Misinformation, Disinformation, and the Climate Sciences: Part 1 Prevention
The first article suggests the author of the second article might in future be fined and imprisoned if an AI algorithm flags his article as climate skeptical misinformation. The suggestion is largely derived from a Treen et al. (2020) article that worries about the systemic dissemination of misinformation on social media, and its potential harmful impact on society.
It advocates such toe-curling cures as governmental regulation, fines and imprisonment for offenders. What is misinformation, and how can we prevent it? Part 1 of this article deals with misinformation, and how to combat it in an effective and scientific manner. Part 2 takes a long scientific look at the “climate alarmist” article that caused the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) controversy, and at our currently floundering peer-review process that enables the scientific publishing of misinformation.
Misinformation and Disinformation
The distinction between misinformation and disinformation is that the latter intends to deceive, that is willingly and knowingly communicates false information (Karlova & Fischer, 2012; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation): intent is an important factor in determining whether the author’s motives are benign or malicious. Most people regularly engage in misinformation, for example you mention you’ll be at a party at 7 PM but actually show up at 7:30.
Your intent was not to deceive, but through carelessness, bad planning, traffic, etc. your conveyed information was inaccurate. Scientific articles occasionally misinform too, but we tend to believe scientists are driven by an altruistic search for objective truths, and are not promoting ideological beliefs, or seeking material gains or social Kudos.
We therefore trust that the scientific community will willingly self-correct misinformation on learning more objective truths. Disinformation however is knowingly communicating false information that intends to deceive, for example stating you will arrive at 7 PM when you are planning to leave home at 7:30.
Treen et al. (2020) however consider disinformation asubclass of misinformation, so their proposals for preventing and combatting misinformation run the risk of censoring both the benignly misguided as well as malicious propagandists.
Since 1665 the scientific community has a tried and tested way of battling mis- and disinformation that doesn’t involve censorship, fines or imprisonment: Henry Oldenburg, the first editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, introduced the peer-review process, whereby an author’s scientific peers would verify a publication’s scientific accuracy.
We therefore tend to trust that a scientifically published article – such as Treen et al. (2020) – contains objective truths as it has been vetted by a panel of editors and reviewers that are driven by altruistic, not ideological, motives. For the last 25+ years however the standards of many publications – even well-renowned ones that are considered scientific authorities such as Nature and Science – has been slipping, and their peer-review process has increasingly been failing the scientific community (see Part 2).
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”.
Determining what is misinformative is often highly subjective. Treen et al. specifically exclude skepticism in its original meaning (an integral part of the scientific method), but explicitly include usage to mean those who doubt climate change or reject mainstream climate science. Note that many “fringe” theories that buck the mainstream viewpoint, such as Continental Drift, the K-T meteor impact, etc. often become mainstream following an updated analysis, and that words like “doubt” and “reject” are vague and open to interpretation.
Retracting and correcting mis- and disinformation
The recent Covid crisis demonstrated that science can become highly politicized when political opponents promote conflicting scientific theories. Most will recognize that a scientific reputation is highly prized but easily lost: a single overtly ideological and un-retracted article can cause a reputational downfall, and a complete, career-ending loss of trust in a scientist or an institution.
An article on Covid treatment is more influential – and trusted – when it is published by one of the more scientifically-reputable medical journals, such as “The Lancet” or “The New England Journal of Medicine”, both of which can be considered as present-day scientific authorities. The reason scientists and the general public trust these publications is their scientific reputation, which is based on our trust of the moral and scientific integrity of their editors and reviewers, who we believe are not driven by material, social or ideological motives.
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.
We trust our scientific authorities – mainly the editors and peer-reviewers of our scientific journals – to separate the wheat from the chaff. If scientists disagree with a theory, and can provide coherent arguments that it is in error, then any publication purporting to be scientific should publish the counterview, for example in a “Letters” section, so the readers themselves can judge the scientific merits of both views.
A publication’s failure to do so – from a scientific viewpoint – implies that it is knowingly promoting possibly false information – disinformation – that in the real world could result in a misallocation of resources and cause societal harm. It is down to the editors and reviewers (and lawyers) of these publications to uphold or recover their reputation as trustworthy, unbiased information sources, and not to the self-appointed ideological watchdogs to censor information they don’t agree with.
The Trent et al. article recognizes the dangers of echo chambers, where like-minded individuals bolster each other’s ideological beliefs and mock their critics. Such echo chambers have no place in a scientific community that should welcome alternative views. Karl Popper famously stated “It is easy to obtain confirmations or verifications for nearly every theory – if we look for confirmations. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or refute it” and claimed it is our duty as scientists to actively look for data that would falsify our favorite theory.
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.
The University of Exeter’s proposal to combat misinformation
Treen et al.’s article is misinformative, as it overstates the importance of “conservative white males who vote Republican” echo chambers in shifting for example the outcome of the 2020 elections, so its recommendations on how to combat misinformation are unwarranted: it promotes measures that will very likely result in societal harm to combat a non-problem. The authors’ motives in publishing the misinformation are not stated, but promoting ideological beliefs, or seeking social Kudos seem likely drivers.
The article may have been written to troll climate deniers, or to virtue-signal like-minded Americans, but a more likely reason is the authors want to give “Scientists claim …” credibility to assertions that climate skeptical misinformation is a problem that needs to be urgently addressed. The article is in effect a call for resources to make it more difficult for any scientist to skeptically challenge the mainstream narrative, in effect a call for censorship. The article is therefore promoting societal harm.
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.
It is highly questionable whether US policy-makers will take any advice from a fairly obscure English university, and any attempt to implement any of the the article’s suggestions would result in the mother of all battles with the US judiciary: Americans are rightly proud of their First Amendment rights, and extremely dismissive of any measures based on race, gender, or political affiliation that limit those rights.
It is also highly questionable whether any scientific endeavor is ever improved by government involvement. Recent attempts of the Biden administration to launch a Disinformation Governance Board failed within weeks of its launch due to a wide-spread public backlash from conservatives, progressives and libertarians alike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Board
Similar efforts by the EU (euvsdisinfo.eu) resulted in one their first posts being removed following legal action https://www.geenstijl.nl/5140445/geenstijl-summons-european-union-to-remove-false-allegations-of-disinformation-immediately/ that demonstrated their own post was disinformation.
Politicians are by definition political ideologues, who can be reliably expected to spread misinformation and occasionally disinformation: they are not trusted scientific authorities. Governmental websites battling disinformation therefore are not trusted by the general public. Scientists need to be self-governing or risk opening the door to government intervention.
It is clear that the Treen et al. article suffers from observational bias: their study selected only climate skeptical posts (misinformation they don’t like) and omitted climate alarmist posts (misinformation they don’t think is a problem). By doing so their advocacy for measures mainly intends to silence all skeptical critics – from the severely misguided to the brilliant scientists – who doubt climate change or reject mainstream climate science.
This observational bias should have been flagged at the peer-review stage, as articles that only promote measures for people whose opinion you find offensive are unscientific. Climate alarmism can be defined as a misinformative call to take urgent action when none is required, thereby promoting the misallocation of resources to combat a non-existent threat. Which seems like a fair summary of the Treen et al. article.
Contrary to what the article claims climate alarmism has a much larger societal impact that climate skeptical misinformation, as climate skeptical articles are no longer being published by scientific journals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change or promoted by scientific authorities, in stark contrast to climate alarmist studies.
Part 2 demonstrates how alack of scientific rigor in Nature’s peer-review process is causing societal harm.
References
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
About the author: Koen Vogel PhD received his PhD in Geology from The Pennsylvania State University, worked in the Petroleum Industry for 25 years in a variety of technical and managerial roles, and since his retirement has been engaged in pursuing his intellectual interests. Such interests include reviewing the IPCC reports, authoring a book on Geostatistics (currently in review), and editing technical proposals for start-ups. His latest paper, ‘The Role of Geomagnetic Induction Heating in Climate Change’ is available for open peer review on Principia Scientific International
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
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Whokoo
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I find settled science unsettling.
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Kevin Doyle
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If the proponents of questionable theories had true confidence in their ideas, then they would welcome open discussion and honest debate.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Kevin,
Discussion, yes; Debate, NO!
Have a good day, Jerry
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lloyd
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A debate is a discussion between two sides presenting their evidence for their proposal/beliefs. Are you afraid of Debates?
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Jerry Krause
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Hi PSI Readers and Lloyd,
I was reviewing past articles to possibly see why there are usually so few comments about articles which I consider are about recent articles related to recent very fundamental observations which have never been made before.
Here,Vogel’s Part 1 article got 12 comments and Part 2 has not gotten one comment.
However, I see I had not responded to your question: “Are you afraid of Debates?” And I now consider I should have answered: No, I consider science should be based upon reproducible experimental results. Hence, there is nothing to DEBATE. However, I just looked up a definition of discussion and found: dis·cus·sion | dəˈskəSHən, noun, ”the action or process of talking about something in order to reach a decision or to exchange ideas”
I consider “to reach a decision” and “to exchange ideas” two completely different actions. Each party of a discussion brings different experiences and known undebatable observations to a discussion. Hence my discussion is a pooling of known experimental results (observations) of which each party may not be aware. After this pooling of information each party of the discussion must reach their own decision if there is a difference of opinion what this pooled, undebatable, information means. There is no need to come to a common agreement which seems the purpose of a debate activity.
Physical Science was founded by Galileo Galilei’s two books about which very few modern scientists have read either. Because for a very long period of time there was no English translation of Galileo’s Italian language (historical fact). (https://principia-scientific.com/us-army-drone-crashes-hours-ahead-of-breaking-flight-duration-record/) and (https://principia-scientific.com/james-webb-telescope-reveals-incredible-views-of-jupiter/) Are two article about new technologies which allow us to observe ‘things’ like we have never been able to observe before in the history of humans.
Yet there are only my serious attempts to discuss about what I now can read.
So, this comment is a serious attempt to generate some serious discussion here at PSI and at the least inform some possible NEW PSI readers about these HISTORICAL PSI ARTICLES. There is a good reason for keeping an archive of past articles and comments.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Greg Spinolae
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No ACTUAL “scientist” would use the term “settled science” which is exact opposite of the MEANING of the word “science”.
The same applies to use of the expression “THE science” if abused to exclude inconvenient hypotheses.
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Andy Rowlands
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Well said Greg.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi PSI Readers.
I am sure that I have never shared this, which my favorite meteorologist, R.C. Sutcliffe, ‘Weather and Climate’ (1966), Chapter 5, The Microsphysics of Clouds, 2nd and 3rd paragraphs) wrote.
“When invisible water vapor in the air reaches saturation point, or sufficiently close to saturation point, enormous numbers of liquid droplets (or solid ice particles) are produced, becoming visible as a ‘cloud’. What determines the degree of saturation or supersaturation necessary to produce cloud? What determines the number and size of the cloud particles? Under what circumstances does condensation take place directly into ice particles? Under what conditions do water droplets freeze or due ice particles melt? What happens to a mixed population of water droplets and ice particles? What factor’s decide whether a ‘cloud’ of small floating particles will give rise to ‘precipitation’ of larger falling particles? What are the processes involved in the transition distinguishing the various forms of precipitation, drizzle, snow, sleet, and hail from ordinary rain?
“Searching for answers to these questions one is brought up against the need for nuclei of condensation and a range of new questions: What is the chemical composition and physical state of the nuclei; which is their origin; how are they transported and eventually removed from the air; are special nuclei required for the formation of ice particles? Looking more closely at the ice phase many notably different types of single crystals and agglomerations are observed, setting in train a new set of inquiries into why, how, when, and where, and still the range of problems is far from exhausted. Many of the curious and intriguing optical phenomena in the atmosphere are caused by ice or water particles, rainbows, glories, coronae and halos of many kinds, while no one can for very long fail to ask how it is that a cloud sometimes manages to produce the electric charges and discharges, necessary for the most violent and spectacular display of nature—the thunder storm. It is sometimes said that the scientific research inevitably raises more problems than it solves and no better support for the thesis could be wished for than the case of cloud microphysics. The subject at the present time is expanding and developing more quickly than ever before, and if we can now give acceptable answers to many question with far more certainty than we could twenty hears ago there are still innumerable doubts and difficulties and the science IS IN A HEALTHY STATE.”
I ask: Why did Sutcliffe write that “the science is in a healthy state”?
Have a good day, Jerry
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Kevin Doyle
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Thank you Jerry,
Good information about Sutcliffe and his book(s). I will track that one down, plus I believe he wrote one in 1939, when he was the meteorologist for the RAF in France.
Your question about why Sutcliffe stated in 1966, “Science is in a healthy state.”, I shall venture a guess. In 1966, American astronomers and engineers were developing a plan to reach the Moon. These folks accurately estimated the surface temperature at the Apollo landing sites by utilizing basic measurements of solar radiation and the Stefan-Boltzman Equation.
Sutcliffe was optimistic due to the abundance of ‘real science’, which was undertaken in the 1940’s-1960’s.
Today, he might be saddened…
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Kevin,
When I wrote my recent comment to Lloyd, I had search for your comment. Supporting my quote–The most obvious is most difficult to see–again. I wanted to suggest you check AbeBooks.com for an inexpensive copy. But I just checked and found a lot of copies available, there is none for less than $10 as I had expected. I really urge anyone with an interest in weather and climate because it was written for the non-scientist even if Sutcliffe claimed it had a serious purpose. And most important he had the practical experience during WWII as at its end he was Chief Meteorological Officer for the British Forces in Europe and probably was part to the team who attempted to predict the weather for the Normandy landing.
Have a good day, Jerry
Have a good day, Jerry
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Wisenox
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Healthy means free from disorder. He’s not saying its truth, he’s saying that they have control over the science. i.e. they have it under their order.
If I had to guess, I would say that you already knew that.
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This is your wakeup call
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Who was it that said to “trust the science”? Oh yeah the governments of the New World Order that seek to kill, enslave and destroy humanity. I think they also say the science is settled.
Science is just another false religion used to fool the people into being obedient slaves.
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Andy Rowlands
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Not all science, but the ‘science’ they are referring to certainly.
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monkey*poops
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that was a good article
one of my aphorisms:
“Follow the Science”: science that is based on consensus and not empirical facts is not a science but ideology, that’s why it need followers.
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