Twitter’s decision to ban advertisements that “contradict the scientific consensus” around human-caused climate change is both bad and sad. Twitter says such ads are now prohibited by its “inappropriate content policy”. Ads that cast doubt on a scientific hypothesis that doesn’t have a single credible paper to conclusively prove it’s correct are now to be placed on a list that includes the promotion of paedophilia. Ads that question almost forecasts about increases in global temperatures by multiple degrees centigrade based on always-wrong climate models are now to be lumped in with vile abuse based on a person’s skin colour.
The move was announced on Earth Day but was largely a virtue-signalling act since few if any ads will be affected. It is mainly woke companies that signal their virtue in their advertising on a range of cultural and political issues. More practically-minded companies maximise their attempts to provide a service and turn a profit rather than indulging in ideologically-charged advertising.
There are fears, however, that the move, banning in effect non-existent ads, could presage wider restriction of the overall freedom to debate climate change science on social media. It remains to be seen whether the just announced purchase by Elon Musk changes any of the cancelling culture at the San Francisco operation. Twitter said that “misleading information” about climate change “can undermine efforts to protect the planet”. It added: “In the coming months, we’ll have more to share on our work to add reliable, authoritative context to the climate conversations happening on Twitter.” It noted that it was “always thinking about other ways” to “serve” climate conversations.
On Twitter, the company’s global sustainability manager Casey Junod later retweeted a post that noted: “Climate change denial is propaganda that needs to be countered with concrete action and progressive policies.” Junod also retweeted Barak Obama’s response calling the banning move “a good example of progress”, and warning “companies need to be more careful about the content they promote, especially in ads”. Junod said the former American President’s comments were a “proud moment for Twitter”.
The Twitter move is sad because it is yet another shift away from traditional notions of empirical science into an era of ‘settled’, or what is sometimes known as post normal science. In 2003, the author Michael Crichton captured the essence of traditional science when he said:
In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is the reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If its science, it isn’t consensus. Period.
In Twitter’s view, “climate denialism should not be monetised” and this approach is “informed” by supposedly authoritative sources like the IPCC Assessment Reports. These reports, written with a considerable input from politically-motivated social scientists, are now seen as infallible guides to back the command-and-control Net Zero agenda. Twitter relays the IPCC ex cathedra instruction that immediate and deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions “are necessary to turn the tide on global warming”.
While we are still allowed, let us turn our attention to that last pronouncement. One excellent way to turn the tide on global warming would be for the controllers of the world’s major temperature datasets to stop adjusting them upwards. Last week the Daily Sceptic published a number of articles showing how an inconvenient pause in global warming between 1998-2012 was erased from the record by two adjustments to the Met Office’s HadCRUT temperature database. Here is the pause as seen before the first change in 2013.
The pause and suggestion of a slight drop in temperature is clearly visible. From this database it looks as if warming from around 1850 was around 0.8°C. It might convincingly be argued that this warming would be expected, since it is a small bounce back from the previous three centuries of considerable cooling. Note also the fall from the 1940s to the late 1970s.
Two revisions later and the graph is showing over 1°C of warming and a more activist-friendly hockey stick. The awkward pause has been consigned to history. Last Monday we revealed that 14% had been added to the recent global temperature record by the move to HadCRUT5 in 2020. In addition, temperatures had been cooled in the past which accentuated the hockey stick effect. If we add the rise from HadCRUT3 to 4, the boost is as much as 30%. In other words, nearly a third of recent global warming is human caused – humans adjusting the surface temperature record.
Similar changes have been seen in other datasets. In his recent State of the Climate report, Emeritus Professor Ole Humlum of the University of Oslo looked at adjustments by NASA to its GISS record and concluded that “half of the apparent global temperature increase from January 1910 to January 2000 is due to administrative adjustments to the original data since May 2008”.
Just how much, if any, global warming has there been since the late 1990s is a reasonable scientific question. The Daily Sceptic regularly publishes the accurate satellite record of global temperature going back to 1979, as compiled by Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama. The past pause lives on in this record along with a current standstill now measuring over seven years.
As we have also reported, Google recently “demonetised” Dr. Spencer’s web page publishing this data by kicking it off AdSense.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Stop Press: Some of Twitter’s left-wing staffers have branded Musk’s takeover “dangerous” and several prominent liberal media personalities have announced they’re leaving the platform, according to MailOnline.
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Treat Musk cautiously.
He’s very much into the technocratic / transhumanism agenda so his control of Twitter may come with strings attached.
Here’s a Christian perspective for any who are interested.
https://rumble.com/v12g1hu-omega-programme-mod-3.2-part-22-the-emerging-global-religion.html
..and he does have some battery cars to sell.
I saw a point someone made on a forum that they speculated the reason musk bought twitter is to harvest all their data and transfer it into the transhumanism agenda. food for thought.
She’s sceptical mainly with regard to the Ukraine narrative.
Cui bono? also suggests that the author’s hopes are deluded, in light of him being the single biggest financial beneficiary of the climate change overhype and its resulting government money handouts. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/04/26/billionaires-only-come-to-the-rescue-in-movies-and-comic-books/
The test for Musk, as for any owner/manager/editor of an information outlet claiming to be an advocate of free speech, will be to what extent his rules (because in the real world there always have to be rules) are applied to the disadvantage of the opinions he really, really dislikes.
It’s worth bearing in mind that his flagship business relies on climate alarmism to push its sales.
Very good point, maybe that’s the reason that he wanted such an expensive mouthpiece
For sure…
Elon has exploited Titter brilliantly as a ‘free’ above-the-line marketing tool to drive crypto values, NFTs, share moves and his personal biz space/energy/transportation portfolio saving millions neigh billions wasted on more typical paid for click media streams.
Don’t expect Trumpster tweets back any time soon….PMSL
Not just (or even mainly) to push its sales, either. Tesla would not exist without the political push it gets from climate alarmism to cut regulatory corners, get state subsidies and protections, and make its products affordable and give them artificial advantages.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing: People who make $$$ from well entrenched technologies will always seek to hinder exploration of possible alternatives. But progress happens through try something different and see how it works out.
This doesn’t justify the dishonest terror marketing, but that’s a different conversation and in the end, the people on the other side do that as well. The world is going to go under, that’s a given, and if this will happen because of climate change or because of misguided attempts to prevent it depends on whom one has been listening to most recently.
The problem is that movement is not “progress” unless it’s towards an objectively better outcome.
And even if you argue that technological advancement is necessarily good, there’s always (as with all state subsidy and directed effort) the issue of opportunity cost.
“The world is going to go under, that’s a given, and if this will happen because of climate change or because of misguided attempts to prevent it depends on whom one has been listening to most recently.”
This appears to be a kind of “alarmist fork”, whereby we’re damned if we follow the climate alarmists and damned if we oppose them.
Ideally, we’d just ignore them, if they were an appropriately powerless fringe minority.
The problem is that movement is not “progress” unless it’s towards an objectively better outcome.
And even if you argue that technological advancement is necessarily good, there’s always (as with all state subsidy and directed effort) the issue of opportunity cost.
I agree with that and wouldn’t argue that technological change is a worthy end in itself. But in order to determine if something will provide a net benefit, it has to be tried first. Ultimatively, Musk’s electrical cars will either solve real problems for real people or they’re going to vanish again, if only because someone else has a new pet project he’d like to see subsidized instead.
Technology for the sake of technology isn’t a good thing.
The Electric car, for example. It was passed over in preference to the ICE and has not progressed since. It still takes a huge, expensive and heavy battery mass to provide a limited amount of power.
Advances in microprocessors, Li-ion technology and vehicle construction methods (aluminium, carbon fibre, lightweight steel etc) contributed to making the batteries/vehicle slightly less heavy and slightly more efficient, but no less polluting.
The same thing might be said about ‘vaccines’.
This the key point. Musk’s entire empire is built on bullshit, the climate change debacle. That’s the only reason people buy Teslas. Once you’ve tapped in to the fat money flow in our corrupt so-called system, you think you’re smart because the cash is flowing, but you feel kinda guilty because you deep down think you know that everything you do is killing the planet, so to pay off your conscience and deal with the incessant pretzel of guilt gnawing away on the inside, even though its bullshit all the way down but you don’t have the independence of mind to know it, where was I, you buy a Tesla. Now look at me, for carbon. Until the lithium fire burns your house down. So yeah, Musk packages all this dross up and sells it back to the intelligentsia and everyone’s a winner. Until the carbon scam falls apart. So buying Twitter is a genius move, in the sense that it will keep the stupidity going just a little longer. But Musk isn’t as smart as he seems, and this will be too much for him. Twitter will crash and burn under the crushing weight of the internal self-contradictions of the woke and their wobbly worldview. Apocalypse Why Are We Still Waiting.
The test for Musk, as for any owner/manager/editor of an information outlet claiming to be an advocate of free speech, will be to what extent his rules (because in the real world there always have to be rules) are applied to the disadvantage of the opinions he really, really dislikes.
Perhaps that’s the test for all of us. How quick are we to damn (collectively) those who hold opinions we dislike, even if they are in complete agreement with us on other issues?
Vigorously, even fiercely, opposing opinions is one thing. Sneering at, dismissing or damning the people who hold them is another. It becomes yet another form of virtue-signalling.
I think you conflate two fundamentally different issues, and aspire to an unrealistic standard.
There is a clear issue of systematic, dishonest bias when free speech is claimed as the operating principle, but not adhered to (as for instance in the near universal censorship of eg explicitly racist, antisemitic or homophobic opinions, which is enacted almost universally throughout the US sphere).
The issue of being respectful towards those you disagree with is fundamentally different, since it is on a peer to peer basis rather than a top down authoritarian one.
What we need to be able to do is to accept that if we dish it out we should be able to deal with receiving it in turn. That does not mean accepting all personal and all collective slurs or smears passively. It just means declining to appeal to authority to protect you from them.
Granted you are absolutely entitled to look down on those of us who use such tactics, or to criticise them when they do so. In practice, though, human beings being what they are, I suspect you will find it very difficult to be genuinely consistent and even-handed in that.
(I should add that in my lengthy personal experience, rules aimed at enforcing decency between participants are usually the very first to be abused to punish people expressing opinions disliked by the moderators/managers/owners of discussion platforms.)
I’m not a fan of rules aimed at enforcing decency – but self-reflectiveness is always a good idea.
The reference to rules was yours of course – I was quoting. I agree with your reply above.
The “looking down” is done by those who sneer at and dismiss others as part of a collectivity they have designated as wrong.
I understand your point, I just don’t think it’s in the same category as the one about censorship (we probably agree on that).
I think a degree of generalisation and indeed of robust criticism is necessary, or at any rate unavoidable in practice for genuine debate. I’m not going to stop calling lefties lefties and hysterics hysterics (usually not personally and directly, but rather collectively and in the abstract) any time soon, and they won’t stop calling me the names they call me.
But calling people names isn’t necessary at all! Those calling you names are silly, at best.
I agree with and appreciate the overwhelming majority of your posts. I’m not interested in finding a collective noun to apply to you or to anybody else here (apart from a very small handful I think are trolls – either that or they’ve dropped in by mistake and are a bit confused).
You’re Mark. That’s it. I have no interest in guessing what you think about other things on the basis of what you say here. I’m interested in what you actually do say, rather than in finding an adjective to describe it.
Generalisations only bother me when they fly in the face of my own observations. The generalisations about Russians annoy me immensely, and I believe they concern you too.
I don’t have a problem with the use of the word “hysterics”, though I would if someone associated them with only certain categories of people.
But I must know a lot more “lefties” than you do – because I find it impossible to generalise about them (or about the “right”). The range of their views is vast, much more so in this century than in the last – but even then the differences were enormous.
The only thing the “left” agreed on in Australia was the need to defeat the Liberals at the next election, and some of them suspected that other “lefties” didn’t really want that either.
All generalisations are just that – there are always exceptions. And in order to fight something you have to have a name for it. That’s just how human politics works.
Labelling happens on all sides. The issue is not the labelling, it’s the degree of honesty in the particular labels.
If it’s the “left” you want to be fight, be aware of the fact that some of those you’re fighting agree with every word you say. What’s the point of that?
Can a label be “honest” if the person you have labelled doesn’t accept or agree with a single one of the ideas or principles you have just attached to them – with or without their consent?
The parties and adherents of the left – first state socialists and later the Blairite identitarian globalists who took over from them – have, over the past long century, destroyed just about everything worthwhile in the civilisations of the west – culture, unity, faith, knowledge, liberty, political and governmental institutions, foreign policy.
Which is not to say that any of those things were ever perfect or anywhere close to it – such is not the human condition and thinking that it can be so is part of the leftist sickness. In some cases the left improved things, early on, before inevitably costing more than any benefits they brought.
There’s nobody on the left – properly defined – who “agrees with every word I say”. There are people who are pushing in the same direction as I am on particular issues, mostly because their particular kind of leftism is out of power for the moment. But when their kind of leftists are back on top, those leftists will go back to calling me a bigot etc and seeking to have me silenced.
There’s the problem: “properly defined”. Who’s in charge of that?
I know plenty of people designating themselves as “on the left” who not only agree with every word you’ve said here (apart from those insulting them, of course), but would never call you a bigot or ever seek to have you silenced.
I don’t define myself in any way politically because I’ve seen the mess it gets people into; but there are those who do, sincerely, and they are not what you think they are.
“I know plenty of people designating themselves as “on the left” who not only agree with every word you’ve said here (apart from those insulting them, of course), but would never call you a bigot or ever seek to have you silenced.”
Then they need to stop mis-identifying themselves with the bad guys and find themselves some populist conservatives to support – probably the ones smeared as “far right” in the media.
You tell ’em, mate – I keep asking how they still describe themselves as “left” for a whole barrage of reasons, but they are stubborn buggers.
The same people are appalled by the denigration of the Canadian truckers as “far right” and see them as working-class heroes. They regard Justin Trudeau as “fake left” – an expression of which they are fond.
You’d probably like them if you met them, and they would long to spend good hours with you in the pub trying to convince you that you are actually a man of the Left who just doesn’t realise it.
I’m serious. They like Ron DeSantis; and detest Australian Labor Premiers like Dan Andrews and Mark McGowan (and campaign actively against them).
Musk isn’t daft. He see’s the wheels falling off the CAGW caravan with even more clarity than the rest of us. Remember, although he’s co-founder of Tesla, he’s only a shareholder albeit the largest at 17.19%.
How much of that did he sell to buy Twitter?
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1518777886668374016?s=28&t=iekvIpOP_8JiS5gmjqdgMA
LOL! Mainstream media lefties have no self-awareness whatsoever!
Goebbels would be proud of that level of projection.
Holy F***!
That’s gobsmacking, how can anyone watch that network if this is the level of respect they have for integrity, the truth and well not being massive corrupt hypocrites.
The balls on it, presenting this like it’s something that “could” be done now it’s owned by someone they don’t support, when anyone who has been paying attention knows that is exactly what has been going on for years.
The sound of slurping Elon Musk’s behind is becoming overpowering.
Or as Toby Young wrote, “My man of the year is Elon Musk – now where’s my free Tesla?”
Where are you going to drive it if he gives you one, Toby? Anywhere nice?
It beggars belief that members of a particular species of largely hairless mammals are seriously convinced that they’re capable of and required to save the planet. Or it would if it was to be taken seriously by anyone but teenagers. In reality, such morale imperative goals whose outcomes are impossible to assess always just mean We want to implement policies which benefit us while they’re seriously detrimental to a lot of other people. But that’s ok, because nothing but our neuroses matter (to us, that is).
A hallmark of a dishonest politician is that he always claims to have his head in the clouds: Nothing of any tangible benefit to anyone who’s alive now is ever supposed to result from his favoured policies because he’s always terribly busy with solving so overarchingly important future problems that he just can’t be bothered with the rather mundane present ones.
Couldn’t agree more. Last time I looked, “the planet” had been around for 4.5 billion years and has had at least 4 mass-extinction events in that time and is still going strong. It is not due to expire for another 1,7 billion years (I think) when the sun starts to expand into a red giant (or something similar). The phrase “saving the planet” is just plain wrong.
“Stop Press: Some of Twitter’s left-wing staffers have branded Musk’s takeover “dangerous” and several prominent liberal media personalities have announced they’re leaving the platform, according to MailOnline.“
Yeah, right.
How many of the lefty hysterics and attention seekers who promised to “leave America if Trump won” in 2016 actually did it? (The answer, by the way, is either “nowhere near enough” if you are American, or “way too many” if you’re British and had to put up with the few who came over here.)
They can’t resist the attention, so they’ll stick around or slink back after a big showy exit, even if it means they have to engage without the benefit of systematic administrative bias to protect their opinions. And boy, will they howl about that!
In the modern era the policy that certain claims may not be freely discussed, open to discusion or rejected as false started with the Holocaust narrative.
As with any claims that the establishment can’t support with convincing proof, evidence or logical reasoning they simply resort to censorship in order to protect their lie from scrutiny.
The San Francisco operation … soon to be operating out of west Texas.
He’s not the Muskssiah, he’s a very naughty boy.
Still, it ought to be be a laugh, and we should take them where we can find them.
Tesla owes its existence to the man made climate change hysteria. Does anyone seriously believe Musk will do anything to threaten the continuation of this hysteria?
The same might have been said of Michael Schellenberger who was principle in persuading Obama that wind turbines are the future.
He’s done a complete 180º and even apologised to the world for the behaviour of the greens.
He should be tied to a blade and left to spin.
Not really. He’s turned into an influential campaigner for nuclear.
In other words, nearly a third of recent global warming is human caused – humans adjusting the surface temperature record.
As several people have pointed out, this kind of discussion is hugely one-sided unless it includes a description of why the adjustments were made. If they are made for good reasons, then all that has happened is they have more accurately reflected global warming and this happens to be an increase. Maybe not. Maybe it was all a global conspiracy of climate scientists. But don’t just assume it.
accurate satellite record of global temperature
So presumably the RSS record is the inaccurate satellite record? Remember satellite data does not measure the surface and requires many of its own adjustments. It is a very useful addition to our understanding of global temperature change but it is not definitive.
As several people have pointed out, this kind of discussion is hugely one-sided unless it includes a description of why the adjustments were made. If they are made for good reasons,
A measurement is a bit of information about the real world. An adjusted measurement isn’t. That’s a bit of fiction someone preferred over real information for some reason. There is no justification for replacing the former with the latter because knowledge about real phenomenons can’t be acquired by making up stuff.
Well you can’t accurately measure the average temperature of the earth without making some adjustments to the raw data – that includes the satellite data.
Satellites measure the temperature of the Troposphere, all of it. The Troposphere is largely uncontaminated by mankind in terms of Urban Heat Islands (UHI’s) and areas without weather stations – much of Africa, Russia, South America, the Middle East, Asia and, of course, the Oceans etc.
Historic sea surface temperatures are completely unreliable, being that as late as the 1960’s they were still being taken by a canvas bucket thrown over the side to no particular depth, probably recorded by a deck hand, when he had time.
Most of that activity took place along well travelled shipping routes which are much the same today. Few of them include much of the Pacific or the Southern Ocean because there isn’t much in either to travel to for trade.
Even today, there is no international standard for shipboard sea intakes in terms of depth, size or routing through the ship.
In other words, 70% of the surface of the planet simply can’t be relied on for data. Even Argo buoys spend their life at 1,000 feet parked beneath the surface before diving to 2,000 feet every 10 days, surfacing to transmit data, before diving to their parked position. Nor does that address the vast area each Argo buoy is responsible for.
Possibly why they didn’t return the results scientists expected. Basically, the oceans aren’t warming.
As another example of data fiddling. A few years ago the Australian BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) introduced new, digital weather stations. They are so good they can record temperatures by the second, which they did, showing the highest and lowest temperatures of the day. The problem being that the international standard is to smooth temperatures over five minutes to allow for momentary temperature spikes. The Aus. BOM is still operating its dodgy practice.
The Troposphere cuts across all these problems. The satellite data has been adjusted to allow for orbital degradation, calibration and new, more accurate equipment but this has been scrutinised by innumerable agencies and found to be acceptable.
Glad you accept the satellite data has been adjusted.
Satellites measure the temperature of the Troposphere, all of it.
Yes – but not all in one data series. Spencer typically publishes lower, mid and tropopause separately. Or are you talking about global coverage which is much better than the surface record but cannot measure every square meter?
I think you are a bit out of date on Sea Surface Temperatures – nowadays they are mostly done by infrared satellite (not the MSU satellites used for troposphere measurement). This can then be used to calibrate and correct the less accurate methods (one of pesky adjustments).
I don’t need to “accept” it. Adjustment based on observations is entirely justified. What isn’t justified is adjustment to unreliable historic data, including paleo data from when there were no instruments.
“Every month, John Christy and I update global temperature datasets that represent the piecing together of the temperature data from a total of fifteen instruments flying on different satellites over the years. A discussion of the latest version (6.0) of the dataset is located here.”
Vitally, Spencer produces a monthly report of the “Global Lower atmosphere”. He provides the data on the Lower Troposphere, Mid-Troposphere, the Tropopause and the Lower Stratosphere so people can use it in any spreadsheet they like.
It is, of course, authorised by NASA as it’s their satellites he uses, with their cooperation.
I assume you’re talking global coverage of satellites, which can cover every square metre but there would simply be far too much data.
I assume you’re admitting satellite data is better than surface records. Some surface records are restricted to hundreds, if not thousands of miles between data collection points.
Infra red satellites can only measure the temperature of the first centimetre or two of the surface of any ocean. This is subject to rapid change which is widely recognised since the use of satellites began in the 1970’s, otherwise, why would they bother with Argo buoys which began in 2003. There are, to date, only about 4,000 of the buoys which represents one buoy per 90,000 square kilometres. That’s more than the surface area of Ireland each.
The 2005 – 2012 data found a possible warming of 0.02°C per decade but this was beset with calibration issues and unreliability with buoys made in different countries to different designs.
Shouldn’t that be ‘sometimes known as not science’?
Just stop using Twitter. It’s got to be punished for its behaviour, not appeased.
If the PC Fascism doesn’t end people need to ditch ‘Twitter’ altogether.
“Twitter” at present is a clear and present danger to truth and humanity
One way or another, it will change. It might be for the good, it might not.
Musk has suggested a subscription based model rather than advertising driven.
Time will tell. I think the enemy of most of us is speculation.
People don’t become billionaires without deceiving a few people into thinking they will get more than they will get.
You don’t get to become a billionaire unless the global money power decides to use you as a front man for their operations.
Bezoz, that Facebook weirdo and the likes of Richard Branson are all of a same.
Of course there is a climate consensus.
1.You only get funding if you produce results that back the offical globalist position unless you are a tenured professor and those willing to tell the truth are dying out.
2.They have been actively censoring alternative opinions for years.
Whoever owns or controls it, the whole thing is just a giant cloaca. The main difference is whether it’s receiving constipated thought, or verbal diarrhoea.
There may be a very good chance of this: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376
And by “law” I assume the 1st amendment.
This is only of any relevance to Twitter shareholders.
For all sane people there is only one course of action: avoid Twitter completely.
I am surprised that no one on here mentioned that The Twit servers are owned and operated by the American Secret Service and therefore ALL twitterers are known to and censored by them.
As it stands the company is a money looser if not for the subsidies. Just like the windmills and Skalectric cars, could not exist without taxpayer funding.
The conservative treehouse.com has done several pieces on this. As Toby would say ‘Well worth the read’
Since when has ” consensus” been a measure of being correct?
You cannot ignore the fact Musk has just made a cool 13 billion and has received incredible amount of exposure and fame. He is also now in charge of a large communications platform, like so many other billionaires, on which to push his agendas. He is a proponent of the climate change scam but that may be to push his all battery powered cars. He is, after all, a very successful industrialist.
If twitter are so keen on saving the planet then perhaps they should close down, as by using more electricity to carry comments they are causing more CO2 production and increasing global warming.