If there was an award for worst fact check of the year, the recent attempt by the French state-owned Agence France-Presse (AFP) to smear the Daily Sceptic would be the clear favourite to win. Taking issue with our report of a recent paper published by Nature that found no “surge” in global temperatures since 1970, the AFP author Manon Jacob branded the article “misleading” purely on the basis of a random selection of what other commentators had written on social media. The so-called fact check is so bad it could well be used in future journalism schools as an example of how not to take a poke at well-sourced material, just because you don’t like what is written.
Lesson one might look at how Jacob and his state paymasters start their mission in bold type with the following:
A 2024 research paper in the journal Nature found no statistically detectable surge in the global warming rate since the 1970s, but social media posts claiming this is evidence climate change is not real are false. The data in this study and numerous others confirms a steady increase in surface temperature during this period, according to its authors and independent scientists.
There is no attempt made to dispute what was written in the Daily Sceptic, just the immediate erection of a strawman to knock down. In Jacob’s world, if the Daily Sceptic reported that man had landed on the moon, AFP would call it “misleading” because some conspiracy berk said it was filmed in the backlot at Universal Studios.
It gets worse. The article’s heading reads: ‘Scientists found “no change” in global warming rate?’ Note the question mark, a punctuation that is absent in the heading of the Nature paper that states: “A recent surge in global warming is not detectable yet.”
Halfway through the article a large red cross is placed across the promoting tweet sent by Daily Sceptic Editor-in-Chief Toby Young that read:
A sensational paper in top science journal Nature has found “no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s”, blowing holes in alarmist claims that global temperatures are surging, says Chris Morrison.
What is the problem here, it might be asked. The first part of the tweet is factually correct as evidenced by the paper itself, while the comment that follows is justified given the ubiquitous claims by alarmists that the recent temperature spike was evidence of accelerated warming. What might have upset AFP is that the message was retweeted almost 3,000 times, helped along by a push from Dr. Jordan Peterson and his four million-plus followers. The article was also reposted in a number of journals including the popular science site Watts Up With That?
Why did the author start by placing a question mark against “no change in global warming rate”? It suggests a lack of understanding of the difference between a consistent statistical rise in temperature since 1970 (despite earlier falls and two significant pauses) and a possible increase or “surge” in the recent rate of warming. The study’s warming trends were said to be misrepresented “to promote climate denial”. What follows later in the AFP hitjob is simply pure gibberish: “But using the article’s conclusions to claim there has been no additional warming since the 1970s is highly misleading, scientists say, noting that the models used in the study instead detect a consistent increase over time.” Why should the first part of this statement of “no additional warming” – a fact published in the Nature paper – be at odds with a “consistent increase” in temperatures over time?
The lack of “additional warming”, however misleading AFP finds it, was crucial to the findings of the paper and the Daily Sceptic was careful to accurately report what was written. Jacob and AFP have simply fallen into the trap of mixing up what others have said with what the Daily Sceptic clearly and fairly reported. The scientists said there was “limited evidence” for a warming surge. “In most surface temperature time series, no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023.” The scientists said it was important to consider random noise caused by natural variation when investigating the recent pauses in temperature and the more recent “alleged warming acceleration”. I noted that the paper was an excellent piece of climate science work since it took a long statistical view and challenged the two-a-penny clickbait alarmists looking for a headline on the BBC. And, it would seem, at the French state’s news agency. The Daily Sceptic has been subjected to a number of nuisance fact checks from this quarter, as has Toby Young who is said to have “spread myths debunked by AFP in the past”. Certainly, AFP is on its game when it comes to smearing and cancelling opinions that detract from the global rollout of the Net Zero fantasy.
The AFP climate desk is run by Marlowe Hood, the self-styled “Herald of the Anthropocene”. As regular readers will recall, this climate champion was recently given €100,000 by the foundation of a large Spanish bank heavily involved in funding green projects. He was one of a gang of activists including Graham Readfearn of the Guardian and Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann that secured the retraction in Springer Nature of an inconvenient paper written by a number of eminent Italian physicists. Led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti, it observed that the available data did not support a climate emergency. Hood claimed the data, which came mostly from IPCC sources, were “grossly manipulated” and “fundamentally flawed”. The paper was initially brought to wide social attention by the Daily Sceptic and Marlowe Hood started the cancellation ball rolling by writing – yes, you guessed it – an AFP fact check.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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“Governments don’t stay in power if they make people cold and poor”. They do if there is no coherent opposition to vote for.
And even if they don’t stay in power and get replaced, the next lot just carry on in the same way, so it makes no difference.
And they are rewarded with gongs for failure.
Which confirms what I keep repeating on here – our governments are NOT running the country.
Pitchforks.
Petrol bombs while we still have access to it.
All the petrol pumps have been damaged by climate zealots.
Pointing out the costs and suffering won’t put an end to insane climate policies.
The policies stem from the idea that burning fossil fuels leads to climate catastrophe and destruction.
In most peoples’ minds, a bit of suffering is better than catastrophe and destruction.
Years and years of brainwashing need to be undone.
But that isn’t going to happen without telling everyone that the whole CO2 climate catastrophe story is a giant hoax.
Too many people who try to argue against climate policy on the basis of the unacceptable costs don’t dare to challenge the broader narrative and that’s a big problem.
I think this is true for the Guardian readers I know, but I also talk to quite a few people much more grounded in reality and I am sure they would be more than happy to forget about the climate crisis if their bills went down.
People are saying that “the whole CO2 climate catastrophe story is a giant hoax” but they do not try to prove it. Probably they do not know enough to be able to.
The UN and WEF will be delighted that their planned destruction of the UK …. at the hands of the British Establishment and puppeticians is going so well.
Only a small percentage of the Earth’s surface has direct temperature reading instruments of varying accuracy and from which these averages of averages are calculated.
The result is numbers, not data.
Net-zero common sense for decades. And all because the earth has supposedly warmed 0.8 deg C since 1860 when records began at the low point after a little ice age.
To physicists, that’s an increase of 0.3% from 288 to 288.8 degrees Kelvin. Meanwhile the difference in average temperature between London and Manchester is 1.2 deg C. Go figure.
A simpleton’s yarn debunked over a decade ago by a Nobel Physics Laureate…
https://mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/recordings/31259/the-strange-case-of-global-warming-2012
“…In this talk I will explain why I became concerned about the climate, and terrified by the one-sided propaganda in the media, In particular I am worried about all the money wasted on alternate energies, when so many children in the world go hungry to bed.”
Twelve years on, the Climate Theatre of the Absurd just runs and runs.
Thanks for the link.
Climate activists are average people
No, I think most of us would consider them below average retards if there answer to a lack of wind generation is just to build more of it. 1 + 1 still only equals 1 when it is the percentage of output from your windmills.
Energy, supply and demand.
The article covers comprehensively the supply end, or lack of it, but leaves out the zooming demand. According to the (fake) statistics, the population of Greater London in 2024 was 9,748,000, 1% more than 2023. Nevertheless, going by measurements of water consumption and sewage production, the real figure is close to 12m. And this is the curious thing. The NetZeroist fanatics also support enthusiastically open borders, ignoring the fact that increasing population levels lead to huge greenhouse gas emissions.
Friends of the Earth’s Tony Bosworth said, “We have an abundance of natural resources like wind and solar,” he says. “They’ll go on forever, and we won’t be reliant on expensive gas and oil.”
Bosworth ought to be sent, along with the Just Stop Oil filth who have just desecrated the grave of Charles Darwin, to Texas, to be instructed by the Texans about what happened to their wind & solar during the terrible “Polar Vortex” Blizzards in 2021. The wind turbines froze solid, the solar panels were covered with snow, and the people froze to death.
“The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says”
“A BuzzFeed News analysis shows the catastrophic failure of Texas’s power grid in February killed hundreds of medically vulnerable people.”
“The true number of people killed by the disastrous winter storm and power outages that devastated Texas in February is likely four or five times what the state has acknowledged so far. A BuzzFeed News data analysis reveals the hidden scale of a catastrophe that trapped millions of people in freezing darkness, cut off access to running water, and overwhelmed emergency services for days.”
“The state’s tally currently stands at 151 deaths. But by looking at how many more people died during and immediately after the storm than would have been expected — an established method that has been used to count the full toll of other disasters — we estimate that 700 people were killed by the storm during the week with the worst power outages.”
“This astonishing toll exposes the full consequence of officials’ neglect in preventing the power grid’s collapse despite repeated warnings of its vulnerability to cold weather, as well as the state’s failure to reckon with the magnitude of the crisis that followed.”
Texas’s Winter Storm Killed Hundreds More Than Reported
Until the mainstream media stop repeating the net zero lies, it will remain difficult to get the honest message such as this article, through.