Reposted from The GelbspanFiles.com
The situation concerning the cavalry-style arrival of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) to save us all from global warming disinformation on Facebook begs for a comparison to a comical scene from a famous old movie, where the man held at gunpoint dejectedly notes the unexpected arrival of the totally corrupt police commissioner.
The highlights from the February 24, 2021 announcement are as follows ………………..
… YPCCC is playing a key role in Facebook’s new initiative to combat the spread of climate change misinformation on its platform.
… Facebook also announced a new “myth-busting” unit, which debunks six common myths about climate change …
“Misinformation about climate change long predates the internet but has been greatly amplified in our new digital world. This new myth-busting section of the Facebook Climate Science Information Center can help raise public climate change awareness and understanding worldwide,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, senior research scientist and director of YPCCC.
… Leiserowitz, along with John Cook from George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and Sander van der Linden, director of the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, worked with Facebook to develop evidence-based refutations of climate misinformation on their platform.
The moment I read about this announcement, I remembered the above comical scene in the 1985 Chevy Chase “Fletch” movie, because of two of the names I highlight above.
Copying from my October 9, 2019 blog post “If nobody spots our fatal problem, we should be just fine,” a title that nicely sums up the appearance problem here:
- Leiserowitz is enslaved to Ross Gelbspan for the ‘crooked skeptic climate scientists’ accusation and this problem is not helped at all when he is still Facebook Friends with Gelbspan to this day.
- John Cook (no relation to me) noted in one of his own pieces that, with regard to overall energy industry campaign efforts designed to confuse the public, one example was,
… the Western Fuels Association, a coal cooperative, spent half a million dollars on a misinformation campaign designed to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”
Where does John Cook’s clickable link go to regarding the “misinformation campaign”? A PDF file of an entire book chapter by Naomi Oreskes, whose page 139 citation for “reposition global warming” is to a place where nobody will ever find those memos — arguably, outright disinformation on her part and John Cook’s part for perpetuating it. Who does Oreskes cite elsewhere as a source for that memo phrase? Ross Gelbspan.
Why is any reference to the “reposition global warming” memos a form of disinformation regarding the existence of ‘fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns’? Because the memos are worthless as evidence to support that; Western Fuels never solicited that memo set and never operated under its direction.
You could hardly ask for a better example of disinformation than a blatantly false accusation that’s entirely designed to distract the public away from seeing faults in science narratives which themselves are comprised of cherry-picked data.
Oh, by the way, John Cook is also Facebook Friends with Gelbspan to this day, upholding my long-held observation about prominent people accusing skeptic climate scientists of industry corruption having three degress of separation or less from Ross Gelbspan.
Sander van der Linden is not among Gelbspan’s Facebook Friends. From the above YPCCC announcement, it also seems like he is just a separate person now working with Leiserowitz and Cook.
Well, not quite. In the 2018-published “The Consensus Handbook,” Sander van der Linden gets second billing after its top author …… John Cook. And what is seen on its PDF file page 8? The identical disinformation sentence above about Western Fuels and the “reposition global warming” memos, citing Oreskes’ book chapter’s page 139.
Perhaps van der Linden could put some distance away from himself on that problem by saying the bit about the non-Western Fuels memos was written by John Cook. But he won’t be able to worm his way out of the problem about being a co-author of a global warming book with the decidedly anti-science title of “The Consensus Handbook.”
Repeating from the end of my February 17, 2021 post, as the late Dr S. Fred Singer pointed out, “consensus is not science and science is not about consensus…science is not a show of hands,” and as Lord Christopher Monckton also pointed out within a lengthy reply to John Cook at WUWT, “consensus” — a.k.a argumentum ad populum — “is rightly regarded as unacceptable because the consensus view – and whatever ‘science’ the consensus opinion is founded upon – may or may not be correct, and the mere fact that there is a consensus tells us nothing about the correctness of the consensus opinion or of the rationale behind that opinion. … science is not done by consensus.”
Facebook has already undertaken mass purges of info / user accounts it deemed to be untruth. Their threats to purge what they consider misinformation have widened lately. How much longer will it be before posts and user accounts start disappearing that don’t adhere to the orthodoxy of global warming as preached by the YPCCC? ……….. Which, in case nobody has noticed yet, is essentially the same as Al Gore’s.
How much longer before other outlets of various kinds follow Facebook’s lead?
Pity the poor Climate Liars, continually needing to squelch, and stomp out the truth, which tends to pop up everywhere like little brushfires. How annoying and frustrating it must be for them. Still, they soldier on.
Sucks to be them.
A good description of the Climate Liars.
YPCCC Helps Facebook Debunk Climate Change Myths
Here we have griff and Loydo and two or three other debunker 😀
Alarmist “Debunking” consists of making unsubstantiated assertions and claims about the Earth’s climate.
This is forced on the alarmists because they don’t have any facts to back up their assertions, so they just make the assertions anyway and hope the gullible take them as facts.
They run into a brick wall, here.
I just stumbled upon this and its seems to explain Facebook’s Yale decision and articulates a lot of what I suspected to be true (as well as the Roger comment):
Persuasion and the Prestige Paradox: Are High Status People More Likely to Lie?
Some highlights:
https://quillette.com/2021/04/03/persuasion-and-the-prestige-paradox-are-high-status-people-more-likely-to-lie/
I suspect this is why many scientific breakthroughs come from unknowns (patent clerks) and people in their twenties, not because of ability, but because of the potential social status loss of opposing mainstream theories. Thus we transition from low status expendable “scientific explorers” to high status scientific “gate keepers”.
“… YPCCC is playing a key role in Facebook’s new initiative to combat the spread of climate change misinformation on its platform.”
****
If I understand it correctly, the whole CAGW theory is supposed to be about whether a human component is detectable in the warming we have seen seen since coming out of the Little Ice Age and whether it is a cause for concern. It is not about whether the climate is changing. If organizations and individuals like the YPCCC can’t even get the definition of the issue correct, they make it difficult to assign any degree of credibility to them. Is there no such thing as natural warming?
Furthermore, seeing them behave like the Orwellian Though Police from Nineteen-Eighty-Four
on Facebook with the co-operation and support of Facebook management tends to paint a picture that suggests they are all scared to death of the skeptics and the skeptics’ science that refutes the alarmist narrative. Their vested interests in the climate scare are far too sacred and holy to be threatened.
Censorship is a behavioral characteristic of totalitarians and a totalitarian mindset. The constitutional amendment guaranteeing free speech only applies to government, and that leaves Facebook and Twitter management and their ilk free to behave in a manner similar to totalitarians or the ruling party and the police from Orwell’s novel. I find myself feeling as though I am in the shoes of Winston Smith more and more every day.
Somehow, I seriously doubt that that the individuals behind the YPCCC, Facebook and Twitter have enough (if any) background in a climate science or related field to determine who is right and wrong in the great climate change debate. Nor are their so-called “fact checkers.” This “initiative” demonstrates what appears to be a high level of arrogance, egotism and hubris on the part of the individuals involved, and it is all too easy to confuse arrogance and a highly overinflated ego for what the individual perceives to be morality and righteousness. Those who manifest this kind of confusion are the most dangerous people of all.
I am not at all comfortable thinking about where the U.S. and western civilization will be four years from now at the end of the current Biden administration. The environmental movement, in its current form and with the climate scare, has way more political influence in western governments than they should, and they are exploiting it for maximum effect. I can almost hear China’s leadership in Beijing laughing at our extreme level of climatic and environmental self-righteousness with which we have endowed ourselves. At that extreme level, it can be self-destructive as much as anything else.
One last thing: This is off topic, but perhaps the reader has heard about six of Dr. Seuss’s children’s books being banned on eBay because they are thought to have racist content. However, guess what is still available on eBay? The English translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
I am at a loss.
And always remember folks: Love Big Brother.
I should say that the Dr. Seuss books were delisted from eBay rather than banned because of their perceived racist content.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dr-seuss-books-deemed-offensive-will-be-delisted-from-ebay-11614884201
The Little Green Book lives on.
They are riding on a name at this point.
Which adds to FoubarBook’s practice of hiring biased people and ‘fact-checking’ organizations. Yeah, the star of The Social Network documentary, who can’t make software reliable.
Consensus: Everybody knows THAT!!! So it HAS to be true.
Solo Skeptic: But what if it isn’t true?
The NOAA defines climate as 30 years of average weather in the geographic area of interest.
So in order to fight climate change, one must first be able to control the weather. For 30 years.
Fact check that, Facebook
My Gawd!!!! John Cook is out with this “tool” to help people deal with misinformation. I sometimes feel defeated by this massive onslaught of thought-control.
https://centerforinquiry.org/video/gamification-to-counter-science-misinformation/
You are not defeated, you are pushing back. Keep it up. 🙂
How does a graphic designer become an expert in climate. John Cook started as a graphic designer and was a web designer until 2011. He then gained a doctorate in psychology. We are constantly told that your opinion on climate matters is not relevant if you are not qualified in climate science.
There’s always more on such angles. I actually also covered the major fault in Cook’s (as I said in the above guest post, no relation to me) doctorate degree as the 8th example in my blog post “Reposition Graduate Degrees as Theory rather than Fact.”
I see a classic logarithmic relation between the YPCCC trending towards the CCCP or even the CCP.
One of their offshoots is Yale Climate Connections?, which is a for-profit organization, yet publishes most of its propaganda under the creative commons license. They are ‘zero carbon’ and mindlessly pro-renewable.
YPCCC don’t list their funders but YCC do.
PS: Grantham is a UK billionaire fund manager with over $100 billion AUM.
IMO the main take-away from this and other accounts of Farcebook censoring various kinds of information and then providing their own “fact checks” is this: Believe nothing Farcebook says with regards to their “facts”. Kind of like people you know who lie a lot…you quickly learn to take everything they say (even if occasionally it turns out to be true) with a huge grain (or rather block) of salt. I might use these sites (FB, YouTube, Twitter, etc) here and there, but I know better than to trust anything they set down as fact.
It is a new religion. They will be burning heretic books soon.
You been in a coma, or what? They have been burning books for some while already! As a matter of fact, they tend to burn the author, the publisher, even mentioning that you have read anything “concerning” now gets you burned, too. Even this site is being soaked in their special, plant-based, non-carbonaceous fire accellerant, as evidenced by the class of troll attracted lately. From Yale, brother, from Yale! You just don’t get a classier troll than Yale!
“As a matter of fact, they tend to burn the author”
eg: Peter Ridd … get his book –
‘ Reef Heresy ? ‘
It’s brilliant !
So, Yale University is encouraging Facebook to spread lies that try to discredit climate theory skeptics?
I’m shocked, just shocked, I tell you..