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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