Identifying Flawed Reasoning in Contrarian Claims about Climate Change

While climate change grows as an environmental and societal emergency, misinformation about climate change continues to hinder necessary action and democratic decision-making. An important step towards neutralizing climate misinformation is identifying the rhetorical techniques and logical fallacies used to distort climate science and confuse the public. We expand on previous critical thinking research, developing a detailed methodology for deconstructing and analyzing real-world misinformation. We apply our extended methodology to a comprehensive taxonomy of climate contrarian claims, finding reasoning fallacies in all the analyzed claims. The most common fallacies were slothful induction, cherry picking, and oversimplification. Contrarian claims regarding climate solutions, while more nuanced than explicit science denial, are still rife with misleading fallacies. 91% of the claims contained unstated assumptions that contained reasoning fallacies, underscoring the difficulties of conventional fact-checking. The ubiquity and complexity of misinformation in online spaces and public discussion necessitates holistic, interdisciplinary solutions that can be scaled up to meet the immensity of the problem. This research is an example of such an interdisciplinary approach, building on existing natural language processing research with critical thinking, climate science, and climate solutions scholarship. Our results are presented as a resource for countering contrarian claims, particularly useful in automated applications that detect and fact-check online climate misinformation in real time.