Claim: Climate Change "Denial" Driven by Bots

Timothy Birdnow

They are the ones who have been caught manipulating temperature data to make it appear there is global warming. They are the ones who have been caught strategizing how to circumvent peer review. They are the ones who have been caught bullying journal editors and boycotting journals that publish "denier" science. They are the ones who have called for the death penalty for "deniers" or "Nuremberg trials". And now we are expected to believe it is our side that is pulling this kind of dirty trick? Ri-ight...

[linkhttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/21/climate-tweets-twitter-bots-analysis?fbclid=IwAR2olgqobQXYBx48DC38wD75GcIVHIlItYKp4HUXQGimTIWvElb92ssheHc]Revealed: Quarter of All Tweets about Climate Crisis Produced by Bots

From the Guardian article:

An analysis of millions of tweets from around the period when Donald Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement found that bots tended to applaud the president for his actions and spread misinformation about the science.

The study of Twitter bots and climate was undertaken by Brown University and has yet to be published. Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account.

"These findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support for Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement,” states the draft study, seen by the Guardian.

On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics – bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about "fake science” and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon.

Conversely, tweets that could be categorized as online activism to support action on the climate crisis featured very few bots, at about 5% prevalence. The findings "suggest that bots are not just prevalent, but disproportionately so in topics that were supportive of Trump’s announcement or skeptical of climate science and action”, the analysis states.

Well, what does that mean?  The Global Warming crowd is always talking about "fake science" whenever research is mentioned that contradicts the climate meme, and the Gang Green are the ones who hate Exxon Mobile.

It sounds to me like pretty much all of the tweets manufactured by bots are on the side of the Climate Change crowd. This sounds like academic sleight-of-hand.

The researcher tips his hand:


The science is NOT more or less settled. That has been the latest mantra from these people. I encounter it every day with alarmists saying things like "wow! Nobody doubts this anymore" when in fact there are plenty of people who doubt it - including many top scientists in the field (Roy Spencer, John Christy, William Happer, Joseph D'Aleo, Roger Pielke Sr. and Jr., etc. etc. etc.)

This shows that this researcher is approaching this with an agenda.

Here's where we learn this study is crap:

John Cook, an Australian cognitive scientist and co-author with Lewandowsky, said that bots are "dangerous and potentially influential”, with evidence showing that when people are exposed to facts and misinformation they are often left misled.

John Cook is the climate activist and head of the Center for Climate Change Communications at George Mason University who runs the alarmist talking points website Skeptical Science and who was the author of the endlessly cited "95% agreement" study. He's a partisan hack.

This was a nice try but in the end it fails.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:06 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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