Science Feedback (a “fact-checker organization”) have generated disinformation about CERES-Science
In George Orwell’s science fiction dystopia, 1984, he envisaged a totalitarian society run by four “ministries”. The titles given to each ministry were deliberately the opposite of what they did:
“Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.” – George Orwell, 1984, Part 2, Chapter 9 (1949).
In recent years, a real-life equivalent to “the Ministry of Truth” has arisen with the rise of so-called “fact-checking organizations”. Currently, there are 118 such organizations that are “verified active signatories” (Archived link) of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)’s code of principles. The IFCN is a unit of the Poynter Institute that “was launched in 2015 to bring together the growing community of fact-checkers around the world and advocates of factual information in the global fight against misinformation.”
The official stated goal of each of these “fact-checking organizations” is to “fact-check” alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation”. Specifically, the IFCN state that,
“We believe truth and transparency can help people be better informed and equipped to navigate harmful misinformation.” – Poynter Institute, IFCN. (Archived link).
However, as we will discuss, the reality is that, in many cases, these organizations are themselves actively generating disinformation and promoting misinformation. Their definition of “truth” seems to be that practiced by Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. In terms of “transparency”, these organizations apparently are accountable to nobody but themselves as the self-proclaimed arbiters of “truth”.
Often these “fact-check” articles might seem harmless, innocuous, and even useful. Naïvely, one might assume that if you disagreed with a particular fact-check, you could simply ignore it. However, they are much more consequential than you might think. This is because the top global social media platforms explicitly delegate these IFCN “independent fact-checker organizations” to evaluate “the truth” of content shared by the platform users. The social media platforms will substantially downrank or penalize users who are sharing content that has been “fact-checked” by one of these IFCN organizations.
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How do oceans start to close? New study suggests the Atlantic may ‘soon’ enter its declining phase
A new study, resorting to computational models, predicts that a subduction zone currently below the Gibraltar Strait will propagate further inside the Atlantic and contribute to forming an Atlantic subduction system—an Atlantic ring of fire. This will happen ‘soon’ in geological terms—in approximately 20 million years.
Oceans seem eternal to our lifespan, but they are not here for long: they are born, grow, and one day close. This process, which takes a few hundred million years, is called Wilson Cycle. The Atlantic, for example, was born when Pangea broke up around 180 million years ago and will one day close. And the Mediterranean is what remains from a big ocean—the Tethys– that once existed between Africa and Eurasia.
For an ocean like the Atlantic to stop growing and start closing, new subduction zones—places where one tectonic plate sinks below another—have to form. But subduction zones are hard to form, as they require plates to break and bend, and plates are very strong. A way out of this “paradox” is to consider that subduction zones can migrate from a dying ocean in which they already exist—the Mediterranean—into pristine oceans—such as the Atlantic. This process was dubbed subduction invasion.
This study shows for the first time how such a direct invasion can happen. The computational, gravity-driven 3D model predicts that a subduction zone currently below the Gibraltar Strait will propagate further inside the Atlantic and contribute to forming an Atlantic subduction system—an Atlantic ring of fire, in an analogy to the already existing structure in the Pacific. This will happen ‘soon’ in geological terms—but not before approximately 20 million years.
“Subduction invasion is inherently a three-dimensional process that requires advanced modeling tools and supercomputers that were not available a few years ago. We can now simulate the formation of the Gibraltar Arc with great detail and also how it may evolve in the deep future,” explains João Duarte, first author and researcher at Instituto Dom Luiz, at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon.
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Python farming could offer one of the most sustainable sources of meat in the world, according to a new study
Python produces large slabs of white meat similar to chicken filet.
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Paper von Miller et al. aus dem Jahr 2011:
Estimating maximum global land surface wind power extractability and associated climatic consequences
The availability of wind power for renewable energy extraction is ultimately limited by how much kinetic energy is generated by natural processes within the Earth system and by fundamental limits of how much of the wind power can be extracted. Here we use these considerations to provide a maximum estimate of wind power availability over land. We use several different methods. First, we outline the processes associated with wind power generation and extraction with a simple power transfer hierarchy based on the assumption that available wind power will not geographically vary with increased extraction for an estimate of 68 TW. Second, we set up a simple momentum balance model to estimate maximum extractability which we then apply to reanalysis climate data, yielding an estimate of 21 TW. Third, we perform general circulation model simulations in which we extract different amounts of momentum from the atmospheric boundary layer to obtain a maximum estimate of how much power can be extracted, yielding 18–34 TW. These three methods consistently yield maximum estimates in the range of 18–68 TW and are notably less than recent estimates that claim abundant wind power availability. Furthermore, we show with the general circulation model simulations that some climatic effects at maximum wind power extraction are similar in magnitude to those associated with a doubling of atmospheric CO2. We conclude that in order to understand fundamental limits to renewable energy resources, as well as the impacts of their utilization, it is imperative to use a “top-down” thermodynamic Earth system perspective, rather than the more common “bottom-up” engineering approach.
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Andy May auf WUWT:
The Holocene Climatic Optimum and the “pre-industrial”
The “pre-industrial” according to the IPCC in a footnote on page 43 of AR6 WGI is prior to 1750 for radiative forcings and before 1850 for temperature. Both dates are within the period commonly described as the Little Ice Age.
The Little Ice Age was a brutal and a miserable time for humanity, but none-the-less the IPCC has chosen to measure and define “climate change” using the global average surface temperature change from that period. They talk about dangers if we exceed 1.5 to 2 degrees above the “pre-industrial” period. These numerical limits have no scientific basis, but they set them anyway.
Then they have the problem of the Holocene Climatic Optimum. This period from roughly 8,000BC to 4,200BC (see figure 1) is widely thought to have been warmer than today based on glacial advance and retreat data, and insolation models of temperatures around the world (figure 2). There has been an attempt to claim that the Holocene Climatic Optimum was actually colder than today by Bova, et al. (2021), but the paper has drawn two serious criticisms (see Laepple, et al., 2022 and Zhang & Chen, 2021 in the bibliography) and undergone a major revision. Bova, et al. is not very credible, and it is likely that the method they used was deeply flawed. A previous post on this paper appeared in WUWT here, it was written before the critical responses were published by Nature.