By Robert Bradley Jr.
“Sounds like the alarmists are losing when they call in the thought police. And they are losing.”
A new international group, Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), advertises itself as the policer against “climate change misinformation and disinformation.”
We are a global coalition of over 50 prominent climate and anti-disinformation organisations, calling for decisive, unified action against widespread climate misinformation and disinformation.
Why? CAAD continues:
Climate change misinformation and disinformation create a distorted perception of climate science and solutions; meanwhile they weaken the public mandate for effective domestic and international policies aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Nothing subjective about it. CAAD’s “Universal definition” is stated:
Climate disinformation and misinformation refers to deceptive or misleading content that:
Undermines the existence or impacts of climate change, the unequivocal human influence on climate change, and the need for corresponding urgent action according to the IPCC scientific consensus and in line with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement;
Misrepresents scientific data, including by omission or cherry-picking, in order to erode trust in climate science, climate-focused institutions, experts, and solutions; or
Falsely publicises efforts as supportive of climate goals that in fact contribute to climate warming or contravene the scientific consensus on mitigation or adaptation.
Their recommendation?
Governments should encourage social media, advertising technology, and broadcast and publishing companies to take these steps:
1 Acknowledge climate disinformation as a major threat damaging the information ecosystem, hindering climate action and policy, risking public safety and health and further widening societal and political divides.
2 Produce, publicize and resource a transparent company plan to stop the spread of climate disinformation.
3 Report on the prevalence of climate disinformation on their products and services.
4 Allow researchers access to all data needed to conduct research and prevent the monetisation of climate disinformation.
5 Implement platform-wide inoculation efforts to expose mis- and disinformation.
6 Implement strong labor policies for content moderation staff.
7 Produce and enforce transparency, safety, equity, and accountability measures related to company use of AI and other emerging technologies.
Government? Big Brother? The one institution that has a legal monopoly on the initiation of force? Shame on Climate Action Against Disinformation.
Losing Arguments
Sounds like the alarmists are losing when they call in the thought police. And they are losing. WUWT is the world’s most viewed climate information site. Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. reigns as the go-to for bottom-line science. LinkedIn and X are populated with skepticism and debate with all-things-climate. DeSmog’s climate disinformation database cannot keep up with all the individuals and groups that criticize climate alarmism and point out exaggerations and failed predictions.
And who won the U.S. election and is replacing the Podesta-Biden-Harris ‘all-of-government’ climate policy with none-of-government? Don’t even mention “climate change” and “decarbonization” in polite company.
Course Correction?
New opportunities abound for questioning climate alarm and debating climate policy. Climate censorship is dead on arrival in a new political world. CAAD should change its name and call out the exaggerators and climate cult. A new organization could reject the Sunrise Movement, Climate Defiance, and other groups who are expected to rev up their civil disobedience in 2025? That would turn down the heat.
Appendix: Pushing Censorship against Heartland Institute
On October 24, 2024, a group of far Left organizations wrote an open letter to Google’s “Trust and Safety Team” to censor the Heartland Institute. [1]
“We are urgently asking Google to fully enforce its existing policy and immediately and permanently demonetize Heartland Institute and all other outlets that continue to spread climate disinformation on YouTube,” the letter read. Continuing:
As evidenced by the above research and reporting, Google ads are directly contributing to the spread of outright lies about our planet’s changing climate– with dire impacts…. We urge immediate and thorough action to end Google’s monetization of accounts that spread and profit from climate disinformation….
Sorry, but the bullying and censorship days are over. It is cool to question the heat of climate change activism, intellectually and politically.
——————–
[1] Accountable Tech; Action Center on Race & the Economy; Center for Countering Digital Hate; Check My Ads; ClimateVoice, a project of Tides Center; Ekō; Friends of the Earth; Greenpeace USA; Kairos Fellowship; The Tech Oversight Project; UltraViolet; Union of Concerned Scientists
——————–
Appendix: The Censors Are Out
Thankfully we look like we have turned the page on Climate Alarmist and its mad energy policies. We must not be too confident though. When huge fossil fuel organisation come up with policies like this from Shell, who claim they are looking at recombining carbon from CO2 capture with hydrogen from renewable electrolysis production (???) to form methane CH4 enabling safe distribution of the upcoming hydrogen production????
This from the Telegraph here in the UK today.
“European natural gas prices have soared to their highest level in two years as the Continent scrambles to refill its rapidly depleting reserves.
Shell’s plans would see it combine hydrogen, made using solar power, with carbon molecules captured from greenhouse gases in the air.
Carbon molecules would then be used to turn the hydrogen into methane or CH4, which is the same molecule as natural gas. The methane could then be frozen into synthetic LNG.
The proposals mark the first time a major oil company has explored turning hydrogen into LNG.
Shell is currently investing heavily in its own LNG business in order to capitalise on the expected rise in demand.
LNG currently supplies more than a fifth of global energy demand, with the market worth over £100bn per annum and expected to grow around 10pc per year over the next five years”.
If anyone can post anything more insane than that, as a serious energy policy please feel free to do so.
NB Wind turbines and Solar arrays at 50+ deg. north latitude don’t count, that insanity has been well tested and failed.
The BBC is starting a new eco loon series on R4, so it can’t have got the memo
“Taking a new approach to the big questions facing us and our planet, Rare Earth will explore the complex and storied relationship between humanity and the rest of nature, and range widely across natural history as well as diving deep into urgent environmental issues. It will draw on history and philosophy, along with the latest developments in science, in order to shed light on where we are and where we are going.”
The trails I’ve heard plugging this are very dark green at best.
Creating CH4 from CO2 and H2O is a viable technology.
That is not the question. Can it be accomplished economically at industrial scale to satisfy the growing demand? That is the true test and we shall see how it resolves.
Wind and solar as the grid energy suppliers insane? Yes. Wind and solar are niche technologies with limited applications. Can they be used to supplement the grid? Yes. That is happening in Maryland. When the sun shines, energy prices drop proportionately. When the sun is hiding, the thermo electric generators provide all the energy needed.
This is an absolutely insane way of running an efficient, cost-effective electric system. Backing up inherently unreliable w/s generation by making fossil fuel systems operate inefficiently, driving up costs unnecessarily for virtue signaling is wrecking whole economies. See Germany and UK especially.
When you remove the subsidies is this still so?
So the folks opposed to GHGs are touting making methane to be used as natural gas, thereby creating GHGs? They must n=be mad, and think that the rest of us are stupid.
“They must n=be mad, and think that the rest of us are stupid”
Some of us must indeed be stupid – believing that adding CO2 to air raises its temperature. Making “GHG”s to burn and make even more “GHG”s, seems slightly, if not completely, demented.
Climate alarmists know that they lost the scientific argument years ago. That is why they have been reduced to urging censorship of anybody who disagrees with them. They cannot refute sceptical points using science so the only thing that they can do is to suppress the truth.
CAAD needs their tactics used against THEM ?
😉
CAAD needs to have its funding made public.
Who is paying for all this censorship?
My bet is one or more Leftwing Billionaires are paying for this censorship effort.
Censorship? Yes.
Indoctrination (in schools) and brainwashing (through emotional media)? Yes.
The best way to influence public opinion is through fear. Second best is anger.
To quote a famous movie,”Fear Mr. Christian, fear.”
The dictators command you to not acknowledge their dictatorship.
And this switch to ‘clean energy’ from ‘saving the planet thu’ CO2’. Are we dirty? No
The old model was that news is fact, and objectivity the ideal. Today’s truth is that “news”, like anything else that is sold to the public, is a product.
Our news product isn’t some abstract notion of truth, or even reality. It’s a story – consistent and repetitive, with a message that’s emotionally fulfilling to the viewer…….
Consistent and repetitive – all weather is now “due to climate change”.
The quote is not mine – it comes from The Race (2007) by Richard North Paterson. I agree wholeheartedly.
The so called legacy media once could be trusted to uphold and publish the Truth.
In the digital age, they have been devolved to profit centers under corporate control.
It is more important that they make a profit.
So, sensationalize the headlines, slant the story, and maximize ad clicks.
Most of what is printed today as “news” belongs appropriately marked, on the editorial page.
Can you name this time when the legacy media could be trusted?
I can’t.
Sure, they didn’t used to be as blatant and one sided as they are now, but they have always tried to slant the news and suppress anything that those in power did not want talked about.
“Most of what is printed today as “news” belongs appropriately marked, on the editorial page.” Well said. I’m going to borrow that.
The Bandar-log are getting ever more shrill, but when will the MSM stop listening just to them and start to report both sides of the CO2 debate equally?
When? When the advertisers leave.
Or when bureaucrats stop jawboning them to stick to the approved narrative. “Nice business you have here, damn pity if something happens to it”.
There is hope – witness the sea change at the Washington Post.
The alarmists have had full control of the media message(s) since 2006 (that BBC seminar) in the UK. And the take home is even full control isn’t enough.
Mis and/or dis information is the damning euphemism for any disagreement and that is what they seek to stamp out – differing points of view and opinions. Naturally, their power over the narrative lends itself nicely to “fact checking“. Who better to lead the BBC Verify effort than someone who is on the record as way more than just economical with the truth?
“Starmer used BBC Verify last night to support the government’s claim that only 500 estates annually will be affected by Labour’s farm tax
…
Guido noticed that Verify has also been quietly making changes to its main farm tax “fact-check.” It gets worse than confusing hectares for acres…
After Guido pointed out that Verify refers to senior Labour activist Dan Neidle an “independent tax expert” the article has been quietly changed to call him “founder of the independent Tax Policy Associates.” More egregiously Verify has completely cut Neidle’s outlandish claim that “the number of actual farms affected is likely to be below 500 per year”
https://order-order.com/2024/11/20/bbc-verify-quietly-changes-farm-tax-fact-check-amid-political-bias-row/
But now, no amount of faux fact checking (in this case a lack of any checking whatsoever) can save the BBC from its uber progressive hubris:
“BBC accused of using Hamas official’s son in documentary about ‘ordinary Palestinians’
‘Hamas propaganda promoted as reliable fact’”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/18/bbc-hamas-abdullah-al-yazouri-gaza-complaint/
As if that wasn’t bad enough, it does get worse…
“The Telegraph can reveal that on at least five occasions the words Yahud or Yahudy – Arabic for “Jew” or “Jews” – were changed to “Israel” or “Israeli forces”, or were removed from the subtitles altogether.
An interviewee praising Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, for “jihad against the Jews” was also mistranslated as saying he was fighting “Israeli forces”.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/25/bbc-whitewashed-anti-semitism-gaza-documentary/
The BBC was forced to pull it. And just to make it all the more messy, there was a message from [progressive] BBC, er, talent…
“Gary Lineker, Anita Rani, Riz Ahmed and Miriam Margolyes are among more than 500 media figures who have criticised the BBC’s decision to pull a documentary about children’s lives in Gaza.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3374xm65mvo
Nullius in verba. Works for me.
UPDATE: Licence payer’s money…
BBC faces potential criminal investigation over Gaza documentary
Corporation admits to ‘unacceptable’ mistakes after disclosing it paid son of Hamas minister for his role in film
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/27/bbc-admits-serious-flaws-over-gaza-documentary/
I bet they don’t.
This is strong signal that we’ve reached a tipping point (puns intended)
There’s been a lot of stop start over the past 2 decades but I think they know this is truly the end of this bandwagon
Even musk knows it, he’s always known this time would come, which is why he has been marketing Tesla as a tech company and not an EV company for years, with daft notions of driverless cars (which he knows is impossible)
He bought twitter and now he just bid 100bn for open AI, which is a sign that he’s ready to make a leap into something else
ESG is also on its way out. China will soon discover that it wasted enormous sums of money developing EVs and windmills it was planning to sell to a suicidal west while it carried on burning coal
I’m anticipating some serious wailing and gnashing of the teeth in near future as the entire net zero scam unravels before our eyes
In his book, Project Mars: A Technical Tale (1949), Wernher von Braun wrote of a character called [the] “Elon“.
In 1979 we were introduced to the likely future by Ridley Scott; Weyland-Yutani
Building better worlds…
I agree except for driverless cars being impossible is subject to debate around definitions, tolerance for errors, etc.
Self driving taxis are at least tentatively operating in a few cities already. On a 0-5 scale of automation, we are at 4, which is full automation under normal circumstances and, where 5 is “full automation, the car can drive itself in all conditions.”
Ultimately, the situation may become one of tolerance for defects. Nothing is perfect is a truism, I suppose.
There are lots of things cars can be made to do. Self-driving is not one.
I was part of a project to develop autonomous navigation.
Too many pitfalls to overcome.
Unless every street, road, highway, etc. includes roadside transmitter markers every 100 feet or so, cans cannot safely navigate.
Don’t say “but GPS.” GPS is good as long as you are not in a city (reflections), not in a forest (trees block the signals) and it is not a heavy weather day.
Collision avoidance is one of those practical technologies that work. A small radar or other sensor in the car is all it takes. Those are already going mainstream because they work.
Do your eyes need a roadside transmitter marker every 100 feet? 🙂
My eyes are analog and see a continuous stream of road, can focus close and far.
Under certain very strict conditions and limits it might be possible.
In a typical urban environment, not so much.
The sensors have to come a long way before true autonomous driving is possible, especially in unfavourable weather conditions
Then you have the algorithms, ie machine learning. Deep learning is very powerful, there is no doubt, but even the fanciest network would struggle with reliable decision making in a highly unpredictable, dynamic environment
It would require masses of real data to train, and then be capable of virtually 100% successful decision making in many and vastly different situations – pedestrians, roadworks, objects on the road, weather conditions,
It can’t obviously be trained in a real environment, so it would have to be trained in a simulated environment, and then be capable of generalisation, something machine learning algorithms are often not good at
Then it has to make decisions in real time, with high uncertainty (noise). Predictably, it will either be too cautious or take too many risks most of the time. Reliably finding the right balance,…. Good luck with that
On top of this, networks lack explainability. This is why they are not used so much in finance as time series methods, in contrast to principled approaches like ARIMA models or hidden markov models or other state space approaches. And they don’t furnish uncertainty bounds unlike the aforementioned methods unless further assumptions are made or a truly Bayesian approach is adopted, in which case they’re frankly infeasible to trwin
The main advantage of networks is their ability to be trained on masses of data, using stochastic gradient descent. It’s not any inherent superiority in terms of accuracy, for that they often are outperformed by simpler methods on smallish data sets
So, I can imagine insurance companies not liking this lack of explainability – how does it work, why this decision and not that, and so on. There’s some effort to try to “explain” them, which as far as I’m concerned will be as fruitful as string theory. They are suck it an see ad hoc approaches, with post hoc explanations that often don’t make much sense
Finally, I really cannot see many people taking the risk of giving up their own autonomy to a robot
Which is not to say they can’t work at some point in the future. I’m sure it’s possible, but I still think it will be in a limited set of scenarios
Pretty remarkable progress. My grandfather, for example, used work horses on his farm.
It is a multi-coupled, chaotic environment.
Precisely, you can’t predict random events by definition – otherwise they are not random
Who the ‘h’ would want a car, and NOT drive it? There has always been great satisfaction to that operation, which opened America to everyone.
If the Environmental Protection Agency rescinds their 2009 finding that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant which requires their regulation, the green grift comes to an end here in the USA.
Might take some time and there likely will be some residuals that do not go away.
As usual CAAD accuses its opponent of the sins they practice themselves.
You would have thought that these people would have come up with something better than fossil-fuelling people, sorry, gaslighting people….
It’s just good for them that they aren’t required to purchase carbon credits to offset their gaslighting.
Humor – a difficult concept
— Lt. Saavik
“Undermines the existence or impacts of climate change, the unequivocal human influence on climate change,”
Well, yes. Climate exists – it’s the statistics of weather observations. Who doesn’t accept that? And yes – weather has impacts. Who doesn’t agree?
The atmosphere is chaotic, and therefore all human activities affect its future. Unfortunately, the outcomes of a chaotic system are completely unpredictable. Will the weather tomorrow be better or worse? For whom? How much rain is too much?
Some idiots believe that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter, but are too cunning to admit to believing such obvious nonsense, so they carry on about “climate change”. Of course the climate changes – just try and stop it, if you want to look really stupid.
Pshaw!
The hubris that human are so powerful they can control the planet is over the top.
This. Exactly
We need to tell the people at CAAD to stop using fossil fuels themselves, keep them in a constant state of mental off balance.
Also, they are not permitted to exhale or flatulate.
Imagine the number of exploding heads if the EPA gets the Endangerment Finding for CO2 removed!
The term “climate change”, as used by the climate liars, is a deliberate fraud that is meant to disinform the gullible.
Disinform? Not. Deceive.
One line stood out when I skimmed the CAAD website:
Climate change misinformation and disinformation are major threats to climate action.
Do these people not notice the difference between climate and weather? In every climate zone or sub-zone, we have various weather conditions both between the seasons and across years. In some areas droughts are followed by floods followed by droughts and then by floods. I am an old man but in my lifetime I have not seen a desert area – like most of the arid Sudan – become subtropical – like much of Zimbabwe (which are the same distance from the equator). I have not seen a winter rainfall Mediterranean area become an Oceanic area with all year round rainfall. Such changes would qualify for the climate change designation. We know from archaeological records that the Sahara was green some 8000 years ago but it was certainly not the CO2 from nomadic camp fires that caused the change. Significant change may occur across millennia but human actions or inactions are not a determining factor.
Clearly this global coalition is guilty of the misuse of better abuse of language and the words climate and change and especially their combination. So too the phrase climate action. Even our best engineers and scientists cannot create the perfect climate for each zone with the appropriate weather conditions. By tweaking the percentage of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere we will certainly not achieve climates with such complexity that we have barely begun to understand. It is insanity thinking we can play God when it comes to the various climate zones.
Do they have plans for a CAAD police force equipped with heavy weapons?
CO2 guns?
If the IRS needs guns, then I’m sure the CO2 cops will as well.
Hopefully, that will soon change, and the IRS agents will have to resort to their ‘billy clubs’.
Or any way else.
I have recently noticed a change on my MSNBC feed. An outfit called Climate Cosmos, while not strictly a skeptical source, presents articles that voice questions about climate orthodoxy and at least tickle the fringes of doubt. I guess someone figured out that the endless screams of disaster were getting fewer clicks and found a way to monetize the growing dissent.
Why do you have an MSLSD feed? Is it for the humor, or do you enjoy watching the clinically insane try to explain their version of reality to their acolytes!?
For the same reason that authors here peruse the opposition. To know what is going on. If I were to simply dismiss other sources without seeing for myself I would be just like them.
Also, the feed has a fairly wide variety of content not particularly political in nature.
And yes,it is fun poking the ants to watch them stir.
CAAD apparently regrets their inability to go full Lysenko, and commit all dissenters to the Gulag.
“4 Allow researchers access to all data needed to conduct research and prevent the monetisation of climate disinformation.”
Just “researchers, huh? Who decides who a “researcher” is?
Two series I have been watching, Paradise on Hulu and Irrational on NBC, just had episodes using climate change as the cause or incident to the plot. Paradise was full blown human induced change caused a volcano/tsunami/nuclear war.
i dare Hollywood to have Sheldon say human induced climate change is bunk.
Yes the CAGW crowd is losing, there is a reason for that, they have no proper evidence scientific or otherwise to prove that what they are saying is right. You know that they knew that the day they started talking about global warming/climate change instead of added CO2. Anything can be blamed on global warming or climate change because those terms can mean anything, therefore they are meaningless. Force the conversation back to CO2.
“As COP29 gets underway, the consequences of climate change are ever more extreme. So too with climate mis- and disinformation, now ubiquitous online.”
The idea that we are fueling extreme weather is the greatest mis- and disinformation online.
Awww, you’re not trying to tell me that my ancestors’s rain dances and sacrifices to the rain gods won’t bring rain, are you?
Americans are catching on, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, who credits a combination of media coverage, political leaders speaking up and public concerns that creates a “symbiotic relationship.”
Most Americans who experienced severe winter weather see climate change at work, AP-NORC poll shows
Moving right along from the global warmening meme to weather events.