Navigating the Storm: Insights into Climate Misinformation
Field Notes: Research Profile
Chris Russill, Journalism and Communication
Chris Russill’s research explores climate communication and its role in public engagement, policy development, and crisis management – and even murder!
Can you offer a “lay” description of your research topic?
I study how climate communication has been transformed by changes to our information environment over the last decade or so. These changes have led to surges of false and misleading communication that we have yet to conceptualize or address adequately.
These surges are especially prominent during moments of crisis, so I wade into those moments to figure out how people make sense of them. Whether it is journalists, emergency responders, information officers, crisis communicators, affected communities, the wider public, etc., they are usually quick to form an understanding of the situation. I’m interested in what information is available to them and found these are moments of collective sensemaking, not simply cognitive processing or factchecking issues.
People often talk about misinformation in its consequences for individuals or the pollution of public discourse. This is a part of it. But I’m concerned with how it degrades the conditions for institutional decision-making or collective sense-making, and so I look to concepts from these areas to understand what’s going on. People got this wrong during covid. We can still get it right on climate.
What piqued Your Interest in This Topic?
Crisis, conspiracies, conflict, who isn’t interested in these things?
What Question were you hoping to Answer in your research?
Well, in an immediate sense, I’m curious what it means that our climate discussions have become more conspiratorial, more animated by actors that feel threatened by climate solutions and climate policies, and more influenced by content creators seeking to undermine institutional decision-making and public sense-making. These voices have outsized influence because they leverage the incentives and affordances of the digital systems organizing the flow of our information. The content produced is often manipulative because it is designed to capture online engagement. These pundits and influencers recognize that the largest digital platforms (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram) amplify content that captures user engagement and design their communication accordingly. And, on these platforms, the systems for determining veracity have been stripped down or eliminated completely, so questions of truth or accuracy just don’t figure into the design and circulation of much of our communication online.
During the next big crisis, these systems will flood with false, misleading, and manipulative content, and undermine our collective ability to understand and respond. This happened during the big wildfires the last two years in Canada, it happened in LA this winter, and it’ll happen next time too. This isn’t about blaming social media for our troubles. It is about understanding how the design features of our information environment are leveraged by political actors to affect our decision-making and how we make sense of reality. We need to integrate this understanding in crisis communication and disaster management as soon as possible.
But the larger question is why engagement is higher for content that speaks so intensely and emotionally to our insecurities? And why we have failed to ground desires and policies for climate protection in these feelings? Part of the problem is the incentives and affordances of the digital systems organizing our information environment as discussed above. But another part of this is an institutional and governmental failure of climate communication. We tend to emphasize policy elegance or cost/benefit analysis over public engagement in communicating the need to protect our climate systems – often these policies fail to resonate with people as a result. Our work at Re.Climate is about trying to get this policy + public engagement mix right.
So, it is these things together, our genuine insecurities and the tools we have for making sense of them, it is that intersection we work toward for more inclusive and effective climate communication.
What is Something People Would Be Surprised to Learn?
It is probably that the fossil fuel era, as the dominant industry and driver of our geopolitics, is effectively over, and that energy transition to cleaner sources of energy is well underway. This is a huge change. It might not feel like it because of Trump’s support of fossil fuels, his attempts to force U.S. natural gas on countries, his support of Russia, his desire to tie American and Canadian futures to fossil fuels. This is a big problem. But he can’t turn it back entirely. So, it is a question of how the transition will unfold. Will it take positive shape and form in Canada? I think most of us want that for our students and kids. Or do we wait until its shape and form are determined from afar and imposed on us? These questions are getting decided now.
What’s the Biggest Misconception?
It is the idea that public opinion is shallow or fickle or fatalist about protecting our climate system. It isn’t. People want action, they want it faster, and they want to be part of a country that cares about this. This is a consistent finding, year over year, and it gets lost in the way we obsess over shifts in polls, surveys, or the priorities of political leaders. It gets lost in the despair of having failed to act quickly enough. It gets lost when we focus on climate conspiracies, funny memes, or the anti-climate ravings of celebrity influencers. Climate trends, anxiety, and disinformation matter, but so does the durability of the bigger picture.
So, the problem isn’t getting lots more people to care and or call for protection of our climate systems – the problem is why we underestimate how many other people feel the same way we do. If you ask people how they feel about doing something on climate, they usually tell you. If you ask people how other people feel about protecting climate, they often underestimate how many people want action – and often by a lot. This is true in my classes but also true in Alberta. When we close that gap, when we recognize how we feel is how others also feel about climate protection, then the sense of isolation or impasse or inaction will be lessened or broken. Of course, the oligarchs will still be standing in our way! But I like our chances at that point.
New Projects?
I’m excited about a climate visuals project we are developing at Re.Climate to help people communicate with visuals and imaging. Too often, graphical elements are an afterthought. People tend to rely on what is most accessible, so you get the same kind of images and emotional appeals circulating. Or people get caught up with inauthentic and misleading representations. Our goal is to improve the circulation of visuals in climate communiation by researching the wider lifecycle: from development, creation, authentication, and procurement into display, use, contextualization, and evaluation of these visual elements. Ideally, we will develop a public repository of images people can access to expand the range of stories they tell with images. We are focused on the role of images in crisis and risk communication right now but hope to extend to climate communication more broadly.
We are also working on a project titled, ‘Who Killed the Carbon Tax,’ and having some fun with that. It is based on interviews and makes visible the different explanations people have for why the policy failed. Some people feel the policy was poorly conceived at the outset, while others feel it was murdered by malevolent forces using disinformation or the general ineptitude of government efforts to explain their approach to people. These are the leading suspects so far! But what we want to do is illustrate the different ways that people understand the relationship of policy and public engagement when discussing climate solutions with people. After all, this is hardly the first climate policy to die a brutal death in this country.
I’m really hoping we develop and share our findings via a true crime podcast later this year. Stay tuned!
Favourite Class…
Ha, ha, the who is your favourite child question! Does anyone answer this honestly?
I have had a great time with our second-year course, COMS 2400: Climate Coms. Anyone can enrol from any field, any background, part time or full time, 1st year, 4th year, and we might even have a 6th student in there. People working at the university or other professors sometimes come. It is open to all students which means we get a good mix of people and perspectives in there.
Communication is for everyone. The quality of our lives and of those around us is determined by it – helping people realize that, to act on it in their own lives, those are the best classes.