#CamFest Speaker Spotlight

Dr Ramit Debnath is the inaugural Cambridge Zero Fellow at the University of Cambridge, a visiting faculty associate in Computational Social Science at Caltech and a sustainability fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge.

He will be speaking about climate change misinformation on the panel Climate change: from despair to action on 30th March from 7.30 to 9pm. Other speakers are Professor Laura Diaz Anadon, researchers Samira Patel and Peter Sutoris, Assistant Professor in Education at the University of York and author of Educating for the Anthropocene. The event will be chaired by Professor Emily Shuckburgh, director of Cambridge Zero.

How did you become involved in researching climate change misinformation?

During COP26, I had the opportunity of working on a multi-national collaborative project with Cambridge Zero that leveraged citizens’ voices/wisdom to understand how they envision a resilient future. This led to planning my current project which I am co-leading with Cambridge Zero that aims at improving public understanding of climate change. I have always believed public voices matter in consensus generation for climate action and it is important to reduce misinformation, remove scepticism and restore trust.

You have worked in several different disciplines since you came to Cambridge. How important is it to have an interdisciplinary background when addressing global challenges like climate change misinformation?

From a personal standpoint, I think interdisciplinary thinking is critical in tackling such global challenges. For instance, my engineering background helps me develop natural language processing models to analyse millions of Tweets containing misinformation while my social science skills help contextualise and derive policy solutions to counter misinformation. I am really excited about mixing these two domains through the development of a niche field called computational social science.

Can research into misinformation keep up with the way misinformation is evolving?

 Absolutely, especially with the advances of generative Artificial Intelligence like ChatGPT it is important that we find ways to stop the evolution of misinformation. One way that I am doing it is through advocating for data justice and designing safer AI systems and algorithms through diverse and inclusive representation of climate action voices.

What are the most worrying trends in terms of misinformation?

The foremost worry is associated with the evolution of AI (like ChatGPT) through use of large-language models like GPT-3 that can mirror human conversation and dialogue delivery. Such advanced AI systems, if not regulated for misinformation, can create hyper-realistic content that can be convincing enough to make misinformation sound like real information. The implications could be devastating, affecting peace and stability, inequality and consensus building for climate mitigation and adaptation.

Are different approaches needed in different settings?

Yes, in this case one-size-fits-all solutions won't help. Moreover, misinformation is very context-specific, so understanding the context and focusing on the deep narratives is very important to design counter strategies.

Can presenting people with climate change data change their minds when views are so polarised and sometimes political leaders promote climate misinformation?

Yes, it can, and there is evidence that political polarisation creates and spreads false information that affects how the public sees climate change data. But the source of the information matters when it comes to whether or not the public will trust a piece of climate data. For example, some studies have shown that people trust climate scientists, even if the information they give is scary. I'm working with Cambridge Zero, Caltech and Harvard University to do a global survey (in about 70 countries) about how much people trust climate science and to learn more about how scientists and university research affect public opinion.