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Friday, June 2, 2017

Fact Checking The Fact Checkers

It never fails to surprise me that people in the mainstream media know so little and are so lazy.  I just read a "fact check" by the AP of President Trump's speech yesterday announcing that the USA was pulling out of the Paris climate accords.  Some of the items checked were ridiculous.

A good example is the AP examining the President's statement that he was elected to represent Pittsburgh and not Paris.  The fools at the AP actually went back to examine how Pittsburgh voted in the last election and they point out that Hillary Clinton carried that city.  Let's stop here.  Does the fact that Hillary won the vote in the city of Pittsburgh mean that Trump is not the president there?  Of course not.  Trump represents Pittsburgh.  He doesn't represent Paris or any part of France.  Of course, Trump's statement was a rhetorical device to make the point that the President is concerned about American workers first and foremost.  The fact check was ridiculous.

Another point that the AP checked was Trump's claim that a study done at MIT had found that if all of the Paris agreements were actually fully carried out, there would be about a 0.2 degree change in the world's average temperature.  The AP doesn't claim that the President cited a phony study or anything like that.  Instead, the AP cited a different study that put the results of full compliance of the Paris agreements at a 1.0 degree lowering of the average global temperature.  The AP then states,


But there's two major problems with this item that the AP just ignores in order to attack the President.  First, the only way one can predict what the outcome of full compliance with the Paris accords would be is to use a computer model to see the difference.  There are, however, no valid models.  Every model used to predict global warming has been proven statistically erroneous just by the data of the last 20 years.  In other words, the models were developed and predicted global warming some 20 years ago.  Then we collected two decades of data.  The data was nowhere near the predicted results.  In fact, the data was so far from the prediction of the models that statistical methods say the models cannot be accurate.  That means that any prediction of a temperature change of 0.2 degrees or even a full 1.0 degree is based upon faulty computer models.  Those models have in every instance predicted higher temperature increases than were actually seen.  There's no way to know if the Paris agreements will lower global temperatures at all.

The second problem with the item shows clearly in the quoted statement.  Supposedly, an increase of even a tenth of a degree will increase the number of extreme weather events by a great deal.  For the last fifteen years, the media keeps telling us that the temperatures are rising and then rising again.  There has been a decrease, however, in instances of extreme weather.  We have seen fewer hurricanes, fewer tornadoes, and fewer cyclones.  There have been droughts and floods, but not in any greater amount than was the case in the fifteen years preceding that period.  Surely, the AP reporters could have checked that out.  It is not something that is secret; there have been many articles written about this.  But the reporters at the AP just quoted their German "expert" and didn't bother to determine if what he was saying was demonstrably false (it is).

If the AP wants to check the facts of Trump's speech, that's fine.  We deserve to have that done honestly and competently, however.  The AP doesn't appear even to have tried.

1 comment:

fastcarken said...

Well, Wgy does the AP and main stream media not aggressively attack China and India whose carbon footprints are astonomical compared to the rest of the World.
NO BALLS They just want us to continue borrowing money from China to Finane the Lefts Crazy Ideological Projects. National debt NOW just below $20Trillion, They are the joke, however, they have brain washed to ignorant to believe their HYPE!