According to a recent study from the University of Michigan, about 15% of the American population does not accept the existence of climate change. This highlights the significant divide in opinions regarding the issue of global warming.

Furthermore, denial of climate change is most prevalent in the central and southern regions of the United States, and research has shown that Republican voters are less likely to accept the findings of climate science.

Researchers utilized artificial intelligence to examine 7.4 million tweets shared by approximately 1.3 million individuals on the social media site X (formerly known as Twitter) from 2017 to 2019. The tweets were geocoded and sorted into categories of either supporting or opposing views on climate change, using a sophisticated language model known as OpenAI.

“More than half of the Twitter posts we examined outright rejected the reality of climate change, dismissing it as a fabrication,” stated Joshua Newell, who co-authored the study and serves as a professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan. “While not unexpected, it was disheartening. I had hoped to see a growing number of Americans acknowledging the existence of climate change and recognizing the urgency of addressing it.”

Donald Trump became a prominent figure among those who deny the existence of climate change. His posts on social media about a cold spell in Texas in December 2017 and his rejection of the 2018 IPCC report, which was presented at the Cop24 UN conference, received a lot of attention from fellow climate change deniers.

According to Newell, public figures like Trump have a strong impact on influencing social media users to doubt climate change when they use these events to do so.

The results align with other research, like the recent analysis from Yale University which predicts that by 2023, approximately 16% of the American population (around 49 million individuals) will not accept the concept of climate change.

The acceptance and faith in global warming is most common on the west and east coasts, which aligns with the high number of Democratic voters in those regions. However, there are still pockets of denial within states that typically vote blue, such as Shasta County, California. In Shasta County, the percentage of people who do not believe in climate change is as high as 52%, but overall, less than 12% of California’s population rejects the concept of global warming.

According to the study, Michael Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that there is a small, yet vocal and engaged group of people who continue to reject the abundant evidence of human-induced global warming.

Mann received a $1 million payout in a libel case against conservative authors who accused his groundbreaking studies on climate change of being deceitful, equating them to the misconduct of a convicted sex offender. In his publication The New Climate War, Mann asserts that it is necessary for scientists to challenge the spread of misinformation and disinformation by malicious individuals on social media, not with the intention of changing their minds as their beliefs are firmly entrenched, but to prevent the spread of untruths, fallacies, and harmful anti-scientific attitudes in the online community, according to Mann.

Scientists utilized AI to categorize numerous social media messages that would have been too costly and laborious to analyze otherwise. However, there are still doubts about the morality of using AI in research, given its known tendency for bias, particularly in facial recognition. This emphasizes the importance of human oversight and verification.

Mann stated that this is a fascinating new tool to utilize for these specific purposes. However, it is important to remember its limitations as it continues to develop as a technology.

Social media platforms are responsible for addressing misinformation and verifying what researchers refer to as “knowledge vulnerability.”

According to Newell, social media companies are taking appropriate measures to monitor false information and take appropriate action. He mentioned Trump’s ban from X (formerly Twitter) after the January 6 riot as an example. Newell also suggests that these influential social media companies should employ similar tactics to combat misinformation about climate change.

Source: theguardian.com