Identifying and rooting out climate change denial

Op-Ed

Identifying and rooting out climate change denial

The contributor of this op-ed is a member of WikiProject Climate change and has been a Wikipedian for over eight years.

“

I've been investigating how good a job @Wikipedia does at explaining climate change. As it turns out, in some of its non-English versions, denial and scepticism are still very much alive.

”

— Marco Silva, via Twitter^[1]

On November 19 last year, BBC News published an investigation into climate denial on non-English Wikipedias.^[2] It showed Wikipedia is rife with climate myths. BBC journalist and climate disinformation specialist Marco Silva described the denial as 'alive'. Classical climate denial—denying warming occurs, or denying humans are the primary cause—has been on the wane for a while.^[3] Within the English Wikipedia, climate denial has become exceedingly rare. The last time the climate change discretionary sanctions were used was in 2019, and that was against somebody exaggerating the dangers of climate change, as if the reality isn't scary enough!

Is it true that it's still alive and kicking within Wikipedia? My hypothesis is that most of these non-English articles are the ruins of a period in which climate denial flourished. Climate denial is dead, but still rotting.

A cross-wiki project

Climate denial on Wikipedia
Climate change in 143 languages

Climate denial removed - 38

Removal in progress - 12

Removal failed - 2

No denial - 82

Machine translation too poor - 12

I started a cross-wiki review on Meta two weeks after the BBC article was published. The goal is to assess the breadth of the denial, and to see it removed from all language editions. We advertised it on seven climate change WikiProjects to ensure it's not just an enwiki project. While the most active editors were still from enwiki, Swedish and Czech Wikipedians also contributed. Depending on the size of the community, we either deleted the misinformation ourselves, or tried to find local editors willing to take on the task. On many articles, it was relatively easy to identify denial as Google Translate has come a long way: For most languages, the translated text was understandable.^[4]

The climate myths we found varied significantly. Many articles were an outdated translation of the English Wikipedia. Up to 2008, the English version contained a set of primary sources that supported alternative explanations of climate change. While back then this may have been a significant minority opinion, these views now fall squarely in the fringe or pseudoscience baskets. Displaying this outdated research plays directly into the hands of climate deniers. Their main goal is not making people deny that humans cause climate change. Rather, it is to plant seeds of doubt, as doubt paralyses action.^[5]

A smaller subset of languages had more blatant issues. For instance, I encountered the myth that global warming has stopped twice. Some articles contained attacks on prominent scientists. For instance, calling Naomi Oreskes, who was the first to research the magnitude of the consensus, incompetent. Accusations of fraud were also common. The Chinese version gave a platform to somebody espousing an antisemitic attack on Al Gore, even if it did this under a heading which translates as 'conspiracy theories'.

So far, the response to our efforts have been mostly positive. In some communities, talk page comments triggered a full update and rewrite (Catalan and Slovak). In others, the comments were addressed one-by-one (Hindi), or promises were made to update the article (Korean). For less active languages, we removed the denial ourselves, and were occasionally reverted (Belarussian). We found climate myths in over a third of the languages. The 52 articles in these languages are read about 7000 times a day.

It's frustrating that many of these language communities do have the capacity to maintain these pages, as shown by how well they responded to our requests. Should these projects become a routine? Or are more systematic approaches to misinformation needed?

A blueprint for other projects?

Climate change is not the only topic that has been plagued by misinformation. The current pandemic is a prime example. As with climate denial, misinformation on this topic costs lives. Misinformation about abortion puts women around the world in danger.^[6] Conspiracy theories surrounding elections are a grave danger for democracy. Can we start similar disinformation monitoring in these areas as well?

There is potential, but perhaps these projects will be more challenging. The misinformation may be spread across more articles, and may be added more recently, so that removal will meet with resistance. Nonetheless, the following steps provide a blueprint

Fact-check the English version. Good Article and Featured Article reviews are great to sniff out final inaccuracies.
Write understandably. We tend to overestimate the educational level of our readers^[7]^[8]^[9]^[10]^[11]^[12]^{[overcitation for needed emphasis]}. Fact-checked information is useless if only half of our readers can understand it. Translators will not be able to translate well.
Set up a meta page. Make a selection of languages, based on viewership. Find editors with technical abilities to help out.
Find editors of major language groups to coordinate with, for instance via User Groups.
Approach interested local editors, translators, and local admins to help out. While misinformation can be deleted with machine translations, keeping it out will require local help.

Or is structural disinformation monitoring needed?

Repeating this for more categories of dangerous misinformation would be beneficial. But it is a time-consuming effort, and in the meantime, our readers will consume heaps of misinformation. It is likely that not all languages will have the capacity to monitor these articles. Should we not be more aggressive? Here are two ideas to add structure to safeguard our readers from misinformation.

Give articles a "best before" date

Our old articles may be long past their 'best before' date

Many topics are 'under development' in the real world. There are new scientific discoveries and review papers on a daily basis. Sensitive political situations change, as investigative journalism unearths scandals. For many articles, these timescales are easy to estimate. For climate change, there is typically little value in research older than 15 years, and even 6 year-old research can be outdated.

What if we give each article a best-before date? If I write an article about sea level rise, with a median source age of 2018, it's best read before 2024. We'll save maximum median source age on Wikidata. If, for a given language variant, the median source date is too old, a warning template could be displayed, perhaps on the article talk page. We could restrict this initially to medical articles, and a few other topics where misinformation is truly dangerous. If an article gets even further out-of-date, language communities may decide to automatically archive or delete the articles.

Archiving articles in addition to deleting

Paper encyclopedias have to make a decision each edition: Does this article get binned, reprinted, or updated? As such, they have a natural decision point to consider deleting outdated research. With over 6.4 million articles just on English Wikipedia, it's completely infeasible to check all articles and make that decision. What if we create a middle ground between deletion and showing articles to our readers? In a (semi-)automatic manner, we could archive many articles that are likely outdated. For instance, articles three years past their 'best before date'. The archive would be accessible to editors, and even readers, with an extra click. No admin intervention needed. A clean slate to write on can be an exhilarating experience. Working in the Dutch Wikipedia, I know how great it feels to start an article on an important topic. Making space in this way might not only help us avoid spreading misinformation, but might also reinvigorate Wikipedia.

References

^ @MarcoLSilva (19 Nov 2021). "I've been investigating how good a job @Wikipedia does at explaining climate change. As it turns out, in some of its non-English versions, denial and scepticism are still very much alive" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
^ Silva, Marco (19 November 2021). "Climate change: Conspiracy theories found on foreign-language Wikipedia". BBC News.
^ Milman, Oliver (21 November 2021). "Climate denial is waning on the right. What's replacing it might be just as scary". the Guardian.
^
And when not thát useful, at least funny (courtesy of User:Chidgk1):
- Amharic: "Some people often try to stop global warming by burning small fossils."
- İloko: "Tattooing is a way for tattoos to ensure the security of the world through the protection of the environment and the awakening of the people through the inundation.""Tattooing is a way for tattoos to ensure the security of the world through the protection of the environment and the awakening of the people through the inundation."
^ Oreskes, Naomi (2010). Merchants of doubt : how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. Erik M. Conway (1st ed.). New York: Bloomsbury Press. ISBN 978-1-59691-610-4. OCLC 461631066.
^ "Anti-abortion disinformation is a 'systematic violation of rights'". openDemocracy. 4 June 2021.
^ Lucassen, Teun; Dijkstra, Roald; Schraagen, Jan Maarten (20 August 2012). "Readability of Wikipedia". First Monday. doi:10.5210/fm.v0i0.3916. ISSN 1396-0466.
^ Modiri, Omeed; Guha, Daipayan; Alotaibi, Naif M.; Ibrahim, George M.; Lipsman, Nir; Fallah, Aria (1 March 2018). "Readability and quality of wikipedia pages on neurosurgical topics". Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery. 166: 66–70. doi:10.1016/j.clineuro.2018.01.021. ISSN 0303-8467. PMID 29408776.
^ Suwannakhan, Athikhun; Casanova-Martínez, Daniel; Yurasakpong, Laphatrada; Montriwat, Punchalee; Meemon, Krai; Limpanuparb, Taweetham (2020). "The Quality and Readability of English Wikipedia Anatomy Articles". Anatomical Sciences Education. 13 (4): 475–487. doi:10.1002/ase.1910. ISSN 1935-9780. PMID 31233658.
^ Jatowt, Adam; Tanaka, Katsumi (29 October 2012). "Is wikipedia too difficult?: Comparative analysis of readability of wikipedia, simple wikipedia and britannica". Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 2607–2610. doi:10.1145/2396761.2398703. ISBN 978-1-4503-1156-4.
^ Simpson, Andrea; Le, Michelle; Malicka, Alicja N. (2 October 2018). "The Accuracy and Readability of Wikipedia Articles on Hearing Loss". Journal of Consumer Health on the Internet. 22 (4): 323–336. doi:10.1080/15398285.2018.1542251. ISSN 1539-8285.
^ Brigo, Francesco; Otte, Willem M.; Igwe, Stanley C.; Tezzon, Frediano; Nardone, Raffaele (1 March 2015). "Clearly written, easily comprehended? The readability of websites providing information on epilepsy". Epilepsy & Behavior. 44: 35–39. doi:10.1016/j.yebeh.2014.12.029. ISSN 1525-5050. PMID 25601720.

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==Climate change denial 1.0 is old news==

Climate change denial 1.0 is old news. Probably at least 1/2 of the people ostensibly denying it know better are are just doing conversational tactics to monkeywrench conversations about the currently promoted solutions, or as a part of the US culture war. Climate change denial 2.0 is denial that population is the main cause and an essential part of the long term solution, of course implemented gracefully. Also denying that some measures (such as nuclear power) that are currently unpopular with those advocating the other measures are an essential part of the solution. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:49, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I looked for other types of misinformation as well in all the articles. For instance, I removed twice the statement that there would me more tropical cyclones under climate change (rather than more intense). The myth/framing that population growth (which typically occurs in countries with very low emissions) is the main cause I saw only about three times. Most of these articles are relatively abandoned, and don't talk about solutions at all. I did not encounter any climate myths about the costs of net-zero for instance.

That said, the old misinformation is still having a effect. Only 10% of people believe humans not responsible at all, but soft denial (humans are 50% responsible) is still massively big in Europe and the US. Femke (talk) 21:06, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your work! Once you get into "partially responsible" then you get into the nuances of the exact definition of "climate change" and "cause." My definition would result in calling humans 100% responsible, but there are other arguable definitions. Your growth in countries with low emissions" does not negate the point. The US has massively reduced "per capita" emissions but those gains have been more than erased by US population growth. And per capita emissions and also birth rate do overall correlate with standard of living although of course there are exceptions. North8000 (talk) 21:23, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect even within the US, population growth is higher among people that pollute less. That said, on a long term, you want poverty eradicated everywhere, and that will be easier within planetary boundaries if population is smaller rather than larger.

This issue is highly sensitive, and there is a long history of racist discourse and practices around "overpopulation". There exists policy to stop population growth that is not horrible (women's education being the prime example), but once you put too much emphasis on the overpopulation framing, it's unclear what policy politicians will come up with. Overpopulation isn't mentioned much in high-quality RSs on climate change, so in that sense we don't have to cover it extensively. There is a chance scientists self-censor overpopulation as a cause, being aware of historical horrors around the topic. Femke (talk) 22:10, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the link to planetary boundaries. That's a good way try to be more specific about the issue. BTW it can be gracefully implemented.....it tends to happen naturally with an increase in standard of living. E.G simply starting with recognizing Japan as a success story rather than saying that it's a "problem" due to reducing GDP growth and endangering retirement program pyramid schemes. Of course graceful implementation will not bring improvement soon enough without the other measures being discussed. North8000 (talk) 01:04, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Another concern for climate change articles is that many articles are out of date. This is true both for content and the sources cited. I recently put in time updating citation urls on Economics of climate change, where a large number of citations had dead links. I found working links for most of them, but many of the sources cited are still from 2001-2007. The entire page would benefit from rewriting and up-to-date information. MaryMO (AR) (talk) 23:58, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Great work on that article :). Outdatedness is also a problem on the English Wikipedia, definitely. We don't have the capacity anymore of the 2006-2010 years. EMsmile is doing great work by merging a lot of these outdated articles into "higher" articles. We have too many middle management articles. For instance: climate change -> effects of climate change -> ~~regional effects of climate change~~ -> effects by country. Or climate change -> effects of climate change -> ~~effects of climate change on humans~~ -> economics of climate change. Chidgk1 is also very active pruning old research, so that people can more easily add new.

It was a bit of a problem for this project too. Our article climate change controversy was used as an argument by a Chinese editor to not remove some outdated information about the solar impact on global warming. The article still implies that it is a significant minority opinion that solar impact was quite strong.. Femke (talk) 18:09, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes thanks for spending time on Economics of climate change. I for one find economics extremely hard to understand. Part of the difficultly is maybe the timing of spending (for example on electricity grids) versus the time that various climate change effects arrive or are prevented. Hoping that the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report working groups 2 and 3 will include economics in one or both summaries for policymakers. If they can make it easy enough for politicians to understand then I might understand too. As the economics is becoming political we need some non-political economist (are there any?) to explain it in simple terms. Chidgk1 (talk) 07:32, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'm myself slowly working on improving the Carbon bubble article, but it'll take a while. Relating climate change to stock market valuations is tough! A. C. Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 13:27, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

What I've heard so far is that the IPCC AR6 WG3 report will contain mostly optimalisation-type of economic models, which have historically underestimated renewables on quite a big scale. Working in simulation-type economic energy modelling, I'm not sure that's the best source. Normally the IPCC is quite good at describing significant minorities. Maybe they'll contain more simulation-type models or arguments after peer review. Femke (talk) 17:09, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
This story of cross-wiki communication sounds logistically difficult and time-consuming, but really valuable. I don't know that we need huge structural changes like "best before dates" (though possibly this could be organisationally useful within the community), just initiatives like these arranged on an ad hoc basis when someone notices a problem. It seems that here that problem was noticed by a journalist—it's good to see some reporting that's (a) investigative; (b) puts Wikipedia in context as written by volunteers; and (c) is actionable criticism. In regards to why Wikipedians weren't fixing the issues until prompted by an English-language explorer, I have tons of pages on my watchlist that I've not fully read or had time to improve and I often do a double take and go "actually this needs fixing now..." when someone makes an edit or talk page reply to bring my attention to it. — Bilorv (talk) 22:52, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I think the problem with the outdatedness of climate change articles is particularly acute. The peak in Wikipedia editor activity (2007-2010) coincided with a period of high media attention, so that we have a very large collection of articles to maintain. Because outdated climate change articles are usually biased towards downplaying climate change, I would support large structural changes. I think medical editors may feel the same, as medical misinformation may lead to harm. Whether that is a "best before date" or a warning on top of the article (if it hasn't been reviewed in X amount of time), or some other more strict monitoring, I don't know.

I find it curious how little critical journalism here is around Wikipedia. Given our large role in perceptions of politics, it would be good if there was more actionable pieces like the BBC has done. Femke (talk) 20:35, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The Broad Brush

I have a problem with the way the word "climate change denier" is often used. (Before firing up your flamethrowers, please see WP:YWAB for my positions on the scientific consensus on climate change and on global warming conspiracy theories.)

My problem is that the term "climate change denier" is all too often a broad brush used for painting people who hold any of the following views:

The scientists are all lying. It is a huge conspiracy. I read it on Infowars so I know it's true.
Climate change? What climate change? I haven't bothered to read anything by a scientist, but I don't believe it.
The climate is changing, just as it always has. Nothing unusual about the last few centuries.
The climate is warming, and that's a good thing. It's ice ages that are bad.
The climate is changing, and humans are to blame, but I am not convinced that the change will be as large as is predicted.
The climate is changing, and humans are to blame, but in my opinion methane has a higher effect and CO2 has a lower effect than claimed.
The climate is changing, and humans are to blame, but decreasing CO2 emissions is not the best answer. I believe that sequesting CO2 is a better plan.
The climate is changing, and humans are to blame, but I don't believe that increasing the size and power of the federal government is the solution. The polluters will just buy off the politicians as they always do.
Everything the climatologists say about climate change is 100% true. I accept all of the climate models and simulations. My problem is with the economic predictions that get tacked on. We have an awful track record when it comes to computer models of the economy.
I believe all of it. Climate, economy, proposed solutions, I accept them all. I also believe that it is too late. We are already doomed.
I believe all of it. I just don't agree that having western countries reduce CO2 emissions while letting China increase them without any restrictions will solve the problem.
I believe all of it. I just don't agree that having the US reduce CO2 emissions while letting the rest of the world increase them without any restrictions will solve the problem.
I believe all of it. I just don't agree that having California reduce CO2 emissions while letting the rest of the US and the rest of the world increase them without any restrictions will solve the problem.
I believe all of it. I just don't agree that having the City of San Francisco reduce CO2 emissions while letting the rest of California, the US, and the world increase them without any restrictions will solve the problem.
I am a scientist. As scientist are in the habit of doing, I am questioning one small part of established science and am doing research into a new theory. I realize that the orthodoxy is usually right, but challenging the orthodoxy is how we do things in science. Alas, I picked an area where any and all opinions that are not in perfect lockstep with the scientific orthodoxy are called "climate change denial"

You can call me a climate change denier now, because the entries about San Francisco and economic models make a lot of sense to me. --Guy Macon Alternate Account (talk) 18:53, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely, there are a lot of degrees of "denial": from pseudo-science to fringe, and from science to politics. We were lucky that much of the POV content we encountered fell in easier categories (proper pseudo-science to fringe), and that we did not have to engage much in the grey area (a political stance that may be considered denial by some). A lot of the articles stopped after describing the science, and did not mention anything about human impacts, adaptation, mitigation or politics. Femke (talk) 19:18, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I just looked over our coverage of climate change Most of the articles, such as Attribution of recent climate change, are excellent. Others, such as Carbon bubble, not so much.

Consider this article in Wired: The Quest to Trap Carbon in Stone—and Beat Climate Change]. (If you hit a paywall, try here:[1])

Our Carbon bubble article acts as if the idea of Carbon sequestration doesn't exist, and makes absolute claims like "these new reserves are unlikely to be exploited, meaning the value of those investments will suffer serious decreases" (sourced to an archive of a claim by advocacy group carbontracker.org that they removed from their site in 2014). If ClimeWorks or Carbon Engineering are right, then not exploiting those reserves isn't the only possible way of meeting CO2 goals. --Guy Macon Alternate Account (talk) 03:14, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As our society/ civilization crumble, we find these sorts of socio-political divides, where the chattering class has already decided their orthodoxy and the rest of us, Wikipedia editors included, are expected to embrace that orthodoxy without reason. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:09, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

English edit summaries on "non-English versions"

It is great that editors from English Wikipedia are trying to counter denial of climate change on other Wikipedias. But I suppose that if somebody bothers themselves to translate non-English article in Google Translate to find what parts of it should be changed or removed, they should also do other Wikipedia editors a favor and translate their edit summary in the language of that Wikipedia (using same Google Translate). When someone comes to Belarussian Wikipedia, removes something and leaves edit summary in English, it really looks as something like foreign invasion, however good "invader's" edits and intentions are. Arado Ar 196 (talk) 20:06, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your feedback. That was something we did think about. It depended on the reliability of machine translations on whether I did this or not. For Belarussian, I suspected the quality would be rather low. On talk pages, I sometimes provided both the original and a machine translation. One of our team, User:Dtetta, went further and worked with native speakers he knew to translate text before posting anything (for the Chinese version).

One of the things that went a bit wrong is that sometimes multiple people involved in the project made edits to one language. While it's okay if one person only does non-controversial edits (like updating figures), it isn't great when two editors come in arguing for the same controversial edits. Femke (talk) 20:32, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Good point - with hindsight it would probably have been better to have put change comments in local language first (via machine translation) and then English in brackets - provided the comment box was long enough (for your info/amusement? Google Translate says what I just wrote is in Belarussian: Добры момант - азіраючыся назад, верагодна, лепш было б спачатку змясціць каментарыі да зменаў на мясцовай мове (праз машынны пераклад), а затым на англійскай у дужках - пры ўмове, што поле каментарыяў было дастаткова доўгім) Chidgk1 (talk) 09:47, 8 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Arado Ar 196 If you or any other Belarussian speakers have time could you comment at be:Размовы:Глабальнае пацяпленне Chidgk1 (talk) 06:38, 25 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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