US states have become more divisive in recent years over Covid-19 vaccines, abortion and political preferences, but a new study adds another divide to the mix: climate change.
An estimated 15 percent of Americans do not believe the alarmism about climate change that has become widespread in recent years.
Research has shown a strong correlation between people’s political beliefs, followed by their level of education, Covid-19 vaccination rates in the area and income.
According to the study, climate skepticism is most prevalent in central and southern Republican-led states, as you might expect.
In contrast, coastal states with higher Democratic populations in particular have a high percentage of believers in climate change.
Climate change deniers lived in Republican-led states, while believers were more likely to live in states with high Democratic populations
Researchers analyzed 40 million tweets on X related to global warming and climate change.
The team narrowed their search by first looking at tweets from accounts with their location information, which accounted for more than 73 percent of the data.
The researchers then further eliminated all fake locations nationally, and to reduce the possibility of capturing non-human accounts, they removed all users who tweeted more than twenty times a day.
This left the researchers with 640,000 “clean accounts” and divided them into two groups – climate change believers and non-believers – using Transformer, a deep learning AI model trained to identify tweets that are against or for the were climate change.
If the model identified an ambiguous tweet or if researchers on the team could not agree on the position they were taking, the tweet was excluded from the data.
The AI model further narrowed the findings to a balanced sample of 6,500 tweets, identifying 3,300 people as climate change advocates and 3,200 as climate change deniers.
Researchers defined deniers as people who claim that humans are not the main cause of climate change, do not believe that climate change is real, claim that experts are unreliable, say that the consequences are not serious and that the proposed solutions are inefficient.
According to the study, researchers said they were not surprised to find that the vast majority of people who do not believe in climate change are in areas of the country where science-based health or safety recommendations are disregarded and who show an overall resistance against science. .
“According to the theory of identity-protective cognition, people tend to selectively acknowledge or discredit evidence in patterns that reflect beliefs prevalent in their group,” the researchers said.
“This theory helps explain why those who vote Republican are more likely to believe tweets from former President Trump about climate change than those from other sources; it confirms identity.’
The study found that climate change deniers often retweet similar messages from former President Donald Trump and conservative outlets like Fox News and the Washington Examiner and alt-right news and blogs like The Daily Wire and Daily Caller that express “contrarian views on the climate radiate’. change.’
Other websites that published misleading and false claims about climate change were also frequently retweeted, including TownHall Media and the Climate Depot; and other right-wing producers, political commentators and activists such as Chuck Woolery.
Climate change believers and deniers differed dramatically on their views on whether there is still time to adapt to climate change and whether humans are the main cause
“During the 2017-2019 survey period, the most retweeted post included a post from Trump questioning climate change due to unusually cold weather in the US, and another post casting doubt on a UN climate report,” says senior author Joshua Newell. professor and co-director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at UM’s School for Environment and Sustainability at Pys.org.
He continued: ‘In almost half of the tweets analyzed, the most common refrain was that ‘climate change wasn’t real.’
“Other common explanations were that humans are not the main cause and that climate change experts are unreliable.”
A large share of climate change deniers live in states with large Republican voters, including Idaho, Wyoming, Texas and Tennessee and more than 20 percent of the populations of Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama and North Dakota.
Meanwhile, climate change advocates were concentrated in Democratic-led states, including California, Washington, Arizona, and in New England and the Great Lakes region.
Even in these areas, there are areas where people are going against the grain, such as Shasta County, California, where 52 percent of people do not believe in climate change, even though deniers make up less than 12 percent of California’s total population.
The same goes for Texas, where 87 percent of the population is religious, while 21 percent of the state’s total population denies that climate change exists.
The study comes at a time when climate change is increasing: Global temperatures have been rising 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit every decade since 1850 and more than three times as fast since 1982, rising 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report.
Climate change has already had a profound effect on the Earth, including melting glaciers, rising sea levels, more intense heat waves and increasing natural disasters, but if climate change continues it will have a profound effect on the future of our planet. .
Scientists predict that by 2100, sea levels will rise by at least another foot, but sea levels could be as high as 8 feet, hurricanes will become stronger and more intense, there will be a longer wildfire season and more droughts, heat waves and the Arctic Ocean. will probably become ice-free, according to NASA.
Yet researchers reported in the new survey that 59 percent of total deniers believe climate change is a “conspiracy theory or hoax and a shadowy attempt to deceive the public into bearing the costs of decarbonization while generating enormous wealth for the blue ‘elites’. ”
The study added that climate change denial carries great risk as communities face increasing natural disasters, including floods, wildfires, hurricanes and tornadoes, as well as extreme heat and rising sea levels.
By ignoring the signs of climate change and disproving its existence, the researchers say deniers “tend to underestimate their current (and future) risks for it.”
“This makes it less likely that they will take the necessary steps to mitigate and adapt to climate change.”