A Directory of Inconvenient Climate Information Websites
Conservative free speech advocates have been rightly concerned about internet censorship, but the focus of those concerns has been relatively narrow. Conservatives are pushing back against big tech suppression of online critics of globalism, mass immigration, identity politics. They are pushing back against big tech suppression of pro-Trump commentators. But there is another collection of online voices that have been quietly, and very effectively suppressed; climate skeptics.
Over the past 10-15 years, at the same time as identity politics was assuming a dominant position in America’s corporate, academic and media cultures, climate alarm followed a parallel trajectory. But starting in 2017, when the social media monopolies intensified their online offensive against politically incorrect content, climate skeptic content had already dwindled. It isn’t hard to understand why.
Identity politics, globalism, and mass immigration create obvious winners and losers, with Americans bitterly and almost evenly divided over what policies represent the best moral and practical choices. Policies and principles embracing “Climate change,” by contrast, have conducted their own long, slow march through America’s institutions without encountering serious resistance. Proclaiming one’s belief in climate change dogma carries minimal downside and plenty of upside.
Embracing climate change politics enriches and empowers the same cast of characters as embracing globalism – corporations, governments, the financial sector, nonprofits, academia, and the useful idiots in media and entertainment. Meanwhile, the downside of climate change policies is harder to articulate than the downside of globalism. As a result, financial support for scientists and analysts tagged as climate change “deniers” has nearly dried up over the past 10-15 years. Whoever is left confronts an overwhelming climate alarm apparatus.
The problem, however, is that globalism and climate alarm are two sides of the same coin. Globalism requires “climate refugees” to overwhelm the cultures and transform the electorate in developed nations. It requires authoritarian rationing to “save the planet.” It requires supra-national governing bodies to cope with the “climate crisis.” And the globalist project is fatally undermined by the availability of cheap and abundant fossil fuel.
Fossil fuel will remain the most inexpensive and abundant source of energy for at least the next 20-30 years, and cheap energy is the prerequisite for prosperity, which in turn is the prerequisite for literacy and voluntary population stabilization, political stability, economic development, and world peace.
Ignoring this fact – that cheap energy worldwide can only be delivered in the near term by continuing to develop fossil fuel – is the true crime of “denial” that is being perpetrated on humanity by globalists. And yet, only a handful of online websites still seek to reopen the debate as to just how dangerous or imminent the threat CO2 emissions are to humanity and the planet. Here, sorted by viewership (most viewed on top) are some of the independent climate skeptic websites that are still active in 2019:
Climate Skeptic Websites
Watts Up With That?
Real Climate Science
No Tricks Zone
Climate Depot
JoNova
Climate Change Dispatch
Roy Spencer PhD
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
Bjorn Lomborg – Get the Facts Straight
Junk Science
Friends of Science
Climate Audit
CO2 Science
Global Warming.org
IceCap
Jennifer Marohasy
Science & Environmental Policy Project`
Greenie Watch
Global Warming Science
The Global Warming Challenge
Tom Nelson Blogspot
Science & Public Policy Institute
Australian Climate Madness
Climate Science
Climate Lessons
The Great Global Warming Hoax
CO2 Web Info
The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition
The viewership reaching these independent websites is almost negligible. Watts Up With That?, authored by Heartland Institute Senior Fellow and former television meteorologist Anthony Watt, only scores a U.S. Alexa ranking of 16,178. Following in a distant second place is Real Climate Science, with a U.S. Alexa ranking of 77,839. Sites with extraordinary work, such as Bjorn Lomborg’s Get the Facts Straight, sit at a distant 780,564.
Web viewership rises and falls based a great deal on Google search results. If a website link shows up on the first screen of Google search results, it will get traffic. And this is a self-reinforcing cycle, the more a site shows up in search results, the more it will get visited, and the more it gets visited, the higher it will go in search results. This chicken/egg process obscures the reality of biased algorithms.
Search Google under “climate skeptic websites,” and the first two results you will get take you to “SkepticalScience.com,” a website devoted to debunking climate skeptics, followed by “RealClimate.org,” produced by the IPCC. Result #4 is of marginal assistance, a Business Insider report from 2009 that provides a mostly geriatric assortment of the “10 most respected global warming skeptics.” The #5 result is WattsUpWithThat, and #4 and #5 are the only results that aren’t directing you to “consensus” material.
Nonprofit Think Tanks Still Willing to be Climate Skeptics
The most unambiguously skeptical think tank still compiling data and analysis that presents a skeptical perspective on climate change is the Heartland Institute. They refer to their position on the issue as “climate realism” and have assembled an impressive lineup of skeptical experts on climate science and climate policy. They regularly host international conferences on the topic of climate change, and sponsor the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which issues regular reports that contradict much of what comes from the mainstream IPCC.
Another consistently realist think tank on the topic of climate change is the American Enterprise Institute. The redoubtable PragerU has produced a 12 video series on climate change entitled “Climate Change: What’s So Alarming.” Useful information on the scientific debate over climate change also comes from the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, although much of their focus has shifted to the policy debate.
Climate Skeptic Videos on YouTube
Searching YouTube to find climate skeptic content yields very little. If there are dedicated video channels offering ongoing new releases of credible climate skeptic content, they’re not very easy to find. Documentaries and other stand-alone videos with a climate skeptic perspective are sparse, but those few that could be found have valuable information:
No Trend In Extreme Weather In The US – Climate Change Fraud Exposed, 2019 – 10 minutes
Is Global Warming a Scam?, 2019 – 17 minutes
Cost-Effective Approaches to Save the Environment, with Bjorn Lomborg, 2019 – 48 minutes
The truth about global warming, 2018 – 14 minutes
Nobel Laureate in Physics; “Global Warming is Pseudoscience”, 2015 – 31 minutes
The Lack of Science in the Scientific Consensus, 2013 – 1 hour, 13 minutes
Freeman Dyson: Climate Change Predictions Are “Absurd”, 2012 – 3 minutes
One climate change scientist takes on a roomful of sceptics, 2011 – 45 minutes
The Great Global Warming Swindle, 2007 – 1 hour, 15 minutes
Watching these videos, along with viewing climate skeptic websites, will present an open minded inquisitor with information, data, logic, arguments, and perspectives that are utterly absent from mainstream public dialog. It has become obligatory for any Democrat and the majority of Republican politicians in America – along with every establishment newscaster – to proclaim their adherence to the “consensus” on climate. The only debate left – not that it isn’t a big one – is how best to limit and eventually eliminate use of fossil fuel.
This is a non-debate with serious consequences. It is preposterous to think worldwide use of fossil fuel will decline by any meaningful percentage within the next 30 years. What could happen, however, is it will be restricted to the point where developing nations, especially in Africa, will be pressured into developing a “renewable” energy infrastructure that will be far too expensive to rapidly deliver the broad based prosperity that is a crucial prerequisite to population stabilization. Moreover, developing nations that are denied access to cheap fossil fuel will continue to rely on biomass to supplement inadequate or unaffordable renewable energy, stripping their forests for energy, or, worse, they will annihilate their ecosystems to plant “carbon neutral” corporate biofuel monocultures.
None of this is necessary. The only reason we are debating how best to quickly eliminate use of fossil fuel is because “the debate is over” with respect to the planetary impact of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. But that debate is not over. Read the material on these websites. Watch these videos. There is ample scientific basis for the debate to be raging, and yet the corporate globalist establishment universally declares the debate to be “over.”
Why?
The reason is because virtually all powerful vested interests in the Western hemisphere recognize climate change alarm as leverage to impose self-serving policies and garner higher profits.
- Fossil fuel companies keep prices (and profits) high.
- “Renewable energy” companies acquire subsidies.
- Politicians enact new taxes.
- Public sector entities get new tax revenue.
- Environmentalist nonprofits have a new source of funds.
- Left wing activists have a new basis to attack private ownership.
- Labor unions get more jobs, especially in the public sector.
- Lawyers have a new basis to file lawsuits.
- Wall Street trades emissions credits, making trillions in commissions.
- Climate researchers get more grant requests funded.
- United Nations bureaucrats get a guaranteed revenue stream.
- “Greentech” entrepreneurs receive subsidies for “green” products.
- Corporations can force consumers to replace all their appliances.
- Corporations can impose the “internet of things” to monitor household resource consumption.
- Millions of “Climate refugees” will be transported to the developed nations who are to blame.
- Global governance will be necessary to coordinate climate mitigation efforts.
Taken individually, each of these reasons – and this list undoubtedly omits additional special interests that benefit from climate change alarm – represent a profound shift in public policy. Each of them represent investments skewing away from optimal returns and instead towards returns that favor a politically entitled group. The overall impact of all of them is regressive, increasing the cost-of-living for the most economically vulnerable populations.
These policies also represent a profound cultural shift with consequences that extend to every corner of society. All of a sudden:
- The litmus test for an environmentalist is whether they embrace climate change alarm and support climate change activism.
- Elementary school children are being indoctrinated to believe the planet is in imminent danger of becoming uninhabitable.
- Capitalism, rather than being viewed as the only practical and reasonably equitable engine for economic growth, is portrayed as the despicable cause of environmental catastrophe.
- A life of rationed scarcity, remotely monitored and managed by algorithms, replaces the reasonable expectation that technology and capitalism will deliver increasing abundance for every generation.
- Sovereign nations have become a toxic anachronism.
- Developed Western nations must admit millions of destitute refugees, often coming from hostile cultures, because the states where they lived failed due to “climate change” brought on by industrial civilization.
And suddenly the madman, racing through the streets screaming that the world is about to come to an end is the sane person, and now the psychopaths are those who hold back, suggesting that perhaps the situation isn’t quite that dire.
All of this is an inversion of reality. All of this must be challenged, and challenged with the same vigor that Americans – of all backgrounds – are finally rising up to challenge identity politics. Climate change alarm, in its emotional fearmongering and scapegoating, in its reliance on authoritarian governance, and in its coopting of the industrial and financial elites, is explicitly fascist.
In George Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, the main character, Winston, worked for the “Ministry of Truth.” His job, day after day, was to systematically rewrite history. Today’s social media and search monopolies are the realized versions of what Orwell imagined. They define and redefine our reality. As credible, informed content offering a climate skeptic’s perspective disappear from search results, as the traffic to these websites dwindles into nothingness, a part of our collective consciousness is lobotomized. We lose our ability to make informed choices. Read these websites. Bookmark them. Share them. Print them. While you still can.
It is not enough to debate climate change policy. Even in the most benign forms, policies based on the premise that fossil fuel use must be swiftly eliminated represent policy choices that will magnify human suffering around the world at the same time as they disenfranchise the citizenry of entire nations.
The scientific debate must be renewed. Even if the alarmists are right, the fact that “the debate is over” is universally recited by every instrument of America’s establishment should terrify anyone concerned about free speech, if not freedom itself.
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Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.
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