Clueless ‘Fact Check’ of Daily Sceptic Climate Article Descends into Pure Gibberish
If there was an award for worst fact check of the year, the recent attempt by the French state-owned Agence France-Presse (AFP) to smear the Daily Sceptic would be the clear favourite to win. Taking issue with our report of a recent paper published by Nature that found no “surge” in global temperatures since 1970, the AFP author Manon Jacob branded the article “misleading” purely on the basis of a random selection of what other commentators had written on social media. The so-called fact check is so bad it could well be used in future journalism schools as an example of how not to take a poke at well-sourced material, just because you don’t like what is written.
Lesson one might look at how Jacob and his state paymasters start their mission in bold type with the following:
A 2024 research paper in the journal Nature found no statistically detectable surge in the global warming rate since the 1970s, but social media posts claiming this is evidence climate change is not real are false. The data in this study and numerous others confirms a steady increase in surface temperature during this period, according to its authors and independent scientists.
There is no attempt made to dispute what was written in the Daily Sceptic, just the immediate erection of a strawman to knock down. In Jacob’s world, if the Daily Sceptic reported that man had landed on the moon, AFP would call it “misleading” because some conspiracy berk said it was filmed in the backlot at Universal Studios.
It gets worse. The article’s heading reads: ‘Scientists found “no change” in global warming rate?’ Note the question mark, a punctuation that is absent in the heading of the Nature paper that states: “A recent surge in global warming is not detectable yet.”
Halfway through the article a large red cross is placed across the promoting tweet sent by Daily Sceptic Editor-in-Chief Toby Young that read:
A sensational paper in top science journal Nature has found “no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s”, blowing holes in alarmist claims that global temperatures are surging, says Chris Morrison.
What is the problem here, it might be asked. The first part of the tweet is factually correct as evidenced by the paper itself, while the comment that follows is justified given the ubiquitous claims by alarmists that the recent temperature spike was evidence of accelerated warming. What might have upset AFP is that the message was retweeted almost 3,000 times, helped along by a push from Dr. Jordan Peterson and his four million-plus followers. The article was also reposted in a number of journals including the popular science site Watts Up With That?
Why did the author start by placing a question mark against “no change in global warming rate”? It suggests a lack of understanding of the difference between a consistent statistical rise in temperature since 1970 (despite earlier falls and two significant pauses) and a possible increase or “surge” in the recent rate of warming. The study’s warming trends were said to be misrepresented “to promote climate denial”. What follows later in the AFP hitjob is simply pure gibberish: “But using the article’s conclusions to claim there has been no additional warming since the 1970s is highly misleading, scientists say, noting that the models used in the study instead detect a consistent increase over time.” Why should the first part of this statement of “no additional warming” – a fact published in the Nature paper – be at odds with a “consistent increase” in temperatures over time?
The lack of “additional warming”, however misleading AFP finds it, was crucial to the findings of the paper and the Daily Sceptic was careful to accurately report what was written. Jacob and AFP have simply fallen into the trap of mixing up what others have said with what the Daily Sceptic clearly and fairly reported. The scientists said there was “limited evidence” for a warming surge. “In most surface temperature time series, no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023.” The scientists said it was important to consider random noise caused by natural variation when investigating the recent pauses in temperature and the more recent “alleged warming acceleration”. I noted that the paper was an excellent piece of climate science work since it took a long statistical view and challenged the two-a-penny clickbait alarmists looking for a headline on the BBC. And, it would seem, at the French state’s news agency. The Daily Sceptic has been subjected to a number of nuisance fact checks from this quarter, as has Toby Young who is said to have “spread myths debunked by AFP in the past”. Certainly, AFP is on its game when it comes to smearing and cancelling opinions that detract from the global rollout of the Net Zero fantasy.
The AFP climate desk is run by Marlowe Hood, the self-styled “Herald of the Anthropocene”. As regular readers will recall, this climate champion was recently given €100,000 by the foundation of a large Spanish bank heavily involved in funding green projects. He was one of a gang of activists including Graham Readfearn of the Guardian and Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann that secured the retraction in Springer Nature of an inconvenient paper written by a number of eminent Italian physicists. Led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti, it observed that the available data did not support a climate emergency. Hood claimed the data, which came mostly from IPCC sources, were “grossly manipulated” and “fundamentally flawed”. The paper was initially brought to wide social attention by the Daily Sceptic and Marlowe Hood started the cancellation ball rolling by writing – yes, you guessed it – an AFP fact check.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The Green Nazis. ‘Fact checking’ is the online Gestapo burning your books. Withdraw all the money, the markets, the corruption, the fraud, the kickbacks and paybacks and you would notice zero about weather or climate. You would not notice any discernible difference, nor would you care about 1.2C or less….
“AFP climate desk is run by Marlowe Hood, the self-styled “Herald of the Anthropocene”. As regular readers will recall, this climate champion was recently given €100,000 by the foundation of a large Spanish bank heavily involved in funding green projects. He was one of a gang of activists including Graham Readfearn of the Guardian and Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann that secured the retraction in Springer Nature of an inconvenient paper written by a number of eminent Italian physicists.”
Climate theology is not a science. Neither is much of physics.
These are just religions and useful if you want to erect a one-world government.
The purpose of stare funded science is to increase the role of state, the parasite always needs to consume more of it’s host.
A successful parasite must consume so little of its host that it remains alive and generally healthy becaue if the host becomes dysfunctional and dies, the parasite dies as well.
The purpose of the green blob which has taken control of most, if not all Western states is to further itself at their expense, with the end goal that the hollowed-out states collapse and only the globalist green blobbery remains as acting agent in questions concerning mankind beyond the level of individuals towns or villages. Its mission is to bring an end to anarchy, that is, freedom of states and individuals alike to make their own choices because it’s claimed that this cannot be sustainable in the long run, ie, will invariably lead to a catastrophe unless replaced by careful and prudent expert planning for every area of life.
That’s essentially a perverted Marxism which no longer seeks to overcome the state as obsolete tool of oppression but to establish Stalin’s real-world socialism (“real existierender Sozialimus”) world-wide as an end in itself (instead of as an intermediate step to world revolution and Marxist utopia).
The straw man is the basis of almost every Reuters fact check I’ve read. Usually set up as : ‘a recent Facebook post claimed..’ followed by a simplified distortion and then a rebuttal.
The worst was their assertion that the Pfizer covid vaccine was not gene therapy. They published a definition of gene therapy that included gene expression, then stated that therefore the mRNA spike protein producing vaccine wasn’t exactly what the definition said it was.
Always works in one direction only
Some “nazis” agree with some things Trump says therefore Trump is a “nazi”, and if you agree with anything he says you too are a “nazi”
The old trick, Hitler wore shoes, you are wearing shoes, therefore you are Hitler!!!!
He liked dogs too. Now I’m getting worried
And he was vegetarian and socialist, he’d be in the green party these days.
He also introduced compulsory schooling, introduced compulsory identity cards, restricted gun ownership, built a lot of houses for low income people, and reformed and modernized the pharmacies. All things that Starmer and Harris would be proud of.
Spelling!!!
Its Starmführer.
An old trick that people still fall for
No surprise the purpose of the state to say up is down and normalise madness. This started when central bank monopolised the money supply at the start of the 20th century and we abandoned the gold standard it’s been a continual power grab ever since. We are conditioned to stupid things like the idea deflation is bad (falling prices are apparently bad, that’s like saying yr wife is too beautiful) as it allows the parasitic state the print and borrow excessive amounts of money to infinity. Why is the great depression taught in school but the great sag not? Brainwashing. The result of this monopoly on money issuance is money has been debased 147 times since 1910 or about 440 times if you measure in a good store of value like gold. Either way a pound is now worth less than a penny compared to a century previous.
It’s amazing how few people know the amount of currency value erosion that is ‘baked in’ as normal… yet people complain about things costing more day to day etc, as though it’s a surprise……
And inflation is almost exclusively created by the state printing too much money.
‘Fact checking’, a newspeak term, is useful as a signal that whoever is initiating the ‘fact check’ almost invariably has a progressive neo-Marxist agenda.
Let’s make Chris Morrison our Secretary for Energy Security and Net Zero. Time to lock up the increasingly unhinged Milibrain.
The thing about climate change is that it is not a black and white issue. It isn’t the case that there are only 2 choices. (1) There is Climate Change (2) There isn’t Climate Change. ————So what you find is that any kind of scrutiny of claims made or any questions asked are dealt with you being automatic placed into category 2. —-The ideological element of climate change and its alleged solutions which amount to about 90% of the thing means that there is no tolerance for anything that is perceived as casting doubt where truth has already been decided many years ago. This puts the whole thing into the category of being a belief system all based on faith and emotion rather than fact and reason
I tell anyone I can we are the most superstitious civilization since we ceased hunter gathering, the ease of our every day lives has made us absurdly irrational.
The people that survive by growing and trapping things like in many parts of the Third World, will be in a better position than us in the West when things start to collapse. And we have become too reliant on imported food.
Yes yr right hunter gatherers would be more rational, I’m just saying we are the most superstitious civilization since humans started farming.
The problem is they conflate global warming/climate change with Manmade global warming/climate change.
Global warming/climate change is Manmade; global warming/climate change is observed; therefore global warming/climate change is Manmade.
Anyone who contests global warming/climate change is caused by Mankind is “denying” global warming/climate change is taking place.
Simple really.
The Climatrons don’t understand the difference between warming and warming rate – same as difference between speed and acceleration, and inflation and inflation rate.
The Climatrons only know slogans and conclusions asserted without any supporting evidence.
Is it coincidence that the Climatrons also insisted the mRNA snake-oil was safe & effective and to say otherwise was misinformation, denying the science?
They insist that any ideas that go against the agreed consensus is somehow dangerous, yet they are the most prolific spreaders of misinformation. Gone are the days when we hear the lines…..I disagree but defend to the death your right to speak etc. You don’t have to defend to the death, but how about stop cancelling people for a start.
Ah the old days – pre-social media seems like a cutoff point for me, when everything seemingly became black or white, right or left etc… all nuance must be avoided. Tribal almost.
You mean The Science
2023 or rather, the time from summer 2023 to the onset of summer 2024, was a period of record-breaking temperature averages and not record temperatures. That’s an important distinction. The second essentially means “it was hot everywhere” which decidedly wasn’t the case and the first that temperature measurements somewhere were higher than usual and that the result of averaging the measurements was thus at most a few tenths of a degree higher than some other average which had been calculated earlier.
Also pretty much only England and North America had decent thermometer records before the 20th century. This is why seldom records are broken there, especially north America as it was super hot in the 1930s. Most places the thermometer record starts in about 1948. Hottest in 75 years (often at airports) in a period of intense urbanisation isnt terribly remarkable in my book.
Is there a place in Texas called Death valley because it is so hot? something along those lines. So even place names can give us a clue.
Remember you were taught about a climate event at school, the dust bowl, we didn’t pretend that was caused by driving cars. Imagine the hysteria if that was happening now?
Going off on a tangent here there is a place in South Africa called ‘Hotasell’ – apparently it is.
What an asset Chris Morrison is. Well done, sir.
“A 2024 research paper in the journal Nature found no statistically detectable surge in the global warming rate since the 1970s, but social media posts claiming this is evidence climate change is not real are false. The data in this study and numerous others confirms a steady increase in surface temperature during this period, according to its authors and independent scientists.” Really? Q) So how come they had to stop calling it ‘global warming’? A) Because that is misleading as the scientific evidence does not support that. So if there is no scientific evidence to support saying there is ‘global warming’, what then is ‘climate change’? Is there any? And if there is what is causing it, as the evidence does not support the ‘global warming’ hypothesis. And that in turn is based on an hypothesis that the unproven ‘global warming’ is based on CO2 emissions. So if there isn’t the evidence to support ‘global warming’ then there isn’t the evidence to support the CO2 hypothesis. URGENT: If there is such a thing as ‘climate change’ [‘CC’] and if CC is going to lead to global catastrophe [is it?] then what is causing it? And can anything be done about… Read more »