Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change

Abstract

A growing body of scholarship investigates the role of misinformation in shaping the debate on climate change. Our research builds on and extends this literature by 1) developing and validating a comprehensive taxonomy of climate contrarianism, 2) conducting the largest content analysis to date on contrarian claims, 3) developing a computational model to accurately classify specific claims, and 4) drawing on an extensive corpus from conservative think-tank (CTTs) websites and contrarian blogs to construct a detailed history of claims over the past 20 years. Our study finds that the claims utilized by CTTs and contrarian blogs have focused on attacking the integrity of climate science and scientists and, increasingly, has challenged climate policy and renewable energy. We further demonstrate the utility of our approach by exploring the influence of corporate and foundation funding on the production and dissemination of specific contrarian claims.