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.
Continue reading “There’s a New Wave of Climate Denial, and Social Media is Making a Killing on It”
