Environmental scientists just wrote off one of the most alarming models for the future of our planet, triggering a tidal wave of headlines. Now researchers have discovered social media can cement opinions in just a handful of posts.
RCP8.5 was a terrifying vision of a devastating tomorrow in which global temperatures could hit between 2.6C and 4.8C above pre-industrial levels. Sea level rise was predicted at anything from 0.45 to 0.82 metres compared with today.
As a result, the planet would no longer be able to sustain life in the way we currently understand, with agriculture, infrastructure and civilisation essentially pushed to the brink (and then likely over the point) of collapse.
Thankfully, last weekend the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change [IPCC] announced that this high emissions, ‘burn all the coal we have left’ scenario was now implausible and was no longer included in the latest set of future models. A number of factors informed this, including the fact that RCP8.5 was a baseline scenario which did not allow for any future climate mitigation, with RCPs — representative concentration pathways — already succeeded by SSPs, or share economic pathways, which allowed for population change and technological development in the future.
Unfortunately, news that the latest tranche of climate scenarios did not feature the most alarming prediction was quickly picked up on by right wing and climate denier-aligned media and influencers. Misinformation about why this has happened has dominated reporting on the step-change, with many falsely claiming that the new climate scenarios were an admission of past ‘scientific claims’ being either false, misleading or inaccurate.
In reality, the latest modelling excludes the level of emissions in RCP8.5, but there is still a consensus that the world is on course for extreme heating. Worse still, the evidence now shows efforts to limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, as per the Paris agreement, have failed and this is no longer possible. In fact, the planet is now on course for between 2.5C and 3C higher temperatures, which has been described by the UN as catastrophic.
Carbon Brief has published a useful fact checking article on the furore that has eschewed. This includes analysis of language in reports by the New York Post, Daily Caller, Fox News, The Times (of London), and a Truth Social statement made by US President Donald J. Trump. Amongst the most damaging (false) narratives is that RCP8.5 has been ‘quietly adjusted’, implying an attempt by the scientific community to cover up past failings, and the wildly misleading suggestion that the worst case had been a prediction of business as usual in an attempt to frame climate research as alarmist.
The need to rebalance bias and misrepresentation with fact is now urgent, although it may already be far too late. A new study published in the journal Systems Research has found compelling evidence that the battle against misinformation needs to begin much earlier than previously thought. While we usually assume that opinions on unfamiliar topics are formed through a relatively slow process of consuming information, engaging in conversations and reading statements from other people, in a social media scenario exposure to as few as five posts might stabilise how we feel about a particular issue.
‘People tend to assume opinions develop gradually through deliberate evaluation,’ explains Ashish Kumar Jha, co-author of the study and professor at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin. ‘What we found is that under typical social media conditions, people can begin forming durable impressions very quickly, often before they have meaningfully assessed whether the information itself is accurate.’
The research, Where the Ball Starts Rolling? An Empirical Investigation into Initial Opinion Formation on Social Media Platforms, used Instagram-style posts which simulated scrolling behaviour. Unfamiliar information was then presented to participants, and the results reveal a clear pattern. Once passed the PCI — or ‘point of critical information’ — every post which backed up an emerging opinion became easier to believe and the likelihood of that content being shared increased. Any contradictions of the narrative were also easier to dismiss, and this trend maintained whether the original information was fact or fiction.
According to the team behind the investigation, repetition, familiarity and narrative coherence are key factors in why beliefs begin to take shape. For example, there was little to distinguish in terms of reactions to false and accurate information at the earliest stages of opinion formation. Participants did not tend to carefully evaluate what they were watching or reading, and instead decided on believability based on the quantity they were exposed to.
‘Our findings suggest the earliest exposures users encounter online may carry far more weight than platforms currently recognise,’ says Venu Puthineedi, co-author of the study and professor at NEOMA Business School. ‘By the time corrections, warnings or fact-checks appear, an initial evaluative framework may already be in place.’
Identity cues were also found to be a powerful factor. Accounts with ‘Dr’ in the title were often considered by users to be more trustworthy even than those with high follower counts. The analysis has been published at a critical time for both climate science and online misinformation relating to the environment, and the future of social media platforms themselves. Crucially, though, while a significant volume of studies are either underway or sharing results relating to online behaviour, this is the only work that has attempted to identify how beliefs actually take shape online, rather than why false information spreads so quickly once opinions are cemented.
Image: Samuel Regan-Asante / Unsplash
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