Thank you, thank you, thank you, NewsGuard, for treating all your new subscribers — both of them! — to one of the cleverest, truest things I ever wrote about climate change.
NewsGuard quotes me as saying (in the course of its danger warning to readers thinking of flirting with Breitbart News):
“When amateurs on a blog know more about science than the guys on multi-million dollar grants at U.S. academic institutions informing global energy and environment policy, you know that the time has come to drain the swamp,” Delingpole wrote.
And it presents it as though this were a bad thing to have written.
But I stand by every word. It’s the kind of thing that makes me go: “God, I wish I’d written that — No, wait. I did!”
Why? Because apart from being demonstrably true, it captures so perfectly the reason why I became something of a climate change specialist in the first place.
It wasn’t — let me assure you — because I found myself suddenly captivated by the how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate in certain scientific ghettos as to the extent to which tiny increases in the otherwise harmless trace gas we exhale every few seconds and that we use in greenhouses to help plants grow faster are warming the planet at a catastrophic and unprecedented rate.
No, much simpler than that, it appealed to my most basic journalistic instincts: here was a story which most of the mainstream media was covering extremely, embarrassingly badly; where the facts were almost diametrically opposite to the breast-beating, hysterical, junk science narrative presented at outlets like the BBC, CNN, and the New York Times; where there was so much low-hanging fruit, so many examples every day of greed, corruption, stupidity, mendacity, and incompetence on the most epic scale — all of it costing us taxpayers a fortune, making the world a more miserable place to live in and — the biggest joke of all — actually harming the planet in the process.
How could any journalist resist an opportunity like that?
So this is one of the things I now do for Breitbart News: I report the truth about climate change — and about the vast money-grubbing industry built around it.
And now, rather than demonstrate where I’ve got my facts wrong (which it can’t do), NewsGuard has instead resorted to the desperate rhetorical fallacy known as the Appeal to Authority.
It says:
Fact-checking organizations have found Delingpole repeatedly misstates climate science and its conclusions.
Yes. Dur. Of course, they have! “Fact-checking organizations” are very much part of the groupthink-driven liberal Establishment I criticize in my articles. (As are: virtually the entirety of academe; schools; publishers; Hollywood; the mainstream media; the United Nations; the corporations; the big law firms; the European Union … I could, of course, go on and on).
They’re part of the so-called “Consensus” on global warming. And what I do, every few days, much to their annoyance, is provide compelling evidence as to why they are wrong.
For some random reason, NewsGuard’s desperate intern top team of forensic experts has chosen to focus on a story I wrote in February of last year:
In a February 2018 story with the headline “Delingpole: NOAA Caught Adjusting Big Freeze Out Of Existence,” Delingpole repeated a claim he has made frequently – that climate scientists have “adjusted past temperatures to look colder than they were and recent temperatures to look warmer than they were” and said the adjustments are “well beyond the regions of error margins or innocent mistakes and deep into the realm of fiction and political propaganda.”
Climatefeedback.org, a fact-checking site that uses researchers to review the media’s treatment of climate change research, found the claim misleading, noting that “some scientifically necessary data adjustments in some places do have the effect of producing a stronger warming trend than would be seen without adjustments, but others do the opposite. Together, these adjustment actually reduce the overall global warming trend.”
Rather churlishly, they don’t include a link — so here it is.
It’s one of many stories I’ve written in a similar vein, largely because it’s just about the biggest ongoing scandal of all in the climate change industry: the way that tax-payer funded institutions like NASA and NOAA are cooking the books — adjusting the raw temperature data in both the past and present in order to suit their alarmist agenda.
That isn’t science — that’s politics. And it gives the lie to the notion endlessly promulgated by alarmists that the science is settled.
If the science really were settled — so true, so observably the case beyond all reasonable doubt — then there would be no need to exaggerate the evidence, would there?
As for their claim that those data adjustments are justifiable: don’t believe a word. In almost every case, these dodgy gatekeepers of the temperature datasets have cooled past temperatures and warmed more recent ones (notably the Big Freeze that racked the U.S. in the winter of 2017/18) in order to create a more dramatic looking warming curve.
And they’ve never plausibly justified these amendments. If the Urban Heat Island effect is causing weather stations to give false data — then it is present-day temperatures that should be adjusted downwards and past temperatures upwards, not the other way round.
But I see that I’ve wasted far, far too much of my time on NewsGuard’s silly criticisms. If you judge a man by the quality of his enemies, then pathetic attacks must make me just about the world’s biggest loser.
So thanks, again, NewsGuard. Only this time, I’m being sarcastic.
Read more at Breitbart
Something along the lines of: when proxy ‘tree ring’ temperatures don’t agree with instrument temperatures, just tack the instrument readings onto the end of the ‘tree ring’ graph line – and don’t tell anyone…..
Water vapor increase was a contributing cause of global warming while CO2 increase has had no significant effect on climate. Water vapor increase, which resulted mostly from irrigation increase, has essentially ended and in any event is self-limiting.
Graph of UAH v6.0 temperatures shows that the temperature uptrend ended in about 2002-2005. Comparison with TPW (water vapor) and CO2 demonstrates what has been driving average global temperature. Apparently, in spite of it being a ghg, CO2 has little if any effect on average global temperature and therefore no significant effect on climate. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DxYl0-fUcAALEW2.jpg
Water vapor has increased about twice as much as calculated from temperature increase of liquid surface water. Both changed slope trend from up to flat about 2002-2005 interrupted by el Nino which peaked in Jan 2016. Both are still in downtrend. Global Warming appears to be over.
Is all that snow/rain just bad weather or has increased water vapor contributed?
Meanhvile in the Arctic city, Tromsø, Norway. 99 years of climate change.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=602067233642300&set=gm.2198276493558515&type=3&theater&ifg=1
“Some of us are determined propagandists who are trying to manipulate the public sphere”…. like fake news, fake data, fake organizations. The internet is just a sea of lies.
If you want to know what “they” are up to just look at what they are accusing “us” of doing.
“Lazer’s team found that among people they categorized as left-leaning and centrists, fewer than 5 percent shared any fake information. Among those they determined were right-leaning, 11 percent of accounts shared misinformation masquerading as news. For those on the extreme right, it was 21 percent.”
“This study shows “most of us aren’t too bad at circulating information, but some of us are determined propagandists who are trying to manipulate the public sphere,” said Texas A&M University’s Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of political rhetoric who wasn’t part of the study.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-twitter-limited-characters-fake-info.html#jCp
Online factual research is almost impossible now. Search results stubbornly direct searches to PC info regardless of how one phrases the inquiry.
The accuracy of fact checking is very dependant on what is considered to be a fact. I’ll select the claim that extreme weather events are increasing. Even the IPCC acknowledges that they are not, and many studies back this up. Yet, the claim that they are increasing is very, very common. If the “fact” that Lazer’s team is using says that they were increasing, then many leftist articles making that claim would not be flagged as having an error, where as they certainly would not have the facts correct. On the other side of the fact check, if a right wing article said that these events are not increasing, it might be flagged as having an error.
You are right that doing factual research is almost impossible. The owners of many search engines have publically admitted that they rig the searchers to favor left wing web sites. I was after the current average pH of the oceans. A search brought up screen after screen of sites supporting the ocean acidification theory and treating it as a disaster. I finally got the answer on the National Geographic web site. The pH at that time was 0.1 closer to acid than the historical average. They interpreted that as a major disaster even though it is well within normal fluctuations.
Of all the evidence against the anthropological climate change theory, I consider the data tampering to be the by the strongest. The so called researchers at NOAA and NASA do understand what is going on. With this understanding, they feel compelled to alter the data to more strongly support climate change theory. Why would they do this? The only possible reason is they know the unaltered data does not support their political cause.
There are two reasons we know that the data is not being altered for legitimate reasons. First, the data stood for decades with no need for adjustment. Only when it became obvious that the data didn’t support the climate change very well was there a need to change it. Second, despite the claim that the data is being changed both ways, it is mainly being changed to support the climate change movement. If these changes were legitimate, they would be both ways.
The facts that back in the 1970’s it was Global Cooling and a new Ice Age was coming that same liberal rag TIME was going on about Global Cooling and so was Newsweek and Paul Ehrlich and his Population Bomb poppycock
We are kindred spirits. I too have been forced to learn the climate science as well as business and politics. My family is full of SJW useful idiots and going around much like AOC freaking everyone out around them about the end of the world. Every time they send me something, I know right where to look to send them about 10 different articles and studies. I also have a whole barrage of related common-sense questions to try to shake them out of their delirium and think critically. I’m always looking for more and find them everywhere, like this article. Thanks!
It’s about time. That knowledgeable amateurs on a blog get some respect is encouraging. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I’ve heard.
From the article, “When amateurs on a blog know more about science than the guys on multi-million dollar grants at U.S. academic institutions informing global energy and environment policy, you know that the time has come to drain the swamp.” This is very true, there is an incredible amount of ignorance about climate change. This is especially true concerning the sun’s influence, the inaccuracy of the IPCC models, and extreme weather events. However, there people who are knowledgeable and just committing out right fraud. This is true of the NOAA researchers who alter temperature data to make it appear it is warming more than it is. This is true of those who wrote the ocean acidification paper where they hid data that showed their theory wasn’t true and substituted computer simulation.
The Liberal Run M.S. Media only listen to those who push their liberal radical agenda on us all Facts is not one of them nor is the truth their cup of tea