Companies train their new AI tools on data that was previously generated by an AI tool, which generates a feedback loop. Misinformation is amplified and becomes the mainstream. Next generations risk pairing facts w talking points of climate misinformation campaigns, creating a feedback loop and the possibility of a future where it's impossible to find accurate information about climate change- Watch: Should lying about climate change be illegal? Simon Clark Sep 2025 report- transcript followsTRANSCRIPT: This is a website called climatecossmos.com. At first glance, it appears to be a relatively normal website writing articles about climate change. But spend more than about 10 seconds on it and you notice that things are a bit odd. Their articles are very generic. They don't interview any experts. Their topics of articles are sometimes completely bizarre, sandwiching articles with information about climate change between those that push an anti-science agenda.
And then they published a piece called what the climate movement isn't telling you. And the piece read, "I'll help you write an article about what the climate movement isn't telling you with current facts and data. Let me search for the latest information." This website is AI slop. And this is Joey Grasturn, a journalist at DMOG, the investigative reporting site specializing in climate misinformation.
A few months ago, I learned of Climate Cosmos and passed it over to Joey to do some digging. And what he uncovered was a bizarre new form of climate misinformation. One that shows how the information landscape around climate change is in danger and raises questions about what we can and should do to safeguard that landscape.
1.15
To begin with, let's look at Climate Cosmos in a bit more detail. So, you'll have one piece that's like a listicle saying something like the top 10 snowiest cities in Hawaii or something nonsensey that's very obviously like there to draw clickbait and then like sort of every third or fourth article would be like the secret hidden costs of the green transition and then quote Bjorn Lomborg who is a kind of very prominent like anti-net zero voice.
So, we did more of a deep dive into the site, trying to look at who owns the site, who's behind it, you know, all these kinds of things. On the about page, they listed staff members, and we found this site maybe 4 months ago. Back then, the staff members had AI generated pictures and untraceable social media footprints. So, at that point, it was kind of clear, okay, maybe these aren't even real people. Things have changed. They seem to have aligned, swapped out these AI generated profiles for real people or what what we think of real people online.
We did some digging into who owns the companies. It turns out Climate Cosmos is part of a group called NextVision Media. This is a German startup media business. Next Vision Media don't just do climate content. They have a few AI generated sites. There were like home decoration sites. There was all kind of like really random seeming topics where you'd think, okay, if this is a a media business dedicated to climate content, why do they have a site called Home Harmony that's about how to like decorate your living room?
2.30
And all of these websites feature AI generated content. In fact, each website includes a disclaimer saying they will flag any use of AI. But that article that included the prompt to the LLM didn't have any such notice of AI generated content. But why? Like why bother setting up all these companies and churning out AI generated content about climate change? Normally the answer would be for advertising revenue. Put out a bunch of clickbait articles, monetize users coming to your website and you have a passive income source.
But Climate Cosmos and its sister sites don't run advertising. There is the possibility that they are tracking and selling the data of users that visit their sites, though we don't have any proof they're doing this. But there is another revenue stream and it is where this story gets more interesting.
3.18
MSN is one of the world's largest news aggregators. That means that it's a web service that collects news articles from places like the BBC, Reuters, Al Jazeera, whatever, and displays them all in one place. If you are running a Windows machine, MSN is the default news aggregator on your desktop. And they have a monetization scheme where adverts that are placed next to full articles displayed from a third party site get their revenue split between MSN and that third party site.
And Climate Cosmos gets its content pulled by MSN and pushed into the feeds of millions of people. The only reason we were seeing Climate Cosmos content is because it was coming up via MSN into our like kind of newswires. In order to be an MSN partner, you have to agree to abide by their content guidelines. One of which is to not post false information.
And we found one article that actually made up the name of both a research institute and its findings. But you know, since we have started pursuing the story, all of the content on MSN has been taken down. This was because, according to a spokesperson from Microsoft, the content violated its policies on misinformation. And so when Microsoft was made aware of the content, it was all pulled.
4.35
But via the massive reach of MSN, Climate Cosmos's content had escaped into the wild, where it was seized upon by an entirely different kind of actor in the climate information landscape. From the 1960s, it was very clear to scientists working in the fossil fuel industry that the fuels they were selling were leading to carbon building up in the atmosphere. In fact, in 1959, physicist Edward Teller warned them that this would lead to global warming and sea level rise. In 1965, President Johnson's science advisory committee published the Restoring the Quality of Our Environment Report.
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1965 report: “Carbon dioxide added to Earth's atmosphere by burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate, by 2000, the heat will possibly cause marked changes in the climate beyond local or even national efforts."
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President of the American Petrole Institute, Frank Ikard, said of the report, "One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth's atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000, the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in the climate beyond local or even national efforts." And he did not dispute the links between fossil fuels, CO2, and global warming.
In retrospect, it's kind of surprising that the fossil fuel industry didn't immediately start disputing those links and climate science as a whole. Because after all, if it became public knowledge that their products were threatening the climate stability that we all depend on, their industry could just cease to exist.
Perhaps it was because no government was seriously considering actual climate policy until the 1980s. And it was at this time when the existential threat to the industry became clear that the fossil fuel companies started fighting back with all the resources of the richest, most powerful industry the world has ever seen.
6.26
They financed think tanks and individual scientists who disputed the scientific consensus, saying variously that climate change wasn't real. real but not caused by the fossil fuel industry or real but actually beneficial to humanity. Their techniques included use of experts outside their fields of study, lobbying policy makers, portraying environmental campaigners as outofouch liberal elites, harassment and legal action against individual scientists, and accusing scientists of accepting money from industry while paying other scientists to produce studies that supported the industry's continued survival.
The fossil fuel industry was using a playbook to dispute the science that had been honed by previous industrial misinformation campaigns, notably by the tobacco industry when they disputed the science linking tobacco smoke and lung cancer. In fact, the fossil fuel industry used some of the same experts from that tobacco industry campaign.
I would highly encourage you to read Merchants of Doubt by Areskis and Conway, which is the authoritative account of how this playbook came to be. Though for more recent reporting, you can also read the Union of Concerned Scientists climate deception dossier or most recently Barbara Fries's Industrial Strength Denial.
The result was that from the 1980s, the climate information landscape became a battleground. On the one side, you had climate scientists and institutions taking observations, doing analysis, and projecting what kind of damage would occur to the environment if we continued burning fossil fuels. Victory for this side meant getting accurate information about climate change to the public and ultimately to politicians. The end goal being government policy to bring down carbon emissions.
But the fight was just about getting the information to the public.
Of course, on the other side of this battlefield, you had the fossil fuel industry and their various proxies who agreed on the fundamental science and that serious environmental damage would occur if we kept burning fossil fuels. But based on valuing profit and in the case of many of their proxies, a lack of government oversight, they fought to keep the public and politicians confused about and distrustful of climate science.
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The playbook to dispute the science had been honed by previous industrial misinformation campaigns, notably by the tobacco industry
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And in the 1980s and '90s and 2000s, they were successful. The consensus on climate change was muddied, the public unconvinced.
Of course, later we had breakthroughs like the Paris Agreement and the Inflation Reduction Act in the USA and the Climate Change Act in the UK. And you could be forgiven for thinking that, well, the war for climate information has been won by the scientists. The public now hears the scientific consensus. But while the scientists have definitely had the upper hand in the information war for the past couple of years, if you think that campaign groups partly financed by the fossil fuel industry and partly by those just ideologically opposed to regulations on businesses are a thing of the past, you would be sadly mistaken.
9.23
Groups like the Heartland Institute and C-fact are very much still around and very vocal, still trying to convince people that the basic science around climate change is unfounded and untrustworthy and definitely not something to base government policy on. And you know what those two groups that I mentioned both have in common? They've both cited or reprinted climate cosmos content, which I think is quite funny cuz it maybe shows the editorial integrity of the anti-climate groups. Their work is supporting anti-climate voices in their own kind of in their own push.
The AI generated content of climate cosmos has provided fuel to the targeted misinformation campaigns against climate action. These articles are reinforcements in the renewed fight against accurate information about the climate which raises the possibility that this is what the people behind climate cosmos wanted to do all along. Astro turfing that is giving the oppression of grassroots activism but it's actually all artificial dissent within the climate movement.
10.30
Now as part of the article that Joey wrote about this investigation which is linked below by the way [heere] he reached out to the three people he could confirm were actually real and not AI generated associated with the site and this is what Matias Binda director of Climate Cosmos had to say.
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Possibility of a near future where it is almost impossible to find accurate information about climate change
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We have no interest in publishing or amplifying misinformation. The articles you referenced were taken offline as part of our ongoing quality review and we are tightening our internal checks to ensure every author, biography, citation, and data point is fully verifiable before publication. And indeed, all the articles that we've referenced so far in this video are only accessible through the Wayback Machine.
After Joey reached out to Climate Cosmos, all of their climate content and the content from its sister sites disappeared from MSN, which you might take to mean that they've learned their lesson and will now be more careful in their use of AI. But since Joey reached out to them, they have posted more articles in the same vein, such as this one, highlighting the views of repeatedly disproven climate skeptics Richard Linden and John Christie. And they now have a YouTube channel.
11.30
Hopefully, I don't need to tell you that this is also AI slop. I mean, just look2 at how frequently they're releasing videos and everything. As it stands, we really don't know what the motivations behind Climate Cosmos are. The best clue we have is looking at one of the other definitely real people involved. Yan Otter. Otter, who owns a third of the business, has repeatedly posted on social media about the role of AI agents in generating wealth and has posted political content, including from Elon Musk. He also posts on his LinkedIn page about the watch time and views received by his various publications.
As far as we can tell, he doesn't have a strong stance on climate action one way or another. Which leads me to believe that the people behind Climate Cosmos are not anti-science, climate misinformation activists, but tech bros trying to make money with AI. And how harmful can that be?
12.35
What the arrival of LLM has done is it's made the cost of producing low quality explainer content without interview partners and without proper fact checking that's very easy now. What's telling I think about the point we're at now is at least we can tell this stuff as AI generated for the moment. But imagine this situation in 5 or 10 years' time when someone who works for a chatbot company's watch this video even or taken on back on board our feedback. Then I think we might be in real trouble when it comes to climate integrity and making sure that the information that people read about climate change is fact checked and like legitimate and accurate. It does not bode well for the future of journalism.
Climate Cosmos is not alone. There are increasing examples of AI generated content within the climate information space being used both by those explicitly opposed to climate action and those who are just seeking to profit from advertising revenue on sensationalist articles that get clicks because climate change is a hot topic. No pun intended.
13.33
Climate Cosmos may seem harmless enough, but what they are doing is, to quote Steve Bannon, flooding the zone, just pumping out content, making it harder for the public to find accurate information about climate change written by experts.
Intention doesn't matter. The zone is being flooded with this mediocre, confusing, not fact checked content. ,4 and that does crowd out good accurate climate content like that from Carbon Brief or you know any of the thousands of good pieces of climate science and journalism that are being done all the time.
And this problem is only going to get much worse. Not just because AI content can be churned out much faster than expert-driven factchecked content, but because of the influence of AI generated content on the next generation of generative AI tools.
You see, the way that AI tools are trained is through passing vast amounts of data and recognizing patterns in it. In the case of a large language model, that means being fed a lot of text. And historically that has come from books, transcripts of videos, and of course websites, not all of which were stolen for this purpose. But as the training data sets used to create new large language models get larger and larger, AI companies are facing the possibility of running out of new data to steal. And this paper from Nature estimates that this could happen as soon as 2028.
To get around this, companies are increasingly training their new AI tools on data that was previously generated by an AI tool. Combined with the fact that high quality training data, such as from academic journals or rigorous reporting, is often behind a pay wall or is on a website that has a robots.txt file that blocks AI crawlers. The training data used to create next generation models is increasingly formed of low quality SEO optimized and often AI generated content.
And this generates a feedback loop where misinformation can be amplified and become the mainstream. In a climate context, that means that next generation LLMs risk pairing the talking points of climate skeptic groups or fossil fuel misinformation campaigns.
15.47
In fact, this is one possible motivation behind climate cosmos. Creating large volumes of climate skeptic talking points by just asking AI tools to churn them out such that it will form a larger basis of the training data sets used to create future large language models. It's what we call LLM grooming. I should say though that we have no evidence that this is what Climate Cosmos is doing. It's just a possibility. We still don't know their actual motivations.
Regardless, the information landscape around climate change is being flooded by AI slop. Slop that is creating a feedback loop, intensifying the misinformation present in the tools used to create additional content.
And scientists aren't just contending with AI slop. They are still facing intentional misinformation of varying degrees of severity, some straight-up denial of the basic science, and increasingly greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry.
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Greenwashing: misleading the public into believing that a company or other entity is doing more to protect the environment than they really are, delaying credible action on climate change.
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16.40
Greenwashing is defined by the United Nations as misleading the public into believing that a company or other entity is doing more to protect the environment than they really are, delaying credible action on climate change. This can be claiming to be on track to net zero while not actually having a plan to do so, touting unrealistic or unproven solutions, or emphasizing one small clean part of their operations while ignoring the polluting majority. And this is all in addition to the generic rehabilitation of their image that's being attempted through, for example, sponsoring sports to the tune of 4 billion pounds. And this has the effect of making the public believe that fossil fuel companies are not the root cause of the problem. They're dynamic companies leading us into the future and not in fact expanding their traditional operations and locking in further emissions.
Greenwashing is another form of misinformation, just a more subtle one that now appears on the climate information battlefield. But it is not the most significant change to that battlefield in recent years. When on the campaign trail, Donald Trump was associated with a set of policies known as Project 2025, published by the Right-Wing Heritage Foundation. These policies included mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, criminalizing abortion, and consolidating power in the executive branch in order to create an authoritarian Christian nationalist government.
Trump distanced himself from these extreme policies while campaigning. But within hours of winning the 2024 election, his allies revealed that Project 2025 was indeed the agenda of the new government. And Project 2025 had a lot to say about climate change. Notably, it pledged to slash the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department's renewable energy offices and block the expansion of the American grid with clean technologies.
And since Trump was elected, all of these things have happened. But what I think has gone beyond even the most pessimistic observer's fears is this administration's explicit attack on the scientific establishment. Funding for the Observatory in Hawaii, source of the data in the iconic Keeling curve of CO2 concentrations, has been cut. Funding for orbiting carbon observatories monitoring CO2 emissions, has been cut, quote, to align with the president's agenda and budget priorities. Meanwhile, the Department for Defense announced it will no longer share its satellite data with scientists, including hurricane forecasters. References to climate change on government websites have been purged, and almost all staff working on climate.gov gov were fired. Hundreds of employees have been terminated at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration with the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research having almost 3/4 of its budget removed, which will quote eliminate all funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes being activities that quote are misaligned with the president's agenda and the express will of the American people.
19.41
And last month, the administration put out a critical assessment of climate science to justify these actions written by five handpicked climate skeptics. It contains over a 100 errors in its 140 pages, ranging from straight up lies to egregious misrepresentation of actual research. The polemic language of project 2025 and thus now the Trump administration especially in this new8 report exactly mirrors that of early fossil fuel propaganda disputing the basic science, downplaying the risks of climate change, and denouncing those who want to reduce emissions as extremists. And this is because the Heritage Foundation has received direct funding from the fossil fuel industry and indirectly from the billionaires who made their fortunes in the fossil fuel industry.
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Trump administration put out a Critical Assessment of Climate Science written by five handpicked climate skeptics with over a 100 errors in its 140 pages, from straight up lies to egregious misrepresentation of research.
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20.44
The US government is currently sabotaging those scientists who are trying to get information out to the public. It is acting as another very powerful proxy of the fossil fuel industry. Between their gutting of the output of scientists, new forms of misinformation from the fossil fuel industry, and the ever multiplying flood of AI slop content, we face the very real possibility of a near future where it is almost impossible to find accurate information about climate change, its root causes, the latest observations of temperature or carbon emissions, and which solutions will actually help the situation.
The information battlefield will have been lost. The public will not be informed of the environmental disaster unfolding around them, let alone why it is happening or what they can do about it. The current best guess for global warming by 2100 is 2.7° C. That's based on current actions, not projecting anything into the future. And at that level of warming, it is really quite likely that some climate systems will go through tipping points. That is, changing irreversibly on human time scales to some new state. That's the natural world is not adapted to.
22.02
It is not an exaggeration to say that. And I've said in goodness knows how many videos now, it doesn't have to be this way. We know which policies and which technologies will work in bringing down emissions. That same research group that predicts 2.7° by 2100 also says that 1.9° by 2100 is entirely within our reach. Yet the fundamental prerequisite for action to limit climate change, access to information about climate change, is under threat, crowded out by easy to produce slop that will only be fed more and more misinformation and obscured or cut off at the source by politicians captured by the industry who have the most to lose from climate action.
And this isn't some debate about the finer points of the science or interpretation. On the one side of this information battlefield, you have scientists taking observations and doing analysis. The other side are lying. And the lies carefully or carelessly wielded by those on this battlefield have devastating consequences.
Lies that condemn entire species to extinction.
Lies that create famines.
Lies that are already killing people and will kill far more in the years to come.
I started this video with the story about Climate Cosmos because there's something about that story that just feels irresponsible. Like it, it feels wrong that people can do this. And when in a society we encounter behavior that feels wrong or irresponsible or especially dangerous, we include that behavior in our laws. We make it illegal to do that thing.
Intentionally lying about climate change is dangerous. It feels irresponsible and wrong. I think it should be illegal. And I'm not the only one.
That's also the opinion of UN special reporter Professor Elisa Morera, who earlier this summer published a report recommending, among other things, criminalization of misinformation and greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry. But what may surprise you is her reasoning behind this. It's nothing to do with the environmental impacts.
24.20
EM: Climate disinformation leads to a separate series of human rights impacts, infringing our human right to information, to benefit from science, to be able to participate in decision making. But it also undermines our human rights in terms of impeding public action to better protect us, undermining, you know, what could have been more effective protection of our human rights.
SC: And this may well be the foundation for groundbreaking new law….
25.34
So my report was really to clarify how international han rights law states have obligations to phase out fossil fuels production and use. And the idea was to bring together different areas of evidence. So climate science but also health science telling us that fossil fuels harm every organ in our body. also looking at how plastics which is a product related to fossil fuels also harm us in so many ways across generations. And the key clarifications in the report is that states must in different timelines phase out fossil fuels as an obligation to protect our human rights. And finally, you know, defossilize knowledge. So really tackle both the causes and the results of those decades of climate disinformation; because that in itself impedes progress at the pace we need to prevent even more catastrophic impacts of climate change on our lives and well-being.
26,35
SC: Legal challenges to stop climate change have historically not been terribly successful. I mean clearly and one of the reasons for this is that historically they have focused on the environmental harms caused by polluters. The high watermark for such legal action actually just occurred a few weeks ago when the International Court of Justice delivered a unanimous advisory opinion, one of only five unanimous opinions in 88 years, that countries have obligations under general international law to prevent significant harm to the environment and that in principle countries can be held liable for climate damages, including that inflicted by private corporations within a country.
This is a landmark moment. It is almost certainly going to go in a lot of future history textbooks, but it's still an advisory opinion. The ICJ has huge sway and its opinions are referred to when domestic courts like here in the UK make their rulings, but this opinion is not going to stop fossil fuel producers from selling their products or more relevantly creating misinformation.
In order for that to happen, a law would need to go on the books somewhere significant. And we'll talk about where that might be in the next section that would explicitly criminalize the creation of misinformation about climate change and have clear penalties for violations.
Professor Mulggera in her report actually recommends several activities for criminalization. misinformation and misrepresentation by the fossil fuel industry, including failure to disclose corporate lobbying activities and the amplification of disinformation and misinformation created by the fossil fuel industry by media and advertising firms.
28.15
I hope the argument for this has been made clear by now. Climate misinformation produces clear and demonstrable harms both to the environment and to us and our human rights. But the obvious counterargent is, what about my freedom of speech? Why can't I say what I want even though I know that something is inaccurate?
I mean it is essential to protect freedom of speech and in all my work I've always mentioned how important it is to have as open conversations as possible. Now the question here is different if this is a conduct that's been repeated and that over time has led to the protection of a vested interest which is intrinsically opposite to the protection of a public good. I mean climate change has been recognized as structural violence against children for instance by the UN committee on children's rights and incitation to violence is for instance one of the very few exceptions that has been recognized to freedom of expression.
[KE: 31,00 transcript ends- More discussion takes place of AI and human rights attached to climate law through end of video. More to come shortly]
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