Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
It’s Not Disinformation If It Serves the Narrative
There was a little-publicized incident involving the second IPCC climate report which contained a statement in the summary section that ice cover in the Himalayas could be gone in as little as 30 years. A senior scientist for the Indian government said that claim was preposterous (India monitors such things closely because those mountains are the source of every major river in the north of that country).
In response, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri became indignant and said that every part of the report was peer-reviewed pure science. The footnote for that 30-year claim referred to a position paper by a green activist group, not a journal article. That position paper’s 30-year figure cited a Russian scientific paper in which the author suggested a 300-year time range (not 30). The Russian author said in a subsequent interview that the figure was entirely speculative and relied on assumptions about trends, and was not meant as a prediction of any kind.
Was this instance of utter and complete BS in a Very Authoritative Document produced by The Consensus an example of disinformation? No. Of course not. “Disinformation” is that which contradicts the preferred narrative. The truth or falsehood of the contradictory element does not matter.
Notice that none of the following items that routinely pollute our news media would be “disinformation.”
- Every hamburger or steak you eat requires 10,000 liters of water and 10.2 acres of land, and if we all stopped eating meat three days a week, that would stop global warming in its tracks.
- Lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates saved 1.75 million lives.
- At the present rate, the polar ice caps will be largely gone by the year 2033.
- Climate change causes 42.3 species extinctions every hour.
- Forty-six percent of all wealth in the USA today is the direct result of three centuries of slave labor.
- Plastic contamination of the oceans now covers an area of 3,253 square miles and kills over 5,000 sea turtles a year.
- The Amazon rainforest supplies 27% of all atmospheric oxygen, and rapid deforestation is making asthma symptoms worse globally.
- Humans will run out of food and most key raw materials within 23.4 years.
- Polar bears and at least seven penguin species are endangered and likely extinct within 18.3 years because of ice loss.
- Hurricanes and other extreme weather phenomena are intensifying and will become exponentially worse by 2050.
I used to think that lefty media hurt its own cause by presenting a stream of utter nonsense. But, I now realize that they have been beating us all down, making us inured to whatever The Narrative needs us to believe in the moment until we no longer expect media content to make sense or even pretend that such content is subject to scientific rigor. There is actually a method to the pure stupid, and they are successfully dumbing us down.
Published in General
That’s one reason why the school system doesn’t teach. Students who are ignorant of basic math and science grow up into gullible voters who swallow such nonsense.
Soon, you’ll decide that a blanket assumption of hostility is in fact the correct course.
As far as I am concerned, there are no innocent leftists. That’s not because it’s necessarily true. It’s just the most prudent assumption given the evidence.
True, but the indoctrination is so strong that those youths good in math and science will seek and find articles to confirm the narrative. Students need match + reasoning + skepticism. The sheeple are mostly ignorant, but the smart ones are still sheeple.
Most of the doom predictions by the Global Warming nuts is based on bad models with horrible assumptions. The worst set of assumptions (RCP8.5) is supposedly going to be retired. I guess the idea that the world population will triple and technology will revert back to the 80’s was just too tough a sell. All the headlines in the mainstream media is based on cars getting 9 mpg, no LED lighting, and crappy steam boilers.
For the past 25 years we have been told we only have 12 years to save the planet. So did we save it? Pretty sure we are not all dead yet.
Sure as the sun will rise and beset the planet with its radiation, environmental researchers will just make $#%^ up.
After a century of failure, you would think that leftists would question their own thinking.
None of those examples is so called disinformation (what the heck is that when it’s at home?) Rather – they are just lies. (Everyone knows what those are.) You can tell because they are told, repeatedly, knowing the representation to be false. Just plain old lies, which should be called lies. And, @bdb and @paulstinchfield, there are no innocent leftists. They are hostile and do intend harm.
Preach!
A hangover does not cure alcoholism. And if you can shift the hangover (costs) onto others, then there is even less chance of a cure.
But those who issued bogus dire warnings were motivated by noble intentions and therefore everyone who disagreed must have been malevolently motivated. Facts have no bearing on narcissistic dramatics posing as high morality.
My Earth Day celebration begins with starting and letting my SUV idle on the driveway for two or three hours. In the afternoon I fill the BBQ with charcoal and douse it with two cans of lighter fluid. It takes an hour after ignition before you can get within ten feet of it.
I’ll be back later; I have to buy a new chainsaw.
I enjoy watching Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying on the Dark Horse podcast. They consider themselves life long liberals but they have been disavowed by the left for following Covid science instead of the Covid narrative.
The New York Times recently declared them to be among the top 5 right wing podcasts spreading misinformation. This ranking was based on a study published by the Brookings Institute. The research cited by Brookings consisted of checking Snopes.com and Politifact. Very convincing.
Weinstein pointed out that this is the first time he has ever been mentioned in the New York Times, and it’s complete falsehoods all the way down.
They’re not failing. Never achieving the purported goal is a necessity. An underclass troubled enough to give you power is too valuable to waste by fixing the trouble.
Humans are horrifically poor prognosticators, yet we continue to parade one doom prophecy, after another. If it’s not the climate, it’s www3, or the second coming! Maybe it’s all 3 at once!
The conceit of man to even think he can control the earth’s climate, is stupifying. This is not about saving the planet, it’s about any number of malevolent manifestations of tyranny, and control.
Hide the decline – Michael Mann
“Peer reviewed” is one of the biggest scams of the science community. Einstein produced over 200 papers in his lifetime – only one was peer reviewed.
Peer review process is very involved with the political process.
For instance: If someone takes on a scientific review of some industry’s darling, as happened when Serrelini and his research team in Caens, France went forward with an investigation of GM foods, then it can be difficult for anyone in the scientific community to step forward and review the research.
Why? Because when the industry piles on Serrelini, and black lists him and his team, as could easily be predicted, then the individual(s) who has offered a peer review and an approving assessment is likely to go down with the original team.
Well it does seem possible that Americans will run out of food in 23 years.
Some days it appears we might run out of food within 23 months.
But the causal factor behind this is not because of the global climate being in crisis mode, but because of the insanity of the Powers that Be. People are waking up to how their draconian desire is to stop us from having dairy and beef herds, chicken farms, unpolluted soil for the crops to grow, and their encouraging Bill Gates to make even produce inedible by inserting mRA vaccines in the crops he is growing on his million acres across the American continents.
All in the name of saving the planet for future generations.
I actually used my chainsaw yesterday to help clear the road after some ice storm damage. It’s a battery powered saw. My son and I could have finished the job with it, but not before dark. Our neighbor wondered if she should call her grandson to help. I encouraged her to do so, because a gas powered saw will do more, faster. I don’t want one, because I never liked all the fuss and bother, but it was nice for someone to have one when we were trying to get the road clear for traffic before it got dark.
Agreed. Although there are also lots of Useful Idiots.
I remember when the East Anglia issue hit the fan. Some of the software programs which were used for the modeling got released. Friends of mine in tech reviewed some of the software – most of it poorly written.
And the McIntyre and McKitrick decimation of the misuse of uncentered principle comment analysis to gin up the Mann hockey stick … the the chief scientific statistician of the NSF suggesting that the paleoclimate guys start consulting real statistics pros instead of relying on their suspect skills … and the ongoing failure of the model ensemble to predict actual temps …an entire branch of science morphing into a sad cry for help.
Don’t forget the lie that catastrophe was certain.
It is certain. It has been delayed and held at bay by good intentions.
Exactly. This is the fallback position for any of these apocalypses — that if not for the tyranny and rent-seeking of over-reaching governments and do-gooder hippies, the dire predictions would have come true!
That’s good advice, but I had never known there was a chief scientific statistician at NSF — and I used to interact with the NSF grant process quite a bit (mostly indirectly). Normally a grant proposal reviewer would be the person to make comments like that, but maybe we’re talking about a different stage of the game here. It’s certainly not a part of the regular process that I’m familiar with.
Well, whaddya know. Here is someone with a title like that. He is also an Acting Program Director. That is a title I’m familiar with. I wonder how he got involved with Mann and his hockey stick. Maybe a special internal commission?
I suspect the person linked above (John M. Finamore) is not the one who commented on Michael Mann’s need for statistical help. There is an Edward Wegman who did, but I see no information about his ever having had a job at NSF.
The House held hearings about the hockey stick. He was asked by the committee to review Mann’s work because that would be seen as an authoritative non-partisan source. Naturally, he was viciously trashed for pointing out the weaknesses in Mann’s work. In essence, the way Mann analyzed a very diverse set of proxy measures allowed for any one of them with a strong signal to outweigh the rest. Inclusion of the Graybill bristlecone pinebark series was the biggest driver of the hockey stick shape.
I found information about the House committee, which is how I found out about Edward Wegman. If it hadn’t been for your reference about NSF, I would have breezed on by, because that is not the way NSF has interacted with science and scientists. I still haven’t run into the exact quote by Wegman, but I did find an interview where Mann objected to Wegman’s statement, saying that climatologists hire lots of professional statisticians. However, I think what both of us are really interested in is whether good statistical techniques were used in constructing and evaluating the hockey stick.
BTW, it isn’t uncommon for professional statisticians to think that scientists should hire more professional statisticians to help them with their analyses. And it isn’t uncommon for researchers to consult with professional statisticians, and do so in a way that protects their grant budgets from getting consumed by consulting fees paid to professional statisticians.
Google “Wegman report.” Wikipedia has the climatista orthodox commentary. He was accused of plagiarism because of boilerplate intro commentary about the theory of AGW which he got from some textbook. The left then micro-scrutinized him in a way that (oddly enough) they never do to the stuff that conformed to the narrative. He is an official enemy of The Narrative.
Ross McKitrick said that Wegman should have reproduced McKitrick’s most devastating finding–if you replace the data from the selected proxy studies with random white noise you still get a hockey stick with Mann’s algorithm which Steve McIntyre dubbed the “Mannomatic.” The way Mann deployed uncentered principal component analysis to get his result was the essential criticism by Wegman but he would have strengthened that with an affirmation of McKitirck.
Wegman also spent a lot of time on how a small group of paleoclimate people are often co-authors and also principal peer reviewers of each other’s work. He found that unseemly. But it was not dispositive of the issued presented. In the Climategate emails, even some of those paleo-proxy guys complained about having to defend Mann and the weakness of overreliance on proxies to model past climate.