After we have deleted over 600 videos from Climate State YouTube, and created a dedicated streaming website to preserve these videos, YouTube still claims that the remaining approx. 350 videos do not contain original commentary or educational value, that we repurpose someone else’s content.

Facts

• We had over a 1.2 million of views on our channel in 2019
• We created new content continuously
• We deleted all the videos we could identify with the YouTube search, videos which have been uploaded before we did, mostly science lectures.
• We deleted over 600 videos from our channel so far in an afford to comply

TIMELINE

What happened so far in our struggle to create educational, climate science related content on the YouTube platform?

• January 2017 YouTube terminates the Climate State channel (but was reversed).
• February 2017 YouTube demonetized the Climate State channel for a week, resulting in about six weeks of no monetization.
• March 2017 YouTube terminates our channel Climate Progress World.
• July 2018 YouTube around this date, changed how they recommend our extreme weather videos. We got millions of views during the 2016 Atlantic Hurricane season, one video was even trending. In 2017 we got similar results with Hurricane Irma. However, since 2018 our videos covering storms or weather events usually no longer are shown in YouTube’s search, essentially banning our videos. Our videos are part of a small fraction of weather coverage mentioning climate change connections. Our weather videos usually get 1,500 – 5000 views, before 2018 it was like 10,000 – 700,000 views.
• January 2019 YouTube demonetizes the Climate State channel citing reuse policy.
• July 2019 YouTube rejects our request to monetize our channel, citing reuse policy after we deleted over 300 videos.
• August 2019 YouTube rejects our request to monetize our channel, citing reuse policy, after we deleted over 600 videos.

Climate State videos have educational values

So I went through all the remaining videos, and these can be broadly classified into the following topics:

• Feature productions often with our own narration, and various public domain content (~ 150 videos).
• Extreme weather related, often mentioning climate change connections (~ 75 videos).
• Exclusive content, exclusively published with permission on our channel (~ 40 videos).
• Content which was first published by Climate State and is public domain (~ 20 videos).
• Content which has been extensively edited to present a brief summary (~ 10 videos).

After deleting almost all climate science lectures, deleting all the minor edited public domain videos we shared on the channel, e.g. from NASA or CarbonBrief, it remains unclear what else we should delete to please the YouTube staff citing no educational value of our videos.

For instance climate expert and YALE Climate Connections video producer Peter Sinclair wrote in 2017 about our videos, ‘Climate State has been doing an absolutely amazing job of providing a useful historical archive of important experts warning on climate issues through past decades. ‘

YouTube judged our videos wrongly before

YouTube staff rejected our dispute of a video copyright strike in 2017. A video we have created entirely to help debunk the so called near term extinction theory. This is the video.

Educational video value

You could argue that the extreme weather videos which do not contain mentions of climate change are not educational, yet they provide historic footage of extreme events which is important too, and how does CNN, MSNBC, Reuters, FOX, Storyful, and all the other major video channels monetize these videos?

A brief summary ( ~ 10 minutes) of an hour long science lecture certainly has an educational value. We are not reusing content if we were the first to publish it, or published it exclusively – meaning we were either asked to share a video or got the permission.

If someone has ideas what content on the Climate State channel has no educational value, please let me know.

Forcing YouTube to reveal what videos have no educational value

The idea is to ask YouTube to reveal to us which videos are considered to violate their since 2019 retroactive enforced reused content policy. Accordingly we violate these rules:

• Third-party videos stitched together with minimal to no changes
• Third-party content compiled without a narrative
• Content uploaded somewhere else first
• Content uploaded many times by multiple users

I’ve tried to ask the YouTube staff to point out which videos are at issue, but without luck so far. The petition asking YouTube to enable monetization again has been signed by over thousand people.

Running out of options

I am unemployed and YouTube cut my revenue in January 2019, the new video site I have created to preserve important climate science videos in one place costs $149 each months. Hence, I’m very thankful for all the support I can get from Climate State Patreon‘s, people who subscribe to Climate State Uscreen, or from the people who donate.

What’s Next?

I will send the Climate State Petition to YouTube, via twitter next week (the only option to reach out to them, since I am not allowed to contact them directly via email or chat). Going to ask YouTube to either communicate to us which videos are at issue, or to monetize the Climate State channel, since the channel content has educational value.

Because this has become a persistent issue, I decided to delete most videos from the channel, there are currently 70 videos remaining.

YouTube is the leading platform on the Internet (by a wide margin) to favor the promotion of climate change denialism. STUDY: Most YouTube climate change videos ‘oppose the consensus view’ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/25/most-youtube-climate-change-videos-oppose-the-consensus-view

If this fails I want to ask a lawyer to force them to reveal to us which videos are at issue.

PLEASE SIGN + SHARE the Petition

If you can, make a donation, become a Patreon, or subscribe to Climate State Uscreen – you would help me to continue to create videos about the biggest issue of our times.

Thank You.