“Global warming is the greatest scam in history.” Denialist headlines like this one litter the internet, confusing the public and frustrating climate scientists. Scientists are fighting back. There is Climate Feedback, an internet tool that lets climate scientists review journalists’ reports on the subject and give each story a credibility score. The system uses a web annotation browser extension called Hypothesis to enable an invited group of climate scientists to comment on words, sentences or data points within media stories. For example, one Forbes article headlined “Updated NASA Data: Global Warming Not Causing Any Polar Ice Retreat” has 33 comments from nine scientists who have given it the lowest possible credibility score.

In addition there is email fact-checker LazyTruth and web page annotation tool Truth Goggles Efforts are being made to encourage Google to take these annotations into account when ranking search results so that initiatives like Climate Feedback make more impact. Google itself is testing a model that assesses the trustworthiness of web content, and scientists are launching a Kickstarter campaign next month to recruit more climate scientists to comment on climate change deniers and to develop a system for scoring the overall credibility of a publication’s climate coverage. (Olivia Solon)

Lies travel round the globe while truth is still putting its boots on. Where do the deniers think all the gunk we produce goes? Some of it goes into the oceans, yes, but the rest? Do they think it drifts off to the Moon, or Venus. If you have been alive and awake these last twenty years the change in the climate it obvious, and the muck in the air is equally so. It probably doesn’t help to talk about devious plots, but one has to assume that some of the denial comes out of ignorance and the rest is paid for by interested parties. We ought to erect a memorial to the deniers in granite, listing their names, so that future generations will know who made coping with the climate so hard.