Researchers dived deep into millions of posts on X (formerly Twitter) curious to probe Americans’ sentiments on the climate change crisis. While people’s opinions on a national level are typically gauged using surveys, this study used a massive trove of social media comments and analyzed them using AI, something that wasn’t possible even just a few years ago. One could argue that such analyses more accurately reflect public sentiment, whether it’s about climate change or who should run for the White House, by virtue of including millions of people rather than a couple thousand typically seen in surveys. But what did the researchers find?
If you think people should trust science more, these findings are sure to disappoint. The researchers found:
- Nearly 15% of Americans deny that climate change is real.
- Opinions on climate change vary greatly across the nation depending on geography. The highest percentage of Americans who trust science and believe climate change is real was determined along the West Coast and East Coast.
- Meanwhile, denialism is highest in the central and southern parts of the country. For instance, more than 20% of the populations of Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, and North Dakota consist of people who do not believe in climate change.
- Even at the state level, opinions could vary dramatically. Across California, only 12% of people think that climate change isn’t happening. However, northern California’s Shasta County had climate change denial rates as high as 52%.
- Political affiliation was the most important factor in predicting whether an American thought climate change was real or not. Republican voters have the strongest correlation with climate change deniers, which confirms regular polls performed earlier.
- Climate denialism was strongly correlated with low COVID-19 vaccination rates. Sadly, this reflects a growing trend of skepticism about science across the United States.
- Among the many accounts on X that spout climate change denialism rhetoric on the platform, former president Donald Trump had the biggest influence. Other influencers with a hand in advancing skepticism towards man-made climate change include political commentators such as Ben Shapiro, as well as publishers such as The Daily Wire, Breitbart and Climate Depot.
“During the 2017-2019 study period, the most heavily retweeted post includes one by Trump that questions climate change due to unusually cold weather in the U.S., and another where he casts doubt on a U.N. climate report,” said study senior author Joshua Newell, professor and co-director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability. “In almost half of the tweets analyzed, the most common refrain was that ‘climate change was not real.’”
“What this indicates is that communities with a high prevalence of climate change deniers are at risk of discounting other science-based health or safety recommendations,” said study lead author Dimitrios Gounaridis, a research fellow at the University of Michigan.
The researchers used data scraped from X from 2017 to 2019. More than 7.4 million geocoded tweets that mentioned climate change were selected for this study. Each tweet was analyzed using ChatGPT’s Large Language Model to gauge whether the author of the post was “for” or “against” climate change. The researchers then used statistical techniques to plot the networks on the social media platform for both climate change belief and denial.
Researchers found that both climate change ‘believers’ and ‘denialists’ form their separate social networks, effectively manifesting echo chambers where there is little chance of crossover. This effectively prevents people from learning about other people’s opinions that differ from one’s entrenched beliefs, unless they outright seek them out. Social media algorithms are consolidating these echo chambers in the name of ‘engagement metrics’. If you don’t like what you hear or see, X, Facebook, or YouTube will serve you less of that and more of what already confirms your views (because that’s typically what people are likely to engage with).
In early 2024, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication ran a survey of more than 32,000 people across the nation, finding just 72% of adults think global warming is happening. That corresponds to roughly 18% of climate deniers, which is not that far from the AI-enabled analysis. Yale additionally found that only 58% of respondents said they believed that global warming is mostly caused by human activities.
More than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans, according to a 2021 meta-analysis of 88,125 climate-related studies.
“We are virtually certain that the consensus is well over 99% now and that it’s pretty much case closed for any meaningful public conversation about the reality of human-caused climate change,” said Mark Lynas, a visiting fellow at the Alliance for Science and the paper’s first author.
However, most Americans must not have gotten the memo. The Yale poll found that only 56% of Americans thought that “most scientists think global warming is happening”.
