In 2007, Mark Hoofnagle suggested on his Science Blog Denialism that denialists across a range of topics such as climate change, evolution, & HIV/AIDS all employed the same rhetorical tactics to sow confusion. The five general tactics were conspiracy, selectivity (cherry-picking), fake experts, impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts), and general fallacies of logic.
Two years later, Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee published an article in the scientific journal European Journal of Public Health titled Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond? They further fleshed out Hoofnagle’s five denialist tactics and argued that we should expose to public scrutiny the tactics of denial, identifying them for what they are. I took this advice to heart and began including the five denialist tactics in my own talks about climate misinformation.
In 2013, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition invited me to give a workshop about climate misinformation at their annual summit. As I prepared my presentation, I mused on whether the five denial techniques could be adapted into a sticky, easy-to-remember acronym. I vividly remember my first attempt: beginning with Fake Experts, Unrealistic Expectations, Cherry Picking… realizing I was going in a problematic direction for a workshop for young participants. I started over and settled on FLICC: Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking, and Conspiracy theories.
When I led a 2015 collaboration between the University of Queensland and Skeptical Science to develop the free online course Denial101x: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial, we made FLICC the underlying framework of the entire course. An important component of our debunking of the most common myths about climate change was identifying the denial techniques in each myth. A common comment we received from students was how much they appreciated learning about FLICC.
Since moving to the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, I’ve continued to build the FLICC taxonomy. In my collaboration with critical thinking philosophers Peter Ellerton and David Kinkead, I was introduced to reasoning fallacies that we hadn’t included in Denial101x. As I begun developing the Cranky Uncle game, I began a series of fallacy quizzes where I gradually built the taxonomy up as I introduced people to an ever-growing collection of denial techniques (note the differing difficulty levels between quiz #1 and quiz #8). When Stephan Lewandowsky and I published The Conspiracy Theory Handbook, we added seven traits of conspiratorial thinking. Here is the latest version of the FLICC taxonomy (with all the icons freely available and shareable on Wikimedia):
When I visited Brisbane in December 2019, I asked the University of Queensland if I could record a video explaining the updated FLICC taxonomy. They agreed but once they saw my script, including explanations and definitions of each denial technique, they suggested I divide the video into a three-parter. Always a sucker for a trilogy, I agreed – here are the three videos:
Since then, I had the opportunity to teach a grad class at George Mason University with climate scientists Natalie Burls and Tim Delsole. As a virtual class during the pandemic, I created a number of video lectures of different aspects of climate misinformation, including a deep-dive into FLICC and the different fallacies in climate misinformation.
As well as the videos, this post includes written definitions and examples of each denial technique. I will continue to update this table as the taxonomy evolves in the future.
| TECHNIQUE | DEFINITION | EXAMPLE | |
| Ad Hominem | Attacking a person/group instead of addressing their arguments. | “Climate science can’t be trusted because climate scientists are biased.” | |
| Ambiguity | Using ambiguous language in order to lead to a misleading conclusion. | “Thermometer readings have uncertainty which means we don’t know whether global warming is happening.” | |
| Anchoring | Depending too heavily on an initial piece of information when making subsequent judgments. | “2.2 million people might have died from COVID-19 so keeping it down to only 130,000 deaths is a good job.” | |
| Anecdote | Using personal experience or isolated examples instead of sound arguments or compelling evidence. | “The weather is cold today—whatever happened to global warming?” | |
| Blowfish | Focusing on an inconsequential aspect of scientific research, blowing it out of proportion in order to distract from or cast doubt on the main conclusions of the research. | “The hockey stick graph is invalid because it contains statistical errors.” | |
| Bulk Fake Experts | Citing large numbers of seeming experts to argue that there is no scientific consensus on a topic. | “There is no expert consensus because 31,487 Americans with a science degree signed a petition saying humans aren’t disrupting climate.” | |
| Cherry Picking | Carefully selecting data that appear to confirm one position while ignoring other data that contradicts that position. | “Global warming stopped in 1998.” | |
| Contradictory | Simultaneously believing in ideas that are mutually contradictory. | “The temperature record is fabricated by scientists… the temperature record shows cooling.” | |
| Conspiracy Theory | Proposing that a secret plan exists to implement a nefarious scheme such as hiding a truth. | “The climategate emails prove that climate scientists have engaged in a conspiracy to deceive the public.” | |
| Fake Debate | Presenting science and pseudoscience in an adversarial format to give the false impression of an ongoing scientific debate. | “Climate deniers should get equal coverage with climate scientists, providing a more balanced presentation of views.” | |
| Fake Experts (appeal to false authority) | Presenting an unqualified person or institution as a source of credible information. | “A retired physicist argues against the climate consensus, claiming the current weather change is just a natural occurrence.” | |
| False Analogy | Assuming that because two things are alike in some ways, they are alike in some other respect. | “Climate skeptics are like Galileo who overturned the scientific consensus about geocentrism.” | |
| False Balance | Inappropriately presenting two things as equal. (fake debate is an example of false balance) | “Climate deniers should get equal coverage with climate scientists, providing a more balanced presentation of views.” | |
| False Choice | Presenting two options as the only possibilities, when other possibilities exist. | “CO2 lags temperature in the ice core record, proving that temperature drives CO2, not the other way around.” | |
| False Equivalence (apples vs. oranges) | Incorrectly claiming that two things are equivalent, despite the fact that there are notable differences between them. | “Why all the fuss about COVID when thousands die from the flu every year.” | |
| Immune to evidence | Re-interpreting any evidence that counters a conspiracy theory as originating from the conspiracy. | “Those investigations finding climate scientists aren’t conspiring were part of the conspiracy.” | |
| Impossible Expectations | Demanding unrealistic standards of certainty before acting on the science. | “Scientists can’t even predict the weather next week. How can they predict the climate in 100 years?” | |
| Logical Fallacies | Arguments where the conclusion doesn’t logically follow from the premises. Also known as a non sequitur. | “Climate has changed naturally in the past so what’s happening now must be natural.” | |
| Lowered Expectations | Lowering the standard by which you grade a performance or assess evidence. | “Two snapshots of Mars show shrinking ice, so Mars is global warming.” | |
Magnified Minority | Magnifying the significance of a handful of dissenting scientists to cast doubt on an overwhelming scientific consensus. | “Sure, there’s 97% consensus but Professor Smith disagrees with the consensus position.” | |
| Misrepresentation | Misrepresenting a situation or an opponent’s position in such a way as to distort understanding. | “They changed the name from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’ because global warming stopped happening.” | |
| Moving Goalposts | Demanding higher levels of evidence after receiving requested evidence. | “Sea levels may be rising but they’re not accelerating.” | |
| Nefarious intent | Assuming that the motivations behind any presumed conspiracy are nefarious. | “Climate scientists promote the climate hoax because they’re in it for the money.” | |
| Overriding suspicion | Having a nihilistic degree of skepticism towards the official account, preventing belief in anything that doesn’t fit into the conspiracy theory. | “Show me one line of evidence for climate change… oh, that evidence is faked!” | |
| Oversimplification | Simplifying a situation in such a way as to distort understanding, leading to erroneous conclusions. | “CO2 is plant food so burning fossil fuels will be good for plants.” | |
| Persecuted victim | Perceiving and presenting themselves as the victim of organized persecution. | “Climate scientists are trying to take away our freedom.” | |
| Quote Mining | Taking a person’s words out-of-context in order to misrepresent their position. | “Mike’s trick… to hide the decline.” | |
| Re-interpreting randomness | Believing that nothing occurs by accident, so that random events are re-interpreted as being caused by the conspiracy. | “NASA’s satellite exploded? They must be trying to hide inconvenient data!” | |
| Red Herring | Deliberately diverting attention to an irrelevant point to distract from a more important point. | “CO2 is a trace gas so its warming effect is minimal.” | |
| Single Cause | Assuming a single cause or reason when there might be multiple causes or reasons. | “Climate has changed naturally in the past so what’s happening now must be natural.” | |
| Slippery Slope | Suggesting that taking a minor action will inevitably lead to major consequences. | “If we implement even a modest climate policy, it will start us down the slippery slope to socialism and taking away our freedom.” | |
| Slothful Induction | Ignoring relevant evidence when coming to a conclusion. | “There is no empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming.” | |
| Something must be wrong | Maintaining that “something must be wrong” and the official account is based on deception, even when specific parts of a conspiracy theory become untenable. | “Ok, fine, 97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming, but that’s just because they’re toeing the party line.” | |
| Straw Man | Misrepresenting or exaggerating an opponent’s position to make it easier to attack. | “In the 1970s, climate scientists were predicting an ice age.” | |
| Wishful Thinking | Choosing to believe something is true because we really want it to be true, instead of relying on scientific evidence. | “Forget climate model predictions of warming, I think we’re about to experience global cooling.” |
And lastly, a bit of fun. Every year, Inside the Greenhouse hold a competition inviting people to submit climate comedy videos. In 2019, I submitted Giving Climate Denial the FLICC, which received an honorable mention.
UPDATE 27 Apr 2020: I’ve updated the FLICC taxonomy, adding the technique Lowered Expectations (this is after I published a blog post on how Donald Trump uses the Lowered Expectation fallacy to deflect from his poor response to the COVID-19 crisis.
Richard H Caldwell
Beautiful (visually and rationally) and necessary work; thank you! I agree with your thesis that there is great benefit in being able to cite a taxonomy of tactics like you have developed in order to precisely, consistently, and repetitively call out these tactics when they are slipped into discourse.
I have similarly threatened to construct such a taxonomy to “call out” the various bullying tactics employed by Donald Trump, since normal, non-bullying people (i.e., non socio- osychopathic) are also intrinsically credulous, and so too easily affected (infected?) by them. If all of us were able to annotate a Trump emission with precision, i.e, “name-calling” or “ad-hominem attack”, rather than the generic “lying”, I think it would be analogously powerful as your techniques.
I think really you are providing leadership in the development of Media Literacy v2.0, in that the incredible explosion in the sheer number of channels reaching the average person make this education critical to individual and societal health. We are seeing the dangerous and noxious effect of the use of these techniques over the last 40+ years in neoliberalism, climate change denial, and political discourse generally.
John Doe Smith (ha)
This is nothing short of excellent. Science Denial is giving many the power to destroy Mother Earth under the “dark cover of denial”. The largest part of the whole working equation of denial, is emotional denial/or personal per individual, at multiple levels, has to be in place, in order for the science denial alchemy to be as effects as it is. Denial of feelings or Will denial needs some attention just like what u have done. Ur capable expressions are not in my tool kit to do. Can u please help????
Sean
So people who have degrees in atmospheric physics, climatology, etc., are fake experts. Interesting. And yet this does not count as cherry picking of experts?
John Cook
You’re misrepresenting my position (this is known as the straw man fallacy, which is included in the FLICC taxonomy). In fact, an extreme form of misrepresentation as its the polar opposite of what I’m saying – climatologists are the appropriate experts in climate change. We document in a detailed rebuttal at https://skepticalscience.com/OISM-Petition-Project-intermediate.htm that the Global Warming Petition Project includes anyone with expertise in computer science, chemical engineering, zoology, electrical engineering, metallurgy, and a range of other scientific fields not related to climate science.
Edelyn aguero
Interesting this information can help me on the project.
Dana
Thank you for this wonderful piece. I feel not only much more knowledgeable but also much more empowered.
Jeremy Segal
Quick question, I know a few people that say that climate change is real, however, the technology hasn’t been invented yet to fully create clean energy to counter coal plants. They would specifically look at solar panels as some aren’t as powerful as others. Through my own research, I have discovered that wind power, now as in late 2020, is a lot more reliable and economical than coal plants.
For the people that are still using this argument, would the fallacies be Cherry Picking (as they are focusing mainly on solar panels) Slothful Induction (As they deny the reality of wind power) and Red Herring (as soon as we discuss climate change mitigation, they refer to solar panels)
Would there be any other fallacies? Thank you
Dimitri Molerov
In 2021, there is also the Drawdown Climate 101 course of working climate solutions, including wind and solar. The technology is there, just needs scaling. I’m not sure one would label this illogical, as it could be due to not having been in touch with information, i.e., whether they are deliberating based on their own available less optimistic info, or whether they are actively avoiding available information they have been in touch with. In terms of focus on solar only, it sounds like false choice (there are more options), but also if the efficiency is less for extracting (energy from two sources with different energy density – apples and oranges?), then one simply needs a higher amount. I would say they are not up to date and maybe not subscribed to the most forward-looking media channels.
Chris
Been made aware of FLICC in a very famous, sustain, fact driven German science COVID podcast, interview Dr Drosten. Part 82 talks about German media too, and unveil FLICC and that Dr Drosten think out loud why is it happen right now. I began to read your thesis and want to thank you for that technic to understand what’s going on. Thank you for this great piece of work.
Will Thurber
Thank you for this wonderful resource. My only quibble is that you left off one very common fallacious argument, affirming the consequent:
If natural conditions are right, the earth’s climate will warm.
The earth’s climate is warming.
Therefore natural conditions must be right (The climate change we are seeing is naturally caused).
Rob
Such a great set of distinctions, thank you. The one I often encounter in conversations is “insufficient evidence”, e.g. “we have only systematically collected climate data over the past 150 years; climates change over millennia; while it looks like human activity is affecting climate with what we can see at present, we just don’t have enough data yet”. This one has the superficial appearance of being a careful, rational position. But I can’t quite locate it in this exhaustive list.
Christopher Ducey
Great stuff, reminds me of this old Creationism warning:
Here is a list of tactics you may encounter when debating with Creationists:
a.) They bring their own rule book to the game and insists that you follow it, even though it contradicts established science. (Talk about plant and animal “kinds” when no biologist anywhere uses that terminology.)
b.) Refers to evidence and then rejects it because that evidence contradicts scripture.
c.) Claims that their approach is scientific while denying basic scientific principles such as indirect observation. (“How do you know the world is 4.5 billion years old? Were you there?”)
d.) Attempts to use willful ignorance of basic scientific principles (the scientific meaning of “theory”, the value of peer review, the difference between experimental finding and an opinion, the principle of parsimony…) as evidence against the theory of evolution and science in general.
e.) Repeat catchphrases and act as if they were brilliant, debate-winning points (“If man evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”).
f.) Act as if the fact they don’t know something means it can’t be known.
g.) Frequently change the subject to theology or the decline of morals.
h.) Strongly and constantly imply that taking potshots at the established scientific theory is the same as proving a case for special creation of all species by the Biblical God.
i.) Continually change the subject from evolution, which is well-proven and understood, to abiogenesis, which is not well-proven or understood, while insisting they are the same thing.
j.) Insist on distinctions that are not grounded in science: All biologists agree that ‘microevolution’ and ‘macroevolution’ are the same thing on different time scales. Creationists insist they’re different, even though they employ the exact same mechanism.
k) Pose as non-religious skeptics in order to concern-troll away the idea that human intelligence could have evolved by natural selection.
l.) Act as if their personal incredulity was scientific evidence and not just personal incredulity.
m.) Try to use the Irreducible Complexity argument, which has be thoroughly debunked, to disprove the ToE; (the evolution of the eye is not irreducibly complex and is actually an excellent example of evolution in action.
n.) Refer to ID (Intelligent Design) as though it was accepted scientific theory, even though it was found to be a scam perpetrated by Christian zealots for the sole purpose of sneaking Biblical Creationism into public schools disguised as something scientific in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, where it was ruled that ID is not science, that it “cannot uncouple itself from its Creationist and thus religious, antecedents”, and that teaching it in public schools violated the First Amendment to the Constitution.
o.) Lie, lie, lie; and when challenged on their lies, lie some more.
I would ask; “Why isn’t Creationism held to the same high standards of truth, honesty and accountability as science?”
j0
You might consider expanding the strawman to include the “weak man” and “hollow man” arguments. I often see people bypassing the main points in argument to pick out a point that is weak or insignificant and focus on it – trying to argue that if it doesn’t hold than nothing else does.
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2009/07/01/the-weak-man/
“With a “weak man,” you don’t actually fabricate a position, but rather pick the weakest of the arguments actually offered up by people on the other side and treat it as the best or only one they have. As Steve notes, this is hardly illegitimate all the time, because sometimes the weaker argument is actually the prevalent one.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
In 2006, Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin expanded the application and use of the straw man fallacy beyond that of previous rhetorical scholars, arguing that the straw man fallacy can take two forms: the original form that misrepresents the opponent’s position, which they call the representative form; and a new form they call the selection form.
The selection form focuses on a partial and weaker (and easier to refute) representation of the opponent’s position. Then the easier refutation of this weaker position is claimed to refute the opponent’s complete position. They point out the similarity of the selection form to the fallacy of hasty generalization, in which the refutation of an opposing position that is weaker than the opponent’s is claimed as a refutation of all opposing arguments. Because they have found significantly increased use of the selection form in modern political argumentation, they view its identification as an important new tool for the improvement of public discourse.[15]
Aikin and Casey expanded on this model in 2010, introducing a third form. Referring to the “representative form” as the classic straw man, and the “selection form” as the weak man, the third form is called the hollow man. A hollow man argument is one that is a complete fabrication, where both the viewpoint and the opponent expressing it do not in fact exist, or at the very least the arguer has never encountered them. Such arguments frequently take the form of vague phrasing such as “some say,” “someone out there thinks” or similar weasel words, or it might attribute a non-existent argument to a broad movement in general, rather than an individual or organization.[16][17]
A variation on the selection form, or “weak man” argument, that combines with an ad hominem and fallacy of composition is nut picking, a neologism coined by Kevin Drum.[18] A combination of “nut” (i.e., insane person) and “cherry picking”, as well as a play on the word “nitpicking,” nut picking refers to intentionally seeking out extremely fringe, non-representative statements from or members of an opposing group and parading these as evidence of that entire group’s incompetence or irrationality.[16]
Ove Junne
I have translated the latest version (v6_2) into Danish. Do you want a copy? BTW in Danish FLICC becomes FLUPK.
John Cook
There is currently work on translating the Cranky Uncle game into Danish – which includes FLICC. If you’d like to be introduced to the other volunteer translators, I suggest you fill out the Cranky translation form http://sks.to/crankytranslationfrm
Mateus
Very interesting
Paxus Calta
Fantastic work. Thank you for putting these different false arguments in such a clear format. It has been a please to work with you on the http://www.QRemedy.org project.
Bibiana Garrido
Thank you for this! As a journalist, I say every person in press should learn how to identify the denial techniques in order to inform properly.
Lillie Fears
So glad I came across this website and these videos. I plan to use some of this material in my propaganda cours.
Mateus
Very useful material
fuego pazzo
Thanks very much for all the info. There is a typo on video 2 at about 4:15, the politician is Marco Rubio not Marc. He has an office where I live.
John Cook
Oh dang, and you can’t edit YouTube videos 🙁