File:Prevalence of super- and sub-claims by climate misinfo communicators statistics.webp

English: "(a) illustrates the share of claim-making paragraphs related to the sub-claims of our taxonomy by CTTs (circle) and blogs (hollow square). (b) and (c) Display the share of 515,005 claim-making paragraphs devoted to the following super-claim categories: 1. Global warming is not happening (green hollow circle), 2. Humans are not causing global warming (yellow diamond), 3. Climate impacts are not bad (blue filled square), 4. Climate solutions won’t work (black circle), and 5. Climate movement/science is unreliable (orange hollow square). Note that estimates prior to 2007 in (c) are derived from a relatively small number of blogs." "Figure 2 provides the prevalence of the five key climate disbeliefs for CTTs (Fig 2b) and blogs (Fig 2c) over time, while also providing the distribution of claim prevalence across relevant sub-claims (Fig 2a). The figure offers insights into the key similarities and differences in claims across contrarian blogs and CTTs, as well as the evolution of claims over time. In general, CTTs focus predominantly on the shortcomings of climate solutions (category 4) and attacks on climate science and scientists (category 5). While the initial years of the series were marked with approximately equal levels of emphasis on these two categories, category 4 gained prominence following 2008. This shift in the focus of the (mainly US-based) CTTs coincides with the transition of power from Republican to Democratic hands and the corresponding threat of climate legislation: in 2007, for the first time since 1993, the Democrats obtained a majority in both congressional chambers and in 2008 Senator Obama, consistently leading the presidential election opinion polls, promised comprehensive climate legislation in his presidential campaign. However, category 4 claims have dominated the CTT discourse for the remainder of the sample period, indicating a more permanent shift towards attacks on climate solutions. Blogs, on the other hand, have consistently devoted the largest share of their claims to attacking climate science and scientists. Yet, even for blogs, discussion of climate policy has risen over the last decade while challenges to the reliability of climate science and the climate movement have been on a downward trend, indicating that future contrarian claims are likely to increasingly focus on climate solutions."