The outsourced Net Zero Stasi

Green billionaire-funded outfits of sinister, self-appointed spooks are monitoring climate sceptic social media accounts, using AI bots, to try to have them closed down. What weirdos!

As I (and others) have reported elsewhere and at length, politics in the UK today is increasingly characterised by the shortcomings of a remote, aloof, intransigent political class. In brief, this comprises: functionally indistinct Westminster parties; legacy news media whose struggles to connect with the public are expressed as sheer contempt for their audience; untellectuals and hack academics, whose campuses have become mere group-think tanks; and ersatz ‘civil society’ organisations, many of which are, of course, merely lobbying fronts for green billionaires. The distinctions between these entities are now blurred, but is the latter which have been most active in servicing the needs of the emerging political order, as it is delivered from democracy’s corpse. They spring up, out of nowhere, to be the authority on a subject that demands attention. Incurious “journalists” cite them uncritically. Politicians revere them, and quote their reports without scrutiny. Something Must Be Done.

One such organisation is the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). And what could that possibly mean? A movement to abolish the middle-finger gesture? A campaign against an emotion? If the terms mean anything at all, ‘digital’ means ‘online social media’, and ‘hate’ means the expression of views that do not align with the blobocracy’s embrace of ideologies. That is to say that CCDH is the institutionalisation of ‘everybody I don’t like is literally Hitler’. And it is indeed telling that there are now a rash of organisations that cannot in fact make a distinction between unauthorised discussions pertaining to the climate and culture wars, and the Third Reich. Mark the point well: I am claiming that they really are catastrophically stupid people — chancers who have no other marketable skills than chancing.

I discovered yesterday that my otherwise retired Youtube channel, Climate Resistance (of the blog site and Substack of the same name) had been exposed by CCDH in a list of 96 channels that they claim are ‘profiting’ ‘by spreading new forms of climate denial’.

The CCDH’s accusations are published in a report, published last week, which is, superficially at least, an attempt to show that ‘climate denial’ has changed. ‘Old denial’ takes the form of claims such as ‘Global warming is not happening’ or ‘Human-generated greenhouse gasses are not causing global warming’. ‘New denial’ takes the form of claims such as ‘The impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless’, ‘Climate solutions won’t work’ and ‘Climate science and the climate movement are unreliable’. According to the report, ‘New Denial constitutes 70% of denialist claims in 2023, up from 35% in 2018’.

It is a tactic of certain consensus enforcers to invent taxonomies and tactics of their counterparts. But the authors of such analyses flatter and fool themselves into believing that by developing such taxonomies they have answered their counterparts, and that by observing a change in that taxonomy, they have won a debate.

It is like the archetype of the Internet blowhard who has an exhaustive knowledge of the Latin names of all the logical fallacies, but no capacity to reason with logic, much less parse an argument he intends to vanquish so as to reveal its logic. And on those lines, CCDH’s report draws heavily from the work of cartoonist-turned-academic psychologist, John Cook, of the infamous, and deeply flawed ‘97%’ survey.

In 2013 Cook developed what he called the ‘FLICC taxonomy’ of the ‘techniques of climate denial’, which has informed his work since. Cook convinced himself that any argument offered by anyone who disagreed with him would fit into one or more of five categories in FLICC.

The problem for Cook — intellectually, at least, for he makes plenty of cash from his projects — is that convincing someone that there must exist species of claims, which must be wrong, fails on each category itself. Cook is a peddler of fake expertise. The idea that all claims will fall into these categories is both a fallacy and an impossible expectation. It inclines the user of his crib sheet into cherry-picking. And, of course, it is Cook et al who believe that ‘misinformation’ is generated by a conspiracy of Big Oil companies, to protect their profits.

Rather than this taxonomy serving to help resolve debates, invariably, Cook’s projects fall back on clumsy appeals to authority. This is epitomised by a debate within politically-motivated academic psychology about what is called ‘consensus messaging’, but which is better understood as consensus enforcement. In short, academic psychologists who have enrolled themselves into the Climate War have sought to legitimise the standards of academic ‘research’ required to smear their critics.

Central to their claims is a hypothesis called the Gateway Belief Model (GBM), which holds that consensus messaging is effective: once people learn that the majority of scientists hold a certain opinion, they are more inclined to believe it. Cook is one a number of academic psychologist activists who defend the GBM, because it is permissive of the appeal to authority. Once the GBM is established as a fact, then academics are also obliged to defer to the consensus, and should face censure for deviating from it. Hence: consensus enforcement.

Academic psychology is a shitty domain at the best of times, suffering from both overt left-wing bias and a replication crisis. But academic psychologists’ clumsy intrusion into climate change debates makes it all the more obviously a highly-ideologically loaded pseudoscience, populated by extremely petty-minded and bitter individuals, far more interested in self-justification and self-promotion than in understanding the mechanisms of the self. Climate change — the end of the world — is a fig leaf.

But taxonomies of other people’s arguments are not rebuttals to those arguments. And the academic psychologist has as much to say about the truth of the first, second and Nth-order consequences of global warming as a plumber, a fork-lift truck driver, a second-hand car salesman, an unemployed person, or even a climate sceptic with no scientific background to speak of. The climate academic has convinced himself that the problem of climate change is such that it requires even academics to be obedient to the scientific consensus, but his domain of expertise gives him no insight into the basis of the putative ‘climate emergency’. As I have asked previously,

Academic psychology seems to have leapt on to the climate issue in particular. But as I've been asking for a long time, how does an academic psychologist get a baseline of his own grasp of climate, such that he can evaluate others' grasp & form general theories about them?

Some might observe, moreover, that the domain itself is so lacking in authority that it requires an emergency to give it authority. And so it is the field, which in the days of the Soviet Union made itself politically expedient, today convinces its membership that it is their rightful duty to shape individuals’ understanding so as to change society. You may not disagree with academic psychology.

In 2021, Nature published what Mann and colleagues believed to be ‘Taxonomy of claims made by contrarians’, which would enable, ‘Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change’.

And this brings us back to the CCDH report. It quotes Cook:

“Science denial has become untenable ... So inevitably, opponents of climate action are strategically shifting to misinformation targeting climate solutions in order to delay climate policy.”

And it explains how Cook et al’s taxonomy drives the report’s analysis:

This study centers on data analysis performed by an AI tool, CARDS, developed by academics Travis G. Coan, Constantine Boussalis, John Cook and Mirjam O. Nanko. The AI allowed us to quantify the frequency of different types of climate denialist claims in text. CCDH researchers identified the changing tactics of climate deniers on YouTube by analyzing thousands of hours of transcripts of videos on the platform from 96 channels dating back to 2018.

In case you did not follow it, CCDH’s analysis did not require any human to watch any of the videos on the 96 Youtube channels. They merely fed transcripts into AI bots.

In other words, they got ChatGPT to do their homework.

Whereas Cook’s taxonomy aimed to mobilise an army of climate dullards to vanquish online climate denial, now the taxonomy didn’t even require a single sentient being to engage their brain. The report admits:

• These transcripts were categorized by an existing AI model trained on climate denial.

• Testing indicates the model is 78% accurate in categorizing claims in our dataset.

It’s a labour-saving device of sorts for climate activists. Now they don’t even have to pretend to have thought, let alone pretend that they have the capacity of thought.

But the problem remains…

The tool is a deep learning model that can automatically process text to identify claims from the taxonomy of five climate denialist super-claims and 17 related sub-claims outlined in the previous section of this report. For example, the super-claim that climate solutions won’t work contains the sub-claim that clean energy technology or biofuels won’t work.

CARDS was developed to work on paragraph-sized chunks of text, making it necessary for us to break down the YouTube video transcripts in our dataset into appropriately-sized snippets before applying the model to them. As such, each video transcript from our dataset was split into one minute snippets, each of which comprises an average of 167 words. By applying the model to these snippets, researchers were able to identify a total of 34,692 climate denialist claims across all text transcripts in our dataset. Videos that the AI model identified as containing denialist claims received 325,227,148 views in total.

… Neither constructing a taxonomy nor training an AI bot to identify comments is a rebuttal to a single utterance.

For example, an argument that ‘clean energy technology or biofuels won’t work’ is not answered by the AI bot, nor by the CCDH. It doesn’t explain why the claim is wrong.

But what about CCDH’s claim:

a new form of climate denial is now dominating, focused more on denying climate impacts, solutions and advocates and less on denying global warming or its human causes.

It is for the birds. It’s of no consequence. Cook’s claim (quoted above) is that sceptics are abandoning their old arguments to favour new in the wake of ‘undeniable’ science is necessarily false, because the figure can take no account of volume. Consider the following chart from the report, for example.

Whereas in 2018, ‘new denial’ claims amounted to approximately five, in recent years, the figure has been greater than 50 — an increase of 1,000 per cent. There are fewer ‘old denial’ claims — perhaps a third — but they’ve not gone away. The change may well be driven by the expansion of the climate agenda itself, which has ceased to be a mere science story with limited appeal, now that Net Zero policies are visible to mainstream audiences, with consequences for household bottom lines. Here’s a chart pertaining to Jordan Peterson’s channel:

The metric that the CCDH report attempts to use to observe a transformation in the nature of claims is clearly meaningless. The taxonomy is bunk. The data is noisy. And the execution is wonky. The only sense that can really be made of the data, if the charts from the two channels are representative, is that there is now much more discussion about climate than there was in 2018.

The point of the CCDH report, however, is censorship — the shame that the fig leaves are intended to hide. CCDH claim that Google is profiting by allowing ‘deniers’ to use their platforms to share their unauthorised discussions. And the content producers, too, are profiting from the sharing.

YouTube is potentially making up to $13.4 million a year in ad revenue from channels studied by this report that have posted climate denial content.

But note the weasel-wording. The $13.4 million is made from the channels, not from the content. It continues:

The social media analytics tool Social Blade produces estimates of typical ad pricing on YouTube using values that the company has found to be common amongst its partners. It states the prices range from a low CPM (cost per mille, or cost per one thousand views) value of $0.25 USD up to a high CPM value of $4 USD.

Social Blade data also shows that the 96 channels studied by this report received 3.4 billion (3,356,433,249) views on their content in the year between 18 December 2022 and 18 December 2023. Combining this figure with the tool’s upper CPM value allows us to estimate that YouTube may have made as much as $13,425,733 in the year studied.

The arithmetic of the claim that Google has profited $13.4 million is as follows (figures rounded):

3,356,433,249 views / 1,000 * $4 = 13,425,733

For the lower CPM of $0.25, the figure would be just $839,108.

But the report admits that videos with ‘climate denial content’ had just 325,227,148 views.

325,227,148 views / 1000 * $4 = 1,300,908

And if we take the lower figure…

325,227,148 views / 1000 * $0.25 = $81,306.

And if we remember that the sum is split between 96 channels, the average channel thus made ad revenue of between $847 and $13,551 for their ‘climate denial content’. And that’s for a period covering five years, meaning that the total revenue was between just $170 $2,710 per channel, per year.

The idea that either Google or the channels have produced ‘climate denial content’ for the ad revenue is thus manifestly bullshit. These sums are so far from what is necessary to fund such productions, let alone profit from them, as to be absurd. And so, having failed to make their case arithmetically, CCDH have used ‘channel views’ and the upper CPM figure to produce a seemingly plausible claim. $13.4 million sure sounds like a lot of money, and a sufficient motive to drive a conspiracy of deniers. But CCDH’s claim is very easily shown to be deliberate misinformation, intended to give the impression of a nefarious plot of putting profit before truth.

At any rate, my channel was not monetised. Here is the most recent video I made.

It was an unfunded project. Nobody paid me to make it. I took no advertising revenue from it, and if I had, it would not have made much at all — between $6.63 and $106, according to CCDH’s methodology, split between me and Google. I did ask for donations to help support my project at the end, but received very little for it. Many people watched, shared and liked it, however. It took about two weeks, including weekends, to put together. It is the result of some research I have been working on, almost entirely unfunded, for a very long time. And I did it because I had two weeks free to make it — but not enough money to go on holiday.

In the video, I make the argument that two extremely wealthy individuals — British hedge fund boss, Sir Christopher Hohn, and news media tycoon, Michael Bloomberg — exert undue influence in global and national climate and energy policymaking. Between them, they now make grants to green organisations every year amounting to close to $0.5 billion between them. And most of those transfers are opaque. Even if their statutory filings declare some of these grants, no more information than the transfer itself is provided. Much of the money goes to pass-through organisations such as the European Climate Foundation, which gives nothing resembling a full account of where their money comes from, how much, where it goes, and what for. (I give a much more detailed survey of the cash from green billionaires to green organisations on this article on my old Substack.)

Christopher Hohn’s philanthropic vehicle, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) made a grant to CCDH of $408,000 in 2020. Since then, CIFF no longer bothers even reporting grants of less than $4 million in its annual reports. And, of course, CCDH do not disclose their grantors at all.

Might we begin then, to see the point of CCDH’s AI-based dyscalculic smear-mongering? Might CCDH merely be servicing the needs of green billionaires and their ersatz ‘civil society’ organisations, protecting them from criticism, by inventing stories that badger Big Tech companies to censor critics, and to lobby for legislation to require them to?

In the same year, CIFF made a grant of $499,000 to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). The ISD with its £5 million a year budget, has also produced glossy reports that claim to offer analysis of ‘misinformation’ from ‘climate sceptic actors’, who had ‘pivoted’ from science ‘denial’ to the culture wars. But this analysis, too, turns out to be just as wonky as CCDH’s low-rent effort, as I pointed out on my earlier Substack:

"Fact checking" and "countering misinformation" are to journalism as a baseball bat is to epistemology. Discovering truth is often an adversarial process. In science, in law, and in democracy, and in academe, people disagree. But disagreement has become politically inconvenient.

ISD also receive funding from the UK and other governments, and the Hohn/CIFF-funded and controlled European Climate Foundation. Here are ECF’s major donors obtained from a leaked internal auditors report a few years ago.

Note, again, the fact of Hohn and Bloomberg’s influence, as well as the substantial anonymous donations.

If anyone had been impressed by CCDH’s fabricated discovery of $13.4 million in advertising revenue earned by Google and shared with 96 content creators over the course of half a decade, what would they make of ECF’s opaque accounts? And what would they make of such large sums being transferred from billionaires to grubby outfits like CCDH and ISD to have critics of those billionaires’ political agendas closed down and shut out of public debate?

The CCDH report demands that:

• Google must update its policy on climate denial content

• Digital platforms must demonetize and de-amplify climate denial content

• Climate advocates: use this report as a call to action to address New Denial

The CCDH’s argument is clearly made in bad faith. It is itself deceptive to the point of lying in the case of its arithmetic, and to the point of slander by hiding its ‘analysis’ in AI black boxes, rather than in accountable and transparent human judgement. It protects the interests of its funders, which it does not disclose. And it lacks the moral bravery and intellectual honesty to challenge the claims it identifies as either ‘old’ or ‘new’ ‘denial’, on any platform.

But the CCDH and ISD are not the only organisations claiming to bring technical analysis of online networks to generate smear stories. In September last year, the Guardian reported that,

Research conducted by the social media analysts Valent in July concluded there was evidence of “an extensive online campaign targeted to undermine support for the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez)” before the Uxbridge byelection.

It found that 48% of the accounts on Twitter, now known as X, mentioning Ulez were created after November 2022, and of those about 90% “exhibited signs of inauthenticity”, using generic names and with a high proportion of fake followers.

These accounts – called spreaders – were primarily engaged in retweeting anti-Ulez opinions from real people or groups opposed to expansion of the area covered by the £12.50 daily charge for old, polluting vehicles across all of London in August.

The aim, the researchers concluded, was to have “thousands of accounts promoting anti-Ulez content on to users’ timelines”. Valent said it only looked at anti-Ulez accounts on Twitter, not other social media sites, but it believed the campaign cost at least £168,000.

The analysis (see link in the above block quote), however, is merely an article in which claims are made merely by asserting ‘estimates’. The only evidence offered is that some number of Twitter users that retweeted Twitter posts that were critical of Khan’s policies could not be verified as authentic. That number is then multiplied by an estimated cost of buying Twitter followers.

Our analysis shows it would cost approximately £44,000 to buy an average of 380 followers for each of the 3,702 spreader accounts, a figure based on a costing of £31 (converted from $40) for 1,000 followers per account when bought in bulk.

The estimated cost of the online manipulation observed during this study includes £124,000 for AIMS-style software (based on 2015 prices quoted by the Guardian) and £44,000 for false followers for the spreader accounts, totalling £168,000. However, this indicative figure might not capture the full cost, as it doesn’t include all potential associated services.

These estimates are worth nothing more than a bloke-in-a-pub’s back-of-an-envelope speculation. But they are marketable, because they service a political agenda. Valent do not disclose how much they were paid for their plastic analysis, nor who by. Yet that is not a problem for those who make use of the conspiracy theory they have generated. As the Guardian explained,

Sadiq Khan is expected to claim that “hundreds of thousands of dollars” were spent on an anti-Ulez online manipulation campaign on Twitter, citing research conducted after Labour’s unexpected Uxbridge byelection defeat.

The London mayor, who will speak at a conference in New York on Tuesday, said he feared that disinformation and manipulation campaigns were “spreading apace” but it was not always clear who was behind them.

I am the author of two reports, jointly produced by Climate Debate UK (which I am co-founder of, and which is funded by subscriptions to this Substack, and direct donations to the website) and the Together Association, which I am an unpaid cabinet member of. The first report (in three parts) looks at the science of Khan’s claims that 4,000 people die each year from exposure to air pollution in London. The second looks at the influence of the likes of Mike Bloomberg and Christopher Hohn in climate air pollution policy campaigning — on which they have both spend tens of £millions, and notes the undue prominence of their fake ‘civil society’ organisations. Both reports were produced on a shoestring budget, for which I received less than I would have, had I been working for the minimum wage.

Neither Khan, nor his offices, nor Imperial College, which seemingly produces the dodgy scientific claims that Khan depends on have made themselves available for debate about the criticisms we have made of his policies or their putative basis in science. It seems they and their sponsors have, however, spent a great deal of money on protecting themselves from criticism by engaging gutter-level smear-mongers to do their dirty work.

But it won’t wash.

Together simply does not have the budget to blow £168,000 on fake Twitter followers. And if anyone else does have that money and did spend it on that end, they have wasted their money. Because we have been far more effective as campaigning organisations with vastly less by way of cash resources than that figure, and the budgets of the CCDH, ISD and Valent. Here is Together’s sold-out 2023 Second Anniversary event.

Together is successful in uniting people from across the political spectrum, from all backgrounds, and all levels of domain expertise, because there is now a growing awareness that British politics is no longer democratic. Policy agendas, from climate, through to covid, air pollution, have destroyed and are destroying countless people’s lives and those people’s views are not represented in policymaking, which is dominated by shadowy billionaire’s lobbying outfits. And their only answer to those people is to set smearmongering outfits on them.

The case for the censorship of critics of an agenda which is costing every household £thousands every year, and is undermining small businesses and entire industries, is made by outfits that are run by mere spivs peddling shonky AI bots, cod psychology and dodgy Excel sheets. They are the Arthur Daleys and Del Boys of the climate debate. They liberate untold £millions from green billionaires and corrupt mayors, to generate misinformation about misinformation to poison debate and to support legislation to prevent criticism and debate about their agendas, because they have very much to lose, but no capacity to defend their positions to the public.

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