21
Aug
2019
The Problem With “Fact Checking” Websites
This is absolutely hilarious. On Facebook a screenshot of this AP News article is floating around…
And then look at how this “fact checker”-type website tries to downplay the obvious critique.
The fact checker declared it true, which was accurate. This supports the premise that we can have confidence in the fact checkers. We have yet to see if the prediction comes true. It was said that the trend must be reversed by 2000. This did no happen. We now will wait and see if countries get wiped out.
We can be reasonably confident that someday entire nations will be wiped off the face of the earth. So even if it’s not caused by rising sea levels, they were at least half right.
*sigh* Harold,
(1) One of these claims is demonstrably wrong, and the scientific consensus does not agree with the other one:
The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown….He said even the most conservative scientists ″already tell us there’s nothing we can do now to stop a … change″ of about 3 degrees.
The Earth didn’t warm “1 to 7 degrees” within 30 years of him saying that. And maybe he was right to say that in 1989 scientists said 3 degrees of warming is unstoppable, but right now people are clamoring to limit warming to 2C and trying to shoot for 1.5C. I don’t know if this one guy was wrong or the scientists he was quoting were wrong, but clearly this warning from the UN was wrong.
** Added: It’s possible the story is using Fahrenheit; I had been assuming Celsius. **
(2) Besides the above, the major thing the fact-checker article did was PIVOT TO TALK ABOUT OTHER PREDICTIONS MADE IN THE 1980S THAT IT CLAIMS PANNED OUT. The article barely talked about the AP guy’s warnings.
1) The claim was “A 1989 Associated Press article predicted disaster if “global warming” went unchecked.”
2) You agree that the fact checker was correct? The claim was true. We can trust the fact checkers at least with the true/false conclusion.
3) This was not an official UN publication. It is not true to say that this story was a UN claim. It was an interview with a UN official.
5) As Transformer points out, the direct quotes from brown do not support the headline. It was all authored by the journalist.
4) We do not know what the scientists were saying from this interview, because it was an interview. If we want to know what they were saying we need to go to publications.
5) Is this a case of journalists going too far to sell the story? Quite probably. Does it tell us anything about climate science or what was the understanding in 1989? No.
“The article barely talked about the AP guy’s warnings.”
they can’t really because we don’t know if they will come true.
Have you read the stuff places like WUWT say about it? They put it under “30 years of fake UN warnings”.
Big league Politics has it as “Should you trust “experts” whose predictions are always wrong?”
This was not a UN warning, it was not fake, it was authored by a journalist, not an expert and we don’t know if it will come true.
This is widely misrepresented as the UN saying counties will be wiped out by 2000, which is totally wrong.
Given the context it is entirely reasonable to talk about the wider picture.
I agree with your point 3 that the fact checker uses a degree of misdirection in its analysis of the AP article.
However I don’t think the various climate-change skeptics who were getting excited about that old article were focused on whether various predictions referenced in that article about likely future temperature changes (that we don’t seem to even know if there were in C or F) were accurate or not. They just wanted to believe that the UN had predicted disaster if global warming was not reversed by 2000 and celebrate the failure of this to transpire as a huge black eye for climate change ‘alarmists’.
But there is very little evidence from the AP story that anyone connected with the UN actually made such a prediction since the alarmist statements are not backed up by actual quotes and quite likely reflect nothing more than sensationalist journalism.
Well put.
If one googles ‘UN alarmism on climate change’ one gets endless links to climate change skeptics implying the UN and ‘climate experts’ of having a history ,of making false predictions.
Bob appears to share these views as he says below
‘it IS true that all the experts should be saying, “It’s too late. As we warned back in 1989, we had a small window of opportunity. But we blew it. Our grandkids are screwed’.
I’m a facts kind of guy and was curious after reading Bob’s post what the track record of the UN (specifically)was (not just in 1989 but generally) in this regard as the 1989 article struck me as mostly noise without substance. My research has (so far) really not throw up much to indicate that the UN has made that many falsified predictions.
(I was frankly a bit taken aback with Bob reaction in accusing me of ‘missing the big picture’ for just asking this question !).
Now don’t get me wrong:
– I would not be surprised to find they did have some ‘alarmist’ bias (one can think of all sorts of reason why this might be the case) and that was one of the things that made be curious about this topic.
– The UN has over the years ramped up the level of its warning and maybe in 50 years time it will have been proven guilty of ‘climate alarmism’. The IPCC report on the consequences of rises above 1.5 C from last year was pretty scary and I sure hope they are wrong. But what if they are not ? These reports are after all actually written by the planets best ‘climate experts’/
– Journalists and politicians for sure take what ‘experts’ says and sensationalize the hell out of it for their own ends. To your point, should the ‘experts’ make more of an effort to clarify what they are really saying ? Probably. But that’s not the specific issue I was interested in here. (Perhaps this is the ‘;big picture’ I am alleged to be missing ?)
I did find this one example of clear alarmism from 2005
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/oct/12/naturaldisasters.climatechange1
You would think that everyone should be happy that entire nations never did plunge into the sea.
Strange that Australia still forks out hundreds of millions in foreign aid money (my money, that I worked for) to Tuvalu and other Pacific islands to fix the problem of sinking islands. We are off fixing a problem that isn’t happening. It’s almost like politicians DO believe this guff.
Without doubt there’s plenty of sensationalist journalism going around. Now show me where those well known climate scientists are getting up and clarifying that we have no reason to exaggerate and making a fair effort to calm the public down. Just give me a link to any interview with a climate scientist saying that the journalists ought to tone it down a notch.
We have had Prince Charles (of all people) telling us we are all doomed in 18 months. Obviously complete garbage … where’s the pushback from the people who know better?
I somehow managed to put my reply above your comment.
Harold, I am not going to get bogged down here, but let me try this:
If the fact-checker site had simply said, “Yep, that’s a legit article, next!” then I obviously wouldn’t have posted about it.
And yet, there’s no mystery here. I specifically said in my OP “look at how this ‘fact-checker’-type website tries to downplay the obvious critique.” And the title of my post was, “The Problem With ‘Fact Checking’ Websites.”
You also try to explain away the fact that they DON’T fact-check the falsifiable (at this point) empirical claims that the story attributed to the UN guy, even though the story quoted them, by saying “It didn’t really say much about his views” (I’m paraphrasing you). Well, they specifically said he claimed 1 to 7 degrees of warming by now. So, did that happen or not? THAT’S the kind of thing I was reading the article, hoping it would explain (since these claims are always tricky, you don’t know if it’s C or F, and you don’t know if he meant cumulative warming or additional warming from 1989 onward), but instead it totally punted. It attributed that prediction to the guy, and then pivoted and started talking about someone else who made a global warming prediction in the late 1980s. Total BS move.
It’s true that Krugman predicted stocks would never recover after Trump’s election, but on the other hand when he bought his son a puppy on his 5th birthday he said the boy would love it — and the boy did. So Krugman’s predictions are pretty good in general.
“Okay, so there isn’t actually a wolf right here right now. But he’s out in those woods and he could show up at any moment. So when you think about it, that boy was pretty much right to cry wolf all along.”
Could it not also be argued that the trend was indeed altered before 2000 ?
Both the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (which had non-enforceable guidelines on emissions) and the Kyoto Agreement (that admittedly didn’t take effect until the 2000s, but could nevertheless be said to have changed the long term trend) happened in the 1990s.
If the trend was slightly altered it was not reversed.
I think we have to accept that if the dire consequences do not come to pass as a consequence of climate change then Noel Brown will have to accept he was wrong. We must not get indivdual statements mixed up with the science.
The thrust of the post was also that we can’t trust fact checkers. The fact that they said it was true indicates we can at least accept their headline conclusion.
I’d be curious to see the full text of Brown’s actually statement from 1989.
Brown is quoted in the article as saying ″the question is will we be able to reverse the process in time? We say that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process.″.
This seems like a perfectly defensible thing to have said in 1989 and is inconsistent with the ‘not reversed by the year 2000’ that the AP article refers to in its first sentence. I’m wondering if that is is an accurate paraphrase of his speech especially as the headline uses the looser phrase ‘Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked”.
No disaster. No warming. CO2 increased some, but the Sahara & forestry & agriculture are eating it up.
The last I followed this closely, they were arguing about 0.2 or 0.4 degrees, (well below measurable changes of the recorded data), but claiming mass catastrophe in 30 years, 12 years…
And it didn’t help the watermelon climate hysterics that they were caught several times fudging the numbers, and exchanging e-mail messages about how to do so & smother debate.
It’s extremely difficult to have rational discussions on this issue considering one side thinks the fate of humanity is on the line.
In 2000 we were at about 22 Gt of CO2, now we are close to 40.. How wrong can you be…
And how deluded do you need to be to not see how futile and utterly impossibly it is to put that genie (which I personally think is rather positive than negative but even if) back into the bottle. Except you are ok with mass murder worldwide…
sorry wasn’t intended as a reply to you.. But yes you are right.
Sorry Dan, wasn’t intended as a reply to you.. But yes you are right.
the fate of humanity is always on the line.
One last thing everybody: I understand that some people looking at the meme might have thought the UN guy was predicting nations underwater by 2019, and if so, then yes that is unfair.
However, I think the more nuanced people mocking this story, had in mind something like, “Ha ha, they’ve been warning us we have x years to act, and they just keep pushing that window forward as people continue to ignore their hysterical warnings.”
So yes, it’s true that nations don’t need to be underwater right now for him to have been vindicated, but it IS true that all the experts should be saying, “It’s too late. As we warned back in 1989, we had a small window of opportunity. But we blew it. Our grandkids are screwed.”
And yet, that’s not the story. The story is, “We have 12 years to act…”
Bob,
Can you point to something more definitive than this rather dodgy story to backup your claim that ‘experts’ said in 1989 that we only had a small window of opportunity ? Most ot what I see coming from the UN back then seems to be more along the lines of the ″We say that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process″ which is one of the few direct quotes from that AP story.
It’s very possible that the corporate press and politicians were misleading the public on the scientific literature back then. Which is the point. They’re still saying we have 10 years to act even though they’ve been saying that my entire life, and even though the scientific literature still doesn’t back up that preposterous assessment.
The greater danger is that people like Mib8 above seize on the idea that experts are always wrong and declare there has been no warming, whilst feeling justified in their false belief. No evidence can change their minds because any relevant evidence must come from the very experts that are always wrong. Promoting this sort of disinformation is dangerous.
I don’t think that is a danger. I don’t care what any so-called expert says. I don’t believe the state should do anything other than get out of the way. If someone opposes government intervention for right or wrong reasons, I’m satisfied.
But I’m ok if you stop using all fossil fuels. Be the change you want to see.
I see it as a problem when people are happy to sacrifice the truth to promote their ideology. You do not, so we will have to differ on that one.
I don’t sacrifice anything. I just don’t see it as a problem if people believe the right thing for the wrong reason. That’s good enough for me. If they ask me, I’ll tell them the truth though. The state should get out of the way. That’s the truth.
It would be hard to find a clearer example of dogma. Thanks for clarifying.
OK, then it should be easy for you supply some stuff from 1989 (or thereabout) that would back up Bob’s paraphrase of what ‘all the experts should be saying’
‘It’s too late. As we warned back in 1989, we had a small window of opportunity. But we blew it. Our grandkids are screwed.’
(BTW: I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, just that I’d like to see it).
The AP should be saying it’s too late. They wrote the article.
The AP is a news agency not a body cleaning climate change expertize.
I’m aware.
Transformer wrote: “OK, then it should be easy for you supply some stuff from 1989 (or thereabout) that would back up Bob’s paraphrase of what ‘all the experts should be saying’”
Transformer, do you really not get the big picture here?
Look, try it this way: Suppose the Earth warms by (a cumulative) 2.8C by the year 2060, and nothing really bad happens climate-change-wise. Then at that time, whoever among the “skeptics” is still alive says, “Ha ha, we told you guys the UN was full of it. Remember back in 2018 when they released a Special Report telling governments how to limit warming to 1.5C to avoid catastrophe? Ha ha, morons.”
Then you would be able to say, “What? The actual science at the time said no such thing. I mean look, William Nordhaus won a Nobel Prize the same time that report came out, and his model said the optimal warming was more than 3C. So it’s a right-wing lie to be claiming that the climate experts in 2018 were telling people 3C would have been a disaster.”
Is that how you would behave in those circumstances?
“Suppose the Earth warms by (a cumulative) 2.8C by the year 2060, and nothing really bad happens climate-change-wise”
Say that happens and really bad things happen.
Given that the IPCC report from last year made some very specific claims about the effects of temperatures rising by more than 1.5C then if that threshold is breached and none of those bad things happen then the IPCC report would really have proven to be a good example of climate alarmism. It would be simply factually incorrect for someone to say after that had happened: ‘So it’s a right-wing lie to be claiming that the climate experts in 2018 were telling people 3C would have been a disaster’. Anyone asking for evidence of this could be pointed to the IPCC report.
If you show me solid evidence that the UN made similar specific and concrete claims back in 1989 that have already been proven to be untrue then I will happily acknowledge they were being climate alarmists even back then (I did actually spend some time looking on the web for the kind of stuff that was out there in 1989 and did not really find anything that could have be described as alarmist , but its possible I looked in the wrong places).
I’m truly not getting why asking for evidence to back up people’s claims is
not ‘getting the big picture’ and would welcome an explanation of what you mean by that.
Yeah, in that way it’s a bit like the doomsday cults that pop up around a specific date that the world is supposed to end. When the prediction fails, just move the date back. But the climate alarmists are a little smarter than the doomsday cults because they never actually allow the fated date to arrive. That way they can just build steam continuously.
Can anybody figure out what the UNEP/EPA joint study is, that the AP story is talking about? I found a study on climate change that EPA presented to Congress in December 1989, but not sure if it’s the same one.
This is all i could find
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1434/ML14345A597.pdf
This is the problem you will face if you put forward one news article as representing the view of the experts. If you want to know what the experts were saying look at publications, not news sories.
We find conclusions such as “The studies of forests in the
Southeast and Great Lakes indicate that these forests
could begin to die back in 30 to 80 years. ”
These cliams that because we have not drowned by 2019 it shows the experts were wrong are really disingenuous.
I think you are missing the big picture here Harold.
Yes, I am sure Iam 🙂
Maybe looking out of a different window at a different view.
Did that 1989 EPA study on climate change make any predictions that have in retrospect proven to be incorrect and could be characterized as alarmist ?
“the most probable global warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide
concentrations over preindustrial levels to be between 1.5 and 4.5°C.
Broadly in line with current thinking.
they predict that forests range will be reduced, because the southern edge will be reduced by climate change but the northern edge can only grow as fast as forests can migrate, which is slowly. Effects may be noticeable in 30-80 years.
Effect of sea level rise is for 2100.
crop yield will rise in some places and fall in in others. May decline overall. Positive effects of CO2 are discussed widely.
water use conflicts may increase.
Summer mortaliy could increase, winter mortality could decrease.
All sorts of regional effects.
“Did that 1989 EPA study on climate change make any predictions that have in retrospect proven to be incorrect and could be characterized as alarmist ?”
No.