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When I was an early career teacher, I taught eighth grade. I remember a pattern of wrangling with parents about their children’s grades. The school guidance counselor would console me afterward, musing that, if the kids would only do their homework, things would be easier for them. It seemed to be a constant struggle, where family belief systems of meritocracy didn’t coalesce with a youthful need to work hard to get ahead.
Now, as I look at the preponderance of climate conspiracies swirling around us, I have to ask: are today’s climate conspiracists the same kids who failed to do their science lab…
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When I was an early career teacher, I taught eighth grade. I remember a pattern of wrangling with parents about their children’s grades. The school guidance counselor would console me afterward, musing that, if the kids would only do their homework, things would be easier for them. It seemed to be a constant struggle, where family belief systems of meritocracy didn’t coalesce with a youthful need to work hard to get ahead.
Now, as I look at the preponderance of climate conspiracies swirling around us, I have to ask: are today’s climate conspiracists the same kids who failed to do their science labs? Or, equally important, was literacy an important and nurtured cultural norm in their households? A significant factor associated with climate conspiracies is distrust in science, which often arises from beliefs about what it means to know the world. When we have the tools to read our worlds, we have a much more nuanced understanding of its ebbs and flows.
Damico and Baildon argue in their book, How to Confront Climate Denial, that propaganda driven by historical, societal, and corporate identities creates climate conspiracies. They claim, rather arising from science, fallacies feed political engines that force people to take sides in the face of an overwhelming complexity of information. As adults, do my former students have the strategic awareness to gain critical distance from the texts of their lives and figure what is and is not climate wool being pulled over their eyes?
A report released this week published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine details the strongest evidence to date that carbon dioxide, methane, and other planet-warming greenhouse gases are threatening human health. Another new report concludes that, if the planet continues to warm at its current rate, exposure to wildfire smoke will kill an estimated 70,000 people in the US each year by 2050.
How will self-serving individuals reconstruct these reports to fit the narrative of climate conspiracies? What if the average person hasn’t been trained to deconstruct logical fallacies embedded in political discourse? It seems like there are new climate conspiracies ready for the picking.
Climate Conspiracies Rise from a Lack of Climate Knowledge
Scientific research overwhelmingly affirms the relationship between the human activity of burning fossil fuels and the rise in global temperatures, which threatens our existence. Yet political ideology, populist attitudes, age, and distrust of scientists primarily mold belief systems that adhere to climate change conspiracies. For example, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright last week referred to the European approach to embracing renewables as succumbing to “climate ideology.”
Conspiracy theories like this have become an increasingly important part of the political realm, especially in the US. “The profit-driven platform model, where sensational falsehoods outperform factual updates in emergencies, ensures this problem persists across political cycles, and it can put lives at risk,” Callum Hood, head of research at the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, told Bloomberg.
Beliefs in climate conspiracies are common in individuals with lower education levels and right wing ideologies, yet other indicators like populist attitudes, low self-esteem, and age are also markers. Climate conspiracists tend not to sift through contradictory evidence; instead, their beliefs inform them whether to integrate new information about the climate crisis into their worldview.
It’s more likely for a person or group of people to endorse climate conspiracies if they view climate knowledge as tentative, rely on intuition to understand climate change, and have weaker beliefs in the interconnectedness of climate knowledge and its reliance on experts and scientific sources. The hands-on activities that connect scientific principles to everyday experiences seem to be fleeting in today’s social media-focused world. Personal observation is crucial for individuals to make independent scientific explanations of real world phenomena like the climate crisis.
The Emergence of Black Market Research
The Trump 2.0 administration has seeded climate conspiracies as it has propped up the nascent fossil fuel industry. As it has sought to dismantle climate science, it has waged a war on wind and solar — really, renewable energy as a whole. Instead of out-and-out contradicting that humans are heating the planet, they redirect the discussion into suggestions that warming can be attributed to natural cycles or variability in the sun. They dispute sea level rise and the stated risks of extreme weather events.
Of course, none of these positions is supported by peer-reviewed scientific research.
What happens when the publication of fraudulent science grows at a faster rate than that of legitimate research?
Due to the large scale and specialization of contemporary science of their research, scientists seem to be recognized more for their rankings in journals than the actual merit of their work. This opens the door to fraud, as some researchers have circumvented the traditional route of acquiring peer-reviewed acknowledgement. A study conducted at Northwestern reveals that cases of fraud are often not isolated incidents but, rather, the result of complex networks that operate systematically to undermine the integrity of science.
The study demonstrated through case studies that:
- individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals;
- brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale; and,
- within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud. Our results reveal some of the strategies that enable the entities promoting scientific fraud to evade interventions. This ability to evade interventions is enabling the number of fraudulent publications to grow at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science. Footprints of activities connected to scientific fraud extend beyond the production of fake papers — they’re found in “brokerage roles in a widespread network of editors and authors who cooperate to achieve the publication of scientific papers that escape traditional peer-review standards.”
The work of AI researcher Song-Chun Zhu has the potential to add another dimension to this discussion of complex communication networks and their effect on climate action. He takes the position that the sign of true intelligence is the ability to reason towards a goal with minimal inputs. Zhu calls it a “small data, big task” approach, as opposed to the “big data, small task” approach that is the basis of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
This small language model (SLM) focus is a lot different than LLMs. Foundation models are large AI systems trained on massive datasets to learn about specific domains. Unlike general-purpose large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, scientific foundation models are tailored for specialized fields, enabling researchers to generate more precise and reliable predictions. While they share the same transformer architectures as larger models, techniques like knowledge distillation, pruning, and quantization help SLMs to achieve impressive task-specific performance with a fraction of the resources. In fact, because SLMs employ domain-specific training datasets, they thrive in focused applications — like climate scenario analysis.
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