Report Reveals the Climate Alarmists’ Propaganda Machine Is No Match for A Small Group of Honest Scientists and Academics
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (“ISD”), a Gates/Soros-funded think tank, has been engaged in monitoring those who question or contradict their “climate change” narrative.
Their 115-page report titled ‘Deny, Deceive, Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 & Beyond’ was published on 9 June 2022 and reads more like an admission their climate alarmist propaganda has failed and, as we previously wrote, the real experts are restoring the scientific definition of “climate change.”
„In [our report’s] executive summary we outline the most prominent discourses identified before, during and after COP26. … This report – ‘Deny, Deceive, Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 and Beyond’ – is a collective effort to quantify the problem and establish concrete responses for the months and years ahead. Produced by ISD, CASM Technology and the Climate Action Against Disinformation alliance (CAAD), it is a data-driven examination of the landscape, actors, systems and approaches that are combining to prevent action on climate. Looking ahead, we have outlined recommendations for governments, multilateral bodies, tech platforms and the media in addressing this threat online.” – Deny, Deceive, Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 & Beyond – Summary, ISD, 9 June 2022
Contributors to ISD’s report were the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (“CASM”) Technology, Conscious Advertising Network (“CAN”), Climate Nexus, Eco-Bot.Net, Friends of the Earth, Purpose, Reset Australia and Stop Funding Heat. With special acknowledgements to Paula Matlach, Kata Balint, Cecile Simmons, Sara Bundzten and Melanie Smith for their efforts in ISD’s climate “War Room.”
Why do they need a “War Room” to defend their “climate change”? Is their version of “climate change” so easily deconstructed that they must be prepared to go to “war” to defend it?
ISD Report, Our Propaganda Has Failed
What follows are extracts from the 16-page executive summary of ISD’s report. The full 155-page report can be read HERE.
Climate mis- and disinformation on social media appear to outperform verified content, even when the latter is promoted by platforms themselves, ISD’s report admits.
ISD then helpfully provides some useful resources that we may not yet be aware of in our own quest for the truth about climate change. The full report details many more resources you may find useful – you may even find one of your posts was found worthy of a mention.
„From 31 October – 12 November 2021, ISD tracked posts produced by Facebook’s official Climate Science Centre and attempted to benchmark these against accounts with a track record of climate scepticism, such as Breitbart London, Spiked Online, Net Zero Watch, GB News and the Heartland Institute.
Not only did the latter group outmatch the Climate Science Centre in volume and frequency of posts (449 versus 188 that matched climate-related keywords), but they continually gained more traction and engagement on such content (average of ~92,000 interactions versus ~7,500).” – Deny, Deceive Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 & Beyond, ISD, page 5
The report identifies that many of the people “super-spreading climate misinformation” came from scientific or academic backgrounds:
„Network analysis by Graphika of 16 accounts ‘super-spreading’ climate misinformation on Twitter revealed 13 sub-groups, largely converging around anti-science and conspiracy communities in key countries (US, UK, Canada). Many influencers in this space commonly come from scientific or academic backgrounds and some were previously involved in the green movement.
From 25 October to 21 November 2021, tweets and quote tweets from the 16 accounts referenced above amassed a total 507,000 likes and retweets (“interactions”) on climate narratives alone1. This includes individuals such as Michael Shellenberger, John Stossel, Bjorn Lomborg and Patrick Moore.” – Deny, Deceive Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 & Beyond, Executive Summary ISD, pages 5 and 6
Shellenberger is a bestselling author and a leading energy expert who’s been called an “environmental guru,” “climate guru,” “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy,” and “high priest” of the pro-human environmental movement.
ISD singles out a particular tweet by Shellenberger in their report. One tweet out of a thread of more than 50:
„For example, Michael Shellenberger tweeted a graphic entitled ‘Woke Religion: A Taxonomy’ on November 11 2021, as COP26 negotiations were reaching their climax. The taxonomy was co-authored with academic Peter Boghossian and positions climate change alongside other contentious issues such as racism, gender identity, crime and mental illness … the taxonomy cites claims such as ‘The Earth’s climate was safer in the past’, ‘We can power the world with renewables’ and ‘Prosperity doesn’t depend on high energy use’.” – Deny, Deceive Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 & Beyond, Executive Summary, ISD, page 5
You can read the article on Shellenberger’s Substack HERE.
ISD’s report expresses dissatisfaction at the ineffectiveness of “fact-checkers”:
“Many of the largest tech companies tout their partnership with ‘independent, third-party’ fact-checkers, certified via bodies like the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN), to identify, review and take action on questionable content. Our analysts found some instances where fact-checking labels had been applied … However, beyond this lowest-tier measure, we found little evidence of any enforcement against known disinformers, even during critical moments like a global climate summit or extreme weather event.” – Deny, Deceive Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 & Beyond, Executive Summary, ISD, page 6
If they were unhappy with fact-checkers ability to curb public debate, ISD’s report is even more dissatisfied with corporate media, accusing them of amplifying climate-sceptic views:
“Coverage across radio, print and broadcast media continues to amplify and legitimise climate-sceptic views, and in turn provide ostensibly ‘credible’ reference points for pundits and high-traction accounts on social media. Among the network described above, outlets such as The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal and Sky News Australia served as key content hubs.” – Deny, Deceive Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 & Beyond, Executive Summary, ISD, page 6
“The question we must ask,” the authors of the report wrote, “is how and why such content continues to gain traction across social media platforms, when tech companies allege their strong support for climate action. At present, this question is impossible to answer for the climate sector.”
Despite the climate alarmists’ network of advertisers, agencies, technology providers and civil society groups, deployment of “fact-checkers,” censorship, support from governments and multinational agencies, and all their funding – it seems a group of 16 “super-spreaders” are succeeding in exposing the official narrative climate change scam and all but defeating the propagandists.
But we should not get complacent just yet. Beginning on page 11 of the executive summary, the report’s authors have over 6 pages of recommendations for governments, regulators and technology companies. These could give us some indication of what future steps climate alarmists may take in an attempt to ensure their unscientific fear-mongering narrative is the only voice the public gets to hear.
ISD’s Contributors and Funders
“ISD is an independent organisation that upholds the highest ethical standards. Our independence guarantees us the freedom and responsibility to work towards our charitable objectives in a way which aligns with our guiding principles (Integrity, Collaboration, Agility, Courage). We do not undertake work, pursue external partnerships or work with funders that could undermine ISD’s credibility, reputation and impartiality, or compromise the integrity or quality of our work,” their website claims.
So how independent are they? A quick view of ISD’s partners, funders, government and multilateral organisations and “private sector” – which includes the usual censorship organisations: Audible, Facebook, GIFCT, Google, Jigsaw, Microsoft, Spotify and YouTube – demonstrates they are not independent unless they mean independent to the public. And their activities are a far cry from ethical. Anyone aware of the nefarious activities of Bill Gates and George Soros will also realise that ISD accepting funds from them ruins their “credibility, reputation and impartiality.”
Contributor Centre for the Analysis of Social Media Technology (“CASM”)
CASM claims they are confronting “online harms.” First on the list of “harms” is “climate disinformation”:
One of the specified areas of CASM’s work is to target “global conversations on climate action for systematic manipulation” using various technologies, one such technology is called “Beam”:
“With the ISD, CASM has developed a counter-disinformation technology called Beam. It currently operates across six social media platforms, multiple news aggregators, hundreds of websites and forums and in over a dozen languages, including French, German, Italian, Arabic, Dhivehi, Somali and Spanish. It can ingest any form of text and new sources are constantly added.”
Who decides what information is considered disinformation? There’s no indication on CASM’s website as to how or who funds them. However, who they have partnered with may offer clues as to who is influencing their selection of “disinformation”.
As well as ISD and other contributors to ISD’s report – namely, Stop Funding Heat and Climate Nexus – CASM’s partners include News UK, BBC Monitoring and the UK Cabinet Office who together have, amongst other achievements, “onboarded” 15 climate organisations and provided a “real-time climate disinformation war room during COP26.”
News UK is a wholly owned subsidiary of the American mass media conglomerate News Corp. It is the publisher of The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun newspapers.
BBC Monitoring is a division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (“BBC”) which monitors, and reports on, mass media worldwide using open-source intelligence.
Contributor Conscious Advertising Network (“CAN”)
CAN is a UK-based international coalition of over 150 advertisers, agencies, technology providers and civil society groups.
Again, who decides what is misinformation?
“We have big news,” CAN announced in an undated statement but what would appear to be published in 2020, “we’ve received funding from two different funders, to continue our work, including on misinformation, hate, climate change, and platform governance.”
Their two new funders are the Quadrature Climate Foundation, which builds fully-automated technology to predict and trade all liquid electronic financial markets, and the European Climate Foundation which is “paving the way for a net-zero world.”
One of the European Climate Foundation’s funders is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and another is Bloomberg Philanthropies. Both funders’ names will be familiar to those who have been following the antics and visions of the World Economic Forum and other proponents of Agenda 2030, the Fourth Industrial Revolution or any other name their plan is given.
CAN’s website proudly states its achievements which include:
“Following 18 months of work with the United National [yes, ‘National’ not ‘Nations’] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, CAN and a coalition of other organisations, in 2021 Google announced a new monetisation policy. For the first time, misinformation that undermines the existence of climate change is no longer monetised through advertising.
“In 2021, CAN joined a global coalition of 20+ leading climate and anti-disinformation organisations demanding robust, coordinated and proactive strategies to deal with the scale of the threat of climate misinformation and disinformation. Our joint efforts led to the creation of a universal definition of climate misinformation.”
It would be interesting to know the names of the 20+ organisations that make up the “global coalition” but there are next to no references to this coalition on the internet, let alone a list of the organisations that have joined. However, one reference may go some way to solving the mystery as to which organisations are responsible for creating “a universal definition of climate misinformation.”
Branch republished an open letter and stated: “The Climate Disinformation Coalition, along with fourteen other climate organisations, penned this open letter sent on October 15th to demand concrete policy shifts from Big Tech leadership.”
Branch lists fourteen signatories at the end, presumably these are the “other climate organisations.” These include four organisations that have already been named in relation to the subject matter of this article – ISD and three of the contributors to its report: Friends of the Earth, Eco-Bot.net and Stop Funding Heat.
But there is no indication of which organisations make up the Climate Disinformation Coalition.
The original open letter is published on CAN’s website. In their article, Branch thanked “Julia Masters, Campaign Manager with Climate Disinformation Coalition, for the support in re-publishing the letter.” Julia Masters is described as “Manager, Climate Disinformation Coalition, Campaign at Climate Nexus” on ZoomInfo. Climate Nexus was a contributor, along with CAN, to ISD’s report. Climate Nexus is also named as in partnership with CASM, the main contributor to ISD’s report.
We would be forgiven for suspecting that the Climate Disinformation Coalition consists of only CAN and Climate Nexus. And the “global coalition” referred to on CAN’s website are the signatories of their open letter which, at the time CAN updated its website, had 20+ signatories. It’s beginning to look rather incestuous – ISD’s report and the open letter are authored or supported by the same group of organisations. And the Climate Disinformation Coalition are from the same.
We could do a summary of the other contributors to ISD’s report, but taking a quick look at the first two clearly demonstrates a pattern – ISD’s determination of what is considered “disinformation” is, rather than being guided by science, determined by those who have a vested interest in keeping their “climate change” narrative, and only that narrative, in the public eye.
The United Nations Declares War on “Conspiracy Theories”
“In February 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) took an unprecedented step, citing mis- and disinformation and the ‘politicisation of science’ as key barriers to action. For the first time, a document accepted by all Member Governments stated that rhetoric from ‘vested economic and political interests… undermines climate science’,” ISD stated in the preamble to its report.
The IPCC is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations (“UN”) responsible for advancing knowledge on human-induced climate change. The IPCC has adopted and published “Principles Governing IPCC Work“, which states that the IPCC will assess: the risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts, and possible options for prevention. IPCC has a vested interest, as it would not otherwise exist, to ensure climate change is seen as human-induced.
The preamble to ISD’s report continues: “Drawing on research compiled over the past 18 months, and especially in the margins and aftermath of COP26, we have clear evidence of the challenge at hand.” ISD’s report was published in June 2022. The data was compiled starting from, say, December 2020/January 2021.
A few months earlier, in August 2020, the UN declared war on conspiracy theories, in UNESCO’s #ThinkBeforeSharing campaign, describing the rise of conspiracy thinking as “worrying and dangerous”, and providing the public with a toolkit to “prebunk” and “debunk” anybody who dares to suggest that world governments are anything but completely honest, upstanding and transparent. The UN also warns that George Soros, the Rothschilds and the State of Israel must not be linked to any “alleged conspiracies,” wrote News Punch.
To launch their campaign, the World Jewish Congress (“WJC”) released the promotional video below:
WJC launches digital resources to counter Covid-19 conspiracy theories, 17 August 2020 (2 mins)
UNESCO’s #ThinkBeforeSharing campaign contains all the elements that the UK government’s #TakeCareWithWhatYouShare campaign contains, and more. Are they working in “lockstep”?
Are we being conspiracy theorists merely asking that question? Or is the answer that it is, indeed, a conspiracy?
yogaesoteric
October 19, 2022