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. An important step towards neutralizing climate misinformation is identifying the misleading rhetorical techniques used to confuse the public. We expand on previous critical thinking research, developing a detailed methodology for deconstructing and analyzing real-world misinformation. Applying our extended methodology to a comprehensive taxonomy of climate contrarian claims, we find reasoning fallacies in all 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% ofanalyzed contrarian claims required hidden assumptions which committed reasoning fallacies, underscoring the limitations of conventional fact-checking. The ubiquity and complexity of misinformation in online spaces and public discussion necessitates holistic, interdisciplinary solutions that can be scaled 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 act as a resource for countering contrarian claims, particularly useful to automated applications that detect and fact-check online climate misinformation in real time.