Laugh or cry?
New AI tool for climate misinformation
“Ultimately, our goal is the Holy Grail of fact-checking, which is being able to detect and debunk misinformation in real time. Ideally, I would have social media platforms using it to detect misinformation in real time.”
What counts as "climate misinformation"?
Let's have a look
"Denialist keywords include references to
extremes in the past, extremes not
increasing or extremes not linked to
climate change."
More denialist claims
Includes "damages/deaths from extreme weather aren’t increasing"
Includes "extreme weather linked to non-climate change phenomena (like ENSO)"
More denialist claims
Includes "Future generations will be richer and better able to adapt"
More denialist claims
"Carbon Capture & Sequestration (CCS) is unproven/expensive"
More denialist claims
"Nuclear power is safe/good for society/economy/environment"
More denialist claims
Criticism of Skeptical Science 🤣
If there was ever any doubt that these guys want to control public debate & silence those with differing views that's gone
🧵
The percentage of a percentage trick is increasingly common & leads to massive confusion
Here a undetectable difference of 0.01 events per year per decade is presented as the difference between a 31% and 66.4% increase (in the *likelihood* of the event, not the event itself)
The resulting confusion is perfectly predictable
Here is a reporter (NPR) explaining completely incorrectly:
"The phenomenon has grown up to 66% since the mid-20th century"
False
Also, the numbers in the text and figure do not appear to match up
I asked Swain about this over at BlooSkeye
A Frankenstein dataset results from splicing together two time series found online
Below is an example for US hurricane damage 1900-2017
Data for 1980-2017 was replaced with a different time series in the green box
Upwards trend results (red ---)
Claim: Due to climate change!
The errors here are so obvious and consequential that it is baffling that the community does not quickly correct course
The IPCC AR6 cited a paper misusing the Frankenstein hurricane loss dataset to suggest that NOAA's gold standard hurricane "best track" dataset may be flawed
JFC - Using flawed economic loss data to suggest that direct measurements of hurricanes are in error!
We’ve reached the point where an IPCC author is openly rejecting the conclusions of the IPCC out of concern over how their political opposition is correctly interpreting the AR6
The integrity of the IPCC on extreme events is now under attack
The IPCC explains that a trend in a particular variable is DETECTED if it is outside internal variability and judged with >90% likelihood
For most (not all) metrics of extreme weather detection has not been achieved
That’s not me saying that, but IPCC AR6
The IPCC also assesses that for most (but not all) metrics of extreme weather the signal of a change in climate will not emerge from internal variability with high confidence (ie, >90%) by 2050 or 2100, even assuming the most extreme changes under RCP8.5
The US National Academy of Sciences has a new study committee on Extreme Event Attribution
Among its sponsors are the Bezos Earth Fund and Robert Litterman
Who are they? . . .
The Bezos Earth Fund sponsors World Weather Attribution, an advocacy group promoting the connection of weather events w/ fossil fuels in support of press coverage & lawsuits
Robert Litterman is on the board of Climate Central which founded WWA & collaborates on climate advocacy
The fact that a NAS committee is funded by political advocates is crazy enough
But that is not all
On the committee itself are individuals from two climate advocacy groups
One . . . the Union of Concerned Scientists which is working to use attribution to support lawsuits . . .