New Delhi: Trawling YouTube for some lessons on climate change? User discretion is advised.
YouTube searches for climate change-related content are likelier to throw up videos about warming denial than about the climate crisis staring at the world, a study has found.
The study was conducted by a senior researcher at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and published last month in the journal Frontiers of Communication.
The study involved a search for videos on climate change using 10 keywords, including climate change, climate manipulation, and geoengineering. Two keywords commonly used by opponents of mainstream science — chemtrails and climate hacking — were included as well.
Of the 200 videos subsequently analysed — 20 for each keyword — 107 challenged the consensus about climate change, with 91 found to peddle outright conspiracy theories.
Only 93, or around 46.5 per cent, presented the mainstream scientific consensus.
“Searching YouTube for climate-science and climate-engineering-related terms finds fewer than half of the videos representing mainstream scientific views,” said study author Joachim Allgaier in a press release.
“It’s alarming to find that the majority of videos propagate conspiracy theories about climate science and technology,” he added.
Another alarming finding of the study is that both sets of videos received almost the same number of views, 17 million, with those supporting the consensus managing just a slim lead of about 2,000.
ThePrint reached Google, which owns YouTube, for comment on the study. This report will be updated when they respond.
What is climate denial?
It’s something you’ll often hear in US President Donald Trump’s speeches.
In January, as parts of the US reeled under record low temperatures, he quipped that “we need global warming”.
In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2019
It’s a trope frequently employed by climate change deniers, who cite winter weather events — and thus confuse weather, which is short term, with climate — to question the claim that the world’s average temperature is rising.
A large part of the global population does not believe what climate scientists have been telling us for decades, that our climate is changing at an unprecedented rate, and that humans are responsible for it.
Until recently, sceptics challenged the notion of warming altogether. But with its effects getting clearer by the year, the focus has shifted to questioning the cause. Some, for example, argue that warming is a natural variation that Earth has witnessed before.
Others acknowledge that “the planet is warming”, but say “CO2 has nothing to do with it, it is the sun”, while some question the credibility of scientists who talk about the ongoing climate crisis.
Another group offers seemingly scientific arguments that employ logical fallacies and misrepresent data. For instance, deniers cherry-pick studies suggesting the Arctic is gaining sea-ice in the winter, while completely ignoring the bigger picture that the Arctic sea ice is on a fast decline and the loss of ice in Greenland is accelerating.
“The most effective climate (change) deniers begin with a nugget of truth, then extend the concept to a carefully-crafted but erroneous conclusion, explaining their statements with lots of fancy scientific jargon,” said Jennifer Francis, senior scientist and an active science communicator from Woods Hole Research Center, Massachusetts, US, in an email to ThePrint.
“Many readers will be impressed and fooled by the plausible-sounding argument, but never are there bonafide, peer-reviewed, up-to-date, scientific journal articles cited to support their contentions,” she added.
Other deniers propound unfounded conspiracy theories like “chemtrails”, an alleged government bid to pollute the environment and change the weather through aircraft exhausts.
Also read: Trump isn’t just in ‘climate denial’, he’s mimicking criminal behaviour
Some who claim to believe in warming propose solutions that can save humanity without cutting emissions, through ‘climate hacking’, which includes such controversial suggestions as solar radiation management (SRM).
SRM aims at reflecting some of the sunlight back into space to keep the Earth cool. While preliminary experiments show that this might help offset future warming to some extent, there could be dangerous side effects. And it is certainly not a substitute to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
‘A toxic mix’
YouTube isn’t the only online platform where climate denial is rampant. There are numerous blogs, Facebook groups, Twitter accounts, and thinktank websites spreading misinformation about climate change, its impact, and solutions.
“We know that polluting interests and state actors like Russia (one of the countries likely to profit from climate change) are involved in creating troll farms and bots whose sole purpose is to promote climate change disinformation and denial and foment online discord and conflict,” said Michael E. Mann, director, Earth System Science Center at the Pennsylvania State University, US, in an email to ThePrint.
“How much of the climate denial noise we see is due to that, and how much is due to misguided individuals taken in by this misinformation is hard to say,” he added. “But the simple answer: It’s a toxic mix of both.”
Climate deniers project warming as a matter of debate despite the fact that scientists have unequivocally established through long-term data records and analysis that the Earth is indeed warming at an unprecedented rate because of human activity.
A survey of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers found a 97 per cent consensus that humans are causing climate change by emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere primarily through the burning of fossil fuels.
Finding followers
Even so, the concerted effort at spreading misinformation has been somewhat successful.
A global survey (including 23 countries) released earlier this year, conducted by the London-based market research firm YouGov and the University of Cambridge, found that a surprisingly high proportion of people are doubtful of human-induced climate change.
Among the frontrunners were Indonesia (18 per cent), Saudi Arabia (16 per cent), and the United States (13 per cent).
In the book The Madhouse Effect, Mann and co-author Tom Toles discuss how climate deniers use twisted logic to make their arguments appear “scientific”, and how that is changing public perception, stalling climate action.
“Climate change is the greatest threat we face as a civilisation. The deliberate effort by bad actors to confuse the public and policy makers represents perhaps the greatest modern crime against humanity… and the planet,” said Mann.
“[We must] publicly mock and shame climate change deniers… We need to make it socially unacceptable for people to lie to the public about this matter,” he added.
Francis said the scientific community was already learning ways to hit back at deniers.
“In my experience, the attacks of deniers have mostly backfired when it comes to their intended impacts on climate scientists,” she added, “In response to these affronts, we have become more outspoken, we have actively sought training in becoming more effective science communicators, and we have organised to push back against their outlandish claims with science-based information.”
The author is a freelancer and has a keen interest in the science of climate change and the environment.
Also read: India must go beyond seeing climate change as a rich vs poor diplomacy battle
This report has been updated with additional quotes