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Bjorn Lomborg shows how social media censors forgot to include the facts in their fact check

Published

4 years ago

12 minute read

From lomborg.com

Dr. Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. The Copenhagen Consensus Center is a think-tank that researches the smartest ways to do good. For this work, Lomborg was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. His numerous books include “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet”, “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, “Cool It”, “How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place”, “The Nobel Laureates’ Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World 2016-2030” and “Prioritizing Development: A Cost Benefit Analysis of the UN’s SDGs”.

The heresy of heat and cold deaths

A group of campaign researchers try hilariously, ineptly — and depressingly —to suppress facts

TL;DR. A blog, claiming to check facts, does not like that I cite this fact: the rising temperatures in the past two decades have caused more heat deaths, but at the same time avoided even more cold deaths. Since this inconvenient fact is true, they ignore to check it.  Instead, they fabricate an absurd quote, which is contradicted in the very article they claim to ‘fact-check’.

166,000 avoided deaths

Cold deaths vastly outweigh heat deaths. This is common knowledge in the academic literature and for instance the Lancet finds that each year, almost 600,000 people die globally from heat but 4.5 million from cold.

Moreover, when the researchers include increasing temperatures of 0.26°C/decade (0.47°F/decade), they find heat deaths increase, but cold deaths decrease more than twice as much:

Or here from the article:

The total impact of more than 116,000 more heat deaths each year and almost 283,000 fewer cold deaths year is that by now, the temperature rise since 2000 means that for temperature-related mortality we are seeing 166,000 fewer deaths each year.

Climate Feedback

However, this is obviously heretical information, so the self-appointed blog, Climate Feedback, wants it purged. Now, if they were just green campaigning academics writing on the internet, that might not matter much. But unfortunately, this group has gained the opportunity to censor information on Facebook, so I have to spend some time showing you their inept, often hilarious, and mostly nefarious arguments. The group regularly makes these sorts of bad-faith arguments, and apparently appealing their Facebook inditements simply goes back to the same group. It is rarely swayed by any argument.

They never test the claim

Climate Feedback seemingly wants to test my central claim from the Lancet article that global warming now saves 166,000 people each year, from my oped in New York Post:

But notice what is happening right after the quote “Global warming saves 166,000 lives each year”. They append it with something that is not in the New York Post. You have to read much further to realize that they are actually trying — and failing — to paste in an entirely separate Facebook post, which addressed a different scientific article.

It turns out, Climate Feedback never addresses the 166,000 people saved in their main text. “166” only occurs three times in the article: twice stating my claim and once after their main text in a diatribe by an ocean-physics professor, complete with personal insults. In it, the professor doesn’t contest the 166,000 avoided deaths. Instead, he falsely claims that I am presenting the 166,000 as the overall mortality impact of climate change, which is absurd: anyone reading my piece understand that I’m talking about the impact of temperature-related mortality.

Perhaps most tellingly, Climate Feedback has asked one of the co-authors of the 166,000 Lancet study (as they also very proudly declare in their text). And this professor, Antonio Gasparrini, does not only not challenge but doesn’t even discuss my analysis of the 166,000 avoided deaths.

Climate Feedback not only doesn’t present any reasonable argument against the 166,000 avoided deaths. It has actually asked one of the main authors of the study to comment and they have nothing.

In conclusion, Climate Feedback simply has no good arguments against the 166,000 people saved, and yet they pillory my work publicly in an attempt to censor data they deem inconvenient. . That academics play along in this charade of an inquisition dressed up ‘fact-check’ is despicable.

Rest of Climate Feedback’s claim is ludicrously wrong

So, beyond the claim of 166,000, Climate Feedback is alleging that I say the following: “those claiming that climate change is causing heat-related deaths are wrong because they ignore that the population is growing and becoming older.”

This is a fabricated quote. I never say this. Climate Feedback has simply made up a false statement, dressing it as a quote of mine, even though I never claimed anything like this. This is incredibly deceptive: it is ludicrous to insist that I should argue that it is wrong to claim “climate change is causing heat-related deaths.” I simply do not argue that “climate change is not causing heat-related deaths”

Up above I exactly argued that climate change causes more heat deaths. My graph shows that climate change causes more heat deaths.

And I even point out exactly that the temperature increases cause heat deaths in my New York Post piece:

“As temperatures have increased over the past two decades, that has caused an extra 116,000 heat deaths each year.” Sorry, Climate Feedback, but the rest of your claim is straight-out, full-on stupid.

Evaluation of Climate Feedback’s review

So Climate Feedback is simply wrong in asserting that I somehow say climate change is not causing heat-related deaths — because I do say that, even in my New York Post article:

Climate Feedback doesn’t show anywhere in their main text how the 166,000 avoided deaths are wrong. They even ask one of the main authors of the study, and that professor says nothing.

Conclusion

Climate Feedback’s deceptive hit job is long on innuendo and bad arguments (see a few, further examples below). But the proof really is in the pudding.

They make two central arguments. First, that my claim of “Global warming saves 166,000 lives each year” is incorrect. Yet, they never address this in their main text. And while they get information from one of the main authors of the Lancet study that is the basis for the 166,000 lives saved, they get no criticism of the argument.

Second, they assert that I somehow say that it is wrong to claim climate change is causing more heat-related deaths, which is just ludicrous because I make that very point, even in my New York Post article:

Verdict: Climate Feedback is fundamentally wrong in both their two main claims.

Additional point: It really shouldn’t be necessary to say, but you can’t make a ‘fact-check’ page, write page after page of diatribe, ignore the first main point and bungle the other main point, and then hope at the end nobody notices, and call my arguments wrong. Or, at least, you shouldn’t be able to get away with such nonsense.

Two examples of the inadequate arguments in the rest of Climatefeedback

Lomborg doesn’t have a time machine

Climate Feedback asks professor Gasparrini, co-author of the Lancet study above. He doesn’t cover anything on the 166,000 deaths avoided. Instead, his text entirely discusses a 2016 WSJ article where I used his 2015-article but he criticizes me for not citing his 2017 article:

The reason I didn’t cite his 2017-article is of course that I didn’t have access to a time machine when I wrote my article in 2016.

Indeed, I have corresponded with Professor Gasparrini several times later about his 2017-article. And yes, his 2017-study indeed shows that at very high emissions, additional heat deaths will likely outweigh avoided cold deaths towards the end of the century. But his study also shows that all regions see additional heat deaths vastly exceeded by extra avoided cold deaths from the 1990s to the 2010s — the exact point I’ve made here.

Serious academics take into account population growth and aging

In a refreshing comment, Climate Feedback asks Philip Staddon, Principal Lecturer in Environment and Sustainability from the University of Gloucestershire to chime in. He says, that I’m wrong to criticize the lack of standardization from population growth and aging, because clearly “all serious academic research already takes account of population growth, demographics and ageing”:

I, of course, entirely agree with Staddon, that all serious academic research should do that. But the research that I have criticized has exactly not done so, resulting in unsupported claims. So, for instance, in the Facebook post that Climate Feedback discusses, I show how CNN believes that a study shows a 74% increase caused by the climate crisis:

This is based on not adjusting for population and age, and is actually from the press release of the paper (and in table S6 in the paper).

Likewise, Staddon might have noticed that a very high-profile editorial in the world’s top medical journals made that very amateurish mistake. They argue that temperature increases over the past 20 years have increased deaths among people 65 and older:

But they cite numbers that are not adjusted for age or population — indeed the world’s population of people above age 65 has increased almost as much:

I absolutely agree with Principal Lecturer Philip Staddon on the necessity of making sure that good arguments in the public sphere are adjusted for population and aging before blaming climate. Unfortunately, they often aren’t

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After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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WEF has a plan to overhaul the global financial system by monetizing nature

Published on September 29, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe of The Sociable

The WEF is plowing full steam ahead with the globalist agenda to monitor and monetize everything in nature, including the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the very earth we walk upon.

With billionaires Larry Fink and Andre Hoffmann as the new co-chairs, the World Economic Forum (WEF) publishes a 50-page blueprint on how to monetize everything in nature.

The WEF’s latest insight report, “Finance Solutions for Nature: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes,” provides “stakeholders” with dozens of financial solutions for monetizing everything in nature.

Nature pricing, biodiversity crediting schemes, natural asset companies, debt-for-nature swaps, and so much more are all packed into this agenda to overhaul the global financial system with nature-based activities:

The landscape of nature finance is rapidly evolving. From sovereign debt instruments and blended capital platforms to biodiversity credits and emerging asset classes, a growing range of mechanisms is being deployed to fund, finance and de-risk nature-positive action.

The WEF leadership page says that in their work on the board of trustees, “members do not represent any personal or professional interests.”

However, the target audiences for latest WEF insight report are “institutional investors, banks, asset managers, and development actors” – the very business interests that Hoffmann and Fink represent.

WEF interim co-chairs Larry Fink and Andre Hoffmann have everything to gain in their business dealings should the documentation, monetization, and tokenization of everything in nature ever come to full fruition.

And they are well on their way.

Hoffmann is also a key player in a whole host of so-called green financing initiatives, including biodiversity crediting schemes, through his various roles as founder, president, and chairman at several companies and NGOs such as: Innovate 4 Nature – the “accelerator for nature-positive solutions” and Systemiq – the “system change company” established specifically to advance U.N. Agenda 2030.

“The economy depends on natural resources. Their value derives not only from their use as direct inputs to production – such as timber for construction – but also for their benefits to society like living trees that help clean the air. Economists use the term “natural capital” to refer to the total value that natural resources provide to the economy and to people.” — BlackRock, Capital at risk: nature through an investment lens, August 2024

“Debt-for-nature swaps [DNS] are a financial mechanism that allow countries to restructure bilateral or multilateral debt in exchange for commitments to fund local conservation and restoration. They are also known as ‘debt-for-nature conversion.’” — WEF, Finance Solutions for Nature: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes, September 2025

Is your country millions, billions, or trillions in debt? No problem!

With debt-for-nature swaps, you can restructure your nation’s debt just by letting somebody else come in and take control of your natural resources under the guise of conservation and restoration, but what they’ll really be doing is forcing you to “take out private insurance policies to ‘mitigate the financial impact of natural disasters‘ as well as ‘political risk,’” as investigative journalists Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin report in Bitcoin Magazine.

Don’t have any money, but want to create value out of thin air, water, soil, or trees? You can set up natural asset companies that can “convert the full economic value of nature into financial flows via equity models.”

Want to help asset managers, bankers, and hedge fund execs get extremely rich while leaving you with only a tiny fraction? Go ahead and get involved in a Payment for Environmental Services (PES) scheme, where financial incentives are provided to individuals or communities in exchange for maintaining or restoring ecosystem services, like carbon sequestration or biodiversity conservation

And if you’re compliant with their rules, you can be rewarded by producing “positive nature and biodiversity outcomes (e.g. species, ecosystems and natural habitats) through the creation and sale of either land or ocean-based biodiversity units over a fixed period” with biodiversity credits, aka “environmental credits.”

Prefer to be left alone and live on the property that you worked hard for all your life? You better be compliant with all the environmental regulations that are coming in the name of preserving biodiversity, so that the $44 trillion of economic value generated by nature doesn’t diminish.

“Environmental credits are verified units of positive environmental outcomes, including biodiversity, water, carbon and nutrient credits. Though developed independently, projects increasingly blend credits via stacking, bundling or stapling.” — WEF, Finance Solutions for Nature: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes, September 2025

“Nature is rapidly emerging as a strategic investment frontier and more institutional capital is flowing into new business models and projects.” — WEF, Finance Solutions for Nature: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes, September 2025

In keeping with the own self-interests of the co-chairs and their business relations, the report highlights “10 priority financial solutions” for these stakeholders to implement:

  1. Sustainability-linked bonds (SLBs):
    • Commercial bonds tying coupon rates to nature-related targets for corporates or governments.
  2. Thematic (or use-of-proceeds) bonds:
    • Bonds with proceeds earmarked for nature projects. Scaling-up requires clearer guidance and aggregation to improve outcomes for issuers and investors.
  3. Sustainability-linked loans (SLLs):
    • Flexible debt, linking interest rates to nature-related targets. SLLs need simpler verification, standardized metrics and stronger triggers to drive nature-positive lending.
  4. Thematic (or use-of-proceeds) loans:
    • Loans for specific nature-related projects. Greater clarity on taxonomies and aggregation is needed to enhance capital flows.
  5. Impact funds:
    • Funds investing in nature-positive outcomes, often accepting higher risk or longer pathways to returns.
  6. Natural asset companies (NACs):
    • Publicly and privately listed companies that convert the full economic value of nature into financial flows via equity models. NACs hold significant potential but need more transactions for price discovery and replicable investment blueprints.
  7. Environmental credits:
    • Tradeable certificates for verified environmental benefits, used in compliance or voluntary markets.
  8. Debt-for-nature swaps (DNS):
    • Mechanisms to restructure sovereign debt in exchange for conservation or restoration commitments, with investable components including bonds and loans.
  9. Payments for ecosystem services (PES):
    • Contracts rewarding conservation for specific ecosystem services, driven by the public sector. Private sector schemes require longer contracts, aggregation and supply chain integration to scale up.
  10. Internal nature pricing (INP):
    • Unexplored, voluntary shadow pricing or fee-based tools to incentivize nature-positive performance in companies or across investment portfolios, similar to internal carbon pricing (ICP).

“While some components of nature – such as food, timber and ecotourism are priced and traded in global markets, the value of many critical ecosystem services remains undervalued….

Carbon sequestration, water filtration, flood protection and pollination are often treated as ‘free’ inputs, despite underpinning our economies and societies.” — WEF, Finance Solutions for Nature: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes, September 2025

“The natural capital approach extends the economic concept of capital to the environment, conceptualizing stocks of natural resources as conventional goods worth restoring, maintaining and enhancing for their productive flows.

This approach includes both accounting – embedding nature in national and corporate balance sheets – and valuation – pricing nature’s contributions into cost-benefit and investment analysis.” — WEF, Finance Solutions for Nature: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes, September 2025

Putting prices on water, air, and soil is a hot topic among globalists at the U.N., the G20, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the COP meetings.

At the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos this year, Singapore’s President Tharman Shanmugaratnam said that water credits and biodiversity credits should be “stapled” on to carbon credits.

The year prior, at the 2024 WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, aka “Summer Davos” meeting in communist China, University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership CEO Lindsay Hooper told the panel on “Understanding Nature’s Ledger” that every part of the economy depends on nature, and that in order to protect natural systems, one solution would be to “bring nature onto the balance sheet.”

In addition to putting “nature on the balance sheet,” another proposal coming at the end of the panel discussion suggested putting a tax on natural systems like water in the same vein as carbon taxes.

With putting prices on nature comes tokenization and derivatives.

At least that’s what former Bank of England adviser Michael Sheren said at COP27 in November 2022.

“Carbon, we already figured out, and carbon is moving very quickly into a system where it’s going to be very close to a currency, basically being able to take a ton of absorbed or sequestered carbon and being able to create a forward-pricing curve, with financial service architecture, documentation,” said Sheren.

And with carbon being close to a currency, “There are going to be derivatives.”

Now, under the newfound leadership of Fink and Hoffmann, whose personal business dealings stand everything to gain, the WEF is plowing full steam ahead with the globalist agenda to monitor and monetize everything in nature, including the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the very earth that we walk upon.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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Alberta

How Alberta is moving to speed up oil sands reclamation with mine water treatment

Published on September 20, 2025

By

From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Deborah Jaremko

New standards to build on rules already in place for other mining sectors

In what the former Chief of the Fort McKay First Nation calls “a critical step in the right direction,” the Alberta government is moving to accelerate reclamation of more than 1.3 trillion litres of water stored in oil sands tailings ponds.

On Sept. 5, the province announced it will expedite setting standards that allow for “mine water” to be treated and released into the environment, building on the rules that are already in place for other mining operations across Canada.

“We cannot ignore this challenge, we need to keep working together to find practical and effective solutions that protect Indigenous rights, people and the environment,” said Chief Jim Boucher, a member of Alberta’s Oil Sands Mine Water Steering Committee.

That committee is behind a suite of nine recommendations that Alberta is putting into action to improve mine water management and tailings pond reclamation.

The Mining Association of Canada (MAC) says decades of research give the industry confidence that mine water can be safely treated and released once regulations are in place.

But that will take the federal government moving faster too.

Both the federal and provincial governments play a role in potential regulations for the treatment and release of oil sands mine water.

“Alberta is proposing science-based parameters to ensure the safe return of treated water used in oil sands mining, just as other provincial governments do for their respective mining sectors,” MAC CEO Pierre Gratton said in a statement.

“We are hopeful that this will accelerate the development of federal regulations – which we requested almost 15 years ago – to be similarly advanced.”

Gratton said setting standards for safe mine water release could unlock “significant investments” in oil sands reclamation and water treatment.

What are tailings ponds?

Tailings are a byproduct of mining operations around the world.

Oil sands tailings ponds are engineered basins holding a mix of mine water, sand, silt, clay and residual bitumen generated during the extraction process. There are eight operating oil sands mines with tailings ponds in northern Alberta.

Recycling water held in these basins helps operators reduce the amount of fresh water withdrawn from the Athabasca River.

In 2023, 79 per cent of the water used for oil sands mining was recycled, according to the Alberta Energy Regulator.

What is oil sands mine water?

Oil sands mine water is water that comes into contact with the various stages of oil sands mining operations, including bitumen extraction and processing.

Tailings ponds in the oil sands also hold water from significant amounts of rain and snow collected in the decades since the first mines began operating.

While the oil sands mining sector has reduced the amount of fresh water it uses per barrel of oil produced by nearly one-third since 2013, the total volume of mine water in tailings storage has grown as production has increased.

What’s in oil sands mine water? 

The constituents of oil sands mine water requiring treatment for safe release are both typical of water in other industrial processes and unique to the oil sands sector.

MAC says common materials are suspended solids like sand, silt and clay, as well as a range of metals. These can be treated by a wide range of proven technologies already in use in Canada and globally.

Unique to oil sands mine water are organic compounds such as naphthenic acids. According to MAC, operators have demonstrated and continue to invest in processes to treat these to levels safe for environmental release.

How does mine water impact reclamation? 

At the end of an oil sands mine’s life, operators must remove all infrastructure and restore the land to features of a self-sustaining boreal forest similar to what was there before.

Addressing the challenge of tailings ponds and the mine water stored in them is critical to the overall success of oil sands mining reclamation.

Why is mine water release important?

MAC says the only way to remove mine water in tailings ponds is to treat it for safe release to the environment.

Strict regulations allow for this process across Canadian copper, nickel, gold, iron ore, and diamond mining operations. But it is prohibited in the oil sands.

The safe release of treated oil sands mine water into the environment can reduce the need to store it, minimize further land disturbance and help reclamation happen faster.

MAC says operators have shown they can treat mine water to safe release levels, using processes that include innovative technologies developed through Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance.

What is Alberta doing? 

Alberta has accepted the Oil Sands Mine Water Steering Committee’s nine recommendations aimed at speeding up solutions for safe mine water release.

The province says the recommendations, developed with input from industry, technology providers, Indigenous communities and scientists, will now be evaluated to determine how they can be put into practice.

Read the full recommendations here.

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