Climate change: "A form of doubt remains among the French"

• In Fake and causes,

  20 Minutes

  sheds light on themes around conspiracy, fact-checking and issues for democracy.

• While 2022 was the hottest year ever recorded in mainland France by Météo-France, we spoke with Laurent Cordonier, doctor of social sciences and director of research at the Descartes Foundation.

• "The use of social networks reduces competence on climate issues", discovered, with astonishment, the researcher in his study, "Information and Climate Engagement".

Through its series of interviews "Fake and causes",

sheds light on the themes around conspiracy, fact-checking and issues for democracy.

gives the floor to researchers, associations, experts or other members of civil society to open the debate.

While 2022 was the hottest year ever recorded in mainland France by Météo-France, we spoke with Laurent Cordonier, doctor of social sciences and associate researcher at Sorbonne University.

With the Descartes Foundation, of which he is the research director, he recently published a study on climate information and engagement, which focuses on perception, information and disinformation on climate change.

The year 2022 was the hottest year ever recorded in mainland France by

It's a good question, especially since we took the questionnaire right in the middle of the summer heat wave and it was also a dry period, with heavy media coverage.

It can be seen that pure and hard climatoscepticism is relatively low.

The figures are

those found in other studies: we have, at most, 7% of people who think that climate change does not exist.

Climate skepticism is more marked in other countries, such as the United States.

But there is a form of doubt that seems to linger in the minds of the French about climate change.

To the question: "Are we experiencing global climate change?"

“, 41% of the population answer yes, probably.

And 47% say yes, absolutely.

But this “probably” is interesting because, for scientists, there is no possible doubt.

Some French people are less assertive than scientists.

Similarly on the origin of climate change, the other great counterpart of climatoscepticism, a third of French people answer that climate change is caused as much by human activity as by natural phenomena.

It is also in total disagreement with climate scientists for whom all climate change is of anthropogenic origin.

Why do these doubts persist?

On the one hand, there may be a bit of a polling effect, it's quite common that people don't like to give too extreme answers.

But I think that there is a tradition in France of climatoscepticism, which had a voice in the big media and which advanced a lot this argument of the naturalness of climate change.

Claude Allègre, who had a good public image, did a lot to get this message across.

Today, on social networks, this argument of the natural phenomenon continues to be regularly exposed in sometimes innocuous forms.

For example, during the heat wave, we saw a lot of posts from people who were worried about extreme temperatures and below, others answered: "yes, it's hot it's summer" to bring back what we were in living to something normal and natural. 

These are disinformation arguments that are easy to put forward because it is a geological reality, our Earth has experienced sometimes very significant thermal changes during its history.

But what is not taken into account is the speed of the phenomenon that we are experiencing.

Climate change is happening at a speed that has never been reached, paleoclimatologists tell us.

This speed is the signature of human activity.

The

Absolutely.

This is something that we see very often: we will find older extremes.

The argumentative strategy of climatosceptics consists in finding extreme events in the past, forgetting, as the IPCC clearly underlines, the increase in frequency of these extreme episodes.

What are the profiles of climatosceptics?

They are rather older people, politically who are on the right or the extreme right of the political circle.

Moreover, ignorance of the climate subject is much more marked among people who regularly get information about the climate via social networks.

In our study, we ran a climate knowledge quiz on very factual questions, and we noticed that people who say they learn about the subject on social networks, get, all other things being equal (age, gender, socio-professional category, etc.), lower scores than the others.

On the contrary, those who claim to get information regularly via the general media are the best.

Is this a surprising result?

Yes, I did not expect to see such a negative effect: the use of social networks misinforms, lowers skills on these issues.

I did not expect it for two reasons, the first is that, in the survey, I did not oppose the information channels: a person could declare that they regularly get information on the climate on social networks and, at the same time, via the general media.

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And the second reason is that on social networks, you can also find very good information on the climate such as, for example, the Twitter account of Valérie Masson-Delmotte, climatologist at the IPCC, who does popularization.

I expected this to moderate the potentially negative effect, but it didn't.

It's a question of statistical probability: if you learn about the climate via social networks, you increase your probability of being confronted with poor quality, misleading or manipulative content.

Whereas today, in the general media in France, you are very unlikely to come across remarks that are clearly climatosceptic or that deny the human effect.

And that's new, because the mainstream media have not always been good on the issue.

The journalists also felt they were doing their job well by giving voice to all sides.

We had a phenomenon, which we still see today in other debates, where a minority position from a scientific point of view had the same representativeness in the debates covered by the media as the consensus opinion on the question.

And, therefore, the public had a biased representation of knowledge since all sides were given the floor in the same way.

On this, the media have progressed and become more competent on climate issues.

We can see this with the appearance of journalists specializing in these issues.

Who do the French trust for information on climate change?

Are the media included?

No way.

The main sources of information, including on the Internet, remain the general media, but the French do not trust this source at all.

It's the usual paradox.

Out of ten groups tested, journalists come in last.

The first were CNRS scientists, then IPCC scientists.

What influence does information or disinformation concerning climate change have on the behavior of French people?

The fact of being regularly informed about the climate, whatever the channel, increases the readiness to act in favor of the climate and the readiness to accept binding measures.

Why ?

It is not detailed knowledge that counts, it is the fact of being interested in the subject, of being sensitive to it that will encourage the fact of wanting to act. 

Other factors are central: the first, and by far, is the fact of judging that the measures proposed are effective in favor of the climate.

If we want people to accept restrictive measures, we must demonstrate their climate effectiveness.

If this is not done, there is no chance that they will be accepted.

The effect of this factor is overwhelming.

The Yellow Vests movement ignites over the fuel tax.

At the time this tax was put in place, there was no explanation from the government.

It is not necessary to communicate, but to demonstrate and convince that it will be useful for something. 

The second factor, which comes out very strongly in our study, is that restrictive collective measures are refused if the respondents have the impression that they are very socially unjust, that is to say that these measures will weigh as much or more on low incomes.

Another lesson to be learned is the need for compensation mechanisms, because these restrictive measures will increase the prices of goods and services that emit CO2.

At the same time, the population must be informed about the fact that such nets are in place, about how they will work.

These two conditions are absolutely

and unavoidable, if this is not done, no measure will be accepted. 

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Methodology of the “Information and Climate Engagement” study

Two thousand French adults, representative of the national population (gender, age, profession, category of agglomeration and region of residence), were questioned via a questionnaire, drawn up by Laurent Cordonier, and passed online by the ViaVoice polling institute from July 28 to August 7, 2022. The raw results were analyzed by the researcher.

“We went further than a survey because we used complex mathematical tools used in economic or sociological research to measure the importance of certain factors on certain behaviors,” he explains.

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