformation and people
who are receptive. These are the two groups in the middle, and this is most people. So these people are less knowledgeable about climate change and more susceptible to being persuaded by misinformation. And then at the other end of the spectrum you have disinformation amplifiers. So these people are small in number, but they're often the loudest voices. So they have a disproportionate influence. So you have at the end of the spectrum the people who are more knowledgeable in
one way or the other. But then in the middle you have the people who are less knowledgeable and tend to be more vulnerable. And the consequence of all the usefulness of having this kind of typology is it can help inform communication strategies and often it's about actressing the people in the middle who are vulnerable, helping them building their climate literacy or building their critical thinking and their immunity against misinformation.
I would add just one thing because it ties into the previous question about social media. But like John said, most people are not the amplifiers, but we frequently.
Have this perception that they are.
And it's partly because of those people frequently are the ones who have mastered the social media and what gets rewarded by the algorithm and what doesn't. And you know, I also say vaccine hesitancy because I'm a massachist apparently, and this is really something that.
We see in that space as well.
You know that those amplifiers, those highly motivated, very extreme, these folks, they're just very loud voices of a small minority but they tend to take over the conversation because of how our information environment looks, And I think it's really useful to take the step back and think of the other people in the spectrum.
As John mentioned, that's a lot more people are there.
Yeah.
Yeah, So you mentioned these five key beliefs about climate change that surveys have pinpointed, and conversely, these like five mirror images around misinformation. Can I have you lay those out as well? What are these kind of key believes them? They are opposites that we're seeing.
So the five key beliefs about climate change were originally developed by Ed Maybeck, who happened to be my boss when I was based at George Mason University, and he did a lot of psychological research into how people think about climate change and found that through his survey work, he identified these five key beliefs and he sums them up very piply in just ten words. It's real, it's us,
it's bad. Experts agree, there's hope. So it's about it's about believing that climate change is real, it's happening, humans are causing it, the impacts will be bad. The climate scientists, the experts agree on these scientific points, but there is hope that we can solve climate change. And again, like what Ed Maybach does is based on these five beliefs. It helps inform communication strategies and you can design fairly
simple messages to just boost these five beliefs. I've noticed that since we wrote this chapter and submitted it, Ed Maybach has updated it now Now he calls them six key truths about climate change, and the sixth edition is people agree or something like that, because there's a common misconception that people don't aren't concerned about climate change, whereas in reality, the majority of the public in the US
and globally are concerned. They are on board about climate change, mirroring what both Dominice and I were saying earlier that the disinformation amplifies us a tiny minority. They're like about ten percent of the US public, whereas more than half of the US public are concerned or alarmed about climate change. So that's the that's I guess what it is identified as another important truth or perception.
Yes, I found this so interesting in your research that because the amplifiers are allowed, and because there's this belief that no one else cares, it has a silencing effect. On people who otherwise might talk more about climate I've seen this happen with media too. It has an effect there as well, where if people call in or email newsrooms, a lot of times the head of the newsroom thinks that that means, okay, there must be ten, twenty fifty, even one hundred other people who feel this way and
just didn't take the initiative to reach out. So it really has a big impact on how stuff gets covered because they take that as being a signal from the audience.
And yeah, that's a really important dynamic and one of those more subversive impacts of misinformation. We kind of think of misinformation's main impact is that it just causes people to believe wrong things, but it can have a range of impacts, such as reducing trust in scientists or institutions. And this is one of the bigger ones is this misconception, which psychologists call pluralistic ignorance, the fact that we're ignorant
that people concerned about climate change are the majority. And when we have this misconception of pluralistic ignorance, it has a silencing effect, which causes this spiral of silence where no one's hearing anyone else talk about it, so we all tend to stay silent. And the real world implication of that is that it reduces the social momentum that we need to get climate action and that's quite a damaging impact.
Climate change misinformation has shifted in the last ten years or so. What would you say are the four major arguments found in climate misinformation today?
Yeah, So, some colleagues that I worked with based in the UK and Ireland, we developed an AI model to track climate misinformation arguments and built a twenty year history of what are the ebbs and flows of climate misinformation and we found this long term, twenty year trend where misinformation was gradually transitioning away from the science denial and more towards attacking climate solutions. And so we see that climate solutions misinformation is really the future of what climates
information is going to be increasingly focused on. And that's what the discourses of delay are. So those are the arguments designed to delay climate action. And the four main arguments that we identify in the chapter is firstly that overall argument that climate change can't be solved, that it's the opposite of the there's hope climate by saying there's
no then there's emphasizing the downsides of climate action. So that's and we hear this argument not only in climate change, but also we heard a lot during the pandemic, actually the argument that the cure is worse than the problem. But major argument we identified was redirecting responsibility for climate
change to others. And I think that fossil fuel industry have actually done a really clever effective job in trying to shift the blame for climate change away from themselves to individuals, saying, you, as an individual, have to solve climate change. And not many people know that the first carbon footprint calculators were funded by the fossil fuel industry.
Now we're trying to get us thinking about our individual carbon footprint so that we weren't thinking about trying to transition away from fossil fuels.
Right, it's a fossil fuel company saying, you know, we're planting trees while they're lobbying against emission rules.
Right, what are you doing?
Right? Yeah, And that's really the fourth argument we identify in the chapter, which is advocating solutions that really don't answer the main thing that we needed, such as like we you know, we do need to reduce our individual footprint, but that's only going to get us a tiny part of the way. The real solution is transforming the way we get our energy, and so I think another example of that is promoting gas, meat, and gas as a bridge to renewables. That's just another way of delaying the action,
kicking the can further down the road. And the fact that it's called natural gas, like that's how they brand themselves, is just another form of greenwashing. It's a way of making them portraying themselves as this natural, cleaner form of energy when it's still just a fossil fuel.
Yeah.
Absolutely. Can I have you explain what the FLICK framework is and how we can use it to understand climate misinformation.
So FLICK comes out of the logical research into how do we build public resilience against misinformation, And one of the ways to do that is by inoculating people by explaining the techniques used to mislead. Once people understand the logical fallacies and the misleading rhetorical techniques in misinformation, they're
less likely to be misled. So FLICK was developed as a as a framework for just helping people remember the misleading techniques they stand for fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry picking, and conspiracy theories, which are five of the main denial techniques not used used not just in climate change but across all areas of science. Dominique mentioned being a masochist and working on vaccine as idency, we see
the flick techniques. Yeah, we see those techniques in vaccine misinformation, just the same as climate.
Missf I mean, it definitely seems like the erosion of trust and experts and science that happened as a result of decades of climate misinformation set us up for a lot of the mis info that we saw during the pandemic.
Oh absolutely, Like climate misinformation has been happening for decades since the early ninety nineties, and it's just been creating this fertile ground for building distrust of scientific institutions and not just climate scientists, but science more generally. So when we came around to the pandemic, the playbook was there.
Like what happened over like a six to twelve month period during the pandemic was like a compressed version of the last few decades of climate misinformation, using all the same techniques. Even the same people were involved, Like climate deniers were also then promoting vaccine misinformation. So it's all cut from the same clock.
We kind of talked about this silencing effect already, but I want to have you talk about it a little bit more. You know, any other kinds of silencing that happen when I guess when yeah, when people are curing all these misleading messages, you know, thinking that everyone else doesn't really care, all those kinds of things. What are the other kind of society wide impacts.
Well, another thing we talk about in the chapter that we haven't covered yet in this conversation is the silencing or the chilling effect it might have on the scientific community. So scientists are humans too, surprise, surprise. And when people when a community is being bombarded with stereotype attacks, then just even without themselves realizing it, they tend to behave
in a way that tries to avoid that stereotype. So when climate scientists are being attacked for being alarmists, then they tend to downplay the alarming results in their scientific research to avoid that exception of being an alarmist. And so there's been studies that have found that climate scientists tend to err on the side of leash drama trying to downplay the more alarming results in their research.
And there's a fair amount of aspect that many people experience as well.
You mentioned they need the people who would call in, you know, they write, They write emails too, they send physical mail. I personally have gotten things, mostly in relation to my work on vaccine hesidency. I think vaccine like vaccine dent, anti vaxer folks tend to be very motivated and they really push back. But I've heard stories from from from colleagues working in the climate space as well, So it frequently also means actual harassment, which isn't very pleasant.
But going back to your initial original question, it isn't just misleading people, right. It then reshapes institutions. So like John said that it will reshape the institution of science because maybe scientists will speak differently, or maybe they'll they won't engage in public as much with their work as they would have done otherwise. It reshapes institutions and policy because it enables you know, greenwashing and all these other
things that John mentioned in the previous answer. So I think when you zoom out, what this tells us is that it's not just specific pieces of misinformation and how
it impacts public opinion per se. It's not just about the ad level, it's also about the system level guard guardrails that we need to have in place, right, And I think a lot of this is highlighted in the case study that we have in a chapter written by our written by our colleague, UH Jean Farlow's host Brown Miguel, who wrote the case study on on on digital populism and President Bolsonaro and Brazil, where these uh, these climate
misinformation actions where transitioning entire institutions within the government of Brazil. So it didn't just impact specific people, It impacted how actual governmental agencies are run, how they're staffed, what they do, and uh that the impacted not just what's happening in Brazil, but but you know, what they did on an international stage and obstructing climate talks, et cetera. So it shows you how those narratives have the power to reship entire institutions, right.
And I think the line that Jean Carlos had in our case that he was in Brazil and mean became a ministry memo, and that really kind of captures I think what has happened, right.
I think what's happening in the US now is particularly interesting that issue of this misinformation influenced seeping into the scientific community, that concept of seepage. We were drawing on a lot of the work of Stephan Landowski is a researcher in Bristol, and he also has written about the subterranean war on science, which has been this kind of a quiet, almost hidden war of harassment or bullying of academics.
And a lot of it has been and I'm sure this is the case with what Dominic was talking about being harassed. Often US academics will be pressured or bullied, but it's kind of hidden, really a lot of it. But now it's open. It's like we've gone from a
cold war to a hot war. And in the US that the war on climate science is overt now where research is being defunded, climate information or just even mentions of climate are being stripped from government websites, and it's just a lot more overt this hostility and trying to undermine climate science.
Okay, can I have you please explain why correcting this information isn't enough and since it's not, what would be enough to combat this problem or at least start to.
Yeah, we've talked a lot about motivation, and when people motivated to reject information, to reject the facts, then fact checking can struggle to be effective with those types of people. So fact checking, I think is necessary but insufficient. Like, we do need to push back against misinformation, but it's it's not the whole answer, and it won't work in all cases. So we do need a range of solutions, and one of them we've already discussed, which is inoculating
people against the misleading techniques of misinformation. The psychology research shows that that approach that we call it technique based in opulation or logic based in opulation. Sorry to get all jargoning on you, but that approach works across the political spectrum. Nobody likes being misled, whether they're conservative or liberal, so explaining the techniques used to mislead can help neutralize
polarizing client misinformation across the spectrum. The other thing we discuss, which is a lot more challenging but really important, is making systemic changes to make misinformation harder to spread. This was the kind of thing that I was advocating for Facebook to do, to build into their algorithms systems to make it harder for misinformation to spread, and they quite
resistant against it. So I think that it's a very difficult thing to achieve, but we need to keep working to try to make those happen.
Use this term in the book that I'd never heard, and I love it, So I want to end on having you define it for us. What is jiu jitsu persuasion?
Yeah, the idea was proposed by Matty Hornsey, who's a colleague at the University of Queensland here in Australia. And the idea with jujitsu, it's about it's like using your opponent's weight, like working with their momentum rather than trying
to push back against it. And the idea communication context is that rather than present scientific misinformation in a way that threatens people's motivations, beliefs, identity, present instead the science information in a way that that aligns with people's motivations or idea of this so you try to work with it rather than against it. So I'll give you a tangible example then, and this actually comes back to that idea of solutions aversion that I talked about way at
the beginning. So there was a study that found that they presented climate change information in two ways. The climate science information was exactly the same in both ways, but in one message they said climate change is real, therefore we need to regulate the fossil fuel industry. In the other message, they said climate change is real, therefore we
need to promote the nuclear industry. And they found that among Republicans they hated the fast message regulate the fossil fed industry in that way, but they were much more welcoming of the nuclear industry message, and so their attitude about climate change was vastly different. Depending on the message. The scientific information presented was exactly the same, but the solution was different. One threatened ideology and the other offend.
That's it for this time. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. You can find more on this season, including transcripts and lots of related articles and background information, on our website at drilled dot Media. You can also sign up for our newsletter there. Our producers for this season are Martin Saltz Ustwick and Peter duff. Our theme song is Bird in the Hand by a
foreknown Our cover art is by Matthew Fleming. Our first Amendment attorney is James Wheaton with the First Amendment Project. The show was created, written, and reported by me Amy Westervelt. Thanks for listening and see you next time.