  Online video-sharing sites such as YouTube are very popular and also used by
a lot of people to obtain knowledge and information, also on science, health
and technology. Technically they could be valuable tools for the public
communication of science and technology, but the users of YouTube are also
confronted with conspiracy theories and erroneous and misleading information
that deviates from scientific consensus views. This contribution details the
results of a study that investigates what kind of information users find when
they are searching for climate science and climate manipulation topics on
YouTube and whether this information corresponds with or challenges scientific
consensus views. An innovative methodological approach using the anonymization
network Tor is introduced for drawing randomized samples of YouTube videos.
This approach was used to select and examine a sample of 140 YouTube videos on
climate topics.
