The online world has become a free-speech battleground. Tech platforms have sided with illiberal regimes to censor posts while flagging “misinformation” in free countries.
We all share a legitimate interest in avoiding outright falsehoods, but much censorship today — whether at dictators’ behest or in the name of eradicating “misinformation” — ultimately is about restricting discourse to a narrow corridor of the politically acceptable.
That makes it harder to identify smart policies. …
Facebook monitors what people say about climate change in 100 countries and uses third-party fact-checkers to identify misinformation for flagging or removal.
Here’s something Facebook’s censors deemed unacceptable: I wrote a comment using the latest peer-reviewed research from the medical journal Lancet on deaths caused by heat and cold.
The paper is the first to show that globally, every year, half a million people die because temperatures are too hot, while 4.5 million people die because it is too cold. In other words, nine times more people die from the cold than the heat.
I ran afoul of Facebook’s fact-checkers for noting that over the past 20 years, our higher temperatures, which we would expect from global warming, have increased heat deaths and decreased cold deaths.
I calculated the net effect in terms of saved lives every year and was flagged for “misinformation.”
To avoid social-media censorship of this article, I bizarrely have to cite one of the study’s lead authors instead of putting it in my own words.
As that author stated, from 2000 to 2019, “Earth’s temperature increased by 0.26 degrees Centigrade per decade. This reduced cold-related deaths by 0.51% and increased heat-related mortality by 0.21%, which led to a reduction in net mortality due to hot and cold temperatures.”
It’s worth considering why this is deemed “misinformation.” Clearly, it cannot be climate-change denial to highlight the effects of increasing temperatures.
It rather seems that the facts are muzzled because they don’t fit into activist-approved talking points, which frame climate change as an overwhelming, always-worsening crisis everywhere, with no exceptions.
By labeling this evidence “misinformation,” Facebook suppresses crucial facts that could help us identify the best policies to reduce future heat and cold deaths while reining in global warming effectively — which surely should be the goal.
Another example of censorship occurred when I wrote on electric vehicles. A recent Nature article reaffirms that electric cars emit fewer CO₂ than conventional cars.
Unfortunately, large batteries also make electric cars much heavier, and heavier cars are more likely to kill the occupants of other vehicles in traffic accidents.
The Nature piece weighed the benefit from less CO₂ against more accident deaths. It found that the climate benefits outweigh accident costs in countries with very green energy, like Norway and Canada, but not in less-green countries like America, Germany, Japan, China, and India.
This is an interesting study. Facebook flagged me when I noted the authors had curiously measured CO₂ benefits at $150 per ton — higher than almost any country prices any (let alone all) emissions.
The current average global price is $2 per ton. At any realistic price — or even at the still-sky-high price of $100 — the study would show traffic-death costs outweigh climate benefits everywhere.
How this point is “misinformation” is extremely difficult to fathom. The inevitable conclusion is that it did not fit an acceptable narrative to reveal that even if the entire world had 100% clean energy, electric-vehicle climate benefits would be outweighed by additional traffic deaths.
Disturbingly, Facebook’s vice president has admitted fact-checkers are not necessarily objective, and the company even acknowledged recently in a lawsuit that fact-check tags are “opinion,” not factual assertions.
That certainly fits my own experience.
Yet some activists want even more censorship. They’ve praised researchers for inventing an artificial-intelligence tool allowing social-media platforms to delete climate-change “misinformation” in real-time.
Absurdly, the AI tool has such a narrow view of acceptability that many mainstream scientific findings would be deleted.
Tellingly, all this censorship is focused on one side: Activists can claim climate-change effects are far worse than they really are, with little or no suppression. In other words: Inconvenient facts get blocked, but convenient mistruths and exaggerations thrive.
This is disturbing above all because it makes identifying good policies harder. Bank of America has found current global action to achieve net-zero emissions will cost the world $5 trillion every year for the next three decades — more than all nations and households spend on education every year.
Consistently silencing inconvenient truths leaves us all less well-informed and risks us walking blindly into spending a fortune without sorely needed perspective.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”
Read full post at NY Post
Excellent analysis as usual Bjorn Lomborg. AND it doesn’t even address estimates of energy poverty deaths from just cooking over open fires at TWELVE MILLION A YEAR! AND even more importantly, it IGNORES ENTIRELY THE SCIENCE OF THE ENVIRONMENT – BIOLOGY! And the entirely beneficial effects of more CO2 for the environment and all of its species. Biology makes clear that life on earth consists of little carbon sacks of water we call cells. All life. Making carbon and oxygen the most abundant elements in our bodies (by a large margin over every other element) and in every species on earth! AND THAT INDISPENSABLE CARBON FOR LIFE ON EARTH ALL COMES FROM A DANGEROUSLY LOW LEVEL OF CO2 IN THE ATMOSPHERE. A level within 30ppm of the beginning of the death of all things – deadly lows – during glacial phases of our ongoing Pleistocene Ice Age. In which earth’s temperature is the COLDEST twelve degree C range of temperature since multicellular life evolved. That’s the coldest in nearly 600 million years. And levels of CO2 that have been dangerously and inexorably declining from life luxuriant levels at life’s birth more than twenty times those of today. And it ignores CO2’s foundational role in the most important chemistry of life on earth – photosynthesis. Whose formula is sunlight plus CO2 plus water, with the help of the enzyme that paints the environment green – chlorophyll, which produces ALL OF LIFE’S CARBON, ALL OF LIFE’S ENERGY (SUGAR), AND ALL OF OUR ATMOSPHERE’S BREATHABLE OXYGEN! (life was born in an atmosphere entirely devoid of oxygen) This earliest green fact of life makes coal, oil, and gas, civilization’s ONLY GREEN ENERGY. Because using fossil fuels recycles the two most important molecules in life on earth, CO2 and H2O! Recycles them back to our biosphere where they will continue their indispensable role in the living environment – life on earth. And where they will continue making us the best fed, longest living, most prosperous human beings that have ever existed. And the environment the greenest, strongest, most abundant, most drought-tolerant it has been since long before Homo Sapiens Sapiens even existed. THAT is the science of the environment. That is the science (a complete understatement) of the CO2 fertilization effect. That is the chemistry of energy. And it doesn’t even address the science of climate. In which climate cycles of the last three million year Pleistocene Ice Age – the coldest since multicellular life began, moves constantly within two great natural, normal cycles. The long one hundred thousand year glacial(85% of the time; coldest eight degree C range)/interglacial cycle (15% of the time; warmest four degree C part of the range). We are twelve thousand years into the most recent Holocene fifteen thousand year interglacial cycle. (There have been thirty of them over the last three million years.) And the much shorter nine hundred year interglacial cycle. In which temperatures warm four degrees C for 450 years before turning sharply cooler for the next 450 years. This interglacial cycle within a cycle has recurred 30 x 16 = 480 times over the last three million years. It’s been studied and described by Dr. Judith Curry as “Eddy cycles”. Our latest iteration of this relatively short natural, normal four degree C climate cycle has had temperatures warming since the “Little Ice Age” when you could ice skate on the Thames River in London. It will keep our climate warming for several more decades before turning down colder sharply (in geological time) for the next 450 years. What science is saying (except the political corrupted imaginary CO2 driven climate) is that temperatures remain well within climate’s normal, natural temperature cycles. Which is reaffirmed by CO2 levels FOLLOWING, NOT CAUSING temperature level changes over the past eight hundred thousand years of ice core data. Because CO2 solubility is temperature dependent. And reaffirmed again by the clear FAILURE OF CO2 DRIVEN CLIMATE MODELS compared to actual weather balloon and satellite measurement actual temperatures. Meaning that CO2 drives life. But is insignificant in climate. Barry Bateman, B.Sc. Advanced (biology)
Barry, you nicely expanded on Bjorn’s points. Good work !
Facebook,Twitter Etc covering up for Big Brother