Facebook’s censorship is totally out of hand, and its “independent and nonpartisan fact checks” are anything but. Now it is censoring Climate: The Movie. The supposed ‘fact checks’ provided by Science Feedback and Climate Feedback (they are two branches of the same organisation) have been shown many times to be both partisan and ideologically driven. The ‘fact check’ of Steve Koonin’s bestselling book Unsettled done by Climate Feedback was blisteringly criticised by the Wall Street Journal in a lead editorial by the WSJ editorial staff.
The editorial includes the following:
Mr. Koonin, whose careful book draws extensively on existing scholarship, may respond on the merits in a different forum. Suffice it to say here that many of the ‘fact check’ claims relied on by Facebook don’t contradict the underlying material, but instead argue with its perceived implications.
The fact check attacks Mr. Koonin’s book for saying the “net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century”. Minimal is in the eyes of the beholder, but the U.S. National Climate Assessment predicted America’s climate costs in 2090 at about $500 billion per year – a fraction of the recent Covid stimulus in an economy that could be four times as large.
The fact check on the statement that “global crop yields are rising, not falling” retorts that “while global crop yields are rising, this does not constitute evidence that climate change is not adversely affecting agriculture”. Okay, but that’s an argument, not a fact check. …
Climate Feedback’s comment on a line from the review about “the number and severity of droughts” does not identify any falsehood, but instead claims, “it doesn’t really make sense to make blanket statements regarding overall global drought trends”. Maybe it doesn’t make sense for Facebook to restrict the reach of legitimate scientific argument and competing interpretations of data.
Steve Koonin’s rebuttals of the Climate Feedback post are here and here. I’ve also written about the erroneous Climate Feedback post here.
In other words, fact checks should check facts, not a difference of opinion between two scientists. ‘Fact checks’ today are too often thinly disguised and very biased editorials, often confusing very Left-wing interpretations of ambiguous data with facts. Then these supposedly “independent and nonpartisan fact checks” are used by Facebook, and sometimes by LinkedIn, as excuses to censor legitimate and well-documented posts and movies. Documentation and references of the facts and interpretations presented in Climate: The Movie can be found here.
Further reading on the blatant bias and misinformation found on the Science Feedback and Climate Feedback websites:
- Climate Feedback’s fraudulent and misleading fact check of a famous and well-respected peer-reviewed article by Ronan Connolly, Willie Soon and 21 well qualified co-authors is refuted here.
- Climate Feedback also gets a fact check of the CO2 Coalition completely wrong, as described here.
- Finally, in its fact check of Gregory Wrightstone of the CO2 Coalition its makes 13 wildly incorrect (lies?) about Wrightstone, as described here.
In summary, the Science Feedback and Climate Feedback websites are both unreliable and misleading. Why Facebook and LinkedIn put their trust in such a biased organisation is unknown, unless they are also pushing an ideologically biased narrative.
Science Feedback’s overly long (4,700 words!!) critique of Climate: The Movie is fully debunked in my annotated bibliography of the main points made in the movie, but I can hit the main points here.
The first clearly false claim is that recent climate change is being driven by CO2 exclusively with no input since AD 1750 from changes in the Sun or nature at large. This is an unsupported claim by the IPCC (AR6, p.5) that is frequently disputed in the peer reviewed literature For example: Soon, ‘Implications of the Secondary Role of Carbon Dioxide and Methane Forcing in Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future’, 2007; Davidson, Stephenson & Turasie, 2016; Koutsoyiannis, Onof, Kundzewicz & Christofides, 2023; Liu, et al., 2014.
Second, there are very serious and well-documented problems with current measurements of global warming at Earth’s surface. These problems are discussed in the movie. Science Feedback attempts, in far too many words to be believable, to assert that the measurements are accurate. The problems are all well documented in the peer-reviewed literature. For example: Connolly, et al., 2023 and Soon, et al., 2023.
Third, the movie explains that temperatures today are within the normal range of temperatures seen in Earth’s recent and longer-term history and they are not unusual or unprecedented. This fact is very well documented in the peer reviewed literature (Kaufman & Broadman, 2023 and Scotese, Song, Mills & Meer, 2021). The Science Feedback critique first complains about this statement and then later agrees with it.
It then goes on to say that “warming trends” are unusual over the instrumental era (past 140 years or so) compared to ancient temperature trends, based upon uncertain climate proxies. The climate proxies used in the latest IPCC report (AR6) have a median temporal resolution (time between temperatures) of 164 years (Kaufman, McKay & Routson, 2020). So how can they know whether the proxy trends are more or less than today? See here and here for the details. Also, see this excellent post by Renee Hannon on the impact of comparing daily thermometer readings to climate proxies.
It makes many other incorrect and misleading claims. It claims there is no evidence that polar bear populations are increasing; they are (Crockford, 2022). It claims that the Great Barrier Reef has not recently reached a record size, when it has according to Peter Ridd and the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
It makes many other claims that statements from the movie are misleading, including claims that the IPCC/CMIP climate models are accurate, but the IPCC itself admits they are flawed:
Hence, we assess with medium confidence that CMIP5 and CMIP6 models continue to overestimate observed warming in the upper tropical troposphere over the 1979-2014 period by at least 0.1°C per decade, in part because of an overestimate of the tropical SST trend pattern over this period. (AR6 WGI, p.444).
In short, the Science Feedback post is clearly incorrect in its claims that the movie is misleading. Science Feedback looks at the same data and facts that the movie examines and draws different conclusions than the eminent scientists in the movie. It has a different opinion than the experts in the movie. That does not mean the scientists in the movie are factually incorrect. Look at the data yourself: support for all 70 serious scientific claims made in the movie can be found here for those that want to see more.
Download the bibliography here.
Read Science Feedback’s ‘fact check’ of Climate: The Movie here.
This article originally appeared on the Watt’s Up With That? website.
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Once again, this demonstrates that the youngest of the population was hit the hardest – disproportionally.
Imagine having already taken your theory test and passed, only to find out, through no fault of your own, you have to fork out for another one along with additional lessons, all because the government decided to abandon it’s pandemic strategy and locked down the country needlessly.
The issues arising from a locked down country are only now really rearing their ugly heads: suicides, depression, NHS waiting lists measuring years, hugely reduced population immunity, failed businesses, etc. 🙁
Which is severely affecting some youngsters employment chances. My son and next doors son (both 21) are in this situation, luckily they have Mums who will/can be taxi not all are so lucky. We live in an area where many jobs are not accessible by public transport. As if having their education f**ked up for the last 2 years wasn’t enough.
Early during Lockdown lite (last summer) I met a young chap who had to take two lengthy bus journeys to get to work in a distribution centre.
Previously he had made the much shorter cross country journey on his motorbike.
Sadly his Provisional licence was ‘timed out’ since the DVSA were not conducting tests because lockdown. Not only that but so had his theory test so, when the DVLC finally got back to work, he would have to start from scratch.
I posted about it at the time here at Lockdownsceptics under the general topic of unintended consequences.
Ed. Exactly as described by JIGR1969 above at the very same time of posting
I doubt this is news to the majority of us who predicted from the start many of, if not all, the problems we are encountering now. Whenever anyone brings them up I do not hestitate to tell them that they are a consequence of lockdown policies and all associated restrictions.
Likewise, lost count of the number of times someone has blamed their misfortune on the Covid when in reality it was caused by lockdown. They require remaining.
“Hundreds of thousands of learner drivers are waiting up to 24 weeks to take their test in some parts of the UK due to a backlog caused by the coronavirus pandemic.”
DM as usual playing its part in maintaining the panicker propaganda.
An honest, but cautious, way of expressing the truth would have been:
“Hundreds of thousands of learner drivers are waiting up to 24 weeks to take their test in some parts of the UK due to a backlog caused by
the coronavirus pandemicthe government’s policy choices in response to the coronavirus“.Much more honest and accurate would be:
“Hundreds of thousands of learner drivers are waiting up to 24 weeks to take their test in some parts of the UK due to a backlog caused by
the coronavirus pandemicthe government’s panic over-reaction to the latest new cold virus to hit humanity“.That Lockdow/Covid Pandemic willful ‘confusion’ has been an irritating constant from politicians and the media since April last year.
There’s a better word than ‘confusion’ that I can’t recall offhand, confabulation or something.
Yes, “if you fuck up or just don’t wish to do something, just blame the pandemic” has been the mantra from day one.
It’s shocking that nobody up there is talking about the “moral hazard” from tolerating this sort of attitude (which was quickly picked up from politicians by all other sorts of tossers across society).
“Moral hazard” used to be a big topic during the financial crisis (if we rescue the bankers, they will just laugh at us and keep behaving the same or worse), but somehow these concerns have completely disappeared during The Pandemic.
Along with the concerns about limitless resort to the magical money tree…
Could have been worse
It’s ok. It’s pointless to get a driver’s licence anyways, since under the New World Order we won’t own cars and we will depend on public transport.
Yes but you will be happy
even if it takes a lot of medicating.
Public transport needs to get a lot better then. Son works at a power station, no public transport services it. He and the other young engineers drive or they run out of workers and we all run out of power.
Coincidentally the govt will likely announce silly e-scooters can be driven on a provisional licence, and blammo, the push towards a prohibition on cars for the plebs moves ever closer,
In a video showing yesterday’s Halloween March in London the seried ranks of ‘boris bikes’ can be seen. Not one of them in use.
Similarly, when the regime forced motorcycle training to halt, and 2-year Compulsory Basic Training (CBT) certificates started to expire, there was a back-bench, genuinely cross party motion to extend them. Amazingly, even my own socialist MP agreed to support it, on the basis that Poors are likely to rely on small capacity motorcycles and scooters, and that it would allow nothing more than riders continuing to do what they’d already been doing safely for 2 years.
Of course, the regime laughed it off and said no, you have to do another training course. Except, you can’t, because we shut the training centres down. Tough.
https://www.bennetts.co.uk/bikesocial/news-and-views/news/2021/february/government-refuses-cbt-extension-during-lockdown
https://www.bitchute.com/video/40Ho2GR6t86Z/
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