NewsGuard has been in touch again for our annual grilling on the ‘misinformation’ it claims to have found on the Daily Sceptic. Suffice to say the errors are all NewsGuard’s. Below is the supposedly damning list the media censorship organisation levelled at us this time – and how we responded. Enjoy.
From: John Gregory
Subject: NewsGuard 2024 update on DailySceptic.org
Date: August 28th 2024 at 20:53:41 BST
To: Toby Young
Mr. Young,
This is John Gregory, Health Editor at NewsGuard. We exchanged emails in 2022 and 2023 when we last updated our rating of DailySceptic.org.
As a part of our rating process, we contact the publication being rated to seek comment on any potential issues we find and to give the site a chance to point us to any information we may have missed. I’ve attached a PDF copy of our previous rating, but keep in mind this is due for update.Please keep in mind that we ask about all potential issues that may affect the site’s rating. We also may ask general questions to help users understand the site’s practices. Thus, questions asked below do not mean the site will not achieve a high NewsGuard score or that we have made any final determination yet of the site’s rating. Instead, the goal of this communication is to make sure our rating is as fair, accurate, and thorough as possible.
If you do have comments in response to any of the questions below, we will include them in our rating report so that readers can see your point of view. As such, please consider this and any additional correspondence with us to be on the record. With that in mind, here are my questions:
1) A June 2024 article, titled ‘The Truth About Covid is Finally Seeping Out’, stated, “Perhaps the most macabre aspect of the Covid scam was the plain stupidity employed to justify the rise of ‘sudden death syndrome’, once it became clear the vaccinated were dropping dead without warning. Heart attacks in 20-year-old athletes used to be a rare occurrence, but not now – virtually anything can trigger a touch of myocarditis. So if you were planning on doing any gardening later, watching TV or heaven forfend exercising after your 93rd booster, you’d be well-advised to give it a miss.” The article did not provide any evidence that there has been a rise in “sudden death syndrome”. According to fact-checking articles citing medical experts, there was not an increase in deaths due to “sudden adult death syndrome” following the rollout of Covid vaccines. Contrary to the article’s suggestion that there has been an increase in heart attacks among young athletes following the rollout of Covid vaccines, Dr. Jonathan Drezner, Director of the UW Medicine Centre for Sports Cardiology at the University of Washington and Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, told FactCheck.org in January 2023, “There is no uptick in sudden cardiac arrest or death in athletes due to COVID-19 or from COVID-19 vaccinations. This is total misinformation.”
The article’s suggestion also appears to be contradicted by peer-reviewed studies, such as a July 2024 study involving 46 million adults in England, which found the incidence of heart attacks dropped following Covid vaccination (while acknowledging the known side effects of myocarditis and pericarditis following mRNA-based vaccines and thrombotic thrombocytopenia after the AstraZeneca vaccine). Do you have any comment on these claims?
Comparisons of vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts have consistently shown that the background death rate in the vaccinated cohort is around half that of the unvaccinated cohort (see e.g. here). This is the ‘healthy vaccinee bias’ and it makes any observational comparison of vaccinated and unvaccinated groups (as in the July 2024 study you cite) very difficult and unlikely to be accurate, even when an effort is made to control for such confounders.
The July 2024 study admits spikes in the known ‘rare’ side-effects of VITT and myocarditis. It therefore strains biological plausibility that an intervention that causes a spike in such conditions would overall result in improved cardiovascular health. Furthermore, official data since 2021 have clearly shown in England a large increase in cardiovascular-related conditions and deaths. Since the vast majority of the older cohorts mainly affected by these conditions are vaccinated, even without access to the elusive data by vaccination status (which authorities have repeatedly refused requests from experts and MPs to release) we can be confident that there has been a significant rise in cardiovascular conditions and deaths in the vaccinated since 2021 (and perhaps also in the unvaccinated – without the data we cannot know). This means that the study’s results showing that vaccination leads to a reduction in such conditions are questionable and the methodology is likely flawed – most likely owing to the strong healthy vaccinee bias not being adequately accounted for.
The Daily Sceptic has covered these issues for a number of years now, citing numerous studies and experts. It should not be the role of journalists like yourself, funded by governments and others with a clear agenda to promote and defend the vaccines they created, funded and profit from, to attempt to censor scientific and public debate about the safety of these novel medical products. Each time a medical scandal is uncovered in which patients have been harmed over years by unsafe medical products, people ask how it could have been allowed to happen. I suspect you may be able to help them answer that question.
2) An April 2024 article, titled ‘mRNA Vaccines Aid Cancer Development, Study Finds’, said, “mRNA vaccines aid cancer development due to the use of modified mRNA designed to suppress immunity, a study in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules has found”’
Another April 2024 article, headlined ‘Did BioNTech’s Experimental Cancer Drugs Promote Cancer? The Plot Thickens’, advanced the same claim while citing the same study, “In light of reports of surging cancer diagnoses since the rollout of the mRNA-based Covid vaccines, I wondered in a recent article whether BioNTech’s trials faltered because its mRNA-based cancer therapies were in fact promoting cancerous growths rather than inhibiting or reversing them. Well, now we have further support for this hypothesis.”
In fact, the April 2024 study referenced in both of the April 2024 articles by DailySceptic.org misrepresented previously published research that tested mRNA vaccines for cancer — not COVID-19 — in mice, experts told NewsGuard and other news organisations.
The study’s conclusion was based on a separate study, published in October 2022 in the journal Frontiers in Immunology, which involved injecting cancerous cells into mice. The research found that mRNA vaccines for cancer that did not contain N1-methyl-pseudouridine decreased the size of tumours in mice, but vaccines that included the ingredient did not.
Tanapat Palaga, a Professor of Microbiology at the Chulalongkorn University in Thailand and co-author of the October 2022 study, told FactCheck.org in May 2024, “Our results did not show, suggest or indicate that modified mRNA promotes tumor growth/metastasis.”
Experts not involved with the October 2022 study also said its results were misrepresented in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules. Imperial College London professor of mucosal infection and immunity Robin Shattock told NewsGuard in a May 2024 email, “The review article is factually incorrect – they clearly haven’t read or understood the original paper that they cite as evidence for modified mRNA causing cancer.”
Moreover, health experts have repeatedly stated that there is no evidence that Covid vaccines can cause or worsen cancers. Dr. Steven Pergam, a professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, said on the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s website that “there are no data that suggest that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer, lead to recurrence or to disease progression”.
Do you have any comment on these claims?
We are entitled to report on an article in a scientific journal and should not be penalised for doing so. I note the article has not been retracted. The comments from scientists who disagree with the study (who you seem to assume are necessarily correct) were not published until after our articles so could not have been cited by us at the time. I suggest the scientists you are in touch with take up their criticisms with the authors of the study and the journal which published it and that you stop harassing honest journalists reporting things which the authorities would rather not hear.
4) Another April 2024 article, titled ‘Study Links mRNA Jabs to Excess Cancer Deaths in Japan’, stated, “For several years, oncologists such as Professor Angus Dalgleish have been linking mRNA Covid vaccines to cancer onset and relapse. Of course, the pro-mRNA side has consistently dismissed such worries as nothing more than anecdotes and coincidences. However, population-level data supporting this link have appeared in a new peer-reviewed study titled ‘Increased Age-Adjusted Cancer Mortality After the Third mRNA-Lipid Nanoparticle Vaccine Dose During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan.’ The authors start by pointing out that age-adjusted mortality rates (AMRs) for all cancers continued their downward trend during the first year of the Covid Pandemic right up until the roll-out of the Covid jabs. A rather unfortunate coincidence, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
As stated above, health experts have repeatedly stated that there is no evidence that Covid vaccine cause cancer or cancer recurrence.
The authors of the study did “not provide any evidence within this study that the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines was responsible for an increase in the incidence of certain cancers in Japan”, Neil Mabbott, a professor of immunopathology at the University of Edinburgh, told NewsGuard in an email. “Any suggestion otherwise is circumstantial.”
Jeffrey Morris, a Professor of Public Health and Preventive Medicine and Director of the Biostatistics Division at the University of Pennsylvania, told Reuters in a May 2024 fact-checking article that the study did not actually demonstrate an increase in cancer deaths. Morris said that the research “implies that the age-adjusted cancer death rate increases throughout the pandemic, when in fact it does not increase – it stays relatively stable and actually decreases from 2021 to 2022.”
Morris said that the study also assumed — without evidence — that COVID-19 vaccine rates correlate to cancer death rates. “They don’t present any data splitting out cancer deaths by vaccination status, and do not show it is increased after vaccination, or higher in vaccinated than unvaccinated of same age/comorbidity status, or otherwise provide any epidemiological evidence that vaccines increased the risk of cancer mortality,” he said.
Moreover, the article itself was retracted in June 2024, with Cureus stating, “Upon post-publication review, it has been determined that the correlation between mortality rates and vaccination status cannot be proven with the data presented in this article. As this invalidates the conclusions of the article, the decision has been made to retract.”
Do you have any comment on these claims? And is there a reason why your site has not corrected the article to reflect that the study has been retracted?
(Did I miss (3)?)
Our article cites a health expert, Dr. Angus Dalgliesh, Professor of Oncology at St George’s Hospital Medical School, London. Is there a reason why you assert that “health experts have repeatedly stated that there is no evidence that Covid vaccines cause cancer or cancer recurrence” when clearly there are health experts who state otherwise? You are only giving one point of view – the one that you and your employer agree with – and presenting it as the only legitimate view and then using it to attempt to demonetise those who disagree.
The study was retracted almost three months after our article was published. Like other news outlets, we do not routinely edit past articles to reflect later developments, allowing articles to stand as reflective of what was known or understood at the time.
It’s also worth noting that the authors did not agree with the retraction, responding with their reasons here. They write that “all authors unanimously conclude that this action is entirely unjustified and unacceptable”, pointing out that relying on a journalist’s ‘fact check’ to retract a piece of peer-reviewed science undermines the scientific process and its credibility. They defend their work, rebut criticisms and highlight the concerning links between the ‘fact-checking’ company that resulted in the retraction of their paper and one of the pharmaceutical companies involved. Perhaps NewsGuard could better serve the public guarding the news from the undue influence of companies with vested interests in defending their products?
5) An April 2024 article, titled ‘New Paper Finds Effect of Human-Caused Carbon Emissions on Climate is ‘Non-Discernible'”, stated, “In the informative Climate: The Movie, the 2022 Nobel physics laureate Dr. John Clauser thundered: ‘I assert there is no connection whatsoever between climate change and CO2 – it’s all a crock of crap, in my opinion.’ While not expressing himself in such forthright terms, the Greek scientist Professor Demetris Koutsoyiannis might agree. He recently published a paper that argues it is the recent expansion of a more productive biosphere that has led to increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and greening of the Earth.”
In fact, there is a broad scientific consensus — reflected in findings from organisations including the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — that human activity is the greatest contributor to global warming, primarily through its emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Demetris Koutsoyiannis did claim in the March 2024 article you cited that the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels was due to natural warming since the year 1800 leading to a “more productive and expanded” biosphere, and also stated that the effect on human carbon emissions on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels was “non-discernible”. However. experts told Science Feedback in an April 2024 fact-checking article that Koutsoyiannis’ conclusions were flawed because his article did not mention existing evidence on the impact of greenhouse gasses linked to human activity.
“What is frustrating and confusing to me is that the author knows that human emissions have increased significantly during the industrial period, enough to explain the rise of CO2,” Sourish Basu, a research scientist at NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, told Science Feedback in an email. “Early on, the author erroneously concluded that the biosphere must be the main driver behind the atmospheric CO2 budget and fossil fuel emissions must be negligible.”
Do you have any comment on these claims?
As we note in our article, Dr. John Clauser is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Physics prize. Our article was a fair report on an interesting view on carbon dioxide from an expert in physical processes. The fact that other scientists disagree with him is beside the point. (As John Stuart Mill said: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”) The scientific process is all about moving forward through such disagreements. Part of that process is airing all the relevant views. If you don’t like the message, don’t shoot the messenger.
6) A July 2023 article, headlined ‘Lancet Study on Covid Vaccine Autopsies Finds 74% Were Caused by Vaccine – Study is Removed Within 24 Hours‘, said, “A Lancet review of 325 autopsies after Covid vaccination found that 74% of the deaths were caused by the vaccine – but the study was removed within 24 hours.”
While the article itself acknowledged that the referenced research was a “preprint awaiting peer review”, both the article and headline refer to it as a “Lancet review”. Is there a reason why the site did not mention Preprints with the Lancet‘s disclaimer that, “Preprints available here are not Lancet publications or necessarily under review with a Lancet journal?”
An article published on Preprints with the Lancet is, quite clearly, a preprint published by the Lancet. The Lancet can’t have it both ways. If it’s going to put its name on a preprint server then we will report the preprints on it as being Lancet preprints, which is what we did. It is a study published in the Lancet‘s preprint server so it is entirely reasonable to describe it in shorthand as a Lancet study, provided we make clear (as we do) that it is a preprint and therefore not yet peer-reviewed. It is not a ‘Lancet publication’ in the technical sense that it appears in the journal the Lancet, but we did not claim it was. If the Lancet is going to put its name on a preprint server then it has to accept that it is publishing studies in preprint and that the articles on it will fairly be described by journalists as Lancet articles in preprint.
7) The above article seemed to treat the preprint’s conclusions as proven fact, stating, “Keep in mind that the CDC has not yet acknowledged a single death being caused by the Covid mRNA vaccines. Autopsy evidence demonstrating otherwise is clearly not what the U.S. public health establishment wants to hear.”
Is there a reason why the article did not mention that the study’s methods were insufficient to prove causation, as medical experts have mentioned in fact-checking articles about the study?
This was merely a comment about what U.S. public health officials don’t want to hear. Is there a reason that you think it’s appropriate to trawl through our articles looking for sentences that you think “seem” not to be phrased correctly?
8) Is there a reason why the July 2023 article did not mention much larger studies indicating that COVID-19 vaccines are not associated with a greater risk of death from any cause?
As noted above, the Daily Sceptic has covered these issues for a number of years now, citing numerous studies and experts. We have gone into some detail looking at studies which appear to show Covid vaccines not associated with higher deaths and looking at why they may be misleading, e.g. due to the strong healthy vaccinee bias noted above. We do not mention these things in every article on the subject as our readers are generally aware of them and it would be tedious to read the same points every time. However, we do draw attention to previous articles looking at these issues from time to time.
9) An April 2023 article said of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, “This is the product that currently has 7,442 reported adverse events in DAEN (Australia’s VAERS or Yellow Card database). Thirty-six of these entries are reported deaths.”
Is there a reason why the article did not mention that reports to Australia’s DAEN (Database of Adverse Event Notifications) database are not verified prior to their publication, and anyone can report an adverse event, including patients, health care providers, vaccine manufacturers and members of the public? Or that the TGA’s website clearly states that DAEN reports do not prove causation and “the search results cannot be used to determine if the benefits of taking the medicine or vaccine outweigh the risks”?
The Database of Adverse Event Notifications is set up precisely to receive reports of adverse events to flag up safety issues with medical products. Denying its use for this purpose is perverse. Our statement is accurate as we refer to reported adverse events and reported deaths. People would not report these events if they did not think they were vaccine related, and many of the reports are made by medics. Some will be mistaken, but also many adverse events will not be reported. Independent reviews have only ever found that adverse events are severely under-reported, never over-reported. Is there a reason you’re so keen to dismiss the relevance of thousands of reports of side-effects?
8) We found two correction [sic] in the past year, not counting the corrections made as the result of our prior inquiries. We also found numerous instances of articles that appear to contain factual errors, as evidenced by the examples above. Do you have any comment on this?
(Shouldn’t this be (10) rather than (8) again?)
We note corrections when we make them. If you spot any factual errors please let us know and we will correct the articles and note the correction. I have responded to your points above and don’t believe at this point any further corrections are warranted. At the Daily Sceptic we have very high editorial standards, sticking closely to the claims of scientific studies and experts, and rarely have to correct our articles once published. This is why your previous rating for us is so inaccurate and unfair. I don’t know if you’re aware that your previous interaction with us was cited by U.S. federal lawmakers as they pressed for action against the kind of partisan censorship organisation you work for. Hopefully, this time you will be receptive to the fairness of our responses and, recognising our high editorial standards, give us a rating much more reflective of that.
I would be glad to discuss these questions via phone or email and to discuss any questions you might have about NewsGuard and our rating process.
—
Best regards,
John GregoryMore about NewsGuard criteria here.
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.
This is a shock:
‘House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) launched an investigation into misinformation tracking company NewsGuard on Thursday, citing concerns about “protected First Amendment speech” and “censorship campaigns.”
‘Questions now surround the influence of NewsGuard’s business relationships and other influences on its ratings process,” Comer said in a statement announcing the probe on Thursday.
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/14/newsguard-oversight-committee-investigation-free-speech
Or not really:
‘In a study published Tuesday, Media Research Center (MRC) Free Speech America found that NewsGuard, the taxpayer censorship giant self-tasked with rating media outlets on reliability, “overwhelmingly favored left-leaning outlets over right-leaning ones.” This is the third year MRC Free Speech America has exposed NewsGuard for its partisanship, and, according to MRC, NewsGuard has become “even worse” than years prior.
Using AllSides, an organization that classifies media outlets by their “right” to “left” bias, “MRC researchers determined that NewsGuard provided a stellar average ‘credibility’ rating of 91/100 for ‘left’ and ‘lean left’ outlets (e.g., The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Vox),” wrote MRC researchers. Meanwhile, “right” and “lean right” outlets, such as Fox News, the New York Post, and The Daily Wire, were given “an outrageously abysmal average score of 65/100.”
https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/13/study-finds-taxpayer-funded-newsguard-is-outrageously-biased-against-conservatives/
If they do not change their rating as a result of your response can you sue them? Just like Elon Musk has done with Media Matters?
Wonderful!
Great stuff. Of course, a briefer reply could have referred him to the response in Arkell v Pressdram 1971.
https://www.wearefieldwork.com/journal/arkell-v-pressdram-1971
Thank you for making me burst out laughing. Incredibly therapeutic
It’s a pity that the Eye is nowadays mostly and establishment mouthpiece¹.
¹ After getting progressively annoyed with the endless focus on the wrongs of Brexit, MD going full-scale COVID pandemaniac in 2020 finally caused me to stop reading it.
you’re so right. It’s now just a left wing establishment house rag. Such a pity.
Yes. Hislop has been a paid up member of the BBC establishment for thirty years. (Have I got news for you).Ingrams Ruston and Booker would not be amused.
Apart from the obvious question of who guards the guards and who rates the raters, it must waste a considerable amount of your time and increase your blood pressure somewhat to regularly have to justify your output in this way.
Teacher wants to mark your work in red, with a ‘see me after class’. Even in this, the world of free speech has shifted noticeably off its axis. In the past, the antique phrase ‘gelding the press’ would have applied.
Please fight your good and just fight. NewsGuard – the censor group, part of the Star Chamber. Free speech for the Totalitarians and Statists, but not for thee. Newsguard should be declared an illegal entity under any Constitution which purports to support ‘free speech’.
Does DS ask to be audited by them and if so, why? Genuine question.
I suppose they have the power to put publications on the Index, and conduct autos-da-fé on their proprietors on behalf of the State Cult. These are consequences of eternal import.
Excellent. Fact check the fact checkers and publish the results for us all to judge.
It’s Mr Gregory’s claims that look suspect given all the reading I’ve done on mRNA jabs and climate change causes from a wide range of sources over a number of years now.
In addition NewsGuard itself is not without criticism, in the context of a world were we can all see now that the censoring of inconvenient facts by the Establishment is a full scale industry. Mr Gregory maybe composed his letter before Mark Zuckerberg’s recent letter apologising for Meta’s censorship, or the arrest of Parval Durov on dubious charges because of Telegram’s stand on free-speech. Tucker Carlson has an excellent interview with Mike Benz on this subject which is very enlightening.
In fact, there is a broad scientific consensus — reflected in findings from organisations including the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — that human activity is the greatest contributor to global warming, primarily through its emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
This makes two government organisations of a government committed to the climate change scare story. And one of these organisation is dedicated to space flight and general space exploration, ie, nothing ‘earthly’ at all. Plus the UN committee responsible for popularizing the notion of anthrophogenic climate change. This kind of broad scientific consensus could aptly be described as Adherents of climate change theory do claim they really believe in it. Even when it’s really none of the kind of business they specialize in.
And then the further wording: Human activity is the greatest contributor to global warming. From greatest contributor follows that there must be other causes for global warming than this human contribution. How much is greatest contributor precisely? Eg, 95% various natural causes individually contributing less than 5% plus 5% human contribution would mean humans were the greatest contributor even despite the total human contribution would be insignificant.
This statement really means very little beyond Climate change propagandists claim to be convinced that humans are doing Really Bad Stuff™ but unfortunately, they don’t know any specifics themselves, ie, it’s an a priori conviction and not one grounded in principally open-ended scientific research.
NASA does aeronautics as well as space exploration, so will have an interest in the state of the earth’s atmosphere.
Their space exploration branch seems limited at the moment by the fact their spaceships leak.
About as much ‘interest in the state of the atmosphere’ as Ryanair.
It’s more grounded in follow the money. Heard them banging on about it on the Radio before. If it’s colder, it is MMCC, and ir it’s warmer it is the same. Apparently the Global average temperature is still going up. But where are they taking the measurements for that claim?
Average temperature isn’t measured. It’s calculated based on the wrong presumption that temperature would be a global and not a local phenomenon, cf the various BBC sensational stories about “It’s hot in the tropcis!” (Oh, really?) recently mentioned in the “BBC Climate Howlers of 2023” text. Heat dissipates into the atmosphere really quickly. You won’t notice the warmth of a fire when standing 500m aways from it. But an average calculated from a measurement adjacent to the fire and one from 500m away would yield a significantly higher temperature than the 500m measurement alone.
Contrived example I’ve already used twice to illustrate why average temperatures are nonsense: Let’s assume there’s a temperature measurment station in the Sahara which yields a temperature of 45⁰C and another in Anartica contributing -50⁰C. This means the average of both is -2½⁰C. But the statement On average, it’s -2½⁰C in Sahara and Antartica is total nonsense as the temperature in either place is nowhere near this value. Adding a lot of other measurement stations dampens the obviousness of the nonsense (so to say) but that’s a sleight of hand.
The organisations mentionned get money, grants, jobs and prestige from saying that humans have a major effect on the climate.
Follow the money.
On the specific case of the objection to the April 2024 article in the DS by Chris Morrison reporting on the then recently published paper “Net Isotopic Signature of Atmospheric CO2 Sources and Sinks: No Change since the Little Ice Age” by Demetris Koutsoyiannis, it’s quite clear that neither the NewsGuard objectors nor the “expert” whose objections they cite actually understand the original paper, or if they do, they have set out to misrepresent it.
Viz:
“Demetris Koutsoyiannis did claim in the March 2024 article you cited that the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels was due to natural warming since the year 1800 leading to a “more productive and expanded” biosphere, and also stated that the effect on human carbon emissions on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels was “non-discernible”.”
The paper actually states:
“Human CO2 emissions have played a minor role in the recent climatic evolution, which is hardly discernible in observational data and unnecessary to invoke in modelling the observed behaviours, including the change in the isotopic signature δ13C in the atmosphere.”
There is a very clear distinction to be made between “non-discernible” and “hardly discernible”, and IMO the objectors reveal their true colours by misrepresenting the original.
Turning to their “expert”:
“What is frustrating and confusing to me is that the author knows that human emissions have increased significantly during the industrial period, enough to explain the rise of CO2,” Sourish Basu, a research scientist at NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, told Science Feedback in an email. “Early on, the author erroneously concluded that the biosphere must be the main driver behind the atmospheric CO2 budget and fossil fuel emissions must be negligible.”
A couple of evidence-free statements are made there.
On the IPCC’s own figures, human emissions only account for ~4% of total CO2 emissions, and all atmospheric CO2 is recycled through the biosphere with a residence time of approx 4 years, as demonstrated in a more recent paper by the same author.
What the original paper actually demonstrates is that it is not necessary to appeal to human combustion of fossil carbon to explain the recent (>40 years) changes in the carbon isotopic signature, an argument which is used by the warmists to “prove” that burning of fossil fuels is causing climate change.
Moreover, in a previous paper by the same author, he convincingly demonstrates that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is the result of increase in planetary temperature, and not the other way around.
If there’s any confusion it’s because the objector doesn’t actually understand the science.
Lastly, the term “broad scientific consensus” is meaningless: that’s just not how science works.
My take away:
Newsguard is basically a hitman for major pharma companies.
Their “questions”.are actually very detailed, very one sided arguments pharma companies want put forward ending with, “why aren’t you writing this instead?”
John Gregory, the Newsguard health editor who wrote the letter, used to work for this lot Innovate Healthcare who seem to be some kind of multimedia communication and information consultancy serving the “healthcare” industry.
How very restrained of you.
I’d have been very tempted to write back “Eff Off.”
Good afternoon Comrade, it is Sergei Popov from Glavlit here. We have received reports that you have been engaging in non-industry and State approved thinking. Please explain yourselves.
I do not need a ratings agency to tell me which news items/publishers have a high credit rating. I will figure out for myself what is of interest and worth reading.
Cheers Toby
Well done DS, these people, in this case John Gregory, must be named and shamed at every opportunity.
NewsGuard Ministry of Truth (and Lies)
I see House Republicans launched an investigation into Newsguard in July, to which Newsguard has not responded. https://www.axios.com/2024/06/14/newsguard-oversight-committee-investigation-free-speech
If they do not change their rating as a result of your response can you sue them? Just like Elon Musk has done with Media Matters?
Your patience with these paid for idiots is admirable.
People should have the right to disagree with NewsGuard.
It thinks only it has the ‘TRUTH’.
Maybe NewsGuard should be fact-checked.
NewsGuard does not seem to understand the concept of free speech.