Fact-checking the fact-checkers

By Craig Rucker

Is there a more insidious threat to free speech online than biased fact-checking?

Global warming pressure groups are using every trick in their book to censor and besmirch Michael Shellenberger after he posted an article apologizing for the climate scare on behalf of environmentalists.

Forbes actually succumbed to the pressure and pulled his article down.

Other online platforms labeled the article as “fact-checked false.”

Climate scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. fact-checked the self-appointed fact-checkers and found their attacks on Shellenberger “incontrovertibly false.”  He took particularly precise aim at MIT professor Kerry Emanuel, who labeled Shellenberger’s assertions that climate change is not making natural disasters or human suffering worse as being “not defensible.”   The facts, as Pielke reveals, are exactly opposite to what Emanuel’s so-called “fact-checking” tries to claim.  “Every study that has looked at global economic losses after normalization (for GDP or other factors) has consistently failed to identify any increase in losses at all,” Pielke revealed.

Even the UN’s top climate science body, the IPCC, backs Shellenberger and Pielke and is at odds with fact-checker Emanuel. “The IPCC Special Report on Extreme Events concluded (on a much thinner evidence base) that ‘long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change,’” Pielke explained.

Biased fact-checkers are a menace to open, fair and free dialogue online.  They assume an unearned mantle of authority and use it to skew debate.  Facebook, Google, YouTube, Amazon and the rest should not rely on them.

Take a look at Marc Morano’s full post at Climate Depot with all the supporting charts, graphs and data.  Dr. Pielke lays out a devastating case.

Author

Craig Rucker is a co-founder of CFACT and currently serves as its president.

From cfact.org