A detailed statistical analysis in a global scientific study undertaken by 258 (yes, it seems excessive) authors involving nearly 60,000 participants in 63 countries and published in the prestigious journal Science has found that when it comes to climate change people will tell pollsters what they want to hear as long as they don’t have to do anything. In fact the detailed findings are even worse for the social engineering brigade than that bald summary would imply, because it showed that most of the propaganda messages that increase peoples’ stated beliefs in climate change and willingness to promise to do stuff that takes no time and costs nothing (like sharing posts on social media) actually decreased their willingness to sponsor tree-planting efforts simply by sticking around longer on the survey website. Thus government propagandists could actually help the climate cause by shutting up. Go for it, we say.

The study, by people convinced “The climate crisis is one of humanity’s most consequential and challenging problems” and “The behavioral sciences have been seen as a crucial component in promoting bottom-up change, through the development of large-scale interventions” which actually isn’t bottom-up, involved exposing survey participants to a bit of climate-alarmist propaganda then asking them to complete a survey. The authors composed 11 brief paragraphs, each representing a type of messaging that has been proposed for goading members of the public into becoming planet-saving activists.

Naturally the paragraphs were filled with the usual untrue rubbish claims about extreme weather, scientific consensus, etc. But the themes of the messages differed. Some made appeals to patriotism, some offered doom-and-gloom warnings, some went in for think-of-the-children finger-wagging, and so forth. As a control they also chose a random paragraph from a Charles Dickens novel, so they could measure how much each type of message boosts climate activism compared to one that obviously would have no effect. Then they went out into the highways and by-ways of the internet to get thousands of people around the world to participate in the experiment, arguably a study design flaw but one that should have made participants more rather than less receptive to such missives from the Ministry of Climate Truth.

Each person was given one of the 12 paragraphs to read. Then they were asked to state their general belief in climate change, whether they support climate policy, whether they would be willing to share a post on social media promoting climate policy, and, finally, they were asked to do a little work to sponsor tree planting. The work consisted of simple tasks like looking at a list of numbers and picking out the odd numbers. For every page they completed the researchers sponsored the planting of a tree.

The researchers found that six of the 11 message types had no effect on peoples’ beliefs in climate change and one of them, appealing to the need for all of us to work together, actually decreased it. They also found that the messages that increased belief in climate policy also boosted support for climate policy but mainly among the people who already believed in climate change. They found that almost all subject participants said they’d be willing to share information on social media. But then when it came to putting a bit of time into tree-planting, the picture looked very different.

The group that read the Charles Dickens paragraph were willing to spend enough time on the survey task to sponsor, on average, about 5.3 trees. None of the climate messages increased that figure. In fact most of them decreased it. Four of the climate-booster messages had zero effect and led to the same amount of tree-planting. Exposure to the remaining seven messages significantly decreased the amount of time people were willing to spend on tree planting. Of all the messages that sapped peoples’ willingness to sponsor trees the worst was the doom-and-gloom one.

The authors put a hopeful spin on their findings, emphasizing that they now have lots of data for bureaucrats to examine when trying to pick just the right message to get citizens on board with high energy prices and net zero decarbonization fantasies. But what the data really show is that the messaging that boosts peoples’ willingness to say what the activists want to hear is likely to reduce their willingness to do anything that actually costs them time or money. Oh the irony.