Free Republic

When Sean Youra was 26 years old and working as an engineer, he started watching documentaries about climate change. Youra, who was struggling with depression and the loss of a family member, was horrified by what he learned about melting ice and rising extreme weather. He started spending hours on YouTube, watching videos made by fringe scientists who warned that the world was teetering on the edge of societal collapse — or even near-term human extinction. Youra started telling his friends and family that he was convinced that climate change couldn’t be stopped, and humanity was doomed. In short, he...

Lies about climate change on Twitter escalated to unprecedented levels this year, according to new analyses. The unnerving rise of content that rejects widely accepted climate science — sometimes referred to as climate skepticism or climate denial — piles on top of growing concerns about misinformation and hateful content that’s proliferated since Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform. There have been more tweets and retweets “using climate-sceptic terminology” in 2022 than in any other year since Twitter’s founding in 2006, according to analysis conducted for The Times by City, University of London researchers. That’s 850,000 climate-skeptic tweets or...

Google announced Thursday that it would no longer allow ads or monetization for content that promotes climate change denialism. The policy change will apply to publishers, advertisers and YouTube creators, who will no longer be able to make money from content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” Google plans to enforce the new policy with a blend of algorithmic detection and human moderation and the change will go into effect next month. While there’s some room for interpretation in the new rules, according to Google they “[include] content referring to climate change as...

It's Memorial Day, and the forecast is for renewed mocking and derision regarding man-made climate change from the know-nothing, science-averse wing of the Republican Party. President Barack Obama's warning—issued during his commencement address at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduation ceremonies Wednesday—that climate change represents a national security threat seems certain to provoke that kind of stormy reaction.[SNIP]Among the Republicans running for president, climate change denial is the current mode of thinking for most....it's hard to see anyone in the crowd calling for military preparedness. Mostly, the candidates appear interested in sidestepping the topic (albeit in a disapproving manner)..The result...