Where Should We Obtain Information?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns the power that human beings have on the climate. The Left claimed that the fire on Maui was caused by climate change until more sane people proved that the fire was caused and/or worsened by faulty progressive ideas. Now the Left are claiming that climate changed by humans made Hurricane Idalia much worse than it would have been otherwise.

Chris Enloe at The Blaze gave an example of the blame being passed around, this time by CNN prior to Idalia making landfall on Wednesday morning. CNN anchor Abby Phillip asked CNN reporter Bill Weir, CNN’s chief climate correspondent about how to protect against hurricanes and other natural disasters. The question itself had a flawed foundation of assuming that “warmer water, historically warm water” means “communities now are suddenly in the path of hurricanes where they have not been before.” Instead of correcting Phillip’s assumption, Weir connected “wicked storms” with fossil fuels and climate change. 

“Is there anything that can be done to protect [these communities] going forward?” Phillip asked.

“That’s an amazing question,” Weir responded. “It’s the biggest, sort of trillion-dollar question about how you adapt communities like this to the world that we’re already now living in at the same time trying to mitigate further more wicked storms down the road with more fossil fuel pollution.”

Weir added that the cost of fossil fuel pollution-driven climate change is “becoming bigger with every storm.”

“Science has been warning about this for a very long time. In many ways, it’s been predicted,” he claimed. “It’s the speed that we’re seeing these changes that has taken most folks by surprise.”

Phillip and Weir should have consulted meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue before making their claim about fossil fuels and climate change intensifying storms. Maue corrected Weir a few hours after the discussion took place on CNN. Enloe explained as follows.

The CNN segment was completely misinformed, Maue later pointed out, because there was a major hurricane that hit in the same area as Idalia in the 19^th century – long before widespread usage of fossil fuels.

“Except, the landfall of Idalia is only strongest along coastal area since 1896 Cedar Keys hurricane (125 mph) 125-years ago, well prior to modern fossil fuel usage,” Maue wrote on social media.

Maue, whose doctoral research focused on tropical cyclones, also exposed the reductionist connection that Weir and Phillip made between warm water and a strong cyclone.

“Why didn’t Idalia rapidly intensify during the 3 days it sat over the NW Caribbean? Did someone forget to push a button or turn a knob?” he mocked, explaining the water in the Northwestern Caribbean is “very warm and deep.”

Finally, Maue wondered why hurricanes in the mid-2000s – like Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, which formed over comparatively cooler waters – were significantly stronger than Idalia if the accumulation of fossil fuel pollutants is intensifying cyclonic storms through climate change over time.

Apparently, Weir and other reporters, who earn college degrees focused on journalism and writing, should not attempt to explain scientific phenomena. Americans should stop listening to the talking heads on CNN and other alphabet media organizations and go to experts for all kinds of information. It would be helpful if the media started consulting experts and stopped shoving propaganda into us.

Do You Want the Truth about Climate Change?

             The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is the necessity of open and free media to maintain freedom and liberty. Big Tech companies – Facebook, Google, and Twitter – were called to the U.S. Senate yesterday to discuss their business practices. One of the problems that was discussed was the censoring of conservative information or anything that might hurt Democrats. I learned tonight of another group that at the hearing because it was “one of the primary targets of social media censors and left-leaning activists.”

            Gregory Wrightstone published an article titled “Meet the Climate Scientists That Social Media Censors Don’tWant You to Know About” at The Daily Signal. He is a member of the C02 Coalition, a geologist, and the author of “Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know.” 

            Wrightstone explained that the CO2 Coalition is “a small nonprofit operating out of Arlington, Virginia” and that the group “formed in 2015 to educate policymakers and the public about climate change and the benefits arising from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.” He said that the diverse group is made up of “leading scientists” who study “carbon dioxide and climate change.” They include “atmospheric physicists, climatologists, ecologists, statisticians, and energy experts.”

            The primary mission of CO2 Coalition is “educating thought leaders, policymakers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy.” The members of CO2 have a broad agreement that “the 130 part-per-million increase in carbon dioxide over the past 150 years is not in any way harmful.”

            Just reading the primary mission and the broad agreement alerted me – an ordinary citizen that pays little heed to the ranting and raving of Al Gore and his kind – to a likely reason why they are not “warmly received by the mainstream media or the social media giants.” These “giants” apparently believe the “consensus” that “carbon dioxide is dangerous” because they ban any discussion that contradicts it. The “giants” seem to be “committed to defending the view that the modest rise in temperature of one degree Celsius over the past 150 years is mostly man-made and leading to catastrophe.”

            Facebook first started to censor CO2 Coalition when they stopped “an op-ed in the Washington Examiner titled ‘The Great Failure of the Climate Models” from appearing on their platform about a year ago. This op-ed “showed that the mathematical computer models used to promote global warming fears have been, for years, systematically predicting an exaggerated rate of warming in the tropical lower atmosphere – typically by a factor of three.” Their opinion piece was labeled “false” by the fact-checkers and blocked from distribution on the platform.

The CO2 Coalition and the Washington Examiner appealed to Facebook, providing a detailed scientific basis for their opinion. Confronted by the overwhelming body of evidence provided by the researchers, Facebook finally removed the label and again allowed the piece to be viewed and advertised.

            The problem was thought to be solved, but it was not. A letter from “groups working to ban fossil fuels” was sent to Facebook demanding that the Facebook page for CO2 Coalition be shut down and that posts by its members be censored. Then four Senators sent an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg demanding that C02 Coalition be censored because “climate change is an existential crisis” and anything contrary to that claim “puts action on climate change at risk.”

            CO2 Chairman Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, created a video for PragerU titled “What They Haven’t Told You About Climate Change.” It had more than 3.6 million views but was labeled by Climate Feedback, the “fact checker,” as misleading and censored. The misleading statement was, “Of course the climate is changing. It always has. It always will.” The misleading label was removed recently after appeals from PragerU and Moore.

Congress discussed the censuring being done by Big Tech yesterday in a hearing titled “Does Section 230’s Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?” CO2 Coalition had an opportunity to present testimony, so maybe some changes will be made. However, I agree with the author that Facebook, Google, and Twitter are not qualified to be the “arbiters of truth on complex scientific and societal issues.”

The censoring of such information begs the question: Why do they want to keep this information from Americans? The answer is obvious. They know that Americans would no longer accept their claim that humans are destroying the planet if they knew that the increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide has benefits.