Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Allan MacRae – Dr. Willie Soon an Dr. Ronan Connolly discussing the chilling effect on scientific inquiry, of Facebook’s apparent policy of shutting down mentions of published, peer reviewed papers their inexpert fact checkers don’t like.
‘Fact Checks’ by Non-Experts Are Shutting Down Genuine Scientific Inquiry
Willie Soon Ronan Connolly
September 22, 2021 Updated: September 22, 2021We recently published a new climate change report in the peer-reviewed scientific journal
Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (RAA). The nearly two dozen co-authors of
our paper are experts in solar physics and climate science from 14 countries.
We were looking at the role of the Sun in climate change. We found that,
depending on which scientific datasets you choose, you could explain the global warming
since the 19th century as being anything from mostly natural to mostly human-caused.
The huge uncertainty over such a key question is a major concern.A few days after our paper was posted online, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) published their 6th Assessment Report (AR6).
The IPCC AR6 concluded that it was “unequivocal” that recent global warming
was almost entirely human-caused.The journalist Alex Newman was struck by the contrast between the two different reports.
He interviewed us, representatives for the IPCC, and several other scientists for
an article in The Epoch Times.…
People began sharing Newman’s article on social media. One of Facebook’s “independent fact-checkers,” Climate Feedback, quickly stepped in. This “fact-checker” website, financially supported by Facebook, TikTok, Google News Initiative, and others, declared the article to be “incorrect” and “misleading.” Facebook then began censoring any posts sharing the link.
…
“Fact-checkers” claim to provide the solution. But a weaponized “fact-check” is nothing more
than a “narrative-check.”Science thrives when scientists are allowed to investigate areas of scientific disagreement.
Read more: https://www.theepochtimes.com/fact-checks-by-non-experts-are-shutting-down-genuine-scientific-inquiry_4008914.html
So, when journalists and social media platforms use “fact-checkers” to suppress genuine
scientific disagreements, they are effectively shutting down scientific inquiry.
Alex Newman’s Epoch Times article on the two contrasting views is available here.
The Facebook fact checkers might have asked NASA GISS Chairman Gavin Schmidt’s opinion on Dr. Soon et al’s solar paper. Epoch Times’ Alex Newman published Schmidt’s response in the original article: “This is total nonsense that no one sensible should waste any time on,”.
A strong view for sure. But is shutting down positions published in peer reviewed journals, which Gavin Schmidt thinks are wrong, really how science should work?
Science advances when mistakes are challenged and overturned, frequently against strong opposition from the scientific establishment.
Consider Dr. Barry Marshall, the hero who risked his own life, deliberately infected himself with Helicobacter pylori to prove that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria, because the medical community refused to consider his work. Imagine if Facebook had asked establishment doctors their opinion, received the advice “this is total nonsense”, then decided to suppress any mention of the infection theory of stomach ulcers. Millions of people could still be suffering debilitating, lifelong medical problems, because the key to curing their condition had been suppressed.
Surely you don’t have to be a Dr. Soon or Dr. Connolly supporter to appreciate how wrong this is. Dr. Gavin Schmidt has expressed a strong opinion. But Dr. Gavin Schmidt recently admitted, his climate models are running hot.
…
But as climate scientists face this alarming reality, the climate models that help them project the future have grown a little too alarmist. Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast. In advance of the U.N. report, scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong and how to turn the models, which in other respects are more powerful and trustworthy than their predecessors, into useful guidance for policymakers. “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
…
Read more: https://www.science.org/news/2021/07/un-climate-panel-confronts-implausibly-hot-forecasts-future-warming
Clearly there is something not quite right with Schmidt’s climate models.
I’m not saying that Dr. Soon and Dr. Connolly unequivocally have the answer, to what is off with Schmidt’s climate models. But if dissenting voices like Soon and Connolly are shut out of the conversation, then Schmidt might never find the missing piece to the puzzle, to why his climate models are running implausibly hot.
The missing piece to Schmidt’s puzzle could be something which Schmidt currently believes is nonsense – just as the missing piece to why stomach ulcers were so difficult to treat, was an insight which the entire medical community dismissed as nonsense, until Dr. Barry Price Dr. Barry Marshall risked his own life and drank his toxic broth to prove them wrong.
Facebook and other communication platforms shutting down dissenting, peer reviewed views is a disservice to all science, not just to the scientists whose work is being censored.
Don’t use farcebook
Problem solved
“Climate Feedback” is a tool of the Climate Mafia. They obviously get paid to troll all the articles that present scientific facts and opinions that do not support the climate Mafia’s dogma. The fact that this is true is demonstrated by the fact that they never “fact check” even the most outrageous claims of doom and disaster coming out of the various Marxist institutions of “learning” that used to be our universities.
No surprise there. The human race has been corrupted by greed. The UN tried the ‘CO2 causes global warming’ scam. When that did not give them world dominance, they turned to medical science by using the World Health Organisation to introduce the Covid 19 bioweapon followed by the mRNA gene therapy bioweapon to kill off a large proportion of the human race, destroy capitalism and democracy and give them their elite heaven foolishly forgetting that it is the great unwashed that provides them with the goods and services that they hope to enjoy.
So much of the Climate Scam runs on garbage proclamations from “fake-it till I make it” scientists like NASA’s Gavin Schmidt. Schmidt is the exactly the person Upton Sinclair had in mind when he said (over 100 years ago):
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
— Upton Sinclair
Why do we care what Facebook do? It is, quite frankly, the toilet of humanity anyway.
There are laws that regulate hate speech.
It’s interesting, then, that governments think social media should control content on their platforms whether or not such communications are illegal. link
The proper way to deal with a criminal act is for the authorities to lay charges and prosecute the individuals responsible. The courts then decide, among other things, whether the alleged actions were indeed illegal. In other words, the courts act as a check on the power of the government.
The EU is going to collapse because of the power it has given unaccountable bureaucrats. America might not collapse because of the power it is giving to unaccountable social media idiots but the result is going to be ugly anyway. The storm before the calm.
If George Friedman (author of the above link) is correct, Facebook will just be a bad memory in ten years. I sure hope he’s right.
This climate change farce is going to be such a hoot to watch as it unravels.
electroverse is already documenting the observed changes during the current GSM. It will be interesting to watch the greenies in europe get skidmarks when the Arctic’s “Ticking Climate Bomb” finally goes off. Good thing our Oz farmers are getting decent crops – they are going to need them to survive.
Doesn’t the attempt at censorship make Fbk etc liable for things which they check and allow, but which turn out to be wrong or defamatory or illegal in some way. They are no longer neutral but take on part of the guilt for getting it wrong
In the article, the second mention of Dr Barry Marshall he becomes Dr Barry Price?
I don’t know, but isn’t Farcebook, Twatter, Instacrap etc vicariously liable for this censorship?
Read more: https://www.theepochtimes.com/fact-checks-by-non-experts-are-shutting-down-genuine-scientific-inquiry_4008914.html
Wish I could. TheEpochTimes itself seems to have been shut down/ up.
In my entirely unscientific, layman’s opinion, the problem doesn’t lie with what modellers know, it’s what they don’t know that has their models running hot. Not just hot, but so wildly inconsistently hot.
It’s clouds.
Unless the world were brought to a halt, no one can guesstimate the effect clouds have on the earths temperature to any degree of certainty, and as soon as the world restarts, the effect of the clouds instantly changes.
Now, forgive me if I’m wrong but, I’m not aware of any acceptable, universal formula to measure the effects of clouds that’s used consistently across all climate models. My suspicion is, an arbitrary sum is used by every modeller, plucked from thin air, which would probably in itself explain the wild variation across the models. I mean, you would expect some outlier results on any given experiment with known and agreed variables, but not one model appears to agrees what the variables are. Consequently, there seems to be an awful lot of ‘creative science’ going on with these things.
What QC is applied to the consistency of data these models run on? Any at all? Not being a scientist I wouldn’t, of course, understand however, it would appear at least logical that there are internationally agreed guesses for something as knowingly influential and variable as clouds.
There is, of course, solar irradiation which seem largely ignored as well, but even that’s more measurable than cloud activity.
So what can we do ? Already in Switzerland, they’re talking about the “growing number of violent anti-vaccine protesters” who have been brought so far “due to the unacceptable lies of the alternative media”. That’s their next move: a crackdown on all “alternative websites”, in other words: full blown censorship like in China. Another thing that’s going on: it’s almost impossible to get tested anymore. Week long delays, and long distances and so on, although now you will soon have to pay for it. They’re saying “the vaccine isn’t mandatory since you can get tested” but in reality this option is becoming ever more difficult to implement. Early treatment of Covid is also forbidden in this country.
After a quite successful protest demo in one city, a planned demo in Berne was unexpectedly cancelled, and by the organizers themselves. I wonder what pressure the State used to achieve this?
So peer-review is a guarantee of quality now? Noted.
The paper is nonsense. Pointing this out is not censorship.
What does Willie Soon know about Climate? Obviously nothing. Does he not know the Sun is over 100 million miles away from Earth so how can that have any effect on our Climate?? These Fact Checkers have 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒑𝒆𝒓 𝒅𝒆𝒈𝒓𝒆𝒆𝒔 such as ‘The Simpsons’ from the Uni of California and even more relevant ‘Clownology’ from the Uni of Missouri and they can, obviously, certainly understand this simple fact. It has to be something closer to home that Bart or Coco are involved in. Naughty boys releasing all that poisonous, dreadful CO2 gas into the atmosphere! (Although that said I see Coco is planning to set up a factory in England to produce this nasty gas as, unbelievably, they are short of CO2 in the UK. One extreme to the other!! One moment it’s ‘too much’, and they spend Billions of Dollars to get rid of it (and want Trillions more to ensure it’s all gone which the nice UN will, of course, strictly control spending) and the next, produce more of it because they have run out!) Just who can you believe anymore??
I despair. I just don’t know what they are teaching Scientists anymore!! /sarc
Newspeak additional…
“social media “
Anti-social and specifically designed for 2 minutes hate – or more.
once more zuck n the minions show abysmal IQ levels
that sonnet
how do i LOATHE thee? let me count the ways
for the bigheaded Z
1984 redux
Fascist dictators cannot allow any dissent from the official propaganda narrative.
It always amuses me how the vast majority of libs equate conservatism with fascism, and always use the slur “fascist” to describe any who don’t subscribe to their propaganda.
It is easy enough to look up the meaning of fascism, as the fascists adopted it. “Fasci” is Latin for sticks. The Fascist Party logo was a bunch of sticks tied together in a single bundle. It represented their notion that individual sticks have no strength and are easily broken, while a bundle of sticks is very strong.
The motto of the Fascist Party was “All for the state .. and nothing for the individual”.
Boy that sure sounds a LOT more like today’s liberal weanies than any conservatives that I have ever known. Conservatives and their cousins the libertarians are the ultimate individualists – in other words, the opposite of fascists.
The only difference between 20th century fascists – which by the way did NOT include the Nazis – and communists was their justification for total state control of the individual. Commies justified it as their “revolution of the proletariat” with class warfare being the motivator; fascists did not emphasize class warfare but were simply dedicated to dictatorship by the state.
The liberal fascists are out to destroy any dissent from their warmunista propaganda. Their Orwellian “thought police” work at Facebook.
To be fair, the standard global climate models are the total nonsense that no one sensible should waste their time on. It’s a projection.
Why is anyone surprised by this? Democrat Party leaders have ordered their minions, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, etc etc, to silence all facts and simply push the Democrat Party approved lies. And just as Faux Joe Xiden has usurped the authority of USG to order businesses to require people get the Chinese Disease shot.
From the paper:
“However, this new estimate suggests these two warming periods were separated by a pronounced cooling period during the 1950s–1970s and that the relative warmth of the mid-20th century warm period was comparable to the recent warm period.”
We know what caused both of those.
And it wasn’t the sun.
Else why is it doing it now.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnUPJW6VQAALY7n?format=jpg&name=900×900
The mid-20th cent warming was caused by +ve phases of the PDO and AMO and low aerosols
The later cooling was caused by aerosol from industry ramping up after WW2 and -ve PDO/AMO regimes.
As is often said here – there is more to the climate systems variability than CO2 -or the Sun.
http://homework.uoregon.edu/pub/blogs/g2.png
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_Fig8-18.jpg
” …. To disentangle surface solar and greenhouse influences on global warming, trends in diurnal temperature range are analyzed. They suggest that solar dimming was effective in masking greenhouse warming, but only up to the 1980s, when dimming gradually transformed into brightening. Since then, the uncovered greenhouse effect has revealed its full dimension, as manifested in a rapid temperature rise (+0.38°C/decade over land since mid-1980s). Recent solar brightening cannot supersede the greenhouse effect as main cause of global warming, since land temperatures increased by 0.8°C from 1960 to 2000, even though solar brightening did not fully outweigh solar dimming within this period.”
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2006GL028031
It really is frightening the number of people who have been trained to believe that government is the ultimate decider of truth.
Roger Waters has clear thoughts about Facebook. (Warning: coarse language, NSFW, rock ‘n’ roll):
https://youtu.be/-TGBcAZ55D4
I had a response on a newspaper Facebook page that used an EPA graph and NOAA temperature data removed because the data didn’t fit the Facebooks fact checker perscribed narrative. Was told that appeal was not possible because of COVID.
I seriously doubt that Dr. Schmidt is spending much time or thought trying to find what is wrong with his models.