Sources and Content of Contrarian Communications about Climate Science
A rigorous computer-driven analysis of organizations producing documents and speeches deemed to express contrarian views on climate change, the texts of these documents, and energy companies providing funding to those organizations has been carried out. Entities receiving funding are more closely connected to one another than are those not supported. The entities most active in generating communication are highly influential in the contrarian movement. Several contrarian topics, from energy industry-funded entities, were the subjects of communications that increased in number strongly in the years since about 2007 compared to those from nonsupported entities. Entities receiving funding were more likely to have produced contrarian writings. These findings provide some understanding of why public opinion in the U. S. is more dismissive of the findings of climate science than it is in other industrialized countries. The United States Congress in...