Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 2, 2022 23 tweets 12 min read Read on X
Over the last week, the mainstream news media claimed that hurricanes are becoming more frequent & intense, but they’re not, as the data clearly show. What’s more, it’s clear that the media are engaging in *deliberate* misinformation. These aren’t innocent mistakes. ImageImage
Consider this article in @FT claiming that “hurricane frequency is on the rise,” based on NOAA data.

But NOAA says “After adjusting for a likely under-count of hurricanes in the pre-satellite era there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts.” ImageImageImage
In fact, NOAA writes, “The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s.” ImageImage
In other words, the graphic @FT chose to show of apparently rising hurricane frequency is, in reality, a graphic showing improved hurricane detection thanks to satellites.

What are the chances that FT reporter @Aime_Williams didn’t know this? I would guess close to zero.
It’s possible that @Aime_Williams was careless but I doubt it. I would bet good money that she read NOAA’s web site, which clearly warns that “there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts,” and chose to ignore it in order to sensationalize.

gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming…
What about intensity? Same story. Writes NOAA, “after adjusting for changes in observing capabilities (limited ship observations) in the pre-satellite era, there is no significant long-term trend (since the 1880s) in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.“
Bottom line? “We conclude that the data do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in:  frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.”
Against the best-available science, the news media unleashed a hurricane of misinformation using the exact same manipulation of data as @Aime_Williams. @FT

The quantity of pseudoscience & journalistic irresponsibility is breathtaking. ImageImageImageImage
And now it’s clear that activist scientists at the UN are working with Google to control the information available on climate change.

This is dark, chilling stuff.
To the extent the cost of hurricanes is rising it’s due entirely to greater wealth in harm’s way. Consider how much more developed Miami Beach is today compared to a century ago. Once you adjust for rising wealth, there is no trend of rising costs. ImageImage
Is it possible that hurricane intensity will rise in the future? Yes. NOAA predicts a 5% increase in hurricane intensity. But it also predicts a 25% decline in hurricane frequency.

I have not seen a single mainstream news media outlet mention any of this. Image
This is not complicated. The information is not hidden away somewhere. NOAA even boldfaces its key conclusion.

Journalists know this. They’ve been covering this for decades. It’s clear that they are actively trying to mislead the public.

gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming… Image
I have made a complete debunking of environmental alarmism available on-line. All slides have references to the best-available science or primary data.

environmentalprogress.org/the-case-again…
These are they key take-aways:

- weather-related disasters are declining not increasing

- rising human resilience massively outweighs climate change

- every major environmental trend is headed in the right direction ImageImageImage
I pushed back against misinformation on hurricanes and climate change in Congress last month at a hearing on… climate change misinformation
Final note: August had no hurricanes for the first time in 25 years. Hardly anybody wrote about it. Compare that to the wall of misinformation about a single hurricane last week.

The media have an agenda. They are peddling pseudoscience. They can’t be trusted. Image
Egregious misinformation by the @nytimes ImageImage

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More from @shellenberger

Jul 10
Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz just now: " I know for a fact [Epstein] documents are being suppressed and they're being suppressed to protect individuals. I know the names of the individuals, I know why they're being suppressed. I know who's suppressing them, but I'm bound by confidentiality from a judge and cases, and I can't disclose what I know. But, hand to God, I know the names of people whose files are being suppressed in order to protect them, and that's wrong."

@SeanSpicer : “Just out of curiosity, without names, are these politicians, business leaders…”

Dershowtiz: “Both. Everything.”
The lip synching is messed up but it's real and not AI. Here's the original:

Correction: The video is from 3 months ago. @seanspicer posted it just now.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 7
Within minutes of Texas floods killing dozens of girls, the media said it was because of Trump budget cuts and climate change. In truth, the deaths occurred in “one of the highest flood-prone regions in the entire state,” warnings were issued, and the underlying cause was the failure to install flood warning sirens. Climate journalists are cultists.Image
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These people are shameless Image
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Read 5 tweets
Jul 6
Trump cuts to the National Weather Service, and climate change, are to blame for the Texas flood deaths, said the media yesterday. Today, most admit NWS did its job. The real problem was the lack of a flood warning system. Those who blame the climate are trapped in a weird cult.
Per capita flooding deaths in Texas declined dramatically:

"As the population of Texas increased from ~9.2 million in 1958 to ~28.6 million in 2018, overall flood deaths remained fairly constant, meaning that the fatality rate dropped by about two-thirds." @RogerPielkeJr Image
More Pielke: "The flooding was certainly extreme but it should not have been historically unexpected. The documented record of extreme flooding in “flash flood alley” goes back several centuries, with paleoclimatology records extending that record thousands of years into the past.

"Consider the figure above, from a classic 1940 historical text on U.S. floods, which shows that the same region of Texas that experienced this week’s floods has long been known to be a bullseye for flash flooding. In fact, almost a century before Hoyt and Langbein, Texas experienced one of the greatest losses of life in U.S. history related to extreme weather.

"In 1846, in the months after Texas became a U.S. state, massive flooding compounded the many problems facing thousands of recent immigrants from Germany who had been settled in New Braunfels, Texas, which was significantly impacted by this week’s floods.

"According to a contemporaneous 1846 account, cited in a fantastic 2006 PhD dissertation on flooding in Texas by William Keith Guthrie, at the University of Kansas, 'The Guadalupe [River] would often rise fifteen feet above its normal stand after these heavy rains, carrying with it in its swift torrent a number of large trees, uprooted farther up the hills. Smaller brooks, ordinarily not containing flowing water, became raging torrents which could be crossed only by swimming.'"Image
Read 5 tweets
Jun 29
The website of NYC mayoral frontrunner says he'll "shift the tax burden" to "whiter neighborhoods." When asked about his openly racist agenda, @ZohranKMamdani insists it's not a proposal at all but rather "a description of what we see right now." That's next-level gaslighting.😬
This guy's ability to lie so calmly while smiling should send chills up the spines of every New Yorker.

He could have taken it down and said, "You know, I regret that the website said that and so I deleted it, because it doesn't express what I believe."

Instead, he's just asked millions of New Yorkers to believe his own obviously flagrant lie rather than their own eyes. That's creepy and wrong.

Everyone can see for themselves that he used a gratuitous racial reference regarding a tax proposal. We don't tax people on race. So why use it? Because he and his campaign wanted to introduce race.

And it's not the first time. @ZohranKMamdani should delete his flagrantly racist tweets and web site language, apologize, and promise to never invoke racism in these ways again.Image
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The audacity of @ZohranKMamdani to cite Dr. Martin Luther King should make your skin crawl. King adamantly rejected anti-white racism.

Mamdani’s call for higher taxes on white neighborhoods should shock New Yorkers. If they elect him as Mayor then they will have no excuses. He’s made clear that he will advance a racist agenda and then demand that people believe his lies.
Read 6 tweets
Jun 28
The idea that former Intelligence Community officials are working with European leaders to censor the Internet sounds like a conspiracy theory, but over the last two days, Obama’s CIA Director plotted with UK, EU, and Irish officials in Dublin to do precisely that. Image
These people are a direct and imminent threat to free speech and democracy worldwide. They are dangerous and out of control:

Former CIA Director John Brennan helped initiate the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. He used foreign spies to help trigger the FBI investigation of of the Trump campaign. And he manipulated the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment to falsely claim the Russians favored Trump over Clinton.

Niamh Hodnett, Ireland’s “Online Safety Commissioner,” leads Ireland’s censorship regime under the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act, which mirrors EU and U.S.-backed models shaped by intelligence-linked NGOs.

Aine Kerr, a Former Facebook Policy Manager, helped manage Facebook’s public policy as it partnered with U.S. intelligence agencies post-2016, then co-founded Kinzen, which received support from EU and transatlantic institutions focused on content surveillance. Her work connects platform moderation with state-funded narrative monitoring.

Nóirín O’Sullivan, a Former Garda (Irish police) Commissioner and EUROPOL Official, who went from leading Ireland’s national police to a senior role at EUROPOL, which works closely with intelligence and security services across Europe. She advocates for integrating security principles into online content governance.

Claire Loftus, Ireland’s Former Director of Public Prosecutions, oversaw prosecutions during a period of expanding legal efforts to criminalize online expression and misinformation. Her presence signals an effort to align the judiciary with state-backed censorship.

Robyn Simcox, the UK Commissioner for Countering Extremism,
operates within the UK Home Office, a department with direct ties to MI5 and GCHQ. She frames conspiracy theories and misinformation as forms of radicalization and demands surveillance and preemptive regulation. Her office channels intelligence priorities into speech policing under the banner of counter-extremism.Image
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Brennan triggered the Trump-Russia collusion hoax
Read 10 tweets
Jun 27
Brazil has been banning and censoring journalists and politicians for years. But now it is taking steps to ban X entirely. It’s time for @SecRubio to block President Lula, Justice Moraes, and their criminal accomplices from entering the US. Image
President Trump and Secretary Rubio must not let these tin pot dictators censor speech and ban the world’s most important social media company.
The sinister Lula and creepy Moraes are trying to intimidate my colleagues and me. We won’t back down.
Read 7 tweets

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