Misinformation, Disinformation, and the Climate Sciences: Part 1 Prevention

Science and social media

Treen et al.’s (2020) main worry is the societal harm is being caused by the corrupting influence of climate skepticism on public policy. As such it is more a Social Science (it was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council) than a Climate Science article. Their analysis is based on a literature study that specifically excluded climate alarmism: “the amount of literature examining climate change alarmism is negligible compared to that examining climate change skepticism”.

In other words, more Social Science articles deal with climate skepticism than climate alarmism as a societal problem. The exclusion of climate alarmism however constitutes an observational bias as to the type of climate misinformation that forms a problem, and essentially assumes climate skepticism has a much greater potential to cause societal harm. Part 2 demonstrates that such an assumption is likely false.

The article mainly worries about the corrupting influence of social media: their concern is that misinformation published in blogs, Facebook, etc. in swaying the public opinion. But are large groups of people’s opinions truly swayed by information from the internet? Most scientists, journalists and policymakers – and even the general public – know that social media is a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what other people are putting in at the other end, and looking for scientific Pearls of Wisdom requires sifting through tons of other’s muck.

Spending 30 min reading through ideological rantings on Twitter has no scientific value: you cannot refer to it in a scientific article, and quoting it as a journalist or politician involves taking the possibly career-ending risk that the information you’ve gullibly read there was not the disinformative work of a troll.

Even your friends will roll their eyes if you claim “I know it’s true because I read it on somebody’s Facebook page”. As a test, think of a hypothesis so ridiculous that you would wager a significant amount that no one in their right mind would believe it. Now do an internet search, and discover that not only has someone beaten you to the punch in publishing it, but that a significant number of followers found it before you thought it. My “illuminati moon base” test clearly was not creative enough as its Facebook page already has 526 likes (I refuse to link to it).

Most people’s reaction to such a page is “well, let them have fun with it, as long as they’re not harming anyone”, but draw the line when such beliefs cause societal harm, for example when significant amounts of tax money are diverted from disaster relief to waging war on the lunar illuminati. Treen et al.’s article should be framed in that context: their concern is not that individuals get funny ideas in their head, but that collectively such individuals demand changes in governmental policy and resource (manpower, money) allocations, whereby things that urgently need fixing don’t get fixed.

The article has a strong US focus and was written in the run-up to the 2020 election that pitted a climate low-active Trump against a climate pro-active Biden. The article fretted that “conservative white males who vote Republican” were participating in misinformative echo chambers. Which is ironic because it is exactly this group that swung the election in Biden’s favor https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/14/joe-biden-trump-black-latino-republicans, indicating that the bulk of the climate skeptic misinformation on social media has either no impact or an unintended one.

The impact of misinformative social media is therefore greatly overstated by the article, as it demonstrably didn’t sway voters towards more climate skeptic government.

Determining what constitutes climate skeptic misinformation

What can we make of the CO2 coalition’s claim that https://co2coalition.org/facts/ “The warming effect of each molecule of CO2 declines as its concentration increases” ? Wikipedia suggests there might be some truth to it, as CO2 climate forcing increases logarithmically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing#Forcing_due_to_changes_in_atmospheric_gas with CO2 concentration.

The statement is one that some (for example Treen et al., see below) might label “climate skepticism”, published by an organization that some might consider a group of climate deniers. The coalition’s stated goal is “educating thought leaders, policy makers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy”, i.e. they want to impact society. Treen et al. propose that AI algorithms would test the post, and – if judged misinformative – would automatically take action, such as removing the post, pre-emptively providing correct information, or explicitly warning people they might be misinformed.

However, if humans have problems determining whether the statement is factual, then outsourcing such decisions to AI is inviting disaster, as anybody who has spent time in Twitter purgatory for an innocent post can testify. It is clear that the coalition’s claim would benefit from a scientific review, or a vigorous debate, whereby trusted scientific authorities sift through the information both for and against, and render a verdict: factually correct or incorrect, likely true, possible but unproven, etc. A vigorous debate on the societal harm caused by increasing levels of CO2 should ultimately result in a scientifically credible view, which benefits society by giving scientific credence to CO2 regulation policies.

However, scientists willing to engage with a group of possible climate deniers are often censored, so in practice such publications are often automatically – but possibly incorrectly – labeled as “misinformative”.

Political ideologues on both sides of the aisle may have a strong emotional response when The Lancet retracts an article on the (lack of) benefits of using Hydroxychloroquine in Covid treatments https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31180-6/fulltext

The scientific method features large in this retraction: the authors could not provide  the full dataset to the reviewers, so the reviewers could not falsify the null hypothesis “Hydroxychloroquine treatment does have an effect on Covid”. The authors themselves retracted the article, implying that all scientists involved agree on the process: the retraction preserves both the authors’ and journal’s scientific reputation and integrity, and prevents any potential societal harm caused by its untimely publication.

In doing so, The Lancet reclaimed its scientific authority in what had become a highly politicized debate. It is our scientific, altruistic duty to society to correct a news article that spreads misinformation. This is obvious when a “wrong” conclusion is reached. Suppose your article reaches a conclusion that “Industrial expansion in Szechuan is limited by the nature areas populated by pandas” and a news reporter writes “Scientist claims panda extermination key to Szechuan economic growth!”.

You would likely want to vigorously scrub any news articles linking your name and reputation to that conclusion, and attempt to prevent the real-world unintended consequence of a Szechuan pandacide. But how about an article that quotes your research suggesting that meat-eaters are more egotistical and less social than vegetarians? (see Part 2) The ideological belief that a possibly misinformative statement will eventually be “proven true” does not absolve a scientist from correcting such its premature publishing until it has been validated via the scientific method.

John Stuart Mill suggests to give a voice to our opponents:

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion […]

Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them. […] He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.” (On Liberty, 1859).

In effect, both Popper and Mill are promoting vigorous reviews by skeptics, and (scientific) debates between (scientific) opponents. Any scientific authority that quashes such debate is gambling with their reputation.

A false, unscientific narrative that gains popularity does so because a large segment of the  public no longer trust their scientific authorities, which highlights the need for scientists to provide better information to counteract the disinformation. Scientists may need to re-evaluate their theories when definitive studies are old and new data has been acquired in the meantime: a re-analysis of all observations, including the data acquired since the previous analyses, establishes whether a scientific doctrine needs improving or replacing.

So, we should be grateful to the group of researchers who in in April 2015 published (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25898051/) a study reassessing whether the MMR vaccine increases the risk for autism spectrum disorder. A peer-review established the article’s credibility, and our science ethics encourage us to think critically about this publication’s findings, methodology, sampling method, etc., and to publish any criticisms.

Skeptics are a necessary part of the scientific community, so competent ones should be welcomed not censored.

Karlova N. A., & Fisher K. E. (2012). “Plz RT”: A social diffusion model of misinformation and disinformation for understanding human behaviour. Proceedings of the ISIC2012, Tokyo.

Treen, K. M. d’l., et al. (2020) Online misinformation about climate change, WIREs Climate Change, doi:10.1002/wcc.665