Over the last year developing video lectures on countering climate misinformation, I’ve accumulated a video library of climate misinformation fallacies. Many of them were included in my epic 41-minute video 23 Ways to Mislead (well, it was epic putting that beast together):
Now as the Cranky Uncle game has been launched and is being used in classrooms, teachers are requesting more critical thinking resources for classroom activities. So like a gold prospector, I’ve starting sifting through my videos looking for stand-alone examples of climate misinformation fallacies (gold prospecting might be a bad analogy, it’s not gold I’m looking for). The result is a google sheet of climate fallacy examples including the quote in text form and links to short, snappy videos:
How this could work in the classroom is teachers have the students play the Cranky Uncle game to build their familiarity with science denial techniques. Next, the teacher shows real-life examples of climate misinformation—either in text or video form—and the students discuss which fallacies they think each example contains.
I uploaded each short video example to Youtube (I was careful not to put the fallacy in the video title so as to not give away the answer if you’re directly showing the Youtube video in class). All the videos have also been grouped into a single Climate Misinformation playlist. Here they all are:
Ad hominem
Note: this is also an example of false equivalence, demonstrating that some myths can contain multiple fallacies.
False analogy
False choice
Oversimplification
Single cause
I will continue to add to this resource over time. If you find any online videos of a FLICC denial technique in climate misinformation, please post a comment with the URL and I’ll add it to this post and the google sheet. Thanks!
Martyn Steiner
This is really great, thank you – exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for.