Channel Hunt: 10 Ways to Present Climate Change Science on YouTube

GenR has selected ten YouTube Climate Change channels to demonstrate different styles of presentation of scientific research on Climate Change to YouTube audiences. In a recent interview featured on GenR with the researcher Joachim Allgaier ‘YouTube — Fix Your AI for Climate Change! An Invitation to an Open Dialogue’ (Allgaier and Worthington 2019) the recommendation was made to scientists working in fields related to climate change to post videos about their research on YouTube to ensure the voice of science is heard on this significant communications platform. To help scientists get to grips with how to engage with YouTube audiences GenR is offering up this varied selection of example climate change science channels.

Channel Hunt has been used in the title to refer to the subject of Joachim Allgaier’s research (Allgaier 2019) in that YouTube is being strategically gamed by climate change deniers to the extent that search results related to climate change show an almost 50/50 ratio of science versus anti-science content. To add to this strategic gaming of YouTube the platform itself is not helping with this contradictory situation  by providing a compromised search engine that is in need of deep repair — it returns search results that are contra to the search terms, offers no public catalog of videos and channels, and doesn’t allow searches/filtering on tags, etc. It is quite plain to see that if you presented YouTube’s current search features as a set of features and no bugs for designing a new search engine you would get laughed out of the room. Peter Kraker the founder of Open Knowledge Maps has highlighted similar problems of underperforming Google products in use in scholarly communications, see ‘Illuminating Dark Knowledge’ (Kraker 2018) also on GenR. It is shocking to see the results of what Peter covers in his article impacting climate science, in that if you search for climate change on Google Scholar you will likely get anti-science content in the results, (Allgaier and Worthington 2019) which shows the severity of the problem.

As a modest contribution to understanding how researchers can represent their work on YouTube and to get a view on what Climate Science content and channels are on YouTube you are invited to add to our GenR Climate Change YouTube Channel Catalog. You can add to the channel listing by posting to our collaborative YouTube Playlist (note: we are using a playlist of videos as a stand-in for a channel lists as YouTube does offer channel lists) or/and to the open Zotero Group Collection.

The List: 10 Ways to Present Climate Change Science on YouTube

1. ‘NASA Goddard’, NASA, 2006. https://www.youtube.com/user/NASAexplorer.

2. ‘Our Changing Climate’, standard.tv, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNXvxXpDJXp-mZu3pFMzYHQ.

3. ‘Zentouro’, 2007. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAz17eZxF5tD7vNOEVgegKg.

4. ‘Just Have a Think’, Dave Borlace, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRBwLPbXGsI2cJe9W1zfSjQ/featured.

5. ‘Max-Planck-Institut Für Chemie’, MPIC, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/user/mpichemie.

6. ‘Climate Engineering Conferences: Critical Global Discussions’,IASS Potsdam, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg4cyMKncP4HiQPwnjNMotQ.

7. ‘MIT Climate’, MIT, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCenSARsycBiZwoO5UvwVJ6w/about.

8. ‘ClimateAdam’, Adam Levy, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/user/ClimateAdam.

9. ‘Climate State’, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/user/ClimateState.

10. ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’, IPCC, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/user/IPCCGeneva.

References

Allgaier, Joachim, and Simon Worthington. ‘YouTube — Fix Your AI for Climate Change! An Invitation to an Open Dialogue’. Text. Generation Research (blog), 11 November 2019. https://doi.org/10.25815/xc8d-hg97.

Allgaier, Joachim. ‘Science and Environmental Communication on YouTube: Strategically Distorted Communications in Online Videos on Climate Change and Climate Engineering’. Frontiers in Communication 4 (2019). https://doi.org/10/gf8rst.

Kraker, Peter. ‘Illuminating Dark Knowledge’. Text. Generation Research (blog), 3 December 2018. https://doi.org/10.25815/FN1Q-KC98.