Climate Change and Artificial Doubt: Approaches to Reduce Misinformation

Despite the existence of an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists regarding the anthropogenic nature of climate change public perceptions of the phenomenon are still dominated by uncertainty, and the validity of scientific evidence is increasingly questioned. High levels of skepticism, along with the overarching perception that climate science is unsettled, can provide a barrier to the implementation of ambitious mitigation policies, particularly by undermining their perceived legitimacy (Cook et al., 2016; Ding Ding et al., 2011; Tvinnereim and Jamelske, 2016)
Several scholars have suggested that this 'consensus gap' between the scientific community and the general public is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, but rather, it is the result of carefully planned misinformation strategies (Freudenburg et al., 2008; Lewandowsky et al., 2015; Cook et al., 2016) that have contaminated and polarised the debate on climate change, creating a deep divide between climate believers and climate skeptics (Banning, 2009). In this scenario, doubt is normally manufactured in a variety of fora, including the internet, newspapers and peer-reviewed literature (Niederer, 2013), where noise-creators generate doubt particularly by producing 'junk- science' (Michaels and Monforton, 2005), or by placing disproportionate weight on the uncertainties vis-a-vis the certainties, weakening the overall trust in scientific findings (Supran and Oreskes, 2017).
Today, the presence of this type of 'noise' aimed at constructing doubt in the public perception of climate change presents an extremely interesting phenomenon in climate policy. In fact, doubt can provide climate skeptics, partisan media outlets and policymakers a renewed vigour in arguing in favour of delays in climate change regulation. For example, U.S. President Donald Trump recently claimed that 'no one knows whether climate change is real' (Eilperin, 2017) as a justification for political inaction on the matter. While this is indeed an undesirable outcome, it also follows that
reducing this noise could lead to a greater public buy-in of current climate science, with a consequent greater support for climate mitigation policies, ultimately speeding up the regulatory process (Ding Ding et al., 2011). This may indeed prove a promising bottom-up political pressure strategy for the near future.
Thus, the main aim of this Ph.D. will be to shed light on the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of noise-creation in climate policy, with the final goal of understanding how accurate knowledge itself can be a form of participative governance, and how reducing noise could become a powerful form of bottom-up political pressure for the future.