
Nearly 15% of Americans still deny that climate change is real, according to a new national assessment from the University of Michigan. Evidence of climate change has been mounting, including science which has shown that climate-related natural disasters are growing in frequency and intensity sooner than originally predicted, researchers said. Nevertheless, climate change is still not wholly accepted as fact in the United States. To assess climate change denialism in America, researchers analyzed Twitter (now X) data from 2017 to 2019, using AI techniques to track how social media has spread such denial. The study also identified key influencers like former President Donald Trump, and assessed how they spread and cemented misinformation about climate change. Using ChatGPT AI, researchers classified more than 7.4 million tweets as “for” or “against” climate change, and mapped the results at state and county levels. “Prior to the advancement of AI and social media data, this work relied on expensive and time-consuming surveys,” said senior study author Joshua Newell, co-director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability. Analysis of the tweets showed that belief in climate change is highest along the West Coast and East Coast, and that denialism is highest in the central and southern parts of the United States. In fact, more than 20% of the populations of Oklahoma,… read on > read on >