Topics:
Articles tagged with
Claim:
Global warming is just the end of the Little Ice Age; Warming is slower than climate models forecasted; Carbon dioxide is beneficial to Earth; Global warming is not intensifying or increasing the frequency of natural disasters
Claim:
Magnetic poles reversals involve the Earth flipping vertically and momentarily stopping its rotation, causing cataclysmic events during 6 days.
“The benefit[s] of increasing CO2 concentrations for plant growth are increasingly being outweighed by the negative impacts, especially of global warming. This is true for natural as well as agricultural ecosystems.”
Thiessen repeated a large number of Lomborg’s claims in his article without fact-checking or verifying these claims by consulting with scientists who actually have expertise on these topics. Unlike scientists, Lomborg writes books and social media posts about a variety of topics, but he does not submit scientific research on these topics to peer-reviewed journals. If Thiessen lacks the scientific knowledge to challenge Lomborg’s claims, he could have done what professional journalists do: reach out to experts to gain insight from them.
“The article is highly factual. One issue that we have is the lack of data over the Greenland Ice Sheet (both spatially and temporally). Thus some of the claims, although backed by the limited data, are valid; we can’t be sure that we may have missed similar outliers. For example, we can’t be sure that a rain event of the type described did not occur in the period before observations were made or may have occurred somewhere on the ice sheet before in a region without any observations.”
“This article recycles old tropes such as “it’s been warm before”, “CO2 levels have been higher in the past” (millions of years ago!), “CO2 is plant food”, “warming is good for ecosystems/humans”, “so far impacts are small, so they will remain small”, etc. All these pseudo-arguments have been addressed many times before (see examples here, here, and here). This article is clearly motivated, misleading and biased.”
Scientists who reviewed the article found that it builds on a collection of misleading and false claims. For instance, Koonin states that “Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago”. Contrary to the claim, scientific studies using airborne and satellite altimetry observations show considerable thinning has occurred along the margin of the Greenland ice sheet since 2003.
“The article’s scientific credibility is very low. The author cherry-picks data, makes broad generalizations and characterizations based on incomplete or flimsy reasoning, and repeatedly misinterprets technological and economic progress in justifying false claims and misinformation minimizing global warming impacts.”
“This article is exceptionally good in delivering accurate information in an engaging way. There are many useful statements made about the effects of climate change on extreme weather globally and in Australia and these have been backed up by links to relevant peer-reviewed literature.”
“What would make their case stronger would be if they actually analysed all the data, engaged with the existing scientific literature and made their own contribution to our scientific understanding by publishing a scientific paper. The cherry picking exercise in this Western Journal article does not contribute to our scientific understanding of the world.”