EGU2025 – Presentation about our collaborations
Posted on 28 April 2025 by BaerbelW
As mentioned in the recently published prolog to EGU2025 article, I submitted an abstract to talk about some of the collaborations we’ve had with other groups and websites over the years. This blog post is a “companion article” to that presentation in session EOS1.1 Science and Society: Science Communication Practice, Research, and Reflection and will go into somewhat greater details than is possible in the 8 minutes available during the oral session. The collaborations are listed along a timeline as they happened.
Klimafakten – Nauka o Klimacie – Denial101x – FLICC-Poster – Repustar – Gigafact – Sabin Center – IUD
Klimafakten – 2011 (ongoing)
In November 2011 we announced our partnership with the newly launched German-language website klimafakten.de. They’d approached us earlier in the year as they wanted to start with a set of professionally translated rebuttals before the Climate Talks in Durban, South Africa (COP17). In the weeks leading up to the launch, Toralf Staud and I collaborated on how best to go about this partnership. We tackled questions like how best to create translated versions of graphics or how to avoid double work by for example linking from a translated rebuttal “stub” on Skeptical Science to Klimafakten. Since then, we’ve collaborated on several publication announcement and generally kept in touch about debunking climate myths and successful climate communications – an area that Klimafakten branched out into in recent years. Most of the website is in German but they also have an about page in English.
Nauka o klimacie – 2013 (ongoing)
Nauka o klimacie is run – among others – by Marcin Popkiewicz and Szymon Malinowski and is our and klimafakten.de’s partner site in Poland. Their website, apart from general climate-related education, is focused on Poland and the denial of human-caused climate change they encounter there mostly due to the country’s dependence on coal. They take this on by “conventional” means such as lectures and media presence and “unconventional” ones such as climate quizzes with prizes or the “Climate Nonsense of the Year” (link to a Google-translate version) voting for the dumbest statements on climate made by journalists, politicians or other persons appearing in the Polish media. Their website also features a myth-debunking section with much of the content originating from Skeptical Science. I had the pleasure to meet Marcin and Szymon at the EGU Meeting in 2018.
UQx Denial101x – 2015 to 2024
Many of you will know that in collaboration with the University of Queensland (UQx) we created and ran the massive open online course (MOOC) “Denial101x – Making sense of climate science denial” on the edX platform. Within nine years – between April 2015 and February 2024 – we offered 15 runs of our MOOC, most of them long-running versions in self-paced mode but also a few delivered as shorter paced versions with new lectures starting on a weekly schedule. UQx provided the technical means to create and run Denial101x on the edX-platform. Many of the lecturers and all forum moderators were members of our SkS team. In April 2025 we unfortunately had to announce that Denial101x had run its course and would no longer be available as a MOOC on the edX platform. Many of the materials created for it – namely the videos – remain available, continuing to provide valuable resources when it comes to countering climate myths.
FLICC-Poster – 2020 (ongoing)
In May 2020 we announced publication of the FLICC-poster in German (original version) and English (first translation). The poster is the result of a successful collaboration between us and our German language partnersite klimafakten.de mentioned above. The idea for the poster was first brought up by Toralf Staud at the K3 conference in Karlsruhe in September 2019 where I had offered a workshop about FLICC. The German poster – put together by graphic designer Marie-Pascale Gafinen – was published in April 2020 and the English version followed suit a month later. For that, we didn’t just have to translate the texts as some of the techniques have different names in English and German, like for example “Rosinenpickerei” (picking raisins) in German which is “Cherry Picking” in English. In addition to the text, the graphics therefore needed to be adapted as well in a few places. This ended up being not just a successful but also creative collaboration with by now 10 published versions – and each language having its distinct challenges.
Repustar – 2021
In 2021 we were invited by Repustar to contribute to their fact checking project by publishing short fact briefs based on our rebuttals but shortened to at most 150 words. For several months after launching the project in April we collaborated with them and created 15 fact briefs during that time. Repustar described their approach on their About Us page as enabling everyone to support their conversations online with facts from credible sources. Organizations that contributed to the platform looked into the public’s concerns and responded with clear answers supported by credible data and documents. The Repustar project has been discontinued in the meantime, but the content lives on via Gigafact (see below), a successor project initially “incubated” by Repustar.
Gigafact – 2024 (ongoing)
In spring 2024 we were approached by Gigafact – Repustar’s successor project – to find out if we were interested to re-start the fact brief collaboration. We were happy to take them up on their offer and launched the renewed collaboration in April. By November, we had published 20 new fact briefs and the number has grown to more than 30 new fact briefs since. They are all based on our rebuttals and we manage to get one out at least every other week on average. Most of Gigafact’s partners are local or regional news outlets in the U.S. who create and publish their own fact briefs but also re-publish fact briefs from other outlets. As a result, some of our fact briefs have been shared by the Wisconsin Watch (right now showing up on page 11 of their listed fact briefs)!
Sabin Center for Climate Change Law – 2024 to 2025
In spring 2024 we became aware of a deeply researched report published by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in which they debunked 33 myths about renewable energy and electric vehicles. The only shortcoming of the report was its publication as a PDF making it impossible to directly link to a specific rebuttal. We touched base with them and then collaborated on the creation of 33 individual rebuttals, getting us from just 9 to 42 debunkings in the “It’s too hard” category in our taxonomy by the time we went live on November 1. Since then, we have highlighted one of these rebuttals each week on Tuesday and will continue to do so well into June 2025.
Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen (IUD) – 2024 to 2025
In summer 2024 we were approached by the Institute for translations at the University Heidelberg. They were looking for suitable texts their students could translate into German as course work during the autumn. We decided that the short fact briefs created with Gigafact (see above) were ideal for this purpose and we could publish 20 “Kurze Faktenchecks” before year’s end! Since then, I’ve tried to keep up with translating new fact briefs as they get published and the list has grown to well over 30 by now! During the second half of the course, the students tackled the 33 rebuttals based on the report published by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law (see above). In February 2025 we received these translations and have published all of them in the meantime. These translations were only possible thanks to the work of students Julia Hellwig, Damianus Pawlak, Isabel Schmitt, Yasmin Speltz, Andrei Sumcov and Ulrike Weber under the guidance of Simona Füger snd Nicole Keller.
As this translation collaboration with IUD is based on our collaborations with Gigafact and Sabin Climate Law, I’m wondering if this could be rightfully called “collaborations squared” or “collaborations raised to the power of 2 (or 3)”? What do you think?
The bigger picture
All of our collaborations share an objective: helping the general public navigate in a world noisy with misinformation, in this case climate bunk.
But there’s another commonality shared between the stories above. By actively working with other organizations, every collaborator’s effort becomes more effective, all of our hours are invested for better return, and thereby we all do better at achieving our respective ambitions. Here in this article we’ve described how to multiply gain for pain by getting our and others’ work into the hands of thousands of minds otherwise unreached. And unlike passively sharing links on social media feeds, this cooperation builds valuable competencies and fruitful professional contacts.
Equally important, by actively cooperating we help to level the awful asymmetry between richly resourced industrial actors such as the fossil fuel industry and relatively tiny NGOs.
Organizations working to help the public better understand climate change share a problem: collectively we spend money comparable to total fossil fuel industry lobbying and PR costs while burning vastly more hours of effort— for far less gain than resources expended by our opponents.
How does our opposition spend relatively so little for so much result? By being organized. In contrast NGOs dealing with misinformation of all kinds suffer from a lack of operational, integrated action as an organized coalition. This is a strategic error not commited by our counterparts.
In truth, lessons from history suggest that collaboration isn’t only a “nice to have” but may instead be mandatory for the collective success of organizations combating misinformation. Organization beats disorganization, and operational collaborations of the type we’ve described here are effective organization. We can try to “break history” by winning as a rabble but it’s probably more reliable to work together, as we’ve shown here.
