The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - How to Inoculate Against Misinformation: Breaking Down Misleading Arguments & Why Science Communication Fails with John Cook

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

Humans aren't rational. We don't evaluate facts objectively; instead, we interpret them through our biases, experiences, and backgrounds. What's more, we're psychologically motivated to reject or distort information that threatens our identity or worldview – even if it's scientifically valid. Add to that our modern media landscape where everyone has a different source of "truth" for world events, our ability to understand what is actually true is weaker than ever. How, then, can we combat misinformation when simply presenting the facts is no longer enough – and may even backfire? In this episode, Nate is joined by John Cook, a researcher who has spent nearly two decades studying science communication and the psychology of misinformation. John shares his journey from creating the education website Skeptical Science in 2007 to his shocking discovery that his well-intentioned debunking efforts might have been counterproductive. He also discusses the "FLICC" framework – a set of five techniques (Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking, and Conspiracy theories) that cut across all forms of misinformation, from the denial of global heating to vaccine hesitancy, and more. Additionally, John's research reveals a counterintuitive truth: our tribal identities matter more than our political beliefs in determining what science we accept – yet our aversion to being tricked is bipartisan.  When it comes to reaching a shared understanding of the world, why does every conversation matter – regardless of whether it ends in agreement? When attacks on science have shifted from denying findings to attacking solutions and scientists themselves, are we fighting yesterday's battle with outdated communication strategies? And while we can't eliminate motivated reasoning (to which we're all susceptible), how can we work around it by teaching people to recognize how they're being misled, rather than just telling them what to believe?   About John Cook: John Cook is a Senior Research Fellow at the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change at the University of Melbourne. He is also affiliated with the Center for Climate Change Communication as adjunct faculty. In 2007, he founded Skeptical Science, a website which won the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge and 2016 Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education. John also created the game Cranky Uncle, combining critical thinking, cartoons, and gamification to build resilience against misinformation, and has worked with organizations such as Facebook, NASA, and UNICEF to develop evidence-based responses to misinformation. John co-authored the college textbooks Climate Change: Examining the Facts with Weber State University professor Daniel Bedford. He was also a coauthor of the textbook Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis and the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. Additionally, in 2013, he published a paper analyzing the scientific consensus on climate change that has been highlighted by President Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron. He also developed a Massive Open Online Course in 2015 at the University of Queensland on climate science denial, that has received over 40,000 enrollments.   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners  

Misinformation is polarising. It pulls the public apart. So I wanted to explore, could you depolarize misinformation or neutralize it? The way I did that was I just talked about a specific misleading technique. And then I used tobacco misinformation and used that as an example of here is how the tobacco industry used to use fake experts to mislead us. And then afterwards, then I showed them some climate misinformation that used that same strategy and I found that it neutralized the misinformation across the political spectrum. And that aversion to being tricked is bipartisan.

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagan's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I'm joined by physicist and communication scientist John Cook to discuss how to recognize and counteract misinformation and how to teach others to do the same for any issue.

John Cook is a senior research fellow with the Melbourne Center for Behavior Change at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He researches how to use critical thinking to counter misinformation for all types of polarizing issues. In 2007, he founded skeptical science, which is one of the most reputable sources for explaining the science behind global heating. Additionally, he created a game called Cranky Uncle, which, as we discuss in this episode, combines critical thinking, cartoons, and gamification to help people recognize and understand misinformation. In this conversation, John and I walked through how to debunk some of the most common claims arguing against human-closed global

heating. More importantly, John breaks down the underlying logic and critical thinking that can be used to correct any misinformation across any subject. My hope is that after watching, you can apply this approach to any current issue or topic you view to be the most important in your own life at the moment. Additionally, if you're enjoying this podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our substack newsletter where you can read more of the system science underpinning the human predicament where my team and I share increasingly quite a lot of written and video content related to the Great Simplification. You can find the link to subscribe in the show description. With that, please welcome John Cook.

John Cook, great to see you. Welcome to the Great Simplification. Thanks, Nate. Great to talk to you. So you have been researching and educating on science communication for almost 20 years, including through the creation of climate education websites, skeptical science, which I know when I was getting my PhD back in the day, I used that, and recently cranky uncle. As such, given we are now in a moment of escalating challenges with communication

across many contentious topics in the world, I invited you today to unpack your methods for becoming aware of and combating miscommunication of all kinds. So to start, I'm wondering if you can tell us about the moment when you realize that the way that we in the world who care about the issues of the world currently communicate science, especially, but not only science about global heating. It's not working and that we need to rethink our approach to science communication. Let's start there. I guess the moment for me was when I realized that I wasn't communicating it effectively. Or potentially it could have been better.

So I started Skeptical Science 2007, I think, and I came from a physics background. So very much natural science, you know, really operating under the assumption that you just get the facts to people, job done, right? And that should be enough. And so skeptical science was really just about making the facts about climate science available to people and debunking climate myths. after several years of doing this, a cognitive scientist, a psychology researcher, sent me some research that found that if you debunked in the wrong way, you could make things worse.

You cause a backfire effect where people read your debunking and end up believing the myth more than before they read your debunking. And the thing that really horrified me, and I still vividly remember the kind of blood draining from my face as I was reading this research paper, was that the bad way of debunking was the way that I was doing it on skeptical science. Fully well-intentioned,

as a scientist and as a science communicator, you recognized at that moment that all of your work might have actually been having a counterproductive impact. Yeah, might have. And more broadly, I realized that there was a science to science communication, which I wasn't even aware of up to that point.

But I will say that early research into this backfire effect of debunkings, making things worse, it hasn't really replicated. Scientists have tried to run experiments where they try to find that same backfire effect, and it's really elusive. It's really hard to achieve. So I probably wasn't making things worse. So wait a minute, the backfire effect. Is that also called motivated reasoning?

No. So motivated reasoning is when people resist facts that they're motivated to reject because it goes against their beliefs or threatens their identity or whatever reason gives them the motivation. With the backfire effect, there are a number of different reasons why a debunking might potentially backfire. One of them might be because it threatens people's ideology. So there is a bit of motivated reasoning in that sense. But the more basic reason why debunkings might backfire, or at least be ineffective, is because they put too much emphasis on the myth and not enough on the facts. So that afterwards, all people remember is the myth, not the factual debunkings.

So that's not really motivated reasoning. That's just basic, bad communicators. Yeah. So I think there's many people, especially in environmental circles, that still have this belief that the problems of the world are because of lack of enough accurate information and facts. And so you no longer believe that's the case. Can you unpack that a little bit? A simple way of looking at science communication is what we call the information definition. model. So it's the idea that the reason why there's controversy about climate change is because people just don't have all the information. So let's just pour that information into them. And hopefully that will solve the problem. Now, it turns out that that's a gross oversimplification and just pouring or throwing a lot of information to people isn't the be all and end all. It's not going to solve the problem. But I will also say that you don't want to

throw the baby out with the bathwater and go in the complete opposite direction and say that facts don't matter. Facts do matter. Education matters. Like we still want to communicate the facts. We just have to recognize that they're necessary but insufficient. We also need to recognize that people are motivated reasons, that we do look at facts or interpret them through our cultural lenses, our backgrounds, our biases. So we just have to recognize those other complexities as well. So does that mean that if we were totally rational robots, you could communicate science and facts in one way. This is the science. These are the facts. Here they are. But with the complexities and the nuance and the context that you just said, does that suggest that there cannot be on an issue,

let's just take climate change for now, there cannot be just one message. There has to be 10 or 20 messages depending on the demographic, the context, the identity, and all that. You can't have just one thing because there's lots of different audiences.

Is that right? Oh, definitely. The message depends on the audience. It depends on the messenger. It depends on what particular aspect of climate change you want to talk about and how you want to frame it and what you want to put the emphasis on.

And I'll give an example of a scientific study that kind of exemplifies this. So there was a study that communicated the same climate facts to people, but in two different ways. So they basically took their research participants and split them into two groups. One group got a climate message, and then the climate source.

solution was regulating the fossil fuel industry. The other group got the exactly same climate facts, but the solution was reinvigorating the nuclear industry. And what they found were was Democrats responded to both messages exactly the same, but Republicans responded to the two different messages in completely different ways. If the solution was regulating the fossil fuel industry, though, like, I don't like that science. That makes total sense. And this is one of my pet peeves is I think we need to distinguish and separate out the science of a world affecting issue and the prescriptions and what do we do?

Because they're separate conversations. And so many people lump them together. And because of what you just said, it's almost impossible. So I wish there was a way that just we could just talk about. the science, nothing else. And then in another conversation, then we talk about solutions and what to do. Is there any hope of something like that working? Well, that's funny you mentioned that because that's also problematic. Oh, okay. Why? Because when you communicate a problem without a solution, that can be paralyzing. So you communicate the doom and gloom of climate change and people are like,

So you have to follow it with some solution. Yeah, because a message about a problem needs to also come with a sense of efficacy that we can do something about it. Now you're casting an umbrella on my entire podcast platform because I don't offer a lot of solutions here and the stuff that we discuss are hell of scary and worrisome about the future. but I don't know the solutions, so I don't talk about them. We're probably going to have to use less on average. We're probably going to have to have a different sort of economic system. I don't know. But I think you're absolutely right.

There's a lot of people that are like, whoa, what do we do? I want answers. Yeah, and the answers are not easy. This is just such a, not only a complicated problem, but so interconnected and ubiquitous and big. Yeah, it's certainly a difficult topic. We're going to dive into a lot of this, John. So you started skeptical science in 2007.

That's 18 years ago. What have been your aha moments about science, science communication, some of the things you just shared, and where are you now? Like in maturing as a human alive at this time, trying to convey these things, but also all of us are susceptible to biases. And, you know, when I'm super confident about something, I have to self-handicap my own view by 10 or 15%

because I'm human and humans can be delusional. So I've gotten used to doing that. I wish more people would do that. But what have you really learned? Like, how have you matured on your journey of all this? over the course of my PhD, I think the thing that I learned was probably, my PhD was really trying to answer the question, what are some ways that we can counter misinformation effectively? Given, like I had already worked out, okay, don't do it this way, how should I do it?

And so I was experimenting, I was just, you know, really, it was exploratory and I was just throwing at different approaches. And I just kind of stumbled into the technique. term, the jargon I would use is logic-based inoculation, which is basically just explain the techniques of misinformation to people. Expose the magician trick. What's the sleight of hand used to mislead people? That is actually, it's almost like a universal vaccine against misinformation, because once people can spot misleading techniques, they can spot them across topics. But is there a motivated reasoning or backfire effect bias there? depending on the issue and the demographic that you apply it to?

Because if you tell me to inoculate myself against misinformation on an issue that I deeply believe in and care about, I may not want to know about that. So is that a real thing too? So you put your finger on the real issue there, a subject that you deeply care about. The power of this approach of, it's really a critical thinking approach, is, is you can sidestep those triggers, that issue that you deeply care about. So let me explain that by giving you or explaining the experiment I did during my PhD. So I wanted to inoculate people against climate misinformation because I had found that climate misinformation is polarizing.

People, when you expose people to misinformation, not everyone responds to it the same. I found that people who were on the politically conservative end of the spectrum were much more persuaded by climate misinformation than people who were on the politically liberal end of the spectrum. And so that means that misinformation is polarizing. It pulls the public apart so that you see this different response. So I wanted to explore, could you depolarize misinformation or neutralize it? The way I did that was I showed people,

an inoculating message, which didn't talk about climate change at all. Instead, I just talked about a specific misleading technique that in this experiment, it was the technique of fake experts, using people who convey the impression of expertise, but they don't have the relevant expertise. And then I use tobacco misinformation as an example. So I took one of those newspaper ads from the mid-20th century, you know, that kind of madman sort of, um, style with the dude in a white coat and he's smoking like a camels or something and use that as an example of here is how the tobacco industry used to use fake experts to mislead us about the health impacts of smoking. And so I was not, I was sidestepping the

trigger of talking about climate change. And then afterwards, after inoculating them and building their awareness of the fake expert strategy, then I showed. them some climate misinformation that used that same strategy, fake experts. And I found that it neutralized the misinformation across the political spectrum, whether people were liberal or conservative.

And what this told me is that, yes, we are motivated reasoners and climate misinformation, people respond to it in a motivated way, but we also don't like being misled. And that aversion to being tricked is bipartisan.

It's the same across the political spectrum. The human aversion to being tricked is as or more powerful than the existing identity or ideology on some issue in some cases. Yeah, well, at least in this case, I found that it completely neutralized it. Yeah, that's encouraging. Yeah, and it also offers an approach because if you can explain misinformation techniques using examples. that aren't loaded, culturally loaded, then you can potentially build up their resilience against misinformation, even on other topics where they are motivated reasoners.

I think you, correct me if I'm explaining this wrong, you've developed a framework to help people think more critically, which you call the five techniques of denial, to look out for one talking about misinformation in the news. And I think fake experts is one of these five. techniques? What are some of the other ones? Yeah. So, to be fair, I didn't come up with it. It was actually Mark Hoofnagle who first proposed the five techniques of science denial. But I was giving a talk to a youth, like a climate youth organization. So I was all young people. And I was like,

okay, I need to come up with a catchy way to remember these five techniques. So I need an acronym. So I was like, okay, fake experts, F, unrealistic expectations. you, cherry-picking, see, this is going in a bad direction. I need to. So I ended up coming up with Flick as the acronym. So it's fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry-picking, and conspiracy theories. And I found that that acronym is a really hooky way of helping people remember the techniques of denial. And it's actually, out of all the things I've worked on, it's one of the things that has really stuck because I think it just helps people remember it. So you spoke briefly about fake experts. Can you give an example of

the others briefly? Yeah. So impossible expectations is demanding impossible standards of proof from the science. So that's something like climate models or, you know, weather models can't predict the weather next week, so therefore climate models, how are they going to predict the weather in 100 years? So cherry picking is looking at just only a limited part of the data and ignoring the full body of evidence.

So it would be something like, hey, global warming hasn't happened over the last three years, therefore it must have stopped ignoring the long-term trend. and conspiracy theories is just assuming that there's a shadowy secret group of people who are conspiring to deceive the public and then the last one is logical fallacies

now I let that to last because it's actually a whole umbrella there's a whole range of different logical fallacies what does that mean a logical fallacy is when the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises of an argument or the starting assumptions. But I'll just give some concrete examples. So probably the most common logical fallacy in climate misinformation is single cause, which is assuming that there's just one cause of something

and ignoring all the other possible causes. It's a type of oversimplification. And we hear this all the time when somebody says, oh, I believe in climate change. Climate has always changed. They're basically saying, well, climate has changed naturally in the past, so what's happening now must be natural as well. Whatever the issue, whether it's climate or something else, certainly there are moneyed interests involved in wanting a certain narrative to expand, but also in an era of social media and clicks and likes and status and we're a certain narrative.

social primate seeking status, it seems like a playground for people that just want dopamine and attention to just wreak havoc with the science. And you could cherry pick till the cows come home and find little nuances and things that neglect the wide boundary aircraft carrier view of the situation. But just look at one little thing. And you are technically right on that one little thing. and it's just legion on the internet. So some part of the science communication problem that you're describing is everyone has their own AM radio station because of YouTube and the internet. And we are incredibly geared to being right and getting acknowledged for being right. What are your thoughts on that?

So one of my science heroes is Naomi Oreskes. She wrote The Merchants of Doubt book. And she also published the first study finding there was an overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. So once I was hanging out with her, trying not to look like a bandboy. So just trying to be cool. And we were just talking about the climate denier influences and speculating. and speculating on what drove them. And so I asked her, what do you think drives them?

And she was just quiet for a moment thinking. And then she said, malignant narcissism. So I think that, yeah, you're right. People are complicated. There can be lots of motives. Money is a motive for some. Ideology is a motive for others. But yeah, I think that some people just get fame

from being a controversial. Yeah, I think that's a real thing. So something I talk about frequently on this channel is our innate cognitive biases, like in-group-out-group or authority bias. So on top of what you just shared, how do cognitive biases play into the way people interpret information? And how does that relate to the logical fallacies you just mentioned? Yeah, I think that question really follows on well from, what drives these denier influences, because ultimately we don't know what's going on in a person's head, but also we don't know whether they genuinely believe the misinformation or whether

it's disinformation where they're deliberately trying to deceive us. And the real challenge in that issue is if someone has cognitive biases, if they're motivated reasoners, I mean, that means all of us. We all have kind of yes. Yeah, to degrees. Like every, if you have a spectrum of motivated reasoning, like you Right. Some people have 10% and some are at 90%. Yeah, some are off the scales.

And yeah, um, well, also it depends on the context, right? Because you might belong to a group where the social identity motivates you to reject a certain about, you know, certain science.

Or you might have a um, belief system that motivates you to reject science. So yeah, when it's apples and oranges, everyone's different and there's lots of different reasons why people might reject the science. But the thing is, from the outside, it looks exactly the same. If you are intentionally deceiving people or if you are inadvertently deceiving yourself through motivated reasoning, what it looks like from the outside is the same. You use the same flick techniques.

You rely on fake experts. Whether you're using a fake expert knowingly to deceive people or whether you're biased towards this person because, hey, they're saying things that I agree with. So I think that they have greater expertise from my point of view. It's like you look through a person's music collection. I think, hey, you have great taste in music. You're actually saying you have my taste in music.

So that's an example of fake expertise from a biased point of view. So how does money apply to this? Because if it were an equal playing field, I would think that over time, the science would win out. But if it's not an equal playing field, and some people have megaphones and those people have the tricks,

the other side doesn't really stand much of a chance. I'm not talking about climate, per se, but anything in our world. Yeah, and firstly, science is winning out. Like, when we look at public opinion, like, when we look at surveys, and the most authoritative surveys are the ones done by Yale and George Mason University, who every year they survey the public, they do these big national surveys. And they've shown that over the last few decades, the public attitudes and opinions,

about climate change have slowly been getting better. Problem is, and so science is gradually progressing, and people are becoming more and more supportive of the science and supportive of climate action, but it's happening slower than we would like. And really, it's happening slower than we need in order to get climate action that the science is telling us we need. So to come back to your question,

one of the reasons why it's moving slower is because of misconduct. misinformation. And the reason why misinformation has been so powerful and effective is because of funding. Bob Brule has documented the amount of funding that has gone from industry, from the fossil fuel industry, to the organizations that produce climate misinformation. And it's of the order of billions of dollars. Arguably, climate misinformation has been the most well-funded misinformation campaign in human history. So I don't expect you to know the answer to this, but maybe you could speculate. Do you think the people that are funding that what you just said, do you think they know that it's misinformation and they just want to do it because it's good for business and their own families and futures? Or do you think they truly believe in what they're saying? And I want to amplify this because the climate science is not true. Like they might think the same, you know, in their bodies and mind, they might think the same as you. I don't know, I'm asking you.

I'd say it's, there would be both, there would be both cases. Some people would knowingly be doing it. Others would be self-deceiving themselves and never underestimate the human capacity to deceive themselves. Oh, I do not. I do not underestimate it. I forget that quote, you know, if a person's paycheck depends on them believing something,

I forget the exact words. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, we can, again, motivated reasoning can help us believe these things. So again, it comes back to a point, we don't know what's going on inside a person's head, but we can see the actions that they take. And so that's why my work is focused on the techniques of misinformation rather than the motives, because you can see those techniques, spot them, and be resilient against being misled. Just out of curiosity, science is a new.

thing for our species. I mean, the enlightenment was not that long ago. So knowing what you know, doing your PhD and spending almost two decades, trying to understand this question, if we put you back 500 years into Europe, you would have been like a wizard to know these things. But we are such an advanced species with the power of gods and now AI is here. And yet we have have these self-deception delusional cognitive bias list as long as my arm aspects of the human social primate brain that were really immature in that sense. And it just seems like this bizarreo combination. Our brains are struggling to keep up. And then you have a problem like climate change. And our brains are really ill-equipped to just, like, even if misinformation didn't exist,

even if there wasn't billions of dollars going to misinformation, and everyone was good faith trying to deal with this problem, it would still be really challenging because our brains are hardwired to deal with a predator jumping out of the bushes at us. It's not hardwired to deal with a global problem occurring over decades caused by all of us. Yeah, you're exactly right. our human predicament, human and more than human predicament, is complex, it's abstract, it's in the future, there are no easy answers, the famous people aren't talking about it,

and it's not immediate in the sense that it's happening at this moment. So it's almost the perfect storm for us to ignore or deny. And you can't fault people for working hard and then coming home and looking at some videos, and being misinformed when they didn't have the chance to have hundreds and hundreds or a thousand hours of education on this like you and I did. You know, it's a pickle. So I have a list, given that I've hosted this podcast

for over four years now, of some of the most common arguments made by people who are skeptical of the reality and the critical relevance of our current trajectory of global heating. So if you would be willing, can you kind of walk us through how to deconstruct each of these one by one a couple minutes each? So something you mentioned earlier, we hear a lot in the past. There were natural changes in Earth's climate. So current changes are natural, not human cause. What's everyone upset about? And the challenge too, like you mentioned deconstructing

them is these arguments are often, you articulated that argument then in a fairly logical way. Often it's a lot more concise and shorter. It's just, oh, climate has always changed. You know, it's just this very short, snappy talking point. But really what that argument is trying to say, if you deconstruct it and break it up into pieces is climate has changed naturally in the past throughout. Earth's history, therefore what's happening now must be natural as well. And the fallacy there is that it assumes that whatever is causing climate change now must be the same cause as what

is causing climate change in the past. It's assuming that there's only one possible cause of climate change, natural drivers. So that's a logical fallacy. That's the fallacy of single cause. Falsy of single cause. Okay. So here's another one. And I've actually asked a few people on this podcast, and I didn't get a great answer. So not to put you on the spot. No pressure. John. But rising temperature leads rising CO2, not the other way around. Yeah. I like this one, actually. This is one of my favorites because it's such a clear logical fallacy. Now, the background of this is when we look at ice core records in Antarctica, we find, We can build a history of the changes in CO2 in the air and also the, like, temperature. And what we find is temperature goes up first and then around 800 years later, CO2 goes up later. And so that implies that temperature is driving CO2, not CO2 driving temperature.

And that's the argument. That argument commits the fallacy of false cause. or false dichotomy. A false dichotomy is when you say it's either A or B, but those are only two options. Maybe A and B are both true. Or maybe it's C. Maybe there's a third option. In this case, they're saying either temperature causes CO2 or CO2 causes temperature, but it has to be one or the other and you have to make a choice. In reality, it's both. What happens is the earth changes its orbit, that causes warming. And the warming then, when you have warmer water, it causes CO2 to come out of the ocean. And then the CO2 causes extra warming. And you have a reinforcing

feedback loop. And it's actually that reinforcing feedback which pulls the Earth out of ice ages. How does Earth's orbital change cause warming? Okay. That's very complicated. question. So the way that the Earth's orbit changes, it happens in three different ways. You have the tilt of the Earth. That's what causes the seasons. And that tilt varies over like tens of thousands of years. You also have the shape of the orbit. So it's not perfect circle. It's actually more oval shaped. But that oval shape gets more circular and then it gets more oval over, again, over tens of thousands of years. And then there's a third way that, again, with the access, that changes in different ways.

Now, when you add all these things together, you combine the tilt changing and the oval shape changing. These combine in ways that change, because the tilt causes seasons, it changes how much sunlight hits the poles each year. Basically, you get more or less sunlight hitting the poles, which causes more or less ice melts. And then as the ice melts, ice is white and reflective, which reflects the sun's heat off. Once you lose that ice, you expose the darker water, and that absorbs heat. And that's another reinforcing feedback. So there are people now, this wasn't on my list, but talking about orbital changes happening now, also impacting things. Is that a big part of what's happening now or a small part? It's a small part. So yeah,

orbital changes is constantly happening, but this is happening over 100,000 year cycles. Okay. Climate change, the global warming we're experiencing now, this has been, happened over a few decades, and it's happening at a rate way faster than what you see with orbital changes. I'll ask you this one, although I did a recent, frankly, on it, so I think I know the answer, but you're a better science communicator than I, so give it a shot. More CO2 is good for plants, so warming is actually a good thing. Yeah, so it's true that CO2 is part of photosynthesis. Like, plants do need CO2, but they also need other things in order to flourish. They need a regular water supply. They need a comfortable temperature range. And adding more

CO2 disrupts those other things. And so the argument that plants just need CO2, it's an oversimplification. It's ignoring all the other things that plants need in order to flourish. It's the same argument as saying

humans need calcium. Calcium's good. Ice cream has calcium. Therefore, all you need to eat is ice cream. Okay. It's an oversimplification. That landed. Especially personally. That landed. Okay, so we're having an abnormally cold winter.

And by the way, three days ago, John, where I live, and you're going to find this unbelievable, because where you are, it's probably 37 C. It was minus 27 degrees Celsius here three days ago. So, you know, we're having an abnormally cold winter, so the climate must not be warming is something that is commonly said. Arguing that it's cold where I am right now. at this moment in time, therefore global warming isn't happening, that's anecdote fallacy.

You're just looking at your own specific circumstances and ignoring the bigger picture because globally, you know, we're experiencing the hottest temperatures on record right now, even if you might be feeling cold right now in one particular place. It's the same argument as saying, I just had a big meal and I feel full, therefore global hunger doesn't exist. Yeah, it's directionally similar to that. And it is quite hot where you are today, right? Yeah, it's, well, right? I'm in a very cold house, but my wife just texted me, she's on a trip at the moment.

She said it's going to be 32C, I think, today. For Melbourne, that's pretty warm. Yeah, yeah. All right, how about this one? CO2 is too small a fraction in the atmosphere to make a big difference in the climate. It's four parts per 10,000. Who cares if it's five or six or 10? Yeah, so CO2 is about 0.04%.

Funnily enough, that's almost the same, well, in Australia at least, 0.05 is the legal limit for blood alcohol level. I think it's like 0.08 in the US, right? I don't know, but that would stand to reason. So we know from things like blood alcohol level or putting a drop of arsenic into a cup of water, we know that tiny fractions can have a big impact. And so we know that CO2 causes warming because we directly measure it.

We measure the heat being trapped by CO2. Is there a phenomenon whereby people don't understand some of the things that you just described, but then they have education or conversations or media or, oh, okay, now I understand. Is there a backsliding when they're in groups that don't agree with them, or once they understand something, it sticks, or do you not have enough evidence to weigh in on that? Certainly factual communication that can fade over time. And I'll give you an example from my field,

misinformation research. So, like, we design messages that try to inoculate people, against misinformation. And we measure the impact it has. So we measure just before we've inoculated them and just after, and we find, oh, that's had a really positive effect. Then if we measure them two or four weeks later, we find that they have backslid. Like, not because of necessarily people or whatever. It's just our memories fade over time. Like, I know you started out as a climate educator, but, you know, the stuff you've been sharing so far, do you ever just take a step back, John and Marvel?

at the human animal that you're trying to understand and influence. I mean, it's really quite, we are just bizarre as a species, wonderful and amazing and creative and delusional and all the things. I mean, because, yeah, you said you haven't studied the evolution and all the anthropological evidence, but you do know how our brains work with respect to science, and it's really an amazing observation, don't you think? Yeah, I mean, humans are incredibly complicated, and the work I'm doing, like trying to undo

misinformation in people's brains is, it just seems to be getting more. The more I dig into it, the more complicated I get. It gets. And the closer I get to the finish line, the more the finish line gets moved further away from me. And yet we have to try, my friend. Well, yeah, we have no alternative but to try. But just to finish my answer to your question. So the effect of facts does fade, which requires booster shuts.

We need to, you know, it's pushing the inoculation analogy. We find that you inoculate people, it's fading, you inoculate again, it fades, you inoculate again, it fades. But there was a really interesting study by some researchers at Cambridge. They found that after the fourth inoculation, it stuck. It stopped fading. In other words, the inoculation, the facts that they were communicating, the people entered long-term memory. And so I had a conversation with the researcher who was doing this. So like, okay, well, how do we get people to, you know, repeatedly, like, do these interventions, like, our misinformation games?

And he was like, oh, that's the big challenge for us. We can design our interventions in the lab and they work and we've got the answer. But then, like, even if you do crack that psychological problem, then there's the social problem. Like, how do you actually implement that at scale? Have you found any, let's stay on the topic of climate change, any misinformation the other way around? Like, there is some information that is overly exaggerating the risk or from the more liberal progressive. side, have you applied these methods in that direction? Yeah, there have been, but it's, it's unequal.

Like, the two aren't equivalent. It's a bit apples and oranges. So, so there are cases of exaggeration or distortions or oversimplifications of the science. Like, a really fundamental one would be, and we use this in our misinformation game. Like, you brought up cold weather disproves global warming, which is an example of anecdote fallacy. And we use that example in our misinformation game, but we also use the example, hot weather proves global warming, which is also anecdote. It's exactly the same anecdote. Yeah. So you do get oversimplifications of that sort. I'll tell you an example. I watched the

documentary Cowspiracy. I've heard of it. I haven't seen it. Yeah, it's a documentary about the animal agriculture industry. And, you know, there is a lot of problematic stuff. about that industry and it is a very carbon intensive industry but the documentary just was had just really

misleading misinformation in it used to justify their arguments so I agree with their final argument that we need to reduce eating meat but I just really had a big problem with them using

misinformation to justify that final conclusion. So you, in your work, you're able to spot that maybe easier than the average person? No, see, that's the thing. Like, you can spot, you can generally spot some fallacies. They have red flags. They have telltale patterns, you know, ad hominem attacks, like attacking people or false dichotomies, these either or arguments. They're easy to spot. But some arguments, you need to know the basic, like all the facts and the data, that undergird that argument. And in this case, it was, yeah, it was quite a complicated thing. You needed to really delve into the original study and the methodological flaws in that study.

So it required expertise, content expertise, in order to spot it. So my understanding is that you currently train educators how to teach critical thinking skills to high school and college students. So what have you found to be the main challenges for educators when trying to get young people to understand and use logical thinking? How I got into that was we developed a misinformation game called Cranky Uncle. And initially we just released it to the public and I just posted it on social media. And I found that the people who were using the game were the kind of people who followed me on social media and therefore already knew all that stuff. They knew flick, they knew all the techniques. This was not the right audience for this intervention.

It was kind of preaching to the choir. And so then we reached out to educators, and we said, here is a tool, an interactive game, it's fun, it's got cartoons, but it also teaches critical thinking. And here are some different ways that you can use this game to teach critical thinking in your classrooms. And so that's where we saw that the game was then reaching the people who needed it. And not

just, it also solved one of those problems I mentioned before. How do you scale up and reach the audiences that need these kind of interventions through educators, you can just reach the general public, not just self-selected? So can you tell us

a little bit about how that game, cranky uncle works and how it actually helps people to overcome the psychological structure and social barriers that you outlined? Yeah, so the game is basically about inoculating people against the flick techniques. So it basically just goes through all the different flick techniques.

Here is what fake experts look like. Here is what cherry picking looks like. But the way we do it is we try to make it funny by having a cranky uncle cartoon character. So he's your science denying cranky uncle. And I've never met a person who doesn't have somebody like that in their life, usually in their family. I said I have several. Yeah, me too. Me too.

This ubiquitous concept that everyone resonated with, and it was using humour to explain Flick. But then the real power of games is we also added an interactive element where we would show people examples of misinformation and they had to spot the Flick technique in it through like a quiz. And if they got it right, then they earned points. We called it cranky points. And as they earn cranky points, once they level up,

cranky uncle also leveled up and his mood got a little bit crankier. So he starts off agreeable, then he becomes peevish, then he becomes huffy. And so we just go through these range of emotions and his face gets angrier and angrier. So by the end, steam's coming out of his ears, his face is red, he's got bloodshot eyes. So it's using again all those elements of gameplay and humor to motivate people to get further into the game, but really what we're trying to do is get them practicing critical thinking. And is that app or website used all around the world or just in Australia?

Used a lot more in the U.S. than Australia. I was based in Virginia when the game came out. And so amongst educators, it's mostly U.S. classes where it's being used in high schools and colleges. I think I know the answer to this on climate change, but my question is broader. Have you noticed any cultural or geographical cognitive biases relative to science, whether it's climate or anything else? Like, do people in the United States and Australia behave a certain way towards science and people in Nigeria or China or France are different? Or have you noticed anything like that or are humans, human, the world over? Yeah, I think I noticed it when I moved to the US. This was in 2017, and I lived there for four years in Virginia, based at George Mason University.

Now, and you're asking what of the insights I've had. This was the next big insight I had after my PhD, because over the five years when I was living in Australia during my PhD, I would have said that political beliefs are the biggest driver of climate denial. But once I moved to the US, I realized that even bigger than political beliefs was political social identity, was an even bigger driver. Now, the difference between the two is your political social identity is what social group do you identify with? I'm Democrat, Republican, independent, as opposed to what are your beliefs?

I believe in small government or I believe in deregulation, you know, that kind of thing. Now, there's a big overlap. If there's a Venn diagram, those two circles are overlapping a lot. But which one is stronger? Social identity is the much stronger one. And I really, it was actually, I think, seeing the change in public opinion in the U.S. towards Russia, which you thought, especially amongst Republicans.

You would have thought that would be a unfixable belief, but it changed so quickly once the tribal leader said, hey, we like Russia now. It surprised me, and around that same time, that's an anecdote, really. But at the same time, scientific research came out finding that political affiliation or that social identity was a much stronger driver of climate attitudes than political belief.

And so what I take for, from that is that at the most fundamental level, humans are social animals. So we do have our beliefs, and our beliefs can be quite strong and hard to change, but even more fundamental than that is, what is the tribe that we identify with? And when our tribal leader says X,

the tribe tends to go with that. Here, here. Yeah, that's it. So I understand you've also applied those same anti-misinformation methods to other content. topics, including, I believe, vaccine education in Northern Africa. Can you tell us a bit how your team and you went about adapting your cranky uncle app for

issues outside of climate change? Yeah, so cranky uncle had just come out, focused on climate misinformation. And then UNICEF approached me and said, hey, can we have that for vaccines? And it was really convenient. there was this existing game, you know, off the shelf. Like it was not a big deal to adjust it. And because the game is really based around critical thinking and fallacies, it is very transferable to other topics.

And so the first thing I did was I did a survey of vaccine misinformation and what were the most common fallacies in vaccine myths. And we just picked the top 10. Now, eight of the top 10 were already in the game. and were, you know, the top climate fallacies. We only added two new fallacies, which were somewhat unique to vaccine misinformation. One was appeal to nature, saying that natural remedies are better than something that scientists have developed like a vaccine.

And the other one was, we call it false cause. The technical or Latin term is post hoc, ergo proptohoc, which is. basically saying this happened and then that happened. So this must have caused that. Someone got a vaccine and then they got autism or showed autism symptoms. Therefore, the vaccine must have caused autism. Or more broadly, you know, a teenager got the HPV vaccine and then showed some kind of, you know, adverse, you know, some kind of injury afterwards.

They used the term injury. And therefore, the vaccine must have caused the injury. Now, and so the example we use of that fallacy is arguing that the rooster crowed and then the sun rise, therefore the rooster must have caused the sunrise. It's exactly the same logic just because two things happen close to each other doesn't mean that one necessarily causes the other. Have you noticed yourself or your wife or your close friends and fans? family over time becoming less susceptible to these things because you understand them? Or do you still just fall right into the pitfalls? Oh, that's a good question.

Yeah, because as you say, we're all motivated reasoners, right? Like my wife would say that I am way too casual eating food in the fridge that has been there for too long, where I would tell, I would say that she's an alarmist. So, yeah. I'm laughing because it rhymes with with my own situation. But yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just, it's metacognition, right?

Metacognition is hard for us to think about how we think. Yeah. Especially if we have some biases that we discovered about ourselves. That usually doesn't feel good. And that can almost be a two-edged sword, right? Because, like, my familiarity with Flick makes me very well. of conspiracy theories. So, and we all see something dodgy and think,

oh, you know, is there a conspiracy behind that? So once our website, like we have a private, with Sceptical Science, we have a private forum for the authors to collaborate and to write the rebuttals. And we kind of peer-review each other's work to try to make our rebuttals as strong as possible. But we do it privately so that there's, the comment. climate deniers can't come in and disrupt the discussion. Now, at some point, the forum started acting weird, and somebody said,

I think someone might be trying to hack into the forum. And I was like, you're just being conspiratorial and paranoid. That's not happening. It turns out it was. We were hacked. Someone took the entire forum, posted it on some Russian server to the public. And then climate denies just started pouring through all our private discussions. and cherry picking, you know, the bits where we were venting, probably, you know, saying swear words or something, and just trying to make us look bad.

That's an interesting story, but it raises my blood pressure because I can only imagine the comment section on this YouTube conversation when it comes out. It's hard, and I'll just share this with you openly on camera, because this platform, the great simplification, I care about climate change and the environment and global heating. I understand it. I've spent time on it. I don't think we're going to be able to do anything just specifically about it because we have 10 other crises that are happening simultaneously. And invariably, every topic will have its own cranky uncles.

And therefore, if you deal with 10 or 12 interrelated topics, there will always be a cranky uncle or aunt. And it's very difficult to consistently stay tethered to the science or the best science that we know on a systems ecology, complex, nuanced story of humanity in the biosphere. And yet we must try. But it's, I think you can probably empathize with the level of difficulty. Yeah. And we'll always have those cranky uncles. Like I mentioned the Yale surveys where they find that the public opinion is improving.

But there's always been this stubborn 10% of cranky uncles, really, who have just a dismissive of climate science. And that just hasn't shifted over a decade. Yeah. Yeah. I recognize that we'll always have that stubborn minority. But do we need to change them in order to get progress? We don't.

I think that it's not about getting 100% agreement on climate action. It's about activating the people who care. But what you said earlier rings true that it's the in-group, out-group, and that we value our social identities more than our political beliefs per se. So if all of a sudden the world is in a depression and times are really tough, the tribe or the in-group that's going to talk about ways forward is probably not going to be the climate group because that's going to add even more economic constraints on our choices. So I don't know what the answer is there, but I could argue that the 10% cranky uncles on that topic will actually increase in, an economically constrained future, if that made sense. Well, hopefully, I think the answer is that those who do want climate progress,

they just have to step up. We need to activate the people who care about climate change. Like, this is my great simplification, right? Even though the public are very complicated, I kind of simplify it into three main groups. There's the convinced. there's the undecided and then there's the dismissive the 10% dismissive

now they're convinced more than half there's something like 58 60% of the public because it's talking about US public and then you have like about 30% undecided so it's not a and I think we do need to try to

convince the dismissive and we do need to move the unconvinced into the convinced but to get climate action, we need to activate that 60% who are convinced, most of whom are inactive. So it's not about convincing the whole public. It's about getting people talking about climate change and doing something about it. Like, we have enough people care about climate change to get enough social momentum to get

political momentum, but we need to be working on activating them. So I asked you this before. Let me ask you in a slightly different way. Given that the original cranky uncle was made for U.S. and Australia audiences, what was it like implementing those techniques in other countries and cultures? Did you learn anything that surprised you? Yeah. So what we did was that once we developed the vaccine version, we co-designed it through a range of workshops in East Africa. So we ran, we drew sketches.

Before my PhD, I was a cartoonist. So I drew all the cartoons in cranky album. Okay, that makes sense. So I drew all these sketches, and they would stick them up on walls, and these participants would go to these workshops in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and then later Ghana and Pakistan. And they would just put all these little sticky notes saying, you know, this is how you make these characters look like us.

And also they would play the game, they would read the content, and they would say, this is how you make the content, more meaningful to us. And so we worked, iterated the game, the content, the characters, created versions for East Africa, another version for West Africa. Then we went to Pakistan,

which was even more challenging and created the Pakistan version. And then we ran these pilot studies where we tested the game's effectiveness. And the thing that jumped out at me most, like the most important result, I think, from all these different pilot studies, because whether it was East Africa, English,

or whether it was Rwanda, and we did French and Kenya Rwandan as languages, or whether it was Urdu in Pakistan, we always found that the people who started playing the game vaccine hesitant, so they said that they were either unlikely or very unlikely to get vaccinated. More than half of those people switched

to being likely or very likely to get vaccinated So they switch from vaccine hesitant to accepting vaccines by the end of playing the game. So that mix of communicating the facts, but also explaining how misinformation tries to distort those facts, all the flick techniques, that combination of facts and logic helped inoculate people and switch their attitudes towards vaccines. Well, isn't that that inoculation and versions of, that game be applied to all different kinds of scientific, contentious issues in the world today? Yeah, potentially, because those same fallacies are seen in every topic. So in theory, you could just create a cranky uncle for any other topic. So in your opinion, at what age

should we be starting to teach people these sort of critical thinking and logic-based skill sets? Is there too young or too old? There probably is, but I don't know the answer to that yet, and I'd like to know. We found that this is, and this is a really weird counterintuitive, surprising statistic. We found that the game was more effective the older people got. We thought it would be the opposite. We thought it would be young people play smartphone games and old people like, what's this newfangled technology? But we found it was like the boomers were showing the greatest effect, like improvement.

Is that maybe a product that they had a longer attention span? You jumped right onto it. So that's my hypothesis. We haven't confirmed that. But I think it's because, yeah, young people breeze through. And I don't, I'm just speculating here, but probably young people breeze through the game, whereas older people just gave it more of their attention. Well, I think you saw the recent study.

Jonathan Haidt was on the show, and he posted something that the attention span and the test scores in high school and college are just going down, down, correlated with how much time you spend on social media apps. And so I think that itself is a barrier to understanding science. Because if you want to read a paper about ocean acidification, the prerequisite of that is some degree of education in the natural science. and some attention span to spend an hour reading something. And there is a little bit of this idiocracy game piece that's been added to our human predicament board. Yeah, I better go back and listen to the Jonathan Haid episode because I like to track down

that paper. Yeah, yeah. I'll find it. Jonathan's episode here was two years ago, but this is a recent thing that he's posted. I'll find it and send it to you. I'll put it in the show notes for others to see. Even better. So how of recent increase in political attacks on climate science

and the climate consensus affected your outlook on your current and future work on these issues? Are you talking about recent as in just this last year or the trend? So we published research a couple of years ago. We trained a machine learning model to detect all the different misinformation claims, and then we could build a 20-year history of climate misinformation. So we're basically using AI to better understand what climate misinformation looks like. Two things really surprised us.

Firstly, like, notice that all the myths that you brought up to me, we're all around science topics, you know, the CO2 lag in the ice cores or cold weather or climate's change in the past. we found that those arguments were actually the least common form of climate misinformation. The two most common forms of climate misinformation were either attacking climate solutions or attacking the scientists themselves. And there was an increasing trend from the science denial to solutions. So climate misinformation is transitioning towards attacking renewables and climate policy and less and less about science tomorrow,

which was quite chastening for me, because skeptical science is all about debunking science myths. Well, my take is on that, and it's just my initial reaction, is attacking the scientists or the solutions, is a lower bar. It's easier to attack than the actual science. Yes, in terms of attacking scientists.

At hominem attacks are the easiest type of misinformation. And you will find even the science myths. it's the simple ones that are the most common. The cold weather disperies global warming or climate has always changed. They're just easy arguments to make. And so they're the most common. Solutions, though, they can be quite nuanced because you get your stupid ones. Windmills kill birds and the sun doesn't shine at night.

So solar panels can't solve our energy problems, that kind of thing. But often climate policy is quite intricate. And so it's a more difficult terrain for a fact checker like myself to deal with misinformation around solutions. You have to have, you personally, John, have to have somewhat of a thick skin or just an unerring North Star moral compass to continue to fight this Sisyphian battle for almost two decades. because this is hard stuff. You're not like making widgets or just testing drinking water sort of science. For me, it peaked around 2013.

So at that time, this is in the middle of my PhD. We published the paper finding 97% scientific consensus on climate change. Oh, that was you that published that paper? Yeah, yeah. I remember that paper. Yeah, so it came out like on May the 16th, and on May the 17th, President Obama tweeted about it. and I came into work that day

and someone's looking at the Obama tweet said, you realize your career has just peaked, don't you? Australians can be quite blunt. And that was the most gentlest because the Obama tweet led to this wave of positive attention and very closely followed behind it, very, very negative attention. How does that 12 years later stand?

that 97% figure and maybe just give me a little context of that. Well, firstly, we were not the first study to find 97% consensus. So with two previous studies that it also found 97% consensus since then, a couple of studies have found that actually it's getting closer to 98, 99. That's just, it's getting stronger, as you would expect. And in fact, even our own study, it was 97% averaged over 20 years. By the end of that 20-year period, it was actually quite, at 98%. So, and the consensus is just getting stronger and stronger, and it's being replicated

in multiple studies. So it's such a non-controversial figure or conclusion that there's overwhelming consensus. So does it bother you when a very persuasive website or article or famous person or congressman or senator or president critiques your work or work linked to it or do you have a thick skin and you know you're with the other 98 percent so it's just part of our distribution of humans on the planet and it doesn't bother you i wouldn't say it doesn't bother me um particularly back then in 2013 when it was at us most virulent the the lowest period though was not when they were attacking me publicly, they actually then started coming at me through my university, strategically, like, attacking, like, or trying to influence the university leadership

to try to either get me fired or censure it or something. And, like, Michael Mann talks about this in, he's a climate scientist, in one of his books, he calls it the Serengeti strategy, which is when, like, lions would try to separate one member of the herd away from the rest of the herd. When the herds together, they protect each other. But if you can just separate one wildebeest, then the lions can take it down. And really that's what they were trying to do,

trying to isolate me from my own community. That resonates. So in respect to your Jack Russell, who I know is on the ground next to you, wanting to go for a hike. Eyes are shut right now. This is the most docile he's being. This is the most docile he's been.

Usually as soon as I start a meeting, he'll just start yapping at whatever's happened at the front window. But you're like, I don't know, maybe it's you and your Jack Russell energy or something. He's been very well behaved. Well, I have a Jack Russell-Dotson mix, and the mix is important. And boy, if I could find another one of those, he's a special dog, Frank. Let me ask you some closing questions I ask all my guests. Do you have advice, personal advice?

advice, John, to listeners, viewers of this program at a time of global upheaval and anxiety, people worried about the economy and the environment and climate, what some would call the polycrisis. What personal advice do you have? I do have some hopeful, positive advice, which I hope does mitigate some of all the depressing stuff we've talked about. My advice to people is pretty simple. If you want to do something about climate change, if you want to contribute to this problem, just start by opening your mouth and talking about it to people. You don't have to be an expert in climate change. You don't have to know all the flick fallacies. You just have to send that social signal that you care about the issue because we're

social animals and that signal matters. And bring what you have to the table. We're all unique. We all have different interests, skills, passions and backgrounds that combine in a way that is unique to you, bring that uniqueness to the table and that can make an impactful contribution. Like, I'm a bit of an odd duck in the academic community. I had a cartooning background, then I did psychology, PhD, and now I work with a whole range of people, game developers, philosophers, critical thinkers, and so on. And it's that weird combination of different things that led to cranky uncle, which couldn't have existed. without all that weird unique stuff. We're all unique. We all have these different things we can

bring and that can all contribute. Do you teach or just do research and this sort of work? Or do you also have classes? I mostly do research. I have done, I do some teaching. In fact, just this last semester I taught a class where it was like teaching psychology students how to go from, come up with an idea, design, experiment, collect the data, analyze it, right from, beginning to end. And that was really exciting and rewarding. And what sort of advice do you have to people in their teens and 20s who become aware of all these things? Well, I mean a similar thing, I think.

Like, do get yourself informed. Do inoculate yourself against the misinformation. But mostly just get out there and start talking about it to people. even start with family, friends, and your cranky uncle. Yeah, well, yeah, and when you talk to your cranky uncle, recognize that you're probably not going to change his mind, but the conversation matters because other people might be listening to it too. And like when I, like, so my version of that is I will give public talks

and there will inevitably be a cranky uncle in the audience who will then stand up at Q and A and say, what about the cold weather? What about the ice score record, etc? And I will answer him, and I recognize that I'm probably not going to change his mind, but everyone else is listening to that conversation, and it's an opportunity for me to inoculate everyone else who's listening. And that actually gives me kind of a, I get less frustrated because I'm not banging my head against a brick wall. Why won't you change your mind? I recognize I probably won't, but I have a different goal to that. That's actually interesting. What do you care most about in the world, John? My family, I guess. Like, it's, yeah, I know that the world is heading in dangerous direction.

So I do want to create a safer world for them. And unfortunately, I think it's going in the other direction. It's becoming less safe. So it's about, also about looking after my family. And in the world that you just mentioned, what are you most concerned about? and most hopeful about kind of in the next decade in our world? I'm really concerned about the backslide of democracy. Like, I took democracy for granted until really about just the last decade and realized that it was a much more fragile thing. I'm worried that with the backside democracy also comes attacks on science.

So it's not just the kind of attacks, the misinformation that I study, it's actual overt taking down of scientific institutions, you know, taking away measurements of, you know, like stopping measurement of what's happening to our climate, that kind of thing, like actually deleting the data and defunding science. So that concerns me. I guess the thing that gives me hope is that, because it's such a big issue, like it seems hopeless right. But there is an analogue for this situation and that's the abolition of slavery. An institution which at the time seemed like it was impossible to shift. The economies were

based on it. The people who were fighting against it felt like they were screaming into a void and making no progress, but they persisted and they eventually prevailed. And so, and the way that they did it was through building social momentum. So I think that, again, by opening our mouths and talking about it, we build social momentum. That's the only way that you can really tackle these big societal level problems. And that's why I'm continuing this podcast after four years. So if you were to come back a year from now, back on this show, what is one piece of research or some topic?

that you are personally really curious about or passionate about that's relevant to human futures that you would be willing to take a deep dive on. Yeah, the thing that we haven't even talked about yet, but I'm intensely interested in at the moment is the potential of fiction. So, because I'm about nonfiction science communication and, you know, we need it. It's crucial. but also there's surprisingly little research into the impact of fiction. But the research that there is, when they compare fictional narratives about climate change to nonfiction, science communication, they actually find that the fiction is more effective in engaging people and even shifting their attitudes. The Kim Stanley Robinson book about the Wetbulb story in India, that was hella impactful reading that. And so I'm surprised that there's, like I've been doing a literature review on climate fiction,

actually empirically measuring it. Like there's a lot of, and also reading a lot of humanities papers about it. The humanities have a lot of opinions, but not many people are measuring the impact. But the little there is is some really teasing, tantalizingly interesting results. So we're actually designing an experiment now where we're testing several genres. of fiction against nonfiction to see the impact. And the thing that isn't studied at all is testing not just climate fiction, but different genres, because I think that if you want to really impact the public at a societal level,

literary fiction is important, it's great, but it doesn't really go mainstream. I think genre fiction or popular fiction is the way to actually go viral basically, go mainstream. And so we're testing different genres. Said differently, we do need the scientists like yourself and the architects and the engineers, but I think we need the storytellers and the artist almost first. And then we get the, you know, the hard science people involved. I happen to connect with a few climate fiction writers who are also academics,

but they publish novels and short stories. So we're working on an experiment now with developing different narratives. Awesome. Well, let's follow up on that. This has been great. Thank you for your time. Do you have any closing comments for people watching

who understand and agree with what you've laid out here today? At the risk of being repetitive, I will just say that, yeah, don't be too discouraged. I'm a pessimistic personality by nature. but I do, I guess I have a steely hope. And it's a hope that I don't know whether acting will get the job done, but we just have to do it. Otherwise, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And also, I guess my last finish thought is climate change is not a binary thing. Again, that's a false dichotomy. It's a matter of degrees, like literally degrees. So how much we do now affect. how much climate damage we'll experience in the future. So every little bit counts now. To be continued, John. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Nate. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit thegreat simplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe to our Substack newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Higgins, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani.

Our production team also includes Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann, Julia Maxwell, Gabriella Sleman, and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.