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.
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.
The only thing that surprises me about this is that Facebook took so long to censor it.
A wise friend of mine now dead saw straight through facebook immediately, changing the first 4 letters to something else rather less polite. Let’s not kids ourselves Meta/WhatsApp is used to spy on the populace.
Faecesbook is my preferred name.
That’s good
If it is free, you are the product.
I’m surprised all msm and social media’s didn’t ban it outright! Maybe they remember “relax” and many other songs and books that were banned and because they were, went straight to number one.
Seems like a tenuous attempt not to encourage people to seek it out!
How do you know if something is true, when F***book censors it!
Yes – when you’re over the target!
I don’t know if Facebook was around in 2007 when Martin Durkin’s first film “The Great Global Warming Swindle” was aired on Channel 4. But there was the very same spitting fury from what can only be described as the Global Warming Mafia. This pincer movement of government and bought and paid for media that was and still is determined that everyone will only have one particular view on climate change —–THEIRS, is even more powerful today, and it has to be, as it is quite clear from real world data that their apocalyptic climate crisis is not unfolding. They insist on calling every study, every model, every opinion and every speculation about what the climate is going to do in 50 or 100 years “Science”. But if it is really about science then you question everything. You check it all against observations and if it does not match then it is WRONG. But when you refuse to even allow any questioning of your so called science that does not match observations then there is only one conclusion that can be reached. ——The issue of climate change is not about science. -It is about POLITICS, and it has been about politics from the very start. —————–All of the so called science (or the vast majority of it) is funded by government. The so called leading authority on it all (the IPCC) is a political body not a scientific one. It has a remit to look for any and all “science” that seems to fit in with the idea humans are changing the climate and ignores everything that doesn’t. This is the corruption of science for political agendas around the worlds wealth and resources and here is an example of that mindset from Mike Hulme who was with the University of East Anglia where the shenanigans of the Climategate emails occurred back in 2009. —–“We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but what climate change can do for us. Rather than trying to solve climate change, we need to approach it as an imaginative idea, an idea that we develop and employ to fill a variety of tasks for us. Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical and spiritual needs”. For Hulme climate change provides a convenient basis to tackle such things as population control, wealth redistribution and “Sustainable Development”
For any of you who feel this comment is too long please just read the last paragraph starting “We need to ask not what we can do for climate change…..” This gives a good idea of what the so called climate crisis is really about, not in my worlds but in the words of someone involved in the politics of it all that global warming proponents keep trying to convince us all is about “Science”. —-It isn’t “science”. It is “official science” in support of political agendas ——Net Zero and Sustainable Development
just like covid and the confected hysteria tub thumping about the next pandemic. How I wish there was a pandemic thst only hit the people like Zuckerberg and Gates etc who try to tell the rest of us how to think and behave. Pandemic that infected only them would be truly beneficial
Boiling these scams all down they are an elite trying to impose a form of serfdom. Their ideal world is the one right before the black death where us peasant tilled the soil for them. For example they hate that normal ppl have foreign holidays, that “should be” their preserve. I have total contempt for ppl like mtf who assist them in their mission to squash humanity.
I would love to be the one with the needle administering the “vaccine.”
This comment may not be overly long in itself, but its readbility could be greatly improved by structuring it into paragraphs.
Thanks for that. I tend to use long lines to create spaces between chunks of sentences. But it helps to know you may have found it difficult to navigate as I sometimes do with your English. But have you anything to say about the actual content?
Part of Facebook’s small print is that you grant it access all areas to your computer. Contacts, messages, transactions, photos, microphone, camera etc. It provides big tech with a wide open window on your life.
I suggest right minded people do a deep clean to purge it, it’s cookies, bots etc from your machine.
https://youtu.be/HQih6jNiCEc?si=C6pyxeTD20jijY9j
Bear in mind too that the US has just recently passed legislation that means US citizens can have their social media spied on without a warrant. Yes they were doing it before, but now it’s legit. Its more Orwell than Orwell.
Who needs the FBI when you have Farcebook?
Deleted facebook long since, none of my so called “friends” ever contacted me. Remarkably my actual friends have stayed in contact. On “Science Feedback” their critique is about as impartial as Melchett’s sentencing of Blackadder over speckled Jim. Imagine shilling for billionaires with messed up personal lives like Chris Hohn, it has to kill the soul.
I strongly recommend that readers look at the actual science feedback review.
For example, Andy May writes of the review:
The first clearly false claim is that recent climate change is being driven by CO2 exclusively with no input since 1750 AD from changes in the Sun or nature at large.
What the review actually says:
From 1990 to 2022, CO2 caused approximately 78% of the increase in global warming attributed to greenhouse gases. The greenhouse gases overall cause the most global warming of all the climate change drivers, and CO2 causes the most global warming of all the greenhouse gases (Figure 1).
i.e. the review does not claim that CO2 is the exclusive cause of temperature change since 1750 (1750 is not mentioned in the review). I won’t cover the other errors in May’s article – just read the Science Feedback review yourselves.
That’s bs science there is no way they can know co2 caused 78% of the increase of what is a corrupted dataset. Their model says that, which is almost certainly wrong since it uses finite elements as the navier stokes is insoluble. We can’t even model clouds accurately so how on earth can such an absurd claim even be made using a model. The 78% is classic example of pseudo science assuming the model is truth, why not 75,76,77 or even 99%. Best available evidence, 4.5bn years of climate show there is no causal relationship between co2 concentration and temp.
I dispute what you say but it is not my point. My point is that the review does not claim that CO2 is the exclusive cause of temperature change since 1750. It is there for all to read. Andy May was indisputably wrong. If you take the trouble to read the review you will find Andy May is wrong in other respects. (In fact I have to wonder if he actually read the review he is criticising!)
The review puts a preposterous number of 78% plucked from thin air. Andy May is not wrong in any way, the 78% is indisputably wrong as it’s based on palpable nonsense. The geologic record shows Andy May is likely totally correct. I’ll take physical evidence over mathematical models anyday. Apply these models during the Cambrian one gets fireball earth with co2 concentration of 0.6% Vs 0.04% of today. This is how we can know these models are nonsense as they do not backtest over long period any of climate history. Ive had this debate with many climate scientists who know it’s a killer for them, they get angry and talk about planetary albedo whilst waiving their arms frantically .
But Andy May wasn’t making a claim about the 78% or the geologic record. He is writing about what the review said:
The first clearly false claim is that recent climate change is being driven by CO2 exclusively with no input since 1750 AD from changes in the Sun or nature at large.
This a statement about what is in the review. The claim is not in the review. Ergo Andy May is wrong.
He’s not wrong at all. The geologic record shows that co2 does not drive the climate, so the above statement is irrelevant. In any case 78%, the nonsense number you quote, is overwhelmingly dominant factor in the pseudo science. If I had data which shows 78% women like dresses, it’s hardly untrue to then say, women wear dresses when communicating to a non science audience. Your semantics over language is ridiculous whilst ignoring obvious issues in the awful science you shill for.
This is nothing to do with the truth or falsity of whether CO2 drives climate. It is simply about what was written in the review (right or wrong) and what Andy May said was written. What was written in the review might be absolute rubbish (I don’t think it was) but it was not what Andy May said was written.
You are being totally unscientific and talking nonsense with silly lawyerly points which add nothing to the discussion. The 78% number is nonsense so your argument falls to bits at hurdle 1.
MTF———Whatever your opinion or other peoples opinion on the climate change issue do you really think it is the business of Facebook to be deciding what and what isn’t true and censoring opinions? Because that is really what this article is about. We can have a Punch and Judy show all day about what we all think is true and isn’t true but I don’t think it is Facebooks business to intervene.
No no he’s all for the censorship what is clearly important is using pseudo science like the 78% to pull apart generally true statements about co2!!!! Loving tag teaming with you Varmint.
do you really think it is the business of Facebook to be deciding what and what isn’t true and censoring opinions
So it is not about climate change. I think the answer to this particular question is complicated and subtle and I am undecided.
Well I am not undecided. ——-If you are, it means you really are 50% saying that Facebook should decide what people get to say about an issue that is claimed to be about science. But in reality it is also about economics, social and moral issues. ——–I can categorically say it is none of Facebooks or any other Social media platforms business to be regulators of the publics opinions. ——–You notice that no one stops you having your opinion here on the Daily Sceptic do they?
it means you really are 50% saying that Facebook should decide what people get to say about an issue that is claimed to be about science.
Being undecided is not the same as 50% agreement.
You notice that no one stops you having your opinion here on the Daily Sceptic do they?
You can have any almost any opinion on FB as well (except possibly hate speech which is a crime). The film and links to the film have not been removed from FB. Try searching for it: https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=climate%20the%20movie and you will find masses of links.
There are plenty of people here have put pressure on me to stop expressing my opinions.
So let me rephrase it then. —–You are “undecided” whether facebook should be deciding what is and isn’t true and censoring opinions. You are sitting on the fence. ——-On your other point I see plenty people disagreeing with you yes, but I don’t see that as pressure to try and stop you expressing your opinions. There are plenty places where name calling is rife in the opposite direction with those who question climate change orthodoxy called “climate deniers” “science deniers” told they know nothing about science, are schills for fossil fuel companies etc etc. —–This seems to be what happens and we all have to fight our corner.
The reference in the “review” is to 1850, not as you correctly say, 1750. I suspect a typing error. However since the graph where this figure appears shows no divergence between CO2 and tempetrature until around WW1 then the argument is no different, so I assert that you are being at best uncharitable.
What is more egregious about using the graph as evidence is twofold.
Firstly the solar contribution uses solar irradiance as the only solar influence on temperature in its simulation, whereas there is a building body of opinion that variations in the solar magnetic field affect the impact of cosmic rays on the Earth’s atmosphere which in turn affects cloud formation, which I am sure you will concede has some effect on surface tempratures.
Secondly , since it is known that increasing temperatures cause dissolved CO2 in bodies of water to be released, then the graph shown does not necessarily support the argument that rises in CO2 cause rises in temperature. At best, the calculation is not as simple as protrayed.
We can get into a debate about the contribution of solar – there has been a lot written on it (actually I think my £5 is about to run out so I can’t get into a debate about anything) . However, for me the key point is that May claims the review says CO2 was the only cause of warming when clearly the review does not say that. It is worth stressing because sceptics are fond of this particular straw man.
As (see other comment) the statement quoted by you is – on its face – pure nonsense, it needs to be interpreted in some way in order to derive a meaning from it. And
recent climate change is being driven by CO2 exclusively with no input since 1750 AD from changes in the Sun or nature at large.
is a perfectly valdi interpretation. That the actual statement, minus the tautology I pointed out elsewhere, is more like
CO₂ causes the largest amount of warming of all greenhouse gasses and greenhouse gasses cause almost all global warming
doesn’t contradict that. It’s claimed that nothing but CO₂ has meaningul influence on global warming which is the same as nothing except CO₂ contributes to it. That there’s a token allowance for other natural phenomina in there doesn’t change the substance of the statement.
People only resort to this kind of sopistry because they know they’re wrong but hope to conceal this by making their statements sufficiently complicated.
Thanks RW for saying so succinctly what I was trying to write. I have now junked my contribution.
You are putting words into the mouth of the review. It simply does not say
greenhouse gasses cause almost all global warming
It says
From 1990 to 2022, CO2 caused approximately 78% of the increase in global warming attributed to greenhouse gases. The greenhouse gases overall cause the most global warming of all the climate change drivers,
However much you may want them to have written something else the truth is there for anyone to read.
78% is the overwhelming majority of warming, so yr playing with words. In any case the 78% is abject nonsense anyway. Stop this ridiculous sophistry which is designed to obfuscate the fact the science is so poor it needs to censor those easily demolishing it.
As I already wrote: This statements doesn’t mean anything because increase in increase would need to be defined first. When ignoring this issue, I absolutely do maintain that my interpretation is consistent with its wording. It’s up to you to demonstrate this isn’t the case and the mere claim isn’t sufficient for that.
Nail firmly on head.
Good remarks
“From 1990 to 2022, CO2 caused approximately 78% of the increase in global warming attributed to greenhouse gasses”———Can’t you see any problems with this statement of certainty where there is none?———It talks of a 78% increase in global warming that has been “attributed” to greenhouse gasses. Not a 78% increase in global warming that is “known” to have been caused by greenhouse gasses. ——–It all depends on who does the “attributing” doesn’t it?
Lol if his side attributes something like the 78% based on unfalsifiable pseudo science it becomes truth, if the other side make a general statement to communicate to a non science audience it gets the lawyerly treatment and is false. Heads I win, tails you lose.
Yes but we all need to remember that this article is about censoring of opinion on a social media platform. ——Why would they want to do that? There are no experts or scientists or computer modellers who know what the climate is going to do in 50 or 100 years so what makes Facebook think they can be arbiters of what is true and what isn’t? ——Which only reveals they do this for political purposes, because that is the only way to get the “official science” recognised as ultimate truth ———-silence all debate.
Yes I agree, the evidence of boiling earth is so good that all dissent must be censored.
From 1990 to 2022, CO2 caused approximately 78% of the increase in global warming attributed to greenhouse gases. The greenhouse gases overall cause the most global warming of all the climate change drivers, and CO2 causes the most global warming of all the greenhouse gases (Figure 1).
Increase in global warming is a tautological construction: Warming means temperatures are increasing, the meaning of the complete term is thus something like temperatures are increasingly increasing. What that’s supposed to mean – if anything at all – is anybody’s guess. That’s already sufficient to discard the complete statement as pointless babble.
Also warming implies an ideal base line from which to start. If we measure from 1850 there is perhaps 1 degree warming. If we measure from 50m years ago there is 13 degrees cooling. Which is the correct starting point? I can demonstrate, slight warming or dramatic cooling depending upon where I start.
Climate Feedback should be designated a terrorist organisation. Clearly their mission is to terrorise the population into fearing a non existent climate catastrophe.
Yep, it’s the ultimate conspiracy theory that the world is boiling in the midst of an ice age. I have such contempt for the shills who push it.
What took so long?
Well, it’s still live on YouTube, fortunately. Not a huge number of viewers, though, from 3 weeks ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3Tfxiuo-oM
I often think that Shakespeare (Hamlet) brilliantly observed this kind of behavioural reaction when the guilty party often ‘over egg’ their protestations……
’The lady doth protest too much, methinks’
Ah, yes, I got that one as well: Your post contains false information! If you reoffend, we may sanction you, ie, as quoted above, shadow-ban you. The term false information was interesting because it’s really unclear what that’s supposed to mean at all. Were I to claim that I was the great-grandson of the former emperor of China, this claim would be untrue, but genuine information.
False information would be something like this:
Luke Hinton’s fenders defrosted Sebastian’s Lacy’s choppiness frogs Brutus hanger
This may resemble a sentence but it’s really just randomly selected words. They also used another interesting, new term, namely, well-known climate contrarians.
That CO₂ drives global temperature rises is firstly a nonsense claim as there is no such thing as a global temperature and secondly, an unproven and inherently unprovable theory: We cannot rerun the last 140 years without changes to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, hence, there’s no way to know what would have happened otherwise.
Unbelievable. A private commercial organisation whose business is enabling communication prevents it in a way that undermines open discussion in what used to be Western democracies.
This is a cold war with unnamed hidden enemies destroying a mainstay of democracy – open and free speech.
But not if you want to promote totally made up unscientific ideas about gender identity – like the UK’s NHS is doing including confusing and mutilating children in pursuit of bizarre unscientific ideas.
NHS Bosses Introduce Banner Featuring 21 LGBT Flags Including “Demiromantic”, “Neutrois”, “Androgyne” and “Genderqueer”
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/04/15/nhs-bosses-introduce-banner-featuring-21-lgbt-flags-including-demiromantic-neutrois-androgyne-and-genderqueer/
I never heard anyone voting for the NHS lunacy.
Anyone able to say who decided this unscientific nonsense?
That is because each and everyone of them should be sacked and barred from working in healthcare for life.
RaceBook is dying. I watched Climate the movie and it confirmed all I suspected. The bad news for fact checkers is they can’t erase my memory of the movie.