Nearly 15% of Americans deny the reality of climate change, AI study finds

Using social media data and artificial intelligence, a new study from the University of Michigan finds that nearly 15% of Americans deny the reality of climate change.

Scientists have long warned that a warming climate will put communities around the world at increasing risk from unprecedented levels of flooding, wildfires, heat stress, sea level rise and more. Moreover. Although the science is strong – even showing that man-made, climate-related natural disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity sooner than initially expected – climate change is still not fully accepted as true in the USA.

Researchers used data from Twitter (now X) from 2017 to 2019 and AI techniques to understand how social media propagated climate change denial, analyzing the data to estimate belief and change denial rates climatic.

The study, published in the journal Scientific reports, also identified key influencers, such as former President Donald Trump, and how they spread and cement misinformation about climate change by leveraging global and weather events.

“Before the advancement of AI and social media data, this work relied on costly and time-consuming surveys,” said study lead author Joshua Newell, professor and co-director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the UM School for Environment and Sustainability.

Using ChatGPT’s extensive language model, Newell and colleagues classified more than 7.4 million geocoded tweets as “for” or “against” climate change and mapped the results to the state and county levels . They then used statistical models to determine the typical profile of a person who does not believe in climate change and performed network analysis to identify the social network structure in terms of climate change belief and denial.

The study found that 14.8 percent of Americans deny the reality of climate change, consistent with previous national studies, and also identified demographic and geographic groups where denial persists.

Analysis of geocoded tweets found that belief in climate change is highest on the West Coast and East Coast, and denial is highest in the central and southern regions of the country, with more than 20% of respondents populations of Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama. and North Dakota, made up of people who don’t believe in climate change.

The researchers also revealed that belief in climate change can vary widely within states. For example, in California, where less than 12% of the population disbelieves in climate change, one county in particular, Shasta County (in northern California), has recorded climate change denial rates as high as 52 %.

Similarly, the average denier percentage in Texas is 21%, but at the county level it ranges from 13% in Travis County (home to the state capital, Austin) to 67% in the county of Hockley (near Lubbock in northwest Texas). ).

The results show that political affiliation plays the most influential role in determining whether or not a person believes in climate change, with a high percentage of Republican voters having the highest correlation with climate change deniers.

Additionally, researchers found a strong link between climate denial and low COVID-19 vaccination rates, suggesting broad skepticism of the science. Other variables they say influence opinion on climate change include education level, income and the degree of dependence of the regional economy on fossil fuels to produce energy.

“This indicates that communities with a high prevalence of climate change deniers are at risk of ignoring other scientific health or safety recommendations,” said Dimitrios Gounaridis, a researcher at UM’s Center for Sustainable Systems and l one of the main authors of the study. .

The study would also be the first to identify which of X individuals influence belief or denial of climate change and to what extent. Furthermore, it shows how climate change deniers and supporters have mostly formed separate X-communities, creating echo chambers that do not interact with each other.

The results show that Trump has the greatest influence, along with three influential groups that have widely retweeted him – The Daily Wire, Breitbart and Climate Depot – in addition to conservative political commentators such as Ben Shapiro.

“During the 2017-2019 study period, the most retweeted post included one from Trump questioning climate change due to unusually cold weather in the United States, and another in which he questioned a report of the UN on climate,” Newell said. “In almost half of the tweets analyzed, the most common refrain was that ‘climate change isn’t real.’ Other common explanations were that humans are not the main cause and that climate change experts are unreliable. »

Newell says that while there is widespread awareness that social media users like Trump can be influential, it is striking how influential some individuals play a role in shaping and consolidating the public opinion on crucial issues such as climate change.

“What is frightening, and somewhat disheartening, is how divided the world is between belief and denial of climate change,” he said. “The respective X echo chambers have little communication and interaction with each other.”

Newell notes that the study did not analyze new social media outlets, such as Truth Social, one of the main channels for disseminating Trump’s recent social media posts.

“Influencers like Trump are creating their own echo chambers outside of X, which in many ways is even more concerning,” he said. “People tend to selectively credit or discredit evidence based on their beliefs, which is why fake experts come to serve as credible messengers.”

“This is the basis of the theory of identity-protective cognition, which helps explain, for example, why Republican voters are more likely to believe Trump’s tweets about climate change rather than other, more reliable – it is an affirmation of identity.”

With election season in full swing, the study’s authors suggest that social media companies should flag misinformation when it appears on their platforms and consider banning users who consistently spread falsehoods.

“The information revealed in this study provides a basis for developing strategies to counter this knowledge vulnerability and reduce the spread of misinformation by identifying communities most at risk of not adopting measures to increase resilience to the effects climate change,” Newell said. said. “We have learned that a relatively small number of individuals have great influence in spreading misinformation about climate change.

“Social media companies have banned users for this type of behavior in the past and other topics, such as when Twitter banned Trump due to tweets sustaining election fraud and supporting the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 (his account has since been deleted).”

The other authors of the study are Jianxun Yang, former visiting scholar at the Center for Sustainable Systems and currently research assistant professor at the School of Environment at Nanjing University, and Miaomiao Liu, associate professor at the Nanjing University School of Environment. .