There is hope: Thirty years of namecalling, propaganda, and censorship still isn’t enough
Despite being raised on nonstop media propaganda and being drip-fed the climate bible in school, one-third of teenagers have somehow figured it out anyhow. Even the systematic censorship on YouTube and Google, where skeptics are downranked, delegitimized, and demonetized, hasn’t stopped the truth from getting through to some of the most impressionable and vulnerable minds.
Because this blasphemy is shocking to Guardian staff, that students might think for themselves they can only report it with a ready-made excuse loaded into the subheader. It’s YouTube’s fault.
Helena Horton, The Guardian, writes:
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
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.
So it’s not that climate models have been pathetically wrong for their whole lives, and many of their parents and grandparents don’t believe the climate religion either — this is caused by evil YouTubers who have been running sophisticated communication campaigns or something like that. It’s a new kind of denial they say (presumably getting ready to ask for even more YouTube and social media censorship).
Instead of studying the climate, Guardian journalists and academics study opinion polls and trends in fashionable words, which is why they have no idea what is going on.
Their own weapons-grade name-calling campaign has fooled themselves. Who are these mythical denier creatures who don’t think we have a climate?
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”.
“Researchers” from the CCDH imply there is some devious importance or meaning in the “shift” in YouTube topics, as if some guys in a smokey room are dishing out the orders. But around 2018, there were a spate of super cold winters, and lately, there has been a spate of economic “storms” for wind and solar projects. The only reason the YouTube content has changed is because the most spectacular failures have changed.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) was founded by a policy advisor to the UK Labor Party, and has staffers on the board. They’re so tight with the Labor Party, one board member had to resign to become chief of staff to the current Labor leader Kier Starmer. (See InfluenceWatch for details). That’s how “non-political” the CCDH is — practically a subdivision of the British Labor Party.
This activist team gets about $1.5 million dollars to save the world but mostly uses it to silence people who point out how stupid climate change policies are. The CCDH provided the statistical cover so the old Twitter could pretend they had a reason to exile Katie Hopkins, and Google could pretend they have an excuse to demonitize ZeroHedge.
If only they had evidence, they could just tell the kids about science instead, eh?
And if they asked students if climate change was more religion than science, and mostly done for money, the answer would probably be a lot higher than 31%.
This article originally appeared at JoNova