How Consensus Messages and Climate Conspiracy Rhetoric Affect Public Opinion

• In Event: Frontiers of Disaster and Crisis Knowledge

Abstract

There is a widespread consensus among climate scientists that human activities are the primary driver of global warming. However, the U.S. public remains divided as to whether or not human-induced climate change is occurring: some individuals in the U.S. including several national leaders reject consensus scientific reports about climate change because they believe it is a deception or conspiratorial hoax. Belief in conspiracies is not limited to one political party in the United States. While Republicans have been reported to see conspiracies in the promotion of climate change action by scientists, Democrats see conspiracies in some of the actions suggested to mitigate climate change, particularly those that might benefit the carbon industry. We implemented two large studies (each of the two studies included a sample of about 3,000 persons in an internet-based survey administered by Qualtrics) focused on two different aspects of climate change response: response to information about the cause, speed and impacts of climate change itself, and response to information about one of the technological “fixes”: direct carbon capture. We used two questionnaires and two study populations. The first study focused on responses to scientific information from the 4th National Climate Assessment report issued in 2018. The second study focused on scientific information about carbon capture technologies and how they can help to slow the effects that will occur due to climate change. Both studies randomly assigned participants to treatment conditions that included either right- or left- wing conspiratorial rhetoric calling into question the consensus message. We evaluated the effects of scientific consensus in isolation and in competition with climate conspiracy claims in order to: (a) identify the ways in which information about the effects of climate change can shape public opinion (e.g., highlighting increasing wildfires, droughts, coastal flooding, heatwaves); (b) evaluate the effects of exposure to this information in competition with “climate conspiracy rhetoric”; and, (c) assess the impact of a partisan source attribution (i.e., President Donald Trump in study 1, Former Vice President Al Gore in study 2) linked with the consensus or conspiracy information. Taken together, the results from both studies indicated that compelling scientific consensus messages about the effects of climate change, or about the benefits of direct carbon capture technologies, had a profound impact on public opinion. Nonetheless, when individuals were exposed to this information simultaneously alongside conspiratorial rhetoric, it often eliminated any positive effect that resulted from exposure to scientific consensus messages in isolation, especially among Republicans when the source of the rhetoric was President Trump in study 1. We also found, importantly, that the impact of both climate consensus and climate conspiracy rhetoric varied across the two studies, insofar as the public was much more responsive to any information about a climate geo-engineering technology (i.e., carbon capture) compared to consensus information or conspiracy claims about the fundamental causes of climate change and the risks it presents. The results show that the impact of scientific consensus information about climate change, and climate conspiracy rhetoric, is conditional on the nature of the belief in question (highly crystallized, low information) and individual-level characteristics such as party identification and generalized conspiratorial belief disposition.

Author

• Toby Bolsen, Georgia State University