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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Jan 6, 2022 • 28 tweets • 12 min read • Read on X
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Many people think climate change is increasing the frequency of natural disasters but they actually declined by 10% over the last two decades, the best-available data show
“The period since 2000 is viewed as the most reliable for data reliability, but it is safe to say that even since 2000, coverage has improved. So the 10% decline is possibly an underestimate.“ @RogerPielkeJr

rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/global-weath…
Much of what people think about climate change is wrong

Deaths from natural disasters have declined dramatically but more people think they increased than think they decreased
The cost of natural disasters has declined as a share of GDP but more people think their cost went up than down
Neither the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) nor any other scientific body predicts climate change will reverse the declining disaster death toll and yet 3x more people believe it will than believe it won’t
US CO2 emissions declined 14% over the last decade but 3x more people believe they rose
Carbon emissions *globally* *declined* over the the last decade and yet 62% of Americans surveyed said they went up and just 10% said they didn’t
Climate change has been one of the most-discussed and most-covered news stories of the last two decades and so much of the responsibility for the public believing things that simply aren’t true comes not from lack of information but rather the constant barrage misinformation.
It is common to hear journalists lament declining overall trust in the news media, particularly among Republicans, but the massive gulf between basic climate facts and what people believe suggests such distrust is warranted & indeed should have declined not risen among Democrats.
This is particularly true because Dems are more likely than Rs to believe false information about many aspects of climate change, as the Google surveys show. (I was a Democrat until April when I changed my party affiliation to “No party preference)

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/democrats-mo…
Forty-two percent of Democrats and 35 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement, “More people are dying from natural disasters.”
Seventy-one percent of Democrats and 30 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement, “Climate change is increasing the cost of natural disasters as a percent of GDP.”
76 percent of Democrats and 34 percent of Republicans agreed that “Deaths from natural disasters will rise in the future due to climate change.”
67 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans agreed that “Carbon emissions have risen in the United States over the last 10 years.”

In reality, carbon emissions declined by 14 percent between 2011 and 2020.
But haven’t disasters hammered banks? Nope. “How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?” asks the title of a recent report by three NY Fed economists. “Not very,” they answer in the first sentence of the abstract.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-thr…
The reason is because “weather disasters over the last quarter century had insignificant or small effects on U.S. banks’ performance.” The study looked at FEMA-level disasters between 1995 and 2018, at county-level property damage estimates, and the impact on banking revenue.
While scientists expect hurricanes to become 5% more intense they also expect them to become 25% less frequent
What about floods? It’s true that more people are being exposed to them but that’s because cities along rivers are growing. Flood deaths & damages are declining
What about droughts? They’re not increasing in US or globally
What about fires? Warmer temperatures dry out the wood but they don’t increase fuel load, and fuel load determines fire intensity. Forest management not climate change thus determines whether you have high-intensity, crown-burning, forest-destroying fires.
What about shrubland fires in places like Malibu in Southern California? “Ignitions explain more than temperature … One hundred percent were human caused, … powerline failures have been the dominant cause”

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
What about food production? Technology (eg fertilizer, irrigation, & tractors) will continue to outweigh temperature increases. We produce food in many climates around the world, including very hot and dry ones.
What about sea level rise? We can handle it
How does climate change rank compared to wars, disease, asteroids, super-volcanoes, and tsunamis? Much lower. There’s no *scientific* scenario for climate change posing an existential risk. By contrast, consider an asteroid.
Is there some place you can see an overview of the best-available science, complete with references? There is!

environmentalprogress.org/the-case-again…
Is there some easy-to-read book you can read that lays out the science on climate change, plastics, meat, species, energy, and food told through fun stories? There is!

amazon.com/Apocalypse-Nev…
Climate alarmism is harmful to mental health and is increasingly used as an excuse by politicians. They blame climate change for bad disaster preparedness and management. We see that with fires, flooding, and hurricanes. That’s bad for many reasons:

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-rea…
Q: If apocalyptic thinking is so easily debunked, why is it so powerful?

A:

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More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 19
The government didn’t censor anyone on Covid, say the media. But it did. Facebook’s Zuckerberg even said he regretted giving in to the government's demands. And now, new documents reveal that the Dept. of Homeland Security may have broken the law by hunting down Covid wrongthink. Image
Department Of Homeland Security Illegally Targeted Covid Dissent, New Documents Suggest

DHS’s cybersecurity agency went far beyond its congressional mandate in hunting wrongthink and monitoring emotions

by @galexybrane & @shellenberger
Chris Krebs, founding director of the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security; President Barack Obama; Jen Easterly, Director of CISA (GETTY IMAGES)

The idea that intelligence and security agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and others have been involved in the surveillance and censorship of the American people is a conspiracy theory, according to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was not a victim of government censorship, says NBC News. There was simply no “Censorship Industrial Complex” or government-coordinated activity that targeted American citizens’ speech and violated the First Amendment, mainstream journalists and commentators agree.

But there was and is a Censorship Industrial Complex. The Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) of DHS expanded its mandate in January 2017, during the final days of Barack Obama’s presidency, to cover election infrastructure as critical infrastructure. This would eventually entail protecting “cognitive security” by combating mis- and disinformation. DHS asked four government-funded think tanks to flag “misinformation,” which was often simply political speech that Democrats didn’t like, and together with DHS urge social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to delete, suppress, or censor it in some other way. In 2020 and 2021, the four government contractors worked hand-in-glove with DHS and other government agencies to pressure social media platforms to engage in political censorship.

Defenders of those efforts say they weren’t engaged in censorship and that the Supreme Court agrees with them. Representatives from these Big Four counter-misinformation NGOs say they did not censor anyone, nor could they, since they didn’t operate the social media platforms. They simply did what anyone could do which was to flag misinformation to the social media companies. No government agency ever threatened to harm a social media platform that refused the offers of help from NGOs engaged in counter-misinformation. And the Supreme Court ruled that government officials have long been free to try to persuade the publishers, reporters, and editors at newspapers and thus were and are free to do the same with social media platforms. “CISA does not and has never censored speech or facilitated censorship,” a Senior Advisor for Public Affairs told Public. “Such allegations are riddled with factual inaccuracies.”

In truth, the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire,” said Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in August. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” Senior Facebook executives worried that the Biden administration would not help Facebook deal with its problems complying with European regulations if it didn’t censor vaccine hesitancy.

And CISA did not refute any of Public’s allegations; it simply dismissed them. That may be because there is no dispute over the basic facts of the situation. DHS and the censorship NGOs persuaded the social media giants to give them unique and special status for flagging disfavored election and Covid content in 2020 and 2021 through a special ticketing (Jira) system. Ordinary members of the public not only did not have access to this system, nobody outside the small government-organized censorship clique knew it existed.

The head of the Stanford censorship program said its function was to “fill in the gap of things the government couldn’t do.” And there was virtually no separation between CISA and Stanford’s flagging and censorship operation. CISA’s Director and the Director of one of the Big Four censorship groups texted each other “with some regularity,” according to a staffer. A CISA official named Brian Scully was in a Signal messaging group with at least one Stanford intern and Twitter’s content team.

It has been a mystery about when exactly CISA began its push for censorship. Ostensibly, CISA didn’t ask the four censorship NGOs to create the “Election Integrity Partnership” until mid-2020, and those NGOs did not come up with the idea to create the “Virality Project” on Covid until late 2020, after the elections.

Now, newly obtained documents provided to Public by the America First Legal reveal that CISA began its hunt for disfavored speech about Covid-19 as early as the week of February 18, 2020. The new documents, obtained from litigation by American First Legal against the State Department and CISA, show that the latter agency had Covid censorship on its mind long before it decided to focus on election censorship. The documents thus provide the missing link in CISA’s operation to chill disfavored speech.
“Incredibly, the evidence is that CISA relied on a dangerous, anti-American blob of ‘authorities’ to closely monitor what the American people were saying,” said Reed D. Rubinstein, America First Legal’s Senior Vice President. “CISA was created to protect the homeland from terrorists, not to protect incompetent federal bureaucrats.” While the monitoring of social media narratives may seem innocent, it is the crucial first step in the process of demanding censorship.

These new documents expose the early extent to which the US government repurposed the homeland security apparatus, including DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for domestic control. The documents show that CISA may have sought to counter information from Bhattacharya, despite claims by the mainstream media recently that the government never tried to censor him. And the new documents come at a time when the in-coming Trump administration has its eyes set on defunding government censorship activities, including by CISA and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).

CISA’s early monitoring of Covid narratives may constitute a violation of what’s known as the Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine, argues America First Legal, which holds that government agencies must not stray from the specific legal authorities given to them by Congress. The Supreme Court has rejected claims by government agencies to have authority over issues of “vast economic and political significance” without clear congressional authorization. And CISA arguably had no congressional authorization to monitor such Covid-related speech, which was unrelated to cybersecurity, infrastructure security, or election security. As such, CISA may have indeed broken the law.

Why, then, did it do it? How did an organization supposedly focused on cybersecurity end up tracking and orchestrating the censorship of disfavored Covid information?

Please, subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism and to read the rest of the article!

x.com/shellenberger/…Image
Image
Thank you and bravo to @America1stLegal for their discovery of these damning documents, which show @CISAgov @CISACyber going far beyond its congressional mandate.
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 18
Biden says there’s no “sense of danger” in the repeated invasions of the air space above homes and military bases by unidentified drones. That’s a ridiculous and terrifying lie. Of course there is. Protecting our air space has been one of America’s highest priorities for 80 years Image
From Biden to Mayorkas to DOD spokesperson, the US government officials are flagrantly lying to the American people and nobody knows this more than US military base commanders and the men and women who work in the military.
If you are in the military, Intelligence Community, or other US government agency and know something about these drones, please contact me to shine the light on the wrongdoing.

Encrypted email: michaelshellenberger@proton.me

I will go to prison to protect my sources.
Read 11 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 14
Biden officials @AliMayorkas & John Kirby said, " We have not seen drones penetrate restricted airspace" and "There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace," but US officials have reported drones at Langley, Edwards, Earle, & many other sites.
Drones penetrated restrict airspace at Langley, Norfolk, Edwards, and Nevada National Security Site.

This was heavily reported and so it's very odd for Kirby to make his claim on Thursday and for Mayorkas to repeat it on Friday.

wsj.com/politics/natio…
Now perhaps Kirby and Mayorkas were only referring to the recent drone sightings in New Jersey.

But in NJ there are official reports from Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle of drone incursions in recent weeks.

nypost.com/2024/12/12/us-…Image
Read 7 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 7
There is an epidemic of white police officers killing unarmed black men, we must block the puberty of children born in the wrong bodies to prevent them from killing themselves, the Russians control Trump through a sex blackmail operation, the Covid vaccine prevents infection, millions or billions will die from starvation and harsh weather from climate change, there's no way a Covid virus could have escaped from a lab, mass migration improves societies with no trade-offs, it's best for addicts if we give them hard drugs to use in special sites downtown, we need the government to fight misinformation online in order to save democracy, Biden is sharper than ever, Kamala is 100% prepared to be president, and anyone who disagrees is racist, sexist, and/or fascist.

While many Americans are increasingly and at least partially aware that all of the above are lies, we are still a long way from coming to grips with their enormity, their monstrous consequences, and the totalitarian ways in which the mainstream news media, many employers, and governments demanded that we believe them. Current and former heads of state, our most-trusted journalists, and full professors at Ivy League universities created and propagated those Big Lies, repeatedly, for years, even after they had been thoroughly debunked, sometimes within days or hours of them being made, by people who ruling elites then sought to bankrupt, shame, and ostracize.

There has not yet been a proper accounting of the very many abuses of power, including the Big Lies, by elected officials, the media, and other governing elites during the Woke Reign of Terror (2013 - 2024). That accounting will need not only to thoroughly debunk all of the major lies, it will also need to explore why elites created and perpetuated them, why so many people believed them, why they lasted for so long, and what can be learned from them, both separately and how they worked together as a whole, constituting the worldview of the people who run Western societies and nations. Historians, sociologists, psychologists and many others will, for centuries, study the Work Reign of Terror as a uniquely irrational and self-destructive period in America's history. Hopefully something good, including wisdom, courage, and improved self-governance, will come out of those studies and reflections.
Woke Religion: A TaxonomyImage
Woke Psychopathology: A TaxonomyImage
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 22
The Australian PM @AlboMP wants global censorship to counter misinformation. But only free speech can counter misinformation. Please share this to affirm your opposition to his awful bill!
Was the censorship bill a head fake to jam through Digital ID? 🤔
👀 Image
Read 6 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 21
I am concerned about the impact of social media on children, but this bill is a Trojan horse to create digital IDs, which is a giant leap into the totalitarian dystopia depicted in "Black Mirror," and already in place in China. And @AlboMP has proven censorial and untrustworthy.
Spot on:

Very concerning

Read 7 tweets

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