Facebook Fact Checkers and the Telephone Game

John Lees

If I post something, anything with any reference to climate change, then it will get a banner from facebook which reads:
"See how the average temperature. in your area is changing".
I've never clicked on it, out of principle.
However, surely the vast majority of facebook users (and humans) live in an ever expanding urban area. Such areas will get warmer as the intensity of urbanization and area of urbanization increases.
This simple fact is well documented and uncontroversial

.
So, for this vast majority, they could look at how the average temperature is changing in their area, and they will see that it has tended to increase as fields were turned into carparks, a bypass, a supermarket and a new housing estate, etc.
So, this is the best that they can come up with. A link to "reputable information" which is already blatant disinformation, simply in terms of the flawed premise.
Yes, most areas have warmed, where people live. But mainly - because people live there.

Tim adds:

Also, this in no way implicated carbon dioxide. We have been warming since the end of the Little Ice Age, and there had been another cooling in the '70's before we began a fifty year warming trend, No mention of natural variability. No mention of things like the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

It's a way of lying using statistics. As has been said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. .

Facebook fact-checkers are rather like the telephone game. Kids often play it. That is where you tell a story, send it around the room, and see how it finishes. It is usually unrecognizable from the original. That is what Facebook fact-checking is; it twists and distorts real data and the opinions of scientists into a form pleasing to the mandarins.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:41 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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