Thread by @clim8resistance

This BBC article yesterday added to the litany of terrible things that are happening because of global warming.

Man-made climate change is killing off the birds, right?

bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-…

The BBC claimed "The research comes as many international albatross populations are in trouble."

"Some data from 2017 suggests the number of breeding pairs of the species are a little more than half of what they were in the 1980s."

How awful, right?

The BBC article was based on this research published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"Environmental variability directly affects the prevalence of divorce in monogamous albatrosses" - as the sea gets warmer because of us, more birds suffer.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.10…

Here's their data... On the left you can see the divorce rate over time. And on the right you can see how well temperature correlates with sea surface temperature.

But what *can't* you see?

You can't see this, which is a chart that shows sea surface temperature anomaly over time.

It shows that the seas were getting colder, not warmer, if they were changing temperature at all.

Albatross monogamy may be sensitive to sea temperatures, but not to "climate change".

Shame on the @BBC, @RSPB and @royalsociety for such obvious bullshit.

If they had showed the chart that showed sea surface temperatures around the population study, then they would not have been able to make the link that created the headline.

That's shoddy science, shoddy journalism, shoddy conservationism.

For clarity - I had to assemble the chart from their data - it's NOT included in either the BBC article nor the article in the journal.

I'm also not wholly convinced by this test of 'correlation', which is used to imply causation.

It seems much denser in the centre and sparse at the sides, which may be the natural way of things, but might be coincidence. Notice that the warmer years 04-06 are on the right.

This sort of thing has been a constant throughout the climate wars.

Here's an old post on the subject of population decline, from the archive...

climate-resistance.org/2009/07/britis…

And here's another one, again featuring the RSPB and BBC, working together to weave a false climate narrative.

climate-resistance.org/2009/03/auntie…

Some commentators have recently demonstrated their total confusion about what motivates these responses to the policy agenda, NGOs, the BBC and institutional science, including it seems, NGO policy wonks and BBC staffers...

https://twitter.com/clim8resistance/status/1463452885480521730

They have drawn complex maps of interactions between people who have unauthorised opinions. They have developed detailed conspiracy theories about who may be behind such rude failures to defer to authority. And they have proposed complex theories about psychological motivations.

Let me offer a much more simple explanation to those people. I make no claim about my work being the final word on any subject. But what I can see is that your work is absolute dogshit, that it drives a political agenda, and indeed is driven by a vast fund from special interests.

In other words...

Physician, heal thyself.

If you don't like your work being criticised, stop producing such easily debunked bullshit -- propaganda passed off as 'science' and 'research'.

As to what I get out of it...

Less than nothing. It has cost me.