Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; Quoted in a USA Today call for social media censorship, John Cook, who once thought it amusing to self portrait himself as a NAZI officer, is outraged people could believe that climate activists want to restrict freedom.
Climate change denial on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok is ‘as bad as ever’
Jessica Guynn
USA TODAYAD0:14The climate is changing, but misinformation about it on the major social media platforms is not.
Climate change falsehoods, hoaxes and conspiracy theories are still prevalent on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube despite pledges to crack down, a new report says.
Social media posts and videos denying climate change, disputing its causes, or underplaying its effects not only can still be found on these platforms, they are often missing warning labels or links to credible information, according to Advance Democracy, a research organization that studies misinformation.
Climate scientists say they’re frustrated by the lack of progress in stemming the tide of climate change misinformation. For years, they’ve urged social media companies to identify, flag and take down the misinformation and the accounts that spread it.
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But, says Michael Mann, director of Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center and author of “The New Climate War,” “it’s as bad as ever.”
John Cook, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University who advises Facebook, says the proliferation of climate misinformation on social media reflects the torrent of misinformation coming from a combination of science denial and skepticism about climate policy and renewable fuels and technologies.
“One element of climate misinformation that seems to be particularly prominent on social media is culture war type posts that attempt to paint people concerned about climate change as belonging to some separate social group intent on impinging on people’s freedoms,” Cook said. “This is a particularly damaging form of misinformation as it exacerbates public polarization on climate change, making progress more difficult.”
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Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/01/21/climate-change-misinformation-facebook-youtube-twitter/6594691001/
Calling the claim that activists want to restrict our freedom “misinformation” is beyond absurd, given John Cook attacked such claims in the context of the USA Today call for social media to be censored.
To be fair, John Cook himself appears to steer carefully around the issue of censorship. But he wants social media companies to tag climate “misinformation”, to do more to push people towards his viewpoint.
Cook’s claim climate activists do not want to restrict freedom is not supported by the evidence. There are plenty of very public climate activist attacks on freedom in mainstream media:
- Climate censorship – USA Today (current article), Reuters (h/t Dr. Soon), Facebook, BBC, Facebook (Again), Elizabeth Warren, …
- Call for a Permanent climate lockdown.
- Green attacks on democracy – Foreign Policy, Financial Times, The Conversation, The Conversation (again), The Guardian, The Hill, Science Mag, James Hansen, …
- Economic de-growth – NYT, Sci Tech Daily, The New Federalist, The Tablet (Laudato Si), Ted Talks, The Guardian, …
- Shut down capitalism – The Guardian, Vice (UN), …
- Penalties for climate skepticism – University of Graz, Carbon brief, NZ Herald, …
- Restrict dietary choices – University of London, PLoS One, All3dP, The Guardian (UN), UN, Washington Post, …
This is just a small sample of public calls for freedom to be restricted, democracy to be dismantled, or “climate deniers” to be punished for expressing an opinion, but I think I have demonstrated my point.
- A significant number of high profile climate activists want to restrict your freedom.
- A significant number of climate activists want to punish anyone who publicly disagrees with their views on climate change, either by annotating or censoring their social media posts, shutting down social media accounts, or in a few cases by imposing criminal penalties.
- A significant number of climate activists want to restrict economic growth and capitalism, effectively undermining the right of ordinary people to start their own business.
This censorship narrative should be too absurd to be considered, but in today’s world of out of control wokeness, climate catastrophism, cancel culture and lockdown mania, our freedoms are in peril. In my opinion the freedoms we take for granted could be taken from us, if narratives promoted by the likes of Herr John Cook and Michael Mann prevail.
From the article:
To Hell with all of them. Skeptics are not going to shut up. Get used to it.
I’m checking this John Cook bloke out, and the organisation he works with, i.e. Center For Climate Change, where they all claim to be about ‘communication’, but tellingly have no contact information. I’d like to ask him and his fellow cultists, my standard burden of proof questions, and may follow this through to something they are apparently signed up to called the ‘Pro-Truth Pledge’, which appears to be a ‘who’s who’ of liars, and it might be interesting to see what response they might come up with in holding truth to account as well, when they are faced with evidence of no truth to the climatard claims.
My burden of proof questions and the responses, as well as telling non-responses, are included in my latest video called ‘Are We The Baddies’: https://rumble.com/vt1fax-are-we-the-baddies.html
I do want to collect as many responses from all over the world, so anyone wishing to take part, is more than welcome, and my details are in video description.
“Calling the claim that activists want to restrict our freedom “misinformation” is beyond absurd”
Yet as ever the opposite of what they say is true.
Dr ‘Death’ Parncutt: “To protect future generations, our legal systems urgently need extension. “
https://web.archive.org/web/20121225215642/http://www.uni-graz.at/richard.parncutt/climatechange.html
Extending legal frameworks normally involves formalised restrictions – eg covid…
“The tobacco industry was prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice under the RICO statutes, in part because of the ways in which individual companies coordinated with each other and with third party allies to present false information to consumers. I believe it is time for Congress to investigate the fossil fuel network, as Congress and the Department of Justice investigated the Tobacco network.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/11/09/naomi-no-evidence-oreskes-careful-for-what-you-wish-for-pt-2/
Restricting the freedom of people who produce fuels counts… Oreskes. But then who needs democracy when there’s a crisis…
“We tend to assume that democracies, over the long arc of history, work towards progress and justice. But with an issue like climate change, we’re running out of time. It may come as a surprise, but at the moment, democracy may be an obstacle to the rapid action we need on climate change. “
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/10/16/the-conversation-democracy-may-be-an-obstacle-to-action-on-climate-change/
Parncutt has been disappeared at DeSmogBlog and Skeptical science. I wonder why?
For those new to the subject who see that image of John Cook dressed as an SS Officer and who think that’s abusive…
That’s an image John Cook made of himself. That’s how he wants to feel. It was found on his own servers.
It’s not other people calling him a Nazi. It’s how he sees himself.
Climate Liars like Cooky and Mikey have to be the least self-aware people on the planet. If there were a Frequent Liar Miles program, they would clean up totally.
CliSciFi IS the Frequent Liar Miles Program and many politicians, universities, NGOs, Deep Staters, crony capitalists & etc. are cleaning up “totally.”
John Cook gets paid for his climate activism. I don’t get paid for my skepticism that his climate activism is unwarranted and mostly BS.
John Cook is one of the primary purveyors of climate misinformation and proves yet again that the Big Climate Payroll continues unabated.
We are not against freedom and if you disagree with us we will censor you, get you fired from your job, and get the police to SWAT your home!
We are reasonable people, and if you just acquiesce to our demands, no one will get hurt.
Climate activists: are these people who watched LOTR movies too many times and think that the Hobbits had it made in the shade?
Or are they just a large and noisy group of self-involved, close-minded individuals who belong to a Very Stupid Club and don’t want reality to confront them?
The real problem with the Greenbeaners and the Ecohippies is that they yakk a lot, but produce nothing of any value, while the rest of us go on doing the work and getting things done.
I do wonder how they’d fare if they were sent back to the late 18th century in the Tardis and turfed out, told “enjoy yourselves” and were left there to fend off hungry crows, coyotes and mosquitoes.
Other the the usual “USA Today is still a thing?”, “John Cook, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University who advises Facebook” is about as far as you have to read anyway.
“John Cook, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University who advises Facebook” It would be clearer if they just said “John Cook, a paid ideological mouthpiece at Monash’s CliSciFi propaganda outlet who lies and supports censors at Facebook to suppress actual climate facts and defraud unsuspecting citizens.” That’s what the history books will say, assuming the Marxists don’t take over the U.S. as they have in much of the rest of the world.
Not agreeing is misinformation! Who would have thought there were, honest, qualified scientists fact checking. Facebook has admitted under oath the fact checkers are checking opinion which is compounding a fraud.
To be clear their censorship and weasel notes of caution and not appreciated.
They DON’T want to restrict your freedom, as long as you do what they say and agree with them completely.
Using government to suppress climate crisis deniers…
Chittenden County, VT, State’s Attorney Sarah George explained her office’s new policy
“Psychological research has shown that those who are being mistreated, or in this case over-policed, will eventually begin to view the system itself as deeply unfair,” she wrote. “Not only is the system viewed as unfair, but also there is evidence suggesting that experiencing over-policing and discrimination causes serious psychological and emotional harm, and can lead those experiencing this treatment to be more likely to engage in criminal behavior.”
She wasn’t talking about climate issues, still it applies.
If Michael Mann says it is thus and so it is not thus and so, that’s the only thing he has proven to be true.
Meanwhile Ross Mittiga and Cambridge University U.K. publish papers justifying dictatorship as the only solution to the “climate emergency”.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/political-legitimacy-authoritarianism-and-climate-change/E7391723A7E02FA6D536AC168377D2DE#
Well John Cook would be the go-to chap for dressing Polish prisoners in German army uniforms.
We need a new war, gives people something to really worry about,
Thanks to Biden’s weakness and incompetence, we have two potential wars on the horizon.
only true religious bigots refuse to identify with their own hypocrisy and are unable to see fault in their argument. Climate activists are without a doubt religiously orientated and consider non believers to be insane, so not worth considering. It is always dangerous and always operates in a fashion it accuses its opposition of.
Sadly in this increasingly tribal world, along with depressingly large amounts of unsupported ‘facts’ and other misinformation the number of people taking sides is increasingly large.
John Cook is a religious nutjob – proven over and again – the trouble is his nutjob religion has a huge number of blinkered followers with high priests such as Michael Mann heading up the propaganda department.
Please can we return to proper scientific examination and dissemination of research material!! Some hope!!
That’s a common trait with pretty much all leftists, of which climate activists are a subset.
Michael Mann and John Cook are among those pushing “climate change falsehoods.”
As usual the criminals accuse others of the crimes they, themselves, have committed. And they’re likely delusional enough to believe their accusations.