UK Observer: April 8, 2025
Hot Air: methodology
The main objectives of the Hot Air project were to
- build a list of most influential online actors disseminating climate change counter-narratives through social media; and
- identify the types of claims and narratives being disseminated.
We identified 274 online actors and 129,334 posts from those actors which we collated into the Hot Air tool. Our research encompassed X, YouTube, TikTok and various news websites and blogs that we identified as frequently disseminating climate change counter-narratives.
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News and blogs
Through desk research we identified ten online publications as potentially relevant:
- Daily Mail
- Daily Sceptic
- Climate Depot
- CO2 Coalition
- Judith Curry’s blog
- Net Zero Watch
- The Epoch Times
- The Heartland Institute
- Spiked Online
- Watts Up With That
- Wind Watch
These online publications were among the most shared domains in the network of accounts that we had initially identified on X. Most of these websites were scraped integrally, meaning all articles published in the time window were collected.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/a-british-media-outlet-wants-to-censor
Who’s funding the effort? A company backed by Al Gore’s investment firm.
By Robert Bryce
Last month, a new media outlet called Tortoise Media launched a database called “Hot Air,” which it claims is “making sense of climate misinformation.” The database includes “274 online actors,” a group that includes David Turver, Roger Pielke Jr., Bjorn Lomborg, Jordan Peterson, Alex Epstein, Tom Nelson, me, and many others who are committing the sin of “frequently disseminating climate change counter-narratives.”
How dare me – or anyone else – provide a counter narrative to the orthodoxy around energy and climate! But here’s the real reason for the database: Tortoise says that “pressure on platforms to filter out misinformation has given way to an online ecosystem that favors free speech — sometimes at the expense of leaving falsehoods unchecked and allowing conspiracy theories to become widespread.”
What a load of flaccid piffle.
Let’s be clear: Tortoise, an online outlet based in the UK, is saying there’s too much free speech, and thus, it’s tacitly endorsing censorship for people who don’t toe the line on the official climate narrative. Of course, numerous climate NGOs, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund, claim that they, too, are fighting “climate misinformation.” EDF has even created what it calls the “anti-misinformation brigade.”
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