Links tagged “consensus buster”

The spectacle of COP26 and the attendant drama is a perfect example of poorly understood scientific ideas marshalled for political ideologies. Official speakers and protestors alike point to hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and fires as proof of climate change and impending catastrophe, despite the lack of evidence showing long-term trends for these extreme weather events. ... Just as eugenicists a century ago were confident that their policies for “racial health” would be a great boon for future generations, climate envoys and activists demand costly policies, now, for the benefit of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. 

The COP26 participants and their cheerleaders are disturbingly certain of their policies’ impacts centuries down the road – and, with an excess of confidence (or hubris), they consistently misrepresent virtually every extreme weather event as a code red for the planet.

Dr. Plimer: "I've had a gut full of the greens telling lies. I've had a gut full of the greens frightening children. I've had a gut full of green schemes that will send this country bankrupt. I've had a gut full of the greens trying to take the high moral ground because they don't. Their policies end up in people losing prosperity, people dying, the environment being ruined and people having no hope." 

In an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times, professor and climate economist Richard S.J. Tol of the University of Sussex explained why it is so difficult to connect weather events on the scale of a tornado to shifts in the Earth’s climate. “Tornadoes are small, rarely more than 3 kilometers in diameter. The most advanced climate models, however, cannot see things that are smaller than 9 by 9 km. Climate models can therefore tell us very little about tornadoes,” he told The Epoch Times via email. “Data are not great, but suggest that there is no upward or downward trend in tornado frequency or severity,” he added. ... 

Responding to that article on Twitter, University of Colorado environmental science professor Roger Pielke Jr. described a figure from the article as “incredibly misleading,” pointed out that the rollout of Doppler radar systems increased reporting of very weak tornadoes in more recent years. ... 

“The rush to attribute the… tornadoes to climate change illustrates perfectly the political distortion of the topic,” climate economist and University of Guelph professor Ross McKitrick told The Epoch Times via email in another exclusive interview. “The IPCC AR6 (Sct 11.7.3) makes no attribution claims between greenhouse gases and tornadoes, and the long term data show no increasing trend in numbers or severity (indeed there is a slight decrease in numbers),” he added, referring to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the physical science basis for climate change. “Yet the public has been so primed by politicians and activists to blame extreme weather on greenhouse gases they hardly blink when someone like President Biden just makes up the connection.” “Now the alarmists are shifting to a claim that while the events are natural, greenhouse gases [make] them worse than they otherwise would be,” he told The Epoch Times. “Aside from the questionable statistical analysis behind such arguments, the big problem is that it’s ambulance chasing. The fact that they only ever associate greenhouse gases with bad weather outcomes is meaningless since they only ever look at bad weather events. They never study whether a stretch of mild weather could be attributed to greenhouse gases.”

Stossel: "Facebook has responded to my lawsuit in court.Amazingly, their lawyers now claim that Facebook’s “fact-checks” are merely “opinion” and therefore immune from defamation. Wait — Facebook’s fact-checks are just “opinion”?! I thought fact-checks are statements of fact. That’s how Facebook portrays them on its website: “Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, Facebook significantly reduces the content’s distribution … We … apply a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article, disproving the claim.”

“Disproving.” Sure sounds like Facebook claims its labels are statements of fact.  Facebook’s “opinion” defense is similar to what Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow argued when they were sued. They said we just give opinions; our viewers knew we aren’t sources for objective facts.  But Carlson and Maddow have a better argument. They’re known for giving opinions. Facebook posts “fact-checks."