Structure and influence of the US climate
change counter-movement
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Embargo
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London: Monday 30 November 2015 16:00 (GMT)
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New York: Monday 30 November 2015 11:00 (EST)
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Tokyo: Tuesday 01 December 2015 01:00 (JST)
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Sydney: Tuesday 01 December 2015 03:00 (AEDT)
Individuals and organizations that produce and disseminate information rejecting the scientific
consensus of human-caused climate change are more likely to have their message represented
in the news media if they have ties to elite corporate benefactors, reports a new paper published
online this week in Nature Climate Change. The study reveals the political and social processes
driving uncertainty and doubt about climate change among US citizens, and may help to explain
why these views are more common in the US compared with other developed nations.
Justin Farrell used network science and computational text analysis to uncover the institutional
and corporate structure of the US climate change counter-movement and its influence on the
news media and politicians. He constructed an institutional and social network of 4,556
individuals and 164 organizations involved in promoting contrarian viewpoints, and then used
Internal Revenue Service data to identify organizations within the network that received funding
from corporate benefactors between 1993 and 2013.
To determine the influence of the climate change counter-movement on the news media and
politicians, Farrell used computational text analysis to compare 40,785 documents produced by
contrarian organizations between 1993 and 2013, as well as all written and verbal texts (nearly
25,000 documents) about climate change from three major media outlets (The New York
Times,The Washington Times and USA Today), US presidents and the US Congress during the
same period.
Farrell finds that organizations with ties to corporate benefactors are better at getting their
message into the news media (indicated by higher text similarity scores) than those without such
connections. He concludes that the study has broader implications for the privatization of
science, the influence of corporate lobbying around scientific issues and, by extension, the
increasing concentration of corporate wealth in the US.
Article and author details
1. Network structure and influence of the climate change countermovement
Corresponding Author
Justin Farrell
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Email: justin.farrell@yale.edu, Tel: +1 203 436 8224
DOI
10.1038/nclimate2875
Online paper*
http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nclimate2875
* Please link to the article in online versions of your report (the URL will go live after the embargo ends).
Geographical listings of authors
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United States