On September 14th the Daily Sceptic published an article reporting that four leading Italian scientists had undertaken a major review of historical climate trends and concluded that declaring a ‘climate emergency’ was not supported by the data. They suggested that children should not be burdened with anxiety about the climate. The Daily Sceptic story was retweeted around 9,000 times, read by at least 24,000 people and was widely seen across social media. It was picked up by print media such as the Australian and broadcast on a widely-distributed Sky News Australia clip. Mention was made of the impressive credentials of the authors, who included two physics professors, an adjunct professor of physics and an agricultural meteorologist, and the wide variety of sources they had referenced.
The story sent shockwaves through the ranks of the ‘settled’ climate science community that takes a more alarmist approach to the prospects of humanity and the Earth’s climate. As always with heretical stories like this, the mere suggestion that the climate is not breaking down runs the risk of destroying the need for a command-and-control Net Zero solution. Something had to be done.
State-owned Agence France-Presse (AFP) is rapidly becoming the ‘fact-checker’ of choice for those seeking to enforce the strict ‘settled’ science narrative. On Monday, the Daily Sceptic published details of a rather muddled ‘fact-check’ written by Roland Lloyd Parry in which it was stated that we had misled over the recent growth in Arctic summer ice. To present his case, Lloyd Parry compared one fact – summer sea ice in 2022 – to a 30-year average ending 12 years ago. Now Lloyd Parry is joined on an AFP fact-check of the Italian scientists by senior editor Marlowe Hood, who was recently given €100,000 (£88,000) by the Foundation arm of a large Spanish bank heavily involved in financing green technology. Hood describes himself as the Herald of the Anthropocene, the latter a political renaming of the current Holocene era that puts the alleged dominant role of human activity on the climate at the centre.
The claim that there is no evidence of a climate emergency is said to be “misleading”. AFP reports that “top climate experts” say the paper “cherry-picked” data. Of course scientists often debate each other’s findings in a robust fashion, but what they don’t – or shouldn’t – do is call for the other side to be cancelled. One of the experts quoted by AFP was Friederike Otto, an academic whose doctoral work was in philosophy of science, who works at the Imperial College-based Grantham Institute for Climate Change, a body partly funded by the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham. She said that “of course” the authors were not writing this article in good faith. “If the journal cares about science they should withdraw it loudly and publicly, saying that it should have never been published.”
AFP author Marlowe Hood tweeted:
Their anti-free speech pressure bore fruit and on September 30th the publisher Springer Nature highlighted the following announcement at the top of the Italians’ paper: “Readers are alerted that the conclusions reported in this manuscript are currently under dispute. The journal is investigating the issue.”
All science, of course, should be in dispute. Will Springer bow to future pressure to place a similar statement against work on particle physics or molecular chemistry if a government-owned news agency ‘fact-checks’ its conclusions?
Other experts quoted by AFP included Professor Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts at the U.K. Met Office. He felt the scope of the paper was much too limited for it to inform a high level-level statement on whether the climate crisis is evident or not. Betts of course is often quoting the high authority of the IPCC, and goes on to note that the ‘attribution’ of human influences to extreme weather events has strengthened of late. Others point out that this type of work is the product of climate models and is unproveable.
Betts went on to suggest the scientists ignored results which showed some “extremes” were increasing. According to Betts, it was noted “in passing” that “global trends in heatwave intensity are not significant”. Inexplicably, AFP and Betts failed to quote the beginning of the sentence in which the rigorous Italians drew attention to studies that had shown for the period 1951-2017, “a significant increase in yearly values of heatwave days, maximum heatwave duration and cumulative heat”.
Friederike Otto commented on hurricanes and droughts, noting: “Nobody said they are increasing globally – the IPCC is very clear on that – but that doesn’t mean the trends that occur are not hugely problematic for the regions where they are already occurring.” With the best will in the world, it is difficult to see what Otto is writing about here.
Another scientist calling for the work to be cancelled was Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth Systems at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He told AFP that he did not know of the Springer journal, “but if it is a self-respecting one it should withdraw the article”.
Citizen journalist Paul Homewood also covered the story and noted: “To simply demand that the journal withdraws the paper is the worst sort of censorship, and reminds us all of the dark days of Climategate, when such practices were rife whenever anybody dared to challenge the climate establishment’s agenda.” Homewood looked at a number of the Italian paper’s statements and concluded the study was “actually a pretty level-headed, uncontroversial assessment of the actual data”.
It is difficult to see how AFP can call its work a ‘fact-check’. It has not checked any facts on its own account, and just reproduced opinions from four people it describes as “experts”. Yet in its headline it says the Italian scientists “cherry-picked” data. The claim there is no evidence of a climate emergency is said to be “misleading”, but AFP’s evidence to the contrary is just what others have told it. Nevertheless it has spearheaded a campaign to cancel the work, and potentially harm the reputations of four distinguished and highly credentialled Italian scientists.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Why don’t we just call fact-checked stories wrongspeak? At least we would all know where we were.
How about calling these misleading statements/fact checks ‘trans-facts’?
Or just ‘trash talk’?
In other news foxes vote to guard hen houses, and men enjoy having sex with women. Of course socialists like to censor ppl that’s what they do, non lefties are utterly deluded to believe rational debate is possible with these folk. You disagree with a lefty fundamentally it’s the gulag for you in their perfect world. Socialism emerged from the French Revolution with its main enforcer the guillotine and little has actually changed since.
See also the case of Professor Richet, first mentioned I think on Wattsupwiththat.
He wrote a perfectly sensible article for a history of science publication called Copernicus. Peer reviewed and ready to publish, pressure on publisher led to its withdrawal.
All he said was that, looking at the last four glaciations over about half a million years, when times started to get cold carbon dioxide levels stayed high for about eight hundred years. So change in co2 concentration follows temperature change and therefore cannot be the cause of that change. Decarbonisation unnecessary.
Copernicus, eh? How ironic.
https://www.history-of-geo-and-space-sciences.net/2021-05-26_hgss-2021-1_latest-version-of-the-manuscript.pdf
If AFP were being honest it would call its piece an “Opinion Check” of claims, made by people who depend on climate catastrophe claims to keep their positions and funding flowing from the unwitting taxpayer.
Anthropogenic climate change for dummies: Take 100 scientists – 50 who believ CO2 is the primary driver of climate change and 50 who don’t. Out of the second group, trash / tarnish /cancel the reputation of 90% of the scientists and their papers and coerce publishers to withdraw or not publish. Result! The science is now settled as published papers show that 95% of scientist believe that anthropogenic CO2 emmsisions are the primary driver of global climate. Repeat for vaccines, mask mandates etc and use captured media sources to reinforce.
Potsdam, Otto and Springer.
Does one need to know more?
It’s at the point where we should just stop calling it science, and instead refer to it by the more accurate: “Tik-Tok / CCP-driven agitprop designed to present all pro-growth, patriotic and individualist policies in the West as evil fascism, so we accelerate our decline to the benefit of China.”
It’s very easy to see what Otto is writing about. Quoting Wikipedia
Otto works together with lawyers in lawsuit that seek compensation for victims of extreme events from companies and governments with historical responsibility for climate change.
In other words, she seeks to extract climate change reparations from American and European governments and companies based on a methodology she developed for associating natural disasters with so-called climate change. As is the case with all the other green scammers, her vocation is making up justifications why she and her buddies are entitled to other people’s money.
Springer has blocked numerous “Covid skeptical” papers without explanation, so my bet would be on them blocking this one. Funny how “Climate and Covid skeptical” is a pretty clean dividing line between people; it’s taken over from “left” and “right” to a large extent.
Whether global warming is real or not, and I am still not sure, there is enough evidence to suggest that changes in the climate are related to naturally occurring events and to man made events other than the burning of fossil fuels. In the latter category are rainforest destruction and water diversion (check out the climatic alterations around the Aral Sea). But anyway we know that sea levels were much higher even 1000 years ago when our locality, Romney Marsh, was largely under water. What we don’t know is what the polar ice caps looked like then. To balance the question of how emissions cause warming, I would like to know what effect the air mixing caused by wind farms has on meteorological conditions.
Who is the woman in the photo? It doesn’t say, damages credibility, looks like a random person. Also, you should include a link to the SkyNews clip.
Science is never settled. And if someone/some people is/are proposing a counter-argument to the “received wisdom” then it demonstrably isn’t settled.
If the evidence for man-made climate change/climate emergency was overwhelming, you’d think the advocates would be only too keen to debate the issue and present their evidence to be challenged.
But it isn’t science, it’s a cult and the cultists mustn’t be challenged.
It is blatantly apparent that any organisation or policy with net zero or climate change within its title, is there to promote or enforce its own agenda as any slight to their existance questions their validity and purpose. The term Peer Review in the case of these organisations is to get a mate to agree with your data.
Why are the facts about CO2 not publicised by mainstream media:-
1) the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is currently 0.042%
2) CO2 at this current slight increase contributes significantly to plant and crop growth and is reducing starvation in some countries.
3) If CO2 levels fall below 150 parts per million (0.015%) plant growth would fail to the point of the whole world suffering from lack of food.
4) progressively increased levels of CO2 do not proportionally contribute to global warming and current levels have not increased it very much. Other greehouse gases that we can’t easily control have a much greater effect.
5) The Uk’s additional contribution to CO2 is so small by comparison to that by China, India and the US that any change we made would make no significant difference.
6) The current drive to nett zero CO2 is driven by incorrect virtue signalling and the money made by companies who benefit from products that are said to reduce it. Many products made by these companies produce more CO2 in their manufacture than they will ever save in their lifetime. That applies to some electric cars.
7) Most climate models are deliberately fed with wrong inaccurate data to give the result wanted and so far every one claiming climate disaster over the last few decades has proven to be wrong. Its difficult to prove whether models covering longer periods could be correct but the track record of them would suggest they will be inaccurate as well.
8) CO2 is one of the things required for life on our planet and is not a pollutant.
MSM aren’t at all interested in facts. They just get in the way of the opinions put out by those who drive the ‘official narrative’, a.k.a. “The Science”
As scientists become more and more dependent on government funding, and climate science is almost entirely funded by government, then their findings require the greatest level of scrutiny. We often hear things like “research shows” or “scientists find” etc. But since climate science is mainly computer model projections of future climate full of assumptions then nothing has been “found”. It has been speculated. Anyone who thinks government funding does not influence science is really very naive, and many of those same people would be quick to hammer any science that was funded by fossil fuel interests as being “agenda driven”. But what makes those people think government have no agenda? Ofcourse they do. The regulatory state always has an agenda.