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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
Yes. I read the Wikipedia page about him and was somewhat suspicious about the way all the talk about plagarism somehow never got the discussion back to the important question about the quality of Mann’s work.
The operant message is that he is an evil man so we can safely discount anything he says without having to deal with any of it directly. The “volunteer” editors of all climate-related Wikipedia pages are insanely dogmatic.
I’m not sure how available the Wegman report is, or how readable it is for someone like me, but I’m tempted to take a look. I know some of the language of statistics, but don’t know much about principle components analysis of any kind, other than in very general terms. I especially don’t know how it would be applied to work like Mann’s.
My caution about Wikipedia was formed quite a few years ago when I saw how the topic of Lysenkoism had suddenly done a 180 degree turn from being an object lesson about the dangers of government politicization of science to the dangers of opposition to government politicization of science by “climate deniers.” I haven’t looked at it lately.
Full Text here: https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/07142006_wegman_report.pdf
Wikipedia is reliable for items like “what is the capital city of Peru?”
Or “how many people live in Tibet.”
Also it is a great resource to track all the songs and albums that an individual’s favorite bands have released.
Phillip Roth, the author, once read a review on Wikipedia of one of his books. And in the review was a summary of his life.
The reviewer had gotten several pertinent facts about Roth’s life wrong. Roth wanted to correct those details. Roth also felt he should be able to address one or two aspects of the criticism of his novel.
Wikipedia maintained that because Phillip Roth was not an established Phillip Roth critic, he had no inherent right to respond to this critic’s writings on Wikipedia, not even in the areas relating to his autobiographical data. (?!!?)
Wikipedia likes money as much as the next enterprise. And I imagine that if the organization ever allowed any published writing by the opposition to the climate crisis debate, they would lose funding, from universities, individual academics ans maybe even from NASA itself.