2025/11/01 by Emily R. Spearing, Eryn J. Newman, Iain Walker +3 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Climate Change Communication and Perception #Public Relations and Crisis Communication
paper · doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2025.102842
openalex publication_date 2025/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/11/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Climate misinformation has been identified as a barrier to mitigative action. One prominent example occurred when the 2019/2020 “Black Summer” bushfires in Australia were blamed on arson. This claim is cognitively attractive because of its simplicity and was widely publicised at the time, but also thoroughly debunked. In two experiments, we examined the impact of a fictional misleading article implicating arson as the primary cause of the Black Summer fires on Australian (Exp. 1, N = 509) and Canadian (Exp. 2, N = 506) participants’ reasoning, associated donation behaviour, and climate change attitudes. The misinformation significantly influenced reasoning about the Black Summer and future fires in both experiments; it also reduced the donations of Australian participants to a local climate organisation and impacted Canadian participants’ reasoning about a novel, conceptually related (but fictional) flooding event. Corrections were largely effective at mitigating misinformation impact. A bolstered correction that portrayed climate change as an important causal factor through its impact on risks and emphasised the multicausality of natural disasters was more effective than a simple correction that merely refuted the misinformation. Climate change attitudes were largely unaffected by the misinformation and interventions. Our findings demonstrate that event-specific climate misinformation can influence reasoning beyond a specific event, and that corrections are broadly useful for combatting its effects. • Extreme-weather misinformation can impact reasoning and donation behaviour • Event-specific misinformation can influence reasoning about related events • Corrections reduce the impact of misinformation on climate-related reasoning • Explaining the multicausality of weather events increases correction effectiveness • Climate attitudes are largely unaffected by extreme-weather misinformation