CARDS - Computer-Assisted Recognition of Denial and Skepticism

In 2017 the Skeptical Science team embarked on a project called C.A.R.D.S. (Computer-Assisted Recognition of Denial and Skepticism). Members from our team helped train a "machine" to detect and categorize denialist claims by reading short paragraphs and determining if they contained a claim which could be matched to one of the defined super- or sub-claims in a defined taxonomy:

Taxonomy of claims made by contrarians. This figure displays the three layers of claim-making by climate change contrarian actors. The original version of this taxonomy with more detailed claim descriptions can be found in Supplementary Table S2 of paper Coan at al. (2021).

Based on this initial machine training, the paper Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change by Travis G. Coan, Constantine Boussalis, John Cook and Mirjam O. Nanko was published in November 2021.

Abstract

A growing body of scholarship investigates the role of misinformation in shaping the debate on climate change. Our research builds on and extends this literature by (1) developing and validating a comprehensive taxonomy of climate contrarianism, (2) conducting the largest content analysis to date on contrarian claims, (3) developing a computational model to accurately classify specific claims, and (4) drawing on an extensive corpus from conservative think-tank (CTTs) websites and contrarian blogs to construct a detailed history of claims over the past 20 years. Our study finds that the claims utilized by CTTs and contrarian blogs have focused on attacking the integrity of climate science and scientists and, increasingly, has challenged climate policy and renewable energy. We further demonstrate the utility of our approach by exploring the influence of corporate and foundation funding on the production and dissemination of specific contrarian claims.

A Video summary of why CARDS is needed

You can summarize climate change in just ten words: it's real, it's us, experts agree, it's bad, there's hope. Climate change misinformation is like a bizarro world version of this summarized with five categories: it's not real, it's not us, experts are unreliable, it's not bad, there's no hope. Understanding the arguments of climate denial is the first step to countering it. This video is a crash course in climate misinformation, summarizing the key arguments used to cast doubt on the reality of climate change and delay climate action.

Other papers about CARDS

Testing the impact of fallacies and contrarian claims in climate change misinformation (Lieu, R., Hayes, O. R., Cook, J.; 2025)

Detecting Fallacies in Climate Misinformation: A Technocognitive Approach to Identifying Misleading Argumentation (Zanartu, F., Cook, J., Wagner, M., Garcia, J.; 2024)

Hierarchical machine learning models can identify stimuli of climate change misinformation on social media (Rojas, C., Algra-Maschio, F., Andrejevic, M., Coan, T., Cook, J., and Li, Y.-F.; 2024)