Automatic Classification of Neutralization Techniques in the Narrative of Climate Change Scepticism

Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 2167–2175 June 6–11, 2021. ©2021 Association for Computational Linguistics 2167 Automatic Classification of Neutralization Techniques in the Narrative of Climate Change Scepticism Shraey Bhatia1 Jey Han Lau1 Timothy Baldwin1 1 School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne shraeybhatia@gmail.com, jeyhan.lau@gmail.com, tb@ldwin.net Abstract Neutralisation techniques, e.g. denial of re- sponsibility and denial of victim, are used in the narrative of climate change scepticism to justify lack of action or to promote an alterna- tive view. We collect manual annotations of neutralised techniques used in these texts, and explore semi-supervised models to automati- cally classify them. 1 Introduction There is strong consensus in the scientific com- munity on human-induced climate change (Cook et al., 2016; Powell, 2017). Despite this, action on climate change has become an increasingly parti- san issue with strong opposition voices discrediting scientists, and spreading scepticism and misinfor- mation. One such source is climate change counter movement organizations, which are an amalgam of lobbyists, big corporations, conservative think tanks, and media corporations (Dunlap and Jacques, 2013; Boussalis and Coan, 2016; Farrell, 2016; McKie, 2018), whose aim is to fuel climate change scepticism (CCS). Public perception is influenced by the narrative presented to them (Fløttum, 2014; Fløttum et al., 2016), and CCS texts use neutraliza- tion techniques to build counter-climate narratives (McKie, 2018). The cure can’t be worse than the dis- ease/problem is a phrase frequently used by cli- mate change sceptics,1 and also recently by Donald Trump in reference to COVID-19.2 Though two widely different issues, neutralization is used to justify opposing a policy, lack of action, and thus promotion of either total denial of the problem (Di- ethelm and McKee, 2009) or its severity. Table 1 1https://www.wired.com/story/the- analogy-between-covid-19-and-climate- change-is-eerily-precise/ 2https://www.business-standard.com/ article/international/trump-opposes- perpetual-lockdown-says-cure-cannot-be- worse-than-problem-120101300184_1.html Sure, we should reduce greenhouse gases, but if our cli- mate policies hurt our ability to create more wealth and bring power to the world’s poor, then we are ridding the patient of the disease, but only by killing him It’s very convenient for alarmist greens to blame the fires of Australia and California on global warming. In reality, global warming is just a natural cycle and the policies they themselves advocate are the culprits. The IPCC falsely attributes natural warming and urban warming to greenhouse gas (GHG) emission warming. It ignores the compelling evidence of natural climate change before 1950 that correlates well with indicators of solar activity Table 1: Neutralization examples presents two examples of neutralization in the con- text of climate change. In social science, neutralization is defined as justification/vindication for a deviant behaviour (Sykes and Matza, 1957; Maruna and Copes, 2005; Kaptein and Van Helvoort, 2019). Though initially developed in the field of criminology, it has been widely studied in different fields ranging from lack of corporate social responsibility (Cherry and Sneir- son, 2010), to fast fashion (Joy et al., 2012), the tobacco industry (Fooks et al., 2013; Oreskes …

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