From Watts Up With That?
Essay by Eric Worrall
According to the Guardian, climate deniers have influenced teens by infiltrating youtube with disinformation videos.
Third of UK teenagers believe climate change exaggerated, report shows
YouTube criticised for amplifying lies about the climate with disinformation videos watched by young people
Helena Horton Environment reporterTue 16 Jan 2024 22.00 AEDT
A third of UK teenagers believe climate change is “exaggerated”, a report has found, as YouTube videos promoting a new kind of climate denial aimed at young people proliferate on the platform.
Previously, most climate deniers pushed the belief that climate breakdown was not happening or, if it was, that humans were not causing it. Now, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has found that most climate denial videos on YouTube push the idea that climate solutions do not work, climate science and the climate movement are unreliable, or that the effects of global heating are beneficial or harmless.
Researchers from the CCDH gathered a dataset of text transcripts from 12,058 climate-related YouTube videos posted by 96 channels over almost six years from 1 January 2018 to 30 September 2023. They also included the results of a nationally representative survey conducted by polling company Survation which found 31% of UK respondents aged 13 to 17 agreed with the statement “Climate change and its effects are being purposefully overexaggerated”. This rose to 37% of teenagers categorised as heavy users of social media, meaning they reported using any one platform for more than four hours a day.
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Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the CCDH, said: “Scientists have won the battle to inform the public about climate change and its causes, which is why those opposed to climate action have cynically switched focus to undermining confidence in solutions and in science itself.”
This mentality has seeped into UK politics, with rightwing politicians having campaigned for years to persuade the public that net zero is unachievable and too expensive, and that technologies including electric cars and heat pumps do not work. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has said recently that climate solutions are too expensive and rowed back on net zero commitments.
What can I say? It’s not our fault if reality gives us plenty of evidence to refute nonsensical climate claims.
I mean, who can forget the hilarious cost blowout and failure, when German greens tried and failed to install a heat pump in their own headquarters?
Or the crazy energy price hikes, inflicted by politicians who claimed renewables are the cheapest form of power?
And let’s not forget the Chicago Tesla graveyard this weekend, caused by Tesla’s failing in the cold – nope, nothing to see here folks.
The fact is green solutions don’t work, and climate change isn’t a problem. It was always only a matter of time before teenagers realised this, and started rebelling against fake adult climate doomsday messaging.
Update (EW): The report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate is available here. The report appears to call for stepping up censorship and demonetisation of any content which criticises climate “solutions”, as well as content which criticises climate science. There’s a picture of Anthony Watts on page 20 of the report;
The New Climate Denial
How social media platforms and content producers profit by spreading new forms of climate denial.
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2023 was the hottest year on record. Once unprecedented wildfires, floods, unbearable heat, and droughts are becoming normal to billions of people worldwide.2 It is difficult to deny the simple fact that our climate is changing in predictable and yet, still, even now, shocking ways. The awe we feel when Mother Nature bellows with rage can only be matched by our fear that her final judgment will be catastrophic for our species.
And yet, the sensible majority of us who seek to avert climate catastrophe find ourselves continually having to deal with a tidal wave of disinformation designed to delay action. These lies, welcomed, enabled, and often funded by oil and gas tycoons who benefit financially, are cynically used by political leaders to explain why they remain stubbornly incapable of taking urgent corrective action.
In this Enlightenment battle of truth and science versus lies and greed, those on the side of science appear to have succeeded in persuading the public that anthropogenic climate change is a reality, which is why those who seek to undermine climate science have shifted strategy.
In this report, for the first time, researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate have quantified the startling and important rise over the past five years in what we call “New Denial” — the departure from rejection of anthropogenic climate change, to attacks on climate science and scientists, and rhetoric seeking to undermine confidence in solutions to climate change. “New Denial” claims now constitute 70% of all climate denial claims made on YouTube, up from 35% six years ago.
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