If you hang out online have been feeling a little 2008-y out there, you’re not wrong.
There’s a new blast of climate denial, boosted by the disastrous change in ownership at Twitter/X, and I suspect also by a grim doubling down on the part of the global fossil fuel oligarchy who recognize an existential threat to their power and wealth, and are determined to stop a transition, or at least hang on as long as possible.
As a result I’m getting besieged by simpletons informing me that “in the 70s Scientists predicted an ice age”, and that “Carbon dioxide is too small a percentage of the atmosphere to make a difference” etc.
In addition, and this has been building for a while, the conversation has moved from climate denial, to solutions denial, something Michael Mann was discussing in his still very relevant book, The New Climate War, of a few years ago.
Of course, I’m in the thick of this nonsense in town halls and township meetings across Middle America, so yeah, I get it.
Boy, do I get it.
YouTube is making millions of dollars a year from advertising on channels that make false claims about climate change because content creators are using new tactics that evade the social media platform’s policies to combat misinformation, according to a report published on Tuesday.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) used artificial intelligence to review transcripts from 12,058 videos from the past six years on 96 of Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) YouTube channels. The channels promoted content that undermines the scientific consensus on climate change that human behavior is contributing to long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns, the report said.
CCDH, a nonprofit that monitors online hate speech, said its analysis found that climate denial content has shifted away from false claims that global warming is not happening or that it is not caused by greenhouse gases produced from burning fossil fuels. Videos espousing such claims are explicitly banned from generating ad revenue on YouTube, according to Google’s policy.
Instead, the report found that last year 70% of climate denial content on the channels analyzed focused on attacking climate solutions as unworkable, portraying global warming as harmless or beneficial, or casting climate science and the environmental movement as unreliable. That’s up from 35% five years earlier.
“A new front has opened up in this battle,” Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH, said on a call with reporters. “The people that we’ve been looking at, they’ve gone from saying climate change isn’t happening to now saying, ‘Hey, climate change is happening but there is no hope. There are no solutions.'”
YouTube is making up to $13.4 million a year from ads on the channels that the report analyzed, CCDH said. The group said the AI model was crafted to be able to distinguish between reasonable skepticism and false information.
In a statement, YouTube did not comment directly on the report but defended its policies.
“Debate or discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed,” a YouTube spokesperson said. “However, when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”
CCDH called on YouTube to update its policy on climate denial content and said the analysis could assist the environmental movement to combat false clai
I believe that some denialists have evolved to be immune to cognitive dissonance:
CO2 has increased, lets say, only 140 ppm and makes up about .04% of the atmosphere. It can’t possibly effect temperature.
CO2 increases have caused global greening.
I’m a denialist. I deny the pseudo-science of climate alarmism. There’s no empirical evidence that increasing atmospheric CO2 levels from here will cause any global warming. It’s merely assumed. The reasoning is circular and the evidence is that the warming causes the increases in CO2 levels, not the other way around.
What do you mean by “alarmism” or “alarmist”?
Is a person who notices a small fire in the laundry room and goes banging on all of the doors in the apartment building an alarmist? Is that person only an alarmist for the apartments that aren’t affected by the fire before it is put out?
Is a recommendation for evacuation even if there’s only a 20% chance that a Cat 4 hurricane will hit your part of the coast alarmism? I certainly hear enough whining from people who evacuated and returned to homes that the hurricane missed, rather than being relieved that they were in the 80%.
What if there are gunshots and people tell you to hide behind a wall even though none of the bullets go near you personally? Are they alarmists?
Do you challenge the basic physics of an increase in greenhouse gas molecules in the atmosphere leading to an increase in heat retained by a planet?
Do you have an alternative explanation for why Venus is hotter than Mercury, even though it is farther from the sun?
Do you understand the concept of system equilibrium, such that changing the inputs to the system can drive it to a different state of equilibrium?
Do you challenge there’s a positive feedback in the system where warming causes the natural release of more greenhouse gases (CH4, CO2) into the atmosphere?
Do you accept the scientific conclusions about paleoclimate? (That is, do you accept their conclusion that the planet was sometimes warmer and sometimes colder in the past?) If so, why? Why believe them about the past and not about the directly measurable present?
Hey, if they can cite references to the Epoch Times, they can believe anything.
There is indeed “A new blast of climate denial, boosted by the disastrous change in ownership at Twitter/X”.
It’s probably a waste of effort, but my Arctic alter ego has been doing “her” very best to expose a certain “Steve Goddard” for the charlatan that he is:
https://GreatWhiteCon.info/2023/12/tony-heller-confirms-global-warming/
However his flock of faithful followers still don’t seem to have got the message. And apparently neither has Iowa!
I don’t recall Tony Heller ever saying or even hinting that there’s been no global warming. His claim to fame is that he’s pointed out that the historical temp record has been retroactively adjusted to make it look like more warming than temperatures as measured at the time. I don’t recall anyone refuting this.
I’ll bet dollars to donuts you never questioned it or looked for a refutation.
I swear to god that Evangelicals + Pentecostals will not be happy until they have created a Christian Taliban (then will jam that dogma down everyone else’s throats).
God bless America. Everyone else can bugger off though!