The Silicon Valley Thought Police are still hard at work making sure that you don’t have to hear voices that stray even slightly from the official left-wing orthodoxy. This week, tech-giant Facebook censored consumer reporter John Stossel for sharing a 2019 video in which three scientists questioned whether so-called climate change is an actual emergency.
Facebook “fact checker” Climate Feedback, a climate alarmist website, claimed that Stossel’s video “Are We Doomed” contained “flawed reasoning,” was “inaccurate,” and was overall “misleading,” which led Facebook to remove it from the platform.
Stossel’s video featured Dr. David Legates, the former Director of Climatic Research at the University of Delaware; Dr. Patrick Michaels, a former president of the American Association of State Climatologists; and Dr. Willie Soon, an astrophysicist from Harvard.
According to Facebook, Stossel’s video and the three scientists were peddling “partially false information,” although they didn’t specify exactly what was false or even partially false.
Climate Feedback engaged several climate-alarmist scientists to write reviews of Stossel’s video. Stossel claimed he reached out to all of those reviewers but only one, Patrick Brown of San Jose State University, agreed to discuss his review with Stossel.
“Brown didn’t like that these scientists said that America can adjust to rising sea levels by doing things like building dikes to hold water back like Holland has,” Stossel said on a video responding to the censorship.
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Brown was especially vexed at the completely accurate claim that sea levels have been slowly rising for millennia.
“To me, when I watch that video, what I hear is that sea levels have been rising at a pretty constant rate forever, it’s very small, it’s not a big deal and we will … adapt,” Brown said. “That’s not the mainstream view.”
Whether that’s the “mainstream view” or not, it’s certainly not inaccurate to say that sea levels have been slowly rising for millennia, emphasis on “slowly.” Brown, on the other hand, has claimed that global warming could lead to sea level rise of 200 feet eventually.
When Stossel pointed out that Brown himself was citing an extreme worst-case scenario and that even the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) didn’t even consider that likely, Brown claimed, “I don’t know if they assess sea level rise out to a thousand years, but that’s what I’m talking about.”
A sea level rise of 200 feet would certainly qualify as an emergency. But spaced out over a thousand years, it seems like something we’ll be able to deal with.
Stossel’s 2019 video also questions the narrative that hurricanes are getting stronger and more destructive as a result of so-called global warming.
“No, they aren’t,” said Patrick Michaels in Stossel’s original video. “You can take a look at all the hurricanes around the planet. We can see them since 1970 because we got global satellite coverage. And we can measure their power. And there is no significant increase whatsoever.”
Climate Feedback labeled this claim “misleading,” although even Brown told Stossel, “That’s true. We don’t see a change in hurricane frequency.”
“I think that’s wrong that you were criticized for saying that,” Brown told Stossel. “The IPCC, they don’t claim that [hurricanes] are increasing, they don’t claim that droughts are increasing, they don’t claim that floods are increasing.”
Brown would later e-mail Stossel and say, “The problem is the omission of contextual information rather than specific ‘facts’ being ‘wrong.’
None of the facts stated in Stossel’s 2019 video were in error, which Stossel points out in a rebuttal of Climate Feedback’s critique. How then, does Facebook get away with labeling a video “partially false?”
Brown conceded, “It’s a tonal thing, I guess.”
So, even when you admit that climate change is happening — which Stossel did — Facebook feels that it can censor items if the proper amount of terror about climate change isn’t being communicated.
The fear being peddled by climate hysterics has real-world consequences. School children are living in fear of the climate “crisis.” Young couples are deciding not to have children out of fear that the world won’t be able to support life in the decades to come. And left-wing politicians are proposing that trillions of dollars be spent on a problem that might come to pass decades in the future.
Big tech companies such as Facebook participate in spreading that fear when they silence reasonable dissenting voices such as Stossel. To paraphrase Greta Thunberg, how dare they?
