 It's truly a pleasure to be here to discuss an unfortunate topic with you, but nevertheless important So I guess to start off any discussion on Climate change denial or climate change policy. We kind of want to talk about the stakes, right? So what are the stakes involved with this issue? Effectively, we're faced with two futures. On the left we have a scenario where Climate changing missions peak before the middle of the century and decline rapidly and the best-case scenario that we can expect is that by the year 2100 we will have experienced only a 1.6 Celsius degree average increase relative to late 19th century The other the other trajectory is the worst-case scenario and Unfortunately, we're on this trajectory. Actually, we're doing worse than this trajectory but what this involves is Emissions don't stop. They actually increase over time and that By the end of the century will have experienced an average 4.3 Celsius degree increase relative to late 19th century so In fact, unfortunately, we are in a Worst-case scenario trajectory plus environment Now what are the impacts of this? We're expected to see a likely average increase in sea level between 0.5 to 1 meter rise in sea level What's what we need to note is that this is not a uniform increase as well So there are certain areas of the world which will experience much more sea level rise than others So for example, the tropics will be 20% higher sea level rise in other places Especially significant risk will be for the small island nations and also the Delta region So Bangladesh for example or even Louisiana and the United States Increased intensity of frequency of heat waves drying up of major rivers Destruction of coral reefs By a massive amount of biodiversity loss and of course negative impacts on agricultural production Including the United States, right? Okay, so those are the those are the stakes that are involved Now we're currently faced with two policy futures I have some quotes here I picked two quotes We have on the left. We have the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. I won't let anyone take us backwards Deny our economy the benefit of harnessing a clean energy future or force our children to endure the catastrophe that would result From unchecked climate change. That's Hillary Clinton November last year Donald Trump is this is a difficult one to pick out which of all the tweets I should pick out January 2014 any and all weather events are used by the global warming hosters To justify higher taxes to save our planet. They don't believe it four dollar signs an exclamation mark I'm not that that's open. We can discuss out later as the kind of interpretations of that So what's you know, what what are we facing here, right? So it's clear that Donald Trump at least in his public speech Denies existence let alone the attribution of climate change to human activity and also it seems that there's a conspiratorial logic to his denial It's an extreme version of denial In his public speech, he's vowed to Repudiate the Paris Accord although that's legally complicated. We can talk about that later if you wish He's proposed to dismantle the EPA to reduce spending He most certainly will drop Obama's clean clean power plan He supports renewed efforts for kind of a renewed Keystone XL pipeline he's He's tagged Kevin Kramer Republican from North Dakota as his likely energy advisor. This is a vocal climate skeptic In general, it's not looking very good for climate policy in the United States with a Trump presidency Although it is hard to to determine his true intentions and how much damage he actually can do But it's clear that he can at least at the very least hold up appointments to key positions and reduce agency budgets Clinton on the other hand, it's quite clear that she's Proclimate policy then we can discuss kind of how much right, but she's proposed to she's promised to uphold the Paris Agreement she wants to increase federal efforts so kind of clean power plan plus right these types of things so It's clear that she would be the proclimate advocate But the sad reality in the United States is that this is a house divided really And if we just looked at say Distribution of climate skeptics vocal climate skeptics in the Senate in the house what we see, you know In the recent 114th Congress, we see that there are 38 Vocal skeptics in the Senate that's 70% of all Republican senators and there are 144 skeptics in the house That's 58% of all Republican Congress people and Because it's such a polarizing polarizing issue What the what's what we've had to do now in the United States is the present would has to circumvent Congress, right? So the the clean power plan all these things are our efforts from the president to circumvent Congress and now actually the clean power plan is in legal trouble So the key point here is that a strong and stable climate policy requires congressional backing But we can discuss that as well later So not only are politicians divided though the electorate the voters are Divided on this issue So here is public opinion data from Gallup on the question of Basically attribution of climate change to human activity Do you believe rise in human temperature in last century is due mainly to human activities? What we see here is that there's a clear divide between Democrats up top Republicans at the bottom so the most recent data suggests that only 38% of Republican voters believe that Humans are causing climate change, whereas 85% of Democrats believe so there is an increase in the independence So this is a good sign Right now 68% of independent voters believe that it's human caused But we shouldn't be too complacent here When it comes to say congressional elections this kind of divide doesn't really or the Independence really don't matter you think about gerrymandering the effects of gerrymandering so forth This has a little bit more of effect on we would say presidential or local elections state elections But if we were to think overall if you just take public opinion overall only one in three Americans believe humans are Not I'm not what I'm sorry one in three Americans believe humans are not the primary cause of Observed climate change and only one in ten Americans understand that over ten over 90% of climate scientists agree on global warming so the major question right so why are Americans so divided on the issue of climate change and Social scientists have been grappling with this question There there are a few hypotheses that have some traction I'll be discussing one of them, which is Motivating my research the first is it could be short-term weather effects of the weather It's cold. It's really cold out there. What's this global warming stuff, right? So we see variation kind of public opinion driven by weather effects the state of the economy when think when times are tough People just climate change goes down the list There's might be some journalistic norms effects in the United States, so Journalists feel compelled to bring in the other side to offer balance but a lot of researchers and myself included are focusing on the influence of an Ideologically conservative contrarian counter movement to climate science and policy So people like Naomi or rescue is at Harvard Raleigh Dunlap Aaron McRite Robert Brawl all American based sociologists This is kind of been true. This is the hypothesis driving their research And so kind of what does this counter movement look like it's been called the denial machine And I guess at the end of the day We're what the argument is that this public opinion data and the division in the house in terms of climate skepticism Is not a ran. It's not it's not generated by a random process, right? This is there's something real going on here behind this and so the structure of this denial denial machine at the top we have Interest groups right so fossil fuel industry corporate America and conservative foundations that seek to Benefit from obstruction of climate policy Either materially or they're driven ideologically to block climate policy So for example to stop government intervention in the private sector Now these organizations then Support materially conservative think tanks and these conservative think tanks are the kind of engine of information for this movement so They these these think tanks leverage their status as a parallel academia they produce policy reports they They're in the media. They hold conferences. They engage directly with policy makers And thus seek to influence policy makers we have front groups which are kind of public outreach groups with euphemistic names and then this is all feeding into what we call the echo chamber which is composed of politicians media and Social media as well and the objective of this whole denial machine is to influence public opinion and to block climate policy now The talk today will be focusing on conservative think tanks. That's where the majority of this research that I'll be presenting has been looking at So with Travis Cohen, who's at the University of Exeter I've studied the communication of these conservative think tanks the major ones in relation to how how they communicate climate change and There's been significant work on this Kind of question of what are they talking about? By as I mentioned earlier my crime Dunlap in 2000 what they did is they sat down and they read over 200 documents Generated by a set of conservative think tanks took them about a summer and they were able to classify Types of arguments right so there's they really came down to three one is that the science is either weak or wrong The second is that well if climate change was to occur it would probably be beneficial and The third is that any policy that any policy action that we take will be will have more harm will do more harm than good So therefore we shouldn't do anything about it But the since then right so since their their study basically covered the majority of the documents They looked at was 1997 to 1998 since then we haven't really had an update And the problem is that since then we have an explosion of information So they looked at their corpus was 240 documents Since then we know now from our study that there's been over 16,000 documents generated by the largest 19 conservative think tanks on the issue of climate change So one problem is just how do you actually read all this stuff, right? So that's where we come in Travis Cohen and I where we leverage Machine learning and natural language processing techniques to help the compute how allow the computer to help us to interpret these documents We'll go into that in a bit or in the in a bit Now one motivating question has been That that that was driving our study is this notion of the air of science than now and it's is it over right? So in 2002, I'm not sure if anyone's familiar with Frank Luntz is a conservative communication strategist in the United States There was a memo that was leaked that a Memo that was circulated among the Republican lawmakers that was leaked that was authored by Frank Luntz and In it he says should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled their views about global warming will change Accordingly the scientific debate is closing against us, but not yet closed There's still a wind of opportunity to challenge the science. So this is 2002 and Basically what Frank Luntz is saying is that we have to change our game plan We need to attack the science head-on. Don't focus on the policy attack the root of the root of the issue Which is the science? Now since 2002 there's been speculation as to well what's going on here? How are these skeptic groups communicating denial, right? Leo Hickman in the Guardian in 2013 made the claim the real world is leaving behind those who flatly reject the science Underpinning the notion that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet So in other words this science skepticism is dead, right? These people are dinosaurs and we've moved on now You know similarly similar claim from the Union of Union of Concerned Scientists in 2015 It's kind of a lighter version But it says deniers now can see that climate change is real but reject the scientific consensus that human activity Mainly burning fossil fuels is driven by it or is driving it rather Right, so the one issue is that we we don't know, right? We don't actually know what how the evolution of the discourses has occurred, right? Because it's been so difficult to study right the man the immense amount of documents and And so this was kind of an auxiliary test of our study to see well How are they treating science? Are they discussing science more than policy or is it inverse over time? Okay, but the first question is kind of what are they talking about? Not to go into detail, but I'll be very happy to go into detail in the question-and-answer period But what we've done is we've had the the computer has allowed has helped us to cluster all these words So in our corpus We have over 24 million unique words right in this collection of documents 16,000 documents We've been able to cluster these words into themes right so we can think of them as topics and That these topics then are we can measure how similar or dissimilar they are to one another And so what we see is we have these kind of clusters of themes within this huge corpus of documents And what we find is that there are certain clusters here that themes have all to do with science scientific integrity Domestic and international politics are that's kind of corrupted there policy and regulation and energy emissions This right here is green jobs the size of these numbers So each of these numbers is an identifier for one of the 47 topics that we found in the corpus and the size of this The the identifier signifies how important that is or in effect in How how often this thing occurs in the sample in the corpus how important it is in other words So there's some takeaways here We see that the discussion of scientific integrity So this is a tax on scientists and scientific bodies themselves as you know at hominem attacks So that there's a conspiracy or that there's a that the climate change is a hoax or that there really is no consensus Among scientists on climate change the words that they use when they discuss those types of arguments is actually Quite different than the scientific discussion that they have right so they use words that are very similar say to what the words that they use in politics, right and So it's not just when they're attacking the scientific bodies They're not using the same words that they use when they're attacking the science itself And this is important because in the experimental literature Psychologists have found that subjects who are exposed to information on consensus are more likely to support climate policy So in a way here the they are they know there's a strategy to have a specific type of attack on the scientists themselves Attacking the consensus for example Now we can take each of those topics and we can isolate them and we can see how these topics trend over time in terms of intensity of discussion Right, so I've selected two of them here to kind of highlight The way that we would interpret this is these are the probabilities of this topic arising Collapse at the quarter level so first second third fourth quarter of a year If I was to take any point here, I would say okay Well, this top graph is signifying the the evolution of the discussion on cap and trade And we see that it spikes at certain periods When the Lieberman-Warner bill was in effect or was put forward and the Waxman-Marcus bills, right? And the way the way I would describe this is I would say at this point in this in this quarter in 2000 late to the 2008, right? If I was to take an average document pull out a document from this corpus of 16,000 documents About 10% of that document would have to do with cap and trade right? So that's the way we would we would interpret this graph the same can be said for the scientific misconduct There's there's a topic that we labeled scientific misconduct and this peaks when the Michael Mann the hockey stick Controversy arose there were congressional hearings on that then when the so-called climate-gate scandal occurred When there was leaked emails from the University of East Anglia There was a spike about kind of this is a conspiracy so on and so forth, right? So we can do this for each of the topics Well getting back to the original question. Well, are they talking about science or they're talking about policy now, right? And how has that evolved over time? What we see is actually Looking at this top graph and I apologize it came out corrupted, but the gray line the gray confidence intervals are the discussion of science and The blue is policy, right? So I took we took all of these topics and we collapsed them into is this about science or is this about politics or policy and What we find is that discussion of science Seems to be dominant in the pre 2007 period, right or 2008 period Then there's an overtaking by policy, but then again going into the 2013 period again, there's a renewed emphasis on on science now This there's some nuance here with our research, which is that we have these 19 conservative think tanks, right? Well We're assuming that all of them are equally important, right? Well, there's some of them that are only devoted to science and we know that so there's a there's an organization called See it with the acronym is CO2 Sino the short version of CO2 science their major emphasis is that Carbon dioxide is actually a good thing and they review academic literature trying to support this argument And so if we remove them from the sample and then we rerun this we see that well policy seems to be dominant But science and policies seem to converge at certain crucial times So for example when an inconvenient truth came out or when the IPCC Was awarded and I'll go were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and later in 2013 and there's also convergence Well again, is this a fair representation of the conservative think tanks or are there certain think tanks that we should actually be focusing on More specifically right so again influence and power within this space is not uniform But we can focus on one actor the Heartland Institute the Heartland Institute has been Called by the economist the world's most prominent skeptical think tank and they display that proudly on their website and they every year they hold a Kind of a climate denialist pseudo scientific conference They had billboards at one point that were equating Climate scientists to Ted Kaczynski the Unabarmour. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them Kind of a domestic terrorist in the United States And what we find is that we only look at the Heartland Institute starting in 2002 going back to that discussion I'm from Frank Luntz right Steering the Republicans one way. We need to focus on the science This organization took that task and they've been increasing their discussion of science ever since and discussion of policy in relative terms Has been going down What we're working on right now is we're trying to study in the same manner other Other components of this Framework right So right now at the moment we're with John Cook from the University of Queensland we're working on the blog the blogosphere so social media and Kind of sneak peek us to our research to our results thus far a similar type of analysis Shows that if we only look at blogs and by blogs, I mean we've gathered a Little little over a quarter million blog posts from 59 climate change skeptic blogs From 2004 to 2016 we see that in at least in social media in the blogosphere the deniers emphasize science Much more than policy And then we can discuss future research in terms of politicians so forth in the Q&A but in conclusion If we were looking just at this conservative think tanks Their discussion has grown rapidly since 1998 since that last kind of Study that I mentioned earlier on and it peaked in 2009 is declined a little Little since then but it's been ramping up again The discourse touches on a wide range of topics and I discussed the themes that the These higher order themes that we can see the clustering of topics which are politics policy science But also scientific integrity is a distinct theme And it's closer semantically to politics and science and From the discussion after we can see that the discussion of science among these organizations hasn't Hasn't gone down over time if anything has gone up And therefore we can infer that the era of climate science denial is not over why is this important because if There is not at least an agreement as to the underlying cause of the problem by all major actors There can be no comprehensive solution to the problem, right? This is the takeaway, right? and Unfortunately, we don't see that convergence in the United States among these actors at the moment and These conservative think tanks tend to react to the external environment I suggested I showed how the external events happen and then they start talking about it more this Lends credibility to our to our measures But what it also shows is that we need to have these long-time series data generation efforts As we're doing right now at the moment to test kind of key questions