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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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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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Environment

New must-see documentary exposes climate alarm as an “invented scare”

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From the Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL).  

Founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist  Marcel Crok, CLINTEL‘s main objective is to generate knowledge and insight into the extent, nature, causes and consequences of climate change and the climate policy related to it.

From CLINTEL on YouTube

This film exposes the climate alarm as an invented scare without any basis in science. It shows that mainstream studies and official data do not support the claim that we are witnessing an increase in extreme weather events – hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires and all the rest. It emphatically counters the claim that current temperatures and levels of atmospheric CO2 are unusually and worryingly high. 

The film includes interviews with a number of very prominent scientists, including Professor Steven Koonin (author of ‘Unsettled’, a former provost and vice-president of Caltech), Professor Richard (Dick) Lindzen (formerly professor of meteorology at Harvard and MIT), Professor Will Happer (professor of physics at Princeton), Dr John Clauser (winner of the Nobel prize in Physics in 2022), Professor Nir Shaviv (Racah Institute of Physics), professor Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph), Willie Soon and several others.

The film was written and directed by the British filmmaker Martin Durkin and is the sequel of his excellent 2007 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. Tom Nelson, a podcaster who has been deeply examining climate debate issues for the better part of two decades, was the producer of the film.

Follow @ClimateTheMovie and @ClintelOrg for updates.

Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL) is an independent foundation that reports objectively on climate change and climate policy and aims to be a voice of reason in the often overheated climate debate. CLINTEL was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout  and science journalist  Marcel Crok . CLINTEL’s main objective is to generate knowledge and insight into the extent, nature, causes and consequences of climate change and the climate policy related to it. CLINTEL also wants to participate in debates on climate science and policy, as well as in decision-making processes in this regard.

To this end:

  • The foundation tries to communicate clearly and transparently to the general public what facts are available about climate change and climate policy and also where facts turn into assumptions and predictions.
  • The foundation conducts and encourages a public debate on this matter and carries out investigative journalism work in this area.
  • The foundation aims to function as an international meeting place for scientists with different views on climate change and climate policy.
  • Will the foundation also conduct or finance scientific research in the field of climate change and climate policy?
  • The foundation participates in decision-making procedures regarding the climate, climate communication and climate policy, in particular legislative and regulatory processes, but possibly also legal procedures regarding climate policy of governments, companies or other parties.

CLINTEL wants to take on the role of ‘climate watchdog’, both in the field of climate science and climate policy.

CLINTEL was made possible in part by a start-up donation from real estate entrepreneur Niek Sandmann. The foundation is very grateful to him for this. Several people have already indicated that they would also like to contribute financially to the foundation. This can also be done anonymously if desired. You can support us by becoming a Friend of CLINTEL or making a one-time donation .

The foundation strives for as few overhead costs as possible, so that almost all resources can be spent on investigative journalism, scientific research and public information. CLINTEL will work on an extensive national network of “friends” and “ambassadors”. To this end, meetings ( CLINTEL Chambers ) will be organized throughout the country . CLINTEL also has a youth organization, Young CLINTEL .

CLINTEL is located in Amsterdam and can be reached via [email protected].

Channel details

www.youtube.com/@clintel628

 

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