[✔️] Jan 17, 2024 Global Warming News | The New Climate Denial, 56 page PDF study, Executive Summary, NBC News reports denialism, 2008 Obama

[Richard Pauli]

/*January*//*17, 2024*/

/[ The New Climate Denial --  well organized and heavily funded ]/
*THE NEW CLIMATE DENIAL*
How social media platforms and content producers profit by spreading new 
forms of climate denial
New Climate Denial Cover with title and subtitle. The cover shows a 
factory representing traditional climate denial, and wind turbines 
representing new climate denial
2023 was the hottest year on record, ever. Billions of people across the 
world experienced extreme heat, droughts, wildfires and major floods.

Climate deniers can no longer pretend climate change isn’t happening - 
so they’ve changed their strategy.

CCDH’s groundbreaking AI-powered research shows that New Climate Denial 
narratives that aim to undermine the climate movement, science and 
solutions, now constitute 70% of climate denial content on YouTube in 2023.
*      Find out more * 
https://counterhate.com/research/new-climate-denial/#about
2023 was the hottest year on record. Once unprecedented wildfires, 
floods, unbearable heat, and droughts are becoming normal to billions of 
people worldwide. It is difficult to deny the simple fact that our 
climate is changing in predictable and yet, still, even now, shocking ways.

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 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.

This study centers on data analysis performed by an AI tool, CARDS, 
developed by academics Travis G. Coan, Constantine Boussalis, John Cook 
and Mirjam O. Nanko. The AI allowed us to quantify the frequency of 
different types of climate denialist claims in text. CCDH researchers 
identified the changing tactics of climate deniers on YouTube by 
analyzing thousands of hours of transcripts of videos on the platform 
from 96 channels dating back to 2018.

In 2018, outright denialist claims like “the weather is cold” and “we’re 
heading into an ice age” were popular among climate denialists – but as 
temperatures and evidence of global warming have increased, those 
narratives are no longer as effective. Analysis of 4,458 hours or nearly 
186 days of YouTube content since 2018 shows that “Old Denial” claims 
that anthropogenic climate change isn’t happening have dropped from 65% 
of all claims in 2018 to just 30% of claims in 2023.

*It is vital that those advocating for action to avert climate disaster 
take note of this substantial shift from denial of anthropogenic climate 
change to undermining trust in both solutions and science itself, and 
shift our focus, our resources and our counternarratives accordingly.

The narrative shift from “Old Denial” to “New Denial” seeks to undermine 
the solutions to mitigating the climate crisis and delay political 
action. A failure to shift our strategies would be enormously damaging.

This report is a call-to-action to the climate change advocates, the 
funders, the politicians doing the hard work to green our economic 
models and incentives, to ensure their work effectively counters what 
our opponents are doing now, not six years ago.*
https://counterhate.com/research/new-climate-denial/

- -

/[ Download the 56 page study 
https://counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CCDH-The-New-Climate-Denial_FINAL.pdf 
]/

*Center for Countering Digital Hate*

*The New Climate Denial*

*How social media platforms and content producers profit by spreading 
new forms of climate denial
*

The Center for Countering Digital Hate works to stop the spread of 
online hate and
disinformation through innovative research, public campaigns and policy 
advocacy.
Our mission is to protect human rights and civil liberties online.

Social media platforms have changed the way we communicate, build and 
maintain
relationships, set social standards, and negotiate and assert our 
society’s values. In the
process, they have become safe spaces for the spread of hate, conspiracy 
theories
and disinformation.

Social media companies erode basic human rights and civil liberties by 
enabling the
spread of online hate and disinformation.

At CCDH, we have developed a deep understanding of the online harm 
landscape,
showing how easily hate actors and disinformation spreaders exploit the 
digital platforms and search engines that promote and profit from their 
content.

We are fighting for better online spaces that promote truth, democracy, 
and are safe
for all. Our goal is to increase the economic and reputational costs for 
the platforms
that facilitate the spread of hate and disinformation.

If you appreciate this report, you can donate to CCDH at counterhate.com/
donate. In the United States, Center for Countering Digital Hate Inc is 
a 501(c)(3)
charity. In the United Kingdom, Center for Countering Digital Hate Ltd 
is a nonprofit company limited by guarantee.

https://counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CCDH-The-New-Climate-Denial_FINAL.pdf

- -

*2 Executive Summary*
*This report uses an AI model to measure changes in climate denial on 
YouTube*

    • Climate denial consists of attempts to undermine the scientific
    consensus on climate
    change based on rhetorical arguments.
    • We gathered transcripts for 12,058 videos from climate denial
    YouTube channels:
    • Data was drawn from 96 YouTube channels that have promoted denial
    • videos under analysis are climate-related and from the last six years
    • Videos in our dataset containing denial claims were viewed 325
    million times
    • These transcripts were categorized by an existing AI model trained
    on climate denial.
    • Testing indicates the model is 78% accurate in categorizing claims
    in our dataset.

*Climate deniers have shifted to a New Denial of climate impacts, 
solutions and advocates*
   Climate experts have noted a change in climate deniers’ tactics over 
recent years.
   Our analysis shows that climate deniers have shifted from Old Denial 
to New Denial:

    • Global warming is not happening
    • Human-generated greenhouse gasses are not causing global warming
    • The impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless
    • Climate solutions won’t work
    • Climate science and the climate movement are unreliable
    • New Denial constitutes 70% of denialist claims in 2023, up from
    35% in 2018.
    • This is driven by attacks on climate solutions, scientists and the
    climate movement.
    • Influential deniers including Jordan Peterson and Blaze TV
    followed this trend.

*Climate deniers have shifted away from an Old Denial of warming and its 
human causes*

    • Old Denial constitutes 30% of denialist claims in 2023, down from
    65% in 2018.
    • This is driven by a sharp fall in denialist claims that the
    climate is actually cooling.
    • Experts suggest climate deniers have changed tactics because the
    results of global warming
    and climate change are evident to the public.5

*YouTube continues to profit from ads served on Old Denial and New 
Denial content*

    • YouTube is making up to $13.4 million a year from ads on the
    channels we studied.
    • YouTube’s policies bar monetization of Old Denial, but do not
    cover New Denial.
    • We collected evidence that YouTube is still serving ads on both
    forms of denial.

*Platforms must update their policies to keep up with New Denial narratives*

    • Google must update its policy on climate denial content to reflect
    New Denial
    • Digital platforms must demonetize and de-amplify climate denial
    content
      • Climate advocates should use this report as a call to action to
    address New Denial

https://counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CCDH-The-New-Climate-Denial_FINAL.pdf



/[  Climate in Crisis - NBC  NEWS  describes our information predicament ]/
*On YouTube, climate denialism takes a turn*
A study of more than 12,000 videos found that efforts to discredit the 
climate movement have moved on from whether climate change is real to 
focus on skepticism of solutions, activists and scientists.

Jan. 16, 2024,
By Evan Bush
The voices that deny climate change have settled on a new refrain.

Instead of rejecting the fact that the Earth is warming, they’re now 
focusing on skepticism of climate solutions, as well as scientists and 
activists and altogether the idea that climate change will cause harm, 
according to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a 
nonprofit organization that researches digital hate speech and 
misinformation.

The organization’s analysis suggests that the outright dismissal of 
climate change is no longer as convincing an argument, so climate 
skeptics are shifting the ideological fight to how seriously humanity 
must take climate change or what ought to be done about it. The report 
also claims that the content policies of YouTube’s parent company, 
Google — which are supposed to block advertising money from content that 
rejects the scientific consensus about the existence and causes of 
climate change — are ineffective and ought to be updated.

“A new front has opened up in this battle,” Imran Ahmed, the 
organization’s CEO, said at a news conference. “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.’”

Scientists who study Earth systems have agreed for decades that the 
human burning of fossil fuels creates an imbalance of heat-trapping 
gases in the atmosphere that are warming the world. Earth has warmed by 
roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius, on average, since before industrial times, 
when fossil fuels began to drive economies.

That warming is melting ice shelves, causing sea-level rise and 
intensifying the water cycle. In recent years, scientists have been able 
to connect individual events, like killer heat waves in 2021 in the 
Pacific Northwest, to human-caused climate change.

U.S. public perception of climate change has shifted in recent decades, 
but it remains highly politicized, according to the Pew Research Center. 
The nonprofit Environmental and Energy Study Institute said in a report 
in February that "Americans are increasingly convinced that global 
warming is happening, human-caused, and a serious problem. Americans 
also increasingly understand that climate impacts are here and now and 
would like to see more government action."

The Center for Countering Digital Hate is a nonprofit organization whose 
stated goal is to “protect human rights and civil liberties” by holding 
social media companies accountable. Ahmed said the organization has been 
“tightly integrated with the climate movement.”

For its analysis, the organization used an artificial intelligence model 
to evaluate the arguments used in more than 12,000 YouTube videos from 
96 channels it said featured climate change denial content, including 
videos from Blaze TV, a conservative media channel, and the Heartland 
Institute, a free-market think tank. The videos were published from 
January 2018 through September 2023.

The “deep learning model” processed YouTube transcripts and sought to 
identify whether particular climate denial themes were present, the 
report says. Independent evaluators checked part of the text transcripts 
and graded the model’s accuracy. The independent evaluators said it 
accurately found denial claims about 78% of the time.

“We feel very confident that, at scale, this analysis gives us ... very 
strong data indicating the trends,” Ahmed said.

Over more than five years of videos, the researchers said, arguments 
suggesting climate solutions won’t work or that climate advocates in 
science or activism are unreliable have grown 21.4 and 12 percentage 
points, respectively. The idea that global warming isn’t happening at 
all has dropped by 34.3 percentage points.

Outside researchers said the analysis mirrors trends they’ve observed in 
recent years.

John Cook, a senior research fellow at the Melbourne Centre for 
Behaviour Change at the University of Melbourne in Australia, developed 
the artificial intelligence model used by the Center for Countering 
Digital Hate.

Cook’s research has focused on trends in climate contrarian blogs and 
conservative think tank websites from 1998 to 2020.

The research, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal 
Scientific Reports, found a similar trend.

“It’s clear that the future of climate misinformation will be more and 
more focused on solutions and attacking climate science itself,” Cook 
said in an email. “Misinformation targeting solutions is designed to 
delay climate action, while misinformation attacking climate science 
erodes public trust in climate science and scientists.”

John Kotcher, a research associate professor at George Mason 
University’s Center for Climate Change Communication who surveys 
Americans’ beliefs and opinions about climate change, said he has seen 
similar trends. His polling asks Americans what kind of questions they’d 
ask a global warming expert.

 From 2011 to 2023, respondents have grown less interested in questions 
like whether global warming is a hoax, whether global warming is 
happening, how experts know it’s happening and whether it will hurt 
people, polling shows.

“This is all consistent with the notion that oppositional messaging has 
shifted focus strategically — from questioning whether climate change is 
actually happening to focusing on how serious is it as a problem, how 
bad is it actually and how effective are proposed solutions to it,” 
Kotcher said.

Kotcher said his research suggests that those interested in action on 
climate change agree with a set of key facts — that climate change is 
real, that humans are the primary cause, that scientists agree about 
those two ideas, that it has negative impacts today, that others care 
about it and that solutions exist today.

“Calling a truce on one of those key battlefields — just the existence 
of climate change — it does move the needle slightly farther in what I 
would argue is the right direction, getting people to have a more 
fact-based understanding of the issue,” Kotcher said.

The report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate takes aim at 
YouTube’s policies on climate misinformation, saying it is failing to 
prevent monetization of denial narratives; the report includes 
screenshots of advertisements on videos it categorizes as “old denial,” 
which outright denies climate change is happening.

The nonprofit group argues YouTube and Google should broaden the kind of 
content that can’t be monetized to include content it categorizes as 
“new denial,” which rejects scientific consensus about the “causes, 
impacts and solutions” to climate change.

YouTube has enforcement teams that review questionable content, 
including content about climate change. YouTube reviewed the Center for 
Countering Digital Hate’s report and agreed that some of the videos it 
cited did violate its climate change policies. However, it said most of 
the videos complied with its policy.

“Our climate change policy prohibits ads from running on content that 
contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence 
and causes of climate change,” Nate Funkhouser, a YouTube spokesperson, 
said in an email. “Debate or discussions of climate change topics, 
including around public policy or research, is allowed. However, when 
content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads 
on those videos. We also display information panels under relevant 
videos to provide additional information on climate change and context 
from third parties.”

Evan Bush
Evan Bush is a science reporter for NBC News. He can be reached at 
Evan.Bush at nbcuni.com.

*https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/youtube-climate-denialism-takes-turn-rcna133651*



/[The news archive - 2008 ]/
/*January 17, 2008 */
January 17, 2008: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama 
discusses his vision on energy and climate change in an interview with 
the San Francisco Chronicle. Days before the 2008 presidential 
election--and for several years afterwards--right-wing websites take 
segments of the interview out of context to make it appear as though 
Obama advocated higher energy bills.
http://blog.sfgate.com/chroncast/2008/01/21/last-weeks-interview-with-obama/



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