Tag Archives: Facebook

Facebook Censorship due to a Science Feedback “Fact Check”

From Watts Up With That?

By Andy May

Facebook’s censorship is totally out of hand, and their “independent and nonpartisan fact checks” are anything but. Now they are censoring “Climate: The Movie.” The supposed “fact checks” provided by Science Feedback and Climate Feedback (they are two branches of the same organization) have been shown many times to be both partisan and ideologically driven. The “fact check” of Steve Koonin’s bestselling book Unsettled done by Climate Feedback was blisteringly criticized by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in a lead editorial by the WSJ editorial staff.

The editorial includes the following:

“Mr. Koonin, whose careful book draws extensively on existing scholarship, may respond on the merits in a different forum. Suffice it to say here that many of the ‘fact check’ claims relied on by Facebook don’t contradict the underlying material, but instead argue with its perceived implications.

The fact-check attacks Mr. Koonin’s book for saying the “net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.” Minimal is in the eyes of the beholder, but the U.S. National Climate Assessment predicted America’s climate costs in 2090 at about $500 billion per year—a fraction of the recent Covid stimulus in an economy that could be four times as large.

The fact-check on the statement that ‘global crop yields are rising, not falling’ retorts that ‘while global crop yields are rising, this does not constitute evidence that climate change is not adversely affecting agriculture.’ OK, but that’s an argument, not a fact-check. …

Climate Feedback’s comment on a line from the review about ‘the number and severity of droughts’ does not identify any falsehood, but instead claims, “it doesn’t really make sense to make blanket statements regarding overall global drought trends.’ Maybe it doesn’t make sense for Facebook to restrict the reach of legitimate scientific argument and competing interpretations of data.”WSJ, May 7, 2021.

Steve Koonin’s rebuttals of the Climate Feedback post are here and here. I’ve also written about the erroneous Climate Feedback post here.

In other words, fact checks should check facts, not a difference of opinion between two scientists. “Fact checks” today are too often thinly disguised and very biased editorials, often confusing very left-wing interpretations of ambiguous data with facts. Then these supposedly “independent and nonpartisan fact checks” are used by Facebook, and sometimes by Linkedin, as excuses to censor legitimate and well-documented posts and movies. Documentation and references of the facts and interpretations presented in Climate: The Movie can be found here.

Further reading on the blatant bias and misinformation found the Science Feedback and Climate Feedback websites:

  1. Climate Feedback’s fraudulent and misleading fact check of a famous and well-respected peer-reviewed article by Ronan Connolly, Willie Soon, and 21 well qualified co-authors is refuted here.
  2. Climate feedback also gets a fact check of the CO2 Coalition completely wrong, as described here.
  3. Finally in their fact check of Gregory Wrightstone of the CO2 Coalition they make 13 wildly incorrect (lies?) about Wrightstone, as described here.

In summary, the Science Feedback and Climate Feedback website are both unreliable and misleading. Why Facebook and Linkedin put their trust in such a biased organization is unknown, unless they are also pushing an ideologically biased narrative.

Their overly long (4,700 words!!) critique of Climate: The Movie is fully debunked in my annotated bibliography of the main points made in the movie, but I can hit the main points here.

The first clearly false claim is that recent climate change is being driven by CO2 exclusively with no input since 1750AD from changes in the Sun or nature at large. This is an unsupported claim by the IPCC (AR6, p 5) that is frequently disputed in the peer reviewed literature [For example: (Soon, Implications of the Secondary Role of Carbon Dioxide and Methane Forcing in Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future, 2007), (Davidson, Stephenson, & Turasie, 2016), (Koutsoyiannis, Onof, Kundzewicz, & Christofides, 2023), and (Liu, et al., 2014)].

Second, there are very serious and well-documented problems with current measurements of global warming at Earth’s surface. These problems are discussed in the movie. Science Feedback attempts, in far too many words to be believable, that the measurements are accurate. The problems are all well documented in the peer-reviewed literature [For example: (Connolly, et al., 2023) and (Soon, et al., 2023)].

Third, the movie explains that temperatures today are within the normal range of temperatures seen in Earth’s recent and longer-term history and they are not unusual or unprecedented. This fact is very well documented in the peer reviewed literature [ (Kaufman & Broadman, 2023) and (Scotese, Song, Mills, & Meer, 2021)]. The Science Feedback critique first complains about this statement and then later agrees with it.

Then they go on to say that “warming trends” are unusual over the instrumental era (past 140 years or so) compared to ancient temperature trends, based upon uncertain climate proxies. The climate proxies used in the latest IPCC report (AR6) have a median temporal resolution (time between temperatures) of 164 years (Kaufman, McKay, & Routson, 2020). So how can they know whether the proxy trends are more or less than today? See here and here for the details. Also see this excellent post by Renee Hannon on the impact of comparing daily thermometer readings to climate proxies.

They make many other incorrect and misleading claims. They claim there is no evidence that polar bear populations are increasing, they are (Crockford, 2022). They claim that the Great Barrier Reef has not recently reached a record size, when it has according to Peter Ridd and the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

They make many other claims that statements from the movie are misleading, including claims that the IPCC/CMIP climate models are accurate, but the IPCC itself admits they are flawed:

“Hence, we assess with medium confidence that CMIP5 and CMIP6 models continue to overestimate observed warming in the upper tropical troposphere over the 1979–2014 period by at least 0.1°C per decade, in part because of an overestimate of the tropical SST trend pattern over this period.“(AR6 WGI, page 444).

In short, the Science Feedback post is clearly incorrect in its claims that the movie is misleading. Science Feedback looks at the same data and facts that the movie examines and draws different conclusions than the eminent scientists in the movie. They have a different opinion than the experts in the movie. That does not mean the scientists in the movie are factually incorrect. Look at the data yourself, support for all 70 serious scientific claims made in the movie can be found here for those that want to see more.

Download the bibliography here.

Facebook Fiasco – and the Fishes

From Jennifer Marohasy

January 21, 2024 By jennifer 

We have been friends for some 20 years, she used to edit Online Opinion (and I used to write for it), when she lived in Brisbane – we both once lived in Brisbane, in Chelmer. Now Susan lives on Norfolk Island that is rather a long way to the East.

Norfolk Island is an Australian territory in the South Pacific Ocean, with pine trees, jagged cliffs, sandy beaches include Emily Bay, where Susan swims most days on the low tide.

Susan still provides writing, editing and proofreading services, and she also swims in Emily Bay, with the corals and fishes.

Over the last few years she hasn’t been selfish about this adventure, rather sharing photographs of the fishes, a pregnant eagle ray, and a growing problem with water quality with us via what had become a most wonderful resource and community Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/norfolkislandtime

Then last week, her Facebook was hacked, and while the site is still sitting there, Susan has lost control of it.

They were not interested in the fishes.

But rather that this page, her Facebook page, links to her writing page that links to PayPal.

The scam has apparently been going for three years at least what happened to Susan is exactly what was reported by Channel 9 as happening to other small businesses that long ago, with the same amount of money debited in the same way:

It took just 15 minutes for hackers to infiltrate Sydney single mum Sarah McTaggart’s Facebook page.

From there, they also took control of the account she uses to run her small business, wiping out 90 percent of the client base she has been building up for the past four years – almost in an instant.

Their target? The PayPal account she uses to buy Facebook ads for her business.

The professional IT advice that Susan has got is that this Facebook page is now lost to her control forever unless she can get the attention of Facebook administration.

It seems there is no way to get in touch with Facebook administration directly, so much for customer service. Susan had asked me to register a complaint from my Facebook account, but I can only report her page as ‘impersonating’ her, when what has happened is ‘identify theft’, that is not listed as an option.

I don’t want her Facebook account shut down, but rather handed back.

Susan has updated me:

I’m trying not to get too down about it. No help forthcoming yet apart from other scammers. I had an IT guy round here a few hours ago and he reckons it’s gone and without Facebook getting in touch with me regarding one of my reports I won’t be able to retrieve it.

I’ve reached out to anyone who I think is influential and may know someone who may be able to help, but no responses as yet.

No responses from Facebook either to any of the various reports that were submitted.

No phone number (well there is one, but they don’t answer it!).

No email address for Facebook.

And then I got a $320 charge from Meta (Facebook) via PayPal. It seems back in 2013 I linked PayPal to Facebook for some advertising for my Write-now business. So the hacker was able to make a charge.

PayPal say the charge is legitimate because it comes from my account (even though I don’t control it any longer!).

I’d already changed my bank passwords, and cancelled my card, so they won’t be able to do it again. I’ve also removed any linked cards from PayPal now, too.

As the IT guy said, it is now a case of pulling up the drawbridge! I’ve done a full computer scan and no trojans or whatever. So now I am filing fish photos, because at least that makes some sense!

One thing this has all brought home to me is how interconnected, interdependent, and beholden we are to the big IT companies like Facebook, PayPal etc etc.

Susan has emailed contact@9news.com.au, amongst others.

And she has explained to them:

My Messenger has also been taken over. As have my other linked pages (Write-now! is one). My deep concern is that those nearly 10,000 followers on Norfolk Island Time trust in my page and now they, too, are exposed to a hacker.

Fortunately, the fishes and the corals are unconnected, still under the waves at Emily Bay.

How many Facebook pages like Susan’s, replete with beautiful photographs of fishes, or something else, are now controlled by scammers – and what might they plan to do with a page like this into the future?

In the first instance this may be Susan’s worry. But if we truly care about community, it is all our problem, for sure.