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How Climate Change Deniers Rise To the Top in Google Searches (nytimes.com)

If you searched for the words "climate change" into Google, until earlier this week, you could have gotten an unexpected result: ads that call global warming a hoax. "Scientists blast climate alarm," said one that appeared at the top of the search results page during a recent search, pointing to a website, DefyCCC, that asserted: "Nothing has been studied better and found more harmless than anthropogenic CO2 release." Another ad proclaimed: "The Global Warming Hoax -- Why the Science Isn't Settled," linking to a video containing unsupported assertions, including that there is no correlation between rising levels of greenhouse gases and higher global temperatures. These references were first reported by The New York Times (the link may be paywalled). From a report: America's technology giants have come under fire for their role in the spread of fake news during the 2016 presidential campaign, prompting promises from Google and others to crack down on sites that spread disinformation. Less scrutinized has been the way tech companies continue to provide a mass platform for the most extreme sites among those that use false or misleading science to reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. Google's search page has become an especially contentious battleground between those who seek to educate the public on the established climate science and those who reject it. Not everyone who uses Google will see climate denial ads in their search results. Google's algorithms use search history and other data to tailor ads to the individual, something that is helping to create a highly partisan internet. A recent search for "climate change" or "global warming" from a Google account linked to a New York Times climate reporter did not return any denial ads. The top results were ads from environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund. But when the same reporter searched for those terms using private browsing mode, which helps mask identity information from Google's algorithms, the ad for DefyCCC popped up.
[...] The climate denialist ads are an example of how contrarian groups can use the internet's largest automated advertising systems to their advantage, gaming the system to find a mass platform for false or misleading claims.

3 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. Well played by PPH · · Score: 2, Funny

    The AGW zealots posted this right when everyone else is too busy shoveling global warming out of their driveways.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  2. Re:Someone said once... by davide+marney · · Score: 2, Funny

    "Google's search page has become an especially contentious battleground between those who seek to educate the public on the established climate science and those who reject it."

    I love the phrase, "established climate science". Feynman would have used it in a lecture.

    --
    "We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
  3. Re:Proven? by KeensMustard · · Score: 4, Funny
    Yes, it's all a vast chinese time travelling zombie conspiracy to take American jobs. There's an easily repeatable test that CO2 behaves exactly as described by Arrhenius, Fourier et, al, but the results are always faked. How? Chinese conspirators travel through time detecting instances where the experiment falsifies the observation of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and give the experimenters vaccines with mercury. Then the experimenters and their audiences are vulnerable to hypnotic suggestions, so that they think they saw direct evidence to the contrary. They've done this thousands of times.

    And the direct satellite evidence?

    Faked.

    The future chinese brought back transmitters from the future to send signals because there are no satellites because, the truth is, there is no space. Space, and the moon, are a vast liberal conspiracy. That's how the whole thing started: Fourier surmised that the reason the earth's temperature was so different from the moon's is because of the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but he would say that, because he is a zombie Knights Templar who is/was/will be in league with the time travelling chinese.