Warning: This article contains quotes from Friederike Otto, Michael Mann, John Cook and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s Jennie King.

With the amount of free speech one sees on the internet nowadays, who can doubt that The Truth is in dire need of protection? I speak, of course, of the threat from climate change denial, that most pernicious of weeds, currently choking the garden of online verity with its weedy lies. And its thriving, don’t you know? If anything it’s worse than when Exxon first planted it, way back in the days when climate scientists were forced into slave labour for Big Oil and made to lie about the true evils of carbon dioxide. Something obviously needs to be done to restore the internet’s borders and lawns so that they can once again provide a safe playground for our children. Legislation could do the trick perhaps, but, in the meantime, who is out there who could possibly come to our rescue with the hoe of justice and the trowel of truth?

As I have acknowledged before now, John Cook of FLICC fame is a man of some stature. Furthermore, Professor Friederike Otto’s ground-breaking work, demonstrating how hotter weather is impossible without extra heat, has previously attracted my attention. And as for Michael Mann, what he doesn’t know about statistics is quite frankly not worth fiddling with. But put them all together and you have something far greater than the sum of its parts. What you have is an assembly of avengers. In fact, all that would be missing from the perfect superhero line-up would be a guest appearance from a spokesperson for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. If only Jennie King were here, she’d know what to do.

Thankfully, the dream team is not just the stuff of dreams, it is the stuff of stuff – the sort of stuff that journalists have already been writing. Take, for example, the stuff that Stuart Braun wrote for DW recently. It starts by asking the question we all want answering: Why is climate denial still thriving online?

The Fantastic Four are already standing in the wings, eager to make their heroic entrance, but first Stuart needs to fully justify their invocation:

An extreme global heatwave has been blamed on climate change, yet online misinformation has evolved to counter the facts — despite platforms like TikTok banning climate denial.

By ‘online misinformation’, I presume he is referring to the correction that El Niño is also playing a dominant role. But let us not get distracted from the crusade. Stuart continues:

Record global temperatures on July 3 kicked off the hottest week ever recorded as intense heatwaves gripped the planet. Climate scientist Friederike Otto of London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment called the heat “a death sentence for people and ecosystems.”

An early opening blow from Otto there. Die you miserable deniers! But who’s that lurking in the next paragraph? Why, it’s one of those dastardly misinformers:

Yet the next day, a political journalist in the UK, Isabel Oakeshott, tweeted that “climate change headbangers panicking about a few hot days last month can calm down … It’s 13 degrees and pouring.” She added that she was “about to light the woodburner.” Within a day, over 2.2 million people had seen the tweet.

An incredulous Braun asks:

Amid the worst heatwaves ever recorded in the US, China, Mexico, Siberia and beyond, and near-unanimous scientific consensus that humans have induced global heating — in large part by burning fossil fuels — how does such denial continue to flourish?

I dunno, Stuart. But XR Cambridge seemed to have Oakeshott’s number when they sarcastically tweeted:

Pakistan, you can stop complaining about the unprecedented floods now because actually it’s 13C in the Cotswolds in @IsabelOakeshott’s garden so 1/3 of the country underwater and loads of deaths and livelihoods destroyed probably didn’t happen.

Except it is well established that a third of Pakistan ending up underwater didn’t happen. But let us not get distracted from the crusade. Stuart has more climate denial weediness to uproot:

“So how are they going to charge their EVs when there is no electricity?” another wrote, implying that renewable energy is not a reliable power source — despite wind and solar being the cheapest and fastest-growing forms of energy.

Implying? Cheapest? Has the Oxford English Dictionary been updated recently without me being informed? Anyway, let’s not get distracted from the crusade. John Cook is about to fly in through a window:

These are old rhetorical tricks that today are targeted less at climate science than solutions, says John Cook, a climatologist and senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, and author of the Skeptical Science blog that has long debunked climate misinformation. The idea that “solutions will be harmful” or “solutions won’t work” is a repackaging of old attacks on the cost of climate action from the 1990s, he added.

KERPOW!!! THWOK!!! ARRGH!!!

Then, after a nice sunset photo of one of those aesthetically pleasing windfarms we all want in our backyard (suitably packaged with the caption “Solar and wind power is now cheaper than fossil alternatives”), we have a surprise contribution from the Center for Countering Digital Hate:

“The goal posts have moved,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the global Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Climate denial now employs deflection and “sows doubt” to ultimately delay the energy transition. The logic runs that “doing something is worse than doing nothing,” Hood explained, referring also to the notion of “climate inactivism” coined by climate researcher and author Michael Mann.

Curse you Michael, with your coined notions! I have no power to withstand such magic. And as for my digital hate, that can surely be no match for Jennie King’s strategic dialogue:

“There are clear vulnerabilities in the way social media platforms are designed and governed at present which allows such content to rise to the surface,” said Jennie King, head of climate research & policy at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a global think tank researching extremism and disinformation.

There follows a lot of stuff about ‘algorithmic bias’, ‘echo chambers’, ‘superpolluter publishers’, the Russian state, the ‘toxic ten’, and broken promises from Google and Facebook, before Stuart once again calls upon Jennie’s superpowers with:

“Misinformation thrives in moments of crisis,” said Jennie King of intersecting health, cost of living, energy and inflation crises in recent years…”The weaponization of ‘genuine trauma’ was evident in the first waves of the [Covid-19] pandemic when the term ‘climate lockdown’ emerged across social media, promotors claiming the lockdown was a dress rehearsal for a coming wave of ‘green tyranny’,” King explained.

I have to admit that I hadn’t quite realised it was we climate deniers that were weaponizing ‘genuine trauma’ during the pandemic. There was me thinking it was the government. But let us not get distracted from the crusade. We still need to know how we can fight online climate change denial. Jennie King returns to the fray:

Like Facebook, TikTok promised to ban climate denial content in April. But Jennie King says such attempts at content moderation are “crude” and “unenforceable,” adding that “it is not criminal to deny climate change.” The ultimate solution would be to “demonetize” climate denial, she believes, something big tech companies have so far largely failed to do.

Well, we have yet to see what is enforceable. Roll on the Online Safety Bill. Meanwhile, John Cook has his own final solution to offer:

John Cook, meanwhile, has long advocated for “pre-emptive inoculating messages” that neutralize what he calls “climate disbeliefs” by explaining “the flawed argumentation technique used in the misinformation,” and that reinforce the scientific consensus on climate change.

Well, all I can say is this. If this article by Stuart Braun is supposed to be a good example of Cook’s ‘inoculating messages’, then one shouldn’t find it in the least bit surprising that climate change denial is on the rise. Talk about the vaccination helping to spread the disease!

So, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go now to sow more doubt and digitize my hate. This climate change isn’t going to deny itself, don’t you know?

47 Comments

  1. First they came for the climate science deniers, then they came for the cost of climate action deniers, then they came for the safety and effectiveness of climate action deniers, then they came for the delayers.

    Liked by 3 people

  2. Jaime,

    Let’s face it. There are people out there with plans and they just don’t like others getting in their way.

    Liked by 2 people

  3. It’s one thing for them to claim wrongly that pointing out the problems with net zero is misinformation (their claim to that effect itself being misinformation), but isn’t it odd that undeniable misinformation (such as 1/3 of Pakistan being under water) always gets a free pass and is even repeated approvingly?

    Liked by 2 people

  4. I wouldn’t mention ‘plans’ if I were you John. Their AI sweepers have probably already picked up on this and you will now be identified as an active member of the hard right global online conspiracy movement.

    Liked by 2 people

  5. Mark, the greater misinformation is that the Pakistan floods themselves can be attributed to climate change. Otto, who tells us that the recent unverified ‘hottest days ever’ are a “death sentence for people and ecosystems” failed to identify a positive link to climate change:

    “Many of the available state-of-the-art climate models struggle to simulate these rainfall characteristics. Those that pass our evaluation test generally show a much smaller change in likelihood and intensity of extreme rainfall than the trend we found in the observations. This discrepancy suggests that long-term variability, or processes that our evaluation may not capture, can play an important role, rendering it infeasible to quantify the overall role of human-induced climate change.”

    https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/climate-change-likely-increased-extreme-monsoon-rainfall-flooding-highly-vulnerable-communities-in-pakistan/

    Not that this prevented the intrepid Otto from assigning a ‘likely’ role anyway! Even so, this makes Stuart Braun guilty of misinformation by omission in my humble opinion. I can see we’re all going to have such fun challenging Ofcom’s rulings on ‘climate denial’ once the Online Safety Act becomes law.

    Like

  6. Then there’s categorising as misinformation the claim that doing something is worse than doing nothing. I think we sceptics make a very powerful argument that near unilateral action by the UK, while most of the world does nothing, is worse than doing nothing, certainly for the people of the UK, whose interests UK politicians are supposed to look after.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. In a governing idiocracy, powerful arguments fall outside the ‘safe, effective and necessary’ epistemological framework and are thus to be deemed misinformation. Sorted.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. Such jocularity in the face of serious and enforceable proposals likely to restrict the ability of critics of climate alarmism to speak out. The risks of a total ban on free speech seem ever increasing.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Mark,

    It is interesting that the same DW that saw fit to quote XR Cambridge as the font of all reliable information regarding the Pakistan floods also wrote this article:

    “Pakistan floods aggravated by deforestation and other ecological mistakes.”

    https://www.dw.com/en/pakistan-floods-aggravated-by-deforestation-and-other-ecological-mistakes/a-5966095

    So it seems they can be adult about flood attribution when they try.

    Jaime,

    When I wrote ‘On Judgment, Speculation and Causation’, it was because I had come to understand that the problem of extreme weather event attribution was a lot more complicated than looking at long-term trends in rainfall. The real problem for the Indian subcontinent lies in intra-seasonal variability, and the models as they stand are nowhere near good enough to model that, at least not when looking at 60-day events. However, that didn’t stop Otto and her team making bold attribution statements with regard to 5 day events, because the only science she needed for that was the Clausius-Clapeyron effect. Even so, to do so she is resorting to a statistical handling of model ensembles that many will tell you has no validity.

    Alan,

    Guilty as charged, but it is one of those situations in which one has to laugh or cry. If you really want to see the tracks of my tears, just read my previous effort: Where is The Harm?

    Like

  11. “Record global temperatures on July 3 kicked off the hottest week ever recorded as intense heatwaves gripped the planet. Climate scientist Friederike Otto of London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment called the heat “a death sentence for people and ecosystems.”

    Let’s kill that claim stone dead.

    On 8th July, the source for that claim belatedly issued a “Special Notice”

    From it, we learn:

    “The purpose of the interactive chart and maps on this page is to view daily snapshots of temperature as ESTIMATED from the Climate FORECAST System. The increase in mean global temperature since the start of July, ESTIMATED from the Climate Forecast System, should not be taken as an “official” observational record.” (My capitalised words)

    https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/

    There was no “reading” it was simply an estimate. ESTIMATES, particularly based upon FORECASTS are not observational records. Especially when real readings have been changed by computer modelling.

    Even more ironic, the 7th July was the 110th anniversary of the world’s officially recognised Highest Temperature.

    https://wmo.asu.edu/content/world-highest-temperature

    So it can be argued that since then, the world has cooled.

    Liked by 1 person

  12. Yet we repeatedly return to criticisms we find appropriate to our cause, like the repeated false mentions by climate worriers that fully a third of Pakistan was flooded. This to me is immaterial. No-one denies that a significant percentage of the land area was flooded or that millions of people were adversely affected. Even more would’ve been affected by especially heavy rains, without causing flooding but causing great hardship. That’s all that really matters. More than 10% of the land area of Pakistan was flooded in a highly mountainous county; I would not be at all surprised to learn that this constitutes more than a third of all the habitable land in the country.

    What I would have wished to learn was whether this year’s inundation, which probably was exceptional, was unprecedented, whether anyone had predicted it on that basis of climate change, and exactly what was the cause of such heavy and widespread rainfall. To date I’ve failed to see this information presented anywhere but then I’ve not been looking that hard.

    Like

  13. To give the people of alarm their due, they are genuinely and sincerely alarmed, in a way that we are not. They genuinely believe that we are facing the end of days, and as such, they belong to a quasi-religious cult. For them, staving off the Apocalypse is the overriding objective, and nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of that. Coherent arguments, such as the futility of the UK taking unilateral action while the rest of the world carries on regardless, just don’t cut it with them. They really do believe that such rationalism is dangerous.

    They are wrong, of course, and their attempts to censor the non-believers must be resisted for the dangerous authoritarianism they represent. It’s strange that they think they stand for science against deniers, whereas we believe we stand for the power of reason against a dark cult.

    Like

  14. John I was not really critiquing your efforts here, merely reminding everyone that your topic is in reality a very serious one. In fact I enjoyed reading it very much, almost immediately identifying its dark humour and so able to play along as I read further.

    Like

  15. Mark
    Bravo for almost perfectly summing up my own views upon the current state of affairs climatique, our critics and the potential threat they pose to our abilities to speak out or write upon our own fears.

    Like

  16. Alan,

    I agree with your statement regarding the greater concerns. Nevertheless, the people of alarm have made misinformation a big issue, so it is only natural that the rest of us should fixate on their own misdemeanors. As for answering your questions regarding this year’s inundation, I did quite a bit of research into it before writing my last article on the subject. What I learnt was that the science is far from straightforward and a lot depends upon how one defines the event, which tends to be the case when dealing with weather event predictions and attributions.

    A Closer Look at Pakistan’s Floods

    Like

  19. John
    What you find “funny” is rather odd and, to me, rather worrying/sad. I checked off points that I disagreed with, but soon lost count.

    Like

  20. Alan,

    I guess it must be because it is a comedy of errors. Or perhaps a case of schadenfreude, where I fail to realise the schadenfreude is also on me.

    Like

  21. Here’s an interesting observation that may be a sign of the times. If you Google the title of this article you will not find it. The DW article from which it takes its title comes up first followed by its many clonings. But not this one. Look for it in vain. Am I reading too much into this? Maybe so.

    Liked by 1 person

  22. This is now a trifle out of date, but… (the original seems to have vanished – funny that – this is however an archived copy, see page 12)

    Click to access wethepeoples-7million.pdf

    And things haven’t changed much since:
    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/19/concern-about-climate-change-shrinks-globally-as-threat-grows-survey-shows
    https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/concern-about-climate-change-shrinks-globally-threat-grows-study-2022-10-19/

    Seems they’ve lied too many times, the CV19 catastrophe hasn’t helped at all.

    Like

  23. Catweazle666,

    CV19 did help, however, in cementing the idea of dangerous information on the internet, thereby encouraging lobbying for extensions to the Online Safety Bill. For those looking for an excuse to clip the wings of the high tech companies, CV19 was a godsend.

    Liked by 1 person

  24. John:

    Alan,

    Guilty as charged, but it is one of those situations in which one has to laugh or cry. If you really want to see the tracks of my tears, just read my previous effort: Where is The Harm?

    Well, I enjoyed and appreciated both posts. (No comment is good news, they say.)

    Well, we have yet to see what is enforceable. Roll on the Online Safety Bill.

    Well, exactly. The warning signs are there but the courts will decide. The outcome is very hard to predict. Now is the time for biting satire. And it balances paralysing gloom.

    Now quoting Callum Hood:

    Climate denial now employs deflection…

    Pot marries Kettle. But, as I say, the offspring is still unclear. Thanks for the effort and the wit.

    Liked by 1 person

  25. Did anyone notice the best example of misinformation that was offered up by the DW article?

    “..John Cook, a climatologist…”

    He is actually a behavioural scientist who has adopted a particular view on climate change and blogs about it. That makes him as much a climatologist as I am. Admittedly, he has also made a living by finding ways to brainwash the susceptible into his way of thinking. But climate science research? I don’t think so.

    Liked by 2 people

  26. In denying the Biden regime the application to stay the injunction he earlier made forbidding them to continue to collude with Big Tech to censor online users and posts, on the basis that such activity very likely breached the First Amendment, the judge noted:

    “CISA Director Jen Easterly views the word “infrastructure” expressively (sic) to include our “cognitive infrastructure,” which deals with the way people acquire knowledge and understanding.”

    The CISA, a federal agency heavily involved in online censorship, describe themselves thus:

    “CISA works with partners to defend against today’s threats and collaborate to build a more secure and resilient infrastructure for the future.

    We lead the national effort to understand, manage, and reduce risk to our cyber and physical infrastructure.”

    So their definition of cyber infrastructure includes the body of communications, knowledge and learning to be found on the web, especially social media and blogging platforms. They literally define what enters our heads via the web as “infrastructure” which must be protected for national security purposes. Very, very creepy. I am sure the same thing applies in the UK, except here we don’t have a First Amendment or even a written Constitution to protect us from government overreach.

    Liked by 2 people

  27. Jaime,

    In IPCC parlance, building the right infrastructure is all about establishing the right choice architecture. People seem to like these civil engineering metaphors when describing methods of manipulation.

    Liked by 2 people

  28. I don’t want to unduly worry anybody, and it’s probably just an awful coincidence, but remember Andrew Tate’s twitter spat with Thunberg, for which he was condemned by the media as a climate denier?

    A few days later he was arrested by the Romanian authorities for ‘people trafficking’ and spent 92 days in jail
    without charge. The case is still hanging over him. Here is his interview with Tucker Carlson, which I can only describe as very, very deeply troubling. The thing is, he has joint American/British citizenship. The American embassy weren’t much interested in his plight but they did at least visit him. The British embassy completely ignored him. To be sure, Tate held many other contentious views which might have marked him out for being targeted by the US or British governments, but they decided to pounce just a few days after he upset Saint Greta.

    Liked by 2 people

  29. Thanks for the pointer to the latest from Tucker Carlson on Twitter Jaime – which is clearly easily the longest so far, since the man was sacked by Murdoch’s Fox News. I was up to date till yesterday! On your ‘Saint Greta’ point I’d go carefully though. Just as I don’t believe that CO2 is the all-important and only control knob for climate I don’t think climate scepticism is the control knob or trigger for all attempted thought control – though thought control is indeed being attempted.

    I’ll watch the whole video before saying more!

    Like

  30. I’m watching it slowly Richard. As I say, the Greta thing might be just a dreadful coincidence. At 40 mins onward, Tate says that the UK Parliament considered him a national security threat because of his very influential views on empowering young boys to become responsible, resilient men. Wow. He’s obviously a threat to the “cognitive infrastructure”.

    Liked by 1 person

  31. Jaime (at 6.25pm) – is this what you were referring to?

    “Joe Biden’s Ministry of Truth
    His administration’s censorship regime could be the greatest threat to free speech in American history.”

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/12/joe-bidens-ministry-of-truth/

    Under President Joe Biden, the US government has undertaken ‘the most massive attack against free speech in United States history’. That was the extraordinary conclusion reached by a federal judge last week. The case of Missouri v Biden has exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and other federal agencies have gone to bully social-media platforms into removing political views they dislike.

    On America’s Independence Day, the Fourth of July, US district judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction, stipulating that the federal government must cease from communicating with social-media companies for the purpose of ‘urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing’ them to remove or suppress ‘content containing protected free speech’. Essentially, government agencies are now prevented from getting the likes of Facebook, Twitter and other tech giants to censor content on their behalf.

    Judge Doughty didn’t mince his words. He said the evidence presented in Missouri v Biden depicted an ‘almost dystopian scenario’. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the US government ‘seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”’, he wrote. As the ruling notes, the US government worked with the Silicon Valley titans to suppress reports of the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin, and to gag those who questioned the efficacy of masks, lockdowns and Covid vaccines.

    What’s more, this assault on free expression extended far beyond Covid. Doughty’s 155-page ruling describes how the government squashed social-media coverage of many other inconvenient issues. …

    The ruling can be found here:

    Click to access missouri-v-biden-ruling.pdf

    Liked by 2 people

  34. Tate says he has only been accused of stealing money by emotionally coercing young women to do pornographic TikTok videos. He states categorically that he faces no charges of sexual assault or rape. The media insists different, saying he faces charges of rape, human trafficking, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women:

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/andrew-tate-indicted-romania-trial-rape-human-trafficking-charges-rcna90121

    Liked by 2 people

  35. Yes John, but the vastly over-the-top reaction to CV19, the ridiculous models of Pantsdown Ferguson, the catastrophic lockdowns now recognised to be responsible for a big increase in juvenile suicide and mental problems, bankruptcy of businesses, the rapidly emerging reports of the damage from a not-vaccine that had none of its claimed benefits and a plethora of highly unpleasant side-effects including death – all justified as necessary to obey “The Science” and combat a disease with a survival rate well in excess of 99% has irreparably damaged confidence in science-based authority for at least a generation.
    Trust in authority has never been lower, and an increase in Internet censorship hasn’t a cat in Hell’s chance of even slightly cancelling it.
    Public trust – like virginity – can only be lost once.
    Time will tell – is doing so now, on both sides of the Atlantic.

    Like

  38. John – followed your Guardian link above & noted the top rated comment –

    “skeptical15 16 hours ago rated 124

    I have two fundamental problems with the current environmental focus:

    1) Nuclear power was, is, and will be the solution to cheap abundant CO2 free energy at least for another couple of decades. Storage for renewable energy does not exist yet to meet the demand when the generation is low. Look what Germany has done to itself by abandoning nuclear in favour of….coal! This leads me to believe that ideology dominates to much over rationality and finding a real solution to the problem.

    2) Climate change politics slowly evolved into ‘we need to save humanity’ to ‘we need to save the planet’.
    The planet will be fine. CO2 levels over time have been much, much higher than any possible human induced level. The planet will be fine, life in the broader sense will be fine. What we want to do is limit human suffering in the present that climate change might cause. This is a technical problem that can be solved, and the solution is through technology, science and expanding the benefits of civilization to the world in a more equal manner. The movement has the flavour of an anti human, anti technology, anti civilizational cult.”

    Liked by 3 people

  40. Catweazle666,

    Sorry not to have replied earlier.

    I can see where you are coming from. It does seem to have the feel of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.

    Liked by 1 person

  41. “British Government Funds Campaign to Rewrite Climate Science Entries on Wikipedia”

    https://dailysceptic.org/2023/07/16/british-government-funds-campaign-to-rewrite-climate-science-entries-on-wikipedia/

    A major rewriting of the science published on Wikipedia that is sceptical of the ‘settled’ climate narrative is being funded by a number of Governments from Scandinavia and the U.K. The operation is being directed by the green activist group, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), under a project titled ‘Improving communication of climate knowledge through Wikipedia’.

    The operation targets climate change pages that have significant daily page views. The SEI notes that Wikipedia articles usually appear at the top of internet search results, and the site plays a “key role” in helping promote climate change knowledge. “The improvement of the key articles making use of available scientific expertise is necessary,” it says.

    The key word of course is “improvement” but, alas, a brief list of the “content experts” does not inspire confidence that rigorous dissemination of all climate science views will prevail. …

    Interesting in its own right, and drawing attention to it on this thread seems appropriate. However, it also has relevance to Robin’s articles, especially those latterly wondering if the Tories can be made to see sense ahead of their annihilation at the next general election:

    …What is truly depressing is that the Conservative Party is often to be found at the front of the queue when it comes to handing out taxpayer cash to fund climate and woke campaigns. Providing money to alter Wiki pages is just the latest misuse of taxpayers’ hard earned money. In February, the Daily Sceptic reported that the British Foreign Office was helping to fund the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which was circulating a ‘blocklist’ of conservative publications including the American Spectator and the New York Post.

    As we noted at the time, one of the reasons the GDI posed such a threat to free speech was that its definition of ‘disinformation’ is unusually capacious. It doesn’t just mean information that is false and dissemination by people knowing it’s false. It has broadened the definition to include what it calls “adversarial narratives”.

    Just weep for the death of science – “adversarial narratives” no longer required.

    Liked by 3 people

  42. “Adversarial narratives”. Oh dear, that counts me out then!

    I note that climate mitigation and climate adaptation articles are both awarded a ‘5.0’ priority – i.e. the top. Extreme weather is also very near the top – 4.7.

    I recently wrote an ‘adversarial narrative’ on how the Met Office seems to be deliberately conflating mitigation with adaptation. I’ve written dozens of adversarial articles on extreme weather – but alas, I don’t get the audience and search ratings which wiki enjoys.

    https://jaimejessop.substack.com/p/behavioural-insights-into-climate

    The thing is, if climate science (which the UN now own supposedly) is so ‘settled’ and climate science deniers are such a dying breed, why are SEI (with the help of grants from the UK government) getting their knickers in such a twist about these Wiki articles?

    Liked by 3 people

  43. I thought the egregious “Stoat” Connolly had pretty much purged Wikipedia of AGW hoax scepticism.
    Of course, when consulting Wikipedia, this always needs to be borne in mind:
    “Jimmy Wales
    Jimmy Wales is an internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Wikipedia and Wikia.
    He is a non-executive director of Guardian Media Group, owner of the Guardian and the Observer”
    https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jimmy-wales

    Like

  44. The Guardian (natch) is all for it:

    “The EU has just clamped down on big tech. Britain, take note
    Chris Stokel-Walker
    The Digital Services Act is finally bringing social media giants to heel after 20 years of laissez-faire. Yet Westminster still dithers”

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/25/digital-services-act-social-media-westminster

    …The Digital Services Act (DSA), Europe’s sweeping attempt to regulate big tech that was passed in October 2022, comes into force for more than a dozen of the biggest tech companies today. The new laws set clear rules on content moderation, user privacy and transparency that online platforms must now follow.

    Any digital platform with more than 45 million users in the European Union – or a 10th of the total population – will have to comply with the new rules, or face fines of up to 6% of their revenue. Nineteen companies, including Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok, will all have to conform to the DSA’s new standards. So financially punitive are the fines that repeat offenders, the EU says, could run the risk of no longer being able to operate in Europe.

    Today, these changes are barely perceptible, but as regulators, governments and academics start to explore the wealth of data they now have access to, the influence of the DSA will no doubt be felt in years to come. In a world where the leaders of tech companies often feel and act as if they are bigger than many countries’ elected leaders, the DSA is a triumph. And it is an example that we in the UK should be following….

    I’d rather wait and see how it pans out in practice, before declaring it a success that the UK must follow.

    Like

  46. Here’s the alternative view from the Guardian’s:

    “The EU’s censorship regime is about to go global
    The authoritarian Digital Services Act means the death of free speech online.”

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/23/the-eus-censorship-regime-is-about-to-go-global/

    …Not only does this give the EU immense powers for censorship, it also represents a profound technocratic evasion of democratic accountability. The unelected European Commission is forcing Big Tech to police the internet to rein in what the EU deems to be unacceptable speech or disinformation. In so doing, the Commission has empowered itself to impose its values on the rest of us. If this draconian censorship were being enforced by a national government, we would at least be able to vote it out. But this is an altogether different scenario.

    Under the new law, the undemocratic European Commission has empowered itself to regulate content on the internet without any hint of accountability to the millions of ordinary European citizens who use these services. By placing the onus on Big Tech to carry this out, the EU can censor at arm’s length, which lowers the risk of mass opposition from within Europe. It is cunning but cowardly. The EU’s technocratic, anti-democratic impulse to censor is being outsourced to Big Tech. And all the leading Big Tech firms have agreed to operate under these regulations, even to the point of funding the EU regulatory body that will supervise their operations.

    Big Tech has little choice but to comply….

    Liked by 1 person

  47. Mark,

    Yes, we will have to watch this space. I can see the positive benefits of the DSA but the negatives are just too scary. When I hear its proponents speak of disinformation such as ‘Russian propaganda’ it becomes obvious how the legislation is so easily weaponised. Does this mean that expressing sympathy for Russia’s position is to be outlawed now under the guise of so-called disinformation?

    Looking on the bright side, I see that the VLOPs are going to have to produce risk assessments regarding the negative mental impact on children of online information. Does this mean that Guardian articles telling children they are all going to die will no longer be offered up by Google searches? We wish!

    Liked by 1 person

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