Why Has the Daily Sceptic Been Put on Tortoise Media’s Climate Naughty List?
by Ben Pile 12 April 2025 10:30 AM
On Tuesday, slow news website Tortoise – which recently acquired the Observer – launched an “interactive database and visualisation tool highlighting the volume of online misinformation surrounding climate change” called ‘Hot Air’. Over the ensuing 48 hours, and after more than 13,000 views, a whopping 26 people liked the project’s inaugural Tweet, and a further seven shared it. But despite such seismic impact, Hot Air is neither the first of its kind and it probably won’t be the last either. And that’s because, no matter how facile an idea is, there is so much Green Blob cash available to fake news and fake research outfits that the movement and its adherents have lost any capacity for reason.
Tortoise boast that Hot Air has been developed with an outfit called “C3DS” based at the University of Exeter – which is also home to the ‘Greenpeace Research Laboratories’, or ‘science unit’, the origin of much fake news. The Centre for Climate Communication and Data Science, or C3DS, claims to “improve strategic communications to deliver meaningful action on climate change”, which it supports with “AI and social science research”.
One of the observations I’ve made of such outfits that now litter UK campuses is that their ideology, and often their corporate benefactors’ names, are written on their doors, and that is manifestly a problem for ‘knowledge producers’ and so-called ‘scholarship’. One of the conceits of academia, perhaps now outmoded, is that the academy was a forum for open debate. But such exclusionary statements aren’t merely barriers to objectivity. An organisation that intends to work to “improve strategic communications” is a communications outfit, not an academic research outfit.
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/04/12/why-has-the-daily-sceptic-been-put-on-tortoise-medias-climate-naughty-list/
