YouTube Still Monetizing, Promoting Climate Science Denial, Report Finds

You don’t have to look far to find misinformation about climate science continuing to spread online through prominent social media channels like YouTube. That’s despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are driving the climate crisis.

A new report by the global activist NGO Avaaz reveals that, despite YouTube’s pledge to combat misinformation, the popular video site owned by Google has failed to crack down on this problem when it comes to climate change. Videos containing false or misleading information on climate change continue to reach millions of users through YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. Furthermore, ads — including those from major brands and environmental groups — displayed on these videos provide a monetary incentive, not only to YouTube, but to the videos’ creators to keep promoting fringe theories contrary to scientific reality.

“We found that YouTube is driving millions of people to watch climate misinformation videos every day,” Avaaz writes in its report, titled “Why is YouTube Broadcasting Climate Misinformation to Millions?” “YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is giving these videos free promotion and showing misinformation to millions who wouldn’t have been exposed to it otherwise.”

Monetizing Misinformation

Examples of videos identified as containing climate misinformation include titles such as “ACTUAL SCIENTIST: Climate Change is a Hoax” and “CIA Whistleblower Speaks Out About Climate Engineering Vaccination Dangers and 911.” Other videos feature interviews with climate science deniers, such as Patrick Moore, and promote false claims that there is no evidence that CO2emissions are the dominant cause of climate change (there is and they are).

Not all of the channels promoting misinformation are owned by pseudonymous individuals with fringe ideas. Some come from established media organizations such as Fox News and the conservative media nonprofit PragerU.

Avaaz uncovered these examples by reviewing over 5,000 videos using the search terms “global warming,” “climate change,” and “climate manipulation.” The NGO found a number of videos containing misleading or false information for each search term.

“For the search term ‘global warming,’ 16 percent of the top 100 related videos included under the up-next feature had misinformation about climate change,” the report states. The percentage of top 100 related videos with climate misinformation, promoted through YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, dropped to 8 percent when the search term “climate change” was used. When the researchers typed in “climate manipulation,” however, that percentage rose to 21 percent. According to Avaaz, the climate misinformation videos it reviewed had 21.1 million views collectively.

 

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/01/16/youtube-monetizing-climate-science...

 

Greta Thunberg has told the World Economic Forum in Davos that planting trees is not enough to address climate change, an apparent rebuke of a pledge made moments earlier by US President Donald Trump.

Key points:

• Donald Trump called climate activists "heirs of yesterday's foolish fortune tellers" but said he was a "very big believer in the environment"
• Greta Thunberg said the inaction of world leaders was hastening climate change
• Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz also criticised Mr Trump's speech.

 

"Our house is still on fire," Ms Thunberg said, echoing remarks she made at the annual meeting a year ago.

"Your inaction is fuelling the flames." 

The ongoing row between the teenage activist and 73-year-old US President around climate change appeared an attempt by both to frame the argument at Davos.

Ms Thunberg called for an immediate end to fossil fuel investments in front of a packed audience less than a hour after watching Mr Trump make his keynote address in the Swiss ski resort.

Mr Trump announced the US would join an existing initiative to plant 1 trillion trees, but also spoke at length about the economic importance of oil and gas and called climate change activists "the perennial prophets of doom" who were predicting an "apocalypse".

Ms Thunberg responded by referring to "empty words and promises" by world leaders.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-22/trump-and-thunberg-do-battle-agai...

 

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Prince Charles used his first speech at Davos for three decades to essentially outline a new economic model that rewrites traditional investment mandates and risk assessments to put nature at the heart of business decisions. The future king even challenged governments to drop "perverse" subsidies for fossil fuels and endorsed carbon pricing regimes - a message that would have gone down like a lead balloon in the ministerial corridors of Parliament House in Canberra.

A couple of hours before that address, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also spoke of a proposed scheme that has received a staggering lack of attention given its potentially huge ramifications for emissions reduction policy. Expect to hear a lot more about this big idea over the coming months.

Von der Leyen's 'carbon border adjustment mechanism' would essentially slap a tax on certain carbon-intensive goods imported from countries that are not doing their bit to lower emissions under the Paris climate accord. China would be an obvious initial target.

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/as-trump-melted-into-the-background-...

 

 

 

Meanwhiletening:

I am sure Tony Abbott is trusting of science-based evidence as he is being wheeled off to an operating theatre, or boarding a plane to France to attend the Tour de France, or, if he can’t be there, turning on a television to watch them as they cycle through the French countryside. Popping something in the microwave to heat up for a midnight snack as he watches them cycle up The Pyrenees, I doubt will call his faith in scientific-based fact into question.

So, why the debate over climate change?

Simple. It is “The Convenient Truth”. It is based on our human interaction with the natural world. The natural world goes back several billion years longer than we do. Plenty of wriggle room for us to deny any mea culpa. How far back do our precise, reliable records of human activity on the planet go? Not billions of years.

People who expect the planet to come up with something new after billions of years of doing what it does have rocks in their heads.

Climate change hasn’t invented fire, flood, drought, typhoons or hurricanes. All are gifts the natural world bestows us from time to time. And there’s the rub. The science suggests we are increasing the frequency of these dramatic natural episodes way above what our limited historical knowledge would have us believe should be the case. It can do no more than that.

Climate change is the convenient smoke-and-mirrors of where our global attention currently resides. We’ve all heard a disgraced public figure say they would like to apologise if their actions have offended anyone. They rarely then go on and actually apologise. I would like to compose a world-famous song but, as yet, I haven’t. Get my point?

We can say we believe in climate change, but it is hard to define what we are actually saying. It is not our fault. We live for 100 years if we are lucky. Doesn’t really compare to 6 billion years.

Some say we are being extremely human-centric in thinking we can actually impact at a major level something as powerful and grand as the Earth and our universe. Whether we do or don’t, I see no harm in living a life less cluttered with pollutants, CO2 emissions, plastics and oil spills. Cleaner air and less pollution can only do us good, but don’t expect our lifestyle to create anything new in the natural world.

 

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/the-con...

 

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the doomest of all...

 

As the melting of the ice on Antarctica and elsewhere is on track to be complete by 2175, It’s time to revalue our options. Even if we manage to scrub 120 ppm of CO2 back by 2075 (which is impossible), we’re on track to experience some major disturbances in our weather, in the survival of species and in our general comforts.

We’re on track to emit 3 per cent more CO2 per year than the year before, etc. till the cows die of desiccation in the paddocks...

An ice-free earth has happened before, but it took quite a dozen millenniums to get there, while at present we’ll be there in less than a couple of hundred years. Is this a wild prediction? Up to you. In my book, it’s actually a restrained prognosis.

The changes are going to be dramatic, traumatic and “beyond beliefs”… So what are the options and the consequences?

As Andrew Bolt now talks of the beneficial side of global warming, we have to warn him that these will be short lived and possibly localised to Russia/Siberia for a few years — though even there, increasing heat might derange the vodka plantations (okay, it’s a cheap joke).

Europe, Australia, Northern USA, Africa, South Africa, even China are more than likely to experience a rapid collapse of the environment around. And let’s not talk about the Ganges delta being tidal back to the Himalayas...

Fires, heat, droughts, floods, destruction by hail the size of cricket balls, tornadoes, hurricanes (cyclones and typhoons), extreme variations of “change”, will be the norm rather than successfully growing wheat and potatoes — or godot forbids, the new climate will destroy our lovely vines for vino. We might have to grow shiraz under bullet-proof greenhouses with air conditioning.

We better get ready. By now, we need to plan better buildings, mostly underground. Cooper Pedy has shown the way for many years. Powered by solar panels and (strong) windmills, cities would become big holes in which democracies would have to be despotic. Our little squabbles would have to be squashed with philosophical rigour... 

Go outside and burn to a crisp. Temperature at the south pole: 0º Celsius. On a bad Sydney day? Temp 56º Celsius. In the sun? Frying eggs in 10 seconds. Plants? As many as in the Sahara desert... 

What would be the major difference between previous “super” warm earth periods? Well, the continental positions would lend to more “extreme” than before, rather than the “balmy all over”... Say Antarctica is surrounded by sea entirely that would create a massive vortex of wind that was not possible in previous periods when continents were in different positions.

Sorry, I am rabbiting on… 

Good on you, The Project people on Channel 10 to alert us on “five things” that we can do to “save the environment”… Very Good. Excellent. 

But I am afraid, we’re too late. The momentum of global warming is now felt. We have five years to start digging — away from the coast as the sea level will rise to more than 30 metres by 2250… Beyond this, your predictions are as good as mine...


GL. Cheers.

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And the imbeciles want to dig MORE COAL TO BURN... for money...

...

And so we circle back to the climate question. There is a tendency on the Right to conflate the question of climate change itself with the policies proposed to counter it. Of course, these don’t actually have anything to do with each other. Shorn of its environmentalist subtext, read as an ethnographic work and a poignant recognition that everything changes, even the ground under our feet, Chesapeake Requiem works. But that subtext—one that should frankly hit conservatives hard—is that climate change isn’t a threat to “the planet” in some amorphous sense, nor is it a “global” problem. It is a threat to thousands of very local cultures and ways of life all around the world. 

 

The fact that Tangier and its irreplaceable patrimony is sinking should alarm those who champion localism, rural and forgotten places, and the fantastic regional diversity of America. The fact that climate change is almost certainly the culprit should prompt skeptics in those ranks to rethink that question. In fact, climate change and disappearing ways of life might just turn out to be inseparable.

 

 

Read more:

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/climate-change-and-the-...

 

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Tangier Island was visited by the Leonisky family back in 1987... Alcohol was not permitted if I remember well. The chowder was the best in the world and the religious fervour was strong. Then it was already under attack from rising tides. The island isn't "sinking" but being swamped by rising sea level. The low lying lands around the Chesapeake Bay are also vulnerable...

 

Thank you TAC (Addison Del Mastro) for having a discreet foray into this far greater problem (global warming) than a temporary virus infection...

The polar ice caps are melting six times faster than in the 1990s, according to the most complete analysis to date.

The ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica is tracking the worst-case climate warming scenario set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists say. Without rapid cuts to carbon emissions the analysis indicates there could be a rise in sea levels that would leave 400 million people exposed to coastal flooding each year by the end of the century.

Rising sea levels are the one of the most damaging long-term impacts of the climate crisis, and the contribution of Greenland and Antarctica is accelerating. The new analysis updates and combines recent studies of the ice masses and predicts that 2019 will prove to have been a record-breaking year when the most recent data is processed.

The previous peak year for Greenland and Antarctic ice melting was 2010, after a natural climate cycle led to a run of very hot summers. But the Arctic heatwave of 2019 means it is nearly certain that more ice was lost last year.

The average annual loss of ice from Greenland and Antarctica in the 2010s was 475bn tonnes – six times greater than the 81bn tonnes a year lost in the 1990s. In total the two ice caps lost 6.4tn tonnes of ice from 1992 to 2017, with melting in Greenland responsible for 60% of that figure.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/11/polar-ice-caps-melti...

 

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The melting (warming) of the ice is retarding the effects of global atmospheric warming. Add ice in your whisky and the whisky cools while the ice warms up. There is a tipping point at which, even if there is some ice left, the effect of such cooling becomes negligible and the temperature of the atmosphere increase sharply. At the moment, most of the models are seemingly based on complex linear equations, while the problem should be based of the theory of statistical reduction (or diminishing returns with a critical BOTTOM LINE), in which, the proportion left of some active ingredients is rising exponentially by diminution of the other contrary active ingredients, in a limited environment.  In short, say you have a punnet of 31 blueberries. You take one away a day and you think you will have enough for a whole month. At first, the impact is not really seen. by day 30, you would have one left. Next day you would have none. The ice has gone. "Global warming has thus far less mitigating factors". But the effect is being felt (seen) at a certain point at which you might choose to take only one blueberry every two days to enjoy them longer, but the blueberries by day 17 start to rot. The tipping point is when the choice of between picking less and rotting blueberries is critical. For global warming, the tipping point according to Mr Leonisky is 2032. There will be some ice left, but not enough to prevent atmospheric rot. Instead of 0.03 Degrees Celsius yearly average increase (0.3 per decade, 3 degrees Celsius per century), the increase will switch to 0.07 per annum at worse or 0.06 at best (0.6 to 0.7 per decade, 6 degrees Celsius per century, increasing towards 9 degrees Celsius by 2115). Please note than in 2015, 2016 and 2017, the increase per year reached 0.7 and has plateau-ed till 2021 when it will rise again at 0.03 (and more) towards the 2032 flip.

Read also: 

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/26175

 

 

The IPCC is incorrect. It should be FAR MORE ALARMIST.