Facebook in deep trouble for scientific censorship
Last week I received a disturbing e-mail with the following message:
Larry, I tried to post your excellent article on my Facebook page, but its auto-screener deemed it ‘false information’ and warned that I could be banished if I posted it with my comments. The evaluators appear to be the usual suspects that feed at grants troughs, where the outcome of ‘research’ is predetermined – CLIMATEFEEDBACK.ORG.”
The person who contacted me was referring to an Oct. 14 article I posted titled “500 Global Climate Scientists Challenge Mob Hysteria.”
Having written well more than 600 total online and print editorial articles divided nearly equally between Forbes and Newsmax, the “false information” assessment drew my immediate attention.
I don’t recall ever having to post a factual correction to any of them.
Very briefly recapping the original article, it highlighted eight points presented for consideration in a letter sent to U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, by experienced scientists and professionals in climate and related fields representing 23 countries challenging any scientific or moral basis for prevalent alarm-based proposals:
* There is no climate emergency. Climate science should be less political in advancing exaggerated predictions, more open in in addressing uncertainties, and more balanced in assessing imagined climate change mitigation costs and benefits.
* Both natural and human causes influence warming. Earth’s climate has always experienced natural cold and warm phases…most recently a period of warming that ensued following the Little Ice Age in the mid-1800s.
* Recent warming is far slower than climate models have predicted. This tells us that we remain far from understanding human and other contributions.
* Climate policy relies on inadequate models. Most tend to exaggerate effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and largely ignore agricultural benefits.
* CO2 is not a “pollutant.” It is essential for photosynthesis . . . the basis for all life.
* Global warming has not increased either the frequency nor intensity of natural disasters. Any historical fact check will offer statistical confirmation of this fact.
* Climate and energy policies must respect scientific and economic realities. The net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050 is unrealistic and harmful.
* An honest climate debate is warranted and overdue.
The original number of petitioners has since grown to more than 700.
A tiny sampling of prominent American signatories includes MIT professor emeritus Dr. Richard Lindzen, Dr. Freeman Dyson at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton professor emeritus Will Happer, and Stanford University professor emeritus Elliot D. Bloom.
In support of their article censorship decision, Facebook had attached a link to a litany of reviewer assaults on the petitioners’ scientific credentials along with extensive off-topic boiler plate talking points obviously intended to bolster claims to their own superior expertise.
This being the case, only one member of the group stands out as a notable, although hardly objective, climate science and policy authority. Professor Timothy Osborn directs the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), ground-zero of the Climategate email scandal disaster.
Twila, a University of Colorado, Boulder “research scientist” (rank unspecified) stated concern that “many of those who signed the letter are well known ‘climate deniers’ and are not actively involved in direct climate change and its impacts.”
The term “climate denier” is prejudicially offensive and grossly ignorant.
Amber, a part-time adjunct lecturer of “agricultural sustainability” at the University of California, Davis observed that many of the signers were likely even worse than deniers. She noted that most of the letter signatories were geologists (19%) and engineers (21%), “many of whom were implicitly or explicitly involved in fossil energy extraction.”
Amber dismissed “most of the rest” as merely “physicists, chemists, and mathematicians.”