Making fact briefs available as videos on Youtube

Posted on 16 May 2025 by BaerbelW

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending harmfully misleading claims, produced primarily for use by thinly-resourced newswrooms but also directly available to the general public. We announced this (renewed) collaboration in April 2024 in a blog post and have published more than 30 new fact briefs since then. Each fact brief comes with a unique and short URL which is ideal to use when linking to it. A screenshot of each fact brief is also available as a “share graphic” and you can access all of them via a link like this one: https://skepticalscience.com/pics/FactBrief-1970s-ShareGraphic.jpg. You only need to use the relevant “code” which you can identify in the list of all published fact briefs:

Unfortunately, neither these links nor the share graphics will work well in the comment threads on Youtube where comments containing links to anything but other Youtube-videos often don’t survive for long as they get automatically deleted (at least this happens to me whenever I forget and include a link in a comment!). I started to wonder how I could make the fact briefs available as a video and decided to try with the help of a powerpoint slide deck which could then easily be saved as an mp4 video file, ideal for uploading to Youtube.

For each slide, I needed a screenshot set to the same width and position as well as the short URL to the fact brief. I also added a start and end “screen” for each group of 10 fact briefs and an auto-click every 10 seconds to move from slide to slide. I then saved each block of 12 slides as an mp4 file to make a 2 minute video.

The result of this activity is a little playlist in my Youtube channel called “Fact briefs” which right now contains 3 videos and to which I’ll add another video whenever the next batch of 10 fact briefs is complete. Each video in the playlist comes with a description listing the included fact briefs and the clickable timestamps they start at. The lists below show the fact briefs’ questions, the related videos’ linked timestamps, the links to the share graphics and fact briefs.

Fact briefs 1 to 10

Was an Ice Age predicted in the 1970s?
Video 00:00:10 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-1970s

Did global warming stop in 1998?
Video 00:00:20 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-1998

Is Antarctica gaining land ice?
Video 00:00:30  – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-antarctica

Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
Video 00:00:40 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-breath

Have climate models overestimated global warming?
Video 00:00:50 – Share graphic –  Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-model

Is the ocean acidifiying?
Video 00:01:00 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-acid-1

Is ocean acidification from human activities enough to impact marine ecosystems?
Video 00:01:10 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-acid-2

Was the Medieval Warm Period a global event?
Video 00:01:20 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-mwp

Does temperature have to rise before CO2 does?
Video 00:01:30 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-lag

Were scientists caught falsifying data in the hacked emails incident dubbed ‘climategate’?
Video 00:01:40 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-climategate

Fact briefs 11 to 20

Are polar bears endangered?
Video 00:00:10 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-bear

Are carbon dioxide emissions from human activities enough to affect the climate?
Video 00:00:20 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-co2

Does CO2 correlate with global temperature long-term?
Video 00:00:30 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-correlate

Is decreased cosmic ray activity driving global warming?
Video 00:00:40 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-cosmic

Is recent global warming part of a natural cycle?
Video 00:00:50 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-cycle

Does manmade CO2 have any detectable fingerprint?
Video 00:01:00 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-co2increase

Is more CO2 a good thing because it’s plant food?
Video 00:01:10 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-plant

Do volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans?
Video 00:01:20 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-volcano

Are most glaciers growing?
Video 00:01:30 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-glacier

Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
Video 00:01:40 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-consensus

Fact briefs 21 to 30

Has human-caused climate change increased extreme weather?
Video 00:00:10 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-extreme

Are we heading into an ‘ice age’?
Video 00:00:20 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-iceage

Can CO2 be ignored because it’s just a trace gas?
Video 00:00:30 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-trace

Is global warming promoting biodiversity?
Video 00:00:40 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-species

Is methane the largest driver of recent global warming?
Video 00:00:50 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-methane

Is sea level rise exaggerated?
Video 00:01:00 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-sealevel

Are high CO2 levels harmless because they also occurred in the past?
Video 00:01:10 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-pastco2

Is Greenland losing land ice?
Video 00:01:20 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-greenland

Is waste heat from industrial activity the reason the planet is warming?
Video 00:01:30 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-waste

Is Mars warming?
Video 00:01:40 – Share graphic – Fact brief https://sks.to/gfb-mars

To be continued!