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

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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

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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Censorship Industrial Complex

New documentary exposes climate agenda as ‘scam’ to increase globalist power and profit

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From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

Martin Durkin’s new film ‘Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth)’ shows how the livelihoods of climate scientists and a host of green advocates rely on keeping their alarmist narrative alive – despite the facts.

Martin Durkin’s new film Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) opens a hot topic with some very spicy takes.

“This is the story of how an eccentric environmental scare grew into a powerful global industry” – so says Durkin’s voice-over, following a reprise of Greta Thunberg’s infamous “How dare you!” speech. The imagery of those deathly pale women in their blood-red costumes cat-walking doom for the cameras fades into whirling wind farms, followed by some striking claims.

One, from the co-founder of Greenpeace, sets the tone: “There’s no such thing as a climate emergency on this planet.”

Climate scam: Global control?

The film directly challenges the claim that CO2 levels from human activity are causing runaway climate change and shows how the livelihoods of climate scientists and a host of green advocates rely on keeping this narrative alive – despite the facts. Professor Steven Koonin of NYU asks on behalf of the climate science industry: “If CO2 is not having this impact – how are we going to stay in business?”

Precisely what that business is, and how it is maintained, is also the subject of a film whose central premise is that the world is in fact entering a period of cooling. Patrick Moore, the co-founder of environmental campaign group Greenpeace, says the presence of the polar ice caps shows that “this is an ice age. We’re at the tail end of a 50-million-year cooling period, and they’re saying it’s too hot.”

READ: Texas pulls $8.5 billion from BlackRock over DEI rules, left-wing climate agenda

It is an opinion shared by noted scientists featured in the film, such as Professor Koonin.

This is an inconvenient truth, Durkin argues, which explains the rising alarmism from the green lobby.

“The climate alarm is nonsense. It’s a hoax” – so says William Happer, emeritus professor of physics at Princeton. “I think ‘scam’ is a better word – but I am willing to live with ‘hoax.’”

Alongside other claims in the film that “activists are calling for the criminalization of climate skepticism,” Happer observes that “we see all these kinds of authoritarian measures being adopted, in the name of saving the planet. You’ve suddenly got the population under control all over the world.”

Yet power is not the only motive – there is also profit – for some. Professor John Clauser, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022, warns of how “there are not only billions but trillions of dollars at stake.”

Fear, power, and profit

Durkin is no stranger to climate controversy, with his 2007 film The Great Global Warming Swindle being praised in the British Parliament for showing how “anyone not agreeing with the orthodoxy of how climate change levy comes about sees their public funding drying up.”

The motion, supported by seven Conservative MPs, also noted “that one of the contributors [to the film] received a death threat.”

The climate of fear looks set to intensify, with Durkin’s new film showing how the science we are told to follow is made by an inhuman agenda of mandated poverty, food shortages, and depopulation – as this 2023 piece from Spiked makes clear.

READ: Trudeau gov’t paid WEF nearly $500k for report justifying its climate agenda, documents show

Man-made climate of opinion

Yet the tide outside the climate skeptical movement may also be turning.

Durkin gave a pre-release interview on March 14 to the UK’s Daily Telegraph. He told the hosts that the climate science we are told to follow is another example of a locked-down discourse presented as a debate.

“We have such an enormously powerful, publicly funded establishment that is able to control, directly or indirectly, what we hear, what we read, what we’re taught, what is okay to think, and what’s not okay to think,” he said.

The exclusion of dissent has manufactured the scientific “consensus” for the climate agenda.

“The frustrating thing for scientists in this area is you’re not really allowed to point to scientific data or observations published in mainstream journals carried out by scientists from very respected universities and so on, even cited by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body] … if it doesn’t fit the narrative,” Durkin said.

“And the pressure on them to shut up is extreme.”

This is the man-made climate of opinion in which fear has become the latest currency of choice.

Within days of the release of the film, German physicist and science vlogger Sabine Hossenfelder asked her YouTube audience whether “we should be terrified of climate change.” Her answer?

“I am indeed terrified, terrified that scientists support manipulating people.”

She cites several recent sources in mainstream and academic media which advocate “evoking fear” to “spur climate action.”

Instead of fearmongering, she suggests we might best look at what can reasonably done to help preserve natural habitats for wild animals. This seems a reasonable position, and she cites a lack of clarity arising from climate modeling which may conflate natural fluctuations in climate with man-made changes.

Fact-checked

The film is intended to reveal that man-made climate change is a fraudulent operation which can only succeed by censorship and propaganda. It claims this vastly profitable industry – which one Swiss bank estimates will require $270 trillion to realist its goals – reduces to a campaign to enforce global authoritarian control by manufacturing an emergency that is not supported by the evidence.

These are bold claims, and we have heard them before. In this case, however, we can check the record for ourselves with ease.

One climate skeptic has taken the trouble to produce a detailed fact-check of the claims made in the film.

Describing his efforts as an “annotated bibliography.” retired petrophysicist Andy May has supplied information supporting “70 key statements” made in the movie, ranging from natural climate variation through unreliable models to data manipulation – and the existence of a multi-trillion dollar climate lobby which ensures that “skepticism is career suicide.”

May has published four books – most recently The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, which “documents biases and errors in the International Panel for Climate Change assessment.”

May’s book challenges the fearmongering such as that of the UN head Antonio Guterres that “we are on the road to climate hell,” saying instead that the IPCC “seeks to rewrite climate history” to frame a narrative of doom unsupported by the facts.

“The strategy of the IPCC seems to be to hide any good news about climate change,” says the summary for his book, available via May’s website. 

Fact-checker responds

May had this to say about the film whose facts he checked: “From the very beginning of this very well edited and produced movie we learn about the man-made climate change hoax or scam.”

He argues that this agenda is secured by the familiar tactic of demonizing and deplatforming skeptics.

“We learn that anyone skeptical that humans are causing dangerous climate change are to be shunned, or censored, or worse!” he says.

Finally, he shows the method in this madness. The alarmism is all about control.

“We also discover the ugly truth that all this government insistence that we are about to die due to global climate change is not true, and is all about money and power,” he explains. “The logic is that if it is truly a global problem, then it requires a global government, and all nations must submit to global domination by those who know what is good for us.”

Criminalizing dissent?

In one note, not included in the film, May cites evidence of “the U.S. Senate attempting to legislate scientific research outcomes,” saying “it doesn’t get worse than this.”

He directs readers to page 202 of a 2021 book by S.E. Koonin, which documents the attempt led by Senator Chuck Schumer in 2019 to pass bill S.729, which aimed “to prohibit the use of funds to Federal agencies to establish a panel, task force, advisory committee, or other effort to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change, and for other purposes.”

As May notes, “Fortunately, the bill failed to pass, but the political pressure to find humans caused recent climate changes is overwhelming.”

This is an agenda which holds much of government, media, business, and even the scientific community captive. With trillions of dollars and the lives and liberty of humanity at stake, it is a welcome development that Durkin’s film, and the facts behind it, are now reaching a global audience.

You can see Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) here for free.

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Economy

The 15-Minute City: An extraordinarily bad idea

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Randal O’Toole

” the average resident of the New York urban area—the closest thing to a 15-minute city in the U.S. or Canada—can reach at least 21 times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive as in a 20-minute walk. The same will be true of other economic opportunities.  “

The latest urban planning fad to sweep across Canada is the 15-minute city, which proposes to redesign cities so that all urban residents live within an easy, 15-minute walk of schools, retailers, restaurants, entertainment, and other essentials of modern life. This is supposed to simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions while it increases our quality of life.

Some think it is a conspiracy. Others insist it is not. Conspiracy or not, the only way to have true 15-minute cities would be to drastically change Canadian lifestyles.

Fifteen-minute cities mean a lot more people living in multifamily housing and fewer in single-family housing. It means most food shopping would be done in high-priced, limited-selection grocery stores. There is no way that Costcos or even large supermarkets can fit into 15-minute cities; to survive, these stores need a lot more customers than could live within a 15-minute walk from their front doors.

Most of the benefits claimed for 15-minute cities are wrong. Proponents claim they would be more affordable, but high-density, multi-story housing costs two to five times as much, per square foot, as single-family homes. Packing people into four- and five-story apartment buildings would require cutting average dwelling sizes at least in half to make them anywhere close to affordable.

Proponents also claim 15-minute cities would save energy and reduce greenhouse gases and other pollutants. But let’s be honest: people aren’t going to give up their cars or stop going to Costco.

Admittedly, the U.S. Department of Energy says that people living in high-density cities do drive a little less than people in low-density areas. But it also says that there is a lot more congestion in high-density cities. Since cars use more energy in slower traffic, high-density cities use more energy (and therefore emit more greenhouse gases) per capita than low-density areas.

Proponents also claim that 15-minute cities will be more equitable. Yet, before about 1890, most Canadian cities were 15-minute cities. Most people in these cities lived in crushing poverty and there were huge disparities between the rich and the poor, with only a small middle-class in between.

What changed these cities was the mass-produced automobile. The Model T Ford democratized mobility, allowing more people to escape the dense cities to find better housing, better jobs, access to lower-cost consumer goods, and a wider range of social and recreation opportunities.

The University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory calculates that the average resident of the New York urban area—the closest thing to a 15-minute city in the U.S. or Canada—can reach at least 21 times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive as in a 20-minute walk. The same will be true of other economic opportunities. Eliminating the automobile, which is the goal of the 15-minute city, would eliminate those economic benefits.

We had this same debate 50-some years ago when urban skies were polluted with carbon monoxide, smog, and other toxic automobile emissions. Some people advocated policies that would force people to drive less. Others advocated new technologies that would reduce the air pollution coming from autos and trucks.

Today, total automotive air pollution has been reduced by about 90 percent. All this improvement came from cleaner cars: new cars today pollute only about 1 percent as much as cars made in 1970. None of this improvement came from anti-automobile policies, as Canadians drive far more miles today than they did 50 years ago.

If anything, policies aimed at reducing driving made pollution worse as one of those policies was to increase traffic congestion to get people out of their cars. Yet, as noted above, cars actually pollute more in congested traffic.

Anti-automobile policies today, including 15-minute cities, spending billions on rail transit lines that carry only a small percentage of urban travel, and converting general street lanes into exclusive bike lanes, are going to have the same effect.

People who care about the planet should demand policies that actually work and not ones that are based on urban planning fantasies and fads. Instead of attempting to drastically change Canadian lifestyles, that means making cars that are cleaner and more fuel-efficient so that the driving we do has a lower environmental impact. The 15-minute city may not be a conspiracy, but it is still an extraordinarily bad idea.

Randal O’Toole is a transportation policy analyst and author of Building 21 st Century Transit Systems for Canadian Cities, an upcoming report published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Watch Randal on Leaders on the Frontier here.

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