The least substantial, most ahistorical, duplicitous, whiplashiest, and factless fact-checky fakeries in the week's fake news.
It's not 11,000 scientists
Last week we learned, thanks to blanket and breathless coverage by the propaganda media, "A global team of more than 11,000 scientists from over 150 countries officially declared that the world is in a "climate emergency," according to a new paper released Tuesday. The "paper" was published in the journal Bioscience.
NBC News noted that an "international consortium of more than 11,000 scientists is backing a study with a dire warning: Earth is facing a climate emergency." Ominously, the McPaper (USA Today) proclaimed in coverage of the "study," "This is the first time a group of scientists have come together to use the word "emergency" in regards to climate change."
As is the case with climate alarmism, this is fake news. As PowerLineBlog.com notes, there was no study published. What was published in the journal BioScience was a press release. And the 11,000 "scientists" weren't all scientists. They were just random people who added their name to support the press release published on a climate alarmism website set up by a guy in the forestry department at the University of Oregon.
The total signatories on the site now exceeds 15,000. But anyone who wanted could sign at the website until the collection of signatures closed in recent days.
Not only were most of the signatories not scientists, some of them weren't even real people. Among the "scientists" who signed on were Mouse, Micky, of the Micky Mouse Institute for the Blind in Nambia; Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts; and Araminta Aardvark from the University of Neasden (which doesn't exist). Real "scientists" included people who claimed to be teachers, students, economists, technicians, therapists, doctors and psychologists.
The site and its declaration is remarkably similar to one produced in 2017 that was spearheaded by OSU forestry professor William J. Ripple. That one garnered 15,000 signatures, according to The Washington Times.
As for the McPaper's claim that it's the first time a group of scientists have come together to use the word "emergency," that is sophistry. Just last year, scientists participating in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claimed that "urgent and unprecedented changes" had to made in order to "prevent corals from being completely eradicated and ease pressure on the Arctic" and avoid "significantly" worse "risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people."
The IPCC warned that "we have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe.
"It's a line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now," said Debra Roberts, a co-chair of the working group on impacts. "This is the largest clarion bell from the science community and I hope it mobilises (sic) people and dents the mood of complacency."
If scientists really believe those things are true, "catastrophe" would seem to qualify as an emergency.
But it's not only sophistry to claim it's the first time the word "emergency" was used, it's a bald-faced lie. In September a group of 500 climate scientists and professionals in climate and related fields sent a letter to the U.N. stating, "there is no climate emergency."
Funny how 11,000 fake scientists got more media attention than 500 real ones because the message from the real ones didn't fit the climate alarmism narrative.
Climate alarmism is the biggest scam in the history of the world.
New York experiences its first storm ever and it's because of climate change
New York's idiot governor, Mario Cuomo, has apparently never seen a storm before a recent torrent left one town's streets flowing like rivers, and neither has the state of New York, to hear him tell it. While speaking with MSNBC talking head Ali Velshi after a heavy storm flooded streets, Cuomo claimed that before "global warming" there were no hurricanes, super storms or tornadoes in the state.
"Ali, anyone who questions extreme weather and climate change is just delusional at this point," Cuomo sniffed. "We have seen in the State of New York what everyone has seen, we have seen these weather patterns that we never had before. We didn't have hurricanes, we didn't have super storms, we didn't have tornadoes. This is a storm that came up just over night and dropped about five inches of rain. It was literally a matter of life and death for people. I was at one of the sites this morning, the river overcame its banks with five inches of water, run through a residential neighborhood. The streets looked like rivers themselves. People were trapped in their homes. The one home you were mentioning, people were afraid the house itself was going to be swept away and luckily we train with the swift water rescue teams and they literally took five people out of the home including an infant, but it was a very dangerous and precarious situation. Thank God we have the best first responders I believe in the United States and everyone got off safely. But this is a recurrent pattern and anyone who is still in denial is making a serious mistake."
Like most leftists, for Cuomo, history started yesterday. Fortunately, we have real history on our side... and the search engine Duck Duck Go.
For instance, Wikipedia notes that there have been 84 tropical or subtropical cyclones to affect the state of New York since the 1600s. The first one known about, according to GeoScienceWorld, citing "overwash deposits" and "stratigraphic evidence" actually occurred sometime between 1278 and 1438.
I wasn't around back then, but I'm quite sure there weren't any automobiles, factories or cows spewing out greenhouse gasses in the 13th to the 15th centuries in the New World.
Cuomo apparently believes that a few thousand colonists cooking their venison, squirrels, rabbits, beans, cabbage and squashes over open fires created enough global warming to cause the first recorded hurricane to hit New York on August 25, 1653.
The New York hurricane that caused the most casualties hit in 1938. It killed 60 people. Hurricane Edna hit in 1954 and killed 29. It ranked third behind Storm Sandy and the 1938 unnamed storm.
According to the Tornado History Project, 438 tornadoes hit New York state from 1952 through 2017. Those storms killed 30 people, with one storm killing nine. The strongest New York tornado ever recorded hit Brooklyn in 2007. No serious injuries or fatalities were recorded, but the storm damaged 40 buildings and 100 cars and flooded streets.
Floods have also been fairly regular occurrences in the state, as the National Weather Service explains on its site. They were occurring long before "global warming" became a thing.
Have I mentioned that climate alarmism is a scam and fake news?
Attenborough's falling walruses again
Regular readers may recall that back in April we told you about the great walrus plunge hoax that ran on the Netflix/BBC documentary narrated by climate alarmist Sir David Attenborough titled, Our Planet.
In one episode, with footage running of walruses falling off a cliff to their deaths, Attenborough claimed the poor beasts were dying because they had been forced ashore by declining sea-ice levels caused by global warming. Their poor eyesight, Attenborough alleged prevented them from seeing well enough to know they were about fall off a cliff.
After the episode, Canadian zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford called the episode fake news, claiming that walruses have always gone ashore and there are many historical reports of them falling off cliffs when they did so. And Crockford claimed the footage Attenborough used was from a well-documented incident in which a pack of polar bears were chasing the walruses over the cliff so they could feed on the corpses.
Attenborough has since made another documentary for BBC titled, Seven Worlds, One Planet, in which he used what appears to be the same footage. This time, however, he stated that polar bears were driving the walruses to their deaths.
Have we told you that climate alarmism is a scam?
Reading Politico can give you whiplash
During recent closed-door impeachment hearings, two officials who served on Trump's National Security Council staff were said to have testified that they had seen no evidence that the Ukraine government interfered in the 2016 election.
Their testimony, Polico's Natasha Bertrand and Andrew Desiderio wrote, undercut a "conspiracy theory" that was being pushed by Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer. Giuliani has long claimed that Ukrainian officials conspired with the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to beat Trump.
"No evidence has emerged to support that idea," Bertrand and Desiderio claimed.
Well that undercuts Politico's own reporting. On January 11, 2017, Politico's Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern wrote:
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.Last May, The Hill's Jon Solomon communicated in writing with Ukrainian Ambassador Valeriy Chaly. According to Solomon's reporting:
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort's resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump's campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine's foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia's alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.
DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort's dealings inside the country in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.So, Politico, which of these is fake news?
Chalupa later tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort's Russian ties on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign, the ambassador said.
Chaly says that, at the time of the contacts in 2016, the embassy knew Chalupa primarily as a Ukrainian American activist and learned only later of her ties to the DNC. He says the embassy considered her requests an inappropriate solicitation of interference in the U.S. election.
"The Embassy got to know Ms. Chalupa because of her engagement with Ukrainian and other diasporas in Washington D.C., and not in her DNC capacity. We've learned about her DNC involvement later," Chaly said in a statement issued by his embassy. "We were surprised to see Alexandra's interest in Mr. Paul Manafort's case. It was her own cause. The Embassy representatives unambiguously refused to get involved in any way, as we were convinced that this is a strictly U.S. domestic matter."
"All ideas floated by Alexandra were related to approaching a Member of Congress with a purpose to initiate hearings on Paul Manafort or letting an investigative journalist ask President Poroshenko a question about Mr. Manafort during his public talk in Washington, D.C.," the ambassador explained.
Reached by phone last week, Chalupa said she was too busy to talk. She did not respond to email and phone messages seeking subsequent comment.
Chaly's written answers mark the most direct acknowledgement by Ukraine's government that an American tied to the Democratic Party sought the country's help in the 2016 election, and they confirm the main points of a January 2017 story by Politico on Chalupa's efforts.
AP's factless fact-check
Following the first day of public testimony in the impeachment sham, the Associated Press decided to fact check the proceedings. The AP tells us:
Republican Representative Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the panel, said, "The Democrats cooperated in Ukrainian election meddling. ... Officials showed a surprising lack of interest in the indications of Ukrainian election meddling that deeply concerned the president at whose pleasure they serve."AP's "factchecker" claimed of Nunes' charges:
The theory that Ukrainians interfered in the U.S. election and that Democrats cooperated in that effort is unsubstantiated. If U.S. officials showed a lack of interest in pursuing the matter, it's because they considered it 'fiction,' as one put it.Unless there are two competing definitions of "unsubstantiated," AP is fake news. Just ask Politico.
-- Jay Baker
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