Climate: The use of propaganda techniques
Climate activists are working to reframe “climate change” to “climate pollution”.
Media: Bad reporting with numbers – “The fastest-growing cities face some of the biggest climate risks”
This Axios news report makes the classic reporter error – providing percentage increases without every providing a starting value. Does a scary +100% mean something increased from 1 to 2? We have no way of knowing.
Media invent scary term “Doomsday Glacier”
The media has run with this fake label “Doomsday Glacier” because it sounds scary, and the primary purpose of the media is to scare you to death which helps them get clicks and sell eyeballs to advertisers. The scientists do not like this label either.
Publisher of Nature retracts over 40 papers from one of its science journals, because they were “nonsensical”
Nature published over 40 papers that were nonsense gibberish and has now retracted them.
The role of media in establishing public consensus
Link to an essay on the role that “technical authority”, media propaganda, and how “consensus of experts” are used to influence the public and to exert control over us. This essay is an eye opener.
Changing the language definition in order to make a point
Another example of fiddling with language to make a weak conclusion with low certainty sound more impressive than it really is.
“Global heating?”
The Guardian is a daily fictional story service that pretends to report the news. They’ve tossed the IPCC official terminology of “climate change” and replaced it with their own creation of inflammatory rhetoric “climate crisis” and “global heating”.
Wild fires: Is everything a single variable problem?
Western state Governors are increasingly blaming climate change for western wild fires, as if the wild fires are a single variable. If only we could control the climate, we would no longer have wild land fires. Realistically, there is no magic control knob on climate that we can control and which will reduce fire danger for decades to come.
There are concrete steps that can be taken immediately to reduce the threats of future wild fires – but politicians would rather blame climate change – which they do not control – because to acknowledge there are factors which they can control is to acknowledge that their leadership has failed.
A common mistake people make is to focus on a single variable in a multiple variable problem. In this case, the focus is on one variable that cannot be controlled in the near term, while ignoring other variables that can be controlled.
Journalism: “Oregon ranks high in rising rate of natural disasters”
The news headline says Oregon ranks high in natural disasters, which the text explains, is wildfires in the State.
This claim comes from a press release from a small, little known online Internet insurance sales web site. This type of press release is put out in hopes of garnering free publicity – and it certainly worked for them – in large part because the media, like all of us, is more likely to succumb to a fear-based scary headline.
However, if we practice factfulness and look at the long term trend in Oregon fires we see that a small rise at the right end of the chart has been translated into a crisis and a catastrophe. The chart above is the official chart from the Oregon government’s Fire Statistics page, and shows actual acreage burned and total fires burned in Oregon since 1911.
The slight increase at the extreme right edge is the basis for the scary headline. By leaving out all historical context and by focusing on large percentile increase in a tiny number at the right edge of the chart, the media creates unwarranted fear and hysteria in viewers.
Social media: Social media meme asserts U.S. corn belt yields 40% more oxygen than the Amazon
This poster is a persuasive bit of propaganda. Most of it is not true. The parts that are true are that the Corn belt is a very productive region, and about 80 million acres (close to 100 million in the poster?) are growing corn. This item had been shared into my Facebook news feed.