In 2018, Gallup’s annual environment survey found that overall concern about climate change in the US was roughly stable. But within that stability was a growing divide. The 87 percent of Democrats who reported in 2017 that they believe global warming is a result of human activity bumped up slightly to 89 percent in 2018. Meanwhile, for Republicans, that number dipped from 40 percent in 2017 to 35 percent in 2018.

How can the misinformation campaign driving this divide be fought? Just reporting and reiterating the facts of anthropogenic climate change doesn’t seem to work. A paper in Nature Climate Change this week argues that attempts to counter misinformation need to draw on the research that is illuminating the bad actors behind climate denialism, the money funding them, and how their coordinated campaigns are disrupting the political process.

Facts alone won’t cut it

“It is not enough simply to communicate to the public over and again the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change,” write Justin Farrell, Kathryn McConnell, and Robert Brulle in their paper, because “individuals’ preexisting ideologies and values systems can play a significant role in whether they accept or reject scientific consensus.”

Something called “attitudinal inoculation” does show some promise as a strategy—essentially informing people of the facts while also providing a warning of the existence of misinformation campaigns and the arguments and strategies they might use. This “vaccine” strategy can create resistance by using a small dose of the virus, and it seems to work across the political spectrum.

On its own, attitudinal inoculation doesn’t tackle the real source of the misinformation: the intentional and often coordinated campaigns of organizations such as think tanks, lobby groups, public relations firms, and others that aim to obfuscate and sow doubt. Attitudinal inoculation could possibly be improved by “drawing more explicit attention to who is behind these messages,” write Farrell and his colleagues.

And, they add, inoculation only succeeds “when the patient is not already sick.” In the case of the refusal to accept evidence about climate change, which is already widespread, they argue that political and legal strategies need to join the fight, too. For instance, research that uncovers the sources of climate misinformation can inform legal battles, which in turn can play a role in swaying public opinion. The discovery that ExxonMobil internally acknowledged climate change while externally spreading denial is one example of the crucial role this kind of research can play.

Getting political

Investigative work can also draw attention to manipulation of the political process, as in astroturfing strategies like the hired actors paid to create the impression of local support for a new power plant in New Orleans. Other possible political strategies include campaigns for divesting from fossil fuels and targeting campaigns at the areas that are high in both opposition to climate science and vulnerability to the effects of climate change (like Florida and Alaska).

Improved laws governing financial transparency, particularly for political campaigns, would be invaluable, write Farrell and his colleagues: “Had better transparency legislation been in place 30 years ago… hundreds of millions of dollars would not have been so easily, and so furtively, channelled.”

They point to the $2 billion spent on climate lobbying from 2000 to 2016, which dwarfed the spending of environmental organizations and renewable energy corporations “by a factor of 10:1.” Without that kind of legislation, and without it being anywhere on the horizon, ongoing research on funding flows is essential.

Any one of these strategies isn’t enough on its own, they argue—the research on funding flows needs to inform legal and political efforts and contribute to the power of attitudinal inoculation. Rebutting the misinformation is part of the strategy, they write—but we “must also confront the institutional and political architectures that make the spread of misinformation possible in the first place.”

Nature Climate Change, 2018. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-018-0368-6 (About DOIs).