The left wing Guardian has published an article on a study that found something I pointed out two years ago, that YouTube is full of videos skeptical of climate alarmism. There are at least a thousand skeptical videos. I have begun collecting them at my Climate Change Debate Education website ( http://ccdedu.blogspot.com) and have about 300 listed at this point.
The Guardian title is accurate: ” Most YouTube climate change videos ‘oppose the consensus view'”.
Mind you “Consensus view” should be capitalized because it is the name of a specific political position, disguised as a statistical description. When it comes to climate change there is no scientific consensus on the role that humans might or might not be playing.
The subtitle however is threatening: ” Scientist behind study urges platform to tweak algorithms to ‘prioritise factual information.’”
This is clearly a call for algorithmic censorship of skeptics. We are already seeing this bias on Google searches, which I have also documented.
Of course the Guardian thinks that climate alarmism is “factual information.” They just instructed their writers to use the terms “climate emergency” and “climate crisis”, neither of which exist. The article leads with a picture of Bill Nye setting the globe on fire, which is simply ridiculous.
Here is how the Guardian puts it:
“The majority of YouTube videos about the climate crisis oppose the scientific consensus and “hijack” technical terms to make them appear credible, a new study has found. Researchers have warned that users searching the video site to learn about climate science may be exposed to content that goes against mainstream scientific belief.”
The study in question uses the UN IPCC as the standard of scientific truth, which is absurd. What the IPCC claims is questionable and the focus of the scientific debate. There is no “mainstream scientific belief” at this time. There is just scientific debate.
At this point my collections include numerous videos from William Happer, Patrick Michaels, Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry and CFACT’s Marc Morano. These are legitimate skeptics, not “hijackers.” Videos range in length from one minute to over an hour so there are hundreds of hours of detailed scientific content.
The study in question is either really bad or deliberately bad, it is hard to say which. They even found a spurious correlation between skeptics of climate alarmism and the bogus chemtrails conspiracy theory. No such correlation exists.
The 300 or so scientific videos on my http://ccdedu.blogspot.com website never mention chemtrails because that is not what the climate change debate is about.
However “chemtrails” was one of the study’s top search terms. So it looks like they jiggered the study by looking at the false issue of chemtrails changing climate, which is trivial compared to the overall climate change debate.
Having studied the YouTube for skeptical content I cannot figure out how these folks got these goofy results, unless they designed them. YouTube is full of well argued skeptical science. The problem seems to be that the alarmists simply do not understand the debate.