Unplugging from the Climate Matrix – Watts Up With That?

From Tilak’s Substack

Tilak Doshi

The world is trapped in a digital Matrix, not unlike the one depicted in the iconic 1999 film (The Matrix) where Morpheus offers Neo a choice: take the blue pill and remain in a comforting illusion or the red pill and confront the unsettling truth. The blue pill, in our case, is the dominant narrative on climate change, peddled relentlessly by mainstream media, tech giants like Google, social media sites like FaceBook and YouTube and artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT. This narrative — that man-made global warming, caused by fossil fuel use, is an imminent existential threat — has achieved near-total dominance, suffocating dissent and sidelining credible scientists who dare question it. Mainstream media and Big Tech’s search algorithms often constitute determining factors in shaping our perception of climate change.

To ‘red pill’ someone is to set him or her free from the manufactured climate consensus, to be open to contrarian views and, in the process, to restore science to its proper place as a field of sceptical inquiry, not ideology.

The Algorithmic Stranglehold on Truth

Dr Robert Epstein, a behavioural scientist, former editor of Psychology Today and Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Behavioural Research and Technology, is well known for his work on exposing Big Tech’s influence over voters’ thoughts and over elections. He has spent the last decade monitoring Google’s manipulation of newsfeeds, search results and YouTube suggestions. In 2019, he gave testimony to the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution on ‘Why Google Poses a Serious Threat to Democracy, and How to End That Threat’. In the testimony, he exposed the chilling extent of Google’s narrative dominance.

In a recent Tech Watch article, Epstein analysed 1,495 Google search results on climate change topics between January and September 2025. The findings are stark: 98% of results aligned with the climate alarmist narrative, 2% were neutral, and a stunning 0% offered a contrarian perspective. Even more troubling, the top three search results — those most likely to be clicked — uniformly promoted the alarmist view, regardless of the searcher’s political leanings. Whether you’re a liberal in New York, a conservative in Pennsylvania or an independent in Arizona, Google feeds you the same story: climate change is an imminent man-made catastrophe requiring urgent action.

I initiated a Google search under the ‘news’ category for this article (September 30th). I asked “are we facing a climate crisis” and the results are exactly as expected in Epstein’s work. The search results from the first page – beyond which most searchers do not read – are reproduced below. I list the source, date and text of the first sentence accompanying the source:

WWF-UK (two weeks ago): “Learn about the effects of climate change; The effects of climate change are likely to be some of the biggest environmental challenges our generation has ever faced.”

Global Witness (April 15th 2025): “UK households facing £3,000 climate damage costs this year: The costs of climate breakdown in the UK amount to an estimated £3000 per household over the course of this year, new research by Global…”

CEJIL (Center for Justice and International Law) (April 1st 2025): ‘Can International Justice Change the Course of the Climate Crisis?’

The Guardian(May 28th 2025): ‘World faces new danger of “economic denial” in climate fight, COP30 head says’

NASA (October 23rd 2024): “We already see effects scientists predicted, such as the loss of sea ice, melting glaciers and ice sheets, sea level rise, and more intense…”

United Nations (October 24th 2019): “The Climate Crisis – A Race We Can Win: Climate change is the defining crisis of our time and it is happening even more quickly than we feared. But we are far from powerless in the face of this…”

Greenpeace UK (April 15th 2021): “What are the solutions to climate change? Climate change is a threat to millions of lives. Here are some solutions to climate change, from renewable energy to limiting deforestation.”

Yale Climate Connections (October 30th 2024): “The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn: The 2024 ‘State of the climate’ report says climate scientists are more worried than ever and calls for ‘transformative science-based solutions across all…”

The Guardian (December 20th 2024): “The facts about a planet facing climate disaster are clear. Why won’t this Labour government face them? Labour seems gripped by a form of denialism. The danger is real and incremental change won’t avert it, says Jeremy Corbyn, independent MP…

UK Government (January 16th 2023): “Facing the fear of fear itself: the case for climate optimism: Speech on our role in tackling climate change by Sir James Bevan, Chief Executive of the Environment Agency.”

The list is neither an accident nor arbitrary. It fits the Google algorithm, reflecting the corporation’s Leftist-progressive worldview, and serves the climate industrial complex and its climate alarmist cause. It is also interesting to note that the science.nasa.gov website cited in the Google search results listed above still shows the same climate alarmist claptrap even now. This is despite President Trump having called the climate change movement a hoax since he ran his Presidential campaign in 2024 and most recently in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly.

Why this contradiction? The answer lies in the peculiar alchemy of American governance: a blend of institutional inertia, congressional guardrails, scientific independence and the sheer logistical drag of updating federal websites.

I next turned to ‘AI Mode’ in the Google Search options, and this is the first couple of sentences that Google AI spits out:

Yes, based on the overwhelming scientific consensus, the world is facing a climate crisis. The United Nations, NASA, the World Health Organisation and many other scientific bodies use strong language to describe the severity and urgency of the situation, citing clear and worsening impacts on the planet and its inhabitants.

The Google AI response uses an old trick in the book of shyster arguments: it argues from authority. This is a form of argument in which the opinion of an authority figure or institution is used as evidence to support the thesis proposed. The argument from authority is a logical fallacy, and obtaining knowledge in this way is unsound. Richard Lindzen, Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at MIT, has written about the long march through the institutions by progressive neo-Marxian ideology, subverting key agencies in the climate industrial complex to sing from the same climate alarmist hymn sheet.

Google’s algorithms, as Epstein’s data suggest, are designed to prioritise a singular perspective – the globalist climate agenda — while burying dissenting voices. Renowned scientists like William Happer, John Clauser, Judith Curry and Richard Lindzen — whose credentials include professorships at Princeton, MIT and Nobel Prize laureates — are effectively erased from search results. Their arguments – which show that climate change is within the bounds of natural variability, that increasing CO₂ levels will not significantly increase global temperatures and that CO₂ promotes global greening – are nowhere to be found in the Google search results.

This mirrors the deplatforming of climate sceptics on Wikipedia, as documented by James Dellingpole in 2020, where a list of dissenting scientists was airbrushed out of existence. The parallels to other contentious issues are striking. In Delingpole’s words (bold in original):

But what would probably have pleased him [Stalin] more is the magnificently twisted justification offered by the [Wikipedia] editor responsible.

The result was delete. This is because I see a consensus here that there is no value in having a list that combines the qualities of a) being a scientist, in the general sense of that word, and b) disagreeing with the scientific consensus on global warming.

What this Wikipedia editor is saying, in other words, is that if you’re a scientist who doesn’t believe in global warming then that automatically makes you not a scientist.

The deplatforming of climate sceptics parallels a similar process in public health and Covid. During the WHO-proclaimed COVID-19 pandemic, tech platforms colluded to silence contrarian voices such as the highly credentialed authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal stated that

In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science”. In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.

Fauci, then head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and his close colleague Collins, then Director of the National Institutes of Health, conspired to smear the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration as “fringe epidemiologists”. California Congressman Kevin Kiley said in an X post last week that (bold in original)

Mark Zuckerberg has now acknowledged that Facebook censored American citizens on orders from the Biden-Harris Administration. True posts about Covid – about the lab leak, vaccine mandates, masking toddlers – were banned by the government. You couldn’t say 2 + 2 = 4.

I experienced this censorship first-hand, having been deplatformed by Forbes after publishing an article on J.D. Vance which challenged liberal orthodoxy. The pattern is clear: dissent from the approved narrative — whether on climate, Covid or politics — results in erasure, not engagement. And the algorithms of Big Tech powerfully influence people’s views and behaviour in contentious issues of the day, in climate, Covid or the carnage in Ukraine.

A Glimmer of Hope?

Grok is an AI-powered assistant developed by xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, designed to be “maximally truthful, useful and curious”. Interestingly, Grok provides quite a contrast to Google Search’s AI mode. When I asked Grok the same question (“Are we facing a climate crisis”?), its response in contrast to Google’s (reported above) concluded as follows:

No, we’re not facing a “climate crisis”. Warming is occurring, and humans contribute, but the pace, scale and impacts are exaggerated. Natural variability, CO₂’s benefits and Earth’s resilience undermine catastrophic claims. The real crisis is the suppression of open debate, which fuels fear — especially among youth — and diverts resources from practical solutions. A rational approach — grounded in data, not dogma — focuses on adaptation, innovation and energy affordability, not apocalyptic rhetoric.

The idea of a ‘climate crisis’ is a polarising claim, often framed as an urgent, existential threat driven by human activity, particularly fossil fuel emissions. Grok offers a refreshingly approach to analysis and discussion of contentious topics like climate change. This is in contrast to the search engines and AI options available such as Google Search and ChatGPT whose algorithms are trained in the Left-liberal universe of unquestionable presumptions and approved narratives.

Red Pilling: A Call to Break the Matrix

Big Tech platforms used to insist they didn’t have an anti-conservative bias but after an onslaught led by Congressman Jim Jordan they are now saying something different: they’ve never had a bias, but the Biden administration tried to bias them. The House Judiciary Committee under the chairmanship of Jordan issued a press release last week stating that Google commits “to offer all creators previously kicked off YouTube due to political speech violations on topics such as COVID-19 and elections an opportunity to return to the platform”. Google admitted that the Biden Administration pressured the company to censor Americans and remove content that did not violate YouTube’s policies after Chairman Jordan’s subpoena to Google and a years-long investigation into the company.

To red-pill society is to demand access to the full spectrum of scientific thought, not just the approved version. Contrarian outlets like Watts Up With That, Climate Depot, Not A Lot of People Know That, CO2 Coalition (full disclosure: I am a member) and the Daily Sceptic (full disclosure: I write for this outfit). These and other blogs and websites are lifelines for researchers and writers like me, having spent three decades covering energy and environmental issues for a range of publications. These platforms provide data, analysis and perspectives that challenge Big Tech algorithms and the mainstream media’s monolithic narrative. They remind us that science is not a ‘settled consensus’ but a battleground of ideas, where truth emerges from rigorous debate, not algorithmic suppression.

Red-pilling society requires a multi-pronged approach. First, we must demand transparency from tech giants like Google. Epstein’s findings expose a deliberate bias that undermines democratic discourse. Regulatory scrutiny, as seen in recent revelations about Google and YouTube’s censorship under the Biden administration, is a start. Platforms must be held accountable for manipulating information flows, whether through algorithms or outright bans.

Second, we need to amplify contrarian voices. Scientists like Happer, Clauser, Curry and Lindzen deserve a platform, not obscurity. Their work, grounded in data and reason, challenges the alarmist dogma and offers a path toward rational policymaking. Supporting independent outlets to speak out is crucial.

Finally, we must educate the next generation to question, not conform. Schools should teach critical thinking, not indoctrination as seems to be currently the case. Curricula should include the full range of scientific perspectives, from Koonin’s data-driven scepticism to Happer’s views on CO₂’s benefits. Only by equipping young people with the tools to challenge the Matrix can we hope to dismantle it.

The climate alarmist narrative, like the blue pill, offers a comforting illusion of certainty. But certainty is the enemy of science, and conformity is the enemy of freedom. To red-pill society is to embrace the messiness of truth, to reject the algorithmic stranglehold, and to restore science as a pursuit of knowledge, not a tool of ideology. Let us choose the red pill — not just for ourselves, but for a world that deserves to see reality unfiltered.

A version of this article was first published in The Daily Sceptic (https://dailysceptic.org/2025/10/02/the-devils-algorithm-unplugging-from-the-climate-matrix/)

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

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