File:A taxonomy of climate contrarian claims (climate change misinfo claims categories).webp

English: "Taxonomy of claims made by contrarians. This figure displays the three layers of claim-making by climate change contrarian actors. The original version of this taxonomy with more detailed claim descriptions can be found in Supplementary Table S2." "Figure 1 displays the taxonomy used to categorize claims about climate science and policy commonly employed by contrarians. To develop this framework, we consulted the extant literature on climate misinformation to identify relevant claims, while further extending and refining this initial set by reading thousands of randomly selected English language paragraphs from prominent CTTs and contrarian blogs (see Supplementary Tables S4 and S5). This process yielded five major categories: (1) it’s not happening, (2) it’s not us, (2) it’s not bad, (4) solutions won’t work, and (5) climate science/scientists are unreliable. We describe these categories as the five key climate disbeliefs, mirroring the five key climate beliefs identified in survey research26. Nested within these top-level categories were two sub-levels (27 sub-claims, 49 sub-sub-claims), allowing a detailed delineation of different specific arguments (see Supplementary Methods for additional information on how we developed the taxonomy). This work is, to our knowledge, the first framework incorporating climate science misinformation, arguments against climate solutions, and attacks undermining climate science and scientists in a single, comprehensive taxonomy."