Abstract
We juxtapose 386 prominent contrarians with 386 expert scientists by tracking their digital footprints across ∼200,000 research publications and ∼100,000 English-language digital and print media articles on climate change. Projecting these individuals across the same backdrop facilitates quantifying disparities in media visibility and scientific authority, and identifying organization patterns within their association networks. Here we show via direct comparison that contrarians are featured in 49% more media articles than scientists. Yet when comparing visibility in mainstream media sources only, we observe just a 1% excess visibility, which objectively demonstrates the crowding out of professional mainstream sources by the proliferation of new media sources, many of which contribute to the production and consumption of climate change disinformation at scale. These results demonstrate why climate scientists should increasingly exert their authority in scientific and public discourse, and why professional journalists and editors should adjust the disproportionate attention given to contrarians.
Highlights
We juxtapose 386 prominent contrarians with 386 expert scientists by tracking their digital footprints across ∼200,000 research publications and ∼100,000 English-language digital and print media articles on climate change
According to Media Cloud (MC) project37 data reported in Fig. 1, the term “climate change” is currently used in approximately 104 media article sentences per week, roughly 100 times as much as the term “climate skeptic”, a broad term that collectively refers to contrarians and denialists, and conventional scientific skeptics who are driven by more legitimate motives for dissent28,42
We focus on a select set of contrarians who have publicly and repeatedly demonstrated their adamant counterposition on climate change (CC) issues12—as extensively documented by the DeSmog project (DeSmogblog.com), a longstanding effort to document climate disinformation efforts associated with numerous contrarian institutions and individual actors
Summary
We juxtapose 386 prominent contrarians with 386 expert scientists by tracking their digital footprints across ∼200,000 research publications and ∼100,000 English-language digital and print media articles on climate change. When comparing visibility in mainstream media sources only, we observe just a 1% excess visibility, which objectively demonstrates the crowding out of professional mainstream sources by the proliferation of new media sources, many of which contribute to the production and consumption of climate change disinformation at scale These results demonstrate why climate scientists should increasingly exert their authority in scientific and public discourse, and why professional journalists and editors should adjust the disproportionate attention given to contrarians. A relevant example is motivated reasoning—the tendency for individuals to bias their judgements according to personal- and grouplevel values, even when faced with documented facts19–21 Another class of factors are prominent external influences, owing to elite political cues, ideological biases, cultural worldviews, and even personal weather experiences. As such, addressing the opportunities and threats facing CC communication requires an integrated understanding of these human, social, and technological factors
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