A new study out of the University of Michigan revealed that nearly 15% of Americans do not believe that climate change is real, bringing into focus the highly polarized attitude toward global warming.
Adding to the polarised attitude is the denialism in the central and southern US with Republican voters not believing in climate science.
Researchers used artificial intelligence and analyzed over 7.4m tweets posted by roughly 1.3 million people on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, between 2017 and 2019.
As per a TheGuardian report, the posts were geocoded, and classified as “for” or “against” climate change using a large language model, a type of artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI.
“Over half of the tweets we looked at simply denied that climate change was real, that it was a hoax,” Joshua Newell, co-author of the study and professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan, told TheGuardian.
“It wasn’t surprising but it was disappointing, I would hope that more and more Americans would believe in climate change and the importance of addressing it,” he added.
Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, was one of the most influential figures among climate change deniers. His posts on a cold snap in Texas in December 2017, and rejecting the 2018 IPCC report at the Cop24 UN conference were some of his most engaged social media posts.
“Public figures such as Trump are highly influential,” Newell said, “when they use these events to trigger disbelief in climate change among social media users.”
The findings are consistent. A recent survey out of Yale University estimated that as of 2023, 16% of Americans do not believe in climate change (about 49 million people).
“It comports with my understanding that there is a small but very vocal and active minority of the public that still denies the overwhelming evidence of human-caused warming,” said Michael Mann, climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, about the study.
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