Peter Neff understands the allure of the world’s fifth-largest continent.

The camera roll on his phone is brimming with videos and photos of his trips to Antarctica, where the glaciologist and climate scientist has spent days and weeks at a time collecting ice core samples. His work helps develop a record of past climate conditions and anticipate what’s to come.

When the pandemic lockdowns started to keep everyone at home, Neff, a professor at the University of Minnesota, upped his social media presence by posting explanations of his work online under the username “Icy Pete.” He reposted a video to TikTok that had done well on X, which captures the sound a chunk of ice makes when it falls 90 meters down a borehole (“Pew!” Just like the sound of a gunshot in a cartoon). It was an immediate success, garnering more than 30,000 views.

A view of the sloping iceberg in Antarctica in February. Scientists like glaciologist Peter Neff are focusing on mapping changes in Antarctica’s glaciers and ice sheets.

(Sebnem Coskun / Anadolu / Getty Images)

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In 2024 (and 2022), Neff was featured as a Climate Creator to Watch, a collaboration between startup media Pique Action and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and his posts had gained more than 4 million likes.

“As a scientist, my job is to tell folks what the situation is and what we could choose to do to not make it worse, or to make it better,” Neff said in an interview. “I hope I can provide information that is accurately used to describe the challenges that we face, because it is quite serious.”

As the internet accommodates a growing range of voices, scientists studying climate and the environment have taken to sharing their work online, translating obscure topics and discoveries into accessible bits of information. Instead of waiting years for their studies and work to be published in academic journals, scientists like Neff have used social media to extend their reach — and their brand.

Joe Hanson, the biologist who hosts PBS’ “Be Smart” series, is a well-known voice on climate issues on YouTube. One 44-second video explaining the Keeling curve (a daily record of global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration) has 2.4 million views. His 28-minute video tackling climate change myths has been viewed more than 900,000 times. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has an authoritative presence on Instagram and partners with influencers to spread the gospel of climate science. Peter Kalmus took the internet by storm in 2022 when he and other scientists chained himself to the door of the J.P. Morgan Chase office building in downtown Los Angeles to protest the company’s fossil fuel investments and were subsequently arrested. On X, his “ClimateHuman” account has more than 330,000 followers.

The potential to attract likes is enormous. According to the Pew Research Center, one survey found about half of U.S. adults said they reported seeing news at least “sometimes” while using social media platforms.

Neff has studied glaciology for 15 years and has traveled several times to the Antarctic region to study ice cores — cylinders of drilled ice that serve as records of past climate change and are extracted from ice sheets and glaciers. Among his many titles, he is the director of field research and data for the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration.

Katharine Hayhoe at the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2022. Hayhoe has an authoritative presence on Instagram and partners with influencers to share climate science.

(Nariman El-Mofty / Associated Press)

On TikTok, Neff explains the process of “how to go from old air in ice to an air sample” in 60 seconds. While an academic journal entry might take on more scientific terms and explanations, Neff breaks down the process of his work with ice cores in layman’s terms, rushing through the narration — “drill your ice core borehole,” “load ice in the vacuum chamber,” “melt that ice” — in a matter-of-fact voice for a video that has more than 617,000 views as of this writing.

Neff’s TikTok account had 224,000 followers, and a graduate student and fellow Antarctica scientist, Austin Carter, who also posts about their work through the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration, has eclipsed him with nearly 254,000 followers.

According to a study published in January by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit that monitors online hate speech, climate denialism has shifted from denying global warming is happening to claiming climate solutions won’t work and that the climate movement is unreliable across all platforms. (The study, which reviewed about 12,000 videos using artificial intelligence, also found that YouTube makes up to $13.4 million “from channels posting denial.”)

Neff has some unkind words for climate deniers. At one point, he deleted a video that showed sun halos in Antarctica because it had gone viral among “flat Earthers” who were trying to use the video as proof that the world is not, in fact, round.

“These people are brick walls … and you’re not going to change anybody’s mind,” he said. “You don’t know what people are going to do with your content once you post it.”

The climatologist stresses the role scientists can play in spreading fact-based information.

“I’m trying to just educate people … especially with all of our work being publicly funded,” Neff said. “We’re obligated to share about it.”

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, took a different path to social media stardom. As the former executive director of the La Jolla-based Waitt Institute, which implements sustainable ocean plans and policy, she led communication efforts to make sure Barbudan fishing communities had input in proposing policy. She began running Facebook pages for the effort, and found she had a knack for communicating her work to the public. Next, she began blogging for National Geographic and writing freelance stories.

Marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson speaks onstage during a NYC Climate Strike rally and demonstration at Battery Park in 2019.

(Ron Adar / SOPA Images/Sipa USA /Associated Press)

“To me, all of climate, environmental communication is about how can we repeat each other’s successes and avoid others’ failures,” said Johnson, who has studied marine biology for about 12 years. “So that requires getting in the weeds a little and hopefully, in a way that’s appealing and welcoming as opposed to like, boring and insufferable.”

Johnson has acquired her expertise through many endeavors. She’s the Roux Distinguished Scholar at Bowdoin College, a co-founder of the think tank Urban Ocean Lab and the All We Can Save Project, both of which promote sustainable marine and climate solutions. This month, Johnson will release her book “What if We Get it Right?” which features conversations with farmers, climate activists and financiers — among others — in an effort to map out possible climate futures. In addition, she appears in several publications and platforms in an effort to convince the general public that there is still hope in avoiding climate catastrophe.

On TikTok, where she does not have an account, a snippet from one of her Ted Talks with five facts about parrotfish has more than 400,000 views. Johnson is often featured on podcasts as a guest to talk about ocean conservation, and followers share her climate action Venn diagram to inspire action and defeat hopelessness.

She gained a big chunk of her followers in 2020, after the Washington Post published her op-ed that tackled climate policy and racism. The content she posts under her name is personal and conversational (she has more than 120,000 followers on Instagram) but the organizations that she runs stick to policy-driven posts.

Conversations among members of the public, scientists and policymakers are all part of working toward a climate solution, Johnson said. “That is really at the heart of the way I attempt to share information, is not by me being out there just like screaming into the void as one person but by trying to make this a collective conversation.”

For now, Johnson said she will continue her “begrudging” relationship with social media and continue to be a voice that people can rely on when it comes to climate policy ahead of the November presidential election, and even local races, which have a direct impact on voters.

“There’s an intense amnesia in the United States about the Trump administration, and how awful that was for the environment,” she said, citing the hundreds of environmental regulations on clean air and water that he rolled back. “I just really want to do my little part in helping people understand how to be a climate voter. The people who follow me care about this issue, but it’s really hard to get good information from a person that you trust.”

Roughly half of Americans subscribe to to some sort of conspiracy theory, and their fellow humans haven’t had much success coaxing them out of their rabbit holes.

Perhaps they could learn a thing or two from an AI-powered chatbot.

In a series of experiments, the artificial chatbot was able to make more than a quarter of people feel uncertain about their most cherished conspiracy belief. The average conversation lasted less than 8½ minutes.

The results were reported Thursday in the journal Science.

The failure of facts to convince people that we really did land on the moon, that Al Qaeda really was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and that President Biden really did win the 2020 election, among other things, has fueled anxiety about a post-truth era that favors personal beliefs over objective evidence.

“People who believe in conspiracy theories rarely, if ever, change their mind,” said study leader Thomas Costello, a psychologist at American University who investigates political and social beliefs. “In some sense, it feels better to believe that there’s a secret society controlling everything than believing that entropy and chaos rule.”

But the study suggests the problem isn’t with the persuasive power of facts — it’s our inability to marshal the right combination of facts to counter someone’s specific reasons for skepticism.

Costello and his colleagues attributed the chatbot’s success to the detailed, customized arguments it prepared for each of the 2,190 study participants it engaged with.

For instance, a person who doubted that the twin towers could have been brought down by airplanes because jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel was informed that the fuel reaches temperatures as high as 1,832 degrees, enough for steel to lose its structural integrity and trigger a collapse.

A person who didn’t believe Lee Harvey Oswald had the skills to assassinate President John F. Kennedy was told that Oswald had been a sharpshooter in the Marines and wouldn’t have had much trouble firing an accurate shot from about 90 yards away.

And a person who believed Princess Diana was killed so Prince Charles could remarry was reminded of the 8-year gap between Diana’s fatal car accident and the future king’s second wedding, undermining the argument that the two events were related.

The findings suggest that “any type of belief that people hold that is not based in good evidence could be shifted,” said study co-author Gordon Pennycook, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University.

“It’s really validating to know that evidence does matter,” he said.

The researchers began by asking Americans to rate the degree to which they subscribed to 15 common conspiracy theories, including that the virus responsible for COVID-19 was created by the Chinese government and that the U.S. military has been hiding evidence of a UFO landing in Roswell, N.M. After performing an unrelated task, participants were asked to describe a conspiracy theory they found particularly compelling and explain why they believed it.

The request prompted 72% of them to share their feelings about a conspiracy theory. Among this group, 60% were randomly assigned to discuss it with the large language model GPT-4 Turbo.

The conversations began with the chatbot summarizing the human’s description of the conspiracy theory. Then the human rated the degree to which he or she agreed with the summary on a scale from 0 to 100.

From there, the chatbot set about making the case that there was nothing fishy going on. To make sure it wasn’t stretching the truth in order to be more persuasive, the researchers hired a professional fact-checker to evaluate 128 of the bot’s claims about a variety of conspiracies. One was judged to be misleading, and the rest were true.

The bot also turned up the charm. In one case, it praised a participant for “critically examining historical events” while reminding them that “it’s vital to distinguish between what could theoretically be possible and what is supported by evidence.”

Each conversation included three rounds of evidence from the chatbot, followed by a response from the human. (You can try it yourself here.) Afterward, the participants revisited their summarized conspiracy statements. Their ratings of agreement dropped by an average of 21%.

In 27% of cases, the drop was large enough for the researchers to say the person “became uncertain of their conspiracy belief.”

Meanwhile, the 40% of participants who served as controls also got summaries of their preferred conspiracy theory and scored them on the 0-to-100 scale. Then they talked with the chatbot about neutral topics, like the U.S. medical system or the relative merits of cats and dogs. When these people were asked to reconsider their conspiracy theory summaries, their ratings fell by just 1%, on average.

The researchers checked in with people 10 days and 2 months later to see if the effects had worn off. They hadn’t.

The team repeated the experiment with another group and asked people about their conspiracy-theory beliefs in a more roundabout way. This time, discussing their chosen theory with the bot prompted a 19.4% decrease in their rating, compared with a 2.9% decrease for those who chatted about something else.

The conversations “really fundamentally changed people’s minds,” said co-author David Rand, a computational social scientist at MIT who studies how people make decisions.

“The effect didn’t vary significantly based on which conspiracy was named and discussed,” Rand said. “It worked for classic conspiracies like the JFK assassination and moon landing hoaxes and Illuminati, stuff like that. And it also worked for modern, more politicized conspiracies like those involving 2020 election fraud or COVID-19.”

What’s more, being challenged by the AI chatbot about one conspiracy theory prompted people to become more skeptical about others. After their conversations, their affinity for the 15 common theories fell significantly more than it did for people in the control group.

“It was making people less generally conspiratorial,” Rand said. “It also increased their intentions to do things like ignore or block social media accounts sharing conspiracies, or, you know, argue with people who are espousing those conspiracy theories.”

In another encouraging sign, the bot was unable to talk people out of beliefs in conspiracies that were actually true, such as the CIA’s covert MK-Ultra project that used unwitting subjects to test whether drugs, torture or brainwashing could enhance interrogations. In some cases, the chatbot discussions made people believe these conspiracies even more.

“It wasn’t like mind control, just, you know, making people do whatever it wants,” Rand said. “It was essentially following facts.”

Researchers who weren’t involved in the study called it a welcome advance.

In an essay that accompanied the study, psychologist Bence Bago of Tilberg University in the Netherlands and cognitive psychologist Jean-Francois Bonnefon of the Toulouse School of Economics in France said the experiments show that “a scalable intervention to recalibrate misinformed beliefs may be within reach.”

But they also raised several concerns, including whether it would work on a conspiracy theory that’s so new there aren’t many facts for an AI bot to draw from.

The researchers took a first pass at testing this the week after the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Trump. After helping the AI program find credible information about the attack, they found that talking with the chatbot reduced people’s belief in assassination-related conspiracy theories by 6 or 7 percentage points, which Costello called “a noticeable effect.”

Bago and Bonnefon also questioned whether conspiracy theorists would be willing to engage with a bot. Rand said he didn’t think that would be an insurmountable problem.

“One thing that’s an advantage here is that conspiracy theorists often aren’t embarrassed about their beliefs,” he said. “You could imagine just going to conspiracy forums and inviting people to do their own research by talking to the chatbot.”

Rand also suggested buying ads on search engines so that when someone types a query about, say, the “deep state,” they’ll see an invitation to discuss it with an AI chatbot.

Robbie Sutton, a social psychologist at the University of Kent in England who studies why people embrace conspiracy beliefs, called the new work “an important step forward.” But he noted that most people in the study persisted in their beliefs despite receiving “high-quality, factual rebuttals” from a “highly competent and respectful chatbot.”

“Seen this way, there is more resistance than there is open-mindedness,” he said.

Sutton added that the findings don’t shed much light on what draws people to conspiracy theories in the first place.

“Interventions like this are essentially an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff,” he said. “We need to focus more of our efforts on what happens at the top of the cliff.”

If you feel certain your preferred candidate will lose the presidential election, that AI is coming for your job or that climate change is going to destroy humanity, then you have fallen prey to a cynical mindset, and you’re far from alone.

Over the past 50 years, cynicism has spread like a virus across American society, infecting us with the belief that other people can’t be trusted, the world is only getting worse and there’s nothing we can do about it. This potent mix of fatalism and hopelessness has led to a loss of faith in our neighbors, our institutions and our dreams for the future.

Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life.

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In 1972, 46% of Americans agreed that most people can be trusted according to the General Social Survey. By 2018, that percentage had fallen to 31.9%. This rise in collective cynicism is not just destroying our hope, it’s also affecting our health. Studies suggest that cynics suffer more depression, drink more heavily, earn less money and die younger than non-cynics.

But there may be an antidote to the cynical epidemic. In his new book “Hope for Cynics: The surprising science of human goodness,” (Grand Central) Stanford professor Jamil Zaki suggests that cynicism can be combated with a willingness to question our most cynical assumptions and corroborate them with facts.

If we would only look at the data, he writes, most of us would discover that people are more worthy of our trust than we imagine, that we have more in common with our political rivals than we think and that many of the problems we believe to be intractable may have solutions after all. He advocates for what he calls hopeful skepticism: Acknowledging that the future is mysterious, and we can’t know what will happen.

“There’s this idea that being hopeful is like putting on a pair of rose-colored glasses,” Zaki, who has spent 20 years studying kindness, connection and empathy said in an interview. “It turns out that most of us are wearing mud-colored glasses already. Being hopeful is not a matter of looking away, it’s a matter of looking more closely and more clearly.”

Here Zaki talks about the media’s role in creating a more cynical society, why so many of us mistake cynicism for wisdom and why trusting others isn’t only for the privileged among us.

Author Jamil Zaki. Photo by Vern Evans

(Photo by Vern Evans)

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How do you define cynicism?

I’m using a purposefully modern psychological definition: the theory that most people at our core are selfish, greedy and dishonest. That’s not to say that a cynic would be shocked if somebody donated to charity or helped a stranger, but they might suspect or impugn the person’s motives. They might say, “Yeah they donate to charity for a tax break, or to look good in front of other people.” So it’s a theory not about human action, but about human motivation.

How does cynicism relate to trust?

Cynicism relates very strongly and very negatively to trust. Trust is our willingness to be vulnerable to somebody else on the expectation that that person will honor your vulnerability. It’s loaning money to somebody because you think they’ll pay you back. It’s confiding in a friend because you think they’ll support you. It’s leaving your kids with a babysitter because you think they’ll care for the children. In all of these cases trust requires a bet on another person. It’s a social risk and cynics think that bet is for suckers. They don’t trust in a variety of contexts, whether it’s strangers, politicians or even family and friends, the way less cynical people do.

“Hope for Cynics” by Jamil Zaki. (Grand Central)

(Grand Central)

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You write that people often mistake cynicism for wisdom. Why is that?

Cynicism has the veneer of wisdom and people view it as a form of intelligence and a sign of experience. It turns out that if you look at the data cynicism is shockingly naive and much more similar to gullible trust than people realize. But cynics act like they know things and it turns out that acting like you know things is a great way to get people to believe you know things. So cynicism is somewhat rewarding to people in that it looks like wisdom. You are treated as a wise person if you are just very grim about everything.

Why did cynicism skyrocket in the past 50 years?

Two things come to mind. The first is inequality. Nations, states and counties that are more economically unequal are poisonous for trust, and the U.S. has become much more unequal in the 50 years when we lost faith in each other. Interestingly, unequal times are not only characterized by low trust among people with less means, but even wealthier people in unequal places are less trusting than well-heeled people in more equal places. Inequality puts us all in a zero-sum mindset where there is not enough to go around and whatever you get, I lose. When you’re in that frame of mind, it’s very easy to have mistrust as your default.

The second source we see is the media. People have something in our minds called negativity bias. We focus more on threatening information than on pleasant information. This ancient bias has been combined with a hyper-modern media ecosystem that feeds us whatever it takes to keep us clicking, scrolling and watching, which is not the same as information that would make us happy or hopeful, or even information that is accurate. You might think if you watch a lot of news you are more informed but it turns out that in many cases you are less informed. For example, people who watch lots of news believe that violent crime is on the rise, even when it’s on the decline.

Your book suggests that skepticism — not optimism — is the best antidote for cynicism. Why?

Cynicism and skepticism are often confused with one another but they are actually quite different. You can think of a cynic as a lawyer in the prosecution against humanity. They pick up on any and all evidence about human evil and conniving and explain away or ignore evidence of positive human qualities. Optimists, or naive trusters, think like lawyers as well but they are hyper-focused on any sign of human goodness and ignore any sign of harmful behavior. Skeptics think more like scientists. They don’t have blanket judgments about people that they default to. Instead, they try to evaluate the evidence whenever they find themselves with a new person or in a new situation. Because of that skepticism, often confused for cynicism, can be a great antidote for it.

In the summer of 2022 you invited Americans to join 20-minute Zoom calls with political rivals to discuss gun control, climate change and abortion. What did people learn about each other from those conversations?

If you look at the evidence there is incredible amounts of common ground even between Democrats and Republicans that most Americans don’t know about. So, what did people learn in these 20 minute conversations? One: that a randomly selected member of the other side is much more reasonable, much more open-minded and much less hostile than they imagined an outsider or rival to be. [Two], when they talked about issues they learned that they did have some common ground, and this immensely deescalated their outrage and hatred toward the other other side. Because now they were thinking of the real other side instead of the image we have in our mind.

I’ve often wondered if the ability to trust others is a sign of privilege. Depending on our race, class, gender and educational background some of us are more likely to be treated with respect and empathy than others. Where do you land on that?

It’s very easy to draw the conclusion that hope is a form of privilege and maybe even toxic — that it causes us to ignore our problems, or rather, ignore problems that we don’t have but other people do have. You might be surprised then, to find out that some of the least trusting and most cynical people are the ones with privilege and money and power. And actually, people who struggle in terms of their socioeconomic status tend to be more interdependent and reliant on trust. I realize I’m a bit of a broken record here, but one of the amazing things about doing the many thousands of hours of research for this book is that over and over again I found out that our assumptions aren’t just wrong, they are the exact opposite of right.

Do you think American society is capable of reversing our descent into cynicism?

I do think we’re capable of it, and one reason I think that is we’ve done it before. The 1890s and 1900s were a terrible time for social life in the United States. There was extreme mistrust, extreme polarization, backsliding on issues like race, the rise of Jim Crow laws. It was a horrible time culturally in all these different ways and that pain spurred what is called the progressive movement in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. There was all this labor organizing and social groups and movements that agitated from everything from public kindergarten to women’s suffrage to the FDA and the Parks Service. There was this sense of responsibility to one another. This growing value of connection. Could that happen again? Yeah, it could. Will it happen again? I have no idea.

What can we do as individuals to shift this trend?

There’s a few things. The first is to be more skeptical — to fact check our cynical feelings. I do this all the time. When I see myself suspecting people I try my best to to say, “You’re a scientist what evidence do you have for that claim?” And oftentimes the answer is, “I have no evidence to support this bleak assumption.” Once we have that mindset of being more curious about our own thoughts we can interrupt the cycle of cynicism.

A second thing we can do is take more social risks. Because of negativity bias, we miscalculate the upsides and downsides of social life. We overestimate how likely it is that if we trust someone they will betray us and we underestimate the likelihood that things will go well. So I try to recalibrate and say, “Based on the actual data of what people are like, I should probably trust them more.” Earnest Hemingway said that the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. I think he’s right, but it’s also true that when you trust people you bring out their best. So you don’t just learn about them, you change them. I try to give people many more opportunities than I used to to show me who they are, and often times they show me something really great.

Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life. Want to pitch us? Email alyssa.bereznak@latimes.com.