By Andy May
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a review of Steven Koonin’s new book Unsettled on April 25, just over a week before it went on sale. A blog called “Climate Feedback” published a “fact check” of the book review on May 3, the day before the book was published. This so-called fact check was used by Facebook to try to discredit the WSJ review and the book itself when a post is linked to the book review.
The editors of the Wall Street Journal rejected this practice with a strongly worded editorial. They pointed out that the so-called “fact check” did not check anything, but merely argued against Koonin’s analysis. Arguing with Koonin is fine, arguing is an important part of science, but don’t call it a fact check. The blog post “Fact Check” contradicts or challenges nothing in Koonin’s book. Koonin offers a counter-argument in today’s WSJ.
Koonin’s more detailed point-by-point refutation of fact-checking is here.
When I searched for Koonin’s book on Amazon.com on Saturday using search terms like “Steven Koonin Unsettled,” I found that I was led to books that criticized Koonin’s book, but not his book. Amazon seemed to have “canceled” a bestseller. Later that same day, Amazon searches began to work properly again. Hopefully it was a simple programming error and not attempted suppression by a fraudulent employee.
You can view his book on Amazon.com at this link if your search fails again. The book can also be found on BarnesandNoble.com. Both purchases will be eBooks, the print edition is expected to be sold out by June. Koonin’s book is now on two of WSJ’s bestseller lists!
We have dealt with fraudulent fact checking and fake news before, they are abundant. See here and here. We have also seen blatant lies about the climate science debate on the internet from otherwise respected organizations like Intelligence Squared (IQ2US), see here. In this case, the record shows that climate skeptics Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen and Phillip Stott won a public debate on climate change in New York. Her opponents were Brenda Ekwurzel, Gavin Schmidt and Richard Somerville. The correct results stayed on the website for ten years after the 2007 debate, but, according to Wayback Machine, someone in IQ2US changed the clear and well-documented results sometime after 2017. Now the IQ2US website is saying the opposite, they say the climate alarmists have won. Shameful but true. We informed them of their flawed reporting back in December, but the completely wrong results were still on their website months later, on May 15, 2021. It’s probably still there.
The news media and our institutions can no longer be trusted. Your fact-checking will quote a statement, say it is false, then subtly change it to a truly false statement, and refute it. Then they claim to have refuted the original. For example, Koonin and the critics say, “Greenland’s ice sheet is not shrinking any faster than it was eighty years ago.” This is true, Greenland melted very quickly in 1940, much faster than it is today. However, Twila Moon’s “rebuttal” claims that Greenland lost more mass from 2003 to 2010 than from 1900 to 2003, which may be true, but it is not what Koonin wrote. For most of the 1900–2003 period, Greenland gained and did not lose ice. Another cherry harvest over a period of seven years is not climatically relevant.
Frederikse et al. Clearly show that melting glaciers in Greenland made a significant contribution to sea level rise from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, but had little impact in recent decades. Overall, the recent rate of sea level rise is quite comparable to the rate in the late 1930s through the mid 1940s. This deceptive type of “rebuttal” is used throughout the “fact check,” and Koonin takes them all apart in his lengthy post. This is the modus operandi of today’s fact checkers, beware of them.
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