Map Shows Climate Change Denialism by US State

Climate change is still considered to be a controversial topic by many people in the U.S., with roughly one in seven Americans not believing there is a climate crisis. But, according to new research, this "climate denialism" is not evenly distributed across the U.S.

Understanding how and why opinions on climate change vary geographically is crucial for effective communication and outreach. However, most data on this distribution relies primarily on time-intensive national surveys which don't always provide a reliable cross-section of the population.

Researchers from the University of Michigan have found that mining social media can provide "tantalizing" insights as an alternative to the survey-based approach.

In a new study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, Joshua Newell and Dimitrios Gounaridis used artificial intelligence to scour through X, formerly Twitter, to create a map of profile of climate denialism across the United States.

The data was collected from 2017 to 2019 and a Deep Learning text recognition model was used to classify 7.4 million geocoded tweets containing keywords related to climate change posted by 1.3 million unique users in the U.S.

"Our analysis resulted in a profile of climate change deniers at the county level, provided insight into the networks of social media figures influential in promoting climate change denial, and generated insight into how these influencers use current events to foster this denial," the researchers write.

In total, they found that 14.8 percent of Americans denied that climate change is real, a percentage consistent with previous national studies. However, this was not consistent across every state; in Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama and North Dakota 20 percent of the population did not believe in climate change.

"The denialism is highest in the central and southern U.S.," the authors write. "However, it also persists in clusters within states (e.g. California) where belief in climate change is high."

For example, in Shasta County, California, climate change denial was as high as 52 percent. And yet, less than 12 percent of California's overall population do not believe in climate change.

The researchers then performed a correlation analysis to characterize what traits are most likely to be associated with climate change denial.

"Political affiliation has the strongest correlation, followed by level of education, COVID-19 vaccination rates, carbon intensity of the regional economy, and income," they write. "Denialism was also more prevalent in areas where local economies were highly dependent on fossil fuels, in rural communities, and in populations where distrust in science was more pronounced."

The researchers said former U.S. President Donald Trump had the highest influence across the platform on the issue and was heavily co-retweeted by conservative media outlets, mis/disinformation websites, and right-wing producers and commentators.

The researchers said that their findings not only highlighted areas were more communication and outreach work was required, but also highlighted an urgent need to combat misinformation on social media.

"Combating misinformation requires effective refutation strategies," they write. "Deploying such strategies on social media sites such as X, however, is challenging as denier and believer communities are isolated from each other, leading to echo chambers."

They added that those who were most likely to be climate change deniers were also potentially more at risk to the negative effects of climate change. "Climate change denialism is also a risk, in the form of knowledge vulnerability," they write. "Those who discount climate change as a natural rather than human-induced process tend to underestimate their current (and future) risk to it. This renders them less likely to take necessary steps to mitigate and adapt to climate change."