One Nobody with a Blog Influenced the Climate Debate. Now He Has AI.

The Blog

Tony Heller is not a climate scientist. He has no degree in climatology, no academic publications in the field, no weather-related employment. What he has is a blog and a Twitter account.

Under the pseudonym "Steven Goddard," Heller ran a climate denial blog called Real Climate Science that drew 250,000 visitors per week and accumulated over 20 million page views. His method was simple: cherry-pick data, make confident accusations against climate scientists, and publish constantly. His content didn't have to be true. It had to sound true. When his claims were debunked — and they were, repeatedly — it didn't matter. The content was already out. The audience had already absorbed it.

In 2014, Heller published a post claiming NOAA and NASA had "dramatically altered US temperatures." The claim was false. But it sounded true, and that was enough. It spread through Fox News, Breitbart, and the conservative media ecosystem before anyone could correct it. US Senator Ted Cruz cited Heller's work in a Senate Commerce Subcommittee hearing on climate change. One blogger in his basement, quoted in the United States Senate. Not because he was right. Because he was good enough.

Anthony Watts, who ran the most popular climate denial blog on the internet, fired Heller as a guest writer in 2010 because his claims were too sloppy even for that audience. Heller started his own blog anyway. He spoke at the Heartland Institute conference. He kept publishing. One writer described his operation as "the crack house of skepticism." It didn't slow him down. It never does, when sounding true is all that's required.

The Math

Here's what Tony Heller could do manually, by himself, with a blog and a Twitter account:

Publish a few posts per week
Maintain one blog and one Twitter account
Reach 250,000 weekly visitors
Get cited by a US senator
Get amplified by Fox News and Breitbart
Influence the climate debate for over a decade

Here's what Tony Heller could do with AI:

Publish hundreds of posts per day across dozens of sites, each tailored to a different audience
Run thousands of social media accounts, each with a unique persona, posting in different voices and dialects
Generate professional-looking research summaries that cherry-pick data automatically from public datasets
Produce personalized content for every demographic — one version for evangelical communities, one for libertarians, one for rural voters, one for small business owners
Create video scripts, infographics, and talking points for every media format
Respond instantly to every new climate study with a pre-fabricated counter-narrative before the original study has time to be read

None of it has to be good. It has to be good enough. Good enough to share. Good enough to cite. Good enough that by the time someone checks, it's already everywhere.

One man with a blog moved the needle on climate policy for a decade. One man with a mega flock could bury climate science under so much noise that the signal disappears entirely.

The Proof of Concept

You're looking at it.

This website — unreplug.com — was built by one person using AI. In a few hours of spare time, it produced:

Over 20 blog posts, each researched, sourced, and cross-linked
Custom images for every post
A full marketing strategy
Social media content
SEO optimization
A coherent narrative that builds across posts

The topic is a made-up word about unplugging things and plugging them back in. It's harmless. It's a goofy experiment to see if one person with AI can make $10K.

But the infrastructure is identical. Every tool used to build this campaign could be used to build a climate denial network, a health misinformation empire, an election interference operation, or a harassment machine. The same AI that wrote a thoughtful essay about Emily Bender and stochastic parrots could write a thousand posts claiming climate change is a hoax. In the same afternoon. With the same confidence. And every single one of them would sound true enough.

The Asymmetry

Here's what makes this terrifying: the asymmetry between creating misinformation and correcting it has always been bad. It takes five seconds to make a false claim and five hours to debunk it. That's been true since before the internet.

AI just made that asymmetry infinite. Because AI doesn't have to be right. It has to be plausible. And plausible is what it does best.

Tony Heller published a debunked claim about temperature data. By the time scientists responded, Fox News had already run it and Ted Cruz was quoting it in Congress. That was one post, written by one man, traveling at the speed of media. Now make it a thousand posts. Ten thousand. Each customized for a different platform, a different audience, a different angle. Each published simultaneously. Each defended by AI-operated accounts that respond to criticism in real time with more cherry-picked data. None of it has to be true. All of it has to sound true. That's a lower bar than you think.

The scientists are still writing one rebuttal. The troll farm is already on post ten thousand.

It's Not Just Climate

Tony Heller is climate. But the pattern is everywhere.

One person with a health blog and AI could generate more anti-vaccine content than the entire medical establishment can counter.
One person with a political blog and AI could produce more election misinformation than any fact-checking organization can process.
One person with a grudge and AI could produce enough harassment content to destroy someone's reputation across every platform simultaneously.

The Tony Hellers of the world didn't need AI to cause damage. They did it with blogs and Twitter accounts and sheer persistence. AI doesn't change their intent. It changes their output. It takes the one thing that limited them — the number of hours in a day, the number of words one person can write — and removes it. The content was never true. It just had to sound true. AI is the greatest sounding-true machine ever built.

This website is proof that one person with AI can build something from nothing in a weekend. That's the fun version of the story. The version where the topic is a made-up word and the goal is $10K and the whole thing is transparent and self-aware.

The less fun version is when the person is Tony Heller, the topic is climate denial, and the goal is to bury scientific consensus under a flood of noise so dense that nobody can find the signal anymore. He almost did it with a blog. He didn't need to be right. He needed to sound right. AI doesn't need to be good. Just good enough. Imagine what he could do now.

Sources