You are right. I am ALARMED – But by Climate Change Counter Movement Shraey Bhatia Jey Han Lau Timothy Baldwin School of Computing and Information Systems The University of Melbourne [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract German evolutionary biologist and physiologist Prof. Dr. Ulrich Kutschera told in an interview The world is facing the challenge of climate crisis. Despite the consensus in scientific com- that CO2 is a blessing for mankind and that the munity about anthropogenic global warming, claimed 97% consensus among scientists is a the web is flooded with articles spreading cli- myth. ... he rejected extremes, among them the mate misinformation. These articles are care- climate alarmists who predict a fictitious, immi- fully constructed by climate change counter nent earth heat death and thus practice a kind of movement (CCCM) organizations to influence religious cult. the narrative around climate change. We re- visit the literature on climate misinformation New Zealand schools to terrify children about in social sciences and repackage it to introduce the climate crisis. Who cares about education in the community of NLP. Despite consider- if you believe the world is ending? What will it able work in detection of fake news, there is take for sanity to return? Global cooling? An- no misinformation dataset available that is spe- other Ice Age even? The climate lunatics ... en- cific to the domain.of climate change. We try courage them to wag school to protest for more to bridge this gap by scraping and releasing ar- ticles with known climate change misinforma- action. tion. Table 1: Articles created by CCCM organizations. 1 Introduction Climate change is one of the biggest challenges threatening the world, and we are at the defin- The rise of this misleading information is ing moment. Rising sea levels, melting polar ice, part of a carefully crafted strategy by climate changing weather patterns, severe droughts, and change counter movement (CCCM) organizations extinction of species are just some of the dreadful (Dunlap and Jacques, 2013; Boussalis and Coan, effects of this crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel 2016; Farrell, 2016; McKie, 2018). These or- on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 5th assessment ganizations use a formula consisting of a narra- report categorically concluded that humans are the tive structured around the principle ingredients of arXiv:2004.14907v1 [cs.CL] 30 Apr 2020 main culprit and there is a need to limit global disinformation, misinformation, propaganda and warming to less than 2◦C.1 More recently, anthro- hoax, sprinkled with the stylistic elements of sen- pogenic climate change has been at the heart of the sationalism, melodrama, clickbait and satire, as Australian bushfires (van Oldenborgh et al., 2020), can be seen in examples in Table 1. Their ap- leading to the destruction of 17 million hectares of proach broadly mirrors that seen in fake news land and the death of a billion animals.2 During in the political arena (Rashkin et al., 2017), but these times, we see articles with headlines such is specifically tailored to the domain of climate as Climate Change has caused more rain, helping change. This motivates the development of ap- fight Australian wildfires spreading misinforma- plications that can inform users via an automatic tion to influence the narrative of climate change.3 detection or alert system, similar to what we have seen for fake news (Rashkin et al., 2017; 1 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/ P´erez-Rosas et al., 2017; Jiang and Wilson, 2018). 2https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1920/Quick_Guides/AustralianBushfires 3https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/climateThe lack of-change-has-caused-more-rain-helping-fight-australi annotated fake news data spurred an-wildfires the creation of misinformation datasets. The ation plays an important role in the identifica- first public dataset for fake news detection tion of misinformation. Biyani et al. (2016) stud- (Vlachos and Riedel, 2014) and claim/stance ver- ied stylistic aspects of clickbait and formalised ification (Ferreira and Vlachos, 2016) are moder- it into 8 different categories ranging from exag- ately small with 221 and 300 instances, respec- geration to teasing, and proposed a clickbait clas- tively. More recently, larger datasets have been sifier based on novel informality features. Sim- developed, such as LIAR (Wang, 2017), collected ilarly, Kumar et al. (2016) examined the unique from PolitiFact and labelled with 6 levels of ve- linguistic characteristics of hoax documents in racity, and FEVER (Thorne et al., 2018), a dataset Wikipedia and built a classifier using a range of generated from Wikipedia with supported, hand-engineered features. Rashkin et al. (2017) refuted and not enough info labels. Ex- proposed using stylistic lexicons (e.g. Linguis- tending the task to full articles, FakeNewsNet is tic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)), subjective a valuable resource (Shu et al., 2017, 2018). But words, and intensifying lexicons for fact check- to the best of our knowledge there is no misinfor- ing, and demonstrated that words used to exag- mation dataset that is specific to the domain of cli- gerate like superlatives, subjectives, and modal ad- mate change. We attempt to fill this gap by releas- verbs are prominent in fake news, whereas trusted ing a large set of documents with known climate sources are dominated by assertive words. Wang change misinformation. (2017) experimented with detecting fake news us- ing meta data features with convolutional neural 2 Related Work networks adapted for text (Kim, 2014). Although articles with misinformation are pre- The way the public perceives and reacts to the con- dominantly human-written, the recent emergence stant supply of information around climate change of large pre-trained language models means they is a function of how the facts and narrative are can now be automatically generated. Radford et al. presented to them (Fløttum, 2014; Fløttum et al., (2019) introduced a large auto-regressive model 2016). Flottum (2017) emphasizes that language (GPT2) with the ability to generate high-quality and communication around climate change are synthetic text. One limitation of GPT2 is its in- significant, as climate is not just the physical ability to perform controlled generation for a spe- science but has political, social and ethical as- cific domain, and Keskar et al. (2019) proposed pects, and involves various stakeholders, inter- a model to tackle this. Building on this further, ests and voices. A range of corpus linguis- Dathathri et al. (2019) introduced a plug and play tic methods have been used to study the topi- language model, where the language model is a cal and stylistic aspects of language around cli- pretrained model similar to GPT2 but with control- mate change. Tvinnereim and Fløttum (2015) lable components that can be fine-tuned through proposed the use of structured topic modelling attribute classifiers. (Roberts et al., 2014) to derive insights about the public opinion from 2115 open-ended survey re- 3 Climate Change Counter Movement sponses. Salway et al. (2014) leveraged unsu- Organisations pervised grammar induction and pattern extrac- tion methods to find common phrases in climate Despite the findings of the IPCC’s 5th Assesment change communication. Atanasova and Koteyko Report and more than 97 percent consensus in (2017) analysed frequently-used metaphors manu- the scientific community to support anthropogenic ally in editorials and op-eds, and concluded that global warming (Cook et al., 2013), coordinated the communication in the Guardian (U.K.) was efforts to tackle the climate crisis are lacking. This predominantly war based (e.g. threat of climate can be attributed to the rise in opposing voices in- change), Seuddeutsche (Germany) based on ill- cluding the fossil fuel lobby, conservative think- ness (e.g. earth has fever), and the NYTimes tanks, big corporations, and digital/print media (U.S.A) based on the idea of a journey (e.g. many questioning the science and research around cli- small steps in the right direction). mate change. These organisations are collectively In linguistics, style broadly refers to the proper- referred to as climate change counter movement ties of a sentence beyond its content or meaning (“CCCM”) organizations (Oreskes and Conway, (Pennebaker and King, 1999), and stylistic vari- 2010; Dunlap and Jacques, 2013; Farrell, 2016; Argument Frame news. CO2 is plant food and is good for the planet Science Climate change is natural and has always been changing Science 4 Dataset We are entering another ice age Science Adapting to global warming is cheaper than preventing it Policy To construct our dataset, we scrape articles with Renewable energy is way too expensive Policy known climate change misinformation from 15 dif- Table 2: Examples of counter climate arguments ferent CCCM organizations. These organizations and their frames. are selected from three sources: (1) McKie (2018), (2) desmogblog.com,4 a website that maintains a database of individuals and organizations that have Boussalis and Coan, 2016; McKie, 2018). McKie been identified to perpetuate climate disinforma- (2018) argues that the motivation behind these tion; and (3) an organizations cited on the web- organizations is to maintain the status quo of site selected from above 2 sources. A number the hegemony of fossil fuel-based neo-liberal of considerations were made when developing the global capitalism. These organizations are found dataset: around the globe and can masquerade as philan- • We only scrape articles from organizations thropic organizations to fund climate misinforma- active in English-speaking countries: the tion (Farrell, 2019), hide behind libertarian ideas United States, Canada, United Kingdom, (McKie, 2018) to question the scientists, and aug- Australia, and New Zealand. ment scepticism to promote pseudo science or ‘al- ternative facts’. Some of these organizations have • A considerable number of organizations are catchy names such as carbonsense.com or either dormant or have a very low level of friendsofscience.org, and organize their activity.