by The voices that deny climate change have decided on a new refrain.
Instead of denying the fact that the Earth is warming, they are now targeting skeptics of climate solutions, as well as scientists and activists and the whole idea that climate change will cause harm, according to a new report from the Center for Combating Digital. Hate, a non-profit organization that researches digital hate speech and misinformation.
The organization’s analysis suggests that the total dismissal of climate change is no longer such a convincing argument, so climate skeptics are shifting the ideological battle to how seriously humanity needs to take climate change. or what to do about it. The report also claims that the content policies of YouTube’s parent company, Google – designed to block advertising money from content that rejects the scientific consensus about the existence and causes of climate change – are ineffective and should be updated.
“A new beginning has opened in this battle,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the organization, at a news conference. “They’ve gone from saying climate change isn’t happening to now: ‘Hey, climate change is happening, but there’s no hope. There are no solutions.”
Scientists who study the Earth’s systems have agreed for many years that human burning of fossil fuels creates an imbalance in heat-trapped gases in the atmosphere that is warming the earth. The Earth has warmed by about 1.2 degrees Celsius, on average, since pre-industrial times, when fossil fuels began to drive economies.
That warming is melting the ice shelves, raising sea levels and intensifying the water cycle. In recent years, scientists have been able to link individual events, such as deadly heat waves in 2021 in the Pacific Northwest, to human-caused climate change.
Public opinion in the United States on climate change has changed in recent years, but remains highly politicized, according to the Pew Research Center. The nonprofit Institute for Environmental and Energy Studies said in a February report that “Americans are increasingly convinced that global warming is happening, man-made, and a serious problem. Americans are also more aware that climate impacts are here and now they want to see more government action.”
The Center for Combating Digital Hate is a non-profit organization whose mission is to “protect human rights and civil liberties” by holding social media companies accountable. Ahmed said the organization is “closely integrated with the climate movement.”
For analysis, the organization used an artificial intelligence model to identify the arguments used in more than 12,000 YouTube videos from 96 channels it said showed 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 to September 2023.
The “deep learning model” processed YouTube transcripts and tried to identify whether specific themes of climate denial were present, the report says. Independent raters checked some of the text transcripts and graded the accuracy of the model. The independent evaluators said they got claims denied correctly about 78% of the time.
“We’re very confident that this analysis, at scale, gives us … very strong data that shows the trends,” Ahmed said.
Over five years of videos, the researchers said, arguments suggesting that climate solutions won’t work or that climate advocates are unreliable in science or action have grown by 21.4 and 12 percentage points, respectively . The idea that global warming is not happening at all fell by 34.3 percentage points.
Outside researchers said the analysis reflects trends they’ve seen in recent years.
John Cook, a senior research fellow at the Melbourne Center for Behavioral Change at the University of Melbourne in Australia, developed the artificial intelligence model used by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Cook’s research focused on trends in anti-climate blogs and conservative websites from 1998 to 2020.
The research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, found a similar trend.
“It is 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, and misinformation that attacks climate science erodes public trust in climate science and scientists.”
John Kotcher, an associate research professor at George Mason University’s Climate Change Communication Center who surveys Americans’ beliefs and opinions about climate change, said he has seen similar trends. His poll asks Americans what kind of questions they would ask an expert on global warming.
From 2011 to 2023, respondents are less interested in questions such as whether global warming is a hoax, whether global warming is happening, how experts know it is happening and whether it will harm people, poll shows.
“This is all consistent with the notion that opposition messaging has shifted focus strategically – from questioning whether climate change is really happening to focusing on how serious a problem it is, how bad it really is and how effective the proposed solutions are,” said Kotcher.
Kotcher said his research suggests that those interested in action on climate change agree on a set of key facts – that climate change is real, that humans are the main cause, that scientists agree on both of those ideas , that it has negative impacts today, that others care about it and that there are solutions today.
“When one of those key battlegrounds is called a truce — it’s just climate change — it moves the needle a little bit further in the right direction, which has convinced people that the direction is right, which makes people understand to be more grounded in the issue,” Kotcher said.
The report from the Center for Anti-Digital Hate takes aim at YouTube’s policies on climate misinformation, saying it is failing to prevent monetization of debunked stories; The report includes screenshots of video ads it classifies as “old denial,” which flatly deny that climate change is happening.
The nonprofit group argues that YouTube and Google should expand the type of content that cannot be monetized to include content it categorizes as “new denialism,” which rejects scientific consensus about the “causes, impacts and solutions” of 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 violated its climate change policies. However, he said most of the videos complied with his policy.
“Our climate change policy prohibits ads from running on content that contradicts the established scientific consensus on climate change and the causes of climate change,” YouTube spokesman Nate Funkhouser said in an email. “Debate or discussion on climate change matters is permitted, including in relation to public policy or research. However, when content crosses the line into climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos. We also display information panels under relevant videos to provide additional climate change information and context from third parties.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
