Friday, September 2, 2016

Watts Up With YouTube Search Engine?


I've long been bothered by the proliferation of climate science contrarian videos on YouTube.  There's something obscene about it, but what can be done?
  
Then, this evening I noticed something that seems over the top.  I was searching for an old greenman3610 video and went to YouTube's search engine and typed in “Delingpole climate contrarian - greenman3610” and this is the search result I got.

Rather than taking me to Greenman3610 videos, YouTube, Google, someone else, rerouted me to a slew of Heartland Institute's dirty tricks videos. 

Try it to see what happens on your computer, share your results if you want.

I wonder if anyone can explain how that works and why YouTube or Google does, or allows, such rerouting?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting one, CC. I thought your search string might have been too complex for YouTube to parse, so I simplified it to:

Delingpole greenman3610

But even with that, almost half the links take me to contrarian sites. Strangely enough, Google fares a lot better with your original search spec. But Google own YouTube now, so you would expect better of YouTube. Go figure.

citizenschallenge said...

Thanks for sharing metzomagic.
It's disturbing, isn't it.

D.C.Petterson said...

I've noticed a debating tactic Steele often uses. He'll pick some almost-but-not-quite unrelated detail, find a paper about it, quote mine that paper for misleading and out-of-context passages, and then demand a response. His intent is clearly to distract into minutia rather than address whatever topic is at hand.

As one example, in a discussion of AGW-driven changes to the Greenland ice sheet, he found a paper dealing with the advance and retreat of one glacier in Greenland. The glacier had retreated a few thousand years ago (Steele didn't fail to note there were no human-produced greenhouse gasses then), and has since grown. It has, in the last few years, again begun to decline.

The point of the paper was to investigate the advance and retreat of the glacier, and the interaction of local conditions with what climate models were saying about the state of the climate back then. The paper concluded by saying there should be further assessment of both the proxy data on local temperatures, and the estimates of CO2 climate sensitivity in current global climate models.

Jim's take was that the authors of the paper used the actions of this glacier to show that current climate models were wrong and needed to be reassessed.

The paper explicitly pointed out that they were studying changes prior to the anthropogenic warming that has happened since the period they were studying. Jim claimed the authors were forced by the editors at Nature to insert that phrase, because editors "enforce" (his word) a policy of supporting AGW in any climate-related paper they publish.

His point seemed to be that since the particular glacier in question had been affected by local conditions, that means local conditions are all we should be looking at. Since the glacier advanced and retreated thousands of years ago, we must thoroughly understand all "natural" local changes before we can even consider any speculative effects due to CO2.

(I put "natural" in quotes, because apparently he thinks the climate has no "natural" response to changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration.)

Anyway, this deflect served to alter the conversation to something other than the documented effects that climate change is having on the Greenland ice sheet as a whole.

Further, Steele frequently goes on about "local climate sensitivity". If a "region" has exhibited cooling (or even insufficient warming) at any time in the last hundred years or so, he says that must mean the region is not reacting to higher atmospheric CO2 concentration, and so the region's sensitivity to CO2 must be low. He will not acknowledge that "climate sensitivity" is a global measure. All climate, he insists, is local.

He also claims that in order for an observed local effect to be attributable to higher human-produced atmospheric CO2, the effect in question has to be greater than any previously-observed "natural" effect. It is as if in order to think a tire has gone flat because someone has slashed it with a knife, it has to be flatter than any previous tire ever got by running over a nail.

D.C.Petterson said...

I think I left my previous comment on the wrong thread. Sorry about that.

I've also noticed that Google searches for any topic with political implications tend to turn up a plethora of conservative results. It's hard to find results from any other perspective.