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The analysis is, ironically, guilty of the same cherry-picking it accuses the original article of. The checkers identify two false claims and two misleading one
by SaltyLemonZest 6y ago
The analysis is, ironically, guilty of the same cherry-picking it accuses the original article of. The checkers identify two false claims and two misleading ones out of Shellenberger's bulleted list of twelve "facts few people know". But the summary never engages with the article's core claim, that climate change won't be the end of the world or of human society even though many in the general public think it will. The first checker explicitly agrees with that claim!
There's also a larger question here. If claims which dispute scientific consensus are fact-checkably false, what does that mean for scientific debate? If Facebook had been created in the 60s, would Freudianism have been forever locked in as an effective form of psychiatry?
- wl 6y agoIf this were a debate for or against a proposition, your criticism would make a lot of sense. Even if there's some false and misleading information used to support the proposition, the proposition can still be adequately supported by other information and arguments. However, that's not the context of the analysis. The question isn't "Does this guy have a point?" It's "Does this article spread misinformation?" The analysis rightly concludes it does.
- SaltyLemonZest 6y agoI'm not sure I agree. A claim that the article "mixes accurate and inaccurate claims in support of a misleading and overly simplistic argumentation about climate change" strongly suggests that the guy doesn't have a point. Perhaps more importantly, a "partly false" tag on Facebook suggests the same - fact check tags will inevitably be interpreted as a claim that the article's not worth reading.